Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

We opened the ark and took out the Torah. We removed the silver crowns and stripped the mantle from the loosely bound parchments. We were unrolling, separating the scrolls.

It was a little like waiting for a strip of leader to play out on film or recording tape. And at first, not distracted by the thick, black Hebrew letters, which always look, with their diminished, left-leaning hooks and finials like the spiky flourish on custard, as if no one not right-handed could ever have made them, it was easy to imagine that the hundred-forty-five-thousand dollars Alyeska was said to have paid for it may in fact have been its actual price.

The story of Creation came up, Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Miriam, the Tower of Babel, Moses and the Exodus, Joseph and his coat of many colors, the Ten Commandments. The Sh’ma, the Mi Hamocha with its apostrophe to God—“Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like Thee, Glorious and Holiness, awe-inspiring in renown, doing wonders?”

And then its gorgeous parchment, the true, smoothly shaven, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed skin of a sheep, abruptly ended, went the blank, vague, smudged and ancient ivory of a window shade.

“We missed it. Quick,” I told her, “roll it back, take it up. We missed it.” I fed her slack off my spool. Mi Hamocha went by, the Sh’ma. The Ten Commandments, Joseph, Moses, Babel. Miriam. Isaac and Abraham. Eve and Adam. Creation spun by and was furiously swept away back into blankness, the thick yellow light of the empty parchment. “It’s not here,” I told her, “it’s gone. Tish’a b’Av dropped out.” I looked at Deborah as if she might have taken it herself, like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Then we rolled it carefully in the opposite direction, the Torah bound on its wooden poles like newspapers in a European coffee shop. It was the same thing. The dietary laws were gone, the Korh Rebellion. It had all dropped out.

“Do you read Hebrew, Miss Grunwald?” McBride, some of the Indians leaned forward. I think they could hear me now, as if, with my question to Deborah, I had started the services up again, resumed the prayers. As, in a way, I had. “Do you know what we have here? Do you know what this is?” Deborah shook her head. So I gave them fragments from the story of Adam and Eve, selections from Exodus, a piece from the Tower of Babel, a bit from the Flood, throwing in all I could remember, whatever I had by heart, of the story of poor old God-bedeviled Job.

I assume the gentiles never noticed, nor the Indians. Maybe even some of the Jews.

Because what it was, what we had here on that authentic, lime-buttered, chalk-rubbed, hundred-forty-five-K sheepskin I was so taken with, were the Old Testament’s Greatest Hits!

The next, the last time, it was blank.

It was Rosh Hashanah. Deborah was gone too now. Which I might have expected. Which I did expect. What I hadn’t expected was that Howard Ziegler, Karen Ackerman and Milton Abish, on whom I counted to be there, if only out of the same goodwill and curiosity they shared with Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink and the Jacobsons before their defections, didn’t show up either. I set up my own chairs, but I didn’t care about that. That was all right. I didn’t mind that part. What I minded was the other thing, the sense I had of having actually lost souls.

It doesn’t require much telling, this shouldn’t take long.

McBride was there again. I recognized Spike and recognized Ambest. I spotted Anderson, I spotted Jim Krezlow. And picked out others whom I’d first seen in Anchorage. Peachblow and Schindblist. Jeers, who had failed to qualify in the jackham-mer and been flown back to Alabama, had evidently come up to snuff and was being given a second chance. (Or perhaps not, maybe he was just there to see me.) There were Indians who looked familiar, and others from earlier fiascos. There were almost no Jews at all.

Rabbi Petch, with whom I had thought to trade jobs, was there. At the Jewish New Year’s solemn beginning — it was early October; we were at Crystal Creek camp; at this latitude the fierce fall had already begun to drain the light, suck at its sparkle and leach its golds and yellows, tamping it flat, white, thin and dull as skimmed milk — he sat dressed in the hot woolen suit he’d been wearing when I’d last seen him, at the dead center of the congregation, not its southwest corner, but in its actual bull’s-eyed nub and nucleus. I was certain he huddled there for protection, as though maybe there were two neutral corners in the natural world, one for indoors and another for out.

Well.

This was the little reconditioned one, the short-handled, twenty-four-inch, ninety-thousand-dollar Sephardic. Or which would have been Sephardic if it hadn’t been blank. Which could be — who knew? — Sephardic yet, if all we needed was to get some specialist, someone checked out in the Sephardic hand the way old Jeers was checked out in jackhammer to go to work on it and copy down Pentateuch (which, considering the losses so far sustained, and providing the new guy was willing to work for nothing, would still come to something just over a hundred thousand bucks a teuch). Or could be if we didn’t have to fly in some extra-holy type first (the flower-bearded fellow, say) to re-deconsecrate the hoaxed-up sheepskin, reconsecrate it again and just set the scribe loose.

But that was something that would have to wait.

First I had to get through Rosh Hashanah.

I began by asking the Four Questions.

“Wherefore,” I chanted on this brisk Alaskan autumn morning six or so months after the Passover in the only Hebrew, with the exception of my haphtarah passage, a handful of broches and poems, and a few prayers for the dead, I had ever memorized, “is this night different from all other nights?

“On all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread; on this night why only unleavened bread?

“On all other nights we eat any species of herbs; on this night why only bitter herbs?

“On all other nights we do not dip our herbs even once; on this night why do we dip them twice?

“On all other nights we eat our meals in any manner; on this night why do we sit around the table together in a reclining position?”

When I finished I looked up from the empty parchment, looked down again quickly, and hurriedly started to recite my haphtarah passage before the remaining Jews, McBride, the other gentiles, the redskins, and the Anchorage Seven.

I might have gotten through it, too, the first Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline ever publicly to re-bar mitzvah himself, when I felt someone beside me. It was Petch.

He took over for me, going through the service without a single mistake. Though why anyone should take my word for this I can’t say. He even had a shofar with him and sounded it, the dark, mottled, polished ram’s horn, glazed as tortoiseshell, summoning the New Year through its harsh, amplified winds like a sort of spittled Jewish weather, brusque, gruff as phlegm. He finished the morning part of the Rosh Hashanah services and started up again in the afternoon. Then again at sundown. From the Torah that never was. I stood beside him on the platform and, properly cued, even participated by chanting the broches, reading them off the blank parchment by following the silver yad that Rabbi Petch moved along the missing Hebrew.

Through the long, prayer-filled day we carried on one of those mysterious conversations inaudible to the congregation.

“I heard about you,” he said.

“I guess everyone has.”

“Is that what you want? To be famous?”

“No. Of course not.”

“ ‘Thou, O Lord, art mighty for ever. Thou quickenest the dead. Thou art mighty to save.’ ”

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said.