The Rabbi of Lud (2 page)

So, given the background, can you at least begin to understand the grief of that founding New Amsterdam Jew with the fancy tomb, that marble miracle of seventeenth-century know-how with its state-of-the-art arches, piers, cantilevers, columns, finials and traves? He had to have been beside himself! He must have been! Not a mark on it anywhere to indicate who was who! Nowhere the family name! Not a Sarah, not a Joe! Nowhere a Darling Daughter! No place a Beloved Son! As if God, God forbid, Himself had died! Grief so great it didn’t matter anymore about keeping the appearances up. An out-and-out proclamation that not only am
I
nothing, but that my wife is nothing too, my sons and my daughters. All. All nothing. Denying the Creator. Denying Creation. I’ll tell you something. Grief that immense has got to be a lesson to me. Yes, and a comfort, too. Because whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself, whenever I’m blue or feeling down because I’m only the Rabbi of Lud and haven’t a real congregation but am just this pickup rabbi, God’s little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey, I like to wander out by our seminal, primal monument, that ahead-of-its-time memorial to nothing, just to get my bearings again and put things in the proper perspective.

I’ll be frank with you. If I don’t sound to you like the Rabbi of even Lud, maybe it’s because I never had a true calling in the conventional sense. Sue me. The fact is our Christian friends have the music and that’s half the battle right there. I’m not even thinking about plainsong, Gregorian chants, the hardcore liturgical stuff. I discount madrigals, chimes, ding-dongs from the carillon. I’m not even thinking of the dirges, dead marches, oratorios and canticles. Just ordinary
hymns!
Forget the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Where in the Judaic tradition do you get an “Amazing Grace”? A “Rock of Ages,” a “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”? So never
mind
hymns. Where are your Jewish Christmas carols? We don’t
have
“The Little Drummer Boy.” We don’t
have
an “Angels We Have Heard on High.” And did you ever hear of a
Jewish
spiritual? Of course not, even though the Jordan is our river, Jewish water from the word go. We don’t even have good chants. There are saffron-robed kids in the airports with better. What do we have, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”? So if it isn’t the calling, the compelling musical inspiration, I mean, maybe it’s because I’ve always been just a little bit more spiritual then the next guy.

Take away the cemeteries, here’s what Lud looks like:

I’m not a world traveler and don’t put myself forward as an expert in these matters, but ever since I first saw it it’s always struck me that downtown Lud is a lot like the buildings and stores that line the highways of western towns like a peddler’s fruit stands, garment racks and card tables. It’s a, what-do-you-call-it, a strip, and Lud, like Las Vegas or Hollywood or Washington, D.C., is essentially a one-industry town. Only it’s even less diversified than those other places, and though there’s nothing to see, it’s even something of a tourist town. It’s amazing how it’s all linked together. The cemetery came first and was out here on its own for a good many years like, oh, say, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, but then somebody had the bright idea of bringing all death’s service-related industries together under one roof, so the town’s long main street has two monument companies where they cut and engrave the monuments. It has two funeral homes, a nursery, a landscaper, Pamella’s flower shop and a dry cleaner’s.

Let’s see, there’s a barber, a notary and a PIP instant printer that does a land-office business in death certificates. There are a couple of lawyers, a limo wash, a draper, a tiny hotel and coffee shop, a post office, and an office with a telex machine that can send obituary notices to any newspaper in the country. There’s also a gas station that has a wrecker on twenty-four-hour call and a trucker named Pete who hauls stone from the quarries. We have a little Jewish notions shop that stocks greeting cards, prayer books, yarmulkes and yahrtzeit candles for the funeral homes, and an agency that provides day laborers to the town’s cemeteries. Also there’s a small office, not connected with either the cemeteries or the funeral homes, that deals in the buying and selling of deeds, graves, plots and all the rest of the real estate of death. And everything done in that brick and white-trim style designed to make you think you’re back in Colonial Williamsburg or Federal Philadelphia during the Revolution. The rest is residential, a staggered half-dozen houses on either side of Route 43—we live in one ourselves—with big backyards and swimming pools and the town’s two leading cemeteries behind them like farms. (There are smaller graveyards in Lud, pockets of consecrated land that touch the town like suburbs.)

So here I am, representing—the merchants and the other rabbis don’t live here, don’t or won’t, and drive in from Ridgewood and other places in northern Jersey, and the houses are either unoccupied or turned into rooming houses for Lud’s transient gardeners and gravediggers—oh, virtually the entire Jewish population, effectively, as I say, the Rabbi of Lud. The rabbi, the mayor, the chief of police. Whatever I say I am. Because of
course
there’s no mayor and, except for that post office, no civil services. No police unless you count the security people who work the traffic for the funerals. No school board, no health department, no tax collector, no department of streets. We’re this company town. (There’s no company.) We’re this ghost town. (No ghosts either, but lots of potential.) And not even the Rabbi of Lud finally, because, to tell you the truth, when it comes right down to it, except for my immediate family, there’s not any Jews who live here. And every so often, in my rabbi mode again, I have to ask, How could this happen? Who shapes discrepancy? I understand about Leviathan, I know about the treasuries of the sky, but what’s responsible for our Luds, those perfectly logical closed systems outside connection? God doesn’t usually do anomaly. I’m not saying He couldn’t if He wanted, but it’s against His nature.

I say “every so often” but it’s more frequent than that. On a nice morning I might be having my breakfast on the red cedar table in my backyard and I’ll look up from my newspaper and coffee and see it spread out before me, cemetery as far as the eye can see. The earth-drowned Jews of Lud, New Jersey. Our crowd. How did there get to be so many? There are graveyards in New York now, of course, in every borough except Manhattan, and new places opening up in Connecticut all the time, in Stamford and other poshy venues and climes even farther out, but Lud still gets more than its fair share. It doesn’t take a back seat even to the cemeteries you see out your taxi window coming in from the airport through Queens. You know what land is like in New York. They look that crowded because they’re so close together. We’re more spread out and, according to the
Journal of the American Funeral Association,
we have fewer people but more families. My God, I sound like a booster!

How could this happen?
I’ll
tell you how this could happen. As the twig is bent, that’s how it could happen. There I am, a kid in Chicago. Not from a particularly religious family. On top of the world, in the middle of the middle class. Ten years old and an only child. The war over half a decade and the good guys winners. Absolutely content. Not looking for trouble—and where could I find it if I was?—and coming into consciousness postwar. This is the end of the 1940s, before the X-ray machines in shoe stores could irradiate your toe bones, before cigarettes could kill you with cancer, before blacks, before projects, ghettos and changing neighborhoods, before juvenile delinquency even. This was a golden age when wholesale was wholesale and your edge was real. I’m living the good life on Chicago’s South Side. My daddy’s rich and my ma is good lookin’.

Let me interrupt myself here a minute. You know what’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America? In America. Not closing the camps, not the new state of Israel. What’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America was the development of the printed invitation. I mean things like when raised lettering came within the price range of the middle classes. I mean when they perfected that transparent tissue paper. Because it isn’t only necessity that’s the mother of invention. Sometimes it’s boom and amplitude. Take Miami, that town’s flush days when they were throwing up buildings right and left and they’d advertise, “Come to the Fabulous Such-and-So—This Year’s Hotel.” It was like that back at the end of the forties. Money relatively easy to come by and the printed invitation revolution moving in to take up the slack, people excited and trying to outdo one another with celebrations, with their weddings and bar mitzvahs and what-have-you’s.

Which goes toward explaining how I’m reading comic books one minute and studying in the cheder the next. Plucked and translated out of my customary ways and haunts by parents who were already thinking about what the invitations would look like three years down the road when it was time for their only son to be bar mitzvah’d, what wondrous concoctions would be coming onstream to amaze the neighbors and confound the relatives.

I
don’t
scorn them. I
don’t
cast aspersion. This isn’t any easy satire I do. Because God does
too
move in mysterious ways, and ain’t
that
the truth, wonders the Rabbi of Lud from his plain in New Jersey. Mysterious? Byzantine. He wants me in Jersey, He arranges raised lettering and transparent tissue paper spinoffs from Second World War R & D. (I’ve got to think I’m doing the work of the Lord or I’ll plotz.—Excuse me. Bust. This other is still a second language to me. I don’t have it right, the rhythms, the Yiddish singsong ways.)

But that ain’t the half of it. Taking a secular kid from a secular family in Chicago and throwing him into Hebrew school ain’t the half of it. Here’s the miraculous, mysterious part.
I’d never been more bored!
I stuttered and hemmed and hawed myself through those lessons like a dyslexic, like someone disadvantaged, Job Corps material, volunteer Army, Operation Headstart—all broke-will, underfunded, bust-hope beneficiary. God’s little own welfare cheat. I had no aptitude for what was finally just another inscrutably foreign language to me and not the ordinary, conversational vulgate of God Himself. The superheroes in those comic books had more reality for me than all the biblical luminaries and shoguns in Pentateuch. And this is who He chooses to ride shotgun for Him in New Jersey?

As my thirteenth birthday approached my teachers started to sweat. My haphtarah, the passage from Prophets that bar mitzvah boys read for their bar mitzvahs, was too long for my poor skills, and they postponed the ceremony for three months, finding another haphtarah for me, the shortest of the year. All the time plotting, conspiring with His sense of the dramatic, arranging His improbable, mysterious scenarios, having taken the secular kid from the secular Chicago family—which, when it came right down to it, was probably more Chicago than Jewish—and putting him through paces that he never understood—that he was never interested enough to understand—finally bar mitzvahing the kid, the bozo Jew, to less than rave reviews, and getting ready to uncork the real and final miracle—to give me, just
me,
a calling, passing over my classmates, the bona fide buchers, those little ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old keepers of the flame to whom Hebrew script did not look like the business end of so many heavy, old-fashioned keys. (Let alone worry about the problem of God, being at that stage in my theological development where whether He sported a long white beard was still an issue.)

So I became a man on the Shabbes of the year’s shortest haphtarah passage, and if I felt any different it was strictly in a material way. The newfangled invitations had done their job. My bar mitzvah attracted over two hundred and fifty people. Family and close friends, of course, but a sort of papered house of the more distantly connected—the rabbi, big shots from the temple, my dad’s bosses and colleagues, his competitors and customers, certain featured gentiles (you could not, in those days, even
think
of throwing a big affair without their little ecumenical presence), my ma’s cleaning lady, everyone, possibly, for whom they could obtain a good address. I did all right. I did better than all right. I cleaned up. Because now, in those boom times, a spinoff of the spinoff, checks and money began to come in envelopes tricked out like little paper billfolds and later, in the hotel, it was practically de rigueur to slip a bar mitzvah kid—or a bridegroom, or a bride—his gift in one of them, working it into a handshake or a pocket of the kid’s suit, throwing maybe a wink into the mix and making the cloak-and-dagger razzle-dazzler’s or card sharp’s or pickpocket-in-reverse’s almost invisible feints. It was a sight to see. Really. A sight to see. The way one moment some guy you weren’t even sure you knew might be brushing your lapel for you and the next you felt the flap on a pocket of your suitcoat lifted and heard the soft susurrus of money changing not hands but actual clothing. It might have looked vulgar for a freshly decreed all-grown-up man to go around like that, paper hanging from him like the tags on new ready-to-wear, except that every so often my mother or father came up to take my envelopes to hold for me. I pulled in over eight hundred 1949 dollars. (Question, Rabbi: Which is more vulgar, if the proceeds from a bar mitzvah exceed or do not meet expenses? Answer: I’m here to tell you this isn’t even a good question. First of all, a man who throws an affair with a view toward making money from it has to be out of his head. Consider the price of the hall, the cost of the catering. Don’t forget what they charge for flowers, don’t forget what you give for a band. And what about those fancy invitations, what about the postage to send them, the stamps for the RSVPs? Plus you have to remember the incidentals. Also there’s an ostentatious element that takes pleasure in outspending the guests. That’s only happy if the numbers make no sense at all, if the very idea of cost effectiveness is thrown out altogether. Admittedly, this has always been a distinct minority, never higher than a couple of percent. For the vast majority of us, the money outlay is only the necessary expense of doing business and the real payoff and genuine pleasure come from showcasing the kid. It’s the kid’s day, his or hers, he or she, whoever’s up to bat that Saturday. I’ll go out on a limb here. I’ll tell you that maybe not the majority but many of us, many of us would just as soon put by showbiz and do away with the shindig part of it entirely and close down after the kid says his piece in the temple. So
vulgar
? Sure, if love is vulgar.—And
this
is the lesson of the rabbi!