A troubled rabbi explores her relationship with God

The Autobiography of God

A Novel

Julius Lester

St. Martin’s Press: 248 pp., $23.95

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Putting words in God’s mouth is a gutsy move for any novelist. There’s always the danger of alienating readers by being too polemical or offering an impression of God that conflicts with their notions. Julius Lester, author of countless children’s books and adult works, makes this choice in “The Autobiography of God,” his first adult novel in more than a decade.

God’s narrative is the story within a larger tale about Rebecca Nachman, a rabbi who believes she has failed as a spiritual leader. Having watched her congregation dwindle, she left before she could be fired. She moves to a tiny Vermont town to work as a counselor at a small private college, buys an isolated old home where no one can bother her and burrows into her unhappiness to explore her love-hate relationship with God.

As an 8-year-old, Rebecca was hit by a car and now walks with a pronounced limp. “God,” she believes, “had done it on purpose.” To compensate, she wears designer clothes. Yet she refuses orthopedic devices that might lessen the limp. “She was afraid that if she wasn’t visibly a cripple, no one would notice her, not even God, and she wanted Him to see every day what He had done to her, wanted Him to see her and feel her rage at Him, a rage she clung to so God would not forget her.” Still, despite her anger, Rebecca remains attracted to the Torah and other expressions of God.

Rebecca’s emotional iciness begins to thaw when she comes into possession of a Holocaust-era Torah scroll that had been revered by Polish Jews in Czechowa, who were later murdered by the Nazis. By opening the long-sealed scroll, it seems, she has loosed the spirits of the believers who had studied it, because at 3 every morning the specters of the dead Poles come to her lonely house to say the Mourner’s kaddish. They wait for Rebecca to intone responses; when she does, their prayer continues. In this way, she becomes the rabbi for this group of dead Jews, a vocation she finds mysteriously healing.

One night, Rebecca is given a text said to be God’s autobiography. It is a story so disturbing, she’s told, that over the ages God has had trouble getting anyone to finish reading it. King David, Moses, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have all taken a glance; none but Isaiah has read the entire manuscript. God hopes Rebecca will be able to understand the complete work.

Rebecca is introduced to God’s ideas about the nature of good and evil, as well as to disquieting views about who was really to blame for the Holocaust. This text opens the door to questions about how we perceive God, but its role in the novel is unfortunately less than pivotal or impressive. It becomes almost a footnote as Lester moves the rambling plot along and introduces a murder mystery that embroils Rebecca and serves as an awkward illustration of the ideas expressed in the autobiography.

This is a book at war with itself, torn between contemplative questions about the nature of God, which could have made a fascinating if slow-moving narrative on its own, and the author’s need to provide a plot compelling enough to keep readers turning pages. Thankfully, beneath it all lies a quiet yet persuasive notion about the injured nature of humanity.

We are all hurting in one way or another, the novel intimates, yet it is through our wounds that God may enter. “How can I love you,” Rebecca’s ex-husband had once asked her, “if I don’t know what hurts you?” Lester goes further, suggesting we cannot know God if we don’t know what hurts God. If we see God only as an all powerful being who couldn’t possibly suffer as we do, the novel ultimately asks, can we genuinely say we know God?

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Bernadette Murphy, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting.”