God's Ear

by Rhoda Lerman

  “ ‘Wait! Wait!’

  “He runs home, gets the tefillin, takes them to the rich Jew, who is overjoyed, runs to the stranger, gives him the sack of coins, and goes home with his esrog and puts it on the table.

  “His wife sees the esrog. ‘So, where did you get such a thing?’

  “ ‘I got. I got.’

  “ ‘You sold the tefillin for this esrog?’ And she picks up the esrog, throws it, smashes it against the wall, and it’s ruined. And my holy husband’s holy ancestor is so holy, he says, ‘Already the Yetzer Hara, the Evil One, follows me. He has taken my tefillin, he’s taken my esrog. But I will not allow him to take my Beis Shalom, the peace of my household. I will not invite him in this house by arguing with you, so,’ he says, this holy man whose memory lives with us, he says to his wife who has grown old trying to make ends meet, he says, ‘I forgive you.’ ”

  Yussel had seen the tefillin in his uncle’s house. They were inscribed by a scribe in the time of the Baal Shem, the founder of Hasidism. The Baal Shem himself said this scribe was the equal of Ezra the Scribe. The writing, in four hundred years, hadn’t faded. No one remembered how the tefillin came back into the family. When Yussel’s mother told him the story, she would look him in the eye and watch him to see his reaction. His sister said there were lines missing from the story. When his father told it, there was something about holiness. When his mother told it, there was something about life and death. Something terrifyingly bitter.

  Grisha, his father’s gabbai, Talmud expert, babysitter, maybe best friend, maybe worst enemy, often told Yussel another story at bedtime. When Grisha prayed or told holy stories about the dynasty, he held his father’s pocket watch, so in case he was transported to higher worlds, he’d be reminded to come back. The Rabbi insisted Grisha was a holy man. The Rebbitzen insisted Grisha was nuts from mercury vapors when he had been in the business of making felt hats. The story gave Yussel nightmares.

  “One day in the Ukraine,” Grisha would begin, putting his watch to his ear to make sure it was ticking, “the Zaddik, Rabbi Elimelech, decided to go into exile for two years to elevate himself to a higher plane and clean up his sins. After two years of exile he came to the outskirts of his little village and heard that his son, Eliezer, had been very sick, near death. He rushed to his house and asked his wife, ‘How is my Eliezer?’ His wife said, ‘Your Eliezer is fine. He’s out playing.’ ‘But someone told me he was sick.’ His wife shook her head. Then she said, ‘There is an Eliezer who was sick, but your Eliezer, Baruch HaShem, is in good health.’ The Rabbi was overjoyed to hear his Eliezer was okay. Then he realized he had accomplished nothing with his exile, no higher rung on the ladder to HaShem, no elevated soul, because he should have felt about the other Eliezer who really was sick, near death, as he felt about his own son. So that same day he said good-bye and went into exile again for another year.”

  The first time Grisha told the story, Yussel asked him if the Rabbi Elimelech said hello or good-bye to his own Eliezer before he left for another year. Grisha said probably not. Yussel had a dream about eating the wax from his own ears. The wax tasted in his dream like ginger.

  And then one more story. Who hadn’t heard that when Moses went to cross the Red Sea, the waters parted for the Israelites? Every Passover they heard it. In school, at home. Also they were told that every Passover the waters all over the world part at the same moment the Red Sea parted for Moses thousands of years before. And then a kid in Yeshiva, whose father hated Yussel’s father, leaned over Yussel’s desk, hissed, “The Red Sea was at low tide.” Yussel tried to beat the kid up that afternoon, but the kid gave Yussel a bloody nose for his defense of the Torah. That night when Grisha was putting him to bed, Yussel asked Grisha if the Red Sea had really parted or was it just low tide. Grisha shrugged and said, “Nu? HaShem doesn’t make the tides?” and turned off the lights.

  Before Yussel had hair on his face, he’d learned that in the world of the zaddiks, husbands betray wives, fathers betray sons, and even the Torah betrays little boys. So why should he get involved? Still, they found him. They came like old gray gulls to pry open the shell of Yussel’s soft heart.

  2

  BY THE TIME HE WAS A TEENAGER, YUSSEL WANTED NO PART OF A rabbi’s life. Neither did his mother. The Rabbi fought all day and wrestled all night, not with the Angel of God, but with his wife who wanted him to get the schlemiels, the goniffs, the no-goodniks out of her house, out of her kitchen, stop giving them our last cent, stop feeding the world, stop stop stop. She would yell, her husband would look at her with those burning eyes, she’d have to turn away. So she took care of the bill collectors and the telephone company when they turned off the phone. She dressed up in her best clothes, went fund-raising to the rich oil dealers and grain suppliers in Kansas City who belonged to fine congregations. The Rabbi shrugged and said things like, “If the check bounced, HaShem wanted it to bounce.” And danced and made prophecy, and people wept to be in his presence and stray children were saved and marriages reconsecrated and hysterical women made calm and somehow the bill collectors went away satisfied or amused although without money and the schlemiel bricklayer and the out-of-work bookbinder and the acupuncturist and the masseuse and the flower children who’d drifted to the West to find themselves and got lost in Kansas, somehow they were all fed every Shabbas and somehow the cup overflowed.

  Not, you should know, Yussel would tell you, through magic or miracle, but through the guts of the Rabbi’s wife, who one day finally left. This is how it happened.

  It was after the Rabbi’s nasty little congregation walked out on him. All the fancy Jews had Reform congregations—for who of substance would come all the way to Kansas, become rich, become American, become right-wing, and remain Orthodox? The shleppers who stayed couldn’t pay the Rabbi his salary, so he sold the little shul on the corner, turned the split-level basement into a shul. His wife demanded a door separating the shul from the rest of the house except for the kitchen. With his own hands he built her such a door. Then she demanded a door separating her kitchen from the shul because the kitchen had strangers like New York City had cockroaches. They fought about the kitchen door. They fought about the strangers, the drifters, the sleep-overs who stayed months, maybe swept a floor once a week to pay off their room and board. The strangers kept coming. The Rabbi kept defending them. The Rebbitzen retreated, welcomed a few guests. But one morning, when the Rebbitzen came down to her kitchen, there was a flower child in a bathrobe, the Rebbitzen’s bathrobe, drinking coffee from the MOMCAT mug, which her granddaughter, Bloomke’s daughter, had given her for Mother’s Day. And a flower child whom she had never seen before, although she looked and smelled of musk and sweat like all of the other lost souls, this flower child looked up at her and said with no emotion on her face, “You’re out of toilet paper.” The Rebbitzen went upstairs and packed. In two days the Rebbitzen was in Haifa with her Bloomke and her rich relatives on her mother’s side. No one had to tell the Rabbi.

  They always knew these things about each other. In fact, Yussel wondered if it was the toilet paper or if his mother had already watched on the screen in her head that Flower Child in her husband’s bed. And merely recognized her.

  So the Rebbitzen left her husband to his mishugas, his mishagoyim, his craziness, his crazy people; to New-Age Natalie, who expected to give birth to the Messiah once she found the right guy; to Dirty Ernie, the out-of-work bricklayer who played practical jokes with whoopee pillows and wind-up dentures until he put his wife into a permanent catatonic fit by pressing her hand with an electric hand-buzzer; to bitter Babe, the Rebbitzen’s best friend; to Grisha, their live-in bachelor who played solitaire morning to night when he wasn’t davening, who insisted God owed him nine thousand bucks, but he’d collect in the next world; to all the drifters, loners, losers, shnorrers, God knows who else came, ate, drank the Rabbi’s blood. The Rebbitzen left the Flower Child, who had two holes burned through her forehead from the eyes of the Rabbi and would s
oon offer to marry him, even though he was sick, possibly dying. “Who isn’t dying?” she asked, and the Rabbi was so struck by her new-age ease as well as her flesh, her little South African accent—she said her father was a racist schoolteacher in Pretoria, but she also said her father worked for the Delaware and Hudson in Oneonta, New York—he squeezed in his mind her little parts even before the Rebbitzen called to have him mail the candlesticks to Haifa. In Yiddish he apologized to HaShem for bothering him so much about sending intelligentsia and students with worldviews, and although he could not understand why HaShem would send him such a young ripe thing—certainly children were not a consideration here—he would honor his duty to her and try to satisfy her as a husband if that were HaShem’s intentions, which it seemed to be. The other Kansas rabbis threw him off the Rabbinical Board, wouldn’t invite him anyplace anymore. Even Grisha left temporarily to live with the Lubavitchers, whom he despised.

  When the Rebbitzen called the Rabbi from Haifa, neither of them said what they meant, although they each knew what the other meant. He meant he was going to marry the Flower Child. She meant over my dead body. “A Fetner doesn’t do such a thing,” the Rebbitzen said.

  He said, “How do you know? You’re not a Fetner. I am.”

  His daughter said, “This is a terrible mistake.”

  The Rabbi said, “It must be for the best.”

  The Rebbitzen said, “Maybe you’re just getting even because I left. Maybe you should ask me to come back?”

  The Rabbi said, “Maybe HaShem wanted to protect you from the suffering, from having to help me die, from those last days.” The Rabbi suggested softly to the Rebbitzen, “Maybe HaShem is lengthening your life.”

  To which the Rebbitzen replied, “Maybe He’s shortening yours.” And hung up.

  Undersea cables boiled, stars shrank, satellite disks trembled as the Rabbi howled through the empty lines: “Nothing is a mistake. You hear me? I know you hear me. Nothing is accidental. Everything on this earth, in this universe, is absolutely intentional!” The Rabbi hung up. He could still hear his wife and daughter shrieking at him from Haifa. “There is no accident!” he yelled back at them. “Everything is intentional!”

  His brothers called from Yale and Brown and Oxford. They had all agreed it was the pain drugs, a cumulative effect over the years, and could he go off the drugs and bring his wife back and get rid of the girl?

  “I couldn’t bear the pain.”

  “Your wife? Or your illness?”

  “Both.” It was a conference call. They all four hung up at once. The uncles called Yussel.

  After his mother left his father, from Hanukah to Passover, Yussel sat in his three-story house on Ocean Avenue in Far Rockaway and spoke to no one. Next door to Yussel lived Chaim, a young rabbi Yussel had no use for. Chaim was the only child of Holocaust survivors. They’d carried him around on a pillow for most of his childhood. He was brilliant, egotistical, and referred to Yussel as arrogant, from that arrogant family. He claimed to make prophecy as well but never to use it for his own advantage. To others he would point out the moss-brick and the Mercedes and the Florence Eiseman outfits on the five kids and the Calvin on Yussel’s wife. Yussel would never invite him over, even though Shoshanna, his wife, would say weakly, “Simply to remove his wrath, we could invite him.” Everything with Shoshanna was simple.

  Yussel crossed the street when he saw Chaim coming and taught his children to cross the street also. If Yussel saw Chaim walking toward him on the boardwalk, he’d turn around and walk fast in the other direction. If he saw Chaim’s old Chevy station wagon parked near the beach, he’d drive home. But now that Yussel didn’t move from his house for all those months because of his parents’ tzuros, his children didn’t bother crossing the street when they saw Chaim’s children. Instead, they all walked away together. Worse, his wife, his own Shoshanna, would stop on the sidewalk and speak with Chaim’s wife, Ruchel. Yussel would watch them laughing, nodding in agreement, exchanging things, kissing each other on the cheek. But worst, ten times a day, Chaim himself walked by Yussel’s front door and waved energetically each time, as if they too were best friends. And Yussel, behind the drapes, the shade, hiding, would curse Chaim. “I’ll get you in the bathtub.” Or, “Your teeth should be like stars and come out at night.”

  Yussel sat in his three-story house and spoke only when necessary. No one reached him on the phone. His clients were happy because the Angel of Death wasn’t knocking on their doors to sell them insurance.

  Shoshanna answered the phone and took the messages. “Asher says your father told him once that on Rosh Hashonah, HaShem determines how much money you’ll make for the next year. So if it’s all set, he wants to know how many hours a day should he work this year.”

  “Tell Asher I don’t make loans.”

  “Levy wants to know if he’ll break his neck at Aspen.”

  “Tell Levy in the tables at Aspen Mountain the odds are one in fifteen hundred. One in ten if he eats pork.” The last part was a joke. Levy didn’t get it.

  “Is he that one, he wants to know.”

  “Shoshanna … tell him … oy … to leave me alone.”

  “Levy,” he heard Shoshanna say, “the Rabbi says simply ‘only you will know that.’ And be sure there’s a minyan in Aspen.”

  “I didn’t say that, Shoshanna.”

  “You should have.”

  He could see his father and the girl in his mother’s bed where he’d slept between them as a baby. He could see his father davening on top of her, their arms and legs spread in a star, the sixth point thrusting the mysteries of the universe into her. “What did you call me, Shoshanna? Rabbi?”

  “You are, aren’t you?” Later she brought him coffee and two of the rugelach her mother made, sat beside him. “Remember the day you brought Schmulke to cheder? His first day, when he was three? We cut his hair. The teacher put a dab of honey on the book and he licked it off so he’d know learning was sweet. You came home, your face was like the sun. You looked exactly like your father.”

  “I look like my mother’s side, the peasants. My father’s side looks like kings.”

  “I mean your eyes, your mouth. For a minute you looked just like your father.”

  “Poor Schmulkele, learning isn’t so sweet. Look what it did to my father’s stomach. The bee gives honey but it also stings.”

  The first girl they’d brought Yussel to marry was as tall as his mother. She was also the daughter of a rabbi and very pretty in a big healthy generous way. She wore a flower in her hair. Yussel turned down the arrangement immediately. He wanted someone shorter. His parents shrugged, brought in Shoshanna. Yussel agreed immediately. He saw his mother give his father a look, ignored it. How should he have known then that it wasn’t short he wanted; it was control.

  After a while he stopped speaking to Shoshanna, spoke only to his children.

  Some of his friends with whom he’d gone to Seminary wrote letters begging him to take care of himself, to maybe stop selling insurance, to become a real rabbi, have a real congregation, that’s why he was in such bad shape. Maybe because it’s in his blood, he shouldn’t fight it. Once a Fetner, always a Fetner. His father wrote, left emergency messages on the service. Yussel didn’t answer. His bills were paid every month. He never paid interest on his MasterCard. His wife ordered two eighteen-hundred-dollar jackets from the Soho designer Linda Evans took from. He sent a thousand dollars a month to his mother in Haifa. She was very bitter, but her stomach had settled. Everyone sent in their premiums, most increased. Yussel ordered a 450 SL for Shoshanna from his friend Bernie, the auto broker. Yussel watched from the living room window as Shoshanna picked up Chaim’s Ruchel, helped Ruchel shlep groceries from the trunk of the gleaming new car. Yussel’s screen showed Chaim looking out his window with envy. Yussel didn’t mind. When Yussel was unhappy, it felt good to have other people unhappy, except for his family. His father used to say, “If you could feel about other people the way you feel about
your wife and kids, you’d be a saint, like your ancestor Elimelech, may he rest in peace.” Yussel was exceedingly careful not to feel that way about other people. Shoshanna would tell Yussel when his father called that his father was well, that his father was happy. Once in a while Yussel broke his silence for his father’s calls. “Ask my father if his flower child is happy.” Shoshanna shushed Yussel, bubbled on to his father.

  “He wants to see you, Yussel. He says you should come out soon.”

  Yussel froze, got a cramp in his stomach, saw them in the bed, returned to his silence. He studied the stock market. He invested in a Tofutti brownie cheesecake you can eat with meat, a Ben & Jerry’s, waste removal plants, cheap haircut chains, walnut trees, crypts, sent a form letter out to his clients advising them to increase their household liability. All but five of his clients mailed in the papers and he mailed papers back. But he didn’t speak, except to his children, at night, to tell them a story, to ask about school for the girls, Yeshiva for Schmulke. He wouldn’t let his children suffer. Shoshanna was a different story. She wanted him to be a rabbi. Her parents were after her to get after him.

  In the spring he knew something was about to happen, but when the screen became clear before his eyes, he blinked and made it go away. He did not do prophecy. Also he couldn’t tell what was prophecy and what was fear. Finally, just before Passover, he flew out to Kansas City to help his father make shmura matzoh in the oven in the backyard, to help cook for Pesach, to fight with him about his mother. “How could you do it? What kind of man are you? You give everyone everything, nothing to her. All she wanted was a door.”

  His father rolled the shmura matzoh. The two men rolled, cut, washed, sanded the rolling pins, rolled, cut, washed, sanded the rolling pins, timed the eighteen minutes between this dough and that dough, yelled “L’Shem! Matzoh! Mitzvah!” to each other, in loud voices, long into the night. They stood before the flaming oven, pulled out the baked matzohs, dropped them into straw-filled boxes. Their echoes could be heard at the 7-Eleven. And they yelled at each other. “Why?” “How?” “What is intended? To do what you want?” Yussel had not seen the Flower Child yet. He had seen a white blouse in the laundry that was printed with large black ants, three inches long, her ants. His father must have sent her away when Yussel visited. Yussel didn’t want to see her. He’d been seeing her in his head since Hanukah. The hippies were everywhere in his father’s house. They didn’t look in his eyes.