In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (32 page)

But he merely turned to her and said, “There is something I must do for the rabbi, Miss Tamar. It is the truth! And no one can stop me.”

She tugged his sleeve and garbage bag and pulled him along toward safety.

When Isaac woke up, he saw a grizzled blond face looming above his. It belonged to Tommy the Penitent. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were twitching. Isaac stared out, clutching his tzitzit fearfully.

“Rabbi, I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” Tommy rasped. “I have to talk to you.”

Isaac was hit with the man’s harsh breath. “Yes,” he said, his voice still slurry from sleep. “What is it?”

“You know, I used to be the biggest drug dealer in Jerusalem?”

Isaac nodded mutely—
Whatever you say, Tommy
.

Tommy went on, “One day, I stopped at a friend’s house, a woman I used to go out with. We used to smoke a lot together. I was the one who turned her on to the stuff. We were still kind of friendly.” As he told the story, Tommy’s face relaxed a little, became less deranged, more regular. “Anyway, when I stopped in, I could tell she was stoned—on drugs I’d sold her. Her eyes had that look and she was talking in that way, well, you wouldn’t know, Rabbi. Just then her little boy wandered into the room, and he had all these welts on his arms. He was just three or something. She screamed at him, and he ran out of that room, and I just knew she was the one who’d given him those welts.” Tommy stopped, though his mouth still seemed to be moving in ten different directions. He pressed his lower arms against his stomach and bent forward as if to stop an intense internal spasm. “So could you tell me this, Rabbi. The sins between you and God can be fixed just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“but the sins between you and man? Not so easy. How can I fix what I caused to happen to a three-year-old boy?” He clenched his jaw so hard, a wobbly blue vein, like a streak of lightning, pulsed across his forehead. “Just a baby. And look what I turned his mother into.” He looked around the
room as if trying to decide what to bang his head against. Then he fell into ranting, “I’m going to Gehenna, I’m going to burn in hell.”

Isaac watched him. He didn’t say anything, just looked at the man with compassion. Minutes passed. Tommy was quiet now. Isaac lifted himself up on his elbows. “Hell?” he said. “Maybe you are going there. But one can lower the temperature one degree at a time until it is no longer hell.”

Tommy pushed a blond shank of hair off his face. “What?” he said.

Isaac nodded. “The sages said so explicitly. It’s written in the Talmud.”

Tommy straightened. He pinched his chin and looked out with a thoughtful eye. “How do you do that?”

By now Isaac had gently shifted to a sitting position. “Through good deeds, Torah, and prayer.” He paused. “I’m going to pray now. You can come if you like.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Tommy said.

Isaac washed his hands at the sink, tried to straighten out his clothes. The place still stank but at least this morning no one was branding him an informer. The other men seemed to notice the difference in Tommy. Definitely fewer mutterings. “Good going,” the tattooed man said, slapping Isaac in the middle of his back. “Include me in your prayers,” he said, when Isaac went off to
daven
in the jail synagogue. “It’s my day in court.”

“What’s your name?” Isaac called after him. “So I can pray for you.”

“Yigal, son of Rachel.”

Ah, Isaac thought. Another Sephardi.

After
shacharis
, Isaac stood in the cafeteria line with the other men for a breakfast of runny eggs and cold cereal. The jostling and shouting of men, the push to get to the bananas before they got grabbed up, the clatter of trays and chairs, the search for a safe spot among so many scary-looking men, the loud chewing and spitting and complaints and the presence of so many guards, made the cafeteria an even more terrible place than the cell. But at least it didn’t stink. Isaac was glad to be sitting next to Nissim, who took on the role of guide. He pointed out which prisoners probably had lice, who to flatter (the cook’s assistant), and which prisoners were most likely crazy or suffering from drug withdrawal. Isaac filed away the useful information.

Back in the cell, he made an attempt to clean up the area around his bunk bed. He would have cleaned up the whole place, but he didn’t want
to get in anyone’s way. After he had collected a small bag of garbage, he saw a huge brown cockroach under a bag of potato chips, and he jumped, startled. The men laughed, not meanly, but in a way that somehow included him.

Midday, Yigal, the tattooed man, was returned to the cell.

“Stuck here another five days,” he announced, rubbing his pig tattoo.

Isaac offered his sympathies as the men rang out with curses, dry spits, and the cracking of nutshells.

“Guess your prayers didn’t work, Rabbi,” Yigal said half-mockingly.

Isaac turned up his palms. “Sorry, they’re not foolproof.”

He was so tired from not having slept the night before, that he managed to nap in the thick of the noise. He woke up an hour before supper. Yigal said with a look both sly and shy, “I saw how you gave Tommy the tissues last night.”

“Oh,” Isaac said, abashed. “I thought everyone was asleep.”

“No. I was watching. You treated him like a real person, Rabbi.”

“I’m not a rabbi,” Isaac said, for the fiftieth time, though lately he was getting tired of correcting the men. Let them call him what they want, as long as they didn’t curse him.

Another night passed. Curses, bugs, loud snorings, and the yellow lightbulb never dimmed.

The next morning, Isaac, spur of the moment, asked the men to join him in the jail synagogue.

Tommy consented with a duck of his head.

Isaac turned to Nissim, who paused for a long moment. He said, “
B’seder
, Reb Isaac,” lifting his hands in defeat. “You want me to come? I’ll come.”

At the last moment, Yigal peeled himself off his mattress (“Anything to escape this stinking zoo”), and joined the small group escorted by Gilad, the beefy-necked guard.

The jail synagogue was a small whitewashed room, with a burgundy velvet cloth covering the rather small holy ark. Isaac’s tense shoulders dropped a notch or two, an ease coming over him, here among the battered benches, the shelves of Torah books, and the tall wooden lectern
stationed in front of the ark like a soldier. Gilad had temporarily returned his
tefillin
, and Isaac now wound the
tefillin
straps around his arm and prayed, breathing deeply. Here, the air smelled fine. As he
davened
, he was conscious of the men watching him with flat, uncurious eyes. He offered them a chance to don
tefillin
, but except for Tommy, they all refused.

“So,” said Yigal, slouching with his elbows on the lectern. “Why do you wear
tzitzit
?” He smiled sarcastically.

Isaac lifted up his shirt slightly so that they all could see the white cloth and the long tasseled fringes poking out. “Anybody know the answer?”

Nissim was flipping the pages of a book of Psalms as if it were a deck of gambling cards. Without raising his eyes he said, “I heard
tzitzit
is supposed to be a forget-me-not string tied around your finger.”

“That’s right. It’s supposed to remind you to do all the mitzvahs.” Isaac gazed at the fellow in surprise. “How did you know that?”

“I did have a bar mitzvah,” Nissim said, “like everybody here.”

“So that’s the whole reason?” Yigal said in a disappointed voice.

“It is the way,” Tommy pronounced, one eye jerking in its socket.

“Do you know what the word
tzitz
means?” Isaac asked.

They shrugged.

“It means to look. Any animal can see. But how to look, to look the right way …”

Nissim, placing a hand over his huge chest, said, “My heart wears
tzitzit
. I don’t need
tzitzit
.”

“Okay, hero, let me ask you.” Yigal leaned across the lectern. “Were you wearing
tzitzit
when you gave your cousin Abutbul a flat tire?”

Isaac blanched. A flat tire, he’d just learned, was jail-speak for a stabbing. Not Nissim, he winced.

Nissim brusquely shrugged the tattooed man’s hand away and averted his eyes.

“My uncle wore
tzitzit
,” Yigal suddenly offered. “He said it kept his eyes only on his wife for their whole marriage.
Ya’allah
.” He spread out his arms as if embracing a bear. “All 220 pounds of her.”

The men’s snorting, honking laughter sprayed the room. Isaac ignored it.

Nissim was poking a finger deep in his ear to relieve an itch. Just then, Tommy pushed out a big yawn. Isaac threw a worried glance around the room. He was losing the men. With a pang, he realized he
didn’t want to lose them. He might never have this opportunity with these men again.

Yigal let out a loud burp.

“All right, let me tell you a story.” Isaac moved toward the lectern and the tattooed man relinquished his spot. “Listen, listen to me, please.”

“Hey, you gonna tell us a bedtime story?” Tommy wisecracked, but Nissim shushed him and they settled down.

“Once,” Isaac began, lightly touching his fingers together, “there was a thief who’d go to a rebbe for a blessing just before he’d take on—what do you call it?” He groped for the Hebrew word. “A heist, a job. Always the same rebbe. He’d bless the thief to have success in his doings, and the thief would burglarize a house and go on his way.”

“Hey,” said Yigal.
“Achla gever.”
What a man.

“Which one?” asked Nissim. “The thief or the rebbe?”

The tattooed man didn’t answer. Isaac thought he meant the rebbe. He couldn’t help thinking of Rebbe Yehudah and Shaindel Bracha, how they stretched to include all kinds of people, even the most unsavory. How did they do it? How did they have patience for all these difficult people? But if you had compassion, you didn’t need patience. One precluded the other.

“Go on,” Tommy urged.

“Or sometimes,” Isaac propped a foot on the bottom rung of the lectern, “the thief would rob a place and then dash over to the rebbe for a blessing with the police hot on his trail. The rebbe always gave his blessing and the thief evaded capture. This went on for years and he never got caught. Then one day, he came running to the rebbe. He pounded on the door. ‘Quick, they’re after me! I need a blessing fast!’ ”

Nissim guffawed. Well, Isaac thought, he had their attention. Then: “The old lady at the door said, ‘The rebbe died. Better ask someone else. Maybe the rebbe of Zikover.’ ”

“The thief knocked on the door of the Zikover rebbe. When it dawned on the rebbe what the man wanted the blessing for, he said, ‘
What?
Are you crazy?’ and slammed the door in his face. The thief ran from house to house searching for a rebbe who’d bless him. No one did, of course.” Isaac looked up. Their eyes were on his.

“Finally he ran all the way to the grave of the very first rebbe. He couldn’t stop crying. ‘Everyone wants to be the rebbe of the tzaddiks,’ he sobbed,
‘but no one wants to be the rebbe of the thieves.’ ” Isaac himself began choking up. “Well, the thief wept so hard he shook up the heavens, and the departed rebbe had compassion and came to him in a dream that night.”

Isaac glanced around at the men with their listening faces. They seemed to be tilting toward him in that unconscious way children lean toward their parents. “So the rebbe taught him a Talmudic passage no one else could decipher. The next day the thief explained it in synagogue in the name of that rebbe. That night, the same thing happened. And the next night, and on and on. And you know what?” He took the briefest look and saw the men right there, with him, they couldn’t have been any closer. “The thief became a different man, a different Jew. In fact, he became a rebbe, a great rebbe, in his own right.” He closed his eyes. “In his own right,” he repeated softly.

He stopped talking. He wiped his eyes with a discreet movement. How did the rebbe do it? he wondered. How had he taught and reached a corrupt, ignorant man? What kind of rebbe could do such a thing?

“Reb Isaac, why are you crying?” he heard nearby.

He opened his eyes. “Ah … I—” He stammered. He held the top edges of the lectern. He glanced at Yigal who was rubbing his upper arm as if he could wipe away his tattoo.

Nissim was patting him. “Don’t be sad, Reb Isaac. It’s a happy story. It means anybody can change.”

“Even me,” Tommy threw in with a half-mad look in the eye.

Yigal’s stomach rumbled. “So did he become the rebbe of the thieves?” he demanded to know. “Or the rebbe of the synagogue?”

“The rebbe of everyone,” Isaac said, and he blew his nose loudly. “A rebbe is a rebbe is a rebbe. He wrote a book that people still study today.”

Yigal let out a low whistle.

“So he probably didn’t get into Gehenna,” Tommy said softly.

A silence wrapped around the room as the men fell into the custody of their own thoughts. Isaac stared at them. Their faces looked cleaner and nicer. His own heart brimmed with pity and feeling.