“It isn’t fair,” he said aloud. “She wouldn’t like it so much if this was Reform and she were faced with the possibility of going in there someday,” but this gave him little comfort; in fact, it gave him no comfort at all. It seemed to lead him right back to where he had started—futile, amazed protest at the injustice and folly of what was being done for him—and he had gone into an unhappy sleep thinking that something, something would have to be done about this; perhaps he could take the case out of the congregation. If the ordinators were led to understand what kind of rites were being committed in the name of high Orthodoxy, they would take a strong position against this, seal up the complex, probably scatter the congregation throughout a hundred other complexes… and it was this which had given him ease, tossed him into a long murmuring sleep replete with satisfaction that he had finally found a way to deal with this (because he knew instinctively that the ordinators would not like this), but the next morning, cunningly, almost as if they had been informed by Stala (perhaps they had), the elders had come to take him to the ark, and that had been the end of that line of thought. He supposed that he could still do it, complain to the ordinators—that was, after his confinement was over—but at that point it hardly seemed worth it. It hardly seemed worth it at all. For one thing, he would be out of the ark by then and would not have to face it for a very, very long time, if ever. So why bother with the ordinators? He would have to take a more direct position, take it up with the congregation itself. Surely once they understood his agony, they could not permit it to continue. Could they?
In the third of his imaginary dialogues with God (whom he pictured as an imposing man, somewhat the dimensions of one of the elders but much more neatly trimmed and not loaded down with the paraphernalia with which they conducted themselves) Leviticus said, “I don’t believe any of it. Not any part of it at all. It’s ridiculous.”
“Doubt is another part of faith,” God said. “Doubt and belief intertwine; both can be conditions of reverence. There is more divinity in the doubt of a wise man than in the acceptance of fools.”
“That’s just rhetoric,” Leviticus said; “it explains nothing.”
“The devices of belief must move within the confines of rhetoric, God said. “Rhetoric is the poor machinery of the profound and incontrovertible. Actually, it’s not a matter of doubt. You’re just very uncomfortable.”
“That’s right. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t see why Judaism imposes this kind of suffering.”
“Religion is suffering” God said with a modest little laugh, “and if you think Judaism is difficult upon its participants, you should get a look at some of the others sometimes. Animal sacrifice, immolation, the ceremony of tongues. Oh, most terrible! Not that everyone doesn’t have a right to their point of view,” God added hastily. “Each must reach me, each in his way and through his tradition. Believe me, Leviticus, you haven’t got the worst of it.”
“I protest. I protest this humiliation.”
“It isn’t easy for me, either,” God pointed out. “I’ve gone through cycles of repudiation for billions of years. Still, one must go on.”
“I’ve got to get out of here. It’s destroying my health; my physical condition is ruined. When am I going to leave?”
“I’m sorry,” God said, “that decision is not in my hands.”
“But you’re omnipotent.”
“My omnipotence is only my will working through the diversity of twenty billion other wills. Each is determined, and yet each is free.”
“That sounds to me like a lousy excuse,” Leviticus said sullenly. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all.”
“I do the best I can,” God said, and after a long, thin pause added sorrowfully, “You don’t think that any of this is easy for me either, do you?”
Leviticus has the dim recollection from the historical tapes, none of them well attended to, that before the time of the complexes, before the time of great changes, there had been another kind of existence, one during which none of the great churches, Judaism included, had been doing particularly well in terms of absolute number of participants, relative proportion of the population. Cults had done all right, but cults had had only the most marginal connection to the great churches, and in most cases had repudiated them, leading, in the analyses of certain of the historical tapes, to the holocaust that had followed, and the absolute determination on the part of the Risen, that they would not permit this to happen again, that they would not allow the cults to appropriate all of the energy, the empirical demonstrations, for themselves, but instead would make sure that the religions were reconverted to hard ritual, that the ritual demonstrations following would be strong and convincing enough to keep the cults out of business and through true worship and true belief (although with enough ritual now to satisfy the mass of people that religion could be made visible) stave off yet another holocaust. At least, this was what Leviticus had gathered from the tapes, but then, you could never be sure about this, and the tapes were all distributed under the jurisdiction of the elders anyway, and what the elders would do with material to manipulate it to their own purposes was well known.
Look, for one thing, at what they had done to Leviticus.
“I’ll starve in here,” he had said to the elders desperately, as they were conveying him down the aisle toward the ark. “I’ll deteriorate. I’ll go insane from the confinement. If I get ill, no one will be there to help me.”
“Food will be given you each day. You will have the Torah and the Talmud, the Feast of Life itself to comfort you and to grant you peace. You will allow the spirit of God to move within you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Leviticus said. “I told you, I have very little belief in any of this. How can the spirit—?”
“Belief means nothing,” the elders said. They seemed to speak in unison, which was impossible, of course (how could they have such a level of shared anticipation of the others’ remarks; rather, it was that they spoke one by one, with similar voice quality—that would be a more likely explanation of the phenomenon, mysticism having, so far as Leviticus knew, very little relation to rational Judaism). “You are its object, not its subject.”
“Aha!” Leviticus said then, frantically raising one finger to forestall them as they began to lead him painfully into the ark, pushing him, tugging, buckling his limbs. “If belief does not matter, if I am merely object rather than subject, then how can I be tenanted by the spirit?”
“That,” the elders said, finishing the job, patting him into place, one of them extracting a rag to whip the wood of the ark speedily to high gloss, cautiously licking a finger, applying it to the surface to take out an imagined particle of dust, “that is very much your problem and not ours, you see,” and closed the doors upon him, leaving him alone with scrolls and Talmud, cloth, and the sound of scrambling birds. In a moment he heard a grinding noise as key was inserted into lock, then a snap as tumblers inverted. They were locking him in.