The Frozen Rabbi (12 page)
The woman informed him in a tone of honeyed condescension that she was sorry, the Rebbe was conducting a transformation-of-self-through-dynamic-stillness session at the moment. “Would you care to wait?”
The answer was no, but Bernie held his peace and continued to shuffle in place. Beyond a paisley curtain he could hear the master’s amplified voice, exhorting the faithful with words and images that the boy already knew by heart: He was citing the significance of each of the four rungs of Jacob’s Ladder, the four faces of Ezekiel’s angels, how the student must concentrate on the letters of Torah until they appear like black fire upon white; there were words whose pronunciation ought to be growled like a lion, others meant to be cooed like a dove. The rabbi told them, himself croaking like an asthmatic frog, to “Be still like the wife of Lot when with salt from the Dead Sea she was encrusted; be lit up like Moses his ponim when he came down from Sinai…” They were the same visualization exercises the rabbi had dispensed so off handedly to Bernie; only now he uttered them with an emphasis that (whether earnest or feigned) made the boy jealous. Why jealous when he knew that Eliezer ben Zephyr was a certified tzaddik, and the tzaddik’s mission was to function as God’s go-between, a conduit between heaven and earth? Bernie ought to be ashamed of himself. But while the receptionist had assured him that no one was allowed to enter or leave the “sanctuary” during a session, he couldn’t stand the suspense. As the turbaned lady resumed her reading, Bernie edged toward the curtain and parted it a hair.
The low-ceilinged room on the other side, most likely a former dance studio, was surrounded by mirrors. In it, sitting on yoga mats before the rabbi, were a score of women, mostly in their middle years, though there were younger ones as well, some as sleek as greyhounds, a couple in the final stages of pregnancy. There were also a handful of men who may have been uxorious husbands dragged along against their will, though they and the ladies seemed equally engrossed. It was an altogether impressive turnout (multiplied to infinity by the wall mirrors) given that the meditation center’s grand opening had been only weeks before—a testament to the success of the marketing campaign underwritten by Julius Karp. Rabbi ben Zephyr himself was seated on a raised dais in one of the Karps’ surplus Naugahyde armchairs, its creases reprising the furrows of the old man’s face. He was wearing a belted white satin kittel, wielding the scepter of a cordless microphone, a fancy pillbox kippah cocked like the cap of an organ-grinder’s monkey atop his dappled gray head. In place of a prayer shawl, a lei of tropical flowers draped his turkey neck; stray flowers entwined the weathered whiskbroom of his beard. The women were dressed in tracksuits and gym shorts, a few in spandex leotards with gauze skirts, their eyes closed in concentration as the rabbi began to warble various prayers. Bernie recognized the prayers as a hodgepodge of penitential slichot, with lashings of the mourner’s Kaddish and the El Molay Rachamim. Then the rabbi broke into a singsong, chanting the Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li (“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”) refrain from the Song of Songs, repeating it over and over like a mantra while encouraging his would-be intitiates to do the same. Bernie, for whom such prayers had become second nature, wondered if the others knew what they were parroting. But while there were one or two faces of a darker Semitic cast, the assembly as a whole didn’t look particularly Jewish. Not that it mattered, since the rabbi’s hypnotic chant apparently required no comprehension to inspire a collective euphoria—as was evidenced by several women who appeared to be in transports, a few showing shadows under their tushies that revealed them to be sitting in midair.
The receptionist came forward to draw the curtain back into place, tugging it with a prim gesture as if to cover up an indecency. But no sooner had she admonished Bernie once again with her zippered smile and returned to her post than the curtain was reopened from the other side. The session was over and the rabbi’s disciples began streaming into the vestibule, most of them still looking half-entranced like an audience leaving a cinema. Some, however, had the presence of mind to pause and browse the display case, purchasing items from the receptionist who doubled now as salesclerk.
“But Hepzibah,” pleaded a pie-faced woman whose tights above her leg warmers appeared to be stuffed with cottage cheese, “you know I don’t read Hebrew.”
Hepzibah, clearly well rehearsed, assured her customer that such knowledge was overrated, if not entirely unnecessary. “As the Rebbe says, ‘Power is in the hands and the eyes.’ You have only to trace the letters with your fingers for their healing power to enter your soul.” When another asked if the outrageous price of a prayer shawl could possibly be correct, she was told that its ritual fringes were colored with an indigo dye derived from the rare purpura snail found only at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. “You can read about it in Numbers 15:38.”
Now that Hepzibah was preoccupied, Bernie took the occasion to duck through the curtain into the so-called sanctuary, which was hung with banners bearing Hebrew characters like an array of military standards. With the aid of a couple of women at either arm, the rabbi was stepping down from the platform, where he was immediately encircled by more adoring ladies, some of whom bore votive offerings in the form of homemade peanut brittle and casseroles. The rabbi rewarded their grateful indulgence with intimate touches, caressing one’s shoulder while pinching another’s cheek, paying special attention to the younger students—such as the ingenue in her red Lycra body stocking, who asked the holy man to please interpret her aura.
“You were in your last life a flower,” croaked old Eliezer, pressing her forehead with bony fingers, “that plucked it the prophet Elijah, may his name be for a blessing, and stuck in his buttonhole.”
The girl turned the color of her costume.
Overcoming his customary reticence, Bernie hailed the rabbi, hoping that once the master set eyes on his erstwhile apprentice he would shake off all his hangers-on. But Rabbi Eliezer merely acknowledged the boy with a nod, then turned back to his admirers.
“Rabbi,” called Bernie, who didn’t like drawing attention to himself, but he was convinced that his predicament called for an urgent audience. “Rabbi, I need some advice.”
The rabbi glanced over his shoulder. “Get why don’t you a pair long pants,” he replied, and upon reflection, “also maybe a haircut.” His sarcasm incited titters among his devotees, who assured him he was a rascal and a scamp. Bernie stood rooted to the spot, cheeks burning, as he watched his mentor borne off on a tide of worshipful women toward a door marked
PRIVATE
at the far corner of the sanctuary. They were squeezing his pasty flesh (which stayed squeezed) and teasing his sparse hair, the ladies, who appeared to Bernie like devils tormenting a saint—though in this case the saint seemed to be greatly enjoying their petting. Always surprised by the way bits of scripture came back to him now at odd moments, Bernie recalled a verse from Deuteronomy, the one in which Moses says, “Just as I learned without payment, so have you learned from me without payment, and thus you shall teach without payment in the generations to come.” Feeling it was incumbent upon him to remind Rabbi Eliezer of the patriarch’s decree, Bernie charged after the holy man to apprise him accordingly.
“Boychik,” said the rabbi, serene in the midst of the women, “they pay by me only for the time that I lose which I would otherwise devote to earnink a livelihood. As it is written, ‘Torah is the best of merchandise.’” Then assuring the boy he would ask if ever he required his advice again, he passed through the doorway along with his entourage.
Mortified, Bernie slouched past the curtain and out the front door of the House of Enlightenment. But on the way home, still crestfallen, he observed the shadow of a day lily shaped like a jester’s cap on the side of a house, and the image propelled him straight into the realm of the sublime.
W
hen the ferry from Ellis Island deposited Shmerl Karpinski (his name recently shortened by a harried customs official to Karp) on the bustling wharf, he shut his eyes to keep out the stimuli that threatened to overwhelm his brain. But the hastening crowds into which his fellow immigrants had already begun to dissolve, the clangor of horse cars and the rattle of the elevated train, assaulted his ears; they upset the peacefulness of the “laboratory” back in Shpinsk, which he was trying to reconstitute behind closed lids. Opening them again, he waited for his gaze to light on something that made sense, and saw the young man from the ship seated beside the driver of a dray whose bed contained a worm-eaten wooden casket. Shmerl had seen the youth before through waves of nausea while clinging to the splintered rail of his berth in steerage, trying not to roll off into the broth of vomit and slops. The atmosphere below decks was suffocating from a multitude of private functions made public, but while the whole of the steerage class groaned in time to the drumming pistons of the SS
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
, the young man—perched on a barrel and peering out of a porthole at the sawtooth sea—seemed to retain a meditative poise. Shmerl saw him again in the crush of passengers who, mutinous after their long confinement, had emerged from their quarters to overrun the lower deck once the promised city hove into view. Some had shinnied up a mast and climbed into the rigging, where they became entangled like bugs in spider webs. All craned their necks for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in her verdigris robes and the glinting towers at the foot of Manhattan Island, itself appearing to float like a low-lying argosy. Everyone looked toward New York, America, all except the staid young man with his handsome face and the worsted suit he seemed never to remove; leaning on the taffrail, he gazed across the expanse of chartreuse ocean the ship had just traversed, as if less interested in where he was going than where he’d been. Lonely since being dispatched by his family to save him from conscription (and to distance him from a community grown ever more censorious of his behavior), Shmerl Karp envied the youth his apparent self-containment. Since they were about the same age, he might have introduced himself, but Shmerl didn’t like to impose, and his slight humpback tended to make him rather shy.
The driver cracked his whip and the wagon bearing the casket drove off, leaving Shmerl to assume that the young man’s aloof demeanor had its origin in his grief for a loved one who’d passed away (as had perhaps a dozen others) during the voyage. But that was all the time he could spare for contemplating strangers now that he had his own welfare to negotiate. Still reeling from an ordeal that had left him barely ambulatory, he was unable amid that head-splitting Babel to grasp the concept of terra firma. After weeks of seasickness, during which he felt he’d regurgitated his very soul, Shmerl had been shunted from steamship to steam launch to the turreted fastness of Ellis Island. There he was made to suffer through stations of functionaries asking bewildering questions in pidgin Yiddish, checking his answers against the ship’s manifest with the severity of clerical seraphs verifying his name in the Book of Life. Doctors thumped his chest, testicles, and gibbous spine, inverted his eyelids, labeled him with chalk, and festooned him with paper flags; then they directed him back into the pitching ferry, where he scarcely understood that, instead of being detained in a holding cell reserved for undesirables, he’d been given a license to enter the Golden Land—which swirled about him now in a flurry of internal combustion engines and clopping hooves. But while the other immigrants, met by family or landslayt, had disappeared with their duffels and eiderdowns into the chasms between the commercial towers, Shmerl still tottered on the dock among pecking seabirds, wondering how best to proceed.
What did he really know of America anyway, outside of the rumors that on arrival everyone became an instant millionaire, which had already proved to be patently untrue? Only a few phrases in New Yorkish such as “awpn der vinder” and “kosheren restoran” were familiar to him; he knew also the address of an aunt and uncle who, when informed of his coming, had responded in a letter that was the equivalent of a grunt. Also he understood that in these turbulent streets the distance from heaven was even greater than it had been in his impoverished and pogrom-ridden Ukraine. Beyond that Shmerl knew little and had nothing besides a carpet bag containing a few scraps of clothing and some designs for inventions that had no practical application whatever. It wasn’t much to begin a new life with, though standing there on that alien shore he felt that his old life, such as it was, was already lost to him. Of an essentially retiring disposition despite the nuisance he’d made of himself back in Shpinsk, Shmerl believed that the person he was meant to become had yet to be born.
For a time he’d been a model yeshiva student who, since his bar mitzvah, had dutifully accompanied his father, Reb Todrus Karpinski, a junk-monger, to morning and evening prayers, and to the oily pool of the ritual bath on Shabbos. Shmerl was well versed in scripture, fluent in the 613 mitzvot, able to cite hair-splitting discrepancies between the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. His specialty had been parsing knotty halakhic conundrums, such as: What is the degree of defilement to a house cleaned for Passover when a mouse brings in a crumb of chometz? During his adolescence, however, when Scheuermann’s disease began to deform his spine and his fellows started making fun of him, Shmerl became more remote. At the same time he was wracked by physical discomfort, not necessarily restricted to his back, which he sublimated into an intensely pious streak. Its symptoms included periods of dreaminess during which he might be seen wandering alone with his peculiar stoop among the moss-mantled stones of the cemetery. He lingered, as well, beside the waterwheel that powered the lumber mill, where he became possessed of the notion that the wheel was for propelling the earth through time. Then it was all he could do to suppress an impulse to plunge an axe handle into the gears that turned the wheel, thus testing his theory and perhaps preserving his town from further aging.