The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  I say “every so often” but it’s more frequent than that. On a nice morning I might be having my breakfast on the red cedar table in my backyard and I’ll look up from my newspaper and coffee and see it spread out before me, cemetery as far as the eye can see. The earth-drowned Jews of Lud, New Jersey. Our crowd. How did there get to be so many? There are graveyards in New York now, of course, in every borough except Manhattan, and new places opening up in Connecticut all the time, in Stamford and other poshy venues and climes even farther out, but Lud still gets more than its fair share. It doesn’t take a back seat even to the cemeteries you see out your taxi window coming in from the airport through Queens. You know what land is like in New York. They look that crowded because they’re so close together. We’re more spread out and, according to the Journal of the American Funeral Association, we have fewer people but more families. My God, I sound like a booster!

  How could this happen? I’ll tell you how this could happen. As the twig is bent, that’s how it could happen. There I am, a kid in Chicago. Not from a particularly religious family. On top of the world, in the middle of the middle class. Ten years old and an only child. The war over half a decade and the good guys winners. Absolutely content. Not looking for trouble—and where could I find it if I was?—and coming into consciousness postwar. This is the end of the 1940s, before the X-ray machines in shoe stores could irradiate your toe bones, before cigarettes could kill you with cancer, before blacks, before projects, ghettos and changing neighborhoods, before juvenile delinquency even. This was a golden age when wholesale was wholesale and your edge was real. I’m living the good life on Chicago’s South Side. My daddy’s rich and my ma is good lookin’.

  Let me interrupt myself here a minute. You know what’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America? In America. Not closing the camps, not the new state of Israel. What’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America was the development of the printed invitation. I mean things like when raised lettering came within the price range of the middle classes. I mean when they perfected that transparent tissue paper. Because it isn’t only necessity that’s the mother of invention. Sometimes it’s boom and amplitude. Take Miami, that town’s flush days when they were throwing up buildings right and left and they’d advertise, “Come to the Fabulous Such-and-So—This Year’s Hotel.” It was like that back at the end of the forties. Money relatively easy to come by and the printed invitation revolution moving in to take up the slack, people excited and trying to outdo one another with celebrations, with their weddings and bar mitzvahs and what-have-you’s.

  Which goes toward explaining how I’m reading comic books one minute and studying in the cheder the next. Plucked and translated out of my customary ways and haunts by parents who were already thinking about what the invitations would look like three years down the road when it was time for their only son to be bar mitzvah’d, what wondrous concoctions would be coming onstream to amaze the neighbors and confound the relatives.

  I don’t scorn them. I don’t cast aspersion. This isn’t any easy satire I do. Because God does too move in mysterious ways, and ain’t that the truth, wonders the Rabbi of Lud from his plain in New Jersey. Mysterious? Byzantine. He wants me in Jersey, He arranges raised lettering and transparent tissue paper spinoffs from Second World War R & D. (I’ve got to think I’m doing the work of the Lord or I’ll plotz.—Excuse me. Bust. This other is still a second language to me. I don’t have it right, the rhythms, the Yiddish singsong ways.)

  But that ain’t the half of it. Taking a secular kid from a secular family in Chicago and throwing him into Hebrew school ain’t the half of it. Here’s the miraculous, mysterious part. I’d never been more bored! I stuttered and hemmed and hawed myself through those lessons like a dyslexic, like someone disadvantaged, Job Corps material, volunteer Army, Operation Headstart—all broke-will, underfunded, bust-hope beneficiary. God’s little own welfare cheat. I had no aptitude for what was finally just another inscrutably foreign language to me and not the ordinary, conversational vulgate of God Himself. The superheroes in those comic books had more reality for me than all the biblical luminaries and shoguns in Pentateuch. And this is who He chooses to ride shotgun for Him in New Jersey?

  As my thirteenth birthday approached my teachers started to sweat. My haphtarah, the passage from Prophets that bar mitzvah boys read for their bar mitzvahs, was too long for my poor skills, and they postponed the ceremony for three months, finding another haphtarah for me, the shortest of the year. All the time plotting, conspiring with His sense of the dramatic, arranging His improbable, mysterious scenarios, having taken the secular kid from the secular Chicago family—which, when it came right down to it, was probably more Chicago than Jewish—and putting him through paces that he never understood—that he was never interested enough to understand—finally bar mitzvahing the kid, the bozo Jew, to less than rave reviews, and getting ready to uncork the real and final miracle—to give me, just me, a calling, passing over my classmates, the bona fide buchers, those little ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old keepers of the flame to whom Hebrew script did not look like the business end of so many heavy, old-fashioned keys. (Let alone worry about the problem of God, being at that stage in my theological development where whether He sported a long white beard was still an issue.)

  So I became a man on the Shabbes of the year’s shortest haphtarah passage, and if I felt any different it was strictly in a material way. The newfangled invitations had done their job. My bar mitzvah attracted over two hundred and fifty people. Family and close friends, of course, but a sort of papered house of the more distantly connected—the rabbi, big shots from the temple, my dad’s bosses and colleagues, his competitors and customers, certain featured gentiles (you could not, in those days, even think of throwing a big affair without their little ecumenical presence), my ma’s cleaning lady, everyone, possibly, for whom they could obtain a good address. I did all right. I did better than all right. I cleaned up. Because now, in those boom times, a spinoff of the spinoff, checks and money began to come in envelopes tricked out like little paper billfolds and later, in the hotel, it was practically de rigueur to slip a bar mitzvah kid—or a bridegroom, or a bride—his gift in one of them, working it into a handshake or a pocket of the kid’s suit, throwing maybe a wink into the mix and making the cloak-and-dagger razzle-dazzler’s or card sharp’s or pickpocket-in-reverse’s almost invisible feints. It was a sight to see. Really. A sight to see. The way one moment some guy you weren’t even sure you knew might be brushing your lapel for you and the next you felt the flap on a pocket of your suitcoat lifted and heard the soft susurrus of money changing not hands but actual clothing. It might have looked vulgar for a freshly decreed all-grown-up man to go around like that, paper hanging from him like the tags on new ready-to-wear, except that every so often my mother or father came up to take my envelopes to hold for me. I pulled in over eight hundred 1949 dollars. (Question, Rabbi: Which is more vulgar, if the proceeds from a bar mitzvah exceed or do not meet expenses? Answer: I’m here to tell you this isn’t even a good question. First of all, a man who throws an affair with a view toward making money from it has to be out of his head. Consider the price of the hall, the cost of the catering. Don’t forget what they charge for flowers, don’t forget what you give for a band. And what about those fancy invitations, what about the postage to send them, the stamps for the RSVPs? Plus you have to remember the incidentals. Also there’s an ostentatious element that takes pleasure in outspending the guests. That’s only happy if the numbers make no sense at all, if the very idea of cost effectiveness is thrown out altogether. Admittedly, this has always been a distinct minority, never higher than a couple of percent. For the vast majority of us, the money outlay is only the necessary expense of doing business and the real payoff and genuine pleasure come from showcasing the kid. It’s the kid’s day, his or hers, he or she, whoever’s up to bat that Saturday. I’ll go out on a limb here
. I’ll tell you that maybe not the majority but many of us, many of us would just as soon put by showbiz and do away with the shindig part of it entirely and close down after the kid says his piece in the temple. So vulgar? Sure, if love is vulgar.—And this is the lesson of the rabbi!

  (Who was not a rabbi yet and who’s still trying to explain the roundabouts of his mysterious calling.)

  Speaking of whom, well, it was the rabbi himself who came up to me, us, me and the older cousin with whom I was slow dancing, the parents and grandparents watching, taking it all in how yesterday’s klutz and this morning’s man had lickety-split discovered sex, beaming, getting their money’s worth from the showcased kid. First I thought he wanted to move us apart, then that he meant to cut in. Then—oh, youth’s tender, indiscriminate imperialism that assumes such tribute—merely that he had forgotten to give me my present and couldn’t wait for the band to stop playing to make amends. Which would he be, I wondered in the split second he’d left me to consider the question, a handshake stuffer or a mock valet?

  “Jerry,” he said. “Miss,” he told the girl, “please. Excuse us.”

  “Oh, Rabbi Wolfblock,” I said, “you didn’t have to. Don’t you remember? You already gave me The Illustrated History of the Tallith.”

  He guided me to a chair at an unoccupied table. “Jerome, you impressed me this morning. The broches could have melted in your mouth.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi.”

  “No, I mean it. I think you could have done it even if I hadn’t written it all out for you in English.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi.”

  “You used your extra months to advantage.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi.”

  “One good turn deserves another. You know this expression?”

  “Of course, Rabbi.”

  “Good boy,” Rabbi Wolfblock said. The band finished a set and some of the people whose table we occupied had started to drift back but were pulled up short when Wolfblock held up his hand. “A moment, friends,” he said, and turned back and lowered his voice. “What you have to understand, Jerry, is that I’m the fellow who found that eensy miniscripture for you that we waited for it to come round like people waiting on a solstice.”

  “I know that, Rabbi.”

  “Jerry,” he said, “that some thirteen-year-old pisher becomes a man when he’s bar mitzvah is only a legalism. With all due respect it’s probably a holdover from the time before penicillin when most people didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of making it past twenty-nine and were already middle-aged by the time they were eighteen. Methuselah lived nine hundred years? Days is more like it. Weeks! Listen, Jerry, Jewish people practically invented cancer and heart conditions. And what about anti-Semitism? That had to shave something off the life expectancy. And those momzers weren’t fooling around. I’m not talking about country clubs you couldn’t get into or nasty jokes in the observation car with ‘kike’ in the punchline. They violated the women and children and shot to kill. So of course little boys got to go around like their seniors. Of course they did. A legal fiction.—In a minute, friends.

  “Rabbi Wolfblock doesn’t say these things to make you feel bad. To make you feel bad? When he scoured Torah to find your itty-bitty portion? Was that to make you feel bad? No, it was so an ignorant, backward boy could be bar mitzvah like anybody else and have a nice affair with a band and lovely presents and a bunch of strangers to cheer him on to remember all his life. Jerry, promise me.”

  He recruited me, a thing someone with my record of rotten attendance and demonstrably lousy skills could never, had no right ever to, have expected, for his minyan.

  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? W
ell, 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.