by Steve Stern
“What are you kidding?” The rabbi was incredulous, or anyway pretended to be. “What you think, dveykuss, which you call it conscious, is a cruise ship to the Bahama? Conscious… ness? is the end of the line; you get yours and you’re a satisfy customer, end of shtory.” One of the women had stuck a lit cigar in his mouth, which he clenched between rows of shiny new ivories.
“But”—Bernie was thinking of the wisdom that the masters would retrieve from their excursions to the celestial academies—“the tzaddiks…”
The old man harrumphed. “What tzaddiks? There ain’t no more tzaddiks. I was the last one and I drownded in the century before the century before this.”
“But Rabbi,” Bernie begged to differ, though the rebbe’s painted fetish of a face posed a weak argument, “you’re still alive.”
“In a sense,” said old Eliezer mysteriously.
“What do you mean?” asked Bernie, perplexed.
“Rabbi,” Messalina respectfully interrupted, “you shouldn’t tire yourself out. It’s time to go down and meet your flock.”
The old man lifted and let fall his scant shoulders, as if to say, I’m a martyr to my public, and took a last puff of his cigar before handing it back to the buxom lady with the reconstructed chin. As his attendants escorted the rabbi out the door, Bernie thought he resembled in his vestments an oversized playing card: The joker, he said to himself before guiltily banishing the thought. He stood wondering what to do next, when the snake-haired woman at the computer terminal, removing the headset to introduce herself as chief technician, invited him to watch the rabbi’s performance from the skybox. She explained that the holy man’s words would be videotaped for uploading onto his website, where his wisdom could be disseminated throughout cyberspace. Bernie pressed his nose to the bulletproof windows to view the assembly, which, if not quite the multitudes the papers had reported, was still an impressive turnout for a weekday morning. The gathering was composed primarily of young and not-so-young women arrayed in stylish exercise outfits, with here and there a fey young man, similarly attired, while the remainder of the crowd—wives in Capri pants, husbands in wife beaters and industrial caps—might have been left over from the Baptist evangelist’s era. Had they returned through force of habit? Seated on a raised dais in a thronelike armchair, a tiny microphone appearing to orbit his jaw like a fly, Rabbi ben Zephyr began his pulpit discourse. It was a case history, really, about a Mrs. Kissel, whose caterer had had a coronary on the eve of her son Sean’s bar mitzvah. The event was to have been followed by a theme party inspired by the video game Grand Theft Auto, its centerpiece a cake in the shape of a car raised on a hydraulic lift.
“Mrs. Kissel, who is here today?” A squat bruin of a woman got awkwardly to her feet and was roundly applauded. “Mrs. Kissel that she might have blew a gasket, but instead of to react she becomes…” The rabbi invited the word with a come-hither gesture, which the congregation shouted as one: “Pro-Active!” “On the names of the Unnameable she meditates,” he continued at an amplified pitch, “which it allowed her to see better the essence instead of the sorry substance from young Sean’s bar mitzvah. She sees how on the higher plane he is readink already his portion Torah in the presence of Rabbis Hillel and Shammai.” Behind the speaker enormous power-point images of the ancient sages were projected onto a screen, juxtaposed with snapshots of Sean in his tallis among action figures from the Grand Theft video game. “The next day, the caterer, olav hasholem, is dead, the reception after the bar mitzvah a train wreck,” another image of guests in a rented hall looking bewildered over the absence of food, “but in her proactive bubble Mrs. Kissel is tranquil, aware of by Heaven and Earth the con-tig-u-i-ty. So what is the lesson? What looks like it ain’t exactly the Garden of Eden, with a little adjust from the focus, it’s the Garden of Eden.”
Unsure of what he’d heard, Bernie shook his head as if to rid it of a flea in his brain. Meanwhile cantorial music was being piped into the amphitheater, and the assembled, profoundly moved, were on their feet swaying ecstatically with upraised hands. Their rebbe went on to assure them that the Light was no more hidden than the Passover afikoymen a papa hides for his children in plain sight; they should keep their eyes peeled. Then beckoning one and all to come down from the stands and sit on the artificial turf at his feet, he explained in a pseudoscientific jargon the power of the Ben Zephyr system to increase CO2 in the lungs, thereby lowering the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve… and so on. While visual prompts were flashed on the screen behind him—mansions with satellite dishes, food processors, digital cameras, and handguns, along with fat cherubs out of Currier & Ives—he led them in a laughing meditation, during which Bernie’s own special perceptions began to come into play. He saw all about them a carnival of auras ranging the spectrum from Technicolor to snot gray, souls shaped like bagpipes shedding period costumes to arrive mother-naked at this particular station in time. The session ended with a penitential prayer, the gathered beating their chests with their fists responsively as if in a martial salute. Then a brief benediction after which the rabbi was ushered by his thick-necked sergeant-at-arms through a gauntlet of the faithful, all wanting to touch him.
When he reentered his communications aerie on the arms of the women, his few remaining tufts of hair were plastered in spit curls to his sunken temples; his face was runneled in sweat, which the girl with the braid (who looked frankly not much older than Bernie) was busy mopping from his forehead and cheeks. The braid tickled her buttocks, which in turn lifted the pleats of her skirt like a partridge tail, as she dabbed at the makeup staining his beard.
“You still here?” he inquired a bit hoarsely of the boy.
There was a moment when Bernie was unable to equate the sage, so composed on his podium as he orchestrated a spiritual debauch, with the runny-eyed scarecrow shuffling into the room.
“What did you mean,” Bernie still needed to know, “by ‘in a sense’?”
“Means?” the holy man knitted his parchment brow in an effort to recall where their conversation had left off. Then nodding his head he remarked off handedly, “Means I’m dead already and in heaven.”
It took Bernie the better part of a minute to respond. “Excuse me, Rabbi, but this isn’t heaven.”
Messalina was pulling the linen ephod over his head while the girl (“A dank, Cosette”) helped him off with his suit jacket and loosened his collar. The wash ‘n’ wear shirt was wringing with perspiration, clinging to his skeletal frame, inciting Cosette to flutter about him with a church fan emblazoned with an aleph in a cake of ice—presumably the House of Enlightenment logo. The lady with the chin tuck offered him a glass of tea with lemon.
“La chayim, Rosalie,” said the old man, popping a sugar cube into his mouth, his carmined lips forming a fishy oval through which to slurp his tea; then he returned to the subject of Bernie’s repudiation: “Is as good as.”
Taken aback, the boy nevertheless stuck to his guns: “No, it isn’t.” He was startled by the aggressiveness of his own rejoinder; where did he get the gumption? But he was thinking of Lou Ella’s daily catalog of disasters, the body counts she gleaned from the radio and insisted on reciting to Bernie to keep him informed. It was the ballast she provided to help tether him to his home planet—though didn’t the ills she listed also compound his reasons for drifting away? “It’s time for your catechism by cataclysm,” she would jauntily announce, to which Bernie might add for good measure various khurbanim, the horrors that had uniquely afflicted the Jews.
The rabbi had assumed a smug expression. “Ketzele, you can’t sit on two pots with one toches. Gib a keek on my boudoir over there.” Bernie glanced through the open French doors at the circular bed beneath its soft track-lighting, surrounded by velvet draperies, electronic monitors, and various gadgets on whose purposes he preferred not to speculate. “You’ll see I got your home theater complete with the ZipConnect CD stereo, the Sony subwoofer and digital tuner; I got your liquid crystal plasma TV and
the webcam for broadcasting to my followers Rabbi ben Zephyr his intimate moments, so under their rebbe’s bed they don’t have to hide to get carnal wisdom. I got here your robotic massage chair.” Lowering himself with a deal of grunting into a padded swivel chair at the head of the conference table, as Rosalie, donning a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, pressed a button that made the chair vibrate. “In the p-parking lot I g-g-g-got a Ch-chevy Tahoe and the P-p-p-porsche car which my bodyguard Ch-ch-ch-cholly Side-pocket will learn me to drive.” Rosalie switched off the chair. “I got in the basement a infa-red shvitz, a frigerator stock full with smoked Nova and import schnapps; I got the ladies”—blushes all around—“to spoon-feed me and give to me the pills that will make to stand up again little Yankl. Takhe”—whispering, though what was left to be discreet about?—“they even change by me mayn vikele should I pish myself.” Bernie was close to clapping his hands over his ears. “I got students that like Messiah ben David they worship me. If this ain’t Gan Eydn, what is?”
The boy opened his mouth to object, something wasn’t right, but found no ready reply.
“I got also scheduled the Botox injection and the vein removal treatment to make me again young. This way will I live forever.”
“Wait a minute,” inserted Bernie, his head spinning. “I thought you said you were dead.”
“In a sense,” replied Rabbi ben Zephyr.
At that point Bernie groaned aloud: Was the rabbi playing with his mind? As if to confirm it, the old man grinned, scattering wrinkles like jackstraws over his hollow cheeks as he changed the subject. “Hey, Moishe Kapoyer, Mr. Upside-Down, you got yet a girl?”
Bernie made a mighty effort to respond in kind. “In a sense,” he said.
“Mazel tov,” said the rabbi, though whether congratulating him on the girl or his ironic faculty (touché), the boy couldn’t tell. “Are you shtupping her?”
“Pardon me?”
“What’s a matter,” the old man seemed concerned, “you ain’t with her yet a man? You’re old enough to pull your putz, you should be already a man. So boychik, you want maybe to borrow my pills?”
Trying to regain some perspective, Bernie asked his mentor in all seriousness, “Is that what’s important? The shtupping?”
“What else?” said the rabbi breezily. “Sex is for the poor man his davening. Of course, there’s the eating and drinking and the chutzpedik movement of the bowel, but ah, the shtupping! I’m shtupping almost every night, almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday…”
The ladies tittered like glockenspiels.
Feeling bludgeoned, Bernie endeavored to remind himself that this was his own Rabbi ben Zephyr, the wonder rebbe he’d salvaged from the deep freeze and in whom he placed his implicit faith. “Lou Ella…,” he tendered, and immediately wished he could take back her name.
“A shiksa?”
“Does it matter?’
The rabbi grinned again, his false teeth glistening like eggs in a nest, and rolled his eyes to indicate the diversity among his attendants.
Cautiously appeased, the boy proceeded with his confession. Was this what he’d come here for? “I think I love her,” he stated under his breath, aware that the ladies were cupping their ears, “but I can’t, like, y’know”—he nodded in a way that caused the rabbi to nod in sync—“because every time we start my spirit takes off for points unknown.”
“Hmm.” The old man frowned like a doctor hearing doubtful sounds through a stethoscope. “Then maybe with the sacred you should break already your connection, so you ain’t no more torn.”
Bernie looked at him with incomprehension. “But isn’t torn what I’m supposed to be?” For this, as the texts agreed, was the human condition.
“Not at all,” replied Rabbi ben Zephyr, dismissing, as Bernie saw it, the fundamental tenet of his creed. “Look at me, how at peace I am with the world.”
“Which world?” wondered the boy, all at sea.
Up went the crooked finger again. “That is the question.”
Again Bernie groaned as the rabbi chortled and took from a tiny gold pillbox a pinch of snuff—at least the boy presumed it was snuff. “Rabbi,” he submitted, “you’ll forgive me, but these things are easy for you to say. You’re”—Did he still believe it?—“an enlightened saint.”
“Nifter-shmifter,” said the rabbi, and sneezed into one of several proffered hankies, “I finished with all that saint business when I was alive.”
“But you are alive,” insisted Bernie.
The rabbi grinned, and Bernie waited for the words he was thankfully spared, though variations—in no sense, innocence—resonated in his head all the same.
“You see,” the old gaffer continued, “the rebbe that I was never waked up from on ice his dream, which it’s a long nightmare I don’t have to tell you. His neshomah that it never returned to his breast. But me myself, Eliezer ben Zephyr, what I realized, I am born again in heaven like I was on earth. Here, nothing is written, everything is permitted. Feel good in yourself is the whole of the law.”
It occurred to Bernie that such heterodox pronouncements might be merely for the benefit of shocking him, though he rejected the notion as precisely the kind of self-centered thinking that Lou was forever upbraiding him for. “What about the mitzvot?” he asked, knowing the question probably no longer applied.
“When I was alive in my life,” came the refrain, “all six hundred thirteen precepts I observed; I was tamim, a perfect master. Tiqqun ha-kelali I practiced to preserve the sex continence, and all my years I never looked once at my shwantz. I would read in a flash your tzelem, what you call the genealogy from souls. Were legendary also my disciples for their piety; about us tales were told all over Galut. Did you hear the one how I hired a person just to keep the names of God before me? How I outwitted the Angel of Death and captured the devil Samael, but let him go so there would still be in the world evil and therefore free will? Then in the flood I died and woke up in Paradise, where it’s my reward there’s nothing I got to observe anymore. So I’m telling the gantser klal, gentiles included, this is heaven already on the planet of Earth. It’s all in my book.”
Bernie reflected that the exploits the rabbi alluded to bore a marked similarity to those of the masters in Martin Buber’s Legends of the Hasidim. “This is what you teach your students?” he asked.
“Peace of mind I give them to trade in the gilt-edge security and refinance the adjustable mortgage, that they should feel good in themselves and not guilty that they beat der kinder, cheat on the wife, or betray the friend. Then I give to them a bisl divinity so as to leave with them a little bliss. Praise God who permits the forbidden. Live like the day is here. ‘Hide not thyself from thine own flesh.’”
“What about”—Bernie was conscious of sounding a tad sanctimonious—“‘Do not unto others what is also hateful to you?’”
“I don’t like to embarrass with too much Jewish stuff the goyim,” repined the rabbi, “though speaking of Hillel, what about ‘If not now, when?’” squeezing the broad behind of Messalina, who giggled gamely.
“This is not helpful,” Bernie admitted to himself.
“Bubbie, you’re all farmisht because how you suffer from the blue beytsim.” He touched his own scrotum sympathetically. “Relax and deposit in the appropriate female orifice your seed. This is nature. Myself, I never had on earth no wife and kids; like the Karaites that would make from themself a eunuch, I was pure. Till the afterlife I waited to be a man so that I’m makink up for it now the lost time. So stop kvetching and start yentzing; this is my advice that I give to you free of charge, plus a first edition of my book that it’s called The Ice Sage, adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God. Rosalie, ziskeit, fetch for me a copy the book, which it’s twenty-nine ninety-five retail.”
Bernie received the self-published volume with its glossy cover portrait of the rabbi in his shtreimel with the snap-on raccoon tail. “Thank you,” he said uncertainly. Here was at least something palpable he could
bring back from his visit. Wasn’t that what Lou was always bugging him about, that he should bring her back something of value from his travels? It wasn’t enough just to tell her about the unity which is the redemption of all things, and so forth; redemption you could get for a pro-rated annual “tithe” at ben Zephyr’s New House of Enlightenment. For a reasonable fee the rabbi would restore your soul. What more could you ask? Which was precisely the question that the still frustrated Bernie put to the rabbi, who sighed impatiently.
“H’omer…”
“Bernie,” the boy corrected.
“I know by you your name. H’omer means matter; the material world, called also pardes, the Garden, which it is all that here concerns us.”
“But,” Bernie felt himself succumbing to exasperation, “isn’t it pretty hopeless, I mean, the world?”
“What kind message is that? You know they are the same in Hebrew, the words for messenger and angel? It’s for the teacher his responsibility to bring the good news.”
“Even if it’s a lie?”
The rabbi ignored him. “I’m a busy man; I got now to meet my Tantric Kabbalah group.” The ladies helped him up from his chair and back on with his ritual garment, dusting him with the powder puff and whisk broom again. “I’m very gratified we had this little talk, baruch haShem and all that.”
He was nearly out the door when Bernie collected himself enough to cry, “Rabbi, wait!”
Turning only halfway ‘round, “What is it you want?’
“Your blessing?” said the boy.
“Sure, sure. Gezunterheyt. Knock yourself out.” And he was gone.
1908.
They slept together like brothers in the same bed, which Shmerl lowered each evening from the ceiling and raised again (sometimes with Max still in it) in the late mornings when he woke. For although Max had adjusted to Shmerl’s odd hours, he often continued to sleep in his borrowed longjohns through much of the day. In fact, during those first days after his rescue Max never set foot outside the automated shack, as if the ordeal of the previous months had finally caught up with him and laid him low. Even though his wound was minor and largely healed before the week was out, he remained convalescent, and Shmerl was happy to indulge him in his prostration. Having saved him, the dung carter now felt somehow responsible for securing his guest’s enduring safety and health. Though Max assured him the attack in the alley was merely a chance episode not likely to happen again, Shmerl remained anxious concerning his new friend’s welfare. He changed his head dressing daily, examined him for any symptoms of concussion, and continued to apply the vile medicinal compresses; he cooked him meals: mostly a gluey amalgam of kasha and eggs, though sometimes there was Jewish fish: “Is now my namesake, Karp.” And Max, who had eaten all manner of treyf these many months, was appreciative, not to say amused by the crucibles and alkaline cells Shmerl employed in his culinary endeavors, the results of which were more often than not inedible. Nor did it help that the aroma of every dish partook of the stables’ distinct bouquet. All the same, in a show of abiding gratitude (and in deference to Shmerl’s insistence that he keep up his strength), Max would dutifully sample the fare; though in time the guest, begging his host’s permission, revived Jocheved’s dormant skills and took over the cooking himself.
