Members of the Tribe (24 page)

Mendy (“it’s short for Mendel”) Kalmanson took charge of me. A smiling, fresh-faced boy in a man’s dark suit and fedora, he led me inside the van, offered me a diet Pepsi (“a little nosh,” he said shyly), and explained the operation. The crew is divided into two teams—outside men who stop passersby, strike up a conversation, and try to convince them to put on tefillin; and inside men, who wait in the tank and show the volunteers how to do it.

At headquarters, Rabbi Friedman had explained that the Chabad emphasis on tefillin stems from the Six-Day War, when the rebbe ordered his followers to convince fellow Jews to wear them in order to demonstrate Jewish power and solidarity. Rabbi Friedman strongly implied that Israel’s victory had been a result of that order—rebbe-centered explanations of historical events and natural phenomena are common among his disciples. But Mendy didn’t know the background of the tefillin campaign, and he seemed surprised that I would wonder about it. “It’s a
commandment
,” he told me with boyish conviction. “It’s straight outta the Torah. What more do you need?”

As we were talking, the door of the van opened and a young man in a business suit entered, followed by one of the outside men who blocked his retreat. The man, a Russian immigrant, looked around nervously. “We must make this quick, all right?” he said, but his concern was unnecessary; Mendy was already working with a practiced dispatch, rolling up the man’s sleeve and winding the leather straps around his arm. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy,” he said cheerfully as the man looked on with a dubious expression. Mendy handed him a prayerbook, led him in what was obviously an unfamiliar benediction, unwound the straps, and wished him a good Shabbes. The whole operation took about three minutes.

Thousands of people passed the mitzvah tank in the next hour, but only seven more came in—two more Russians, a Moroccan Jew from Montreal, an Israeli who lives in Queens, two Mexican tourists, and a Turkish businessman. There wasn’t a single American customer. I pointed this out to Mendy, but he simply shrugged. “It’s like anything else, you get your good days and your bad days. Besides, a Jew’s a Jew and a mitzvah’s a mitzvah.”

Curious to see what was happening on the street, I left the van and joined the outside men on the corner of 47th and 5th. Each one had a stack of pamphlets he offered to passersby, asking likely candidates, “Are you Jewish?” People rushed past without looking up, or shook their heads briefly. No one stopped.

“If a person says no right away, that means he isn’t Jewish,” explained Shaya Harlig, one of the outside men. “So I just say, ‘have a nice day.’ But if he hesitates before saying no, then he’s Jewish. Usually I don’t say anything, but sometimes, if he really looks Jewish, I say, ‘Come on, gimme a break.’ ”

“That’s right,” said another one of the boys. “But you know, sometimes people have funny reactions. Like one time a man came over to me and said, ‘Last week you asked if I was Jewish and I said no. I haven’t been able to sleep all week. So, yes, I’m Jewish.’ ”

“Did you get him into the tank?” I asked. The boy shook his head. “He said he was too busy. But at least it was a start,” he said, sighing.

A well-dressed lady stopped to talk. The mitzvah tank crew does not stop women, who have no religious duty to put on tefillin. But, unlike other Chasidic men, Chabadniks are not afraid to talk to them in public. The lady had just seen a production of
The Merchant of Venice
. “Are Jews allowed to charge interest or not?” she asked one of the crew, who answered her politely, as if he had been put on the corner as a municipal Talmudic information service.

One of the boys came up to me with a stack of pamphlets. “Why don’t you give it a try?” he offered with a grin. “You almost look like one of us.” I realized that he was right. I had a beard, a dark coat, and black trousers, as well as a black silk yarmulke on my head, and I looked like an older version of the tank crew. I accepted the pamphlets and, feeling somewhat foolish, took my place on the corner.

Menachem Begun, the Brazilian Chasid, gave me a little coaching. “Don’t try to stop everyone. Let the ones who don’t look Jewish go by—you know, blacks, Orientals, Latins. The other ones you should at least ask. You’re a beginner, you can’t pick out the Jews.”

“Can you?” I asked.

He smiled. “Sure. It’s easy, just look right here,” he said, pointing to his nose.

Even with coaching, I soon realized that stopping Jews on a midtown Manhattan corner is like trying to hit major league fastballs—they go whizzing by faster than they look from the stands. By the time I asked people if they were Jewish I was talking to the backs of their heads. After a couple minutes I was more or less continually mumbling, “Are you Jewish are you Jewish are you Jewish,” and attracting some peculiar stares. Menachem and Mendy, standing a few feet away, were immensely amused by the spectacle, but after a while they stepped in to give me some more pointers.

“Stand back and offer the pamphlets from a distance—if you get too close, it scares people off. Ask ‘Are you Jewish?’ in a loud voice, but polite. And you don’t have to ask the whole thing, just, ‘Ya Jewish?’ like that.” Mendy and Menachem made it sound easy, but even with my new stance and abbreviated text, I couldn’t get anyone to stop.

A little later, I looked up and saw that I was sharing the corner with a colleague, a funky-looking black man wearing an orange vest over a battered imitation leather jacket. Like me, he was distributing leaflets—but, I noted enviously, with considerably more success.

I sidled up to him. “What
you
got?” I asked, and he handed me a flyer announcing specials on stereo equipment at Sound City. I offered him one of mine, a personal letter from the Lubavitcher rebbe on the importance of tefillin. He took it out of professional courtesy, but when he thought I wasn’t looking he let it fall to the pavement.

Discouraged, I headed back to the tank, where some of the boys were talking to a beat cop. At first I thought he might be hassling them, but it turned out they were discussing the policeman’s days as a yeshiva boy in Kew Gardens. “As a cop, these guys are a pain in the ass,” he told me. “They won’t move their van when you tell them to; they play their klezmer music so loud that the storekeepers complain; and when you try to talk to them about it, they won’t even listen. But as a Jew, I like what they’re doing. I mean, somebody’s got to go out and remind people that they’re still Jews.”

* * *

In the mitzvah tank, the Chabadniks are reasonable and friendly, ready for amiable argument. But it is a bogus pose; there is a fanatic’s hard edge just under the personable facade. The Chabad Chasidim see themselves as medical missionaries in the midst of an epidemic of assimilation and impiety. The rebbe has prescribed a cure—fundamentalist Judaism—that very few American Jews are prepared to take plain. Chabad’s great skill is its ability to sugar-coat the pill.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Hollywood. Chabad and show business were meant for each other. The rebbe—for all his piety and isolation—is a master showman who stages his public appearances carefully and beams them around the world via satellite. And in recent years, Chabad has become expert in the use of another American show biz art form—the telethon.

The Chabad telethon is one of the great media events of the Jewish world. When I was in Los Angeles I watched a tape of one with Marilyn Miller, an old friend who was one of the original writers on
Saturday Night Live
. Marilyn grew up in Pittsburgh, where she was active in the Reform youth movement, and she still takes an interest in Jewish life. Lately she has been trying to establish a sitcom library for the Jerusalem Cinemateque. But none of the old comedy series, or even
Saturday Night Live
in its heyday, ever came up with a more improbable premise or a zanier entertainment than the Chabad special.

The show opened with a group of sweating Chabadniks dancing frenetically to the sound of a klezmer band. The number ended with one of them spinning wildly with a quart bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale balanced on his nose. This feat won loud applause from the host of the show, Jan Murray of
Treasure Hunt
fame, who emceed the evening dressed in a black tuxedo and matching silk yarmulke.

Murray told a couple of borscht belt jokes and then introduced the stars who were there to raise money for the rebbe—Ed Asner, Connie Francis, Shelley Berman, Martin Sheen, James Caan, Tony Randall, Elliot Gould, and dozens more. My personal favorite was a Korean nightclub crooner who sang “Volaré” and “B’Shanah Ha’ba’ah,” a Hebrew standard whose words he managed
to mispronounce in their entirety. Murray didn’t seem to notice.

Performances alternated with film clips of Chabad’s philanthropic activities and testimonials from some of Hollywood’s most powerful (and least pious) Jewish stars and movie big shots. There was something about them that reminded me of a stoned Elvis appearing at the White House on behalf of Richard Nixon’s war against drugs.

The television special, like much of what Chabad does in America, was the product of dedicated and talented emissaries, men who know the world and are willing to reach out to assimilated Jews on their own terms. The effort goes on across the country—in Chabad houses on college campuses, in mitzvah tanks, and anywhere else the missionaries can gather an audience.

In L.A. on Super Bowl Sunday, I attended a Chabad show biz study session at the Westwood home of Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, one of the rebbe’s chief West Coast operatives. I was invited by Roger Simon, a novelist whose Jewish private eye, Moses Wine, was portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie
The Big Fix
. Simon was working on a new Moses Wine story that involved Jewish mysticism, which is how he began attending the weekly class. His motives were of no great concern to Rabbi Schwartz, however; there is a rabbinical principle that holds that if you start out doing the right things for the wrong reasons, you will eventually do them for the right ones. Chabad believes in mitzvah momentum.

Simon and I arrived at Schwartz’s comfortably unpretentious home a few minutes before ten in the morning. A dozen men and women in French designer jogging outfits, Reeboks, and yarmulkes were gathered in the kitchen, sipping coffee. The men discussed the Super Bowl, which was being played that afternoon just down the road in Pasadena. The women debated the respective merits of jogging and speed walking. Most of them were between thirty-five and forty, and I knew from Roger that almost all of them had some connection with show business. He pointed out a high-powered agent, several musicians and movie-score composers, a couple of middle-level studio execs, and a film industry lawyer.

Chabad is not the only Jewish group that cultivates show biz contacts. The film industry is a Jewish business, after all, and many
of its leading figures have been active on behalf of Israel or other Jewish causes. In Los Angeles, synagogues recruit Jewish stars as drawing cards. But no one has been as successful as Chabad in attracting and exploiting show biz people.

At exactly ten, Rabbi Schwartz joined the group. He is a short, tubby man in his mid-forties, with a red beard and a genial expression. Steel-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose and he wore paisley suspenders over a white, short-sleeved shirt. He looked like a campus eccentric, a sociology professor from the 1960s about to conduct a graduate seminar.

Schwartz took his place at the head of a long table and the others gathered around. For a few minutes he chatted idly with the group, making ostentatiously hip conversation dotted with references to Magic Johnson, Bob Dylan, and “the Village.” The technique was familiar; in Jerusalem, Chabadniks stop young tourists at the Wailing Wall, ask them if they want to turn on—and then hand them copies of the rebbe’s sermons, saying, “Turn on with this.”

The class came to attention after a few minutes, and Schwartz began with an announcement. Meir Kahane was scheduled to come to Los Angeles, and Schwartz suggested that they attend his lecture. Several people groaned, but the rabbi accepted the reaction with unruffled good nature. “You don’t have to agree with the man. But he has an interesting message. You owe it to yourselves to hear him firsthand.” This appeal to open-mindedness had an effect; several people wrote down the date of the JDL leader’s appearance.

Rabbi Schwartz then passed out a schedule of Chabad House events for the coming month. The group’s L.A. operation is a combination of Torah and tinsel. Its two major events for February were “Survivors, an evening with former concentration camp survivors”; and “Hollywood and Hassidism—Bruce Vilanch who wrote all the Donny and Marie Show sequences … will cause great diversion with humorous choice tidbits of today’s Hollywood.”

The flyer also advertised the Chabad House weekly Sabbath service: “Friday Night Live! Have a tequila sunrise at sundown every Friday night at Chabad House. The singing and dancing will break the ice. The horseradish on the gefilte fish will defrost the system. And the jalapeño pepper chicken soup will start the 100
proof juices flowing. Enjoy fascinating new faces that will tickle your Platonic fancy, and get some kosher smarts playing stump the rabbi.” And, at the bottom of the flyer, “For Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, non-affiliated and any Jew that moves.”

Chabad isn’t averse to selling Judaism like a singles bar, but in the est belt of Southern California its strongest card is mysticism. The Chabad House offers a number of courses, including a beginner’s seminar that promises “insights into human psychology, depression and ecstasy, divine and animal soul, meditation and self-awareness, male and female energy, spirituality and self-centeredness, ‘karma’ and free choice, etc.”

After the flyers had been distributed, Rabbi Schwartz began the class by describing how he had explained the hidden meaning of the Song of Songs to Carole King (and, having revealed its message, convinced her to sing an excerpt from it on the Chabad telethon). Then he passed around mimeographed copies of the day’s study material, “Bosi l’gani,” an article written by one of the Lubavitcher rebbe’s predecessors. The article is a mystical and linguistic interpretation of a single Hebrew phrase in the Song of Songs.