The men, on the other hand, were splendidly coiffed. It had to take some doing to get their side locks to curl like that. Did they use rollers? There were dozens of men swarming in the streets outside the shul, and dozens more outside the Rebbe’s house, which was twice as large as any of the other houses, redbrick with black shutters.
She looked for a sign indicating the froyen seit. Any town that segregated the sidewalks was going to segregate the entrance to the Rebbe’s house. She didn’t see Cass or the Klap anywhere, and she wondered how she was going to get herself inside for the powwow with the Rebbe. She didn’t want to miss it. It was probably unsafe to approach any of the men to ask them for instructions. There were clearly female-contamination taboos in place here.
She walked down the paved driveway, keeping far to her right to avoid passing too close to the men, and was rewarded by the sight of two women standing outside a side door. She walked up to them and, before she opened her mouth, they pointed her to the open side door.
She walked a few steps in and saw an empty room to her right. She looked back at the women questioningly. “Gei, gei”—“Go, go”—the older woman urged, flicking her wrist in a motion bespeaking “be gone.” Roz turned back to the room. There were a few wooden slatted chairs, and no windows. It looked like a converted pantry. Was she just supposed to sit here and wait?
She walked back down the hall to the women at the door. One was about sixty and one was about eighteen, but they were dressed almost identically, with kerchiefs wrapping their heads as a diaper does a baby’s bottom, and a little fringe of synthetic bangs sticking out in front, looking as natural as the bristles from a plastic whisk broom.
“I’m supposed to see the Rebbe.”
“Yes,” the younger woman responded. “We showed you. There. There.”
“I came here with two friends. Menner. I think they’re already in with the Rebbe. Our appointment was for four o’clock. I drove all the way from Boston to see the Rebbe.”
“Yes. There. There. Froyen tsimmer.”
“I’d like to speak to the person in charge.”
Now the older woman stepped in.
“There.” She pointed back inside.
Roz went back inside. These gender taboos were inconvenient. She should have dressed up as a man, like Barbra Streisand in Yentl. Roz could be convincing. She had done it before. If someone didn’t come and get her soon, she’d just go and insert her big contaminated female self into that crowd of homeboys in the front yard. That ought to get their attention.
She should have stuck with the men. Klapper had written to the Rebbe on his professional stationery, embossed with his full title: “Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values, Frankfurter University, Weedham, Massachusetts.” Cass and the Klap were probably lounging like pashas on tufted settees, being served herring in cream sauce.
But they weren’t. They were sitting, like Roz, on wooden folding chairs, although the room they were in was larger and had windows, and there were quite a few other men, all Hasidim, waiting along with them. But the stationery must have done the trick, since they had hardly sat down before a Hasid came for them and ushered them into the Rebbe’s office.
It was a spacious room lined floor-to-ceiling with leather-bound Hebrew books. The Rebbe himself was sitting behind a large handsome desk flanked on either side by two middle-aged Hasidim, both wearing the black felt hats with the rounded tops Cass had seen on the other men. But the Rebbe was wearing a fur shtreimel, more streamlined than the one he’d be wearing on Shabbes, but still an impressive piece of pelt.
The Rebbe stood up and came around in front of his desk and held out his hand to Jonas Elijah Klapper.
“Extreme Distinguished Professor Klapper of Frankfurter University,” he said in clear English without an accent. “Welcome to New Walden.”
“I am honored, Grand Rebbe, that you have permitted me this private audience.”
“And you, Reb Chaim Yisroel Seltzer,” the Rebbe greeted Cass. “It is wonderful to see you again.” Cass was surprised to learn that the Rebbe remembered ever having seen him. Of course, the Rebbe had been at his bubbe’s funeral, but he had been such a lofty figure, surrounded by his courtiers. Cass had assumed he hadn’t noticed, and certainly not remembered, the one person who had cried. “Your bubbe, of sainted memory, could never stop singing your praises,” the Rebbe said to him now, which made Cass almost tear up again. Being in New Walden brought her back so vividly. He could recall the smell of her house, a special Hasidic-certified scouring powder that used to make his mother gag. “May her praises continue to intercede on your behalf from On High. How is your mother, Devorah Gittel?”
Cass’s mother had never clued him into the Rebbe’s unusual mind, since she never had any praise to spare for the Valdeners. The Rebbe’s remarkable recall for names was among the least of the wonders his Hasidim recounted. It was taken for granted that a Hasidic Rebbe would manifest extraordinary mental and spiritual attributes, since he was believed to inhabit a different spiritual plane, his soul garnering a greater share of the divine sparks that were, according to the Kabbalist cosmogony, scattered in the great metaphysical mishap that accompanied the creation of the world. The position was dynastic, passed down from father to eldest son—though, should the designated inheritor be deemed of unworthy spiritual or intellectual caliber, it could go to a younger son, or even another relative or a student.
Sometimes there could be feuds and factions, a War of the Rosens over succession. Such discord had never, thank God, rent the Valdeners. Though he had five older sisters, the current Valdener Rebbe was the eldest son, with three younger brothers. His intellectual sharpness and analytical skills had been apparent since childhood, though they manifested themselves with a zeal for matters more practical than mystical. The Valdener Rebbe would much prefer to discuss the requirements for New Walden’s sewer system and water supply than the Kabbalist Zohar, The Book of Splendor. He had committed to memory a whole directory of doctors and their specialties, so that, if any of his Hasidim came to him with a particular ailment, he knew where to send him or her. The Rebbe’s brilliance was often turned to the Talmudic complexities of attaining government subsidies—for housing, for health, for education—for the members of his community, the majority of whom lived below the poverty line, not surprisingly, since none were college-educated and they almost all had, thank God, large families.
“Please give your blessed mother my regards.”
Cass was surprised that the Rebbe seemed to harbor no hard feelings toward his mother.
The Rebbe had retreated again behind his desk—for a small, round man he moved very quickly, giving the impression of forceful rolling— and now sat down. Cass and Klapper did the same.
“So your mother, Devorah Gittel, left the Hasidim. But you, Chaim Yisroel, have returned. You, too, are a Hasid.”
Cass remembered how his bubbe used to call him a little Hasid. Had she told the Rebbe one of her bubbe meisahs, her grandmother tales? Cass felt compelled to clear up the confusion, as delicately as possible.
“I haven’t been raised as a Hasid, Rebbe. I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s for me.”
“Of course you’re a Hasid! How can you deny that? Especially sitting right there beside your Rebbe!” he said, gesturing grandly toward Jonas Elijah Klapper.
A look of beatitude settled over Jonas Elijah Klapper’s face. The Valdener Rebbe clearly recognized him as a fellow charismatic.
“We have many interests in common,” Professor Klapper said now to the Rebbe. “I have a consuming passion for the esoteric texts of Jewish mysticism.”
“You are an educator on the highest order. An Extreme Distinguished Professor at an accredited university. We Valdeners value education to the highest degree, too. Every Valdener Hasid is a scholar. Our boys are learning from the age of three on. In our kollel, which is our adult-learning institute, we have over fifty percent of our married men learning Talmud full-time, an
d for the first year after their marriage, every single man learns full-time, supported by the community until he has to go out and earn for his family. But even those who have jobs come in the evenings to study two or three hours. The ones with jobs support the ones who sit and learn full-time to the best of their abilities. All our men, young and old, are scholars, though some have special needs. You can imagine how hard it is on the community to support such demands of scholarship. In the outside world, only the chosen few, such as yourself, Rav Klapper, are permitted a life of study, but for the Valdeners every butcher, baker, and bus driver is also involved in a life of study.”
“Indeed. The scholarship is, I presume, intensely esoteric. I am a student myself of Yehuda Ickel, the pre-eminent secular scholar of Jewish Kabbala. Ickel shrewdly brings the strategies of Heideggerian hermeneutics to the study of Jewish mystical texts. Heidegger lamented man’s forgetfulness of Being, at the same time pointing out that it is Being that now hides itself from man. I quote now from memory: ‘We come too late for the gods and too early for Being.’”
“But not, fortunately, too late or too early for help from the federal government,” responded the Valdener Rebbe. “The United States government believes, together with you, Rav Klapper, and with your own Rav Heidegger, in the importance of education. And they have made available special grants both for advanced study and for those among us who have special needs if their divine spark is to reveal itself. You do believe, Rav Klapper, that all our holy children have divine sparks?”
“Ah, you refer, of course, to the ‘breaking of the vessels,’ the shevirat hakelim. I am familiar with the opinion of Chaim Vital, the foremost disciple of Isaac Luria, the holy Arizal, that the vessels are to be thought of as representing the womb of the Cosmic Feminine Presence, so that the shattering of the vessels signals not only the broken waters of birth but also the erotic displacements that the catastrophic aspect of creation unleashed.”
“It is very true what you say, Rav Klapper. We have here right now in New Walden many families who are shattered because they have children who have been, from their birth, in need of whatever additional resources the government—federal, state, and county—can provide so that their divine spark, too, can be rejoined to all of Klal Yisroel.”
“Ah, the work of tikkun olam, the healing of the world! Yehuda Ickel, who is a close and valued friend, has …”
“Exactly as you say, Professor Klapper. And we have received letters of support in our efforts to get the needed funds from many prominent people such as yourself. Well, no, I shouldn’t really compare. We don’t yet have an Extreme Distinguished Professor, though Dr. Platinsky, a leading cardiologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has been very helpful in backing our application for Pell funds.”
It was a shame that Roz was missing this exchange between the Valdener Rebbe and Jonas Elijah Klapper, though things had livened up in the windowless waiting room where she’d been stored.
A little group of four had entered the room, arranged in height like a stepladder, all of them wearing identical long black winter coats. Very pretty girls, the oldest about nine or ten and the youngest about three or four.
No, Roz had been wrong. They had taken off their coats, the oldest one helping the youngest with the row of buttons, and when the coats came off Roz saw her mistake. The second-to-smallest was a boy.
The three girls were dressed in identical pleated brown plaid skirts that came down to their mid-calves, even the baby of three or four, and in starched white button-down blouses and brown wool cardigans, while the boy was dressed in black pants and a white button-down shirt, with a black velvet vest that was buttoned over the shirt. He was also wearing the knee-high leather boots that Cass had said the men wore only on the Sabbath, his pants tucked into the tops. The girls were wearing clunky lace-up brown shoes. The whole ensemble had the sort of eerie charm you see in photographs of Victorian children, dressed up in the somber clothing of adults. The girls had their hair severely held back in elastic bands, plastered down smooth and solid on their heads. They looked like nuns in training. They were blonde like the little boy, but because his hair was allowed to flow into the long swirling side locks, his looked shades lighter and silkier.
It wasn’t just the hair that made him outshine his companions. He was an exceptionally beautiful child. His eyes were large and luminous, and there was something about the delicate folds around them that made him look both vulnerable and wise. He had the white skin of the very fair and a sculpted, round little chin. He might have been a cherub in the sort of paintings that would be deeply offensive, Roz suspected, to his community.
He turned his eyes and stared at her, and she stared back, and the effect he produced was even stronger. Was it the odd getup, the little velvet vest and the knickers and boots, that made him seem as if he had traveled far to get here, from some other time or even farther?
The oldest girl said something to him in a low chastising voice, unintelligible to Roz, presumably in Yiddish. She heard “froy,” and assumed he was being told not to stare at the lady. But then the sister, maybe regretting her tone of voice, kissed him on the top of his head, right on his black velvet yarmulke. He whispered something in her ear, and she shook her head.
“Are you all brother and sisters?” Roz asked.
The oldest girl took it on herself to nod yes.
“How nice that there are so many of you. It must be fun! I always wanted to have a sister or brother.”
“You don’t have?” It was the little boy who spoke.
“No, I don’t. It was just me when I was growing up.”
“Were you sad?” The child’s voice was high and chimelike.
Again the older sister felt compelled to issue a gentle “shah.”
“No, I don’t think so. I had lots of friends. And my parents were my friends, too. They were my playmates!”
All four of the children stared at her with concentrated seriousness, even the youngest, as if they were trying to interpret her words. Perhaps their English wasn’t very good.
Roz was not sentimental when it came to children. She found the standardized cuteness of kids about as inspiring as the standardized intelligence of grown-ups. She’d never been the kind of girl who spent much time with kids. She hadn’t babysat, and she hadn’t taken summer jobs as a camp counselor. Children had always left her cold until she studied the Onuma kids as part of her field research. She found most of them to be pains in the neck, though she’d grown fond of a few of them, particularly one, whom she had nicknamed Tsetse, and who was such a creative liar that even the elders admired him.
“Still, I think it must be lovely to be four like the four of you.”
“We have more,” said the little boy.
This time the older sister gave her brother a warning look that needed no interpretation.
Just then, a tall, thin woman came into the room. She was in a dun-colored dress and thick flesh-colored stockings, and the same clunky style of shoes as the girls. She was wearing a matching dun-colored wig. Her face lit up when she saw the children. Actually, it was the little boy she directed her glow to, and she cooed at him in Yiddish, apparently telling him to come to her.
He got up and walked over to her, and she took his hand and brought it to her lips lovingly. Was this the mother? She didn’t look like the children, certainly not like the enchanting little boy. And she didn’t spare a glance for the girls.
She asked the little boy something, and he answered “Ya” and turned back to Roz.
“I have to go now. I’m going to see my tata,” he said to her. She surmised that this meant “daddy.”
“Is your tata the Rebbe?” she asked.
The children, even the little boy, looked down at the floor in response, and the dun-colored woman sharply asked Roz, whom she hadn’t deigned to notice before, “Who you?”
“I’m here to see the Rebbe.” Roz extravagantly rolled the r of “Rebbe,” which was both fun and, she thought, h
elpful in convincing them of her respectful attitude. “I had an appointment to see him at four o’clock. I drove in from Boston with my two friends.”
“Yes, they’re mit da Rebbe now. If you want, come.”
Holding the little boy’s hand—the sisters were left behind, never glanced at—the woman led the way down a corridor into a little antechamber, where she knocked at a door. A bearded man poked his head out, took a look at the boy, and opened the door for him. Roz slipped in behind the child. The man quickly looked at her sideways and then closed the door behind her.
They were in a book-lined study, with a large desk behind which was sitting a pudgy man in a shiny black coat and a beard in the white, flowing model they stick on soldiers of the Salvation Army around Christmastime, and one superlative fur hat. There were two full-bearded subordinates standing guard behind him, and seated in front of the desk, cozy as could be, were Cass and Klapper. The seated man in the headdress could only be the tribal chief, and, judging by his circumference, the choicest matzo balls went to him. (The Valdeners, from what Roz had seen of them, were a pale, malnourished lot.) The Rebbe took no notice of Roz’s entrance—nobody did—but he smiled broadly when he saw the boy, and he gestured for him to come. The boy went straight over to the chief—perhaps tata meant “grandpa” rather than “papa”—and was lifted up onto the ample royal lap.
“My son,” he said to Cass and Klapper. “Your sisters brought you, tateleh?”
“Ya, Tata.”
“How many sisters do you have, tateleh?” Roz asked, even though it had been impressed on her that the rules of female modesty required her to render herself as close to nonexistent as possible.
The boy stared at her, wide-eyed. It wasn’t the endearment that had startled him: it was her question.
“Don’t you know, sweetie? Don’t you know how to count?”
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 18
