Here I Am (36 page)

A gentle chuckle of recognition.

“He spoke slowly, and with effort. He told me about Sam's bar mitzvah, and Jacob's show, and Max's early long division, and Benjy's bike-riding, and Julia's projects, and Irv's mishegas—that was
his
word.”

A chuckle. He was winning.

“And then he said, ‘Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.' ”

This was either the most audacious heaping and steaming mountain of Jewshit ever shoveled by a rabbi or anyone, or a revelatory glimpse into Isaac Bloch's consciousness. Only the rabbi knew for sure—what was accurately recounted, what was embellished, what was fabricated out of whole tallis. Had anyone ever heard Isaac use the word
despair
? Or
gratitude
? He'd have said, “It was horrible, but it could have been worse.” But
would he have said
that
? Thankful for
what
? And what were all these miracles he'd witnessed?

“Then he asked me if I spoke Yiddish. I told him no. He said, ‘What kind of rabbi doesn't speak Yiddish?' ”

A proper laugh.

“I told him my grandparents spoke Yiddish to my parents, but my parents would never let me hear it. They wanted me to learn English. To
forget
Yiddish. He told me he'd done the same, that he was the last Yiddish-speaker in his family, that the language would be in the casket, too. And then he put his hand on my hand and said, ‘Let me teach you a Yiddish expression.' He looked me in the eye and said,
‘Kein briere iz oich a breire.'
I asked him what it meant. He took back his hand and said, ‘Look it up.' ”

Another laugh.

“I
did
look it up. On my phone, in his bathroom.”

Another
laugh.

“Kein briere iz oich a breire
. It means ‘Not to have a choice is also a choice.' ”

No, those words couldn't have been his. They were too faux-enlightened, too content with circumstance. Isaac Bloch was many things, and resigned was not one of them.

If having no choice were a choice, Isaac would have run out of choices once a day after 1938. But the family needed him, especially before the family existed. They needed him to turn his back on his grandparents, his parents, and five of his brothers. They needed him to hide in that hole with Benny, to walk with rigid legs toward Russia, eat other people's garbage at night, hide, steal, forage. They needed him to forge documents to board the boat, and tell the right lies to the U.S. immigration officer, and work eighteen-hour days to keep the grocery profitable.

“Then,” the young rabbi said, “he asked me to pick up toilet paper for him at the Safeway, because they were having a sale.”

Everyone chuckled.

“I told him he didn't need to buy toilet paper anymore. It would be taken care of by the Jewish Home. He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘But that price…' ”

A louder, freer laugh.

“ ‘That's it?' I asked. ‘That's it,' he said. ‘Was there something you
wanted to hear? Something you wanted to say?' He said, ‘There are two things that everybody needs. The first is to feel that he is adding to the world. Do you agree?' I told him I did. ‘The second,' he said, ‘is toilet paper.' ”

The loudest laugh yet.

“I'm thinking about a Hasidic teaching that I learned as a rabbinical student. There are three ascending levels of mourning: with tears, with silence, and with song. How do we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears, with silence, or with song? How do we mourn the end of his life? The end of the Jewish epoch that he participated in and exemplified? The end of Jews who speak in that music of broken instruments; who arrange their grammar counterclockwise and miss the point of every cliché; who say
mine
instead of
my, the German people
instead of
Nazis
, and who implore their perfectly healthy relatives to be healthy instead of feeling silent gratitude for health? The end of hundred-and-fifty-decibel kisses, of that drunken European script. Do we shed tears for their disappearance? Silently grieve? Or sing their praises?

“Isaac Bloch was not the last of his kind, but once gone, his kind will be gone forever. We
know
them—we have lived among them, they have shaped us as Jews and Americans, as sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters—but our time of knowing them is nearly complete. And then they will be gone forever. And we will only remember them. Until we don't.

“We
know
them. We know them with tears for their suffering, with silence for all that cannot be said, and with song for their unprecedented resilience. There will be no more old Jews who interpret a spot of good news as the guarantee of imminent apocalypse, who treat buffets like grocery stores before blizzards, who touch a finger to the bottom lip before turning a page of their people's Maxwell House epic.”

Jacob's hatred was softening—not evaporating, not even melting, but losing its shape.

The rabbi paused, brought his hands together, and sighed. “As we stand at Isaac Bloch's grave, there is a war going on. There are two wars. One is on the brink of breaking out. The other has been happening for seventy years. The imminent war will determine the survival of Israel. The old war will determine the survival of the Jewish soul.

“Survival has been the central theme and imperative of Jewish existence since the beginning, and not because we chose it to be that way. We
have always had enemies, always been hunted. It's not true that everyone hates Jews, but in every country we've ever lived, in every decade of every century, we have encountered hatred.

“So we've slept with one eye open, kept packed suitcases in the closet and one-way train tickets in the breast pockets of our shirts, against our hearts. We've made efforts not to offend or be too noisy. To achieve, yes, but not to draw undue attention to ourselves in the process. We've organized our lives around the will to perpetuate our lives—with our stories, habits, values, dreams, and anxieties. Who could blame us? We are a traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma's power to deform the mind and heart.

“If you were to ask one hundred Jews what was the Jewish book of the century, you would get one answer:
The Diary of Anne Frank
. If you were to ask what was the Jewish work of art of the century, you would get the same answer. This despite it having been created neither as a book nor as a work of art, and not in the century in which the question was asked. But its appeal—symbolically, and on its own terms—is overpowering.”

Jacob looked around to see if anyone else was as surprised by the direction this was taking. No one seemed fazed. Even Irv, whose head only ever rotated on the axis of disagreement, was nodding.

“But is it good for us? Has it been good to align ourselves with poignancy over rigor, with hiding over seeking, victimization over will? No one could blame Anne Frank for dying, but we could blame ourselves for telling her story as our own. Our stories are so fundamental to us that it's easy to forget that we choose them. We
choose
to rip certain pages from our history books, and coil others into our mezuzot. We
choose
to make life the ultimate Jewish value, rather than differentiate the values of kinds of life, or, more radically, admit that there are things even more important than being alive.

“So much of Judaism today—regarding Larry David as anything beyond very funny, the existence and persistence of the Jewish American Princess, the embrace of klutziness, the fear of wrath, the shifting emphasis from argument to confession—is the direct consequence of our choice to have Anne Frank's diary replace the Bible as our bible. Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition.
Righteousness
is.

“Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom because of the
righteousness
of its citizens. Not because life is inherently deserving of saving, but because
righteousness
should be spared.

“God destroys the earth with a flood, sparing only Noah, who was
‘righteous in his own time.'

“Then there is the concept of the Lamed Vovniks—the thirty-six righteous men of every generation, because of whose merit the entire world is spared destruction. Humankind is saved not because it is worth saving, but because the righteousness of a few justifies the existence of the rest.

“A trope from my Jewish upbringing, and perhaps from yours, was this line from the Talmud: ‘And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.' This is a beautiful idea, and one worth living by. But we shouldn't ascribe more meaning to it than it contains.

“How much greater the Jewish people might be today if instead of
not dying
, our ambition was
living righteously
. If instead of ‘It was done to me,' our mantra was ‘I did it.' ”

He paused. He held a long blink and bit at his lower lip.

“There are things that are hard to say today.”

He almost smiled, as Irv had almost smiled when touching Jacob's face.

“Judaism has a special relationship with words. Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. ‘Let there be light,' God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is perhaps the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: expression is generative.

“It's the same with marriage. You say, ‘I do,' and you do. What is it, really, to be married?”

Jacob felt a burning across his scalp. Julia needed to move her fingers.

“To be married is to say you are married. To say it not only in front of your spouse, but in front of your community, and, if you are a believer, in front of God.

“And so it is with prayer, with
true
prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that would otherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.' We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

He bit again at his lower lip and shook his head.

“There are things that are hard to say today.

“It is often the case that everyone says what no one knows. Today, no one says what everyone knows.

“As I think about the wars in front of us—the war to save our lives, and the war to save our souls—I think about our greatest leader, Moses. You might remember that his mother, Jochebed, hides him in a reed basket, which she releases into the current of the Nile, as a last hope of sparing his life. The basket is discovered by Pharaoh's daughter. ‘Look!' she says. ‘A crying Hebrew baby!' But how did she know that he was a Hebrew?”

The rabbi paused, and held the agitated silence in place, as if forcefully saving the life of a bird that only wanted to fly away.

Max spoke up: “Probably because Hebrews were trying to keep their kids from getting killed, and only someone in that situation would ever put her baby in a basket and send it down the river.”

“Perhaps,” the rabbi said, showing no condescending pleasure in Max's confidence, only admiration for his thought. “Perhaps.”

And again he forced silence.

Sam spoke up: “So, I say this fully seriously: maybe she saw that he was circumcised? Right? She says, ‘Look.' ”

“That could be,” the rabbi said, nodding.

And he dug a silence.

“I don't know anything,” Benjy said, “but maybe he was crying in Jewish?”

“How would one cry in Jewish?” the rabbi asked.

“I don't know anything,” Benjy said again.

“Nobody knows anything,” the rabbi said. “So let's try to learn together. How would one cry in Jewish?”

“I guess babies don't really speak.”

“Do tears?”

“I don't know.”

“It's strange,” Julia said.

“What is?”

“Wouldn't she have
heard
him crying? That's how it works. You hear them crying, and you go to them.”

“Yes, yes.”

“She said, ‘Look! A crying Hebrew baby.'
Look
. She
saw
that he was crying, but didn't
hear.”

“So tell me what that implies,” he said—no patronizing, no self-righteousness.

“She knew he was a Hebrew because only Jews cry silently.”

For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to lose the most intelligent person on earth.

“Was she right?” the rabbi asked.

“Yes,” Julia said. “He was a Hebrew.”

“But was she right that Jews cry silently?”

“Not in my experience,” Julia said, with a chuckle that drew a depressurizing chuckle from the others.

Without moving, the rabbi stepped into the grave of silence. He looked at Julia, almost unbearably directly, as if they were the only two living people left, as if the only thing that distinguished those buried from those standing was ninety degrees.

He looked into her and said, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?”

She nodded.

“And now I'd like to ask
you
a question, Benjy.”

“OK.”

“Let's say we have two choices, as Jews: to cry silently, as your mother has said, or to cry in Jewish, as you said. What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”

“I don't know.”

“Nobody knows, so you can't be wrong.”

“I don't even have a guess.”

“Maybe like laughing?” Max suggested.

“Like laughing?”