Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  “I’ve got supper for two, Rabbi,” young Avrum said, wheeling in the cart. He proceeded to name the food as he placed it on the table in plain sight. “Hummus, tabbouleh, poached salmon, potato salad, cucumber salad, pita.”

  “And what to drink?” asked Goldfarb, though a pitcher of iced tea stood before him. Zach understood then that his mentor was blind.

  “Iced tea. But we also have lemonade. Or juice if you prefer.”

  “Tea is fine. And for dessert? At my age, anticipation is half the pleasure.”

  “Rugelach and halvah.”

  “Metzuyan! Mr. Katz. Excellent!”

  The boy appeared to be eleven or twelve, but he had to be at least thirteen or Rabbi wouldn’t be calling him by his surname. The moment when Zach became Mr. Levy was one of the high points of his life. He was on the bimah in his new blue suit, having just completed his Torah reading and his bar mitzvah speech. Rabbi was gripping both his shoulders and looking down on him—down because Zach was barely five feet tall at the time—before bestowing on him the traditional priestly blessing. In stentorian tones, Goldfarb had proclaimed, “Until today, you were Zach. Until today, your father and mother were responsible for your actions. But from this day forward, you are Mr. Levy and from this day forward, you are to be responsible for yourself. May you always bring nachas—great pride and pleasure—to your parents and your people. May the Lord bless you and keep you . . .” Rabbi had spread open his voluminous tallis, stretched it out over Zach’s head, and invoked the blessing, and when he finished, as was the custom of the congregation, everyone had shouted “Mazel tov!” and pelted him with wrapped candies, symbols of the sweetness of the day. Zach’s heart had raced with joy and relief, but he had not laughed, or lunged after the sweets, because he wasn’t a boy anymore, he was a man, a son of the commandments. He was Mr. Zachariah Levy.

  Young Avrum was backing out of the room when the rabbi said, “Mr. Katz, you may be interested to know that Mr. Levy’s parasha was Mishpatim. Do you happen to recall the subject of that Torah portion?”

  “Civil and ritual legislation,” squeaked the boy.

  “Exactly. So, isn’t it interesting that Mr. Levy grew up to be a lawyer?”

  “Very interesting,” murmured Avrum. “I’ll be right outside, Rabbi,” he added as he closed the door.

  Zach marveled. The Torah is divided into fifty-four portions, Eleazar Goldfarb had tutored God knows how many hundreds of students, yet he remembered the portion Zach had chanted twenty-seven years ago and the fact that he had become a lawyer. Between the rabbi and his wife, who never forgot anyone’s name, the Goldfarbs could start a memory course. Thinking fondly of the tall, smiling rebbetzin, Zach asked after her.

  The old man shook his head. “Gone five years, my Malka, may she rest in peace.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry,” Zach said, though he was more than sorry, he was devastated.

  The rabbi rubbed his eyes. “So tragic, so gratuitous. She cut her hand opening a can—wouldn’t go to the doctor. You remember my Malka, never a complaint, never anything for herself—and the wound got infected. She died of septic shock. I wasn’t blind then, Mr. Levy, but I was too busy, too distracted.”

  Zach mumbled his condolences. Conjuring the rebbetzin, he recalled her big laugh, the extra squeeze in her hug, the niggunim she hummed as she wheeled in her cart, her long strides across the patterned carpet. Above all, he recalled, with considerable discomfort, his boyhood fantasy about her, about which he’d always felt guilty, not because it was erotic, but because it was disloyal. He used to fantasize that Rebbetzin Malka was his mother.

  “Enough with my tsuris, Mr. Levy,” said the rabbi. “Clearly, you’ve got troubles of your own. Speak, please. I’m here to listen.”

  His eyes were blank, but his concentration was palpable. After Zach finished describing his dilemma, Goldfarb was silent for quite some time before he answered: “A great sage once asked his pupils to define dawn, that moment when we recognize that light has overcome darkness. One of his students immediately replied, ‘Dawn is when you can see well enough to tell a goat from a donkey.’ Another ventured, ‘Dawn is when it is light enough to distinguish a palm tree from a fig tree.’ A third said, ‘When you can tell a cart from a carriage.’

  “With each student’s reply, the great sage shook his head until eventually, the class gave up. ‘Dawn,’ said their teacher, ‘is when you can look into the face of another human being and see your brother. Until then, all is darkness.’”

  Come again? What was Zach supposed to deduce from that? Did Rabbi mean brother as in brotherhood, or was Zach supposed to literally look into Terrell’s face and see Yitzhak? Neither reading jived with the commandment that Goldfarb had drummed into his students’ heads twice a week at this very table: “In their ways you shall not walk.” In other words, Jews were supposed to be proudly particularist and Judaism shouldn’t be seen as a universalist movement. Unless Zach was missing something, the parable about dawn counseled the opposite.

  “May I serve you dinner, Rabbi?” was all he managed to say.

  “If you please, Mr. Levy. A little of everything but heavy on the hummus.”

  Somehow, once the plate of food was set before him, the old man transported each forkful of tabbouleh to his mouth without dropping a single grain. One could almost forget he was blind, but because his eyes were opaque, Zach experienced a kind of reflective blindness. It was like trying to read sign language from behind a screen. “I’m sorry, Rabbi, but could you clarify the moral of the parable? Are you saying I should accept Terrell even if he’s not Jewish and never will be?”

  “Who said never?”

  “His mother. When she first told me she was pregnant, I asked if the baby could be converted. She said never.”

  “Only God knows never, Mr. Levy.”

  Zach shook his head in frustration. “At this point, I really need concrete advice, Rabbi. Yesterday, I spent hours at the HUC library and was hard-pressed to find two sources that agreed on the matter. Listen to this.” He pulled out his notepad and read from it, “One scholar writes, ‘A Jewish parent who raises his or her child as a non-Jew is finishing Hitler’s work.’ The next scholar says, ‘Jews give Hitler a posthumous victory every time we permit a belief system—any belief system, even if it’s Judaism—to become more important than a human being.’ So what’s the least terrible thing I can do? Reject my son or raise a Christian?”

  The rabbi frowned like an angry god. “I find it obscene that anyone would give Adolph Hitler a role in a Jew’s decision-making. But now that the Nazis have been brought into our discussion, let’s go back to the guard who killed your brother. For argument’s sake, suppose he had given your mother a choice: to let Yitzhak be raised as a Christian or to keep him Jewish and let him be killed. Which do you think she would have chosen?”

  Without Rabbi’s eyes in play, Zach couldn’t read his intent but the answer was obvious. “My mother would have done anything to save Yitzhak.”

  “B’vadai,” said Goldfarb. “Of course.” He stopped to finish his poached salmon. “Rather than agree to stop teaching Torah, the great sage, Akiva, chose to be tortured to death. But in general, God seems to prefer survival to martyrdom. There’s a reason why the core commandment of Judaism is, ‘Choose life.’ Your brother is dead. Your son is alive. Big difference. Today your son belongs to them, tomorrow he could be ours. As it is said, ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope.’”

  The old man must be losing it, grief can do that to a person, but Zach hadn’t come here for clichés and he wasn’t interested in talking about death and martyrdom. If by “choose life,” Goldfarb meant choose Terrell, why didn’t he come right out and say it? Exasperated, Zach watched the rabbi feel around the surface of his desk for his fountain pen and guiding his right hand with his left to keep the words from running over each other, scribble something on one corner of his desk blotter. Zach was pretty good at reading English upside down, but Hebrew was hard to decip
her even rightside up. Goldfarb tore off the corner of the blotter and slipped it under a paperweight.

  “I’m not following you, Rabbi. Can you be more specific?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Levy. Two thousand years ago, a dilemma not unlike yours was put to our sages. The wise men began their deliberations, as poskim do, with a mode of thought called l’chatchila. Literally, l’chatchila translates as ‘in the first place,’ but its applied meaning is, ‘the proper way to do something.’ For example, the proper way to stir a meat sauce is with a meat spoon, not a dairy spoon. This rule stems from God’s commandment that we must not bathe a calf in its mother’s milk, which has been interpreted as a prohibition against the mixing of meat and dairy, a basic tenet of kashrut.”

  As the old man rambled on, Zach sank deeper into despair. What did the Jewish dietary laws have to do with Terrell? Still, he listened respectfully as his teacher amplified the story. “One day, a poor housewife came to the wise men and told them she had used a dairy spoon to stir her meat sauce, maybe in error, maybe her meat spoon was broken or one of her children had misplaced it. Whatever the reason, the woman asked the sages if she might be permitted to serve her family the meat sauce even though it had been contaminated by the dairy spoon. She knew she was supposed to throw out the sauce and start over, but she had run out of meat and couldn’t afford to buy more. The sages knew they were entrusted with enforcing the laws of kashrut, but they also knew the woman was poor and her children were hungry so they struggled mightily to save her dinner. You might say, they had the will to find a way to resolve her dilemma. Which they did. By shifting from l’chatchila to an alternate mode of thinking called b’diavad, which means ‘after the fact.’ They decided after the fact that, because the dairy spoon had not been used for hot dairy food within the last twenty-four hours, its contact with the meat did not render the sauce unkosher.”

  Zach’s patience was nearly gone. “I’m afraid I don’t see what a dairy spoon has to do with my son. With all due respect, Rabbi, my time is running out.”

  “For me, too. For all of us.”

  “Please! Just tell me what I should do.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Levy, but should is not helpful. Should ignores the housewife’s humiliation, her children’s hunger, the shortage of meat and money. The sages didn’t think ‘should,’ they asked ‘how.’ They understood the complexity of the human condition. They had rachmoness, pity, compassion.”

  “Rabbi, okay! So I’m asking, how? How can I keep my son and also keep my promise?”

  Goldfarb closed his eyes and stroked his beard as old men often do when they’re thinking, or when they’re not sure whether to say what they really think. He opened his gray eyes and faced Zach. “What exactly was your promise to your mother?”

  “I told you. To do my part for Jewish survival.”

  “Define Jewish survival.”

  “Raising Jewish children. Don’t you want me to raise Jewish children?”

  Rabbi touched the tips of his fingers together. “How Jewish?”

  “Enough to carry our heritage forward.”

  “Tell me something, Mr. Levy, how many Jews do you know who are carrying our heritage forward? How many are equipped to teach our tradition to their children? I myself know a half dozen Friedmans and Cohens who might as well be Fords or Carnegies for all they care about our heritage. If you’ll pardon my rudeness, you can trace your genes back to Moses and Aaron, but can you carry our heritage from here to the bus stop?”

  Zach winced.

  The rabbi pressed on. “One man in my congregation got a PhD in French but can’t be bothered learning Hebrew; a woman reads Foreign Affairs but wouldn’t deign to dip into the Talmud. I know Blumbergs and Steinbergs who make time in their busy lives to memorize wine vintages and perfect their golf swings or tennis serves but can’t find an hour a week to study Torah. You might want to ask those people to carry our heritage before you lay it on one little boy.”

  Nothing convoluted about that message, Zach thought. “You’re right, I’m in no position to ask anyone else to do what I don’t do myself.”

  “Ahhh,” it was more like a breath than a word. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, Goldfarb asked Zach if he remembered the story about Rabbi Hillel and the man who wanted to learn the whole Torah while standing on one leg.

  “Of course, every Jew knows that story. Hillel summarizes the Torah by saying, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.’ You gave a sermon on it at my bar mitzvah.”

  “Thank you for remembering that, but do you remember who Hillel was talking to and what was actually going on in that scene? Think about it. The man made a seemingly frivolous demand. He challenged the great sage to teach him the entirety of a complex legal and ethical system in the length of time that he, the man, could stand on one foot, which, unless you’re a Yogi, most people can’t do for very long. But did Hillel ridicule him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he turn his back on him or send him away?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t you think the great Hillel had better things to do at that moment? After all, he was the towering Judaic intellectual of his time, right? He must have had acolytes to advise, tasks to accomplish, texts awaiting his amplification. He must have been a busy man, yes?”

  Zach couldn’t imagine where Goldfarb was taking this. “Yes, very busy.”

  “Yet he not only took the man’s request seriously, he formulated that pithy, epigrammatic summation of Judaism’s essence with such exquisite clarity that we still quote him to this day. Why would he bother?”

  Zach pondered the question but came up blank. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember who the man was, Mr. Levy?”

  “Sorry, no.” Zach felt he was about to be flunked.

  “He was a prospective convert, a gentile who doubted that our Torah had anything to offer him. He was essentially daring Hillel to prove to him that Judaism was worth joining. Our great sage took the time to distill the whole Torah into one pure principle so that the doubter would understand what we’re about and what he was missing.”

  The sun had dropped below the windowsill, tinting the curtains ocher and gilding the walls. “That’s a beautiful drash,” Zach said. “I wish I could come up here every week and resume my studies with you, Rabbi, I really do, but right now I’m desperate. I have to give Cleo my answer by midnight.”

  “What’s the question again?”

  “What’s the question?”

  As if he’d seen Zach’s eye roll, Goldfarb said, “I know it’s aggravating, but I’d like to hear you restate the issue you’ve been wrestling with for the last five days.”

  Zach couldn’t leave, couldn’t eat and run, had to wait until the Sabbath prayers were over. “The question is . . .” He built his reply slowly, in layers. “. . . should I take Terrell, or not? Should I raise him, even if he never becomes a Jew? Is it okay for a Jewish father to raise a Christian child? Should I remember my promise or forget my history?”

  “Remember! Forget!” The old man’s face beamed with pleasure. “That reminds me of the wonderful Jorges Luis Borges story about the man who falls from his horse, lands on his head, and discovers, when he regains consciousness, that he now has a perfect memory. Everything that happened before—every grape he’d ever pressed into wine, every cloud in the sky on a particular morning, every detail of every dream, every word anyone ever said to him—he remembered to the last detail. And he continued to remember everything that happened from then on. At first, this seemed like a marvelous gift, but before long, the man had accumulated so many memories he became paralyzed with the weight of them, and for the rest of his life, he could never again leave his bed.”

  Rabbi scooped some hummus on a pita and ate it without messing up his beard, his plate, or the table. “Jews are good at remembering,” he continued. “We’re always harking back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel; and reminding ourselves that we w
ere slaves in Egypt. Always recalling the bad with the good: Amalek and Haman, the destruction of the Temple, the Strasbourg Massacre, Kishinev, Auschwitz, Treblinka. For Jews, memory isn’t just history, it’s us.

  “Everyone dreads dementia because without memory, and memories, we are severed from the past. We lose our dignity and our legacy. You know this all too well from watching your father’s lively mind evaporate into thin air. But God doesn’t want us to remember everything. Too many memories—all the slights, wounds, even vows—weigh a person down. That’s why we’ve also been blessed with the ability to forget.”

  If only, Zach thought. Memory hadn’t paralyzed him yet but he felt it pressing down on him every day of his life.

  Goldfarb washed down his meal with his iced tea. “You asked me if you should take the boy. I don’t think that’s the real question. I think the real question is: What’s more important to you, the happiness of your child or the continuity of your people?”

  That’s what I’m asking YOU! Zach wanted to shout. His watch said 8:01 p.m. Twelve more minutes until candle lighting, then he would leave. For the next twelve minutes, he would control himself, not lose his temper, not scream when his teacher went off on a tangent, or spoke in circles, or answered questions with questions. For twelve minutes, he would study the design in the Persian carpet and think about Rebbetzin Malka.

  “Mr. Levy? Your hand, please?”

  Glancing up, Zach was astonished to see the old man reaching for him. He took his teacher’s hand and trembled at the sight of their interwoven fingers. Affection had always been the province of the rebbetzin; Rabbi never touched his students except to bless them.

  “As you’ve been pondering your dilemma over the last few days, Mr. Levy, I’m sure your parents, may they rest in peace, have been in your thoughts. I’m thinking about them right now. I wasn’t just their rabbi, you know. I was their friend and privy to their sorrow. I know how much they loved you—both of them, though your mama couldn’t show it—and I’m sure they dreamed of a long line of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come after them. But I also know that they would no sooner have you be haunted by their dreams than by their nightmares.”