Making the Rounds: A Reader's Guide

Here are some notes that will help readers, particularly non-Jewish readers, understand the stories better. Some of what I discuss regarding the indivdual stories may contain some spoilers; you're duly warned!

First, some background: I wrote the first story, “The Missing Word,” when I was about sixteen or seventeen. I’d been reading sword & sorcery stories in pulp magazines and anthologies, and thought it would be funny and fun to turn things around a bit. All the heroes were big-muscled barbarians like Conan or otherwise fairly powerful beings dealing with worlds that were out of Celtic/Germanic/Tolkienesque cultural traditions, so I decided to write about an old, somewhat frail Jewish kvetch (complainer) of a wizard. He needed someone to kvetch to, a sidekick, and since he had nobody else it only made sense for him to have by-play with his horse. And there was no reason the horse—since we’re talking about a fantasy world—couldn’t talk back. It would have to be telepathically, of course, since horses don’t have the anatomy to form speech (contrary to the “Mr. Ed” idea); that would also allow Melech to make some secret and not-so-complimentary remarks about the humans they encountered.

The story at the time was about 9,000 words. I liked it but couldn’t sell it, partly because of its awkward length and partly because editors simply didn’t like it. Some years later, however, the Canadian SF magazine On Spec was founded, and it had an upper word limit for its stories of 6,000 words. I bravely cut the story down to something like that, and sent it off. At least one of the editors (still with the magazine) was interested in spiritual themes in SF and has been one of my biggest boosters at the magazine. They accepted the story, and it was published in 2001.

For me, the story was one of the most fully formed stories I’d ever written. All the parts seemed to fit together perfectly, from the themes to the characters to the plot, and I didn’t want to dilute it by writing any more stories about Eliezer and Melech. However, a member of the writers’ group that I belonged to (the Cecil Street Irregulars), Theresa Wojtasiewicz, insisted that I write more stories about them. I thought about it, and finally and wisely took her advice; the result was “Making Light,” which appeared in On Spec six years later. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be a book called Making the Rounds, and I acknowledge her role in its creation in my dedication. I have been interested in the story cycle—the collection of linked stories that form a larger structure—since I was a kid, and since I was now writing more than one Jewish wizard story I figured I might as well turn the series into a cycle. Because I did not set out to write a cycle—unlike the case with Living Room—it isn’t quite what I might have produced if I had thought originally in those terms; there are elements of “The Missing Word” I might have done differently. I ordered the existing stories and wrote others to form a vaguely calendar-based structure for the cycle as a whole, with “The Missing Word” presumably occurring after Yom Kippur one year and the other stories set during the year leading up to the next Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The final piece, “The Eighth Day,” is set during the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during which Jews are supposed to atone for their sins of the past year.
Some Basics

I named my wizard Eliezer ben-Avraham because Eliezer means “My God is help” and I figured he wouldn’t have any magical powers if he didn’t get them from a divine source; ben-Avraham means “son of Abraham” and Avraham/Abraham is my Hebrew name. Every Jewish child receives two names: a Hebrew name and a vernacular name usually beginning with the same letter or something close to it. That’s why my vernacular name is Allan. For a boy, the Hebrew name is followed by “ben” (son of) and then the Hebrew name of his father. Thus, I am Eliezer’s “father” because I created him, and in fact during the final story, the novella, I’m the one who sends down the spirit to have a chat with him. That’s why I leave it deliberately vague whether the spirit says she’s sent by “his” father or “the father”; in the fictional world, it’s God, but in reality it’s me, because I’m that world’s god. That’s a bit of deliberate metafictionalizing, I’m afraid. Eliezer has gone through quite a lot, and I’m about to decide what to do with him.

I named the horse Melech because it means “king,” and I thought that sounded like a good horsey name. I may have encountered it during a Western story or movie at some point. Then I decided to play with it a bit in the stories, and there are many times when Melech is the one in charge. In the Purim story, the reversal is apt, since Purim is the Jewish carnival, when everything in society is inverted. It seemed funny to me to have the horse be smarter than the man and also have a fairly cynical view of human beings generally. He provides a satisfying outside perspective for me to work with, and to show up Eliezer’s failings, particularly the way his pride, curiosity, and above all self-pity blind him to some things. Melech isn’t always right—he sometimes misjudges things—but he has a strong nose for evil and usually figures out the mystery before Eliezer.

Since my wizard was Jewish I had to come up with a magical system for him to use, and the logical one was the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is mainly a Jewish mystical system of thought full of odd beliefs and ways of describing the world. Like other mystical systems, such as Zen Buddhism, it’s based on a fundamental belief in cosmic unity, particularly one grounded in balanced opposites: think of the yin-yang symbol. There are different versions of Kabbalistic thought, but one sees the universe as basically unified while also imbued with masculine (God) and feminine (Shekhina) principles. (In other belief systems, by the way, Shekhina represents evil; that’s how she was portrayed in the Pentecostal church that a friend attended.) One of the great Kabbalistic myths is the crackpot: the universe was once a solid whole, a cosmic round pot, and then it was broken into pieces that scattered all over, and that was the creation of our material world. We are shards of the original Unity. One day, the pot will come back together again.

In the Kabbalah, the universe is represented by Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man; for a more secular analogy, see Hobbes’s Leviathan or notions that a nation or society is an organic whole like a human being, with the king being the head, the labourers being the hands, etc. Kabbalists devised all sorts of complicated analyses of what Adam Kadmon’s different parts represented. They also saw the universe as having a set of basic principles represented by ten “sefirot,” which are the agencies or principles by which you can know God, among them wisdom, power, beauty, love, and understanding. Each of them is associated with a body part, a virtue, a colour, etc., not to mention one of the plagues of Egypt and various other things. At the centre of everything is God Himself: the En Sof (“without end”), or the ultimate. However, all I knew when I wrote “The Missing Word” was that it was a complex system that was Jewish, involved magic, and relied on language. It was logomancy, or magic using words. Much of the rest is invented.

Understanding the magic depends on knowing the way Hebrew works. The Hebrew letters are also used as numbers: aleph (א) is one, beth (ב) is two, and so on. Every word has a numerical value, in that you can add up the letters in the word to come up with a total. I knew when I wrote “The Missing Word” that numerology had something to do with Kabbalistic magic, and that’s why I figured that you could transform into an animal by saying its name (note the Adamic power of naming) the number of times that its letters add up to. Actually, Kabbalistic magic seems to be mainly about calling forth spirits to do your bidding—some of it quite nasty bidding—but I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t have bothered to include the idea if I’d known about it. Fantasy writers have the freedom to invent their own magic systems depending on their needs.

Language is therefore extremely important throughout the book. It is the source of magic, and it is magic: if it weren’t for language, Eliezer himself wouldn’t exist, since he’s a construct of language. He performs magic by saying words, and a writer performs magic by writing them. In fantastic literature, you can create and destroy entire worlds, not to mention individuals, just with language. The book is full of references to the constructive and destructive power of words—or, in some cases, the constructive power of language and the destructive power of silence. It was only a small step for me to play with these ideas and themes and then get metafictional with the book. In “The Missing Word,” the most important word—the one Eliezer is chasing down—is missing, but the reader ought to be able to figure it out on their own. The story cycle in some ways quite literally comes full circle; thus, the title of the collection refers to two things: the circle that is the universal mystical symbol of wholeness and perfection (very prominent in Kabbalah), and the cycle itself.

To make Eliezer a wizard, I tossed in a few more ideas: he would be a Jewish version of the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew, only in this case he wanders not because he was mean to Jesus but because he poked around in forbidden areas of the Kabbalah and gained magical powers that were the equivalent of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Just like Adam and Eve, he’s exiled from his home and forced to go out into the world to labour for his food and shelter. Since he insisted on pursuing forbidden knowledge and gaining somewhat God-like powers, his “punishment” is that he has to use his powers to help anybody who asks for his help—to perform “mitzvah”s (Heb. mitzvoth), or good deeds. In other words, with his greater power comes greater responsibility. But they have to be good deeds; he may not use his powers to perform evil ones. Furthermore, while he can transform life, he can’t create or destroy it. That’s God’s prerogative alone in my secondary world.

He’s very unhappy with his fate, even though he brought it on himself. What he doesn’t appreciate is that he also brought it on Melech, who had no say in the matter, and the book (thanks to fellow members of the Cecil Streeters) is in part the story of his gradual understanding of Melech’s position in all this. Eliezer is so caught up in feeling sorry for himself that he’s blind to Melech’s own enslavement to Eliezer’s “curse.” Over time, I came to a better understanding of what “doing mitzvahs” really means in Jewish culture: every Jew is expected to perform good deeds anyway, wizard or not. There is a principle called Tikkun Olam: “repair of the world”; it means that we’re supposed to do everything we can to make the world a better place. What Eliezer must finally learn is that he’d have to do good deeds no matter what, and having magical powers is as much a benefit as a curse: yes, he has lost his home, and perhaps his family (I’m not sure he had any), but he also has the opportunity thanks to his powers to perform more, and greater, good deeds. After all, how many people can capture and return to its book an escaped word? or stop a city from crumbling to pieces? or prevent an apocalyptic disaster resulting from random magic? He brought both a burden and a boon upon himself, in the grand scheme of things. That’s what I send Shekhina down to tell him.

Why Shekhina? It struck me that Eliezer is not just a terrible sexist, as someone with his background would almost certainly become; he’s also not a very good Kabbalist as a result. (Orthodox Judaism has very strict rules about male and female roles. It’s a very patriarchal worldview.) He doesn’t get the fact that to truly understand the world you have to take into account both the masculine and feminine principles. It’s comical when he is so shocked to see a Queen on the throne of a Jewish city-state, but it’s also absurd, since he should know better than to dismiss feminine presence this way. His pride and other problems are in part a reflection of his overemphasis on the male principle, and Shekhina is the spirit who opens his eyes because he needs some feminine principle in his life.
 
As I said earlier, the structure of the book is circular and based on the calendar. A number of Jewish holidays form the bases of some stories: Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. Eliezer spends the book atoning for his sin of crossing the line, and pursuing forbidden knowledge. That’s the whole purpose of Yom Kippur. The Kol Nidre is a song associated with Yom Kippur in which you ask God and everybody you might have sinned against to clean the slate.

Then there’s Yiddish, the “low” and “ugly” hybrid language based on Hebrew, German, and Slavic. Jewish humour depends greatly on Yiddish's “vulgar” and lower-class nature, and the resulting contrast between respectable environments and everyday speech. It’s one thing in a fantasy story to hear the wizard declare, “O evil mage! Catastrophe shall come if thou dost continue so!” and quite another for him to say, “Oy, what a schmuck!” Traditionally, Hebrew was reserved for religious observances and rituals, while Yiddish was the language of everyday life; with the creation of Israel, Hebrew became commonly spoken, too, while Yiddish has faded. Think of it as the mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews, and as with all immigrant groups people speak it less and less over the generations. My grandmother apparently spoke lots of Yiddish; my mother could speak it but mostly spoke English. But some words and phrases make their way into everyday speech because they’re very expressive. Here’s a short glossary to help non-Jews with the Yiddish expressions:

chaleria (lit. “cholera,” usually meaning a jerk, someone as awful as a disease: a chaleria!)
feh!: expression of disgust
fershteyn: “understand”
goy pl. goyim: “Gentile”/”Gentiles”; to say someone has a goyische kopf means he has the head of a non-Jew and is therefore stupid
mazel tov: “good luck” with various other positive meanings, or said ironically: “You’re going to try to convince him to show up? Mazel tov!”
meshuggah/meshugge: “crazy”
meshuggenah: “crazy” or “crazy person”
meshugass: “crazy thing to do”
Oy vey iz mir!: “Oh, woe is me!” or simply Oy vey!
oy gevalt: “Oh, God” but more generally, “That sucks!”
putz var. pitzeleh: “prick,” basically meaning little jerk, but often used more neutrally for children; other words meaning penis include schmuck, which is
      always used as a derogatory term
shmegeggi: jerk
treyf: non-kosher

I try to translate Yiddish phrases in situ, and it works since people actually sometimes do say them in Yiddish first and then in the vernacular to emphasize them: “Vos villst-du fun mein leben? What do you WANT from my life?” “Gantse meshuggah? Are you completely crazy?” “S’gehert? Did you hear that [ridiculous thing he just said]?” (this was thrown in by Wayne and Shuster, the Canadian comedy team, during one of their sketches). By the way, these are the sorts of phrases you’ll generally hear spoken by your mother.
Structure

It’s a somewhat complicated structure. There are seven short stories and a novella made up of seven mini-stories that parallel or mirror the seven short stories, plus a coda to finish things off with. I decided on eight texts altogether because eight is a mystical number in Judaism. I learned about this from reading and looking more closely into a novel by Antonine Maillet, the Acadian author, called, On the Eighth Day. In some traditions, there was an eighth day of creation following the seven we’re all familiar with: seven days of the creation of our world, and one more for a transcendent realm, or maybe the completion of everything in the other seven. I was always curious about why both Passover and Chanukah last eight days rather than seven, since seven is so often the magic number. Maybe that’s why: eight is an even more magic, mystical number. Anyway, it seemed appropriate in a work of fantasy to expand the physical universe’s seven to the transcendent, magical, mystical eight. Also, in Kabbalah there’s a belief that while this universe’s stars have five points, the Other Realm’s stars have six, thus the Star of David (the Jewish yin-yang with its two opposite-pointing triangles overlaid on each other).

Eliezer does the rounds of the world he lives in—a kind of secondary-world version of the Middle East—performing magic for some “regular customers” and for strangers he encounters. The circle is the universal shape of perfection, eternity, and the transcendent, and so the circle dominates the text at the structural and symbolic levels, not to mention the book’s setting(s). There’s a circle in every story; for instance, in “The Missing Word,” the rock-city is built in the remains of the meteorite that slammed into the Earth and created a giant round crater (the rock and crater forming a sort of sundial).

The stories are unified by motifs and themes: the circles, the power of language, the need to make moral and ethical choices, and so on. As for the power of language, a major part of that is expressed through references to the Adamic power: God gave Adam dominion over the rest of creation by giving him the power to name the other beings. Naming something gives you power over it—not just in the Jewish tradition but in many others as well, and fantasy is full of references to things like “learning one’s true name” in order to control someone. Wizards and witches do this sort of thing all the time. Thus, I associate name, identity, existence, and selfhood at various points.
The Stories

“The Missing Word”:

As I said, this is the story that is the closest to fully formed I think I can write. Everything fit together, and that’s why I didn’t want to dilute it: the character, the magic, the theme, the plot, the symbolism, etc. Eliezer is a Kabbalist, meaning he understands how language works and his magic is based on words. The problem he’s hired to deal with involves a word. Words gain power when people believe in them and/or what they represent. The word in the story has gained special power, even the power to move around, because of the belief invested in it. As I note, the people of Al-Ayar are worshippers of the sun (appropriately, given their desert existence; think of the Egyptians’ Ra), and the word that goes missing is their word for “sun”/”God”; I hope there are enough clues for the reader to figure that out. The story is based on the Logos idea: creation comes through language, and everything in the physical universe is God’s word. “God said, Let there be light, and there was light”; that is, all God had to do was say something and it came into being. The danger is when the word, which only represents something else, starts to think it is that something else. The word isn’t the only one making that mistake; Eliezer is only God’s word, but he gained forbidden knowledge and sought to become (more like) God. That’s why he can identify with the word and its sin. The word climbs the mountain aspiring to be, and to become one with, what it thinks it is, the sun, in the same way that Eliezer reached up past his legitimate heights. Think of the Tower of Babel here and you’ll see what I mean. Both have to learn they’re only symbols or representations of the divine, not the divine themselves. Meanwhile, Kala-Wek employs a different, less morally restrained kind of magic—for the sake of survival, so he isn’t really evil in that sense—and so there’s something of an ethical clash involved. 


“Unspeakable”:

“The Missing Word” is about the creative power of language; this story is about the decreative power of silence. Any resemblance between the Mayor and a recent mayor of Toronto is entirely intentional. The city only endures because the Poet, high atop his mountain, continues to compose poetry about it; when he stops, the city begins to crumble. Since the Kabbalah and other mystical systems operate on paradoxes, it seemed only natural to have the solution based on a paradox: compose poetry about your inability to compose poetry, about void, and therefore keep things going. It’s a story about gaps in other ways. There are two main tropes in fantasy about Jewish themes: golems and dybbuks (spirits, generally evil ones, that possess people). It seemed far too obvious to have a story in a book of Jewish fantasy about a golem, so I changed things up by writing what a call an “anti-golem” story. In this one, there is no golem, even though one is asked for, because Eliezer knows full well what happens when you make one: it runs amok. The somewhat anti-Semitic Mayor (“Isn’t that what you people do?”) is dumb enough to think that making a golem, particularly one against an unidentified, unknown, possibly non-existent foe, is the solution to a problem involving destruction. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The story ends with a threat rather than a promise. The Poet, by the way, is the second Annoying Magical Being I created for Eliezer to deal with, even though he’s the first Eliezer encounters in the book. The first was Keeper, who shows up in the next story; I didn’t want to get to Chanukah too early in the book, so I figured I would set this story sometime in the autumn (it just so happens Ford was elected in October, so maybe it’s set then). Note the circular shape of the shaved-off mountaintop he sits on.


“Making Light”:

The title, by the way, is a pun on “having fun” as you do with a situation; “A Little Leavening” is also based on a pun involving fun, or lightening up an otherwise difficult occasion. The story is about Chanukah, the Festival of Lights; it originates in a myth about the Maccabean Rebellion against the Hellenistic king, Antiochus, who tried to get the Jews to worship him (kings in those days, such as the Pharaohs, tended to see themselves not just “divine right” monarchs but divine themselves; even the Roman emperors claimed divinity at one point). Antiochus violated the sanctity of the Temple, and when the Maccabees recaptured it and sought to sanctify it, they only had enough oil to last one day. Miraculously, the oil lasted eight days, and so Chanukah was created to celebrate and thank God for the miracle. Jews light a special candelabra, or menorah, for the eight days of Chanukah. There’s one “servant” candle that you use to light the others, so there are actually nine branches of the menorah. On the first night, you light one candle, on the second you light two, etc. Theoretically, Eliezer needs far more than eight candles, but there’s a bit of hand-waving going on there. These are magic candles that don’t burn down.
 
Chanukah takes place around the winter solstice, and it’s essentially a solstice festival honouring the return of the light after the time of the greatest darkness. There is an association between the cycle of the year and the cycle of life: it’s about life, death, and rebirth. Thus, the return of the light after the solstice is equated with the return of life after death, however one believes that might occur. We are all carriers of life, of the spark of life if you will, and Keeper, or Timekeeper, or Father Time, is just one being responsible for maintaining the life and light around us. Melech is so cynical about humans he thinks that Keeper, who lives inside and is part of the menorah, wants to trick Eliezer into replacing him as the Keeper and that would allow Keeper to escape his “trap.” The idea that he alone is the Keeper of life, light, the power of rebirth, etc. amuses him to no end, and shows that Melech and Eliezer don’t get it. It’s one of the few times Melech misunderstands things, although many other humans do manage to confirm his opinions about us.

There is a game that children play on Chanukah: the dreidel game. A dreidel is a spinning top with four sides, each of which has a Hebrew letter on it:
 ש  ה  ג  נ (nun, gimel, he, and shin)
The letters are the initials of the Hebrew phrase, “Nes Gadol Hayah Shin,” or “A great miracle happened there,” which refers to the miracle of the eight days the oil lasted. Each player spins the dreidel, and which letter comes up on top when the dreidel lands determines whether the player wins playing tokens (pennies, shells, nuts, whatever you like) from or surrenders them to the pot. It’s effectively a gambling game. (I just realized that that works nicely with the Purim story, but that was accidental.) It seemed only right that Keeper spins a magic gold dreidel and it doesn’t land for eight days. It forms a perfect circle as it spins, blurring the flat sides into one round cylinder. Gold is the universal mystical symbol of perfection, unity, timelessness (it never tarnishes), and God Himself; that’s why both the timeless menorah and ever-spinning dreidel are gold. Again, Keeper was the first Annoying Magical Being I threw at poor Eliezer. He’s something of a doppelganger: another Jewish magical type who seems to be able to read Eliezer’s mind. He’s much, much older, though, especially if he’s an embodiment of annual Time and is reaching the end of the year; think of your typical Father Time figure as depicted on December 31, with a baby being born representing the New Year. He’s also much more fun than Eliezer, embodying the playful spirit Eliezer kind of lacks. As a wise fool, he tosses out paradoxes and spiritual truths, even though Eliezer thinks he’s just an idiot. Keeper uses Eliezer as his kabbalistic conduit to tap into the En Sof and summon magical bees to start the process of making the candles with their wax.

The story is also about homecomings/endings/coming full circle/etc., a kind of prefiguration of the final scene in the book. Eliezer has lost his home, just as the Jews did when they went into Egypt and were enslaved, or went into exile in Babylon when they (well, probably only some members of the upper classes) were abducted after the sixth-century conquest of Israel by the Babylonians (Ps. 137: “By the rivers of Babylon...”). The Jews in Egypt sought the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey, and Moses led them there, even if he himself didn’t get to go there. The land around the giant menorah is a land of milk and honey: the milk from Mother Nature and the honey from the bees. It’s not home, not quite the Promised Land of Milk and Honey, but at the end of a long journey—the year’s and Eliezer’s—it will do for now.


“The Whole Megillah”:

The next big holiday after Chanukah is Purim, the Jewish Carnival. The story of Purim is told in the Book of Esther. Conventionally (I don’t know why), it’s thought to be the longest and most digressive narrative in the Bible. The Book of Esther is read out during the holiday and it’s supposed to be a fairly draining experience. Megillah is Hebrew for “scroll” (or “book”: same thing in the ancient world), but while every book of the Bible is in the form of a megillah, the only book regularly referred to as the Megillah is the Book of Esther. Since the Megillah is supposedly the longest story or book of the Old Testament, I decided to make the Purim story the longest short story in the book. But when for structural reasons I added the novella, it ceased to be the longest piece in the text. Can’t have everything.

The story of Esther is as follows: King Ahasuerus of Persia—possibly Xerxes I—had a harem, of which his favourite wife was the Jewess Esther/Hadassah, although she wisely never told him her nationality; he even made her his Queen. His prime minister/chief advisor was Haman, a notorious anti-Semite. Esther had an uncle named Mordecai, who one day did not show Haman the expected and required amount of obeisance and deference, since Mordecai would only bow before God and Haman was wearing an idol around his neck. Haman was infuriated at this disrespect and counselled the king to slaughter all the Jews on a gibbet. He threw lots (Heb. purim) to decide on which day to kill the Jews. But Esther interceded on behalf of the Jews and convinced the king to kill Haman instead, and on the same gibbet. She has been celebrated ever since as one of the great saviours of the Jewish people, along with Moses and Judah Maccabee, leader of the revolt mentioned above.

Purim celebrates the Jews’ salvation through a carnival. It is the only day of the year that Jews are allowed to get drunk and eat without restraint. Eliezer drinks and eats more than he’s used to, and more than he should, and can no longer tell what’s real and what’s dream or nightmare. It is also the day people dress up as the characters in the story, and so the story is about fluid and unreliable identities. Eliezer takes a while to clue in that he can’t trust anybody’s appearance. He meets another doppelganger: a young Kabbalist who also strayed into areas of forbidden knowledge. In his case, however, instead of being able to transform into anything he wants to, he must transform, against his will, into anything other people don’t want. If Eliezer doesn’t like mice, he becomes a mouse; if he doesn’t want to encounter the Queen, he appears in her guise (though forgetting his plural pronouns). Because he has no control over his nature or identity, he lacks a fundamental self. He is, existentially, a blank—and that is worse than being evil, or it could be considered the ultimate definition of evil. In Jewish lore, we gain our identity through God and our name. Jacob ben-Ari has thrown away his selfhood in favour of the power to transform, thereby losing himself and making himself a nothing. His spiritual father is Isaac Luria, one of the fathers of Kabbalah, whose nickname is Ari, Hebrew for “Lion.” He clearly knows his Kabbalah, given his knowledge of the sefirot, including the Keter or Crown, which is the top one representing the Godhead. But his arrogance and curiosity surpassed even Eliezer’s, and that’s why he got himself into such trouble.

Melech is able to figure out why a Jewish city has a supposed Queen long before Eliezer does. There were female prophets and judges, but Israel was consistently ruled during its monarchy (actually, two monarchies: Israel and Judah) by males. Eliezer’s sexist orthodoxy is scandalized by the existence of a Queen who wasn’t merely the wife of a King but the actual ruler, until Melech reminds him that it’s Purim, the time of social inversion and fake identities. Thus, a female servant with dirty hands has taken on the traditionally male role of monarch, while the real king is a somewhat chubby, out-of-shape guard. I hint that she was once Jacob’s lover till he became no longer able to exist in society. Eliezer finds a way to stabilize his identity and self, and slow down his consciousness of time, by making him into a statue—appropriately, as a lion—until God can figure out what to do about him.

One of the traditions of Purim involves the children, as with the dreidel game during Chanukah. They are provided with spinning noisemakers, or graggers, and at the Purim service, as the Megillah is being read aloud, the kids spin their graggers whenever the evil Haman’s name is spoken as a way of booing and hissing him. Since Haman appears to be walking the streets in this town, his name is voiced frequently; at first, Eliezer is okay with it, thinking it’s just being done as part of the service, but then the noisemakers sound almost all the time, and that begins to annoy him immensely and give him a headache.

Haman is identifiable and usually characterized by his hat: traditionally, he wore a triangular hat, and so that kind of hat is a conventional part of the Haman costume. The signature treat of Purim is the hamantaschen: a triangular pastry named after Haman’s hat, and filled with dates, prunes, poppy seeds, or far more tasty flavourings. They’re delicious for people who like that sort of thing. (I prefer the jam-filled ones.)

Finally, there’s a reason the town has a central circle, not square, for people to gather in...


“A Little Leavening”:

The Passover story. The seder is the traditional meal served during the holiday, and there are two seders during the first two nights of Passover. Eliezer wishes to get to a Jewish village in order to celebrate first seder but is kept from it by the insistent requests from the non-Jewish villagers he is working for. Melech suggests he teach them how to run a seder, and I think he does so just to watch and be amused by the chaos that will inevitably ensue.

Passover celebrates being led out of slavery in Egypt and to the Promised Land. It is also the time when Moses received the Law—the Ten Commandments—on Mount Sinai. While he was away, the Jews backslid into idolatry, forging a Golden Calf to worship; when he saw what they were doing Moses lost his temper. One problem Eliezer has is that he insists on a few things: first, that the seder be done the “right” way, even though he shouldn’t expect it from these poor villagers, as he puts the letter of the Law ahead of its spirit; second, he has a somewhat elevated sense of himself, and while he could very well create some of the things he needs, or do certain other tasks himself, he thinks he’s above that. That’s why the visiting spirit mocks him for saying, “I’m a wizard, not a baker!” The basic message is, “Who do you think you are?”

Food is a major symbolic element of the seder. First, the foods laid out symbolize the suffering of the Jews in bondage in Egypt; for example, salt water represents the tears they shed, bitter herbs represent the bitterness of slavery, and some foods represent the bricks and mortar they had to use to build Pharaoh’s pyramids. Because the Jews left Egypt quickly, and due to the heat in the desert, their dough baked before they could add the yeast and they were forced to eat unleavened bread. That’s why the Jews eat matzoh, or unleavened bread, on Passover. Passover is a time to eat different food on different dishes in a different way. Once again, children play a role in the ceremony: the youngest boy in attendance, or the closest person to that status, asks four questions, stemming from one overarching question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and the answer the patriarch gives is the story of Passover. All this is laid out in the Haggadah (“telling”), the guidebook and prayer book for the seder. Eliezer gives up trying to teach the boy the four sub-questions in favour of the main one. That does not go well, especially given that Eliezer insists the boy ask the question in Hebrew, a language utterly foreign to him.
 
One extra place is set at the seder table: it is thought that the prophet Elijah might come, so room is made for him, including a glass of wine for him to drink. In my story, Elijah does indeed show up, primarily to teach Eliezer a lesson about humility and not enslaving people—Eliezer is behaving like Pharaoh, with all the latter’s pride and claims to final authority. Pharaoh had to learn to bow down to the Jews’ God, and Eliezer must learn to do the same to the same entity and His emissary; Elijah refuses to listen to any nonsense about Eliezer’s age and status. There are hints here about the difference between the letter and the spirit of the Law—in Judaism, the latter always trumps the former. It is also one of the occasions in the book where Eliezer becomes and/or refuses to be a child. He thinks about what it was like to eat matzoh as a boy, but is incapable of “stooping” to the level of a boy and just asking the question himself. Incidentally, matzohs come in square and round shapes, but of course only one of those choices can appear here.

There are some subtle jokes here. Jewish wine, like Manieschewitz, is notoriously sweet. This, however, is a Gentile village. They supply Elijah’s wine, so it’s bound to be less sweet than what he’s used to. Also, the story contains my favourite line in the book, when Eliezer realizes the boy is not learning the question and thinks, “How sad: the child was clearly a moron.” That speaks volumes about my sense of humour. There’s also the theme of positions, both physical and social: Eliezer needs to find exactly the right position for sleep, and he prides himself on his wizardly position in the world. Not the right attitude. Also, I’ve struggled with insomnia my whole life, and came up with a joke about it. Whenever anyone asks if I had a good night’s sleep, I sing The Question in Hebrew: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” I decided to give Eliezer that joke at the end of the story.


“Of the Law”:

Once again, the split between the letter and spirit of the Law comes to the fore. Judaism is a humanistic religion; in other words, if there is a clash between following the Law and saving or helping a person, the latter comes first. If your neighbour’s house is on fire on the Sabbath, when you’re supposed to do no work, you can and must help save it. A demon possesses Melech and tricks Eliezer into “breaking” nine of the ten commandments, but since no evil intent was really involved in Eliezer’s actions, he hasn’t really done anything wrong. Good intentions cancel out supposedly “bad” deeds. The demon that feeds on evil will starve if this is the best he can do with the Law.

Eliezer is again blind to what is happening, assuming that the demon is possessing something in the town and not really listening to Melech’s words—which I designed to be ambiguous, but I was aware that smarter readers would probably catch on fairly soon. I set up Melech’s nose for evil in “The Whole Megillah,” so that it would appear that he was detecting and responding to evil outside himself. His uncharacteristic behaviour is supposed to be similar to his reaction to “Haman.” The story is about good and evil and what these really mean. The townspeople have a dualistic religion that involves the forces of Light and Dark, reminiscent of the division in “Making Light” (and Zoroastrianism). Their belief in colours is similar to the myth about the covenant with Noah and humanity after the flood: God sets the rainbow in the sky as a sign of his promise not to destroy evil humanity with a flood again. The demon fights for the Dark by trying to draw Eliezer, and by extension Melech, down into it.

To be precise, Eliezer breaks the following Commandments:
1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me: Eliezer attends the Gentile ceremony and superficially worships their polytheon on the Sabbath before worshipping his own God;
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image: he has a lucid dream in which he consciously envisions—makes pictures of—himself and the neighbour’s wife;
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: as he does at the ceremony to please his hosts;
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: he attends the Gentile service and pursues the demon on the Sabbath;
5. Honour thy father and thy mother: he denies to “Joseph” who his real parents are in order to protect the boy’s faith;
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery: he dreams he is the neighbour woman’s husband, solely to enjoy her wonderful cooking;
8. Thou shalt not steal: he technically “steals” grain for his starving horse;
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour: he lies to protect the neighbour woman;
10. Thou shalt not covet (thy neighbour’s wife, house, etc.): he certainly does that, but only for the sake of a tasty meal.
The only Commandment he does not break, of course, is “Thou shalt not kill.” When Melech says, “Kill it!” Eliezer knows he must be possessed, since the real Melech would know that Eliezer cannot do that. Eliezer finally clues in and exorcises the demon.

The Biblical Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob, was famous for his robe of many colours, and naturally Eliezer gives the boy who serves him that nickname. The ten sefirot of the Kabbalah also have their colours, so the story parallels the townspeople’s beliefs, the rainbow myth, and the Kabbalah.

The story is based on a terrible hidden pun, and that’s what Melech verbalizes at the end, the comment that does not bear repeating. The story is about possession, and due to that possession Eliezer technically “breaks” nine-tenths of the Law...


“Towering Pride”:

The Tower of Babel story. The power of language is highlighted by people who seek a kind of pre-Babel universal language through random experimentation; as a result, they accidentally gain the powers that Eliezer deliberately sought. Like Jacob’s, however, their power is out of control. The story is an investigation of faith, since they’re willing to end the world in the pursuit of what they truly believe in. Do they have the right to do that?

For the first time, Eliezer chooses a task rather than submits to one that others ask him to perform. He takes on moral responsibility, much to Melech’s chagrin, and strives to solve a serious problem entirely of his own accord. Apart from their officials, who hypocritically consider themselves superior beings, the villagers are humble to the extreme. That contrasts with the somewhat arrogant monks, whose faith has given them a strong case of spiritual pride. They produce and write down random combinations of sounds, building a tower out of their pride made up of their undifferentiated quasi-language. There seems no way to stop them, given their determination to pursue their quest for their god’s language, so Melech advises that Eliezer steer them as best he can to avoid true disaster. All Eliezer can do is what he can do; the rest is beyond him. In a way, he learns humility, too. His magic is powerful but not omnipotent. By teaching them what the Kabbalah teaches about magical words and phrases, he can arm them with enough knowledge to know where not to go in their rituals. Knowing the difference between what one should and should not do is the best humanity can achieve.

Bellar raises questions that challenge Eliezer’s own beliefs. Paul Fayter, a United Church minister who co-created the science fiction course I have been teaching in the Department of Humanities, told me once that during his theological studies he argued in a paper that the Jews were not monotheists but monolatrists: that is, they did not so much believe in only one God as worship only one God as the “true” one. More recently, I read a study by Norman Cohn that said the Jews originally believed in two gods: El, the creator god, and Jehovah, the war god; later, the two were combined into one. The idea that Jews might not have been, or not always have been, monotheists came as quite a shock to me. I thought the whole historical significance of Judaism was to introduce monotheism in a polytheistic world (later, I learned there were other monotheistic beliefs out there). What is Ba’al, though? A god, but not the “right” one (whatever that means)? A figment of people’s imagination? A demon that people thought was a god? If the answer is the first one, then the idea that Judaism was not monotheistic is right. There were other gods, but only one deserving of worship because He was—what? More powerful, perhaps. I gave Eliezer my own philosophical issue to wrestle with.


“The Eighth Day”:

This story takes place over the eight-day period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Given that Eliezer became a wizard due to his sins of pride and curiosity, he has much to atone for; given that he has already been punished, it is time for him to complete his atonement. The entire period is a time for Jews to renew by atoning for all they have done for the past year, and Yom Kippur is just the culmination of the process, the day on which they fast and purge themselves of all they have done wrong. Each day, Eliezer encounters beings who mirror those he has met before, or similar circumstances, most notably involving the power of language and the constant requirement to make ethical choices and perform mitzvahs.

1. Once again, Eliezer deals with some bizarre creatures, who have found a document that causes them to become more humanlike and aware. Their response is full of contradictions: they like the extra power it gives them, since magic is so compelling, but it also changes them in frightening and unnatural ways. They cease to be what they properly are. They are, of course, analogues of Eliezer himself. They are grotesques, travesties of humanity, and he needs to help them by depriving them of what they’ve gained from their contact with the magical words. They have aspired to be more than they ought to be, and became non-beings in the process: betwixt and between, outside of all right categories. It is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a time of change and renewal. This story parallels “Towering Pride” to some extent, but is mainly the mirror story of “The Missing Word.”

2. Another proud leader, and a parallel to “Making Light.” Here, the Lord confuses the Light above with the common, material form below. Eliezer thinks back to his time as a child, as he does in “A Little Leavening,” in order to come up with a form of miracle of light that these people will find magical and at a much lower cost. Once again, as in “Making Light,” there is a tapping into of the En Sof, the Godhead, but here instead of a swarm of bees comes a blizzard of snow.

3. Eliezer seeks hospitality, and he gets it in droves here among the believers in the Great Principle. That principle of extreme unselfishness proves to be burdensome as well as admirable. The townspeople are mirrors of Eliezer, in that they cannot stop doing good deeds even to their own detriment and that of their guests. In their selflessness, they are reminiscent of the villagers in “Towering Pride.”

4. A dark story and the only one involving anti-Semitism directly. This is the parallel story to “The Whole Megillah” and also features a religious service. To perform services properly, the members of a synagogue need ten men, i.e., males who have had their Bar Mitzvahs, to constitute a minyan, or quorum. Eliezer is asked to help out, if only temporarily, but he finds a way through metamorphosis to flood the city with “Jews”; the authorities cannot find and stop every Bar Mitzvah, real and phony. The amount of metamorphosis that goes on reflects the fluid identities in “The Whole Megillah,” and here we have a city full of dangerous Hamans. I hope it’s clear that the guard who lets Eliezer in and out is the “missing” son of the rabbi, passing as a Gentile. Note that the rabbi doesn’t say, in answer to Eliezer’s question about whereabouts of the son, “I don’t know,” but rather, “I cannot say.” The story also includes references to possible enslavement by an overeager “client,” as in “Making Light,” plus other motifs from elsewhere in the book. The rabbi’s curiosity about the scroll mirrors Eliezer’s own personal flaw. It was while I was writing this mini-story that I realized Eliezer had transformed himself and others but had never used his power on Melech—an idea that was irresistible.

5. The parallel story to “A Little Leavening.” Here, Eliezer becomes an “avian Moses” despite his best intentions. He frees the birds from bondage by invoking the Adamic power, naming the birds “the freed ones” and thereby freeing them. He briefly considers naming them using the term applied to Jews after they left Egypt; I tried to come up with the Hebrew word for “manumitted ones” but I’m not sure I did. It’s something of a coining, since no such word exists, really. The story also refers to Sukkot, the harvest festival that is one of the major autumn holidays. During Sukkot, ritual meals are conducted in a tent or pavilion lined with fruits and vegetables. Farod (whose name--not to mention his girth--echoes Ford’s...) is the embodiment of sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

6. Kitte Stam embodies the other six of the Deadly Sins. As such, he turns the story into a parallel of “Of the Law”; he’s guilty of six out of seven the way Eliezer was guilty of nine of the ten. Stam is wholly acquisitive, with no appreciation for anything spiritual, just as the demon doesn’t really get what good and evil are in the context of Judaic Law. Stam, incidentally, is equally easy to fool, as Eliezer does nothing real to benefit him. The placebo effect goes a long way for him.

7. Our final Annoying Magical Being; by this point, Eliezer is used to such nonsense and doesn’t respond with a great deal of personal offense-taking. The Geomancer is truly absurd; there really is something called geomancy, or divination using the Earth and its stones, but it does not involve reading the planet’s entrails. The story parallels “Unspeakable” (and there are several calls for “Silence!”). The Geomancer possesses powerful magic after all, just like the Poet, and he can also predict what will happen to Eliezer at the end.

8. Eliezer comes closer to his destination; like Keeper, he is approaching his death and possible rebirth. The scroll, meanwhile, is excited about returning home, too. As it turns out, the scroll belongs to the people of the rock-city of Al-Ayar; once again, their words have wandered away and been brought back home. Eliezer has come full circle, returning to where he began the book.

Shekhina, the feminine principle, appears the way that Elijah did in “A Little Leavening,” and offers him a choice. He can go home, surrendering his powers and, it seems, his life, and finally gain some rest after all his troubles. He still sees his power and punishment as a curse, a burden, but when he asks whether this will finally mean an end to doing mitzvahs he realizes how foolish he has been. Doing mitzvahs has not been his punishment or curse for his presumption, but his birthright as a person: all people are supposed to perform mitzvahs, wizard or not. The burden is that with his extra added power he can and therefore must do more than anyone else. He can’t just relinquish his obligation. And if he can do more good deeds than anybody else, and therefore more to repair the world, why is he complaining? He might instead consider this a blessing or a boon. It’s doubtful that he can go that far. At first, he’s willing to accept Shekhina’s offer, but learns that he will lose his magical abilities—and his connection to Melech. Melech will revert to being a common horse once more, since the magic and Melech’s consciousness and language are tied together. Is he willing to lose his friend and companion? He chooses life and further obligation/opportunity to do good. By now, he realizes that if he has been enslaved by his “curse,” Melech has been even more so; after all, Melech didn’t do anything wrong, or anything that would lead to wandering the world looking for work, food, and shelter. Eliezer has been Melech’s Pharaoh and now must let him go, or at least treat him as an equal. After first assuming he has the right to decide for both of them, Eliezer asks Melech to make a choice. Melech agrees to continue as Eliezer’s transportation and companion, and they continue as partners rather than master and beast of burden.

As already noted, Shekhina is in some sense my emissary, whom I send down to talk to Eliezer and find out what he wants to do. Will he live past the end of the book? Or will he finally seek home and rest? I wrestled with that problem myself; in some ways, having him finally come home would have made for a satisfying ending, one that rewards him in a way for his hardships by ending them. In other ways, however, it would be a wrong choice, in that it would be a dereliction of duty, a failure to fully atone for his sins—in poking around in forbidden knowledge, in unintentionally mistreating Melech, in presuming too much along the way—and a cop-out, not to mention very sad. That in itself isn’t a deal-breaker, but I wanted to leave myself the opportunity to write more about him if I chose, and I wanted the ending to be morally right even if somewhat open. In any case, the ending is highly metafictional; consider, for example, who has the last word and what it is.