Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  Gimpel wagged his head. I wondered if he was a simpleton.

  One morning I woke up in a puddle of cold, sticky semen. Hodel’s hand passed through it as she stirred to wake and she sat up in bed with a start, wiping her palm on the sheet with a disgusted expression.

  “I told my mother about that,” she said, looking down at my sodden long johns. I lay waiting for what she would say next, bathed in humiliation. It was no use admonishing Hodel for betraying me to that black-eyed bitch. She would only cry.

  “Mama says it’s a succubus, coming to steal your seed and make baby demons with it,” said Hodel, opening her clear blue eyes in credulous wonder, her little bud of a mouth puckered like a nursling’s. “She says we have to have relations every night I’m clean, otherwise the baby demons that the succubus made with your seed will kill our babies when we have them. They’ll suffocate them in their sleep.” My child-wife’s eyes were filled with tears—whether at the thought of dead infants or nightly encounters with her husband’s prong, I could not tell. I lay there in a cold, congealed puddle of my own spunk and imagined a female succubus hunched, squatting over me, wild-haired, naked, with wine-dark nipples and a fleshy mouth, shuddering as she stole my seed for her evil progeny. I found the image intensely erotic and had to lie on my stomach to hide my condition from my wife. What was wrong with me?

  I discharged my worries into Gimpel’s willing ear that afternoon as we walked single-file along a narrow, muddy street. In the middle of my speech, a carriage passed; I flattened myself against a building. “Mme Mendel thinks it’s succubi, coming to steal my seed,” I said, wiping specks of mud from my face.

  Gimpel chuckled, lumbering in front of me, kettles clanging, his broad back slightly bent. “The Besht says that’s just a natural occurrence.”

  “So you don’t believe in demons?”

  “I didn’t say that! Demons were created by Hashem. In fact, Cain’s wife, Lilith, may have been a demon! But the body—the body is basically good,” he shouted over his shoulder, stopping to let a clutch of Cistercian nuns rush by. The sisters held up their starched white and black habits as they leapt over a stream of sewage that coursed down the center of the street. Paris stank in those days. “The act of love between man and wife is a holy thing,” Gimpel continued loudly. “There is even a belief that it can help heal the universe, which was torn when the vessels were broken!” Gimpel turned then and smiled at me, his anchored eye twinkling, the other, disconnected one rotating freely in its socket.

  “Shsh,” I begged. “The world doesn’t need to know my problems.”

  “The world doesn’t speak Yiddish,” he said.

  Once we had reached our destination and sat organizing our wares on the Place Louis XV, I went on: “What if I am no good? No good at all? I can’t stop myself from thinking about carnal matters. I mean, even succubi don’t sound so terrible to me. My wife—being with my wife is—like being with a sick child. She holds no appeal. Yet I am tormented by lust.”

  “The Besht says it is possible that even sin is from Hashem,” Gimpel pronounced sagely, biting into an apple. “When you have strange thoughts, during prayer, for example about women, think about the origin of those thoughts—the origin is divine love. If everything is Hashem, and Hashem is in everything, then He is in badness too. If you were destined to think bad thoughts, you will think them. Even sin has an element of destiny. There may not be such a thing as evil in the world. I admit, I don’t know much about any of this—I am at the beginning of my studies. But I get to eat the crumbs that fall from the rebbe’s table, and I have learned a lot that way, believe me. You mustn’t turn away from your wife, Jacob. When a man couples with his wife, the Shekinah couples with Hashem in heaven.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The heavenly spheres reflect our sublunar world,” he answered. “Our acts—good and bad—have the power to shift heaven. The more good we do, the faster Moshiach comes. Simple.”

  “But the Shekinah—”

  “The Shekinah is Hashem in the world. She is female. She is the part of Him we can touch down here. She reunites with Hashem.” He clasped his hands together, whitening the knuckles. I stared at this simple elucidation of what I imagined as a hermaphrodite God, my mind drawn to the mystery without understanding. Gimpel’s simple authority was irresistible. I took him that day as my model and my leader. I grew my sidelocks and curled them. I grew my little goat’s beard as long as I was able. When Gimpel and I walked through the streets in our caftans, Jews and French people alike stared at us. Every morning when I prayed, I wound the leather strands of the tefillin around my left arm: thrice around the upper arm, seven times around the forearm, with the little leather box containing tiny scrolls from the Torah nestled at the biceps, pointing toward my heart. I wore the head tefillin strapped to my forehead. I rocked back and forth as I prayed beside Gimpel, the enthusiast. Gimpel never missed a chance to pray. Every morning he rushed off to a home where a makeshift shul had been set up—these moved from week to week, to keep ahead of the police, who sometimes raided places of worship—and I tagged along. When we set off with our wares, he brought along his striped prayer shawl, which he folded up and tucked into a little velvet pouch. Wherever we were in late afternoon, Gimpel managed to find eight more men so we could pray, even if he had to run out in the street collaring Jews for a minyan. In the evening it was the same. He never missed a prayer. He even prayed spontaneously at non-prescribed times, to my father’s irritation. He began to be known in the neighborhood as Holy Gimpel, or, behind his back, “That crazy Hasid from Mezritch.”

  Though in normal life I often skipped the afternoon prayer, when I was with Gimpel, I always prayed at Mincha. I even bought myself a little velvet tallis bag, like Gimpel’s. We threw our striped prayer shawls over our heads and rocked back and forth fervently three times a day, chanting our prayers like clockwork. I have to admit that there were moments, as I recited the prayers and read the Hebrew letters of the Torah, when I discerned the edge of something, like the fluttering hem of an infinite garment—something too vast to describe. In those moments I felt a wave swelling inside of me, carrying me up with it as it rose. But I was always washed up at the shore of my own mind, brought down, perhaps, by the instinctive irony that one day was to take over my whole spirit like a crazed vine. Gimpel, though—he was swept away daily. He cried out to Hashem, he wept, he implored. He prayed to become worthy. To stop being such a lousy sinner.

  To Gimpel, worship didn’t end when you removed the prayer shawl. On the contrary, he was in a virtually constant state of joyous worship. It was a new way of being a Jew, he explained. He was a Hasid. To them, depression was sin. Happiness was good. Gimpel even said a prayer after he took a dump. I started saying it, too, when I left the latrine: “Creator, who formed man with many openings and hollow spaces … if one of them would be opened or sealed it would be impossible to survive and stand before you …” God was everywhere for this man, and everything was joyous. I tried hard to emulate him—I wanted so much to live ecstatically at one with the Creator, to escape the reality of my life—but I couldn’t avoid Hodel, weeping in our conjugal bed night after night. I couldn’t squelch the lustful thoughts that multiplied in my head like maggots.

  I kept the extremity of my sadness from Gimpel for as long as I could. Finally, one afternoon as we sat by the Seine to rest, I unburdened myself, weeping: my wife was half mad, hated the sexual act. Her farts smelled like a dead rat. Gimpel nodded and sighed. “It’s hard to know what the answer is,” he said. A young water carrier trudged by, a curved stick balanced on his shoulders, two full buckets weighing him down, spilling every few feet. Gimpel watched the water sloshing around in the buckets until the boy had passed us. At last he asked, “Has this girl been given an amulet against the evil eye? She’s obviously sick.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, she needs something,” he warned.

  Gimpel continued to stay with my parents, t
aking my place in the bed I shared with Shlomo before I was married. Every Friday he used my mother’s kitchen to prepare huge pots of pea soup, which he and I heaved down our staircase just before sunset in order to feed the poor a Shabbat meal. The widow Morel, our landlady, was a branchlike, bent, red-faced woman who always seemed to be searching for her cat. She had a merciful heart and allowed us to set up a long wooden table and chairs in her courtyard. There were some desperately poor people in the few streets where the Jews lived, and Gimpel endeavored to touch each of them with his ladle. He had a kind word for every arthritic crone, every barefoot urchin, every failed peddler. He knew all their names. Occasionally a starving gentile joined us; Gimpel welcomed them all. Tucked by his joyful side, I ladled thick green soup into chipped bowls held out between dirty, cracked hands, and I enjoyed doing it—or did I enjoy looking as if I were enjoying it? No, I honestly think I was becoming good by doing good. If Gimpel had stayed in Paris, I am sure my life would not have progressed the way it did.

  Once the soup was all served up, Gimpel would say a blessing over the five or six loaves of challah my mother had convinced the baker to donate to the poor. He then presided over the table as the people ate their Shabbat meal, doling out thick slices of the sweet bread, along with stories of the Rabbi ben Eliezer, also known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism—and unorthodox servings of Kabbalah. Cold as it often was in the widow’s courtyard, we were warmed by Gimpel’s impromptu and often shocking statements.

  His mystical cosmology was foreign but compelling: when Hashem set out to make the world, pouring infinite light like molten bronze into vessels meant to contain it, there was a terrible accident. Hashem blundered! He poured too much light into the vessels; they shattered. Sparks of Divine Light fell onto the earth and are now trapped in every mundane created thing, with or without breath in its nostrils. The reason for the exile of the Jews is the gradual release of the sparks trapped in the world. Through the performance of our daily duties, through fervent prayer, through the sanctified marital bed, through concentrating on the Divine while eating—through all of the hundreds of mitzvot performed each day by Jews, each of whom have a certain number of sparks they are destined to release in their lifetime, the sparks will all be returned to the Almighty and Moshiach will come. I wondered at the paradox: Hashem, perfect, spilled the light. Yet clearly it was His intention. Even evil, which was the result of the accident, was in His mysterious plan. There was nothing He hadn’t thought of.

  One Friday about six months after Gimpel had moved in with my family, my mother was waiting for me, smelling of challah. After sunset, she hid her eyes with her ravaged hands and prayed over the lit candles. As always there was a hush in the room as she made her wish to the Creator, the mother’s gift every Shabbat—to make her wish. During the meal, Gimpel was humming and looking at the ceiling, as usual, when he stopped and said:

  “A wandering soul may have been punished for its sins by being made to inhabit food. Only by being eaten by a tzaddik—a true spiritual master—in a spirit of holiness can the wandering soul be released from this torment.”

  “Does the soul know that it is a piece of food?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I’m no tzaddik,” shrugged Gimpel, and went back to his humming. Out of nowhere, it seemed, my father brought his fist down on the table so hard that it sounded like a chandelier had fallen. Everyone but Gimpel looked at him, terrified.

  “What is this about wandering souls?” my father said. He was really angry. His blue eyes were sharp, intense, and fixed on Gimpel, who smiled back at him warmly.

  “Wandering souls? You know,” Gimpel said helpfully, “those who go through gilgul and keep being incarnated until their sins are redeemed. It’s all in the Kabbalah, of course. And did you know that my teacher can look at the forehead of a man and tell from what source his soul came, and the process of gilgul through which it had passed, and what its present mission is here on earth?”

  There was an ominous pause.

  “Your teacher …,” said my father.

  “Rav Dov Ber. He is the disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov. The Besht, as we call him, tells of a soul who was incarnated in a fish and the soul was redeemed when it was eaten by a holy man!”

  “Gimpel,” said my father, “you are my blood. But you can’t live here anymore. This muck you are wallowing in is very dangerous.”

  “But we are the same, you and I,” said Gimpel. “A Jew is a Jew. It’s all written—”

  “No, we are not the same. Those Hasidim over there in Poland are crazy people and I don’t want you infecting my sons with those ideas. I’m as Jewish as the next Jew, but I want my children to have a chance at a good life in this country! I don’t want them dancing around all the time in ecstasy! In this house we have the Torah and the Talmud and that’s the end of it! Do you want them to kill us all? Is that what you want?” My father’s cheeks were flushed; flecks of spittle marred his fine beard.

  “Do you believe Moshiach is even coming?” asked Gimpel gently.

  My father sighed, averting his eyes. “I believe he’s taking his time,” he said sadly, a depressive film coating his eyes. It was then that I realized that my father had given up on Hashem. He only believed in rules now. As much as I had resented his rigid system of behavior and belief, I despised the cynicism concealed beneath it.

  The room was silent for a long time.

  “This too is beshert,” Gimpel said to me as he got up from the table. I could tell that my father felt sick from his outburst. He pushed his dish away half eaten. My mother had tears shivering in her eyes, but she made no move to stop Gimpel from leaving. His mysticism and my sidelocks frightened her.

  I watched as Gimpel made a bundle of his few possessions in the room where I once slept.

  “I should be getting back to the rebbe soon anyway,” he said. “It’s so difficult being away from him. Paris is impossible for the Hasidim. The Besht’s work will never take root here. It is too late.”

  “What did you mean when you said, ‘This too is beshert’?” I asked him.

  “Destiny unfolding,” he stated, tying the bundle fast.

  “I just don’t see how we can have free will, as the Torah says we do, if God knows everything beforehand.”

  “That’s the mystery,” said Gimpel, sitting down on my old bed and leaning back on the wall, his belly shivering like a bowl of pudding beneath his stained caftan. He smiled, looking relaxed, satisfied. “For example, I came to Paris to make money for the Hasidim in Poland, but I didn’t make any money. I came to see if we could bring the work of the Ba’al Shem Tov. But they’re all waiting to become Frenchmen. So why did I come to Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I came to Paris to meet you,” he said. “That’s what I’m guessing. Come with me to Mezritch, Jacob. For a time. You must meet my rebbe. Eat at his table. If your wife is too sick to come, return to her when you have learned something. I’m worried that if I leave you, you will be lost. You are still so soft, everything you lean against makes an impression. I don’t want your soul tossed back and forth in Gehenna for all eternity.”

  Clearly, I should have gone with him.

  12

  Deirdre Senzatimore strode over to the “parent trap,” as she called the smaller house beside her own, to be sure everything was in order for her appointment with Mrs. Drexler. She used part of the house—the living room and foyer, to be exact—as a showroom for her decorating business. Everything in that area of the house was for sale, right down to the candy dishes. Her parents, Don and Libby Jenkins, had the run of the rest of the place. This deal seemed pretty sweet to Deirdre. Her father, Don Jenkins, was appalled by the vulgarity of living in a showroom, but, as his wife Libby reminded him frequently, he didn’t have much to say about it, seeing as he was between jobs and had been for the past seventeen years, having lost his position at First National Bank at the age of forty-nine for being intolerably discouraging to loan a
pplicants. He couldn’t help himself; he just had to be honest, and most of the ideas these people wanted loans for were asinine. Don would open the conversation by saying, “Let’s just go over this,” and proceed to eviscerate the applicant’s business plan, even as he approved their loan, often as an afterthought. People left his desk feeling they had lost the battle already, that, though they had the money they needed to accomplish their goals, they were doomed to failure. Don didn’t mind lending them the bank’s money—he just hated to see them weave such idiotic dreams. There was even a physical attack by one Jeff Wyant, who, though normally a patient man, simply couldn’t stand listening to Don Jenkins’s condescending theory on why a fish farm could never succeed in eastern Connecticut. Wyant punched him in the face, broke his nose. The police were called, but the culprit walked free the next day cleared of aggravated assault, maybe because the particular policeman who answered the call had fantasized about smacking Don Jenkins over the head for years, having endured one of his lectures about the stupidity of opening a cat kennel. Don was a dream masher.

  Deirdre walked into the foyer and was pleased to see that everything was still in place: silk orchids in a Chinese ceramic vase, a large photograph of a lily pond on the wall, peach silk-upholstered bamboo couch beneath it. She lit a vanilla-scented candle on the hall table and stopped, hearing the ominous, high tinkling of ice landing in a glass. She walked into the kitchen. There was her father, Don Jenkins, bent over the freezer drawer, a bottle of vodka on the counter.

  “Dad,” Deirdre said, packing as much patience, exasperation, disappointment, and love into that one word as any daughter possibly could.

  “Don’t ask me if I know what time it is, lovely,” Don said, unfolding himself to an impressive height. His fingers were wet from refreshing the ice tray, the one domestic chore he always undertook without being asked, and he flicked his hands to dispel droplets of water from his elegant fingers with an impatient gesture. Don had a long, squared-off head, and his face was a mass of wrinkles. His once-aquiline nose, diverted by the Wyant attack, listed to one side. Don wore a cherry-red cashmere sweater, a gray silk cravat tied in a loose knot at the base of his thin neck, and hadn’t shaved for several days.