THE LAST JEWISH AMERICAN NERD
Dara Horn

“I remember the first time I was humbled into learning. When I was seven years old and had already become one of those annoying smart-aleck children that people want to smack in elevators, I told my mother I had some questions that I wanted to ask a rabbi. My mother, always encouraging me, took me to meet with one. I suspect that she thought I was on an earnest quest for wisdom, as I now assume of my own students. What she didn’t know was that my real motives were far less innocent. I was convinced, at seven years old, that I had personally uncovered gaping holes in the fabric of Jewish thought, and that I was the first person in the history of the world to discover that the whole religion was a sham. I was on an obnoxious mission to catch the rabbi in a trap.

In the rabbi’s office, I could see right away that the man behind the desk—who seemed strangely normal and unauthoritative without a tallis on his shoulders or the bimah beneath his feet—was putty in my hands. He smiled at me like I was four years old. (I was seven, thank you.) Clearly he had no idea that I was about to shatter his self-esteem and destroy his faith in his Torah and his God. It would have been sad, if it weren’t so much fun. My mother introduced me, and the rabbi kept smiling the smile for four-year-olds as he waited for me to begin. I leaned forward, thrilled, and asked my first devastating question.

“ Did Adam and Eve have bellybuttons?”

The rabbi answered, “No.”…”

Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in comparative literature, focusing on Hebrew and Yiddish, and a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College, teaching courses in Jewish literature. Her first novel, In the Image (Norton 2002), received a National Jewish Book Award, the Reform Judaism Prize for Fiction, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Her second novel, The World to Come, will be published by Norton in September of 2005. She lives with her husband in New York City.