Oh, My Gods

Mack Gelber

When most people look back on their childhood, some things tend to be a little bit exaggerated. Recollections of my early days are not free from embellishment, but I can say with an entirely straight face that my childhood was the stuff of legends.

            Although our heritage is Jewish, our family mostly avoided the local synagogue. My parents felt they shouldn’t have to shell out money for holy enlightenment, so one day, Mom took my religious upbringing into her own hands. Sunday mornings were set aside for Bible stories, meaning Mom and I would loll around and occasionally crack open an illustrated children’s Bible. It was the one my dad had read as a kid, so it wasn’t uncommon to find Abraham in a penciled-in dress or Moses with a handlebar mustache. As my mother read the old book, it often seemed as if the recitations of these biblical events took longer than the events themselves. But when Mom saw that I wasn’t riveted, she started to mix in Greek myths. We’d already rejected institutionalized faith, and had a rather elastic definition of religion, anyway. We celebrated all kinds of holidays – Christmas, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, we did them all. So why not go one step further? Stories of Odysseus and Poseidon soon sat happily alongside David and Goliath on my bookshelf. After awhile, we abandoned the Old Testament altogether. After all, the ancient Greeks offered all the morality lessons I needed. Don’t break someone’s trust, or else you’ll be stuck pushing a rock up a hill with Sisyphus for the rest of eternity. Worked for me.

            I eventually began asking for books on Greek mythology on my own initiative, and would sometimes receive them on, of all occasions, Hanukkah. Where most kids had Batman and the Ninja Turtles, I preferred Perseus and Zeus. In first grade, I put together an alphabet book with a mythological character for every letter. D was for Daedalus, E was for Eurydice, and so on. It was illustrated, too. Medusa, the snake-headed gorgon, was lovingly rendered in black and red Crayola. Granted, the serpents that sprouted from her cranium resembled fanged intestines, but they got the job done. A year later, I put together a Greek mythology-themed board game for a contest in a children’s magazine. I called it Wild Zeus Chase. It came complete with a three-dimensional, cardboard Mount Olympus, encircled with cotton ball clouds and crowned with an imposing, manila Zeus. I didn’t win the contest – I guess trivia questions like “What was Prometheus’s gruesome punishment for bringing fire to man?” weren’t exactly what Kid City was looking for.

            Maybe I got a little too absorbed. When Disney’s animated version of the Heracles legend came out – they called it Hercules – I drafted an absolutely fuming letter to Michael Eisner pointing out the film’s many mythological inaccuracies. Come on, Michael, the Hydra didn’t sing!

            I was certainly more attracted to Greek mythology than the Bible stories. Tales from the Old and New Testaments seemed no more or less believable than the legend of, say, Theseus and the Minotaur. I’d never considered the Greek myths factual accounts, but really – is a story about a gigantic, man-eating pig that much more fantastic than Adam and Eve’s talking snake?

            After taking a high school course that compared ancient myths to Bible stories, I made up my mind. No, I wasn’t going to start sacrificing sheep to Zeus and staging Dionysian bacchanals in the hallway next to the gymnasium. But I decided that all legends of the past made better children’s stories than belief systems. It wasn’t much later that I wrote an article for my school’s newspaper in which I publicly declared my atheism. About a week after publication, my mom received a phone call from a friend of hers who said, “If only you’d had Mack bar mitzvah’d, he wouldn’t have turned out this way.” I smiled, since my atheism had come not from a lack of religious knowledge, but from an excess.

            Oh, and in case you ever find yourself in a heart-pounding game of Wild Zeus Chase, the answer to that question is “vultures ate his liver every day.”