Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“ Machers tip twenty percent,” Jerry said.

“And you’re a macher , aren’t you?” David slipped Jerry’s card into the pocket of his sweatpants, where he thought he might start keeping a switchblade, just in case. “I’ll talk to Rabbi Kales,” he said.

“All I can ask, Rabbi Cohen,” Jerry said. They shook hands again, and David was surprised to feel sweat on Jerry’s palm.

“Tell me something,” David said, not yet letting go, his smile wide and friendly, or at least trying to be, his jaw still not quite right in his opinion. “How did you know my name?”

“Oh, right.” Jerry tried to pull his hand away, so David covered up their grasp with his other hand. He’d seen Rabbi Kales do a similar move when he wanted to keep someone from ending a conversation before Rabbi Kales was ready. “It was in the HOA newsletter. It’s a big deal when a rabbi moves in. Good for home values.”

It was just after noon, and Temple Beth Israel was filled with kids, all of them screaming or crying or running, or all those things at once, the temple’s Children’s Hanukkah Party in full swing. The entire playground had been turned into a carnival area, with face-painting stations, booths filled with cooking food — latkes, hot dogs, burgers and fries, funnel cakes, because it was David’s understanding that you couldn’t have a carnival without funnel cakes — a guy making balloon art, a ten-foot-tall inflatable dreidel that the kids could get inside of and make spin, and, surrounding the perimeter of the playground, the parents, including Bennie and his wife, Rachel, sipping coffee and ignoring their children entirely, letting the teenagers who’d volunteered to take the brunt of the abuse.

David stood on a small stage in the middle of it all, trying not to feel sick while Rabbi Kales made a speech welcoming everyone to the annual party. David had lived his entire life lurking in the background, a shadow, the person in the room no one wanted to speak to, and now here he was front and center, minutes away from being formally introduced by Rabbi Kales.

After, David feared the adults would want to talk, make polite conversation, something David had never done in his entire life. What if he got something wrong? What if he said something that was completely contradictory to the Jewish faith? Rabbi Kales had told him not to worry, that if anyone questioned anything he ever said, all he needed to do was tell them that it was from the Talmud and he’d be covered, because no mere quasi-practicing Jew (which is what the temple was mainly comprised of, what Rabbi Kales called “pork-eating Jews”) ever cracked open the Talmud. Besides, Rabbi Kales told him, it was all about interpretation. He could have an interpretation that was different than any other rabbi in the world. That was the nice thing about being a Reform rabbi, Rabbi Kales said, they were open to the idea that maybe another rabbi had a different slant to the same set of beliefs.

He had a pretty good feeling that was going to be true.

“Some of you may have noticed a new face here at Temple Beth Israel,” Rabbi Kales said. David searched the playground for a soft landing place and instead found Bennie Savone, who at some point had moved directly in front of the stage, along with his wife. She was smiling at him with genuine warmth, and it occurred to David that she thought he was an actual rabbi, like her father was an actual rabbi. They’d met in passing only twice — she’d come to the temple to pick up her daughter while he and Rabbi Kales were in conversation, so she just stuck her head into his office and said hello, told him if he needed anything not to be afraid to call, that sort of thing, which struck David as extremely polite for a woman married to such a fucking prick — and somehow his mere countenance had been enough for her to believe.

David thought maybe that was the thing. People wanted to believe that you were who you said you were.

Rachel had an expensive haircut, nice makeup, white angora sweater, simple gold jewelry, a significant diamond on her wedding ring — maybe two, two and half carats — but it was nicely inset, not like his cousin Ronnie’s wife, who had a diamond so big it could send SOS signals on sunny days. Rachel didn’t wear gaudy hoop earrings or huge clusters of ice on every appendage. The Orthodox, they were big on the idea of tzniut , keeping modest in dress, particularly the women, which meant they all dressed as though they’d just escaped from Russia with the Cossacks hot on their tail. Rachel wasn’t that modest, comparatively, though up against the other women he saw in Las Vegas, particularly the ones he could see staring at him now from behind their Starbucks cups and huge bug-eye black sunglasses, she looked like a nun.

David focused on Rachel, tried to imagine that she was rooting for him, thought about how disappointed she’d be if he started vomiting, and that seemed to soothe him a bit, until the sound of Rabbi Kales voice once again pierced through the roaring of blood rushing to his ears. He was talking about how the Maccabean warriors took it upon themselves to live or die nobly, some fairy tale about, when you got right down to it, how noble it was to be a killer, provided you happened to be killing people for your freedom to believe in something. It was the same bullshit the Family tried to press on the new meat. Problem was, as time wore on, you started to realize you were just part of the same bureaucracy found in any business. The only thing noble about it, as it related to the Family, was at least you knew your friends were more likely to stab you in the chest than in the back.

Rabbi Kales paused in the middle of his speech and turned to look at David. David smiled, still feeling like if he moved too quickly or even opened his mouth more than a crack he might hurl. The rabbi looked pained for a brief moment, just a flash, really, probably not long enough for anyone to notice, and then he cleared his throat and started in again.

“No one can replace Rabbi Gottlieb,” Rabbi Kales said, “not in our hearts, nor in mere presence, and we all wear the tragedy of his passing each day here at Temple Beth Israel, particularly today, on the first holy night of Hanukkah, when we celebrate the onset of a true miracle. I think you will come to find Rabbi Cohen to be a kind and faithful servant of the Torah.” David saw the adults in the audience nod, almost imperceptibly, and David understood that the rabbi was proving David’s very point: He was telling them what to believe, and because they believed in Rabbi Kales, they believed what he said. “Like all of us, Rabbi Cohen is still learning that life looks somewhat different here in Las Vegas.” The audience laughed, since no one was actually from Las Vegas, at least not according to the statistics David read in the paper. Even Bennie chuckled, though probably for entirely different reasons. “So please do keep in mind that Rabbi Cohen is still in training, both as a rabbi and as a Las Vegan, which means I don’t want to hear of anyone inviting him to any poker games for at least another six months, and he is never allowed anywhere near the Strip when the rodeo comes to town, and that’s an order!” More laughing, the rabbi putting on a nice little nightclub patter now, full of inside jokes, bringing the room back up. It was a holiday, after all. “Especially not in the company of my son-in-law.” And the house came down, as much as a house can come down when it’s also filled with a bunch of sticky six-year-olds, wealthy Jews, and a Mafia boss who happened to own the Wild Horse strip club and was inexplicably married to the rabbi’s daughter.