Bliss of Rapture

Farewell, Christians — don't let the gates of paradise hit you on the ass on your way out
By DAVID S. BERNSTEIN  |  May 19, 2011

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Okay, I'm not happy, exactly, that, as a Jew, I am excluded from Saturday's date with Heaven's eternal rewards, and will instead be left to suffer through great tribulations before perishing, with the rest of the Army of the Antichrist, as a dismembered corpse beneath a waste-deep river of blood.


But hey, not my call. So, if that's how it's gonna be — and since those of you who might be offended won't be around long to complain — let me say: I'm really looking forward to life after all you Christians are gone.

I'll be honest: you can be pretty annoying. Slowing up the line at Kupel's with all your questions about bagel toppings. Asking us to explain matzo and dreidel at the holidays. Whining every December if there's a patch of space not plastered over with your Christmas kitsch. Making Holocaust movies implying that my family could have avoided slaughter by going all Rambo on the Nazis.

Everywhere I go, one of you wants to rope me into Bible classes — and worse, the rest of you know I'm heading for eternal hellfire but choose not to warn me. Thanks for caring.

No more will we have to listen to you Christians screwing up our Old Testament, telling us it mandates creationism and outlaws gay marriage. Come on, you guys can't even figure out the right day of the week to have the Sabbath.

More important, you're going to leave so much stuff.

I, for one, have day-after plans for Sunday — or, as we heathens call it, moving day — to take up residence in some tastefully appointed, newly vacated South End home. Who knows — I might take a Brahmin Beacon Hill pied-à-terre too. There will be plenty for everyone.

I hope you Christians will be considerate enough to tidy before you go. And if you have a Lexus you won't be needing after Saturday's upward emigration, leave the keys in the ignition.

With all of you gone, traffic will be a breeze and parking spaces plentiful. Also — as I learned from the Rapture handbook, the Left Behind novels — most young children will get taken up. No babies? No toddlers? Air-travel bliss, thank fucking Christ — a phrase, by the way, that I'll finally be able to say without worrying about taking your Lord's name is vain. Christ Almighty, you people are sensitive about that.

WORK GOES ON

More good news for the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others remaining on this corporeal plane next week: fast-track promotions! All those undeserving, well-connected, legacy, frat-brother, country-club oafs will be cleared out of the upper levels.

There won't be any openings in my line of work, however. The godless, liberal, New-York-Jew media — apologies for the quintuple-redundancy — will remain intact here on Earth. There will be no lamestream media in paradise.

I learned that from Left Behind too. One main character, a journalist at a Newsweek-esque magazine, gets the post-Rapture word from one of his New York editors that only a few low-level staffers have gone missing — mostly from the Chicago office, the book specifies, probably to reassure Godly Windy City readers that they are sufficiently distant from Semitic Ground Zero, a/k/a the Upper West Side.

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