Saturday Night VIII
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God says, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
And God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited,” 1965
by Joel Deutsch
When he wasn’t fielding phone calls from clients demanding news about pending green cards and overseas relatives’ visa applications, or transcribing and printing out the paperwork Nudelman dictated on audiocassettes at night and left for him beside his keyboard to find in the morning, Sasha studied. Even as the computer booted, voice mail rasped out from the speakerphone and the electric teapot started bubbling on the kitchenette counter, he was already piecing together for himself, to an underfoot soundtrack of seismic Caribbean bass-thud from the leather boutique downstairs,, some version of the long and rambling Jewish chronicle.
He learned of a world (A universe, did that mean? A solar system? A Planet?)conjured out of nothing, fully adorned with vegetation and populated in six days with all its creatures, a man assembled from dust, a woman from purloined bone. A world in which, until a great flood, people routinely endured nearly a millennium and then, after the waters receded, saw their life expectancies drop to a mere 120.
He stumbled through pages of genealogies so extravagant with procreation and so profuse with familial branching as to make his head spin. He learned that Abraham begat Isaac and then subjected him, his late born and dearly beloved son, to the horror of an aborted sacrifice; with a shudder, he thought of Dostoevsky’s mock execution by firing squad on a cold midwinter morning in Semyonovsky Square. Although he noted that Isaac, apparently not so traumatized by this cruel prank of nearly being knifed in the heart and set afire as to have become even sexually dysfunctional, never mind a vengeful Dostoevskian parricide, had proven resilient enough to father Jacob, who in his own turn had sired the entire nation of Israel.
He followed Jacob’s ever-multiplying progeny down into Egypt and eventual slavery than out again, tracked Moses and Aaron and the progress of their herdlike retinue, now numbering over 600,000, around and around the Sinai desert and up to the threshold of promised Canaan.
Exhausted by Genesis and conscious of the stack of material still waiting, Sasha allowed himself to just skim through the other four books of the bible, resolving to give them a closer reading later. He pressed on, skipping through, flipping pages, stopping when half-remembered characters, place names and proverbial stories, common-coin references and allusions, caught his eye.
he turned then to the library books for the secular history, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Hebrew nation into an unreliably hospitable wider world. At which point God had apparently stopped protecting his Chosen People, altogether. No more heaven-sent incinerations of wicked cities, angelic exterminations of first-borns, partings of waters or regional genocides assisted by blasts from battlement-shattering magical horns. Nothing but pitiable suffering for a nation of now-defenseless wanderers: The Spanish Inquisition, the Tsarist pogroms, Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz.
But there was also a counter-narrative to that of serial victimhood, a story written in two parts, on two continents: In Palestine, there was Theodore Herzl’s vision of a Jewish homeland in the ancient place, the birth of the national State, the Six Day war, the controversial sowing of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the professed bafflement at the depth of the displaced and subjugated Arabs’ resentment, the persistence of their rage.
Oceans away, there were the landings at Ellis Island and the crowded tubercular tenements. In Lower East Side nickelodeons and vacant Brooklyn fields, the beginnings of Hollywood. The reflexive Jewish social justice passion for causes like collective bargaining and civil rights, the blinding light-flash and colossal history-changing mushroom cloud over New Mexico, the sprouting of a lush gambling Xanadu in the postwar Nevada desert, the interpretation of symphonies and concertos, the contribution of a distinctive presence in literature, theater, movies and television. All this, he learned, despite the fact that white Protestant America, far from rolling out any red carpets, had, decade after decade, thrown up barriers to one thing after another, from college admission to professional advancement to buying a house in a good neighborhood if you had somehow managed to make an end run around the first two. The point being, finally, not that Jews hadn’t had to struggle in the United states, but that struggling didn’t get you a KGB bullet to the back of the head or a term of slave labor in the gulag.
By the end of July, Sasha felt that he’d read enough for awhile. He put the Chumash on a shelf at home, telling his amused grandfather to mind his own business. He returned all the library books. Now was the time, he decided, to dip his toes into the water of the faith itself.
Sure, it would be easy just to scoff at Genesis and dismiss the whole thing. It was hard not to notice that the bible’s cosmology was at least as implausible as that of Greek myth. The Hebrew God was petulant, paranoid and lethally punitive in response to the merest hint of disobedience or disrespect, and his magic and miracles were about as credible as the spells the ancient crone Baba Yaga cast in the old folk tales from her little hut that screeched like a tortured demon as it spun round and round on chicken-leg stilts in its deep-forest clearing.
For all that, and somewhat to his bewilderment, Sasha had to admit that there was some compelling essence, some deep core of profound certainty, something that must have nourished the hungry Jewish soul all these millennia. He could just feel it. Maybe the Bible was simply the best a primitive people could do to express the inexpressible given the knowledge and understanding they happen to have had at hand. To learn the round of rituals, the daily practice, he thought, that would be the key. The living manifestation, not just the ancient texts, at once so grand and yet so utterly and obviously unreliable.
Thus it came to pass that Sasha, on a Saturday morning that was already up to 80 when he stepped outside so that he immediately began sweating in his one dress suit, made the 30-minute walk over to the storefront shul he’d noticed the day he’d bought his Chumash at the bookstore.
He knew the Russian Chabad synagogue on Santa Monica Boulevard, closer to home, but that wouldn’t do. He had been there one time, under duress, ordered by his mother to accompany unsteady, forgetful old Mr. Karnovsky to services a few months before when his wife was in the hospital for something. The two of them had stood together, holding their prayer books open to random pages, rocking forward and backward, humming along tunelessly. Except for the American rabbi leading the service and the Russian-born cantor crooning liturgical melodies instead of ballads about blue balloons and heartbroken midnight Moscow trolley rides, it felt too much to him like being at a bard music concert.
This shul, Ahavat Israel, was a longer distance to hike, especially in the midsummer heat. Even if Irina had allowed him to take her car for the day, which he doubted she would have, driving or riding on Shabbat was forbidden, at least for the Orthodox, so there was no way around walking. But the little congregation had other merits to recommend it.
He admired the polished wood floor and the majestic ark rising at the rear of the pulpit, flanked in one corner by an American flag and by the Israeli flag in the other. He like the elderly congregants whose English was inflected with the accent and cadence of Yiddish, rather than Russian. He like the native-born Americans with their ready smiles. He was grateful for the way Rabbi Schoenfeld had come over to welcome him on his first visit and offered to teach him whatever he needed to learn. Which, in Sasha’s case, was everything.
At this synagogue, as at the Russian place, a line of tall plastic screens made to look like stained glass panels bisected the sanctuary down its center aisle, men on the left and women on the right. The purpose,, Rabbi Schoenfeld had explained on that first visit, being to prevent the disruption of the men’s spiritual focus by the sight of the women.
Couldn’t women be as easily distracted in that way, themselves, Sasha wondered? Or, if they could, didn’t it matter? The question intrigued him enough that he sat alone at his computer deep into that night, looking for something more, and eventually, after trying a succession of search terms in Google, came upon a Web site with the URL judaismforbeginners.com, where he found a summary of the status of women according to Orthodox belief.
Women were inherently superior to men, it said. More intuitive, wiser, more directly in touch with the Holy. But only men were privileged by the obligation to perform daily all the 613 commandments, or mitzvoth, including lifelong study of the Law and commentary, presumably allowing them the chance, , Sasha speculated,, to overcome their sex’s spiritual handicap.
A woman’s place, the text said, was in the home. For her to attend services at the synagogue was optional and without any benefit to the congregation, as her presence could not be counted toward the minimum of ten souls needed to conduct a service, nor would her prayers help to fulfill the quotient of required devotions.
In her role of wife and mother, the woman was to be held in the highest esteem, provided she knew and accepted her station. Separate but equal, was how the Web tutorial unabashedly put it. Separate but equal, Sasha remembered from civics, was the very principle the U.S. Supreme Court had finally overturned in Brown versus some city’s board of education back in the 1950s,, mandating the racial desegregation of public schools.
As for the division of male and female at worship, the tutorial said that men’s single outstanding, irremediable character flaw was that they were lustful, and that the ceremonies of the primitive religions from which Judaism had sought to distinguish itself in ancient times involved sexual orgies. Therefore the men must be blindered, but the women, being by nature less lascivious and higher minded, were not in need of such protection from themselves. Sasha knew there was much that he didn’t understand yet about men and women, his dating experience so far being limited to group movie dates, class picnics, and a brief, confusing senior year entanglement with a buxom, pretty-faced brunette named Leah with whom he’d worked on the school paper. Still, this sounded fishy and sexist to him in a very strange and retrograde way.
But this issue of women, like his skeptical impression of the Bible, was something he felt he ought to let pass for the moment, something else to ask the rabbi about later. For now, he was trying to explore the beliefs of his ancestors with an open mind, he was looking for a lost or misplaced piece of himself, and these unsettling distractions would just have to wait.
It had been a long day, this Shabbat. Sasha had arrived at 10 in the morning for the Shaharit service, after which he had partaken of the COLD BUFFET lunch laid out on a table in the Rabbi’s study behind the pulpit., He had returned to the sanctuary for Mincha, the afternoon service, which was followed by another light repast, with Rabbi Schoenfeld presiding over discussion of a scriptural passage. By this time, only a hard core of the congregation’s most devout men were present, the less pious among them and all the women having departed for home before noon upon the concluding benediction of Shaharit. Then it was back to the sanctuary for the evening service, Ma’ariv, followed by one final adjournment to the Rabbi’s study, where the Day of Rest was lovingly and ceremoniously ushered out with three blessings, one over a cup of sacramental wine, one over a filigreed silver spice box from which wafted the sharp festive aroma of cinnamon, and one for the lighting of the fat multi-wick Havdalah candle.
Now it was nearly 9 P.M. and Sasha felt tired, dead tired, but he felt exhilarated, too. He felt heavy, he felt light, he felt full, he felt drained. Insofar as his private mind was turning things over, processing, he felt apart. Yet In the act of participatory prayer, in the rising and the sitting down, in communion with the others, he felt rooted, felt at home in an unfamiliar and almost overwhelming way.
And of course home, in the usual sense, was where he’d be headed back to, now. His grandfather would be sitting on the sofa bed, unshaven, in slacks and slippers and his sleeveless undershirt, a cup of lukewarm tea in one hand and the TV remote in the other, flipping back and forth between a Russian cable channel and a rerun of some American sitcom with its dialogue crawling across the bottom of the screen to help him understand it. His mother would return from work with more stories about the come-ons from drunken wedding revelers at Nevsky Prospekt or how Vadim had pinched her butt again when she’d brought in her .jpg photo files for him to print. Same old, same old, as Coach Ward the gym teacher liked to say.
The deeper Sasha let himself sink into the embrace of Judaism, the more harshly the daily round of such ordinary repetitions seemed to grate against his vague new sense of how life could be. More conscious. More reverent. More elevated. Which was what he wanted to speak about with Rabbi Schoenfeld . This disparity. How to find his balance, before he would have to tear himself away again from the refuge the shul had SO QUICKLY become for him.
He shifted from foot to foot, waiting for the rabbi to finish chatting amiably with the tiny, oddly well-spoken black woman in her sleeping bag, noticing the chill of the night air. At last, the woman fell silent and her head retracted into the sleeping bag like a turtle’s. the rabbi turned to face him, looking up as he had to.
“So, Alex. How did you like Shabbat today? Are you starting to get the hang of it?”
“Sure,” Sasha said. “I mean, I really liked the service and everything. It was a really good day.”
“You’ll like it even better when we get you into our adult Hebrew class and you aren’t just reading the English. I’m telling you, if you could have understood the Bar Mitzvah bocher this morning, what a little mensch, the way he chanted his haphtarah. But there was something you wanted to ask me? Maybe something that I said about today’s Torah portion when we sat down to Shala Shudis to have a little dinner?”
“No,Rabbi,” said Sasha. “It’s not that kind of thing. It’s sort of complicated, and I’m not sure how to explain it. Just a feeling I’m having, lately.”
“so what isn’t complicated?” said the rabbi. “Go on. Give it a try.”
“Okay,” said Sasha, gathering his thoughts. “It’s like, well, I was just about to go home, and I was thinking—”
All of a sudden, out in the street, something blasted the first bars of the Israeli song “Hava Nagilah. Sasha didn’t understand the song’s lyrics, but he recognized the melody, because the band at every Russian restaurant inevitably played it at every wedding reception and birthday party while the celebrants circle danced in an approximation of the Hora, singing along, mostly faking it.
Hava nagilah, hava nagilah
Hava nagilah
V’nismachah
“Good evening to you, Rabbi Schoenfeld,” came a hearty salutation from the passenger’s window of a white van at the curb. On the van’s side, in blue Hebraic-looking lettering within a giant blue Star of David, was stenciled ROTHKO ROOTERS. Its still-idling motor had an unusually deep and powerful-sounding exhaust note.
“Any trouble around here tonight? Everything copasetic so far?”
Sasha guessed the beefy-looking man to be in his fifties, judging from the double chin and the receding hairline of his gray pompadour, the long-sideburned, swept-back style Elvis wore in the cover photos of his CDs, which he’d seen in their bins on his weekend trips to Amoeba Records with Eric, who was a big collector of rock and Indie music.
The driver cut the ignition, and the two got out, slamming their doors shut behind them. They strode across the sidewalk and advanced into the shul’s little forecourt between the stone planters, one after the other, each looking to the left and the right as he came through, noting the huddled figures on the ground.
The man who had hailed the rabbi turned out not to be nearly so big as Sasha had imagined. He was well under six feet, and considerably overweight, with a sizeable gut. His massive arms, close up, were more flabby than muscular. His white t-shirt, which hung untucked over low-slung khaki cargo pants cinched below his belly,, said MIDNIGHT MACCABEES across the chest and, immediately beneath that, in a smaller font, Never Again!, all of it in the same shade of blue and the same faux-Hebrew lettering as the van’s signage.
From his reading in a library book or on some Jewish educational Web site– all the reference sources he had devoured over the summer having conflated in his brain like informational stew—Sasha remembered that the Maccabees had been rebel warriors in biblical times who had, according to legend, beaten back the army of a Hellenized Syrian king named Antiochus and saved the Jewish people from forced assimilation. He didn’t suppose that any of that hardy band had been this deplorably out of shape.
The second man appeared to be the other’s identical twin. Same height, same gray Elvis hair, same small mouth and closely-set eyes. Except that he was 20 or even 30 pounds slimmer, and wore a pair of thick-lensed black-framed glasses that made him appear intellectual by comparison. The two were outfitted exactly alike, from the Midnight Maccabees t-shirts to the khaki cargo pants and the black military-style boots into which the cargo pants were tucked.
“Hey, kid, how ya doing?” said the heftier twin. “Rabbi, you gonna introduce us to your young friend?”
“Alex, ” said the rabbi, indicating with his eyes the man who had spoken, “this is Manny Rothko. And this is his brother, Marvin. Manny, Marv, this is Alex, one of our newest. ” Sasha shook hands with both of them.
“Rabbi,” said the more slender, bespectacled brother named Marvin, while he still had Sasha’s hand in his grasp, “no disrespect intended, but how many times do I have to tell you that you need them to make it a no stopping zone here? The way it is, with just another parking space, anybody who wants to can pull up directly in front of your shul , any time of the day or night, slide right into that space just like I did, and God forbid they should have something worse than plumbing supplies in back. For them, it’ll just be easy in, easy out, and let’s not even try to imagine the possible damage. The potential heartache. I gave you the number of your guy on the city council, didn’t I? Eli Levinson? Like I said, all you gotta do is get in touch with them and get the ball rolling. A couple of phone calls, a hearing, and they’ll rip out that meter and paint the curb red, and that’s that. But first you gotta pick up the phone. I’m sure you know the old saying my dad used to tell us all the time? God helps those that help themselves?
Rabbi Schoenfeld touched Sasha’s elbow. “Alex, we’ll talk later. Right now these men and I have a few matters we have to discuss. I’m sorry.”
Sasha bade the rabbi and his visitors a good night and began to leave.
“Hey kid,” the one named Manny called after him. “Need a lift? We’ll be splitting in just a couple minutes.”
Sasha paused and turned around. “Thanks. But I’m looking forward to a good long walk. I’ve been sitting down most of the day.”
“You sure?” asked the other one, Marv. “It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“Positive,”,” said Sasha. “Really. thanks anyway.” He plucked the white satin skullcap he’d taken from a box inside the synagogue door off his head, folded it and slipped it into a pocket of his suit coat. Then he shrugged out of the coat, slung it over one shoulder, and moved off.
“Lead a horse to water,” said Manny, looking after him. “A regular Sinatra, this one, with the hat and the jacket shtick, as if he’s gonna start singing ‘My Way’ or something.” .
“So, Rabbi Schoenfeld,” said Marv. “What we’re talking about here is security. Basic security in a dangerous world. Farshtei? Am I getting through?”
To be continued…