The Promise (40 page)

Then someone said “Shah!” loudly, once, and the synagogue was suddenly silent, and I got to my feet along with all the others and craned my neck and saw Reb Saunders coming slowly through the crowd, which moved back for him, somehow finding the room to make a wide path. He wore a dark satin caftan and a fur-trimmed cap, and his beard was white and he walked slowly, supported on his right hand by Danny and on his left by Levi. Danny too wore a dark satin caftan and a fur-trimmed cap and looked tall, lean, and quite majestic I thought. There was a smile on his face and he nodded his head in acknowledgment of the hushed greetings uttered as he went through the crowd, and his eyes were luminous, blinding, as if filled with a light borrowed from one of Michael’s stars. Levi looked thin and frail, but he walked very straight alongside his father, and some of the men touched him gently as he went along, touched the dark satin of his caftan as though to acknowledge his coming sovereignty over them. Behind Reb Saunders and his sons walked Joseph Gordon, dressed in a dark suit and looking a little dazed. Behind him there followed more than half a dozen elderly men, all in dark caftans, all bearded, all in fur-trimmed caps, except one, who wore an ordinary black hat and seemed younger than the rest. I recognized most of them from descriptions or from photographs I had seen or heard over the years. They were tzaddikim of the various other Hasidic sects of Brooklyn.

The crowd around the long table had melted away into the seats, and I thought Reb Saunders would go directly to the chair at the head of the table. Instead, as he began to pass by my father, he stopped and turned. His dark, watery, tired eyes gazed at my father. I saw Danny give me a smile. Reb Saunders stood there, looking at my father. In all the years that I had known Danny this was the first time Reb Saunders was actually seeing my father. He stood gazing at my father, and I thought I saw his lips quiver in the tangle of his long white beard, and then he moved very close
to my father and reached out with his right hand and took my father’s hand and then put his left hand over my father’s hand and just stood there, holding my father’s hand in his two hands, just holding them for what seemed a very long time, and I saw my father nod and smile, and then Reb Saunders released my father’s hand and raised his arms and brought them around my father’s thin body and embraced him and I could hear whispers move like a sudden wind through the synagogue. “Who is that?” “Who?” “Malter?” “Which Malter?” “David Malter?” “The Talmudist David Malter?” “The one who—?” “The book?” “
That
Malter?” “Look at the rebbe!” “He is kissing him!” “Which Malter did you say?”
“The rebbe is crying!”
“Shah!” “Let there be silence!” “Shah!”

Reb Saunders stepped back. Danny and Levi took his arms. Danny did not look at me. My father’s face was flushed. His eyes were wet. Reb Saunders moved to the chair at the head of the long table and sat down. Danny took the chair to his left, Levi to his right. Joseph Gordon sat down next to Danny. The other Hasidic rebbes took seats around the table. There was a faint shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs as everyone in the synagogue sat down. The silence continued. Everyone sat staring at the table.

The ceremony was brief: the two fathers signed the document containing the terms of the betrothal agreement; two men at the table who appeared to be the oldest of the tzaddikim signed as witnesses; a handkerchief was produced and each of the two fathers held a corner of it, performing the kinyan, the legal formality which binds both parties to the terms of a written agreement; the document was read aloud by the rebbe in the dark hat; another rebbe then produced a plate and broke it against the top of the table, an act that symbolizes the destruction of Jerusalem—and the ceremony was over. Someone in the crowd shouted, “Mazel tov!” and the words were picked up by the others until they became an ecstatic din. A moment later there was silence once again. Everybody stared tensely at the table, waiting.

Reb Saunders sat in his chair, swaying faintly back and forth, his right hand playing with an earlock. I noticed Abraham Gordon staring at him intently, his face expressionless. Then Reb Saunders began to speak. His voice was thin and frail, a shadow of what it had once been. It quivered and trembled and he had to stop from time to time to gain control of himself. He spoke for only a few minutes on a passage of Talmud in the tractate
Nedarim
. Then Danny rose and spoke for half an hour on a very difficult passage of Talmud which he explained brilliantly, moving briskly and with flawless ease through a dozen tractates and a host of medieval commentaries as he spoke. The crowd sat enraptured. Levi gazed up at him in awe. My father smiled with pleasure. Abraham Gordon stared in disbelief. And Joseph Gordon continued to look dazed.

Then Danny was done. He sat down. I saw Reb Saunders bend over to him and whisper something in his ear. Danny’s face broke into a joyous smile and he nodded at his father. Levi was saying something to him. He seemed to be talking loudly but I could hear nothing. For the crowd inside the synagogue had exploded. That is the only way to describe what happened. It exploded. Chairs were picked up, tables were moved away from the walls, food was brought in. The young Hasid who had led us into the synagogue suddenly materialized by my side and took us to a table; there was the ritual washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, and we were eating and singing, and then I was dancing, wildly, ecstatically, the hand of an old Hasid on my right shoulder and of a young boy in his teens on my left, whirling and dancing and singing, and there was Danny and I grabbed a chair and pushed it under him and others helped me and I took hold of the legs of the chair and we raised Danny over our shoulders and danced with him on the chair, Danny high on the chair, and the songs loud and the hands clapping and the feet stamping and the joy like a wildness all inside me and around me. I was exhausted and sweating when we were done, and Danny came off the chair
and looked at me and said nothing and suddenly I felt his arms around me and my arms went around him and the satin of his caftan was smooth against my fingers and then we separated and he smiled, his blue eyes moist and brilliant, and someone grabbed him for another dance and he was gone.

I started back to the table and saw that the chair in which my father had sat was empty. I looked around. He was standing against a wall of the synagogue, talking quietly with Abraham Gordon. I sat down and had something to eat. When I turned around again I saw that both my father and Abraham Gordon were gone. A few minutes later my father came back into the synagogue and was on his way to the table when an elderly Hasid in a long gray beard stopped him. My father nodded and accompanied the Hasid to the table where Reb Saunders sat together with the other rebbes. He sat down in Danny’s empty seat. Reb Saunders leaned forward. The other rebbes moved their chairs closer to Reb Saunders. Levi and Joseph Gordon were in the crowd somewhere. The rebbes and my father sat around the table. Reb Saunders was talking. The others listened, nodding their heads. My father was there a very long time before I saw him get to his feet. There was a smile on his face. He made his way slowly through the crowd to the table and sat down.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“Torah,” he said.

“You didn’t produce that Yerushalmi.” The Yerushalmi is the Palestinian Talmud.

He looked at me, puzzled.

“The passage in the Yerushalmi that would have solved Danny’s problem.”

He laughed loudly. “No, Reuven. I did not mention the passage in the Yerushalmi.” He laughed again. “You are more of a scholar than I am. In the midst of a celebration like this you can remember a Yerushalmi!”

“That Yerushalmi could have saved Danny a lot of trouble.”

“Why do you consider it trouble? The people who listened to Danny considered it trouble? Can you see them listening with joy to the critical method?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t see that at all.” A moment later I said, “Did Abraham Gordon leave?”

“Yes. He has to fly to Chicago early tomorrow morning.”

“He doesn’t look well.”

“He has reason not to look well. Michael has not moved in days.”

Levi came over and asked me to join him in a dance. I got up and entered a circle of Hasidim with Levi at my side, and danced. We danced around Danny, who stood clapping his hands and singing, and I looked at Danny and felt a part of myself slide out of the dance and look coldly at what I was doing and heard it telling me how strange it was to be dancing with Hasidim, whose way of life I disliked, whose ideas were so different from mine, whose presence was destroying my world. I continued dancing, but for the rest of that night that part of me remained outside it all, watching.

Sometime later, the dancing and singing ceased and we all returned to our chairs for the Grace. It was almost midnight when my father and I said good-bye to Reb Saunders and Danny, and left. The crowd inside the synagogue had resumed dancing. We could hear the singing and the stamping of feet as we walked carefully through the snow beneath the dark sycamores, and could still hear it, coming faintly through the night, when we turned into Lee Avenue. The wind and the cold had crusted the surface of the snow into a thin, hard film, and I could feel it breaking beneath my feet. Lee Avenue was dark and deserted, the lights of the lamp posts faintly smoky in the powdery snow blown through the air by the wind. I held my father’s arm as we walked. We went along in silence for a while, the singing and dancing still echoing in my ears.

“He told the others how I had influenced you to become
Danny’s friend,” my father said. “He told them how I had guided his son’s reading and prevented him from leaving Yiddishkeit. He thanked me before the others for helping him to raise Danny.”

We walked on a while longer.

“He is a remarkable man,” my father murmured. “They are remarkable people. There is so much about them that is distasteful to me. But they are remarkable people.”

“I wish they weren’t so afraid of new ideas.”

“You want a great deal, Reuven. The Messiah has not yet come. Will new ideas enable them to go on singing and dancing?”

“We can’t ignore the truth, abba.”

“No,” he said. “We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do.” He was silent a moment. “That is the dilemma of our time, Reuven. I do not know what the answer is.”

We turned into our block. The wind was loud in the winter branches of the sycamores. I turned to my father.

“Is Abraham Gordon talking to you about teaching in the Frankel Seminary?”

He stopped and looked at me in astonishment. Then he laughed and shook his head. “How—?” He broke off and shook his head again. “You are remarkable,” he said, smiling broadly. I could see his eyes very bright in the lights of the lamp posts.

“Is he?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you do it?”

“I do not know.”

“What happened to the offer from Hirsch?”

“I have told them I want a little time to consider it.”

I did not say anything.

“Will you be upset if I accept a position at the seminary?”

“I don’t know.”

We went up the stone stairs and into our brownstone. As we were putting away our hats and coats, he said, “Will you take your smicha examinations?”

“Yes.”

“How will you take them?”

“Exactly the way you taught me.”

He nodded soberly. We stood in the hall of the apartment. I looked at the phone. For some strange reason I almost expected it to ring. I saw my father smiling at me.

“It has been a long and happy night, Reuven. But I am still cold from the walk. Would you like to have some tea? Come, let us drink tea and take the cold from our bones before we go to sleep.”

It was after one o’clock when we finally went to bed. I lay awake a long time with the sounds of the singing and dancing in my ears before I was able to fall asleep.

“You are still seeing Gordon?” Rav Kalman asked me the next day after class.

“Yes.”

“How is the boy?”

“There’s no change.”

“You are going to take your smicha examinations?”

“Yes.”

“You have informed the Dean?”

“I’m going to do that now.”

“So,” he said. “You have made your choice.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you stand now, Reuven?”

“I’ll have to show you.”

His eyes narrowed.

“At the examinations,” I said.

His face darkened. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I can’t tell you my choice. I’ll have to show it to you.”

His lips grew thin and he tugged at his dark beard. “I will not give smicha examinations to someone—” He stopped. “I will
not give you smicha examinations until I know with certainty where you stand.”

“Then I can’t take the examinations,” I said very quietly.

He stared at me from across the desk. The hand with the misshapen fingers trembled quite visibly on the closed Talmud. There was a long silence.

“What will you do at the examinations?” he asked softly. “You will use your father’s method?”