Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

It was Shavuoth. Now Shavuoth is a fairly important holiday. It commemorates both the revelation of the Law up on Mount Sinai and the celebration of an ancient wheat festival. Something for everyone, Shavuoth is. That year it fell on June 6, so I picked up D-Day too.

It wasn’t as if I was surprised at the turnout. The factors were all there. They were in place, I mean. Well, I’d been building the tip. And there was the money thing. (Did I say how I was reminded of the engraved-invitation revolution back in the forties? The construction of the pipeline was a little like that.) And then, of course, when you weren’t actually working there wasn’t a whole lot to do. So church — I speak generically — became your entertainment. As lots of other things did. (I remember reading, for example, that in the seven major Alyeska camps the men pumped over a million dollars a month into the pinball machines. Of course, that was at Alaskan prices. A game was a dollar, a free game cost you fifty cents.)

So of course I wasn’t surprised. The other way round, really. I would have been surprised if they hadn’t shown up, if all those Tshimian and Athapaskan Indians, if all those hunters and fishermen and totem-pole carvers and ivory scratchers from King and Little Diomede islands hadn’t shown up. If all those blasters, heavy equipment operators, jackhammerers and acetyle-nists hadn’t. What, and miss Shavuoth? Frankly, I’d have been less surprised if Karen Ackerman, Milton Abish, Debbie Grunwald, Dave Piepenbrink, Arnie Sternberg, Howard Ziegler or the Jacobsons failed to show. But that’s a figure of speech. Of course they were there. Dave Piepenbrink met my plane. He was waiting for me out on the 5 Mile camp landing strip. (The different camps had begun to submit sealed bids to see who would host the services, proceeds to the Trees for Israel Fund. You have to understand something, none of this was my idea.)

“Good yontif, Rabbi.”

“David.”

“You had a pleasant trip?”

“Very nice, thank you, David.”

“Thank God! Alevay! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“Could you lend me a hand? The makings for the ark are still in the plane, the Torah and accessories.”

“The Torah? You brought a Torah on the flight with you? Oh, let me carry it. Please, Rabbi, please. I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your trees if you do.”

“Enough with the trees already, David.”

“You said trees,” Piepenbrink protested. “Trees for Israel was your idea. I never thought trees was a hot idea. Trees is just another place for Arab snipers to hide themselves and take potshots at us. So tell me, Rabbi, if not into trees, where then should we put our money? You’re the rabbi, you tell me.”

“Nowhere. It was a bad idea. But everyone’s so hipped up here on throwing their money around. On being a good sport. I shouldn’t have to charge people to get them to help me out. I’m not selling indulgences. Of course you can carry the Torah. It’s in the duffel.”

I took the smaller duffel, into which I’d transferred a Torah out of Philip’s duffel before I left Prospect Creek camp that morning, and held it out to Piepenbrink. He’d lost his enthusiasm. Oh, he carried it, but now that it wasn’t costing him anything all sense of ceremony had gone out of it for him, even decorum. He practically brushed it along the ground.

“Hey,” I said, “watch what you’re doing. That’s a Torah in there. You don’t shlep it along like it was a bowling ball.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and hiked his burden up a few inches. “I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who thinks he can get a ticket for flying a torn flag.”

It was true. I did think I could.

Karen Ackerman, Abish, the Jacobsons, Debbie Grunwald, Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler were already setting up the chairs for services the next morning.

“I don’t know,” Debbie Grunwald said, stepping back, considering. “You think it’ll be enough?”

“Oh, sure,” Milton Abish said. “Hey, there’s three hundred chairs here. For Shavuoth? Three hundred chairs? Sure it’s enough. What, are you kidding me?”

“I don’t know,” Bill Jacobson said, “we were out at the airstrip earlier and there was an unusual amount of traffic landing for a Monday morning. Isn’t that right, Miriam? Didn’t you think so?”

“I sure did, Bill.”

“We could always put more out if we need them,” Arnie Sternberg said.

“Absolutely,” Howard Ziegler agreed.

“Well, I’ll bet we do need them,” Debbie said.

“I’ll take that bet,” said Miriam Jacobson.

“All right, big shot,” Debbie said, “what are the stakes?”

“For every chair we need over three hundred I donate ten dollars to Trees for Israel. For every chair under three hundred you donate ten dollars.”

“You’re on,” Debbie Grunwald said. “Who holds the money?”

“Why don’t we just put it down on the ground here where it can blow away?” Miriam Jacobson asked triumphantly, as Debbie Grunwald, knowing she’d been both set up and out-sported, blanched.

As it turned out, Debbie Grunwald would have had to pay Trees for Israel a hundred and twenty dollars if I hadn’t disallowed the bet.

It was just the sort of thing I was up against, the point of my missionary’s message to them. It was sin. Such pride and vainglorious strut and vaunt and bluster. Put brag by, friends, I would have told them. Put by swagger and swank and grandiloquence. Knock it off with all swelled-head big britchery, all that high and mighty of the soul and hot air of the heart. You don’t six-pack God, smarty-boots, I would have told them. I would have. In my sermon. If I’d gotten that far.

Because I wasn’t surprised. It was Shavuoth. I wasn’t surprised. I practically almost expected not only that just about a third of those two hundred and eighty-eight seats would be filled with Athapaskans, Tshimians and other assorted fisherfolk, hunter-gatherer and totem-pole types, and that ordinary blue-collar Baptist, Methodist, Adventist and Mormon drillers, drivers and sappers would take up still another third or so — it was Shavuoth, after all; it was Shavuoth, come one, come all — leaving another ninety-six for the outright Jews in attendance. I wasn’t surprised. I counted on it. It was those Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers up on dogsleds with whips I hadn’t figured!

Because this was June, for God’s sake. D-Day. (Could they, I wondered, be opening up some second front?) There wasn’t even any damned snow on the ground! Yet there they were. In full fur. Mukluk to parka in the June heat. Tricked out with their harpoons and ulus by their sides, the sharp, curving knives the women used to gut fish. The dogs, sprawling on the ground in their complicated harness, seemed at some lazy, ceremonial equivalent of parade rest, but at a signal from their masters, some tug of the reins, I suppose, which rolled along their gear like a wave, they rose to a sort of attention. I made some announcements, called out the preliminary blessings (thanking God for restoring the body, for dressing the naked, for opening the eyes of the blind, for freeing the captives, for giving the rooster the intelligence to distinguish between the day and the night, and for making me — I couldn’t keep my eyes off those Eskimos — an Israelite), and began the service.

I’d just finished the Akdamut, the ninety-verse alphabetical acrostic praising the greatness of God and the excellence of Torah (and concealing the name — Meir bar Rabbi Yitzchak — of the poem’s author and father) you recite on Shavuoth before you open the Torah.

I went toward the ark. I proclaimed the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel,” I announced, “the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” opened the ark, withdrew the Torah, took the silver crowns off its wooden handles, undid the soft, fine cords that bound it, removed the velvet parochet that covered it, and laid it down on the bema. Since this was a Torah that had never been used, all its slack was taken up. The scrolls were set at the beginning, like a rental cassette from a video store. I would need someone to help me roll them to the portion for Shavuoth, and I beckoned David Piepenbrink to come up beside me.