On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!
On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi! is a 1974
Plot
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The frame story is Milchik the TV repairman, the firsthand immediate witness of the events, tells a "Mr. Important Journalist" in a very eloquent and embellished way how this all happened.
A sample of Milchik's "Jewish talk".
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About half of the story is a lively explanation of why the Great Rabbi Smallman of Venus is so great and how Venus' administration loves the Jewish people, who Neozionists are, and why their congress was convened on Venus, and what a huge crowd of Jews from all over the galaxy had arrived. Milchik muses: "I look around and I remember the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—“I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven”[6] —and I think to myself, “A promise is a promise, but even a promise can go too far. The stars by themselves are more than enough, but when each star has maybe 10, 20 planets…”" All Jewish living quarters are densely occupied, and one morning Milchick finds in his bathtub "three creatures, each as long as my arm and as thick as my head. They look like three brown pillows, all wrinkled and twisted, with some big gray spots on this side and on that side, and out of each gray spot is growing a short gray tentacle." His son explains him that they are the Bulbas,[7] delegates from the fourth planet of Rigel.
And their accreditation has become a stumbling block of the opening session. The committee said their credentials are in order but for one small thing: they cannot be Jews. - But why? - Of all thises and that's, for starters the Jews have to be human. - Bulbas kindly ask for providing a quotation to this. - deputy chairman takes over the awkward situation: "But this is really simple: No one can be a Jew who is not the child of a Jewish mother." - But the Bulbas readily present their birth certificates to confirm that all of them have Jewish mothers... Someone calls to a vote, but there are as many opinions as delegates.
They've been accepted as delegates, and who are we to pass upon them as Jews? I'll accept them as Jews in the religious sense, someone else stands up to point out, but not in the biological sense. What kind of biological sense, he's asked by a delegate from across the hall; you don't mean biology, you mean race, you racist. All right, all right, cries out a little man who’s sitting in front of him, but would you want your sister to marry one?
A High Rabbinical Court was convened and rabbi Smallman became its member after some manipulations. Bulbas tell their history before the court. Originally they were a small Orthodox community from
Bulbas were told that the change they described is against the experimental facts of biology. The Bulbas, who presented their complete genealogical charts, retorted: "Who are you going to believe, the experimental facts of biology—or your fellow Jews?"
And this turned out to be an important question: "
It was suggested that their problem may be resolved simply by conversion to Judaism. But others insisted that the procedure of conversion of people who already are Jews would be a mockery.
Eventually rabbi Smallman brought everybody to a common point of view. "To bring a bunch of Jews—and learned Jews!—to a single decision, that, my friend, is an achievement that can stand"...
History
The story was written in about seven years after the author's last published story (not counting reprints in collections).[8]
In 2016 the
In 1978 it was translated in German as Wir haben einen Rabbi auf der Venus and in 1998 in Russian as Таки у нас на Венере есть рабби!.
William Tenn delivered the reading of the story on WNYC's Spinning on Air with David Garland, November 22, 2002.[9] The reading was accompanied by an interview.[10]
Discussion
Phil M. Cohen writes: "This hilarious story, which rings with
Bud Webster pinpoints the conflict as follows: Bulbas are not just aliens (after all, there were blue Jews from Aldebaran), they are not simply different, they are inhuman aliens. He writes that the solution is both properly Talmudic, and properly science-fictional: the Bulbas have sufficient human-ness, to transcend their non-humanity.[8]
Nick Gevers wrote that the story shows "that even the oldest assumptions are perhaps more timeless than we think, and will make the future in their own, in this case distinctly rabbinical, image."[12]
References
- ^ David Kilman, "Scide Splitters: Four by Tenn", a review of four stories from Immodest Proposals, Amazing Stories, January 25, 2017
- ^ Norman J. Fedder, Alliance for Jewish Theatre
- '^ Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction publication contents at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- ^ Tablet Magazine, December 26, 2016
- ^ Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5, (variant)
- ^ Exodus 32:13
- ^ Note: "bulbe means "potato" in Yiddish.
- ^ a b Bud Webster, "In a Klass By Himself (or, Tops On a Scale of One to Tenn)"
- NYPRArchives and Preservation
- ^ "Review of On Venus, Have We Got A Rabbi! by William Tenn", SFFaudio, September 10, 2004
- ^ Phil M. Cohen, Jewish Science Fiction, Jewish Book Council, September 7, 2020
- ^ Nick Gevers, "Immodest Proposals", a review, SF Site, 2001
- ^ "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!", The American Interest, December 28, 2016