Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

It’s a sort of sacrament then, what I’m doing, my husbandly obligation. I have to protect her from her nuttiness and outrageousness. Shelley would go crazy in a real congregation. So I have to condescend to her behind her back.

And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Do you know how much worse it is for you to be burdened with a lot? My heart goes out to the President and Joint Chiefs, to high-ups in the CIA and secret services, to everyone top-secreted, eyes-only’d. To editors with stories they dassn’t break. To anyone with knowledge too hot to handle. Oh, it’s awful, too terrible, and worse yet for the Rabbi of Lud. You think not? Are you kidding? Privy to the counsels of God? This is my rabbi mode. I don’t fool around in my rabbi mode. This is straight from my studies, my lessons in the Forbidden Practices seminar with Rabbi Chaim on the atoll in the Maldives. From my practically pitch-perfect memory of those notes that we were not only required to destroy at the end of each class, but required to destroy in front of the bearded, sidelocked monitors in their long coats and ancient Polish gabardines, the Orthodox proctors of my offshore schooldays.

We don’t tell you this stuff, the cruel, arcane orthodoxies that would scare you off and keep you out of Paradise — that it’s forbidden to dip your right eye in an eyecup, that you can’t be buried in your jewelry, no, not your wedding or engagement rings, not your locket with the picture of your kids, not even so much as a red paper Poppy Day flower or a tin button on your lapel from the Red Cross. That you mustn’t look at an X ray or handle the vital organs of a woman taken in adultery. That you shouldn’t wear contact lenses or shoes with lifts. That, strictly speaking — all of this is strictly speaking, of course — it goes against God’s law to walk with a cane more beautiful than the leg it’s intended to support or to use any prosthesis that improves upon the original body part. (Jews may place no hearing aid in their ears that corrects hearing acuity beyond what is considered normal in the population as a whole.) Left-handedness in an unmarried woman is a sin and, according to some interpretations of Talmud, a man may be denied his place with God if he can lift three times his own body weight. You’d be amazed how much evil we do without ever knowing it.

But the family comes first and, after the wife, the consanguineous loyalties are clear. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters, but sons and daughters before brothers and sisters. Am I my brother’s keeper? Of course not. Even old Cain knew it was a rhetorical question. The attenuate blood trailing away, thinning out and burning off till, if you want to know, the idea of humanity and the notion of universal love go up in smoke. God is no humanist, no One Worlder, and is hostile to the very concept of brotherhood. The fact of the matter is, even the thought of family, of family in its broader, metaphorical sense, is distressing to Him. He doesn’t want His people to get too cozy. And in Isaiah? The wolf dwell with the lamb? The leopard lie down with the kid? The calf, lion and fading together? Cows and bears feeding, and the big cats scarfing straw like the ox? This is theology? This is wish fulfillment. This is typos, bad translations, rotten scholarship. No? Give me a break. Are you kidding? Why did He give us zoos and cages then? Isaiah was a wuss.

To tell the truth, I talk too much. I don’t have the character to be this Rabbi of Lud. Not twenty-five years out of the Forbidden Practices seminar and already I’m selling my teachers and proctors down the river. “Sure,” I hear them saying, “go on, go ahead. Let everyone in on the cabala, why not? Tell them Lord of All Outdoors doesn’t even need rabbis, that He knew what He was doing when He invented the Diaspora, Hansel’d and Gretel’d the Jews and lost ten tribes of Israel. Go on, go ahead, blow your own people’s cover. Tell them, shout it from the rooftops, my yiddishe mama was a bad Jew, and chicken soup Hebes go against Nature. Go, ruin it for anyone who happens to believe Himself Himself is some big-spending Democrat, for the dole, disarmament, all the unilaterals, the A.D.C and other agencies.”

Well, of course you can’t look this up. It’s privileged information. Why do you suppose we were sworn to secrecy, why do you think we had to tear up those notes?

Me, I don’t agree with His politics. I happen to like and respect my fellow man. If it had been me, I’d have left Christ alone, and let him die our crowd’s natural death, overweight, and all stressed-, smoked-, whitefish’d and cholesterol’d out, like anyone else in his early thirties.

Anyway, I love my wife. With me it goes beyond orthodoxy, duty, the slavish fear of hell. Constance is a fine daughter, none better, and I love her very much. But there’s this glue in the glands for the Mrs. You have my word on it, I’d feel this way even if it weren’t my religious obligation.

So you see the dilemma. On the one hand my Connie’s everyday diminished fingernails bitten down to their bloody quicks while my nervous, heartsore child grazes beneath their gritty, jagged overhangs, waned moons and torn cuticles, settles in her anxiety and daily seeks fresh purchase, expert as some kid mouth-mountaineer contemplating the angles, all the flat, polished facets, approaches and billiard reckonings of face and, on the other, nutty Shelley, front-runner Poster Lady to the Loonies. I have to wonder. If she can do what she does for all dogleg kink, quirk and aberration just in little Lud, who knows what she might not yet get into, what marvels and wonders of the psy-chopathological she could work were she ever to come up to bat in the great world? There were my holy obligations and there was my good, old-fashioned romantic love, but there is also, I admit it, my heat-seeking curiosity, my blockbuster temptations. Because Eden ain’t over, you know. We weren’t thrown out of the Garden. We’re still in it. All He ever really did was lock the gate. Eden ain’t over. Beset we are by temptation, up to our fig leaves in it. So I have to wonder. And fear and tremble for the kid. But all I’m doing is speculating, talking momentary diversion, juggling the bright what-ifs. In the end it would be as it was in the beginning — no deal. The kid stays. The rabbi stands pat. The wife don’t make a move.

Well, a move. It isn’t as if she’s under lock and key. She comes and goes as she pleases, in winter and throughout the school year chasing up and down the back roads and side streets of northern Jersey in her one-woman car pool the thirty-some-odd miles she puts on the car every day, rain, snow or shine, even on days when Connie is poorly, or some other child either, and has to stay home, and Shelley, operating under her screwy, self-imposed rebbitzin’s rules of order, not only picks up the other kids anyway, but actually phones around, absorbing the city-to-city, intrastate tolls, to find an alternate, “so the seat-e-le shouldn’t go wasted,” every year trading in one big brand-new Buick station wagon for an even newer, even bigger one, some huge, gleaming Conestoga you wouldn’t be afraid to cross the plains in (a station-wagon nuch, for an intimate little nuclear family of three!) because she doesn’t want it on her conscience that a kid came to grief in any eensy, flimsy jalopy. So move. It’s just New Jersey she can’t leave, just, for more than her errands, Lud. Otherwise, she’s all over the map, not only free to move but positively running with the pack.

I’m just getting comfortable again. (Now my erection is silenced, my meat withdrawn and chemicals subsided like clarity returned to cloudy tap water. In less time than it takes to speak, or speak to, the problems, my rabbinical conundrums not only unresolved but forgotten, my sins, and all, now my wife and I have had congress, and Connie’s outside again, my cheese-it-there’s-the-kid! misgivings forgiven.) When the doorbell rings like a cue in a play.