All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > My Lover, the Rabbi > Status Update

„Wasn't every human being, whether on the brink of sexual arousal or deep in arousal's clutches, digging for gold, if we stretched the definition of gold to include stupor, individuation, amnesia, and reclamation? Gold digging by ferreting out the overlap between synagogue and friendship center, was I not indirectly replaying the TV drama, set in Cairo, in which my parents were minor players…“

“…and though I at times seemed the star and center of his heart, I was also periodically, and without warning, banished from his affections and rendered literally unseen, like the inside of a tree if you are a tourist in a national park and are regarding a sequoia and yet have no purchase on the sequoia's inner circles of grief and history, the genealogical strata determining the sequoia's present existence.”

“Why was my body suddenly the rabbi's property, when I'd worked my whole life to achieve a measure of autonomy? Or was autonomy revealed as merely fictional at the moment the rabbi decided to undo his ban against my nakedness, the moment he encouraged me to take off my clothes, the moment he said that he liked the way I filled my briefs, the moment he said that I had a considerable talent, nothing to scoff at…”

“The rabbi bragged about his nothingness; nothingness seemed to him a visible sign of his spiritual valor, as well as confirmation of an intrinsic masculinity that would never dissipate, however much the size of his rabbinical congregation diminished; the prayerful and the other half-hearted habitués of his temple had begun to defect to other synagogues, those with friendship centers…”