The Rabbi of Lud (3 page)

(Who was not a rabbi yet and who’s still trying to explain the roundabouts of his mysterious calling.)

Speaking of whom, well, it was the rabbi himself who came up to me, us, me and the older cousin with whom I was slow dancing, the parents and grandparents watching, taking it all in how yesterday’s klutz and this morning’s man had lickety-split discovered sex, beaming, getting their money’s worth from the showcased kid. First I thought he wanted to move us apart, then that he meant to cut in. Then—oh, youth’s tender, indiscriminate imperialism that assumes such tribute—merely that he had forgotten to give me my present and couldn’t wait for the band to stop playing to make amends. Which would he be, I wondered in the split second he’d left me to consider the question, a handshake stuffer or a mock valet?

“Jerry,” he said. “Miss,” he told the girl, “please. Excuse us.”

“Oh, Rabbi Wolfblock,” I said, “you didn’t have to. Don’t you remember? You already gave me
The Illustrated History of the Tallith.”

He guided me to a chair at an unoccupied table. “Jerome, you impressed me this morning. The broches could have melted in your mouth.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“No, I mean it. I think you could have done it even if I hadn’t written it all out for you in English.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“You used your extra months to advantage.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“One good turn deserves another. You know this expression?”

“Of course, Rabbi.”

“Good boy,” Rabbi Wolfblock said. The band finished a set and some of the people whose table we occupied had started to drift back but were pulled up short when Wolfblock held up his hand. “A moment, friends,” he said, and turned back and lowered his voice. “What you have to understand, Jerry, is that I’m the fellow who found that eensy miniscripture for you that we waited for it to come round like people waiting on a solstice.”

“I know that, Rabbi.”

“Jerry,” he said, “that some thirteen-year-old pisher becomes a man when he’s bar mitzvah is only a legalism. With all due respect it’s probably a holdover from the time before penicillin when most people didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of making it past twenty-nine and were already middle-aged by the time they were eighteen. Methuselah lived nine hundred years? Days is more like it.
Weeks!
Listen, Jerry, Jewish people practically invented cancer and heart conditions. And what about anti-Semitism? That had to shave
something
off the life expectancy. And those momzers weren’t fooling around. I’m not talking about country clubs you couldn’t get into or nasty jokes in the observation car with ‘kike’ in the punchline. They violated the women and children and shot to kill. So of
course
little boys got to go around like their seniors. Of
course
they did. A legal fiction.—In a minute, friends.

“Rabbi Wolfblock doesn’t say these things to make you feel bad. To make you feel bad? When he scoured Torah to find your itty-bitty portion? Was that to make you feel bad? No, it was so an ignorant, backward boy could be bar mitzvah like anybody else and have a nice affair with a band and lovely presents and a bunch of strangers to cheer him on to remember all his life. Jerry, promise me.”

He recruited me, a thing someone with my record of rotten attendance and demonstrably lousy skills could never, had no right ever to, have expected, for his minyan.

In addition to our attendance on people just bereaved who were supposed to stay in their homes during the mourning period, the compulsory seven days of shiva, we had additional assignments.

You have to understand something. This was Chicago at the end of the forties, the war over four years and the terrors of the Holocaust still fresh. In those days certain older people wouldn’t leave their apartments at first light or walk abroad at dusk to go to synagogue for the sunrise and sunset services. They believed that Jew-haters, familiar with the broad outlines of our religious practices, waited and watched for a lone Jew to leave his home and come into the streets, where they would be hiding themselves, posing behind kiosks perhaps, where they sold newspapers, or skulking about the gangways between apartment buildings. It was a familiar nightmare, a common delusion among old people. So these old Jews, some of them even Orthodox, wouldn’t or couldn’t get to shul. And it wasn’t that long after the war, remember. The agencies still verifying the identities of death camp victims and the Defense Department still closing the books on MIAs, each day making grief official. So it wasn’t as if there was any shortage of relatives to mourn. And they were old, infirm, handicapped. A lot of these people couldn’t have gotten to temple even if they’d wanted to. (And, let’s face it, they didn’t all want to. The invitation revolution just didn’t have the kick that some of these old IWWs and Trotskyites and ILGWUs were accustomed to.) So we delivered. Rabbi Wolfblock’s Traveling Minyan. We were like Meals-on-Wheels. Like the Postal Service. It was neither rain nor snow nor dark of night by us too.

We were not comforters, not eulogizers—most of the time we didn’t even know the people whose souls we were commending to God, vouchsafing to God as if we were cosigning their loans—and I wish I could say there was something embarrassing about sweeping into the homes of people who had just been widowed or lost a father, say, a mother, a brother, a sister, a child, who hadn’t yet had time to take in the implications of their ceremonial or blood bond so surprisingly destroyed, and inviting them to override their grief not only with ritual but with ritual made suspect by having it served up by mere legalisms, a troupe—that’s what we were—of thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah pishers. We were, what? Rabbi Wolfblock’s Children’s Crusaders. Ten little men, thirteen to fifteen years old, ten little Infants for Orthodoxy against a background of the new calligraphy—so ornate it might itself have been a kind of Hebrew—on the new invitations, who minstreled the South Shore of the South Side, Shachris to Marev, administering Sh’ma, administering Shemoneh Esray, administering Kaddish, administering, that is, what any
grown
quorum often bar mitzvah’d Jews—God does not hear the prayers of nine Jews—would administer. I wish I could say I was embarrassed. There was certainly enough opportunity—the mirrors covered with sheets, the mourners’ stools and low, hard, makeshift benches, the rumpled clothing, bad breath and sour smells of the bereaved, as if a little at least of death were contagious, its sloven, unshaven, caught-short essence. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but the fact is, I loved it, and loved the articles about us in the weekend supplements. I ate it all up like a Hitler Youth and loved saying prayers for the dead and guiding people five and six times my age through the mazes of Jewish death. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but I was more embarrassed on the bema reading my haphtarah.

And anyway you don’t look a calling in the face. For this was it, the real, genuine, miracle calling—me, Jerry Goldkorn, God’s little card trick, His will, take it or leave it, revealed. Working, as ever, with chaff, His by-this-time familiar, boring, inferior materials, His … Ech, to hell with it. And if we’re going to plumb the depths of all this, untangle the ironies, is it really, come to think of it, such a wonder after all? Is it the first time someone has found himself in too deep, out of his league, out of his depth, in over his head? Corruption—don’t get me wrong, it’s an example, I’m not corrupt—almost goes with the public trust. Even a starting pitcher who can go the full nine innings is a rarity. So why should I carry on just because I happen to read a halting Hebrew and am a little rusty in the ritual and custom departments? Isn’t my heart in the right place?

All right, you’re going to find out sooner or later, so I’ll make a clean breast right now and be done with it. You’re asking yourselves, if his Hebrew is so bad how did this improbable guy ever get to be a licensed rabbi? Well, you know those offshore medical schools where people sometimes go if they haven’t got the best grades in the world? Places like Grenada and St. Lucia and along the Pacific rim? All right, I attended an offshore yeshiva. It was on this tiny atoll in the Maldive Islands a few hundred miles southwest of India. What are you going to do, arrest me? I’m a person whose calling came about, at least indirectly, through a postwar boom in the engraved bar mitzvah invitation industry. Don’t be so quick to judge. (I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here.) Isn’t it only fitting I received most of my religious training abroad, among Sikhs and Hindus—all the queer castes with their sacred cows and trayf human beings? Only fitting that an almost charter member of Rabbi Herschel Wolfblock’s all-boy minyan and original Little League davening society should pick up his Hebrew lore somewhere closer to the road to Mandalay than the Wailing Wall? My God, my brothers, my God, my sisters, we were like the von Trapp Family Singers, Quiz Kids, famed vaudeville chimps.

Norman Sachs, Donny Levine, Ray Haas, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stanley Bloom, Jake Heldshaft, Al Harry Richmond and I were Wolfblock’s first team, and though we had understudies, kids who could be called upon to stand in if one of us was out of commission, the odd thing was we never got sick. Once we signed with Wolfblock’s special forces we never came down with flu or fell victim to the kid diseases.

Now maybe
you
can explain this, but at the time it was as difficult to account for—and Wolfblock the first to point out what was happening, not crying miracle, understand, just underscoring our strange run of good health—as it was for us to fathom the wonders of the Ouija board or the dynamics that worked the little pendulum that hung from a thread which we used to swing above one another’s palms in circles or verticals and that it never occurred to us we controlled.

So why
not
New Jersey? Why
not
Lud?

The world isn’t plotted like a model city, isn’t laid out on a neat grid for the convenience of tourists and postal employees. There really was a Diaspora, you know, and shipwrecks and castaways, folks lost in deep woods and in the higher elevations and not everywhere filled up with the symmetrical quotas of Caracas and Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, New York. Anomalies abound. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel weren’t all found. Or weren’t found where you might expect. There are frontiers, outposts if not of empire then at least of likelihood. I’m speaking of queer parishes on the high seas, congregations in the wilderness. And this
isn’t
my rabbi mode. I’m not being mystical here, I’m not suggesting martyrs slugging it out with the elements and with themselves in the jungles and along the frozen wastes, and I’m not being glamorous either, only practical. I’m speaking, I mean, of accepting what’s left after the plummy assignments have all been awarded. Practical, we’re practical men we rabbis of Lud, compliant, comers to terms with our oblique, improbable lives. Yes, and if you troubled to press us you’d find that there isn’t a man among us who doesn’t dream of the splashy yellow architecture of some temple in Cleveland. Hey, I know a rabbi who conducts services on a cruise ship that often happens to find itself in the Caribbean of a Friday evening. (Well, you say, but
that’s
glamorous. Oh? He’s hooked on Dramamine and, though he’s not yet forty, the ship’s doctor informs him his beautiful tan is only an early stage of skin cancer.) And wasn’t I myself once Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline?

Because there isn’t a place that
ain’t
covered, or at least that a man of the cloth couldn’t get to on six or seven hours’ notice given good weather and the right bush pilot.

So why not Lud? Why not Lud, New Jersey? Why not this funerary, sepulchral, thanatopsical town?

two

S
O I’M WALKING DOWN Lud’s main street one fine Tuesday morning figuring I’ll pop by Sal’s, see can I hear anything worth listening to. I’m fresh from my prayers, the modified Shachris I do on my own about nine or nine-thirty, after my shower, before my breakfast. To keep myself honest, if you take my meaning. Because, in case I haven’t made myself clear, theologically speaking this is the sticks—ultima Thule. God—and I’m talking in my rabbi mode here—forsaken. I don’t even bother with the phylacteries anymore and haven’t since maybe my second or third year in Lud, since, that is, what was supposed to be temporary began to feel permanent. My wife, Shelley, thinks I still lay t’phillim every morning, but Shelley’s a little eccentric in her ways and doesn’t question me too closely about Jewish practices anymore—not since she saw those leather straps bound about my forearm and head and confessed they were a turn-on for her.

“You know what you’re saying? There are parchments inside these boxes with sacred quotations from the Holy Scriptures.”

“I can’t help it,” Shelley said, “I think you look sexy in them.”

“If that stays fair it’s blasphemous, Shelley,” I a little relented. Shelley always knew how to get to me.

“Well, you
do”
she said, and tried to get me to promise I’d wear my tallith when I came to bed that night.

“Shelley!”

“It’s the fringes, Jerry. They do something to me.”

“Cut it out, Shelley.”

“If you’d taken a post in Williamsburg I’d get to see you in those swell hats and long gabardine coats all the time,” idiosyncratic Shelley pouted.

“You don’t even keep kosher.”

“Would you put your yarmulke on?”

I’ll tell you the truth, now I think of it, maybe my backsliding had more to do with Shelley’s preposterous attitudes than with my growing awareness that I was playing to an empty house. I’m no Graham Greene rabbi, I never was. I don’t burn out so easy. What, because I have a lousy job and I’m stuck in the sticks, there’s no God? Who am I to say? I’m not even good at what I do. But even I have to admit it’s futile. What, it isn’t futile? In this travesty of a community? It’s futile. And face it, who’s to say if that extra hour or so of sleep I get by modifying the morning prayers to my own specifications doesn’t put me in a better mood for the day and make me not only a better husband to my wife but a better father to my daughter, Constance? Surely it does. Because, frankly, you have to be in a good mood to deal with some of Shelley’s idiosyncrasies. Although there’s never been any question in my mind of
not
dealing with them.