The Ascent of Eli Israel (6 page)

“I am going to take a picture of your posture as it is now,” the doctor said, aiming the camera. “Look at the curve in your back, and the way your shoulders — ”

“No. No!” the rebbe said. “You can't do that. It is against the Second Commandment.”

“Just to record your progress,” the doctor said.

“No graven images,” the rebbe said, turning away.

The doctor put his camera away and apologized to the rebbe. “I am sorry. I am very sorry.”

The rebbe looked into the doctor's eyes for the first time, and they were blue and shining like the springtime pools of his youth. He wore some sort of silver charm around his neck that was shaped like the English letter “t.” The rebbe shuddered and again thought back to his youth.

“McGraw,” the rebbe said, pronouncing the name for the first time. “Where do you come from?”

“Saint Louis.”

“I believe there really are Jews everywhere,” the rebbe said, smiling.

“I'm not Jewish,” the doctor said. “You can put your shirt on now.”

“Well, why are you here?” the rebbe said, not quite understanding. He noticed that the doctor's breath smelled like peppermint. “Why did you come to me?”

“I practice the art of correcting,” the doctor said. “I locate spinal malfunction and fix it. Do you have frequent back and neck pain? Do you have pain in between your shoulder blades? Do you feel a numbing or tingling in the arms or hands?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” the rebbe screamed.

“Israel, are you all right?” Sarah called from outside the door.

“I am fine, wife.” The rebbe pulled his shirt over his head, forgetting his beard inside his nightshirt. “How are you going to help me?”

The doctor explained how nerves connecting to the spine, when pinched or compressed, can cause pain or irritation in almost any part of the body, and how he simply, through controlled pressure, restores the spine to a more normal position, in turn reducing pain and irritation.

“Imagine a garden hose as a nerve and the water flowing through it as the nerve impulses — ”

“A what?” the rebbe said.

“A garden hose,” the doctor said.

“Do you see a garden around here?” the rebbe said. “In Jerusalem, everything is stone.”

“But you are made of flesh and bone,” the doctor said. “We must ease the pressure on the nerve. This will take some time. Maybe a week, maybe a few months. Your spine is curving like a question mark.”

“A question mark, huh? I have a question for you,” the rebbe said, reaching out toward the doctor. “Do you mean you can fix my back?”

“You must have faith.”

The doctor walked around behind the rebbe, told him to place his arms across his chest in the form of an “x.” He pressed himself close to him and reached around the rebbe. Placing one pale hand on top of the rebbe's and one between his shoulder blades, he pulled in and thrust forward at the exact same moment. There was a pop, pop, and the rebbe screamed out.

“That feels good,” the rebbe said, after a moment.

“You should come to my office,” the doctor said. “For a complete adjustment, to prevent it from being hurt again.”

“But I feel fine,” the rebbe said, kicking up his slippered feet, humming a joyous-sounding
nigun
under his breath. “The just among Gentiles are priests of God. Thank you, thank you,” he said, “I am so grateful. How can I pay you?”

“You will find a way,” the doctor said, removing his glasses to clean them with a handkerchief.

“But a physician who takes no fee is worth no fee.”

“I am no physician,” the doctor replied.

But the rebbe was so happy, he sang, “I feel so good, I feel so good,” and called out for Sarah. “Wife, come look! I feel strong as an ox! Thank you, thank you,” he said again to the doctor, who just stood silently, looking about the room.

“You have some very curious objects here,” the doctor said, motioning to the rebbe's Galician spice box on the dressing table.

Sarah rushed in, still holding a wooden spoon in her hand. “Israel, I've never seen you so happy,” she cried.

“I have found my youth again.”

The doctor shook the rebbe's hand, and before walking out of the room, tapped him lightly on the back with his index finger. “Until next time,” he said.

Within a few hours, not long after the sirens began wailing throughout the city to announce the sabbath, the rebbe was on his back again, moaning in pain. He had tried to pull himself into his Shabbat finery but fell back onto his bed, where he lay all of Saturday and Sunday. The clanging church bells of the Holy Sepulcher were like mosquitoes in his ears that day in bed, as he lay in the dark with one pillow arching his neck and another covering his face.

Several acres of the Jerusalem forest had caught fire in the dry heat, and the smell of smoke woke the rebbe early Monday morning. Dr. John J. McGraw knocked on the rebbe's door soon afterward. At first, Sarah would not let him pass, and raised her voice when he offered to adjust her and fix her dowager's hump. But finally she relented when the rebbe called, “Let him come.”

The stubborn rebbe had piled two pillows onto a chair and sat on them, where he hunched over a small table covered with an open copy of the Talmud. The rebbe looked up and squinted at the doctor. The doctor was dressed in a white shirt with beige pants and looked like nobody the rebbe had ever known. He was thin and plain-looking, like a slice of his wife's challah waiting to be buttered.

“You?” the rebbe said. “I waited for you yesterday. But I couldn't wait,” he said, pointing to the pillows beneath him.

“How do you feel?” the doctor said, stepping forward. And for a moment his glasses caught the overhead light and a glare flashed into the rebbe's eyes.

“I feel like I'm sitting on a cloud,” the rebbe said. “Filled with fire.”

The doctor stepped closer, reached into the rebbe's beard, and placed two fingers beneath the rebbe's chin, raising it. “Do you read like that all the time?”

“Yes, yes,” the rebbe said. “I am in very close study.”

“Stand up,” the doctor said. “You should never read like that.”

He led the rebbe to the center of the room. “Does it hurt to walk?”

“Only when I walk.”

He placed the rebbe's arms across his chest as he had the first time, and pressed himself close enough that the rebbe noticed that the minty smell had been replaced by cinnamon. The doctor pulled in and thrust forward, and again there was a pop, pop. But this time, the rebbe did not scream out. He simply said, “
Baruch Hashem,
Praise God.”

“And now we must walk.”

Out in the streets of the shabbiest section of the Mea Shearim quarter, the rebbe walked beside Dr. John J. McGraw. He shuffled his feet at first and then took baby steps, before his feet stuck to the ground not a block from where he lived. A pink stretchy substance clung to the bottom of the rebbe's shoe. “That's mine,” the doctor said apologetically, pulling the gum off the rebbe's shoe with a handkerchief. “I spit it out on my way over.”

Before long, the rebbe strode like a young man at the side of the doctor. They passed gray stone walls plastered with Yiddish-language posters, walked beneath caged-in balconies where children cried from above, stepped over potholes in the road. They passed bearded men in striped caftans, a woman with a scarf on her head carrying grocery bags, a couple of young yeshiva students bent almost double from the weight of their books, and then a red-bearded Bratzlaver whom the rebbe knew from prayers at the Wall.

“They all do not see me,” the rebbe said. “You would think the sun had gone out.”

They walked as far as the Street of Prophets, and then turned around, walking back toward the sky blackened with smoke. When they reached a small synagogue not far from the rebbe's home, where the sound of prayers floated out the open windows and into the street, the rebbe stopped to catch his breath.

“My back feels okay. But my lungs, they're bursting.”

The doctor peered into the window and began to laugh. “Like pecking chickens,” he said under his breath. The rebbe joined him at the window. He had prayed there many times before and saw men bobbing and swaying as if their prayers were taking them very far away. Others sat hunched over large leather-bound books searching for hidden wisdom. The rebbe felt a pain in his heart.

“The Torah says, ‘If you forsake me for a single day, I will forsake you for two days,' ” the rebbe said. “It has now been six days.”

The doctor wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Look at them,” he said, arching his neck to get a better view. Praying men moved like rusty engines and lifted piles of books as if they would collapse under their weight. The doctor turned to the rebbe. “They only need one book. I imagine they feel as much pain as you.”

“But I feel pain
not
praying,” the rebbe said.

“I will help you fix that,” the doctor said, touching him lightly on the back. “But you mustn't shrug your shoulders like that.”

The next morning when Dr. John J. McGraw arrived to treat the Dokszycer rebbe, Sarah told him to wait.

“The rebbe is not feeling well,” she said. “His back is sore again.”

Overhearing his wife in the hallway, the rebbe called, “Let him come.”

The rebbe stood gingerly beside his bed wrapping the leather straps of his tefillin around his left arm.

“I don't mean to interrupt,” the doctor said, as he entered the rebbe's room. “But what are you doing?”

The rebbe placed the second box of the tefillin onto his forehead and said, “I am putting on my tefillin. And then I am going to pray.”

“How is your back today?”

“It hurts,” the rebbe said, tightening the straps.

The doctor stepped forward and touched the rebbe's arm where the leather straps were wound tightly against his skin. He walked around behind the rebbe and tapped him between the shoulder blades. “Can you touch your toes?”

“I am trying to pray.”

“I can see the tension in your shoulders,” the doctor said. “Prayer should not mean pain.”

The rebbe smelled cinnamon and felt a sickness in his stomach. “Don't you know there is pain in everything?”

“There doesn't have to be. Those straps are too tight. Look how your body is being pulled to the left, while you lean to the right. The vein in your neck is like a rope,” the doctor said, starting to unwind the straps from the rebbe's arm. His nose was so small it looked like it belonged to a young child. “And when you bend over you must remember to bend your knees.”

“Bend my knees?”

“Become flexible, and then pray. Like supple reeds on the banks of the Jordan.”

He had finished unwrapping the straps of the tefillin from the rebbe's head and laid the two boxes on the cluttered table beside them.

“But I must say the blessing,” the rebbe said. “It is a mitzvah.”

Dr. John J. McGraw hesitated and said, “Finish quickly then.”

After the rebbe completed his prayers the doctor adjusted him, making tiny pops in his back and neck.

“Good,” the doctor said. “When you are ready I will bring you to my office for a thorough adjustment.”

“What will happen then?” the rebbe asked.

“Prayer,” the doctor said. “Painless prayer.”

The doctor showed the rebbe how to stretch his back simply by lying face down on the floor and pushing up with his hands. The rebbe hesitated at first, saying he felt like an animal, but relented when he felt the warm stretch in the muscles of his back. He learned to stretch his calves, neck, and pectorals, and wondered how he could not have known to do something so simple.

Afterward they walked under a hot June sun, through the cluttered streets of Mea Shearim, past the Street of Prophets as far as the British Council Library and the Ethiopian church.

The next morning, the rebbe rose early, wound himself in the leather straps of his tefillin, and muttered the prayers under his breath. As he lay on the floor stretching his back the rebbe wondered if the pinching pain he felt was guilt.

“Good. You've already stretched,” the doctor said when he arrived. “We are going to walk a little bit farther today,” he added, smiling.

It was already a blazing hot Wednesday morning, as the doctor and the rebbe stepped out of the dingy apartment and into the street. From the doorway Sarah waved a cup and called after the rebbe as he walked away, “Israel, drink some water first! The
hamsiin
has arrived.” A dry wind had blown in out of the desert and carried with it a stifling heat that made the asphalt soft beneath their feet. The perfect blue sky was marred intermittently by thin wisps of smoke that rose into the sky like floating Hebrew letters. The sun was already high enough in the sky to bleach all of the stone buildings a harsh, luminous white. There was not a shadow in sight.