Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud

In addition to our attendance on people just bereaved who were supposed to stay in their homes during the mourning period, the compulsory seven days of shiva, we had additional assignments.

You have to understand something. This was Chicago at the end of the forties, the war over four years and the terrors of the Holocaust still fresh. In those days certain older people wouldn’t leave their apartments at first light or walk abroad at dusk to go to synagogue for the sunrise and sunset services. They believed that Jew-haters, familiar with the broad outlines of our religious practices, waited and watched for a lone Jew to leave his home and come into the streets, where they would be hiding themselves, posing behind kiosks perhaps, where they sold newspapers, or skulking about the gangways between apartment buildings. It was a familiar nightmare, a common delusion among old people. So these old Jews, some of them even Orthodox, wouldn’t or couldn’t get to shul. And it wasn’t that long after the war, remember. The agencies still verifying the identities of death camp victims and the Defense Department still closing the books on MIAs, each day making grief official. So it wasn’t as if there was any shortage of relatives to mourn. And they were old, infirm, handicapped. A lot of these people couldn’t have gotten to temple even if they’d wanted to. (And, let’s face it, they didn’t all want to. The invitation revolution just didn’t have the kick that some of these old IWWs and Trotskyites and ILGWUs were accustomed to.) So we delivered. Rabbi Wolfblock’s Traveling Minyan. We were like Meals-on-Wheels. Like the Postal Service. It was neither rain nor snow nor dark of night by us too.

We were not comforters, not eulogizers — most of the time we didn’t even know the people whose souls we were commending to God, vouchsafing to God as if we were cosigning their loans — and I wish I could say there was something embarrassing about sweeping into the homes of people who had just been widowed or lost a father, say, a mother, a brother, a sister, a child, who hadn’t yet had time to take in the implications of their ceremonial or blood bond so surprisingly destroyed, and inviting them to override their grief not only with ritual but with ritual made suspect by having it served up by mere legalisms, a troupe — that’s what we were — of thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah pishers. We were, what? Rabbi Wolfblock’s Children’s Crusaders. Ten little men, thirteen to fifteen years old, ten little Infants for Orthodoxy against a background of the new calligraphy — so ornate it might itself have been a kind of Hebrew — on the new invitations, who minstreled the South Shore of the South Side, Shachris to Marev, administering Sh’ma, administering Shemoneh Esray, administering Kaddish, administering, that is, what any grown quorum often bar mitzvah’d Jews — God does not hear the prayers of nine Jews — would administer. I wish I could say I was embarrassed. There was certainly enough opportunity — the mirrors covered with sheets, the mourners’ stools and low, hard, makeshift benches, the rumpled clothing, bad breath and sour smells of the bereaved, as if a little at least of death were contagious, its sloven, unshaven, caught-short essence. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but the fact is, I loved it, and loved the articles about us in the weekend supplements. I ate it all up like a Hitler Youth and loved saying prayers for the dead and guiding people five and six times my age through the mazes of Jewish death. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but I was more embarrassed on the bema reading my haphtarah.

And anyway you don’t look a calling in the face. For this was it, the real, genuine, miracle calling — me, Jerry Goldkorn, God’s little card trick, His will, take it or leave it, revealed. Working, as ever, with chaff, His by-this-time familiar, boring, inferior materials, His … Ech, to hell with it. And if we’re going to plumb the depths of all this, untangle the ironies, is it really, come to think of it, such a wonder after all? Is it the first time someone has found himself in too deep, out of his league, out of his depth, in over his head? Corruption — don’t get me wrong, it’s an example, I’m not corrupt — almost goes with the public trust. Even a starting pitcher who can go the full nine innings is a rarity. So why should I carry on just because I happen to read a halting Hebrew and am a little rusty in the ritual and custom departments? Isn’t my heart in the right place?

All right, you’re going to find out sooner or later, so I’ll make a clean breast right now and be done with it. You’re asking yourselves, if his Hebrew is so bad how did this improbable guy ever get to be a licensed rabbi? Well, you know those offshore medical schools where people sometimes go if they haven’t got the best grades in the world? Places like Grenada and St. Lucia and along the Pacific rim? All right, I attended an offshore yeshiva. It was on this tiny atoll in the Maldive Islands a few hundred miles southwest of India. What are you going to do, arrest me? I’m a person whose calling came about, at least indirectly, through a postwar boom in the engraved bar mitzvah invitation industry. Don’t be so quick to judge. (I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here.) Isn’t it only fitting I received most of my religious training abroad, among Sikhs and Hindus — all the queer castes with their sacred cows and trayf human beings? Only fitting that an almost charter member of Rabbi Herschel Wolfblock’s all-boy minyan and original Little League davening society should pick up his Hebrew lore somewhere closer to the road to Mandalay than the Wailing Wall? My God, my brothers, my God, my sisters, we were like the von Trapp Family Singers, Quiz Kids, famed vaudeville chimps.

Norman Sachs, Donny Levine, Ray Haas, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stanley Bloom, Jake Heldshaft, Al Harry Richmond and I were Wolfblock’s first team, and though we had understudies, kids who could be called upon to stand in if one of us was out of commission, the odd thing was we never got sick. Once we signed with Wolfblock’s special forces we never came down with flu or fell victim to the kid diseases.

Now maybe you can explain this, but at the time it was as difficult to account for — and Wolfblock the first to point out what was happening, not crying miracle, understand, just underscoring our strange run of good health — as it was for us to fathom the wonders of the Ouija board or the dynamics that worked the little pendulum that hung from a thread which we used to swing above one another’s palms in circles or verticals and that it never occurred to us we controlled.

So why not New Jersey? Why not Lud?

The world isn’t plotted like a model city, isn’t laid out on a neat grid for the convenience of tourists and postal employees. There really was a Diaspora, you know, and shipwrecks and castaways, folks lost in deep woods and in the higher elevations and not everywhere filled up with the symmetrical quotas of Caracas and Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, New York. Anomalies abound. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel weren’t all found. Or weren’t found where you might expect. There are frontiers, outposts if not of empire then at least of likelihood. I’m speaking of queer parishes on the high seas, congregations in the wilderness. And this isn’t my rabbi mode. I’m not being mystical here, I’m not suggesting martyrs slugging it out with the elements and with themselves in the jungles and along the frozen wastes, and I’m not being glamorous either, only practical. I’m speaking, I mean, of accepting what’s left after the plummy assignments have all been awarded. Practical, we’re practical men we rabbis of Lud, compliant, comers to terms with our oblique, improbable lives. Yes, and if you troubled to press us you’d find that there isn’t a man among us who doesn’t dream of the splashy yellow architecture of some temple in Cleveland. Hey, I know a rabbi who conducts services on a cruise ship that often happens to find itself in the Caribbean of a Friday evening. (Well, you say, but that’s glamorous. Oh? He’s hooked on Dramamine and, though he’s not yet forty, the ship’s doctor informs him his beautiful tan is only an early stage of skin cancer.) And wasn’t I myself once Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline?