The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

by Joshua Braff

  “. . . tziva lanu Moshe!” Rabbi Mizrahe tosses his books and cigarettes on his desk and exposes every filling he’s ever had with an endless yawn. No tooth is spared. In nine seconds the song will begin again from the top. It’s like being stuck on an orthodox carousel. “Torah, Torah, Torah, Torah, Torah, Torah, Tor-ah, tziva lanu Moshe.”

  Rabbi Mizrahe moves toward the lineup and touches each of Gary Kaplan’s tassels. Gary sings along to “Torah Torah” but stops completely when the rabbi steps past him. I feel a sour and tingly stomach-burning climb up my throat. I try to swallow but I have no spit. Michael Bornstein is next. His yarmulke needs centering but his tzitzit has never hung better. And then I see him. I see my brother. He’s hopping in the hallway, trying to find me. I shake my head. “Too late,” I say without sound. Too late.

  As the rabbi moves closer, our eyes meet. I sing with him, “. . . tziva lanu Moshe.” I watch his fingers touch Ari’s tassels. I watch him finish and step up to me.

  “Excuse me, Rabbi Mizrahe,” says Asher.

  The rabbi stops his song and turns to the door. Asher keeps his eyes from me and takes a step closer.

  “I need to tell my brother something. May I see him for a second, please?”

  Rabbi Mizrahe faces me and nods his head. Asher steps up and grabs me by the elbow. He leads me back toward the door.

  “Do not . . . leave this classroom,” the rabbi says. “Torah, Torah, Torah . . .”

  Asher holds my shoulders and turns my back to my classmates. He reaches in his pocket for his balled-up tzitzit and crams it down the front of my pants.

  “No time to put it on,” he whispers. “Untuck your shirt and let the fringes just hang over your belt.”

  “No, no way.”

  “You either try it or you don’t. I’m not gonna stand here all day.”

  “Wait,” I say, but he yanks up my shirttails.

  Asher grabs the tzitzit and slides it around the waist of my pants. He then adjusts the tassels so they droop from all four sides.

  “It’s crooked,” I say.

  His eyes slowly shut. “I’m gonna kill you. It’s fine. I’m leaving you now.” Asher turns for the door and stops. “Thank you so much, Rabbi.”

  The rabbi glances over his shoulder, the song still flowing from his nearly closed lips. “Wait,” he says, and approaches us.

  “I . . . really have to get back,” Asher says, his thumb toward the hall.

  “What is happening over there?” he says, his head on a tilt.

  Asher moves for the door.

  The rabbi steps up to me and reaches for my two front tassels. Asher steps into the hall. “I’ll see you later, J.” Rabbi Mizrahe reaches for the two rear tassels. He gives them each a squeeze and walks to the door.

  “Asher!” the rabbi says, and motions my brother back into the room with his finger. Asher taps his watch and moves toward the staircase.

  “I’m so late. I’ll come back when—”

  “Come here, please.”

  Asher folds his arms and walks slowly back into the room. Mizrahe steps up to him and reaches under his shirttails. “Where are your tzitzit?”

  My brother puts both hands in his pockets and shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says.

  The rabbi grabs the back of Asher’s neck with his small right hand and playfully jostles his head around. He presses his forehead against Asher’s and smiles. “Where are your tzitzit?” he says softly.

  Asher glances up at him, their heads still pinned.

  “I think I . . . must have packed it,” he says with his own chuckle. “We’re moving, you know? To Piedmont.”

  Rabbi Mizrahe laughs. “Today? You move today?”

  “No . . . ,” Asher says.

  “No,” the rabbi says, shaking Asher’s neck. “You love your brother. You will take risks for your little brother, yes?”

  Asher tries to pull away but the rabbi doesn’t allow it. He gets more of a grip, keeping their foreheads locked.

  “Would you let go of me, please?” Asher says, and puts his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder. He begins to push him away but he can’t get free. Mizrahe’s face turns pink and his feet shift for more leverage. He seems to think it’s a game, his cheeks rattling from the force. Ari turns to me in disbelief.

  “Rabbi Mizrahe,” Asher says, his head shivering to pull away. “Get off me.”

  I take a step toward them. “Rabbi,” I say. He is holding his breath, struggling to keep Asher locked in his grip. “Rabbi Mizrahe,” I say again, and reach for his elbow. Asher jolts to get out but is pinched in the vice. “Get off him,” I yell. The rabbi widens his legs and moans, bumping his desk into a screech.

  “You’re nuts,” Asher says with a forced grin as his eyes turn serious and widen. I watch his back stiffen, trying anything to break out. I am helpless as he peeks out at me, locked in this embarrassment, this absurd and abusive game.

  “What should I do?” I say to him, and he laughs and tries again to jar himself loose. “Stop!” I yell at Mizrahe. “Stop it!” And then it happens. I’m on my way, my hands out and on him, yanking at whatever I can grab. I feel the buttons of his shirt against my fingernails, the mush in his belly, his breath. And a second before I no longer touch him, I hear the give of something sewed, the severing of cloth. Asher spins out of the hold, sliding backward to the ground, his head nearly banging the floor. I stand next to Rabbi Mizrahe who stares down at his waist, lifting the remaining fringes of his weathered tzitzit. In my palm is a handful of the woolen and woven. I see them there, a part of me now, like a gash in my skin too wide to hold closed. I drop them, letting them rain near my shoes, the tiled floor. And then I run. Past my brother, down the hall. I run from that room.

  Son of Abraham

  They haven’t found me when the office calls my house. My mother is told she must come to Perth Amboy to pick up Asher. A “desecration of God” is what they call it and he’s given a rest-of-day suspension. “Jacob too has been charged,” she learns, “but is hiding somewhere in the building.” When they’re unable to find me by the time she arrives, my mother calls my father with fear in her voice. He tells her to calm down, to bring Asher home. He assures her I’m there, says he’ll call when they find me. “I’ll take it from here.”

  As a fugitive I’ve never been that strong. In a hide-and-seek game when I was six my father found me underneath an afghan in the middle of the living-room floor—a story he just loves to retell to friends. My brother had taken my new spot behind the drapes in the den and my mother and sister were both crouching in the nook beneath the basement stairs. The countdown was loud and hurried I remember, and there was just nowhere else to go. When my dad performs the memory he usually stands and goes through all the motions. He says he leaned an elbow on my covered head and asked the empty room where his son could have gone. The skit always draws a laugh and that’s why he does it, but now, as I play the game in the halls of Eliahu Academy, I can only wish we were the family he loves to portray. I could see him through the square holes of yarn that day, his hands on his hips, these forlorn eyes. And I knew what grade I’d been given for my lame attempt to vanish. He circled me twice before gripping the afghan near my ear and flung the thing high with all the strength he could muster.

  In a way I’m relieved when Rabbi Belahsan finds me on the second floor, standing on a toilet seat like a wide-eyed cave boy. It’s past eleven by then and I’m drained and teary from my flight and capture. I sit in the office next to Rabbi Mizrahe as he dials my father’s number. “We found him,” he says into the phone, and begins a diatribe on the pure size of this unprecedented chilul Hashem.

  “The numerical value, Mr. Green, of the Hebrew word tzitzit, is six hundred. The eight threads and five knots make a total of 613, the exact number of precepts in the Torah. The Torah is a grid for conduct, Mr. Green, the conduct of how we as Jews should behave under God. The Talmud tells us . . .”

  I stare down at my clasped hands, trying to picture my father�
��s face, his thoughts. He is humiliated for the family, ashamed of me, infuriated by this murky lecture.

  “. . . where each fringe represents the numerical value of Hashem echad. This means, The Lord is one. The Lord, Mr. Green . . . is one.”

  There is a small pause in which the rabbi looks up at me and switches the phone to his right ear. I can hear my father speaking but I cannot hear his words. Rabbi Mizrahe interrupts him. “When a child fully honors his father and his mother, Mr. Green, the Lord says, ‘I account it to them as though I were dwelling among them and they were honoring me.’ So, my final question to you is this. Do your sons fully honor you, Mr. Green? And do they honor God? Please, now come. Retrieve your son.”

  We sit in the parking lot of a Burger King three blocks from the yeshiva. My father pokes the inside of his cheek with his tongue and stares straight ahead, out the windshield of his Cadillac. I keep my head turned away from him, trying not to move, then bump the power-window button with my elbow.

  “Leave it!”

  “Sorry.”

  “You can’t just sit there?”

  “I can.”

  “Can’t behave.”

  “I can.”

  “Is that how you sit in class?”

  “No.”

  “Fidgeting?” He bangs the steering wheel with his palm and uses the pain to taste his rage. He peers at me with thinned eyes as if I’d bit him, waiting for me to cower, to look away.

  My mother once told me that my father never stops loving us, even when he’s lost his mind. A difficult thing to believe for sure, although every tantrum, however potent and lengthy, ends with a flurry of uninhibited affection, as if he’s sorry it all had to come to this. My parents got married five months after they met at a party in Belmar, New Jersey. The irony that it was the annual clam bake for my father’s accounting firm has always added flavor to the story. “Shellfish brought us together,” he always says when telling the tale. My mom says before Asher was born she had no idea her husband even had a bad temper. It began soon after they brought him home, when my father learned that parenting was in fact a task of selflessness and that the beautiful girl he’d seen at the party was now someone to be shared.

  My father reaches into the pocket of his overcoat and pulls out the suspension notice. He unfolds it onto the steering wheel and stares down at the words. Six and a half days left of yeshiva and it’s my first official pink slip. Asher has them wall-papering the back of his closet. I’ve seen him give tours to his friends.

  NAME: Asher Green

  GRADE: 5

  DATE: May 3, 1975

  TEACHER: Belahsan

  REQUEST: 1-day suspension

  REASON: Called Rabbi Belahsan a “cock smoker” after rabbi tore front cover off his copy of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Disrespect of teacher and minyan.

  OUTCOME: Suspension accepted—called mother.

  (Laloosh claimed Asher had it hidden behind his prayer book during the morning minyan service. Asher vehemently denied this charge but later claimed to have read the entire Apes series while davening.)

  NAME: Asher Green

  GRADE: 6

  DATE: October 16, 1975

  TEACHER: Hadad

  REQUEST: 1-day suspension

  REASON: Asher wore a belt buckle to school that spelled out the word bullshit. Dress-code violation.

  OUTCOME: Suspension accepted—called father.

  (The belt buckle was huge and brass and had been stuffed in his pants until he got to school. He lasted until lunchtime when Rabbi Hadad led him to the office by the actual buckle itself. The story became legend at Eliahu Academy.)

  NAME: Asher Green

  GRADE: 8

  DATE: September 5, 1977

  TEACHER: Cohen

  REQUEST: Expulsion

  REASON: Vandalism

  OUTCOME: Impossible to link drawing to the accused student, Asher Green: Expulsion denied.

  (A disturbingly accurate pencil drawing of Rabbi Belahsan was found pinned-up in the yeshiva library. In it, the rabbi was in a consensual threesome with a lobster and an erect pig. Asher came inches from being expelled and there was serious talk of calling the police. To this day, Asher says it wasn’t him. I saw the drawing. I only know one person who can draw like that. That pig belonged to Ash.)

  “Name,” my father says: “Jacob Green. Grade: fourth. Date: October ninth, 1977. Request: Suspension, one . . . full . . . week. Reason—this is my favorite part: Destroying—let me read that again—destroying Rabbi Mizrahe’s tzitzit.” He folds the paper and places it back into his pocket. “I’m trying Jacob . . . to recall a time in my life where I have felt this level of humiliation, so I’m going to need some more time to try and . . . pin it down . . . if it exists at all. Do you have time for me to do this, this kind of search?”

  I keep my head resting on the window.

  “Hello?” he barks.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You’re not too busy, too booked? Gotta be somewhere?”

  I shake my head.

  “Answer me with words.”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “I’m not too busy,” I say, covering the hole in my pants with my hand.

  He puts his glasses on the dashboard and leans his forehead onto the steering wheel. He then slowly begins to thump his head against it, banging the ridge above his eyes harder and harder.

  “Dad?”

  “Still thinking!” he hollers, his dark hair jolting forward with each smack.

  “Stop.”

  “Stop, what?” he says, lifting his head off the wheel.

  “Stop doing that.”

  “Stop making a fool of myself, stop making a fool of you? What? Tell me what I’m supposed to say to a son who destroys a rabbi’s tzitzit. Tell me!”

  “He was hurting, Aaaaasher,” I say, and drop like a rock into tears.

  “Oh, tears, right, great, I love tears,” he says, putting his glasses back on. “I don’t even know you. God! Where’s my son?” he yells, craning his neck to the backseat. “Are you back there? Is he? I don’t see him. Do you see him? Maybe he’s in the goddamn trunk.”

  I wipe my face.

  “Does this embarrass you, Jacob? It should. Do you feel it? Do you feel what I feel inside me?”

  “Soooorry.”

  “Do you?”

  “Noooo.”

  “No?”

  “I mean yeeees.”

  “Not good enough!” he says, and jumps out of the car.

  I watch him hustle across the parking lot to the door of the Burger King and stop. He takes his glasses off and motions to throw them with a jolt of his arm but doesn’t let go. He suddenly looks up at me in the passenger seat and begins to jog back. I try to sit taller but slide on the interior. I can see the entire bottom row of his teeth. He swings the door open. “Get out! Follow me!” He walks back to the Burger King.

  Rule Number 4 of the Green House Rules

  I. As of July 1975: After consuming meat products, all family members must wait one full hour before eating any dairy products. Meat and milk will never, under any circumstance, be eaten together.

  a. Nonkosher meat (Allowed, outside of house.)

  b. Swine (Never.)

  c. Shellfish (Never.)

  d. Cheeseburger (Never.)

  e. Bacon cheeseburger (Never, never.)

  f. A Whopper without cheese (Allowed but not in house.)

  g. A Whopper with cheese at a friend’s house (Never.)

  h. A Whopper without cheese at Grandma’s house (Allowed.)

  i. A Whopper without cheese in the garage (Why would you want to eat a Whopper in the garage?)

  II. The family will have two sets of dishes and two sets of silverware for meat and dairy meals. If a meat spoon touches a dairy spoon it must be boiled or buried in the garden.

  a. Really? (Really.)

  b. Do we do that? (We boil.)

  c. Why? (We’re kosher.)

  d. W
hy? (We’re Jews.)

  e. Why do Jews . . . ? (Because we’re Chosen.)

  f. What? (The animals are killed in a less painful way.)

  g. What does that have to do with eating ice cream after dinner? (It’s tradition.)

  h. What happens if I forget? (Your father will go ballistic.)

  i. What’s ballistic? (In this case it’s a rotating column of fury, usually accompanied by a funnel-shaped downward extension of a cumulonimbus cloud which moves destructively over a narrow path.)

  j. Oh . . . that.

  “A Whopper without cheese. I do not want cheese on it. Ze-ro cheese, please . . . thank you. And a Coke, medium.”

  “You want fries with that?”

  “Fries, sure. But I do not want cheese on—”

  “I understand.”

  “Thank you. I don’t eat cheese with meat,” my father says with a slight bounce on his toes, and turns to the woman behind us in line. He smiles at her. In his perfect dream the woman would grip the tip of her chin and blink before speaking. “So you don’t eat meat with cheese. How interesting. Are you a Jewish man?”

  “Yes,” my father would say. “I am. We are. This is my Jewish son, Jacob. His Hebrew name is Ya’akov. I don’t allow him to eat meat with cheese either because he is my son. We don’t eat meat and cheese together in our Jewish home.”