Oneiron

to go into the kiln during the performance, which we will return to because it became a turning point in Shlomith’s rising career—after this, the heavens opened, as the saying goes. Four more death threats came, and Shlomith didn’t smirk any more. The police classified two as serious enough that Shlomith was forced to hire a bodyguard for the next eighteen months. Although it began as a contractual relationship, this “experiment”, as Shlomith later described it in an interview, led to some unique situations; among other things, Shlomith found herself carrying her bodyguard’s child. She had an abortion and used the material (experiential material, not the aborted fetus!) in a performance named Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and never accepted that the novel by the same name published ten years later by the Hungarian author Imre Kertész had anything to do with her work. Shlomith was a pioneer in her field, and she knew it. People followed her work, something of which she was also aware. And that was precisely why she approached her material so seriously. Being in the avant-garde creates certain obligations, and she couldn’t give murderous religious fanatics even the slightest justification to throw stones. Now they could have a chance to swallow the strangeness of their religion down to the last bone, as she had done. But let them leave her in peace, Elokim save them, let them leave her alive! Because she, if anyone, didn’t make mistakes and that was that, and that was precisely why Shlomith absolutely could never be let off the hook so easily. “In hell”: where exactly did Shlomith think they were?

It’s unfortunate if our thirst for civilization and above all our desire to unearth information causes disgust in two groups of people: in those who love adventure and quick progress and in those who already know everything, perhaps even more than us (which is hardly possible). But Shlomith must be held to account. We must explain how seriously her art should be taken (she herself took it deadly seriously). We must ask whether her art holds up to time or whether it was only born of a desire to shock. Of course we don’t doubt her intentions a priori. Surely no one would care to provoke, just for the sake of provocation, for forty years on end. Surely a person could find something better to do in all that time. Shlomith could have, for example (and this is only a suggestion), rebuilt her burned bridges. She could, if she wanted to, have devoted all her strength to finding some new connection to her two children, Malka and Moti, a connection which she had ruined by her own hand (one could also say: out of her sheer stupidity). But that is also another story. Now we simply want an answer to our question: where is a Jew when she’s in hell?

The written Torah, which God delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, does not know heaven or hell. “But Gehenna!” some will shout with tremulous voice, “but Gehenna!” Yes, there is Gehenna, but it wasn’t located on the other side of the veil, it was just on the south side of ancient Jerusalem. From the beginning it was a profane, miserable place, a rocky valley where innocent children were sacrificed to Moloch and the Canaanite god Baal, or Baal-sebub, who later, among believers, became Beelzebub, as you may know: the Evil One, Old Scratch, the Father of Lies, the Horned God. It was rabbis studying the cryptic language of the Old Testament who invented heaven, naming it Gan Eden, and hell, which they called (and yes, the connection to the place of slaughter mentioned above is clear) Gehinnom. They invented heaven because, despite his promises, Yahweh didn’t remain by his chosen people’s side. He seemed to be doing something else entirely (sleeping? demurely averting his eyes?) and allowing his people to suffer, allowing the children of Israel to be enslaved through no fault of their own, to be tortured and killed, even though they were willing with one accord to follow literally each and every one of God’s 613 commandments and injunctions; or had someone gone AWOL after all? The irrational, unexplainable suffering simply began to exceed the human capacity to understand, so God a) was a sadist, or b) didn’t exist, or c) had something better in store for his chosen people. And so that had to be it. He had reserved something better for them in another world. Not in some ancient, murky underworld but above, in a bright heaven. The first two options were out of the question. Contemplating them wasn’t even permitted, at least not out loud. Those were ideas you couldn’t even taste with your lips, even if you left the thought silent, even if your lips only brushed by the words (out of some incomprehensible defiance) and even if you uttered the words all alone, with your whole body facing the corner: God is a sadist, God does not exist. It’s impossible. “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.” And thinking about points a) and b) might lead to that place we shall soon reach, the Jewish hell, which no one actually believes in any more these days, and probably never believed anciently either. Jews have always been practically minded. Heaven and hell were just the result of frantic digging by rabbis in the post-biblical period using a big, rusty shovel to fill holes in the Bible. One might wonder whether a dose of narcotic herbs might have been necessary to invent them, or perhaps the human imagination was significantly more prone to megalomania in ancient times than today. Whatever the case, hell had to be invented. There was no other option. Otherwise the atheists and all the other soulless degenerates might get out like a dog from its cage, and often they seemed to: Yahweh didn’t cast brimstone down on their heads; instead He let