Are You There, God? It's Us, The Very Hot Jews

Let's talk about God.

Okay, either your stomach just did a little "Oh, no" flip, or you let out an involuntary snort at our impertinence. What makes us, two hilariously non-observant Jews who accidentally erased huge portions of our Jewish educations while "experimenting in college," qualified to tell you anything about The Big Guy/Girl/Many-Armed-Creature Who Might Not Even Exist?

Look, straight up? We're not all that qualified. Um, we're blogging. This ain't exactly Hebrew University here. But look on the bright side. No pop quiz. And you can, and probably should, read this naked. And drunk. Stoned, if you're into that; whatever, man — we don't judge.

The Very Hot Jews have a lot to say on the topic of God. Appearances (and utterly un-God-fearing behavior) aside, we think about It a lot. So we decided to create a sort of God Guide for our dear readers. Being irreligious never seems to deter our people from metaphysical musings, and with the exception of our smoldering hotness, we are squarely in the tradition. (Not that other Jews aren't hot. We are, to generalize about our people, smoldering in that distracting semitic way. To roughly quote Sarah Silverman: "Jewish girls are sexy! Yiedel diedel diedel." But it would be wrong of the Very Hot Jews not to also clarify that we're so hot we fuck up the bell curve.) In the next few posts, we'll wander in the theological wilderness and explore the cosmological crannies that the Rebbe never told you about.

God, The Blog: Part The First.



The Holocaust. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cambodia’s killing fields. Darfur. Slavery. Fox News. The soul-chilling horrors of human psychosis and its results are always threatening to pop the pretty, pretty balloon we call faith. For people who think of themselves as Jews, the question of how a kindly, rabbinically bearded Jehovah could permit the world to turn into a slaughterhouse is always, how you say, front of mind.

Yet as often as we Liberal Arts-edumacated writer types ponder this question, we don’t really know the answer. But we promised to write about it anyway and so we will.

We set our alarms, woke up at the crack of 10:30 this morning, grabbed some Starbucks, and headed down to the bookstore to read everything they have on the subject of the existence of God. Just to keep our karma good, we then purchased a calendar filled with adorable puppies and kittens for $12.95.

(If there is a God, he wants you to make a purchase to justify reading $3000 worth of literature for free, then leaving your half-empty latte cups in the aisle for some seven-buck-an-hour employee with papercuts all over his body to trip over, spill, and then have to clean. Come to think of it, slipping said employee a fiver is also acceptable.)

So we read for a few minutes, and then Simon decided he was bored and wanted pizza and a beer, and when he approached Sera to tell her it was time for the break that refreshes she berated him, wagging her copy of Conversations with God accusingly… but then the Men’s Health and Fitness magazine fell out of it, creased open to a full-page photo of Adrien Brody with practically no clothes on, and Simon spoke volumes with one raised eyebrow. And that, people, is how research is done.

No need to thank us for our heroic efforts.

Here's the main question that gets in the way of us being fully down with the Lord: While Hitler was killing six or so million of us, including one and a half million innocent children, what the high holy fuck was God doing? And furthermore: Why didn’t he raise a pinky to help our supposedly Chosen asses? If there is a God, how could he have allowed such a thing to happen?

While 97% of the self-help books now clogging your local Barnes & Noble like hair in a drain will sell you some confirmation that a benevolent deity rules the universe, we prefer to offer a menu of options:

1. God is compassionate, but if he steps in every time you'll never learn.
2. God isn't compassionate. We are so fucked.
3. There is no God.
4. There was a God, and He was getting all ready to help out, but then He DIED.
5. It's complicated.

We'll examine these in more depth in posts to come. You won't know whether to ROFLYAO or drown your existential sorrows in a bottle of Kedem wine. (Speaking from personal experience: avoid the Kedem.)