The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  The only Québécoise student to enter the department in years, from a staunch Catholic background to boot; intelligent and engaged, but without the slightest trace of earnestness; lacking both the grades-crazed fervor of her academically minded classmates and the ersatz zealousness of her more mystically minded peers. As I had discovered over the years, graduate students in Religious Studies came in two flavors: aspiring professors and aspiring saints. Personally, I preferred the former—or, rather, found them slightly less detestable than the latter.

  Myra Goldfarb, for example, in last semester’s Eastern Philosophical Texts—there was something grotesquely unsettling about the way she stared at you, unblinking as a cat, with the enormous, nearsighted blue eyes of the bodhisattva-in-training. You could tell from her seminar papers that she secretly believed she would achieve satori if she just plowed through enough books, ladled up enough pea soup at the soup kitchen, and managed to squash that pesky little illusion we called the self. Minus a catechism and a wimple or two, she was like Mother Teresa on speed: she padded her spiritual résumé with the furious zeal of a high school senior intent on getting into Harvard or Yale. Val, praise be, had none of that.

  She reentered the coffee shop, tossed her phone into her handbag, and sat down across from me, radiant. Her stylish bob had grown out in recent weeks, so that the tips of the hair now skimmed the tops of her shoulders. The effect was extremely becoming. We drank the rest of our coffee, chatting about the courses I’d be offering next year (Development of Jewish Mystical Thought, The Gnostic Worldview) and about her dissertation (“Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism: The Unthought Debt”). Words tumbled across the table—Neoplatonism, Gottheit, Merkabah, demiurge—and sat there, and that was what I loved: neither of us felt the need to beat our words into swords, or to roll them toward some overwhelming question. Free from the burden of persuasion, the words became carriers of pleasure. So that by the time the sky had been recast in a series of pinks and purples and oranges, I began to feel as though someone had opened up the taps in my nervous system and flooded the veins with red wine. Taking her elbow for the second time that day—but with a different kind of pressure in the grip—I steered her down the street toward her apartment, looking forward to an evening of luxe, calme, et volupté.

  Back home in my study the next morning, with the red wine glow gone from my system, I stared at the heaps of research on my desk.

  Before the heart attack, I’d begun a book on kabbalah, focusing on the Tree of Life and based on notes for my lectures in Development of Jewish Mystical Thought. Leafing through the pile, I realized that for all their physical thickness, the notes I’d put together were shockingly thin. Scanning page after page, I was struck by the shallowness of my textual exploration. I’d written: The kabbalist’s goal is to climb the Tree of Life by spiritually binding himself to each of its ten vessels in turn, until he reaches God and becomes one with Him. Okay, I thought, but “bind” how? Why hadn’t I gone into more detail? Wasn’t the “how” the most interesting part?

  In my discussion of two vessels—Ani, the lowest, and Ayin, the highest—I’d noted: Commentaries warn that undirected meditation on Ayin is perilous and should only be done under a master’s supervision. Pre-Hasidic thinkers do not reference this practice, and even the Hasidic thinkers reference it very obliquely. Yet I hadn’t given a single example of these “oblique” references.

  A scrap of paper fell out of the pile and landed on my knee. Here, right here, was one of the phrases I could have mentioned: “Ayin is the crown of Ani.” Why hadn’t I cited that quotation? It seemed to suggest that the highest vessel was intrinsically linked to the lowest—but how, exactly? I got a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote out Ayin, then, below it, Ani.

  In Hebrew, these names were anagrams, made up of the same three letters scrambled. This had to have some significance beyond mere wordplay: while Ayin meant “nothingness” and was associated with ego-annihilation, Ani meant “I” and was associated with the ego or unified self. But what did that mean, practically speaking, for the kabbalist trying to get from point A to point B? I had no idea.

  It was painfully clear now that my notes were hopelessly banal. If I let them form the basis for my course lectures, they would put all the students to sleep. Well, almost all the students. Even now, I could picture the frisson of agonized delight on Myra Goldfarb’s face upon seeing her new brick of a course pack. The fact that I’d created a lesson plan that would thrill just such a person came as an unpleasant, almost sickening jolt.

  Something on my desk began to ring. I dug the source out from underneath heaps of paper. “Hello?”

  “David? Is that you? It is so good to hear your voice.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Ira! Ira Rosenthal!”

  “Oh, yes, Ira . . . of course.” I could picture him perfectly, seated behind his desk, fingers forming a tent above his rather significant belly. The famously congenial smile that had landed him the title of dean of Religious Studies nearly a decade earlier, the dimples in his rosy face, the glint of sincerity in his eyes—all the qualities he had deployed to smooth out the wrinkles in the political fabric of the department and to make the eggheads play nice. The remarkable thing was that his own niceness was not at all put on; he really was a likable guy, and in the years before Miriam’s death our two families had enjoyed something that might even have been called closeness. After Miriam died, he and his wife, Judy, offered to take Samara and Lev to their house for a few hours every day after school—they were picking up Jenny anyway, so it was no trouble, really, no trouble at all—and because I needed time to finish my dissertation, I gratefully accepted. But when Samara and Jenny’s friendship mysteriously dissipated years later, I allowed that gratitude to lapse. Shabbat dinner invitations piled up on an answering machine that I conveniently pretended never to check—until, one week, the invitations simply stopped coming.

  “How are you, Ira?”

  “I should be asking you. Are you doing all right?”

  “Yes, I’m doing—” I paused, looking at the notes in my hand. When I spoke again, it was with a faint tremolo in the voice. “Well, I’m doing as well as can be expected.”

  “Aha, yes, mm-hm. You gave us quite a scare, you know that? And how are the kids?”

  “They’re fine. Summer break, you know.”

  “Great. That’s great. Listen, David, I was wondering—and, now, I know you must be needing to take it easy, I mean obviously after the, ah—but what I’m wondering is, have you had a chance to look over those term papers? From spring semester?”

  “Term papers?” My gaze canvassed the room and lit upon a stack of papers half-obscured beneath a heavy green desk lamp. I held the phone against my shoulder and pried the eighty-odd papers out. “No, I’m afraid I haven’t felt quite up to the task.”

  “Yes, well, that’s, ah, to be expected. No rush—it’s just that we need the grades for the undergrad courses by, well, three weeks ago, actually—but, again, no rush.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. Again—”

  “I’ll get back to you with the grades as soon as I can.”

  “Well!” He laughed. “That sounds fine then, David, just fine.”

  “Give my best to Judy.”

  “What? Oh, yes, yes, thanks, thank you, I will. So. Take it easy now!”

  “I will. Good-bye.”

  As soon as I’d hung up, I suddenly needed—not wanted, not the banality of wanted—to go for a run. I knew this would be anathema to Singh, and to Val, and to my kids, and to whatever specter-shadow of their dearly departed mom they liked to imagine might still be watching over me from above, but. Ever since Miriam’s death, I had been exercising twice a week, every week, without fail. Eager to finally shed the physical wimpiness associated with yeshiva culture, I’d become acquainted with the perverse pleasures—the masochism, really—of long-distance running. Now, because I wasn’t about to let one little heart attack undo years
of training, I dug out my T-shirt, jogging pants, and running shoes and snuck out of the house.

  Freedom! The morning sun was high up in a cloudless sky, glinting off the brick row houses’ wrought-iron gates and balconies, sparkling in the dewy grass of their tiny front yards. The air had that just-mowed scent that always put me in mind of childhood and summer camp and Ralph Waldo Emerson and his “transparent eyeball.” I took in gulp after gulp of it and felt it polishing my lungs from the inside.

  For once, the neighborhood was quiet. The young professionals had already left for work; the twisting staircases they’d painted in lively purples and greens and oranges were free of the bicycles that usually lay propped against the rails. In their various yeshivas, the Hasids were gathered for morning prayers—beating their breasts during the Silent Devotion, or bouncing on the balls of their feet as they sang Holy Holy Holy et cetera during the cantor’s repetition.

  Rounding the block at a quickening pace, I noticed a lone figure squatting on a lawn under a majestic old oak tree: Katz. His pants were damp with dew, and yet he seemed oddly separate from the unkempt grass and the ground beneath it. I might have pitied this religious nut had he not made a habit through the years of buttonholing me in the street to debate the merits of various rabbinic commentaries on this or that biblical verse. Suffering from some mental affliction that everyone in the “community” was too gossip-averse to name, he’d spent his adult life as the ignored manqué of a yeshiva world that should have been his birthright.

  But ignored only to a point. Ten years ago, for reasons unknown to the good citizens of Mile End and, for that matter, to the non-tinfoil-hat-wearing segment of the population, he had hung dozens of lemons—in dental floss cradles, no less—not from the old oak he currently sat under but from the branches of a makeshift construction, the cardboard imitation of a real tree. At first, the neighbors viewed this as odd but innocuous. Then summer arrived: the lemons ripened and rotted, grew mottled and moldy. Katz explained that this was miracle fruit, dropped down from above, and human beings had no right to remove it. Unfortunately, this miracle turned out to have a putrid stench, which, as the weeks wore on, became unbearable. Katz, too, imbibed the smell, and the flies that had been swarming the tree took a shine to him as well.

  One night an angry mob of caftaned men rushed his front lawn. They ripped apart the toilet paper roll branches and painted leaves, and set them aflame in a garbage bin in the middle of the street—a bonfire into which these Savonarola’s children tossed lemon after lemon. Katz looked on and wailed, high keening notes escaping him, like the sounds Jews emit when mourning the destruction of the Temple. Driving by with the kids, I couldn’t help laughing. But, to my surprise, Lev looked miserable, even tortured, and Samara’s eyes flashed with anger.

  That experience appeared to have cured Katz of the creative impulse; for years after, his hands lay dormant in his lap. Yet what he was doing now was so eerily reminiscent of that long-ago summer that I slackened my pace to observe him. Surrounded by a three-foot-high fort of unlabeled tin cans, he was using a screwdriver to poke holes into the bottom of each one. A spool of twine waited on the grass beside him. Katz looked up and waved merrily. I nodded and, not wanting to become entangled in the sticky web of conversation, quickened my pace.

  I raced along the tree-lined street in a tunnel of green light, then turned onto Bernard. Pulse pounding, I sped past boutiques and bakeries, and was just starting to enjoy an endorphin rush when all of a sudden I heard my heart thrumming, heard it—almost—saying. Saying what?

  At that instant I had the kind of intuition generally enjoyed only from that rearview mirror known as hindsight. Now—right now, before it was too late!—was the time to flick this idea away from me. Nip it in the bud. It was absurd, the thought of an internal organ speaking in human language—and dangerous, too, because there is nothing more seductive to an intellectual of a certain generation and class than an absurdly romantic notion about his relationship to his own body. I remembered Emerson: The eye reads omens where it goes, and speaks all languages the rose. A heart, I reminded myself with each footfall, does not speak in words—that is not what is meant by body language!

  Yet instead of slowing down to silence it, I sped up. My heart rate accelerated. Blood was pounding in my ears, a whooshing, whistling sound. My knees ached, my shins cried out for respite, I pressed on, I needed to be sure. Monosyllabic? No. Definitely disyllabic. A vowel, followed by a consonant, followed by . . . another vowel? It was unclear; I gathered speed, my lungs shriveled, my brain whined, but now, at last, I could make out the first syllable: aaaahhhh.

  And the second? The second syllable was more elusive, but this only made me want to hear it more; nothing had ever seemed more vital. Was it an n—or, perhaps, an m? It might have been a y—but, then again, could just as easily have been an l. Picking up still more speed, dripping with still more sweat, I cranked up the volume of my heart.

  But I took an unfortunate turn: instead of darting along one of the neighborhood’s deserted back alleys, I made the mistake of bolting down Durocher, which, at 8:35, was already teeming. Morning prayers over, Hasids flooded the street, and I was drowning in a sea of fur-trimmed hats and black satin coats. Dark beards and scrawny shoulders pushed past, while the gazes of their owners slid right through me; I felt, for a moment, the loneliness of the invisible. And they were loud, so loud, calling to each other in a tumult of Yiddish and Hebrew, in the vulgar vox populi of the European shtetl. Beginning on the steps of the synagogue and slowly but surely filling the entire street, a thousand separate cries of Gut shabbes! rang out and joined forces to become an inescapable wall of sound. I couldn’t hear what my heart had been trying so hard to tell me. Not for the first time, I experienced a bitter surge of hatred for this particular type of Jew, whose shrill holiness dominated the bandwidth of religious sensibility, silencing stiller, smaller voices until the only signals that were audible were those spoken in the first person plural, in the cultish key of we.

  I lurched into the kitchen to find Lev and Alex making cheese and jam sandwiches. Samara sat at the table, reading a book. They had their backs to me and didn’t notice my entrance. Alex, who had just finished his first year at McGill, was gushing on with his usual intensity.

  “But it’s not just intentional messages we’ve got to think of; really we’ve been sending signals into space for years and years, because our radio signals flow way out across the galaxy, and conceivably, I mean, with a big enough telescope, someone could pick up on all that—”

  “Hello, Alex,” I said. “Still waiting for E.T. to call?”

  The boys spun around. Alex, blushing, was rendered momentarily speechless. Samara shot me a sharp glance that held the tinge of a warning: she was ready to leap to Alex’s defense.

  Lev saw the patina of sweat glazing my face and throat. “Did you go running?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that, you know, healthy? I mean, shouldn’t you be resting?”

  “Probably,” I said with a laugh. “But I feel fine. In fact, I’ve never felt better.”

  “You should be careful,” Alex muttered. “The heart is a delicate organ.”

  “Excuse me? Did you say delicate?”

  “Yeah. I mean the slightest frequencies—even radio frequencies—impact the tissue, so . . .”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. “You’re saying my heart is a radio?”

  Alex smiled the grateful smile of a person who is, for once, in his element. “Well, not exactly a radio, maybe, but definitely able to pick up signals. More like an antenna,” he said, his body turning ever so slightly toward Samara. Even after all these years, he never missed an opportunity to show off in front of her.

  “Did the doctor say it was okay for you to be running?” Lev said.

  “What kind of signals?” I asked Alex.

  “Oh, well, you know. Like, doctors use radio frequencies to repair damaged passages in the heart sometimes? Like, radiofrequen
cy ablation of an accessory pathway, let’s say?”

  “Maybe I should call Dr. Singh,” Lev said.

  “Oh, I already called,” I lied. “He said it’s fine as long as I take it easy. Which I am.” Lev looked dubious, so I picked up the pill bottle on the counter and poured some of the white capsules into my palm to show him. “Besides, Dr. Singh gave me this. Digitalis, it’s called.”

  “What does it do?”

  “These little white helpers? Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.”

  “What?”

  “They help the ticker tick faster.”

  “What?”

  “The heart. They make it contract. Make it pump harder.”

  “Harder? But is that, you know, safe?”

  “Doctor’s orders.” I shrugged, tilting the pills back into the bottle. “Don’t worry. I’ve got an appointment with him on Thursday, so I can double-check then.”

  Lev nodded, placated at last, and bit into his sandwich. But now Samara was looking me over as if I might collapse onto the kitchen tiles at any moment.

  I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of asking Alex to elaborate on the radio heart concept. Showing interest in his field of study was dangerous. There was a bloodhound devotion to the way he pursued his science, and a certain catching sadness in the relentlessness of it; you had the impression that he looked skyward not just for pulsars and quasars but for emotional companionship and spiritual solace. I excused myself and went to my study.

  Two weeks after the heart attack, I found myself back in the hospital. Singh had called to say he wanted to run additional tests. What kind of tests? I asked. And was told: The usual. A chest X-ray. An ECG. A cardiac MRI.

  Because I didn’t want to give Singh the satisfaction of seeing that his spooky medical acronyms unsettled me, and because I didn’t want to worry my kids any more than was strictly necessary, and because my sexy-professor image had been diminished enough in Val’s eyes as it was, I’d come alone. And remained convinced of the rightness of this decision throughout the first two tests. An X-ray was nothing; I’d done it a dozen times at the dentist’s over the years. An ECG? Piece of cake. Singh placed probes on my chest and monitored the signals around my heart. His eyebrows shimmied higher on his forehead, and even when his face failed to hide his growing consternation, I did not pester him with questions. I was, in short, a model patient.