Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud

As my thirteenth birthday approached my teachers started to sweat. My haphtarah, the passage from Prophets that bar mitzvah boys read for their bar mitzvahs, was too long for my poor skills, and they postponed the ceremony for three months, finding another haphtarah for me, the shortest of the year. All the time plotting, conspiring with His sense of the dramatic, arranging His improbable, mysterious scenarios, having taken the secular kid from the secular Chicago family — which, when it came right down to it, was probably more Chicago than Jewish — and putting him through paces that he never understood — that he was never interested enough to understand — finally bar mitzvahing the kid, the bozo Jew, to less than rave reviews, and getting ready to uncork the real and final miracle — to give me, just me, a calling, passing over my classmates, the bona fide buchers, those little ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old keepers of the flame to whom Hebrew script did not look like the business end of so many heavy, old-fashioned keys. (Let alone worry about the problem of God, being at that stage in my theological development where whether He sported a long white beard was still an issue.)

So I became a man on the Shabbes of the year’s shortest haphtarah passage, and if I felt any different it was strictly in a material way. The newfangled invitations had done their job. My bar mitzvah attracted over two hundred and fifty people. Family and close friends, of course, but a sort of papered house of the more distantly connected — the rabbi, big shots from the temple, my dad’s bosses and colleagues, his competitors and customers, certain featured gentiles (you could not, in those days, even think of throwing a big affair without their little ecumenical presence), my ma’s cleaning lady, everyone, possibly, for whom they could obtain a good address. I did all right. I did better than all right. I cleaned up. Because now, in those boom times, a spinoff of the spinoff, checks and money began to come in envelopes tricked out like little paper billfolds and later, in the hotel, it was practically de rigueur to slip a bar mitzvah kid — or a bridegroom, or a bride — his gift in one of them, working it into a handshake or a pocket of the kid’s suit, throwing maybe a wink into the mix and making the cloak-and-dagger razzle-dazzler’s or card sharp’s or pickpocket-in-reverse’s almost invisible feints. It was a sight to see. Really. A sight to see. The way one moment some guy you weren’t even sure you knew might be brushing your lapel for you and the next you felt the flap on a pocket of your suitcoat lifted and heard the soft susurrus of money changing not hands but actual clothing. It might have looked vulgar for a freshly decreed all-grown-up man to go around like that, paper hanging from him like the tags on new ready-to-wear, except that every so often my mother or father came up to take my envelopes to hold for me. I pulled in over eight hundred 1949 dollars. (Question, Rabbi: Which is more vulgar, if the proceeds from a bar mitzvah exceed or do not meet expenses? Answer: I’m here to tell you this isn’t even a good question. First of all, a man who throws an affair with a view toward making money from it has to be out of his head. Consider the price of the hall, the cost of the catering. Don’t forget what they charge for flowers, don’t forget what you give for a band. And what about those fancy invitations, what about the postage to send them, the stamps for the RSVPs? Plus you have to remember the incidentals. Also there’s an ostentatious element that takes pleasure in outspending the guests. That’s only happy if the numbers make no sense at all, if the very idea of cost effectiveness is thrown out altogether. Admittedly, this has always been a distinct minority, never higher than a couple of percent. For the vast majority of us, the money outlay is only the necessary expense of doing business and the real payoff and genuine pleasure come from showcasing the kid. It’s the kid’s day, his or hers, he or she, whoever’s up to bat that Saturday. I’ll go out on a limb here. I’ll tell you that maybe not the majority but many of us, many of us would just as soon put by showbiz and do away with the shindig part of it entirely and close down after the kid says his piece in the temple. So vulgar ? Sure, if love is vulgar. — And this is the lesson of the rabbi!

(Who was not a rabbi yet and who’s still trying to explain the roundabouts of his mysterious calling.)

Speaking of whom, well, it was the rabbi himself who came up to me, us, me and the older cousin with whom I was slow dancing, the parents and grandparents watching, taking it all in how yesterday’s klutz and this morning’s man had lickety-split discovered sex, beaming, getting their money’s worth from the showcased kid. First I thought he wanted to move us apart, then that he meant to cut in. Then — oh, youth’s tender, indiscriminate imperialism that assumes such tribute — merely that he had forgotten to give me my present and couldn’t wait for the band to stop playing to make amends. Which would he be, I wondered in the split second he’d left me to consider the question, a handshake stuffer or a mock valet?

“Jerry,” he said. “Miss,” he told the girl, “please. Excuse us.”

“Oh, Rabbi Wolfblock,” I said, “you didn’t have to. Don’t you remember? You already gave me The Illustrated History of the Tallith.”

He guided me to a chair at an unoccupied table. “Jerome, you impressed me this morning. The broches could have melted in your mouth.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“No, I mean it. I think you could have done it even if I hadn’t written it all out for you in English.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“You used your extra months to advantage.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“One good turn deserves another. You know this expression?”

“Of course, Rabbi.”

“Good boy,” Rabbi Wolfblock said. The band finished a set and some of the people whose table we occupied had started to drift back but were pulled up short when Wolfblock held up his hand. “A moment, friends,” he said, and turned back and lowered his voice. “What you have to understand, Jerry, is that I’m the fellow who found that eensy miniscripture for you that we waited for it to come round like people waiting on a solstice.”

“I know that, Rabbi.”

“Jerry,” he said, “that some thirteen-year-old pisher becomes a man when he’s bar mitzvah is only a legalism. With all due respect it’s probably a holdover from the time before penicillin when most people didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of making it past twenty-nine and were already middle-aged by the time they were eighteen. Methuselah lived nine hundred years? Days is more like it. Weeks! Listen, Jerry, Jewish people practically invented cancer and heart conditions. And what about anti-Semitism? That had to shave something off the life expectancy. And those momzers weren’t fooling around. I’m not talking about country clubs you couldn’t get into or nasty jokes in the observation car with ‘kike’ in the punchline. They violated the women and children and shot to kill. So of course little boys got to go around like their seniors. Of course they did. A legal fiction. — In a minute, friends.

“Rabbi Wolfblock doesn’t say these things to make you feel bad. To make you feel bad? When he scoured Torah to find your itty-bitty portion? Was that to make you feel bad? No, it was so an ignorant, backward boy could be bar mitzvah like anybody else and have a nice affair with a band and lovely presents and a bunch of strangers to cheer him on to remember all his life. Jerry, promise me.”

He recruited me, a thing someone with my record of rotten attendance and demonstrably lousy skills could never, had no right ever to, have expected, for his minyan.