God flirts with me. Well, not a god I believe in; if I believed in him we would long be past flirting.
Following Friday-night meals apart (he wont drive downtown on such sacred night), we spend long hour emailing salacious messages, tracing intrepid finger-taps across each other’s digital two-day stubble. Syrupy. O God!
Hidden from the vapid orthodoxy of our high-rise basement, we make long undulatory communion
interrupted only by the knocks of the talmidim, come to proclaim zman kriyat shema has arrived.
They work for the God I do believe in. He’s shomer negiah – Guardian of (His) Touch! Has been since a long time ago, ever since the ambrosially sandy men of the Middle East folded into pasty bodies, into obsequious passions. Europe. Except for that one tryst in 1372 with that ever so soft, gentile Spaniard – understandable – and, of course, the occasional anonymous thing or two (flings – God’s desire now takes the form of flings, no longer emanations or revelations – he’s gotten very postmodern on us). But in general, He’s just not the flirtatious type.
People choose to be shomer negiah, I would venture, for one (or more) of three reasons: They fear the intractable slide of pleasure, they fear being disappointed by the pleasurable, or they fear the rapacious intimacy of a foreign face. Gods, on the other hand, always choose to be shomer negiah – again, just a venture – for one of two other reasons: Either because the fawning human body, our inescapable eagerness for Touch, sheds its grain, its alluring hook, or because they have been hurt by touch. Not violent touch, but intransigent touch, which for them is a lot more painful. They desire playful, yielding touch, fingers who know their textuality, children’s ruddy fingers, already adulteress, touching at once the gemara and rashi, fingers that bite from the off-center tree and live forever.
The god that flirts with me has never been touched, never been severed by being believed in, never been petrified by the promises of my desire. And so we flirt and stop at that.
Maimonides, not so shyly, named his apophatic God: Known Knower Knowledge
I, a little less shyly, call mine: Touched Toucher Touch
And still we flirt, longingly, and stop at that.