“On that terrible day, when the universal injustice was committed and Jesus Christ was crucified in Golgotha among robbers—on that day, from early morning, Ben-Tovit, a tradesman of Jerusalem, suffered from an unendurable toothache.”

This story begins my little trio of god texts. As I say in the introduction, I myself am not religious, but religious stories were some of the first texts I saw being talked about with reverence. Stories that were held up as something important, rather than your ‘Biff and Chips’ or Charlotte’s Webs, which were, as far as I could tell as a child at least, for play, or simply ‘educational’. Yes, I was indeed a fairly serious sort of child.

My grandpa on my mum’s side was a Church of England vicar, whilst my dad is a very atheistic Jew who tried sporadically to keep up the tradition of Shabbat and Passover. All this culminated in a personal sense that when people talked about god, it was a symbol for something foreign, distant, and outside the everyday.

The excerpted sentence above pretty much summarises the plot of this story. In the shadow of infinite suffering, Ben-Tovit has a tooth ache. The description of a man not noticing the immensity of something right beside him is as discomfiting as it is amusing. You get a prickling feeling that the sublime could pass you by and you wouldn’t even know it, because you’d been too busy explaining the details of your own personal gripes to notice that the irredeemable world was in the process of being redeemed.

English translation published in The Crushed Flower and Other Stories, 1916. Read online here