Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“What?” he said.

“This is a virgin Torah,” I told him from the side of my mouth. “I’m laying a very high power aliyah on you here. You hold on tight to the left side while I roll up the right. It should be about a third of the way through.” He started to say something. “ Don’t ,” I warned, “don’t you dare mention money.”

“The dogs,” he said.

“What?”

“The dogs !”

The huskies, urged on by their Cossack Orthodox Russian Eskimo masters, were pulling the heavily laden sleds over the dry, stony ground. “Quick,” I told Piepenbrink, “take up the slack. The slack! We’ve got to save the Torah from them. Quick, Piepenbrink, this is an even higher honor than that first one I gave you.”

“What,” he said, “protect this? It’s a crib, a trot. It’s a pony.” He was speaking conversationally now, all the nervous, customary stage inaudibles, the directions and quiet, cryptic promptings that flow back and forth between a rabbi and a bar mitzvah boy, say, and which ordinarily aren’t heard in even the first row — why is this, I wonder, what special physics protects our grit-teeth, iron-jaw arrangements? — his voice normal, audible, clear, punched up as a broche.

“What do you mean, a crib?” (And my voice normal too, as clear as Piepenbrink’s.) But I saw what he meant. I’m such a lousy rabbi. When I’d chosen the Torah in the black velvet mantle to bring with me to 5 Mile, I didn’t even look at it first. It wasn’t Hebrew but a phonetic transcription of Hebrew, a transliteration in English. It was Wolfblock’s work. It was old Rabbi Wolfblock’s work, the man who’d written out my tiny haphtarah passage in English for me when I was bar mitzvah, the shortest of the year. I’d have recognized his printing anywhere.

And all they ever meant, the Eskimo Russian Cossack Orthodox momzers, was just to come closer, and the dogs too very likely, who were probably called, someone suggested later, when I sang out that Sh’ma!

I went out again, on Tish’a b’Av. McBride was there, but not an Eskimo, who were gentlemen, was to be seen.

Tish’a b’Av commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples, and also the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The year I’m speaking of it fell on Thursday, August first, and I’d chosen Toolik camp, maybe two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, as the venue for our services. The Jacobsons had dropped out, Dave Piepenbrink of course, Arnie Sternberg, maybe a quarter of the Jews. Of course Tish’a b’Av was never your most popular holiday anyway. What’s it got going for it? All negatives. Two acts of high vandalism and the blackballing of an entire people from a major country. That’s Tish’a b’Av. What’s to celebrate? To tell the truth, I think it should be taken out of the canon altogether. Too defeatist. Why, it’s like celebrating the date the first Jew wasn’t admitted to a country club, or the first time his name showed up in an ethnic joke. And the destruction of those temples? Commemorate swastikas painted on the walls, why don’t you? Crosses burning on your lawn. Also, it always falls in the hottest part of the summer. People are out of town.

It was a packed house anyway. Gentiles and Indians made up for the defection of the Jews and Eskimos. And Deb Grunwald was there. Shlepping chairs, offering her optimistic body counts.

“You’ll see, Rabbi,” she told me the night before the services, “there’ll be an even bigger turnout than last time.”

“Sure. They’re coming to see how I’ll screw up.”

“No,” she said, “really. They never heard such davening. Once you found your place, you whizzed along like a champ.”

“I read from a crib, Deb.”

“Who knew?”

“After Piepenbrink stepped down? Half the congregation.”

“It was beautiful.”

“Well, you’re kind,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Tell me,” she said, pointing in the direction of the ark, “did you happen to get a chance to look over …” The question trailed off.

I’d chosen the blue-mantled, hundred-forty-five-thousand-dollar Sephardic job, I recall Philip pointing out, but no, I hadn’t looked at it, hadn’t rolled it yet to the appropriate portion, hadn’t even removed its crowns or undone those tasseled ornamental cornsilk cords that loosely bound its twin cylinders. (Because I was working on the theory that it was Fate, God’s hand, that it was up to Him, that if He still wanted me chastised and publicly shamed practically a quarter of a century to the day after some overripe Chicago bar mitzvah pisher went head-to-head with Him over something as insignificant — to a child, remember, a little kid — as the thickness and shape of the letters in what was apparently the Father Tongue, if He, that is, could hold a grudge — or should I say Grudge, your Majesty? — every last second of every damned minute of every single one of those twenty-five years, just because I happened to be learning-disadvantaged in the Hebrew department, if all that His vaunted Mysterious Ways came down to was moving Jerry Goldkorn by way of Lud, New Jersey, all the way past the Arctic Circle so he could make asshole/asshole before a bunch of folks who weren’t too nuts about His Chosen People in the first place, then who was Jerry Goldkorn to sneak a peek, or look up the parchment skirts of some multimulti-K Torah?)

“No, Deborah,” I told her sweetly, “I didn’t happen to find an opportunity.”

As I said, and as Debbie predicted, the house was packed. Standing room only. I delivered my announcements to the bare quorum of Jews and approving goyim and unsmiling redskins, giving all of them the times for the next Jewish Singles’ Happy Hour (Alaskan corned beef, Juneau pastrami, rye bread flown in from magnetic north), and began the morning prayers. I thanked Him for redressing grievances, for being a Settling Scores kind of God, finished the prayers, told the congregation that we would read the Torah portion, declared the Sh’ma, and summoned Deborah Grunwald beside me to join me on the bema. Together we went toward the ark.

“Not,” I told her, speaking in my normal voice now too, in that customary pitch of conversation which, if it wasn’t audible in the first rows, was a proof of God’s existence that just by raising the volume a few ticks it was clear as a bell in Heaven, “because, counting Shavuoth and all those Friday night services, you must have set up the better part of a couple of thousand chairs for me by this time, and I owe you. Not even because”—our backs to the congregation as we moved toward the precious shittim-wood cabinet that contained the scrolls, I wasn’t even ad-even addressing her out of the side of my mouth, but was speaking flagrantly, profile to profile, like people in public seen from behind—“you’re a special favorite of mine, Rabbi’s pet, say, or something, well, lurid. I’ll tell you the truth, Miss Grunwald, lurid ain’t on my palette. I know how it goes in the world, how some-times it’s the priest gets the girl just because he is the priest. Not just the celibacy thing but because he has God’s ear, a line on the mysteries. That’s impressive to girls. Look, break in anytime if I’m out of line here, because, well, chances are I could be out of line and not even know it. See, I’m this Garden State rabbi and as much at a loss when it comes to the mysteries as everyone else. I mean, I’m impressionable too. Innocent beyond my years and trade. A rabbi who never had a proper congregation, who just says words over dead people for living people who don’t have the hang of or calling for it themselves. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you I’m the kind of shaman ladies don’t usually take a shine to. I regard myself as eligible and red-blooded as the next guy, but you’ve got to admit, the death of the next-of-kin doesn’t normally put someone in the mood. Widows never fell all over me, I guess I’m trying to say. So of course I never had much opportunity to fall all over them back. So it isn’t because of the likelihood of either of us having a crush on the other. It’s because I need a witness and you happened to ask the question is why!”