21st August 1998

The Yahweh Springer Show

Camera: Wide pan across jeering, baying audience of rough, coarse-faced men and women. They all have wings. And halos.

Music: Big, blaring and beaty.

Titles: Massive, ornate gold lettering thumps into the screen – The Yahweh Springer Show!! And then, spinning for maximum impact, the theme of today’s programme – Judgment Day!!!

Camera: Yahweh Springer bounds down the stairs towards the stage, cleaving through the adoring angels like a prophet parting seas. He’s average height, with a clipped white beard and shining white locks, but his tanned face looks early 50s, and his hyped-up energy is pure 20-something.

Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh!

Camera: Yahweh Springer, the highest-paid chat show host in the universe, is grasping hands and trading friendly punches with frantic delight as the audience pants to glimpse him. His double-breasted suit glows. Even his multi-coloured tie has its own divine aura.

Yahweh: Thank-you, and if you thought last week’s show, ‘Hi Honey I’m The Messiah’, was going to be hard to top – get this! In tonight’s studio we’re dishing out eternal damnation! Heavenly retribution! And the ultimate lie detector test! It’s… Judgment Day!

Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh!

Yahweh (to fat, confidant-looking Rabbi in tubular chair onstage): Your name’s Rabbi Eli Goldstein, right?

Rabbi: I got nothing to fear.

Yahweh (incredulously): You don’t fear me? And you a God-fearing man? Bad start, Rabbi.

Rabbi (suddenly sweating): I did everything just like you said. I kept my family indoors on the Shabbat. I never made out with my wife when she was menstruating.

Angels: Wooo! Wooo-wooo-wooo-wooo!

(Three-second bleep out, as someone in row three, very much in the Prophet Elijah’s vicinity, hurls an obscene coment)

Rabbi: Everything I ate was kosher, I never touched unclean – not even a packet of pork scratchings.

Yahweh: Looks like you didn’t starve on it.

Rabbi: It’s my hormones, is it my fault if I got a slow metabolism?

Yahweh: No. But what I want to ask you, is this your fault?

Camera: Backstage, a girl with black hair and dark rings round her eyes is pushed forward by stagehands. Her legs, thin as wire, will barely hold her. She slumps in a chair half-turned to the rabbi’s and stares in terror at the howling angels. She is 13 years old.)

Rabbi: I’ve never seen this child. Nothing to do with… (he starts to grin, and lets off a fat, smarmy chuckle) Are you going to suggest this is my illegitimate daughter? The big surprise? Because I got news for you – your researchers have goofed. My private life has been blameless!

Angels: Lie test! Lie test! Lie test!

Rabbi: Sure. (He sits back while a pillar of salt is levelled at his head. The pillar crumbles. Angels cheer and chant, and the rabbi grins and brandishes his fists aloft.)

Yahweh: This girl’s no relation of yours. She just happens to live ten miles down the road from your Jerusalem apartment…

Rabbi: She’s Palestinian! Anyone can see that! So maybe I’ve seen her running around in those roadside gangs – maybe she’s hurled a rock at my car once in a while, yeah? What am I supposed to do – get out and pat her on the head?

Yahweh: I don’t know if you’ve seen her before. Well, OK, I do know, because I’m omniscient…

Angels: Yah-weh! Yah-weh! Yah-weh!

Yahweh:… but what I don’t know is this. How come you’re well-fed and she’s not?

Rabbi (baffled): It’s the political situation.

Yahweh: OK, I’m not expressing myself very clearly. How come you’re well-fed and she’s not, and you don’t seem to care? This girl sits down, you quite rightly think immediately, ‘She’s young enough to be my daughter’. And then you decide, ‘No, she can’t be, and what the hell, she’s not Jewish. She’s an Arab.’ Isn’t that what went through your mind?

Rabbi: Well…

Yahweh: Am I right?

(He points his microphone at another pillar of salt.)

Rabbi: Yes! Yes!

Yahweh: So it doesn’t matter if she starves? Just so long as some of your flock, the ones who get government-issue batons and guns, so long as they make sure she doesn’t hurl too many rocks at your car? Right?

Rabbi (screaming): Haven’t I got enough to do looking after Jewish souls? You want me to care about Muslims too?

(Long series of bleeps as the Prophet Elijah blows his cool and plunges out of of the third row onto the stage, fists flailing. He slaps the rabbi’s glasses off his face and plants a foot in the large, absorbent stomach before four crew men drag him off and back into the heavenly congregation.

Yahweh watches, mouth set in prim disapproval and arms folded.)

Cut to – Yahweh’s Final Thought: Judgment’s never easy. It’s something no deity takes lightly. And believe me – when it comes to your turn, I’ll be reading my research carefully. But ask yourself this question now: Am I living by the rules? Or just by the rulebook? Until next week, when we’re going to be confronting Noah with his alcohol problem… shalom.

End title: Five raucous angels bawl out “Tell Yahweh he’s groovy” to the tune of Tell Laura I Love Her.