MY GOD

As a boy I used to imagine that God was watching over me and could do anything he wanted with me, could move the chess pieces of my life to any spot on the board he chose, but would not, as Shakespeare would have it in King Lear, play with me as a wanton boy plays with flies. I trusted him. How could I not? God suffused my young life. I felt he (I use the male pronoun for convenience and because he was solely a he to me) was a companion, a presence with whom I could share my most secret thoughts and fears and wants.

My parents were believers, and while my doubts spread as I grew into young manhood, my mother was certain that God marked down even our smallest lies and indiscretions. She would speak of God as the creator who had filled the world with an amazing range and variety of people, and she spoke with near wonder at how the differences in people were what God handed out at birth — talents and abilities, defects and disabilities, handsomeness and ugliness. To her, the beauty of the divinity was in the wondrous diversity and breadth of human creations, the miraculous feats of a master builder. "God made no two people the same. Not even twins," she would say. "And," she assured me, "God gave you many blessings he did not give to others."

My supposed good looks and intelligence and winning personality, which a loving Jewish mother complimented and brightened at, were gifts handed to me at birth by God himself. Such notions sustained me like mother's milk. They were difficult to shake even as I was increasingly drawn away from belief. When as a young child I asked my mother how I was born and came to be, she had a stock answer: "Your father planted the seeds, and we prayed to God." So I imagined my parents getting a package of seeds like the ones on the rack of flower and vegetable seeds sold at the pharmacy in our Cleveland Heights neighborhood. And for many years the facts of life to me meant planting seeds, as one did in order to grow roses or asparagus, but with a requisite preconception prayer to God. In my mind, childbirth depended on God's allowing planted seeds to grow. My entering the world was the result of God answering my parents' prayers.

As a boy I liked feeling God was my father. I loved my biological father and tried to honor him as the commandment dictated. But he worked terribly long hours and came home too tired to do anything but eat supper, read the newspaper, and head off to sleep. If he told me he loved me, he did so only on rare occasions, usually when I was being disciplined or if I became ill. He would say, "You know your father loves you." It was never "I love you." It was always "Your father loves you." I desperately wanted his attention. I wanted above all in life to know he cared about me and loved me. it was the same with God. I wanted to know he approved of me. I wanted to make both him and my earthly father proud. How could I be certain of God's love or my father's? How much did my heavenly and earthly fathers even like me?

I had an imaginary friend who had a full name — Michael Berber. I also had Sammy Kaye. Doubtless out of father hunger, I announced one day that Sammy Kaye, the bandleader, was my second father. God was my imaginary friend, too, but he was also, like Sammy Kaye, my imaginary father. Was he imaginary? He surely seemed real to me then, even if I vested him with a reality formed from my imagination, a reality that many who exalt art tell us is superior to the reality we identify as the reality. As a kid I watched Miracle on 34th Street, with Maureen O'Hara and Natalie Wood, the warm and bathetic Christmas story of Kris Kringle, played by Edmund Gwenn, who claimed he was the real Santa Claus. When the child played by Natalie Wood sat on his lap and asked him about the reality of Santa Claus, he told her there was another nation called the imagination, a line I fancied just as I fancied the sound of the word Godspeed, which concluded many orations. Was hunger for God simply a result of an oedipal need for a strong father who could be relied on for whatever one needed or longed for? Was the God whom I felt was my heavenly father merely a production of my seeded imagination? Was there such a thing as Godspeed?

When I write that God suffused my young boyhood, I mean it. The words under God were officially added to the Pledge of Allegiance when I was a boy, despite the many people who insisted on keeping them out. In courtroom television dramas like Perry Mason, men and women testified in court after putting a hand on the Bible and swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help them God. As youngsters we argued about God questions with a seriousness that bordered on passion. We did not argue about whether God existed, because for nearly all of us his existence was a given. What did it mean to take the Lord's name in vain? Were you even supposed to swear to God? (I remember a guy we called Tommy T saying, "I swear to God, I don't believe in God.") Could you say "goddamn"? Would God punish us for hanging out in the backyard of our neighbors' home at night to sneak peeks at their teenage daughter, Gloria, as she came into her bedroom naked after a bath? Would he exact payback for our chewing gum on Yom Kippur?

Kate smith sang "God Bless America" on Ed Sullivan, and we all sang "America the Beautiful" in classrooms, asking God to shed his grace. The presidents ended their talks with "God bless America." Money said "In God we trust." Men and women who helped the poor and those who donated their time to charitable causes, as my mother did, were said to be doing God's work, and when the snow in Cleveland reached five or six inches we stayed home from school because of what was called an act of God. Something that occurred in the nick of time, a stroke of good fortune, was a Godsend, and one eluded an unhappy fate by the grace of God. God was the ultimate signifier. Adonai and Elohim and Ha Shem and Jehovah and all the various other names attributed to the invisible prime mover, the patriarch in the sky, were represented by that three-letter word. He was our God and the God of our fathers.

And he was my God. God Almighty. God the omnipotent. God the eternal, and God the everlasting. Nearly every Jewish home had a mezuzah outside its door with the Shema inscribed inside, words I said over and over and over again throughout my boyhood: "Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one." It was God, after all, who had brought my people out of bondage and provided the...