He wants Gavriel to know he’d sat through his own father’s mourning because of his upside-down devotion. And twenty years later, he wishes desperately that he could un-sit and do right. That is the warning he wants to share. To say, You’ll never be able to pray all those prayers unuttered.
And yet, Reb Shuli is still too ashamed to admit to being the man he once was.
What he says instead is, “I want to know if you sit because you’re mad.”
“At my father?”
“Yes. For dying.”
“I don’t understand,” the boy says. “Because it’s his fault?”
Reb Shuli can see Gavriel’s bottom lip beginning to wobble.
“No, no, no. Chas v’chalilah. God forbid. That’s not what I meant. I just thought—”
“My mother,” Gavriel says. “I’m mad at her.”
Again, the boy’s tone—it’s as if he speaks out of pity for the suffering of his teacher.
“But why?” Reb Shuli says. “What has she done?”
“She broke a promise. She lied.”
“I’m sure your mother didn’t lie.”
Gavriel looks back over his shoulder at the clock.
“Is it second recess yet?”
“No. It’s still first recess. Anyway, there is only ever one recess. I made up the others so we could talk until we’re done.”
“What if it takes longer?”
“So I’ll make more. A fourth and a fifth recess, even—only for you. Or for you and someone you pick to play with.”
“You promise?”
“Bli neder, if it takes that long, then yes.”
Gavriel, sharp child, says, “If I just tell you quick, can I have the fifth recess as the fourth?”
“You mean an extra for you and a friend?”
“Yes.”
“If you tell me quick-quick, and if you and the friend play in the library and not the schoolyard, so I don’t have to answer to the rosh yeshiva if he sees. You can have both fourth and fifth as a private recess for you and this friend.”
Gavriel nods.
“When my father died, my mother promised I could choose anything of his that I wanted. That the youngest gets first pick.”
“OK,” Reb Shuli says.
“When I chose, she said no.”
“That’s not necessarily lying,” Reb Shuli says, full of affection. “Not everything is for a child. Let’s say he had a gun in his drawer.”
“It wasn’t a gun.”
“I didn’t think it was. I meant if you wanted a car that you couldn’t drive, a better example.”
“It was his Kiddush cup.”
This sets a heavy silence over them both. It blocks out the noise from the playground, and the dull hiss from the PA system that never, in that classroom, seems to turn off.
“You wanted your father’s Kiddush cup?”
“And my mother said no.”
“Maybe because you’re still a family, under one roof. Maybe while she’s lucky enough to have you and your siblings at home, if there are others…”
“Leib. He’s still home. And one of my sisters.”
“See? That makes perfect sense. There’s no reason to be mad. She wants it to stay. The family cup.”
“She already gave it to Yisroel. It’s at his house.”
Reb Shuli does his best not to show it, but he has to admit, it does sound like a lie.
Gavriel then crosses his arms and presses that mouth closed.
This is when Shuli wishes he were better trained. He isn’t a social worker, or even a licensed teacher, for that matter—you don’t need some piece of paper from the state to teach Gemara in private school.
Shuli isn’t quite sure if another bribe is, for the boy, good or bad. He assesses the situation as best he can and does what he needs to do.
“The triple recess today,” Shuli says. “And a double tomorrow, for you and one friend.”
“The Kiddush cup,” Gavriel says. “It has our last name on the side. On the bottom, it says 1856. It’s been used by our family for like two hundred years. My father made Kiddush with it every week.”
“A treasure,” Reb Shuli says, feeling stupid, as the treasure is already lost.
“My mother said that my father said that it was really important to him that it keep getting used every Shabbos, long after he was gone.”
“This is what ritual does. It binds from chaos. Across time.”
Reb Shuli asks if what he just said makes clear sense, and Gavriel gives his teacher a thumbs-up.
Then the boy says, “Me always being in trouble? With you, in here?”
“Yes?” Shuli answers, solemn.
“At home it’s kind of always the situation. Even from before my dad. The treif candy. The money from the purse. I’m always getting punished for that kind of stuff—when I get caught. That’s what she was saying, why I couldn’t have it.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Of the five of us kids, my mother says I’m the one who, if I don’t fix it, will end up off the derech. Who’ll end up not being shomer Shabbos, and not religious, and living like a goy.”
“God forbid!” Reb Shuli says.
“She gave her word to my father that the cup would get used. That’s what she told me. She said, even though she knows she made me a promise, she already made my father a bigger promise, and that one needed to be honored more, because he was the father, and because he was dead. So she couldn’t, with a good heart, trust the cup to go to me. Considering how I act, is what she said. Then she told me to pick something else.”
What to say now? How to build trust here, but not break it at home?
“She did this, your mother,” Reb Shuli says, “because you might not, at some future time, do what a Jewish boy should?”
Gavriel nods.
“I’m sure your mother means well. But I want you to know, I believe, with all my heart, that you—you’re a good boy. And I want you to know,” Reb Shuli says, “if I didn’t have children of my own, I’d give you my own Kiddush cup, believing it would be in the best of hands.”
Shuli smiles down upon his student, who looks like he might cry. Then, Shuli sees, it’s a different expression completely.
“Can I go to recess now?”
“Go,” Reb Shuli says. “Play nice.”
X
How often does Miri steer him in the right direction? How often does she know what’s right? They bring the children to the wedding, and it is, for Shuli, a true tonic for the spirit.
At the bedekken, the bride sits stunning in a throne of a chair. Putting aside his rabbinical duties, Shuli hooks Hayim’s arm in a joyous father-son moment, as they join the other men to dance the chassan over, stomping and hooting, so that the groom may veil his bride.
He spies Miri among the crowd of women, with Nava pulled to her chest. His beautiful wife, her arms wrapped around their daughter, winks at him when he nears.
Shuli celebrates at every step, kiddushin and nissuin, dinner and dance. He swirls in every circle, singing along to every song. When bride and groom are seated, Shuli is first to do a solo jig before them and quick to grab the back of the groom’s chair when it’s time to lift the couple into the air.
With the newlyweds hoisted above everyone’s heads, someone grabs a napkin, so that the chassan can hold one corner and the kallah the other. The heavy lifters raise and lower those chairs to the music, while new husband and wife howl, aloft.
Shuli stares up, admiring the union he’d just consecrated and which he very literally supports. The sweat stings his eyes, as he shoulders his burden.
And it’s the thought of burdens and of unions, the idea of hoisting this couple toward Heaven, and the tension on the napkin they hold, that brings Shuli back to th
e signing of the ketubah. It has him contemplating the wedding contract, and the handkerchief the groom had given to Shuli to pass on to the eidim, the two kosher witnesses. It was a kinyan made to seal the deal, to represent physically the commitment entered into.
The realization hits Shuli so hard it nearly knocks him from his feet. He stumbles, weak kneed. The others, supporting the chair, shore it up in a panic. They stare at Shuli with a mix of concern and anger—fighting not to drop the chassan and spill him, like Humpty Dumpty, to the floor.
The chairs are hurriedly lowered, everyone grinning and clapping to cover it up, while Shuli stumbles off, past his son and daughter, and out of the hall. He can see Miri breaking away from the women’s hora, as he heads toward the exit.
* * *
—
What has left Shuli light-headed is the understanding that all his years of t’shuvah, a lifetime of redemption, had—for his father—done nothing. Not the yahrzeit candles lit, nor the services led. It was twenty years of Kaddishes without meaning, as they were not Shuli’s to say.
So maybe Gavriel doesn’t stand when he should, but hadn’t he sought a responsibility more lasting? Hadn’t he gone after the legacy of his father’s Kiddush cup, while well aware that his yetzer hara—his own budding evil inclination—would make owning it, for him, a great challenge?
This pisher, too young to grow even a wisp of beard, had succeeded where Shuli had failed. He’d tried to serve his father across time.
Shuli hasn’t even made it to the end of the street before Miri catches up.
“What’s gotten into you, husband?” she says, sincerely concerned. “Are you drunk? You look green.”
“I’ve figured it out,” he says. “What that boy has woken up in me.”
“Not that student,” Miri says, disappointed. “That’s not what you’re thinking about here.”
“What better place,” he says, “when overseeing contracts, when transforming love into law. It’s the kinyan,” Shuli tells her, looking around nervously, as if someone might overhear. “Just because I returned to the fold doesn’t mean I brought everything back with me. On that website, a lifetime ago, I gave up what was mine.”
“This isn’t news, Shuli. How many times have we discussed this over the years? You paid for a service, and that’s all.”
“But it’s not all. I don’t know if I ever told you. When I signed, there was a digital pen that I put into a digital hand. I made a kinyan. I transferred over my rights—for real. Which means, even now, remembering my father is that other man’s job.”
“You’re serious?” she says, and Shuli is. “You think that would hold up in a rabbinical court? A shaliach mitzvah, a representative acquiring that license in perpetuity? It wouldn’t stand. The passing of the pen, it’s for optics, just for show. A wedding kinyan is a different deal.”
“You always have the answers, my brilliant wife. But you don’t know how a beis din would judge when it was my intent to be rid of that responsibility for life. The privilege doesn’t just revert on its own. The other party would need to return it.” And here Shuli thinks he might faint. “What if he wants to keep what he’s been given? Where will I be then?”
“And how would you even find him to ask? But let me think about it,” Miri says. “I can look it up. I can advise.”
“I can tell you right where to look, Miri. In the Torah. At Avraham’s death. The first Jewish father buried, and his two sons left to mourn. You can study that monster Esav, the firstborn, who traded his birthright for a bowl of lentils. Do you know what is written?”
“I do.”
“But do you know what word specifically is used?”
“Vayivez,” Miri says.
“Yes, vayivez. To despise! Esav didn’t just reject, he didn’t just turn down, he purposely threw away his birthright because he despised it. This is the rot he and I both hold in our hearts.”
“Oh, husband,” Miri says, looking fully forlorn.
“Take the kids home,” he says, already walking in the direction of school.
“What do I tell everyone?”
“That I’m sick. That I’m not well. Tell them it’s mental indigestion. A little reflux of the soul.”
XI
Shuli hurries along, mumbling to himself in the dark and following the rhythm of his thoughts…Kiddush, Kaddish, kadosh, kadeshah. He rolls that loaded root around in his noggin, tracking it from sacred to profane.
It’s almost a relief to discover the truth of his empty redemption, to uncover—through Gavriel, of all people—that Shuli was living a ghost life, a spiritual existence that one could, like steam, push a finger through.
All the years of teaching and outreach, all the effort dedicated to t’shuvah, it was as if he’d been saving money for twenty years only to find he’d been depositing it into someone else’s account. Regarding the one thing that mattered to Shuli, the very spark that started the fire of his rebirth, the Kaddish still belonged to Chemi, who roamed as true heir, Shuli’s dead father’s legal son.
Rushing toward the yeshiva, distractedly crossing against the light, a skateboarder nearly hits him, jumping from his board, which clatters past. The young man somehow sticks the landing, coming to a halt.
Shuli picks up the board, which is a beauty. A perfect fit for a skater whose costume is as complete as Shuli’s own, from his baseball hat down to his sneakers. Shuli can see in the skater’s gaze how he is being seen, with his long beard and black hat, and the fancy silk bekishe he wears for weddings. How easy it is to fool people with one’s outside, even if the work hasn’t been done within.
“Nice deck,” Shuli says, passing the skateboard back.
“Thanks,” the man says, skating off. Shuli considers calling after him, asking to use his phone.
Such a temptation as a cell phone with Internet, Shuli didn’t allow for himself or his family. There was no Wi-Fi in their house. No laptops or desktops. Such a portal to temptation isn’t safe when the children are small, and is even more dangerous as they turn big, which is why he races to the computer room at school.
Just thinking about logging on musters the image Shuli has involuntarily pictured countless times. There it is, that poor woman and her glass dildo, taking form in his mind’s eye.
Shuli’s father had warned him against the permanence of a tattoo, but this, this is even worse. How it haunts him. “Dildo!” Shuli thinks. That he even still knows the word is pure wretchedness. He picks up his pace, as if he might leave that memory behind.
* * *
—
Before heading into the computer room, Reb Shuli runs to the teachers’ lounge for the corkboard he’d hung over his shared desk. Pinned to it were flyers for this and that, the new class schedules tacked above the old. In pride of place were the photographs of former students at different milestones and, blessedly, those students’ children—some of whom would soon enough be in Shuli’s class. Buried beneath it all, the very first thing he’d affixed to that blank board was the picture of Chemi, leaning over a book.
Reb Shuli stands there with the moon cutting grayly through the sad unwashed window, feeling blessed with clarity and a vision for repair. He lifts that corkboard from its hook on the wall and rests it flat on his desk. Shuli begins pulling tacks and tossing papers. It is, for Reb Shuli, like peeling back time. Layer after layer, year after year.
XII
Reb Shuli sits in front of a space-age monitor in the computer room, searching for its base. He can’t find the cord that runs from the monitor to the tower, or, for that matter, the tower itself. On top of it all—this was something—the keyboard and mouse lie untethered, cut loose.
It’s no short stretch before Reb Shuli understands that the computer, the guts of it, are built into that sliver of a screen. The whole machine was pressed into that sleek, flat space.
After some fiddling, Reb Shuli finds the button to turn the accursed thing on. He feels a quick rush of pride when, guessing at icons, he finds himself on the World Wide Web. Years away from all this nonsense, and he’d managed to figure it out.
Such shrewdness only confirmed what he’d always been taught. If one is well versed in the Torah, all other knowledge will be yours.
This time, Reb Shuli knows exactly what to enter. He looks at his picture of Chemi, takes a deep breath, and types in kaddish.com.
He’s whisked to the site with a speed he couldn’t have imagined. There it is, still active, still providing its miraculous service to the shirkers and deadbeats of the world.
How far the site has come from that fish-mouthed dawn at his sister’s house. The design is as streamlined and space-aged as the machine on which he views it. Across the top of the page runs a banner with a number that looks as if it’s actually printed in bronze, so dimensional and solid does it appear.
What Reb Shuli can’t fathom is what he sees written there. The number reads, “2,784.” Below it, in that same hefty type, it says “souls served.”
And just like that, while he’s watching and absorbing, the last digit turns, right before his eyes, from a four to a five.
He looks at his watch. Barely dawn in Israel, and these fine men hard at work, engaged in their monkish labors.
In the center of that home page, lovely pictures of the students studying and praying rotate in a well-choreographed cascade. Reb Shuli stares at them, misty, with his pinpricked and faded photo of Chemi set alongside the keyboard.
He watches this new generation of talmidei chachamim, mesmerized and wondering if his ancient image of Chemi might materialize.
When he’s sat through the complete slide show what must have been a dozen times, feeling moved, feeling connected to that distant study hall, he tours the other tabs.
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