Saturday Night VII
By the rivers of Babylon
Where we sat down
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion
For the wicked carry us away captivity
Require from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa song
In a strange land
So let the words of our mouth
And the meditation of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight
Over I
Rivers of Babylon by The Melodians
B. Dowe – T. McNaughton, adapted from Psalm 137:1
by Joel Deutsch
His final year of high school, Sasha was overtaken by an unexpected, gnawing hunger to have something more for a sense of roots than just a caricature of a Semitic nose and such an unmistakably Ashkenazik surname as Shteynberg. If at first he was at a loss how to satisfy that hunger, at least he understood its cause.
After seven decades of State-sponsored atheism, soviet Jewry had lapsed into a religious and cultural coma, except for a tiny class of covert faithful who, against all odds, persisted in lighting their Friday night Sabbath candles behind drawn curtains and procuring their beef and poultry from underground networks of rabinically certified slaughterers. For the rest , practically all that “Jewish” meant was the Nationality designation on the fifth line of an internal passport and the concomitant privilege of being the target of systemic bigotry, getting teased or worse in school, beaten up in the Army, and denied admission to desirable university programs and career paths.
The result being a population of Russian-speaking Jews, generations of them, from Moscow to Haifa to Brighton Beach and West Hollywood, most of whom lacked even a passing acquaintance with Judaism or Jewish history, who knew from piroshki but not from knishes, who had never heard a joke told in Yiddish or a prayer uttered in Hebrew. In late December, you could even see gaily trimmed Douglas firs in their apartments, the Christ-birthday conifer rehabilitated as the secular Soviet New Year’s tree and innocently adopted. “My dad would go ballistic if he saw that,” an astonished and scandalized classmate of Sasha’s named Eric Landau had said when he’d come by during winter break to return a book he had borrowed.
And circumcision? The universal evidence of a boy or man being party to the covenant between Jehovah and his Chosen People, the sacred tribal infant scarification rite, as Sasha’s smugly atheist grandfather Zalman liked to describe it? except among the same demographic of clandestine believers, the practice was nearly extinct. Which, for Sasha, had resulted in curious locker room glances and more than a few questions from his public school P.E. classmates. Most of the questions were reasonably polite. But a boy named Eli, the son of an Israeli building contractor, so precociously muscular and deep-voiced that even the toughest gangbangers kept their distance, had not been so deferential as he jogged beside Sasha around the athletic field track that spring. According to his father, Eli had informed Sasha scornfully, the new Russian immigrants weren’t even real Jews. Not that Eli’s family were exactly observant, themselves, but that wasn’t the point. A foreskin was a foreskin. Eli had then added gratuitously that his sister Ashira, a still-single travel agent in her twenties, had once told him that she’d sleep with a Muslim before even considering sex with an uncut man, Jewish or not. Especially Jewish.
Nudelman, the immigration lawyer who hired him to answer the phone and do clerical work until the start of Fall Quarter at UCLA, hardly ever came around. The office was a repurposed studio apartment over a Melrose leather boutique whose young body-pierced, tattooed female clerks (Sasha had to allow that his curmudgeonly grandfather was just as cynically anthropological about Cubit Zirconium eyebrow studs, golden belly-button barbells and skin art as he was about circumcision) played vintage reggae music so loud and ceaselessly that Sasha could barely think,
His first three days on the job, with nothing to do from 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon,, he read every article in an ancient National Geographic Nudelman had left on the toilet tank, while the thinly carpeted floor throbbed beneath his feet like a drumhead to the music’s amped-up bass and backbeat syncopation.
Wednesday evening, after eating dinner at home with his family, he had walked to the nearest branch of the Public Library, conducted a search on one of its computer terminals for anything and everything Jewish, and selected a formidable stack of history books and even a couple of novels to check out.
He knew he needed a Jewish Bible, too, so while he was there he trolled the Web, looking for one. He had a computer of his own, a Macintosh ensconced in a narrow Ikea work station in a corner of the living room, but he wanted to keep his searching private. He could just imagine the sarcastic interrogation he would be likely to suffer at the hands of his grandfather if he should forget to delete the Web browser’s history after such an expedition. He visited amazon.com, he found the Web sites of Jewish publishing companies and book vendors. But the multitude of choices overwhelmed him.
He had noticed a Jewish bookstore on Fairfax Avenue, a few blocks from the high school, and one day after work he paid it a visit.
Bookshelves and display cases full of religious artifacts lined the walls on both sides. In the center of the narrow space between stood a round oak table where a gray bearded Chasid and three young men no older than himself, wearing skullcaps and sidelocks, sat before opened books. The boys’ fingers jabbed at the text as they debated something excitedly, looking frequently to the Chasid for approval.
The Chasid, glancing up at the tinkle of the entrance bell, arose and came over to where Sasha stood, hesitating just inside the door, and introduced himself as Moti.
There were a lot of Bibles. Some of them Sasha recognized from his online virtual window shopping, most he didn’t.
“Just a plain Bible is all I’m looking for,” he explained. “I don’t know what you call it. Just one single book with the basic stuff. You know what I mean?”
Moti pulled down a book from the shelf, large and black and heavy but not humongous, and handed it to him. “I think What you want is just the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. Yes?”
“I guess,” said Sasha.
“Which would be a Chumash. Which is what you’re holding. The Stone Chumash. English on the left, Hebrew on the right.” He reeled off The Hebrew names of the Five Books, which Sasha had to admit he didn’t understand. “Genesis, Exodus,” translated Moti. “Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. All there. And there’s enough commentary in the last section to keep you busy for a few years.
“So, my young Jewish friend,” he continued, as Sasha flipped the pages, “Now that you’ve got your Chumash, how about I show you how to put on tefillin? Ever done that?”
“No,” said Sasha, having no idea what the man was talking about.
“Then it’s time you did.” Moti went over to one of the display cases, unlocked its glass door, and took out a small blue velvet pouch with a drawstring closure and a Star of David embroidered on its side in gold thread.
“come with me,” he said, leading Sasha by an elbow to the sales counter. He pulled open the mouth of the pouch and withdrew two small black leather boxes, each of which was attached on one side to a long black leather strap.
He placed one of the things on the counter and held the other one up, the two long sections of its strap dangling like tentacles . “this is the shel rosh. The head tefillin. ‘Shel rosh’ means ‘of the head.’” he set it back down and picked up its mate. “And this is the shel yad. Of the hand.”
He gave both to Sasha, took another blue velvet bag from a drawer and extracted from it two more tefillin like the first ones, except that the leather was a little scuffed in places from use. He also produced a folded white satin skullcap, which Sasha took and held with everything else. The young men at the table continued their discussion, their adolescent voices ringing with challenge and retort.
“Okay. Here we go. Just do what I do and say what I say. Ready?”
“I don’t know,” said Sasha, holding the tefillin and the skullcap a little bit in front of him as if the unfamiliar items might be radioactive.
but the Chasid was not to be deterred. “Our great Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, may his memory be blessed, used to remind us that the Talmud says that once a Jew puts on Tefillin, even if it’s just one single time in his life, he falls into a different category as a Jew. It strengthens his bond with the faith, his bond with the Jewish people, and of course his bond with Ha Shem.”
“What’s that?” asked Sasha.
“Ha Shem?”
Sasha nodded.
The Name,” said Moti. “His name. Which we’re not allowed to say.”
“You mean you’re not allowed to say ‘God?’?”
“It’s a little complicated,” said Moti, but that’s pretty much it. We have nicknames we use, I guess you could call them.” He raised a hand and pointed to the crown of his head. Now put on your kipah, and we can get started.”
Sasha unfolded the skullcap, spread it open, and patted it into place.”
“Here we go,” announced Moti. The procedure was elaborate. First you donned the arm tefillin, with the box on the inside of the left bicep facing inward toward the heart, unless you were left-handed, which Sasha wasn’t, in which case it went on the inside of the right bicep instead. The not securing the little box to the arm had to be tied in a specific way, and then the trailing strap had to encircle the forearm in a seven-loop downward spiral wrapped with exactly the right spacing, and then the rest of it went around the hand and between the fingers in a very particular pattern.
There was a prayer which Moti recited in Hebrew, instructing Sasha to repeat it after him one phrase at a time like an oath taken on the witness stand in a foreign country, then translated into English.
There was a second routine for the head, similarly rigorous. The little box had to be positioned precisely above the forehead, right between the eyes, and after its loop was pulled on with its knot centered at an exact spot beneath the base of the skull, the trailing straps had to be brought forward over both shoulders, the left one falling to the level of the navel, the right one to the level of the crotch.
“So that’s it,” Moti concluded. “Now you’ve performed the mitzvah of tefillin. You know what this means, to do a mitzvah?”
Sasha had heard the term. “That means a good deed, right?”
“More than a good deed,” said Moti. “A commandment. When you do a mitzvah you’re complying with one of the 613 commandments a Jew is supposed to follow every day of his life. So you put on tefillin when you pray Shaharit, the morning service, and there’s one down and only 612 to go. Just kidding, of course. Every minute, every breath, every thought, every movement, there’s a mitzvah for, practically. But a little humor never hurt anyone.”
Sasha looked back at the table where the three boys still sat. Two of them were bent over their book, as before. The third boy, a kid with his white shirt buttoned up to the neck and one side curl that swept outward as if it had been slept on, was beaming at him. When he caught Sasha’s eye, he pumped a congratulatory fist in the air.
He wished he could see himself. “Do you have any mirrors?”
“You’re wondering what you look like? ” said Moti. “Just look at me.”
Weird, thought Sasha. Trussed up in all that leather, this scholarly, godly man unfortunately reminded him of the bondage Web site he’d happened upon late one night when his mother and grandfather were asleep in their rooms and the sofa bed was opened and made up, waiting for him at the fringe of light thrown by the Mac’s screen. Which was the first time he had bothered to figure out how to delete the browser history.
He knew he should be ashamed of thinking of such a vulgarity when he was supposed to be experiencing reverence, but he almost burst out in another fit of inappropriate laughter, like that time in English class. He concentrated hard on keeping a straight face.
“You want a pair of your own?” Moti was asking. “We’ve got both types, the Gassos and the Dakkos. The Gassos are cowhide, last you practically a lifetime. The Dakkos are from goatskin or lambskin, less durable but half the price. We’ve got with the wide straps, we’ve got with the skinny straps.”
“How much?” asked Sasha, mostly out of politeness, to compensate for his secret transgression.
“These ones I’m wearing,” said Moti, “these are Gassos. Top of the line. $700. Yours are Dakkos. $350.”
“wow,” said Sasha. “that’s a lot of money.”
“It’s not for nothing,” said Moti. “Everything is Hand made under rabbinical supervision. The boxes, the straps, the scriptural passages they roll up inside the boxes, which are Lettered with special ink in the traditional tiny font by qualified scribes. One hundred per cent kosher. This is not something you could outsource to Mexico or China.”
“I think I’ll just take the book,” said Sasha.”
“We have payment plans,” said Moti, as Sasha unwrapped his arm. lifted off the head loop and the skullcap, and put everything down on the counter. “we even have a subsidy you can apply for.”
“Just the book,” said Sasha. “Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” said Moti, removing his own tefillin and putting them away. “Maybe someday. You never know . My job is just to plant the seed.”
He rang up the purchase. “Regular $49.95,” on sale $39.95,” he said as the figures came up in the cash register’s window.
For lunch, Sasha had been eating mostly Chinese takeout at his desk, with an occasional splurge on a burger and fries from Johnny Rockets, both washed down with hot tea that he brewed in the office kitchenette. Now he would be brown bagging leftovers from home. But that was all right., He was gathering what he needed.
To be continued…