The Rabbi of Lud (25 page)

So of course I wasn’t surprised. The other way round, really. I would have been surprised if they hadn’t shown up, if all those Tshimian and Athapaskan Indians, if all those hunters and fishermen and totem-pole carvers and ivory scratchers from King and Little Diomede islands hadn’t shown up. If all those blasters, heavy equipment operators, jackhammerers and acetyle-nists hadn’t. What, and miss Shavuoth? Frankly, I’d have been less surprised if Karen Ackerman, Milton Abish, Debbie Grunwald, Dave Piepenbrink, Arnie Sternberg, Howard Ziegler or the Jacobsons failed to show. But that’s a figure of speech. Of course
they
were there. Dave Piepenbrink met my plane. He was waiting for me out on the 5 Mile camp landing strip. (The different camps had begun to submit sealed bids to see who would host the services, proceeds to the Trees for Israel Fund. You have to understand something, none of this was my idea.)

“Good yontif, Rabbi.”

“David.”

“You had a pleasant trip?”

“Very nice, thank you, David.”

“Thank God! Alevay! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“Could you lend me a hand? The makings for the ark are still in the plane, the Torah and accessories.”

“The Torah? You brought a Torah on the flight with you? Oh, let me carry it. Please, Rabbi,
please.
I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your trees if you do.”

“Enough with the trees already, David.”

“You
said trees,” Piepenbrink protested. “Trees for Israel was
your
idea. I
never
thought trees was a hot idea. Trees is just another place for Arab snipers to hide themselves and take potshots at us. So tell me, Rabbi, if not into trees, where then should we put our money? You’re the rabbi, you tell me.”

“Nowhere. It was a bad idea. But everyone’s so hipped up here on throwing their money around. On being a good sport. I shouldn’t have to charge people to get them to help me out. I’m not selling indulgences. Of course you can carry the Torah. It’s in the duffel.”

I took the smaller duffel, into which I’d transferred a Torah out of Philip’s duffel before I left Prospect Creek camp that morning, and held it out to Piepenbrink. He’d lost his enthusiasm. Oh, he carried it, but now that it wasn’t costing him anything all sense of ceremony had gone out of it for him, even decorum. He practically brushed it along the ground.

“Hey,” I said, “watch what you’re doing. That’s a Torah in there. You don’t shlep it along like it was a bowling ball.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and hiked his burden up a few inches. “I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who thinks he can get a ticket for flying a torn flag.”

It was true. I
did
think I could.

Karen Ackerman, Abish, the Jacobsons, Debbie Grunwald, Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler were already setting up the chairs for services the next morning.

“I don’t know,” Debbie Grunwald said, stepping back, considering. “You think it’ll be enough?”

“Oh, sure,” Milton Abish said. “Hey, there’s three hundred chairs here. For Shavuoth? Three hundred chairs? Sure it’s enough. What, are you kidding me?”

“I don’t know,” Bill Jacobson said, “we were out at the airstrip earlier and there was an unusual amount of traffic landing for a Monday morning. Isn’t that right, Miriam? Didn’t you think so?”

“I sure did, Bill.”

“We could always put more out if we need them,” Arnie Sternberg said.

“Absolutely,” Howard Ziegler agreed.

“Well, I’ll bet we
do
need them,” Debbie said.

“I’ll take that bet,” said Miriam Jacobson.

“All right, big shot,” Debbie said, “what are the stakes?”

“For every chair we need
over
three hundred I donate ten dollars to Trees for Israel. For every chair under three hundred
you
donate ten dollars.”

“You’re on,” Debbie Grunwald said. “Who holds the money?”

“Why don’t we just put it down on the ground here where it can blow away?” Miriam Jacobson asked triumphantly, as Debbie Grunwald, knowing she’d been both set up
and
out-sported, blanched.

As it turned out, Debbie Grunwald would have had to pay Trees for Israel a hundred and twenty dollars if I hadn’t disallowed the bet.

It was just the sort of thing I was up against, the point of my missionary’s message to them. It was sin. Such pride and vainglorious strut and vaunt and bluster. Put brag by, friends, I would have told them. Put by swagger and swank and grandiloquence. Knock it off with all swelled-head big britchery, all that high and mighty of the soul and hot air of the heart. You don’t six-pack God, smarty-boots, I would have told them. I
would
have. In my sermon. If I’d gotten that far.

Because I
wasn’t
surprised. It was Shavuoth. I
wasn’t
surprised. I practically almost expected not only that just about a third of those two hundred and eighty-eight seats would be filled with Athapaskans, Tshimians and other assorted fisherfolk, hunter-gatherer and totem-pole types, and that ordinary blue-collar Baptist, Methodist, Adventist and Mormon drillers, drivers and sappers would take up still another third or so—it was Shavuoth, after all; it was Shavuoth, come one, come all—leaving another ninety-six for the outright Jews in attendance. I
wasn’t
surprised. I
counted
on it. It was those Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers up on dogsleds with whips I hadn’t figured!

Because this was June, for God’s sake. D-Day. (Could they, I wondered, be opening up some second front?) There wasn’t even any damned
snow
on the ground! Yet there they were. In full fur. Mukluk to parka in the June heat. Tricked out with their harpoons and ulus by their sides, the sharp, curving knives the women used to gut fish. The dogs, sprawling on the ground in their complicated harness, seemed at some lazy, ceremonial equivalent of parade rest, but at a signal from their masters, some tug of the reins, I suppose, which rolled along their gear like a wave, they rose to a sort of attention. I made some announcements, called out the preliminary blessings (thanking God for restoring the body, for dressing the naked, for opening the eyes of the blind, for freeing the captives, for giving the rooster the intelligence to distinguish between the day and the night, and for making me—I couldn’t keep my eyes off those Eskimos—an Israelite), and began the service.

I’d just finished the Akdamut, the ninety-verse alphabetical acrostic praising the greatness of God and the excellence of Torah (and concealing the name—Meir bar Rabbi Yitzchak—of the poem’s author and father) you recite on Shavuoth before you open the Torah.

I went toward the ark. I proclaimed the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel,” I announced, “the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” opened the ark, withdrew the Torah, took the silver crowns off its wooden handles, undid the soft, fine cords that bound it, removed the velvet parochet that covered it, and laid it down on the bema. Since this was a Torah that had never been used, all its slack was taken up. The scrolls were set at the beginning, like a rental cassette from a video store. I would need someone to help me roll them to the portion for Shavuoth, and I beckoned David Piepenbrink to come up beside me.

“What?” he said.

“This is a virgin Torah,” I told him from the side of my mouth. “I’m laying a very high power aliyah on you here. You hold on tight to the left side while I roll up the right. It should be about a third of the way through.” He started to say something. “
Don’t
,” I warned, “don’t you
dare
mention money.”

“The dogs,” he said.

“What?”

“The
dogs
!”

The huskies, urged on by their Cossack Orthodox Russian Eskimo masters, were pulling the heavily laden sleds over the dry, stony ground. “Quick,” I told Piepenbrink, “take up the slack.
The slack!
We’ve got to save the Torah from them. Quick, Piepenbrink, this is an even higher honor than that first one I gave you.”

“What,” he said, “protect this? It’s a
crib,
a trot. It’s a pony.” He was speaking conversationally now, all the nervous, customary stage inaudibles, the directions and quiet, cryptic promptings that flow back and forth between a rabbi and a bar mitzvah boy, say, and which ordinarily aren’t heard in even the first row—why is this, I wonder, what special physics protects our grit-teeth, iron-jaw arrangements?—his voice normal, audible, clear, punched up as a broche.

“What do you mean, a crib?” (And my voice normal too, as clear as Piepenbrink’s.) But I saw what he meant. I’m
such
a lousy rabbi. When I’d chosen the Torah in the black velvet mantle to bring with me to 5 Mile, I didn’t even look at it first. It wasn’t Hebrew but a phonetic transcription of Hebrew, a transliteration in English. It was Wolfblock’s work. It was old Rabbi Wolfblock’s work, the man who’d written out my tiny haphtarah passage in English for me when I was bar mitzvah, the shortest of the year. I’d have recognized his printing anywhere.

And all they ever meant, the Eskimo Russian Cossack Orthodox momzers, was just to come closer, and the dogs too very likely, who were probably called, someone suggested later, when I sang out that Sh’ma!

I went out again, on Tish’a b’Av. McBride was there, but not an Eskimo, who were gentlemen, was to be seen.

Tish’a b’Av commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples, and also the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The year I’m speaking of it fell on Thursday, August first, and I’d chosen Toolik camp, maybe two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, as the venue for our services. The Jacobsons had dropped out, Dave Piepenbrink of course, Arnie Sternberg, maybe a quarter of the Jews. Of course Tish’a b’Av was never your most popular holiday anyway. What’s it got going for it? All negatives. Two acts of high vandalism and the blackballing of an entire people from a major country. That’s Tish’a b’Av. What’s to celebrate? To tell the truth, I think it should be taken out of the canon altogether. Too defeatist. Why, it’s like celebrating the date the first Jew wasn’t admitted to a country club, or the first time his name showed up in an ethnic joke. And the destruction of those temples? Commemorate swastikas painted on the walls, why don’t you? Crosses burning on your lawn. Also, it always falls in the hottest part of the summer. People are out of town.

It was a packed house anyway. Gentiles and Indians made up for the defection of the Jews and Eskimos. And Deb Grunwald was there. Shlepping chairs, offering her optimistic body counts.

“You’ll see, Rabbi,” she told me the night before the services, “there’ll be an even bigger turnout than last time.”

“Sure. They’re coming to see how I’ll screw up.”

“No,” she said, “really. They never heard such davening. Once you found your place, you whizzed along like a champ.”

“I read from a crib, Deb.”

“Who knew?”

“After Piepenbrink stepped down? Half the congregation.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Well, you’re kind,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Tell me,” she said, pointing in the direction of the ark, “did you happen to get a chance to look over …” The question trailed off.

I’d chosen the blue-mantled, hundred-forty-five-thousand-dollar Sephardic job, I recall Philip pointing out, but no, I hadn’t looked at it, hadn’t rolled it yet to the appropriate portion, hadn’t even removed its crowns or undone those tasseled ornamental cornsilk cords that loosely bound its twin cylinders. (Because I was working on the theory that it was Fate, God’s hand, that it was up to Him, that if He still wanted me chastised and publicly shamed practically a quarter of a century to the day after some overripe Chicago bar mitzvah pisher went head-to-head with Him over something as insignificant—to a child, remember, a little kid—as the thickness and shape of the letters in what was apparently the Father Tongue, if He, that is, could hold a grudge—or should I say Grudge, your Majesty?—every last second of every damned minute of every single one of those twenty-five years, just because I happened to be learning-disadvantaged in the Hebrew department, if all that His vaunted Mysterious Ways came down to was moving Jerry Goldkorn by way of Lud, New Jersey, all the way past the Arctic Circle so he could make asshole/asshole before a bunch of folks who weren’t too nuts about His Chosen People in the first place, then who was Jerry Goldkorn to sneak a peek, or look up the parchment skirts of some multimulti-K Torah?)

“No, Deborah,” I told her sweetly, “I didn’t happen to find an opportunity.”

As I said, and as Debbie predicted, the house was packed. Standing room only. I delivered my announcements to the bare quorum of Jews and approving goyim and unsmiling redskins, giving all of them the times for the next Jewish Singles’ Happy Hour (Alaskan corned beef, Juneau pastrami, rye bread flown in from magnetic north), and began the morning prayers. I thanked Him for redressing grievances, for being a Settling Scores kind of God, finished the prayers, told the congregation that we would read the Torah portion, declared the Sh’ma, and summoned Deborah Grunwald beside me to join me on the bema. Together we went toward the ark.

“Not,” I told her, speaking in my normal voice now too, in that customary pitch of conversation which, if it wasn’t audible in the first rows, was a proof of God’s existence that just by raising the volume a few ticks it was clear as a bell in Heaven, “because, counting Shavuoth and all those Friday night services, you must have set up the better part of a couple of thousand chairs for me by this time, and I owe you. Not even because”—our backs to the congregation as we moved toward the precious shittim-wood cabinet that contained the scrolls, I wasn’t even ad-even addressing her out of the side of my mouth, but was speaking flagrantly, profile to profile, like people in public seen from behind—“you’re a special favorite of mine, Rabbi’s pet, say, or something, well, lurid. I’ll tell you the truth, Miss Grunwald, lurid ain’t on my palette. I know how it goes in the world, how some-times it’s the priest gets the girl just because he
is
the priest. Not just the celibacy thing but because he has God’s ear, a line on the mysteries. That’s impressive to girls. Look, break in anytime if I’m out of line here, because, well, chances are I could
be
out of line and not even know it. See, I’m this Garden State rabbi and as much at a loss when it comes to the mysteries as everyone else. I mean,
I’m
impressionable too. Innocent beyond my years and trade. A rabbi who never had a proper congregation, who just says words over dead people for living people who don’t have the hang of or calling for it themselves. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you I’m the kind of shaman ladies don’t usually take a shine to. I regard myself as eligible and red-blooded as the next guy, but you’ve got to admit, the death of the next-of-kin doesn’t normally put someone in the mood. Widows never fell all over me, I guess I’m trying to say. So of course I never had much opportunity to fall all over them back. So it isn’t because of the likelihood of either of us having a crush on the other.
It’s because I need a witness and you happened to ask the question is why!”