The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  Leslie sat down. “You mean you will take me?” she asked faintly.

  He nodded. Ah, she thought, what can I do now?

  She met with him on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He talked and she listened, more carefully than she had listened in her most difficult lecture course at college, asking no idle questions, interrupting only when it was vital to get his explanation.

  He outlined for her the fundamental principles of the religion. “I will not teach the language,” he said. “New York is full of Hebrew teachers. If you wish, go to one of them.” In The Times she saw an advertisement which brought her to the 92nd Street YMHA, and that took care of Wednesday evenings. Her Hebrew teacher was a worried-looking young Ph.D. candidate at Yeshiva University. His name was Mr. Goldstein and he ate his supper in the cafeteria below the classroom, always the same thing, she noticed, a cream cheese-and-olive on toast and a cup of black coffee. Total: thirty cents. The cuffs of his shirt were frayed and she knew that his supper was modest because he couldn’t afford more. Her own well-filled tray by comparison always seemed gluttony to her, and for a couple of weeks she tried cutting down, but the class lasted two hours and then she went to another lecture down the hall, this one on Jewish history, and she found that unless she ate well she became dizzy with hunger.

  Mr. Goldstein took his teaching seriously and the evening students were giving up valuable spare time, so they were well-motivated. One of the students, a middle-aged woman, came to only one session and then dropped out. The other fourteen members of the class learned the thirty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet in a week. By the third week they were taking turns saying aloud the silly short sentences of their limited Hebrew vocabularies.

  “Rabi ba,” Leslie read, and translated, “My rabbi is coming,” with such exultation that the teacher and class stared.

  But when it was again her turn to read aloud, the exercise was: Mi rabi? Ahbah rabi. “Who is my rabbi? My father is my rabbi,” she translated. She sank quickly into her chair, and when she again glanced at the book it was as though she were looking at the page through milk glass.

  Rabbi Gross was not an old man, she realized one evening as she listened to his voice tell her about idols and warn her that the Christian finds it extremely difficult to visualize a God without an image. But he looked and acted old. Moses himself could not possibly have appeared sterner. Now, as he glanced over her shoulder at her notebook, his mouth tightened.

  “Never write the name of God. Always write G–d. This is very important. It is one of the commandments that His name should not be taken in vain.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There are so many rules.” Her eyes filled. He looked away in disgust and resumed his pacing, his voice droning on, while the knuckles of his right hand gently slapped the palm of his left hand behind his back.

  When she had been studying with him for thirteen weeks he told her one evening that she would be converted on the following Tuesday; unless, he suggested delicately, for any reason she could not undergo immersion in the ritual baths on that day.

  “Already?” she asked wonderingly. “But I haven’t studied for very long. I know so little.”

  “Young woman, I did not say that you were a learned scholar. But you have absorbed enough information to become a Jew. An ignorant Jew. If you want to be an educated Jew, that is something you will have to arrange by yourself as time goes on.” His eyes softened and the tone of his voice altered. “You are a very hard-working girl. You did well.”

  He gave her the address of the mikva and some preliminary instructions. “Do not wear jewelry. No bandages, not even a corn plaster. Your nails should be cut short. Nothing, not even a wisp of cotton in your ear, should keep the waters from touching every outer cell of your body.”

  By Friday she had a continually nervous stomach. She didn’t know how long the ceremonies would take, so she decided to plan on being away from the office the entire day.

  “Phil,” she said to Brennan, “I need Tuesday off.”

  He looked at her wearily and then at the pile of unclipped papers. “Holy Mother, our ass is dragging as it is.”

  “It’s important.”

  He knew all the important reasons why female researchers needed the day off. “Grandmother’s funeral?”

  “No, I’m becoming a Jew and Tuesday is my conversion.”

  He opened his mouth to say something and then began to roar. “Jesus,” he said, “I was going to say no, but how can I cope with a mind like that?”

  Tuesday was gray. She had allowed too much time and she arrived fifteen minutes early at the synagogue where the mikva was located. The rabbi was a middle-aged man, bearded like Rabbi Gross but much gentler and very cheerful. He showed her a seat in his office.

  “I was just having coffee,” he said. “Let me give you a cup.”

  She started to refuse but then she smelled the coffee when he poured and it was good. When Rabbi Gross arrived he found them sitting and chatting like old friends. Another rabbi arrived a moment later, a younger man, unbearded.

  “We will be witnesses to your immersion,” Rabbi Gross said. He saw her face and laughed. “We will stay outside, of course. With the door open just a crack. So we can hear the splash when you enter the water.”

  They conducted her downstairs. The mikva was located in a one-story addition at the rear of the synagogue. In a dressing room they told her to make herself comfortable and to wait for someone named Mrs. Rubin. Then the rabbis went away.

  Leslie wanted to smoke but she wasn’t quite sure that it would be all right. The room was very depressing. It was small, with a wooden floor that creaked when you walked and a small braided rug that had been thrown in front of the little wooden dresser that stood against the wall. The dresser supported a mirror that had little yellow hemorrhages in the lower right corner and light blue hemorrhages in the upper right corner; it gave back a wavy, distorted image when she looked into it, like the mirrors in an amusement-park fun house. The only other furniture was a white-painted kitchen table and one kitchen chair, which she sat on. She was memorizing the nicks in the surface of the table when Mrs. Rubin came.

  Mrs. Rubin was gray and plump in a dry, rather nice way. She wore a house dress and a blue apron, and her shoes were medium-heeled black with the leather in each stretched out into two big bumps by bunions. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

  “All of them?”

  “Everything,” Mrs. Rubin said without smiling. “Do you know the brochas?”

  “Yes. At least I did a little while ago.”

  “I’ll leave them. You can look them over.” She took from her pocket a mimeographed slip of paper and placed it on the table, then she left the room.

  There were no hangers. Leslie draped her clothing over the back of the chair and sat down to wait. The seat of the chair was very smooth. She picked up the paper and looked at it.

  She was reviewing the brochas when Mrs. Rubin returned and took a small pair of nail clippers from the pocket of her apron. “Your hands,” she said.

  “I clipped them close myself,” Leslie said. She held them up with pride and Mrs. Rubin grasped them and from each finger snicked off another shaving of nail. She unfolded a clean bedsheet and draped it over Leslie’s nakedness, then handed her soap and a washcloth and led her through a door into a shower room with seven stalls.

  “Scrub, mine kind,” she said.

  Leslie hung the sheet from a hook on the wall and washed, even though she had showered with equal thoroughness in her own apartment the night before and then had soaked and scrubbed in her bathtub only two hours before coming to the mikva.

  Through another doorway as she washed she could see the surface of the pool, still and heavy as lead, gleaming under the yellow light of a naked bulb. In one of his lectures Rabbi Gross had told her that Jews had practiced ritual immersion for thousands of years before John the Baptist borrowed the rite. The waters of the mikva had to be natural waters; originally the ceremony had been
held in lakes and rivers. Since the modern need for privacy had driven the pool indoors, rainwater was collected in troughs on the roof and piped into a tiled tank. After a relatively short while this inert water grew stagnant and unappetizing, so another tank adjoined the first. Into this second pool continually fresh water was drawn from the city water supply and heated for comfort. A tiny plug in the wall separating the two tanks was removed each time the second pool had been filled with fresh water, allowing the waters in the pools to merge for a fraction of a second before the plug was replaced. This sanctified the city water without raising its bacteria count, Rabbi Gross had assured her. Nevertheless, glancing apprehensively at the surface of the pool as she scrubbed her body, Leslie admitted to herself that if the water appeared at all unclean she would not be able to go through with it.

  When she left the shower Mrs. Rubin was waiting. She reached into her apron pocket again and this time took out a small tortoise shell comb. She pulled it slowly through Leslie’s long hair, tugging gently when the comb hit a tangle. “There mustn’t be a single wet snarl to keep the water from your person,” she said. “Lift your arms.”

  Leslie complied submissively and the woman stared at her close-shaven armpits. “No hair,” she said, like a merchant taking inventory. Then Mrs. Rubin pointed with her forefinger and handed Leslie the comb.

  For a long moment, unbelieving, she could do nothing. “Is that really necessary?” she asked faintly.

  Mrs. Rubin nodded. Leslie wielded the comb without looking, feeling the blood in her cheeks and the tears behind her eyelids.

  “Come,” the woman said finally, hanging the bedsheet around her shoulders again.

  A black rubber runner led from the shower room to the pool. At the top of the three cement stairs leading down into the water, Mrs. Rubin stopped her. The old woman walked down the cement runway bordering the pool to the door at the far end of the tank. She opened it and stuck out her head. Leslie felt a draft from the door, which opened onto the back yard of the synagogue.

  “Yedst,” Mrs. Rubin called. “She is ready.”

  Leslie could hear the sound of the rabbis conversing in Yiddish as they approached the doorway. The woman left the door open just a crack and came back to her. “Do you want the paper with the prayers?”

  “I know the prayers,” Leslie said.

  “You must duck completely under the water and then say the prayers. It is the only time that a brocha is said after an act instead of before it. The reason is that the immersion cleanses you of all former religions, so that following it you are able to pray to God as a Jew. To make sure everything you got good and wet you will probably have to duck several times. You are not afraid of the water?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Good,” Mrs. Rubin said. She took the sheet.

  Leslie walked down the steps. The water was warm. In the middle of the pool it rose to a point just below the bottoms of her breasts. She stood for a moment and stared into it. It looked clean and clear, with a bottom of wavering white tile. She closed her eyes and sank down, holding her breath as she went to a sitting position and she felt against her haunches the crisscrossing grout lines of the tank’s tile floor. Then she stood up, sputtering a little, and recited the prayers in a voice that trembled.

  “Oh-main,” Mrs. Rubin chanted, and she could hear the amens of the rabbis behind the almost-closed door. Mrs. Rubin made a downward motion with both arms, like a football official signaling to the crowd, and Leslie submerged again, this time more confidently. It was so easy that she wanted to laugh. She sat in the water, her hair floating, and miraculously she felt purged of physical and spiritual weight, freed from the guilt of having lived twenty-two years as a human being. Washed in the blood of the Lamb, she thought giddily, and rose like a fish from the bottom. Listen, my children, she thought, and I will tell you the story of how Momma became a Jewish mermaid, and thereby hangs a tail. She said the brochas this time with more assurance, but Mrs. Rubin still wasn’t satisfied. The arms dropped again, and so did Leslie. On the third trip down she kept her eyes open, peering up at the glowing bulb hanging over the pool, sending its light through the waters to her warm and bright, like the eye of God. She broke the surface and stood there, panting a little, feeling her nipples grow in the cold draft that came through the crack in the door where the rabbis listened, and this time she said the prayers with gay certainty.

  “Mazel tov,” Mrs. Rubin said, and as Leslie climbed out of the pool, water streaming from her flanks, the old lady wrapped her in the bed sheet and kissed her on both cheeks.

  She stood in the rabbi’s study with her makeup washed off and her stringy hair coldly damp upon her neck, feeling as if she had just gone ten laps in the Davenport Pool at the college. The rabbi who had given her coffee smiled at her.

  “Wilt thou love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy might?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered, no longer gay.

  “And these words,” he said, “which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and thou shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thy house, and upon thy gates: that ye may remember and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God.”

  Rabbi Gross came to her and placed his hands upon her head.

  “In token of your admission into the household of Israel,” he said, “this rabbinical tribunal welcomes you by bestowing upon you the name of Leah bas Avrahom, by which you will henceforth be called in Israel.

  “May He, Who blessed our mothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, bless you our sister Leah bas Avrahom, on the occasion of your acceptance into the heritage of Israel and your becoming a true proselyte in the midst of the people of the God of Abraham. May you, under God, prosper in all your ways and may all the work of your hands be blessed. Amen.”

  Then the youngest rabbi handed her the conversion certificate and she read it:

  IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD

  AND OF THIS RABBINICAL TRIBUNAL

  I hereby declare my desire to accept the principles of Judaism, to adhere to its practices and ceremonies, and to become a member of the Jewish People.

  I do this of my own free will and with a full realization of the true significance of the tenets and practices of Judaism.

  I pray that my present determination guide me through life so that I may be worthy of the sacred fellowship which I am now privileged to join. I pray that I may ever remain conscious of the privileges and the corresponding duties that my affiliation with the House of Israel imposes upon me. I declare my firm determination to live a Jewish life and to conduct a Jewish home.

  If I shall be blessed with male children, I promise to have them brought into the Covenant of Abraham. I further promise to bring up all the children with whom God shall bless me in loyalty to Jewish beliefs and practices and in faithfulness to Jewish hopes and the Jewish way of life.

  Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!

  Blessed is His glorious sovereign Name forever.

  And she signed it with a hand that trembled no more than was justified, and the rabbis signed it as witnesses, and Mrs. Rubin kissed her again and she kissed the old lady back and she thanked the rabbis and they shook her hand. The youngest rabbi told her she was the best-looking conversion he ever expected to participate in, and they all laughed and she thanked them all again and left the synagogue. A wind blew and the sky was still gray. She felt unchanged but she knew that her life was going to be different from any existence she had ever dreamed for herself. For a moment, but only for a moment, she thought about her father and allowed herself to mourn the non-existence of her mother. Then as she walked briskly down the street she felt a mounting urgency,
a need for a telephone booth in which she could open her lips and whisper her earth-shaking secret.

  24

  Michael came to New York the next day, driving the station wagon to Little Rock and then sitting in a pitching, tossing airliner that ploughed through a spring rainstorm all the way to La Guardia. She was waiting for him at the airport and it seemed to him as he hurried toward her that each time he saw her was like the first time, that he would never become accustomed to looking at her face.

  “The thing I don’t understand is the part about the mikva,” he said in the taxi when he had stopped kissing her. “If you had been converted by a Reform rabbi you would have skipped all that.”

  “It was wonderful,” she said shyly. “I wanted to do it the most difficult way. So it would last.”

  But the next afternoon when they went together to the Shaarai Shomayim, Max Gross grew pale.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded of Leslie. “If I had known that the man in your case was Michael Kind, believe me when I say I never would have converted you.”

  “But you didn’t ask me,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to deceive you.”

  “Max,” Michael said. “I’m only doing what Moses did. She’s a Jew. You made her a Jew.”

  Rabbi Gross shook his head. “You are not Moses. You are a nahr, a fool. And I have helped you to make this mistake.”

  “I want you to marry us, Max,” Michael said quietly. “Both of us would like that very much.”

  But Rabbi Gross took a Bible from the table and opened it. Swaying, he began to read aloud, disregarding them as if he were alone in the shul.

  Michael’s mouth tightened as he listened to the Hebrew words. “Let’s go,” he said to Leslie.

  When they were in the street she looked at him. “They can’t . . . take it back or anything, can they, Michael?”

  “You mean the conversion? No, of course not.” He took her hand and pressed it. “Don’t let him make you miserable, darling.”