The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “You could have gotten away anytime. You could have pretended to visit Madeline and flown out to see me. This was always possible.”

  “But I didn’t, Walter. And here I am now. Stuck inside this crazy riddle.”

  “It seems that way, doesn’t it? Look—you have turmeric on your fingers.”

  She’elah: In the world of men and women, which is stronger: Love or Torah?

  Teshuvah: As it is written, many waters cannot extinguish love. Human love is bounded by choice; Torah is unbounded by interpretation. Love can birth generations, while Torah breeds infinite words that contradict each other for generations.

  Rosalie is scheduled to fly home on Sunday night. She and Walter wait until Sunday morning to attack their assignment; they write as if they share one mind, finishing each other’s sentences. Rosalie thinks of the congregants’ geometry of faith and she makes up a story about a hardened man who sheds a tear made of light that saves an entire village from a flood. She sets the scene in prewar Poland and calls it a Hasidic tale. The words of the Ishbitzer that Rosalie learned from her father court Walter’s theories of the eternal return. Together they invent little astonishments as if Madame Sylvie is in the studio with them. As they write, Walter and Rosalie sniff palmfuls of turmeric root. They travel the world with real and fictional spiritual masters whose words will allow Sol to linger a while longer in the holy paneled sanctuary of Temple Briar Wood.

  Once the sermons are drafted, they embellish them with lines from Thoreau, Emerson, Rilke, Rumi, and Native American lore. Walter offers phrases from Tagore’s poetry and Rosalie stuffs the words into the near-finished sermons as if she is arranging raisins in a babka. Aphorisms fly out of their mouths like fireworks and Rosalie jots them in the margins. God cannot be pinned down but peeks about in the shadows between one person and another. We are fully alive when we embrace our potential to be transformed. The meaning of a single human life cannot be decoded, only reinterpreted. The body teaches the soul its necessity. May the garden path of your life be rimmed with fresh growth! Find your boundaries, push apart their seams, and morph into butterflies!

  Walter places the pages in a purple binder and labels it SOL’S WISDOM.

  “We now have a book of our own,” he says. “To prove that the body does not tell our entire story.”

  Rosalie arrives home six days before the Selichot service, when the first prayers of forgiveness and redemption are chanted at midnight as a prelude to Rosh Hashanah. She hands her husband the purple binder, its pages darkened with typescript and ink. Sol opens to a random page, holds it to his nose, and sniffs.

  “I’m grateful,” he says. “In more ways than I can explain.”

  When Sol delivers his first speech from the binder, the words tumble from his lips with ease. He feels lighter, younger, beloved. Congregants gaze at him, surprised at first, and then attentive. After the first speech Missy Samuels says to Rosalie, “What have you done to him? He’s come alive.”

  At night Sol sits at his desk and pores over the words in the purple binder. The first page is labeled THIS IS NOT A SERMON and contains a single, typed paragraph.

  For rabbis, words are tools, as ordinary as dinner utensils. Metaphors are knives that need to be sharpened when they become blunt; words of commentary are ladled out with serving pieces that extract meaning with precision and grace. The entire biblical canon is a stew that can be stirred again and again, flavors adjusted for taste, spices added for new effect. Let the words of this binder inspire you to reach for new sensations and glorious delights.

  Just when Sol thinks he has found all the aphorisms Walter and Rosalie stuffed into the sermons, he uncovers random jottings in the margins. Unfulfilled longings become an altar for faith. Empty days are eyelashes that fall to the earth with God’s tears. Our lives are the storybooks and God is the Eternal Reader. We wrap our faith around a yearning for God, and this human yearning forms a silken pillow where God rests on Shabbat and dreams of us. Sol reads interpretations and stories that he never could have conjured himself. In one, the gleanings of the field in the Book of Ruth are not made of barley, but symbolize the small courtesies of human discourse—please, thank you, excuse me—that we toss around like leftover sheaves of grain. In another, a village baker and his wife long for a baby. As the baker’s wife prays, her tears fall into a bowl of yeast that bubbles like a small geyser, and she forms this mixture into a dough that pulses like a heartbeat. A woman passes through town, buys challah baked from this brew and nine months later gives birth to Elijah the prophet. When Elijah is an old man, he meets the elderly village bakers and blesses them with eternal life. Sol wonders if Rosalie learned this story from her father or if Walter translated it from a Hindu legend and replaced chapatti with challah.

  When Sol delivers the words from the purple binder the syllables roll off his tongue and he feels as if he is soaring beyond the confines of his body. The lines make him feel endowed, charged, replenished. Such meaningful sermons, says Missy Samuels. I’ve never been so moved. With the help of the words in the binder and a psychiatrist who prescribes Elavil for his depression, Sol tells Rosalie that at last he is healed, thank God, just in time for his contract to be renewed.

  At the end of October, Sol asks Rosalie for another round of material.

  “But you’re better now. You don’t need help. And the holidays are finished. Such a relief, isn’t it?”

  “I have too many regulars now. They are in love with the words you wrote, Rosalie. God knows their affection is not directed toward me.”

  “I’m not going back to Berkeley,” says Rosalie. “It’s too hard.”

  “But you must, sweetheart. Do you realize what’s happening here? The two of you are making me into a rabbi again!”

  “I can’t explain this, Sol. It’s complicated and I’m so confused—”

  “Trust me. Once more. For me. For us. For all of us.”

  Rosalie believes that if she visits Walter now, she will never return. She wants to vanish into his studio and move her body across the futon like a snake in the desert. She wants to stand under a rain of turmeric and dye her limbs yellow. She wants to feed Adelaide and Liberace peanuts from her hands. She wants not to drive her children anywhere, not to be asked what she plans to cook for Shabbat, not to dress in a skirt and pretend to pray in a synagogue.

  But when she is alone with Walter, she feels as if she has departed this world and inhabits a distant planet. She misses the antics of her sons, and the synagogue seems like a forgotten dream. When she lies in his arms, she often thinks about the congregants, these intimate strangers who make her feel tethered to something outside of her own confusion, and she relaxes. She likes to ponder their delicate geometry of faith, and consider what they truly need: Serena needs a little astonishment that speaks to the body, something that will bite her behind the knees when she least expects it. Nadine needs to know that the politician she loves will find another woman and she will survive the loss. Delia needs a prayer of healing that she can repeat like a mantra during chemotherapy. Marv needs to marry his son’s teacher. And Missy Samuels needs to wear less makeup and quit her job as a Weight Watchers group leader.

  Rosalie knows more about these people than Sol ever could. When Delia began chemo, Rosalie delivered casseroles to her house. When Bev’s father collapsed for the last time, Sol sent Rosalie to accompany Bev to the hospital so she would not be alone when he died. He was the love of my life, said Bev. My only family. When Serena sat shiva for her mother, Rosalie delivered the cold cuts and searched Serena’s kitchen drawers for the meat silverware, the Saran wrap, and the garbage bags. Know where a woman stores her Jell-O molds, thinks Rosalie, and you will understand the contours of her heart.

  If she is away, Rosalie won’t be around to take the pulse of the congregants, look out for their well-being. The loyalists of Temple Briar Wood would be alone with their Elavilled rabbi who would be mute to their longings. They would come to shul and wait for Sol to speak, hop
ing for a word or a phrase they could grasp tightly when they woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night, wondering how and who and why this life instead of all the other possibilities.

  “I will go,” she says. “For two nights.”

  “Ten speeches.”

  “No promises.”

  This time Rosalie takes a taxi directly to Walter’s studio, where Liberace and Adelaide greet her like an old friend.

  “We work first,” says Rosalie. Books are scattered all over the floor: Rumi, Tagore, Heschel, anthologies of American poetry, Hindu scriptures, Kabbalah, Hasidic tales, and world mythology. Rosalie takes a seat and eagerly digs in. Together she and Walter move their fingers across the pages like pianists, lingering on the phrases that could possibly resonate in the paneled sanctuary.

  “Here is one from the Chandogya Upanishad,” says Walter. “I first read this in Shantiniketan. Wind has no body. Clouds, thunder, and lightening have no body. But we are all gods, all fixed in a single self.”

  “That won’t play in Westchester. How about Rumi? We used one of his lines in the purple binder and they went wild for it.”

  What is the body? Endurance.

  What is love? Gratitude.

  What is hidden in our chests? Laughter.

  What else? Compassion.

  “Yes,” says Rosalie. “Rumi is good for my Jews.”

  “Here’s another,” says Walter. “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

  “Emily Dickinson! I learned that as a girl.”

  “And another: Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

  “Who wrote that?”

  “Abraham Joshua Heschel.”

  “My matchmaker,” says Rosalie. “When he lectured at YIVO, I sat between Sol and a man who reeked of sauerkraut. And everything began.”

  “My rebbetzin of the between places.”

  Rosalie smiles. “So it seems.”

  “I would have liked to meet Professor Heschel,” says Walter.

  “I believe we were otherwise occupied.”

  He places his hand on Rosalie’s neck and leans in for a kiss.

  “Not yet,” she says.

  “When?”

  “Let’s finish. Please.”

  Walter opens another book. “When a man and a woman unite, and their thought joins the beyond, that thought draws down the upper light.”

  “Iggeret ha-Kodesh. Thirteenth century. A steamy time, obviously.”

  “You didn’t learn that from your father.”

  “Nope.”

  Rosalie holds out her hand. “The rebbetzin’s learning comes from fountains the eye cannot discern.”

  Walter runs his finger along the rivers at the center of her palm.

  “My unwritten tractate,” she says.

  He licks her hand, lightly bites the tips of her fingers.

  “I want what you hold in here,” he says.

  Rosalie sighs. “I want and I want and I want—”

  For two days they move between the pages of the books, the sentences they compose, and the pages of their bodies, opening and closing and opening again on the studio floor. Just before her taxi arrives, Rosalie begins to cry.

  “I feel as if I’ve been dropped inside a riddle that’s impossible to solve,” she says.

  “One day it will make sense.”

  “You and your damn karma,” says Rosalie. “Just keep kissing me so I don’t think about how tawdry our little affair has become.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” she says.

  From his perch behind the lectern, Sol peers down at Rosalie in her front-row seat. He raises an eyebrow and delivers the words written for him, because of him, and despite him. When he needs to conjure an impromptu comment, Sol tosses his head, and Rosalie meets him at the steps to the bima and whispers words into his good ear.

  Rosalie gives Sol an explanation for everything. She invents proverbs and interpretations with the ease of Madame Sylvie dispensing little astonishments. She doesn’t need Walter to invoke pockets of wisdom. After he runs through the contents of the binder, Sol asks Rosalie to deliver a sermon of her own. She talks about the true meaning of their congregation, and she refers to the Briar Wood loyalists as her extended family, joined together in prayers and in hope. She asks them to look around the paneled sanctuary and behold one another. “Every one of you is a perfect work of nature,” she says. “Together we create a magnificent garden of dignity and courage. Together we will bravely strip away what clouds our inner joy. We will stand beside each other in this modest holy space, allow our time together to wipe away every pinch of sadness, every fleck of confusion.”

  The local Jewish weekly runs a story about the charismatic Kerems who have brought a synagogue to life through their teachings. A single photograph takes up a double-page spread: Sol sitting behind his desk, Rosalie in a slinky wrap dress, perched cross-legged at the edge, both of them beaming at the camera. She mails a copy of the article to Walter and he responds with a postcard: My work is complete then. The two of you have found your calling.

  Rosalie writes back: Don’t ever say that again.

  NEW SHANTINIKETAN

  July 1971

  Walter runs his fingers over the stamped cover of his latest book: Religious Themes in Tagore’s Poetry, Paul Richardson and Walter Westhaus, coeditors. He leafs through the pages he and Paul wrestled over for years. When Paul had translated a line from Gitanjali to read: “Thou art the sky and Thou art also the nest,” Walter changed it to read: “You are the heavens and You are the home.” Our partnership is impossible, Paul had said to him. I understand Bengali better than you ever will and I can’t revise your work. You are closer to the source than I am. Walter believes that he will always be Paul’s lost man, the refugee who followed him off the ship, the Jew who accepted an offer in India that was better than no offer at all.

  When he finishes reading Walter calls Paul.

  “Namaste.” The lilt of a sitar plays in the background.

  “I was rereading our Tagore,” says Walter. “We created something wonderful, didn’t we?”

  “That we did.”

  “I want to thank you for everything—”

  “Enough with the propriety, Walter! When are you coming to the ranch? Be my scholar in residence, comfort my more intellectual students with your prowess and reputation.” Walter doesn’t want to be Paul’s sidekick, but he is grateful for the offer. Since Rosalie’s last visit to Berkeley, Walter has felt bereft. He needs to get away from the confines of the studio that he now thinks of as their lovers’ den, their beit midrash, their hideaway sanctioned by the peacocks that now annoy Walter with their night cries and putrid droppings.

  “Think of Eden Ranch as a new Shantiniketan,” says Paul. “You can lie under a tree and dream your life into possibility.”

  The ranch is a seventy-acre desert wilderness overlooking a canyon, dotted with a single house, several tents, outhouses, and a trailer. Paul has set a circle of stones in a clearing and he calls this the amphitheater, the place where his students gather and listen to him speak about the power of juice fasting and the teachings of a Baba he met on his last trip to India. Over the years, Paul has morphed from a scholar into a guru. He has grown his hair long and after years of meditation practice, his left eye no longer twitches. His students call him a maharishi, and he lays marigold garlands at their necks.

  At dawn Paul and Walter patrol the perimeter of the ranch.

  “I don’t get it,” says Paul. “All these years later and your head is still in that spice sack. You’ve built an illustrious life and you’re still the vagabond I found in Bombay. There are ways to work through trauma, my friend.”

  “That was a long time ago,” says Walter.

  “Then why do you remain so disconnected? You carry on with models in your little studio and do nothing to secure your future.”

  “I wrote fi
ve books,” shouts Walter. “One of them with you! Find a tenured professor who’s published five books in ten years and still sketches and makes love to women with generosity and care and—”

  Paul laughs. “You don’t need to tell me the details of your prowess.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You have scattered yourself. Nothing perpetuated from those bones.” Paul stops walking and strokes Walter’s cheek. “I have always loved you,” he says.

  “I know,” says Walter.

  “And I saved you.”

  “In a way, yes. I’m grateful.”

  “We go back a long way. Longer than you may even realize. And when you are gone from this world, the university will keep your name alive in an archive and the library will stock your books, but you pass nothing down. It’s such a loss.”

  “Where is this coming from, Paul? What happened to your karmic perspective?”

  “Giselle is pregnant.”

  “Giselle?”

  “A student. Like you were once. I found her in India.”

  “Another stray you adopted?”

  “Giselle is my life, Walter. As are you. And yes, our child is my future.”

  Sol’s contract has been renewed. Nathan tells him that he has become a good enough rabbi and that the congregants will fill in the gaps between what he provides and what they need. It’s not perfect, you’re not perfect, but we have a history together and we’ll work it out. Sol wakes early and jogs through the streets of Briar Wood before morning services. As he runs Sol tests his memory of the words in the purple binder: What is the body? Endurance. What is love? Gratitude. He laces the invented Hasidic stories with his own proverbs and tries his hand at writing little astonishments.

  Sol imagines Walter beside him, playing a round of she’elah and teshuvah.

  Who is an inadequate rabbi?

  An illusion cannot be measured. There is only inadequate faith.

  Is there any illusion greater than faith?

  One cannot ask this of a rabbi. The rabbi will say, “Yes, of course faith is an illusion.” But no one will believe him.