Shalom Auslander is the author of three books: Foreskin’s Lament, Beware of God, and his first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, which will be in stores January 12, 2012. Auslander graciously agreed to be interviewed for The Beacon in response to some nudgy emails on my behalf.
Q: In some articles, you claim that you haven’t decided what your belief in God is, yet in a more recent piece (“I Miss God”) you seem to have settled on the decision that there is no God. Are you sure about that, and why?
A: I think that if one is being honest and open, no belief is fixed – believers have moments of doubt, atheists have moments of belief, and agnostics have moments of both. As a misotheist, and a passionate one at that, I also have my moments where I just can’t buy it anymore – not the plagues, not the burning bush, not the furious vengeance, nothing – and that was what that essay reflected: a moment I wanted to hate God, but I just couldn’t work up enough belief to do so.
Q: You mention your upbringing a lot, and blame it for your attitude toward life and religion. Do you think that, had you had a happier childhood, you would believe in God today?
A: I have no idea. But it doesn’t say much for theism if belief in a Supreme Being comes down to a happy childhood.
Q: When did you start realizing on your own that you don’t subscribe to the beliefs of others in your community? It takes many people years to come to that conclusion–what do you think helped you figure it out “at a young age” as you say?
A: Well, I’m forty and I still haven’t “figured it out,” so I’m not sure where you got that. I’ve been fighting with God, struggling with him, since a young age, yes, but that’s because I was taught about him at so young an age. I simply didn’t see anyone else around me struggling with him the way I was, in such a personal manner. Abraham did, Moses did, sure – but then the struggling seemed to stop. God gets away with more bullshit than he used to. To a certain degree, I think my failing was that I believed my teachers and parents more than most did. I believed them when they said he created the world in six days, when they said that he has a big book and he writes your name down for a good year or a bad year, that every sin is a black mark on your white soul that can’t be removed — I believed all that shit. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. Perhaps I should have been a more discerning six-year old. Or perhaps they should have been more responsible adults. Tough call.
Q: What’s your attitude toward people like many of us at YU who believe in a good God? (Do you pity us, mock us, feel indifferent, etc?)
A: I pity everyone in YU, but not because they believe in God. I pity them because they’re in YU. Even typing those letters gives me a fucking rash.
Q: As someone who claims to hate mankind, and someone who is often angry at life in general, you still have had children whom you clearly love. How do you plan on raising them with hope for a future?
A: Every day, until they’re thirteen, I’m going to read them stories about a furious, possibly psychotic being who runs the world and gets super-pissed off if they eat cheeseburgers. Just kidding! Who would do such a monstrous thing! To be honest, my hope is that without the dysfunctions of my own childhood, that with little more than genuine love, it’s possible to have a reasonably happy life on this miserable planet. It probably isn’t, we’re probably all fucked no matter what happens, but it’s worth a shot.
Q: Many good things take place in the Jewish community– things like camps for special-needs children, hatzalah, shomrim, etc, that can’t be found in other secular communities. How do you account for completely writing off a community that isn’t pure evil?
A: What a fantastic example of Jewish self-loving (a much more heinous crime, in my opinion, than self-hating). I’m fairly certain there are camps for special-needs children in secular communities. As well as volunteer EMS services. And community watches. Indoor plumbing, too, and electricity. Even the blacks have them! As for the second half of the question – yowza. You sound like someone whose vagina I crawled out of. I didn’t write anything off or call anyone pure evil – I left a community that was injurious and suffocating to me. I arose in the morning and I left. Some other guy did that once, I forget his name now.
Q: Do you have respect for anyone who believes in God or the institution of religion?
A: I respect doubt and doubters. The certain concern me.
Q: This is an article for a YU paper, [Editor's Note: at the time of this interview, the Beacon was still a YU paper] which I’ve gathered you’re not too pleased with. What is it about YU that bothers you in particular?
A: Yours is a school that purports to be about ethics and morals. And yet twenty-odd years ago, I left two dime bags on the roof of the high school and have never gotten so much as a phone call. Morals, my ass.
Q: Does your wife share your atheism/dislike (to put it mildly) of religion?
A: She doesn’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean she likes it when I undress her and cover her with bacon.
Q: Do you have any tips for an aspiring writer?
A: Give a damn. About anything, something. Not political things, but life things, existence, injustice, fraud, hypocrisy, love, death, sex, murder, joy or the lack thereof. That’s it. The rest is just Legos.