Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

If anyone had actually liked this stuff I guess it would have constituted a kind of vote fraud.

But, as I say, I wasn’t much into corruption. I had taken (because I couldn’t afford not to up there) a Christian’s view of things, forgiving their debts as they forgave their debtors, and willing to go them, the Christians, one better, forgiving even the sin of final despair. Though who asked me?

To tell the truth, no one. Asked or was expected to. It wasn’t my job. No, my job was organizing the picnics and volleyball games, the Jewish retreats and Jewish discussion groups (where we would talk about what we always talked about—“The State of Israel,” “The Palestinian Problem” [there was none], “Anti-Semitism” [rife, it existed everywhere, under the bed, out in the hall, wherever people gathered, wherever grown men strolled by themselves down country lanes, everywhere], “Hebrew Education,” “Cross Marriage,” “Marriage and the Family,” “Judaism: Race or Religion?”). But they knew me now. And if I accomplished nothing else I’d accomplished that at least. I taught them, that is, their rabbi’s name.

I made a nuisance of myself. Hey, no problem. It pays to advertise.

Because by now, even if they weren’t showing up for actual services, I’d begun to put together a small cadre of kapos, little Hebrew helpers, Jewish or not, you see them everywhere, dressed to the nines in stockings and heels behind their aprons, female or not, volunteer minutemen, male or not, smoothers of the way, chipper chippers-in and general all-round good sports who not only supervised the music, lettered the signs, put up the crepe-paper decorations, prepared the eats and mixed the punch, but stayed on afterward to return the records to their jackets and, hunching the state of the treasury, lay by money and string to turn economies right and left, taking the crepe paper down and folding it, pouring the punch out of the bowl and into a jar and, waste not, want not, making up doggy bags from the uneaten scraps. Then, God bless them, they went over the signs and erased the words and dates they deemed it unlikely we would be using again.

I had Karen Ackerman, I had Milton Abish. I had Bill and Miriam Jacobson, Debbie Grunwald and David Piepenbrink. Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler from the motor pool were with me. These were my good Jewish sports from the early days. These were the folks who knew me when.

It was time.

I’d had my second brainstorm — my personal Marshall Plan, the food giveaway, was my first — and it was time. (It was obvious, really. If it had taken the kindness of strangers to get me off my duff in the first place, that infectious, killer generosity that I took to be the hitch and hinder, blemish, chink and defect that flawed their characters and made seconds of their souls, why hadn’t I also seen that if epic profligacy was what got you in to trouble, wasn’t it only poetic justice then that what ought to get you out of it again was more of the same? A taste of their own medicine. A hair of the dog. Which was when I stopped the flow of just ordinary purple mail, all those announcements for parties and invitations to kick the Jewish issues around, and started to send out barefaced pledge cards, requests for money, pleas for bucks, your outright give-till-it-hurts pressures and appeals. The money poured in.)

So it was time.

I gathered my prayer books together — I don’t understand it, but for a people of the Book we Jews use our Torah less cost-effectively than any religion I know of uses its own scriptures; strictly speaking, it’s not required at all, really, save on Monday and Thursday mornings, on Shabbes and on the holidays — and flew to Coldfoot where I conducted Friday night services for those by this time good old boys Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink, Karen Ackerman, Debbie Grunwald and Milton Abish, among my kapos only Howard Ziegler and Bill and Miriam Jacobson no-shows and holdouts. I knew, however, that when next we met (in Prudhoe Bay the following week), I would have not only Ziegler and the Jacobsons in the congregation but a considerable portion of the Alaska pipeline Jewish population as well.

Because it was easy now. Because it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Because it was Prudhoe Bay, the farthest north of Alyeska’s camps, and they would have to inconvenience themselves, put out money, and charter a plane to get there (and it had been a difficult spring, the weather foul that year, powerful storms, high winds, low ceilings, lousy visibility).

Even more successful than that. More successful than I had any right to expect. Because once the word got out, and the non-Jews learned that the Jewish Jews had found a whole new way to six-pack the house and dispose of money, the gentiles dropped by too. And actually even volunteered a collection when they saw I was not going to take one up myself!

“No,” I objected. “No, no,” I protested, “you don’t understand. I’m quite well paid. The company pays me. Alyeska does. I’ve a quite good rating. As high if not higher than the most highly skilled laborers among you.”

And when they overrode my objections and insisted I keep it anyway I told them, well, oh, all right, if they wouldn’t take no for an answer, I’d hold on to it and donate it in their honor to the Trees for Israel Fund.

“ What ,” someone shouted, “there’s a Trees for Israel Fund?!” and wrote out a check right then and there for two hundred dollars. It was Jack Nicholson, the man I’d seen in the motel that first day, the one they called Spike. Peachblow was there too, and Ambest. The money poured in.

“Building the tip,” I think they call it. Building the tip. Whatever you do to create interest, demand. The dancing girls in their scanties in promissory, there’s-plenty-more-where-this-comes-from undulation outside the tent. The you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yets. The no-obligation-examine-in-your-own-home-for-ten-days-frees. All that primed-pump, water-cast bread that gets the juices rolling. Free sample. Words to the wise.

I was building the tip. That’s all those Friday night services were to me. Who had this hunch (not even articulated) that real Judaism consists not of the ingrained and the daily, the taken-for-granted, steady-state ritual attentions one pays to God, but comes in jolts of enthusiasm, in fits and starts, in great waves of stored-up sanctity and the piecemeal pious. In feelings released — released? escaped, exploded; I hadn’t been a burier of the dead all these years for nothing — on great occasions. Not just on any ordinary Sabbath like a magazine you get once a week in the mail, but on our most sacred holidays, our movable feast days and festivals.

I would have come before them heavy-laden, burdened as a priest, a doctor, blackly bagged, making a house call. I would have brought them, I mean, the jeweled tools of my trade, the branched candelabra with all its official, thou-shalt-made cups and knops, set up my shittim-wood ark like some holy swing set knocked together, and hidden — wrapped like a mystery in the velvet, masculine mantle with its great, rampant, applique lions and weighty crowns — the Torah there, and spread my heavy cloth before them on the bema, the sterling silver yad like the major piece in a place setting. Above the ark I would have burned whale oil for them in eternal lamps.

So it’s a Shavuoth I’m shooting for, a Pesach, a Purim, my Friday nights only God’s little loss leaders, as Mother’s or Father’s Day, say, are only your jerry-built festivities of the historically lackluster months. And what I’d really like to have given them was something spectacular, honored the creation of the world, say. (The reason, I think, Christianity has the numbers — though I’d be the first to tell you it’s not numbers alone that make a great religion, ideas have something to say about it too — is that Christianity has heavier holidays. Real concept occasions. What’s Christmas but your birth of God, Easter week but those seven action-packed days from the time he first pulled into town to the time he got killed and resurrected? Succoth, which is only a harvest festival, pales in comparison. Chanuka, our famous festival of the lights, which commemorates a victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians, does.) There are marvelous untouched holidays there for the plucking. I myself could have come up with a dozen new reasons to praise God. We might have celebrated heart bypass operations, Chinese take-out, record-setting Wall Street rallies. The Festival of the Cruise we could have. The Feast of the Successful Children. Yes, and heartbreakers too, heavy and solemn as anything Christians put on — The Fasts of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen. The Festival of the Holocaust, say.