kaddish.com

by Nathan Englander

  “Do they come to your restaurant?” Shuli feels rather smart as he says it—for she’d not said a word about what she does.

  “It’s a stand in the market. Not a restaurant. I only do takeaway.”

  “Does that mean the seeds are for sale?”

  Shuli’s stomach grumbles loud enough to hear. More than the breakfast he’d skipped, he was ravenous from his violent dream feast.

  Fishing a folded twenty-shekel note from the inside pocket of his wallet, he gives it to her. She passes it back to him, laughing.

  “What’s funny?” Reb Shuli asks in Hebrew, somehow wounded.

  His Hebrew makes her laugh even more, so that Reb Shuli sees all the fillings dotting her teeth. He repeats his question in English.

  “I don’t know where you got it from,” she says. “But that kind of twenty hasn’t been used in forever. It’s not worth anything anymore.”

  “It’s from my last trip to Jerusalem.”

  “And you kept that money in your wallet all this time? Like a teenager with a condom?”

  Shuli blushes. And he knows she must think it’s because of her racy talk. But it’s the reason he keeps it that has him glowing red.

  For he’s again stung with the reminder of all he’d rejected that he now embraced. Back when he was living as Larry, he’d laughed louder than this woman when his father had begged him to at least prepare for the end of days. The old man was frightened Larry would be left behind. He’d told him of the tzaddikim among them, of Larry’s neighbors in Brooklyn who quietly waited for the Messiah’s return, Jews who literally kept their suitcases packed and ready, so that they might not waste a second in following the Moshiach home to Israel when he called.

  To Shuli, who now waited for the ingathering himself, the suitcase seemed a step too far. But he admired the conviction behind it. And when he’d last left Israel, he’d kept that twenty as mad money for when the Moshiach brings the world’s Jews back to the Holy Land. Shuli thought it might be nice to be able to buy a cold drink or a falafel when they arrived.

  The woman with the seeds tells him to wait. She slips through the solid metal gate in the wall behind her, leaving it ajar. Shuli spies the sky-blueness of her front door through the space the open gate makes.

  She returns with a wax paper bag and begins serving up an order for Shuli.

  He puts his twenty-shekel bill back in its place and from his back pocket produces the envelope of dollars with which Miri had sent him off.

  This time, without laughing, the woman tells him to put his money away.

  “It’s all right,” she says, and hands him the seeds, still warm.

  “I couldn’t,” Shuli says. “It’s your parnasah. To take from a stranger. You must have your own family to feed.”

  “Such a pilgrim as you, with that sad, worthless bill stashed away. This I don’t get outside my door every day.”

  XX

  When Shuli builds up enough courage, he follows Rav Katz out the side door to the little patch of dirt between the yeshiva and the perimeter wall, where the rosh yeshiva goes to smoke.

  Before Shuli has a chance to feel awkward, Katz shakes a second cigarette loose, which Shuli accepts. Katz holds up his lighter, giving it a flick.

  Shuli leans into the flame.

  “Thank you,” he says, in Hebrew. “For the cigarette, and for the hospitality. It’s nice of you to make room.”

  “Why wouldn’t we? It costs us nothing to have our learning lifted higher by yours.”

  “Not everyone is so welcoming. Who hasn’t walked into a shul in some city and felt everyone looking him up and down?”

  “That’s not been my experience,” Katz says. “The opposite, even. But I’m glad we’re not that way. Especially when our visitor has so much to offer. I watched you yesterday. You must be a rebbe yourself, in the States.”

  “I am,” Reb Shuli says. “But that Gilad is naturally gifted. A very smart kid.”

  “This whole group is especially strong.” Katz pauses to sniffle and then sneeze. He looks up, eyes watering. “Remind me again how you found us?”

  “A friend. Actually, a friend through your website.”

  “Our website?” Katz says, now staring Shuli up and down—exactly in the way Shuli had just described.

  Shuli first nods and then shakes his head, trying to read the correct response on Katz’s face.

  The rabbi helps him along. “A website, thank God, is something we don’t have. And don’t want.”

  “If it’s bad to mention,” Shuli says. “If it’s private.”

  “A private website?” And now Katz looks more confused than suspect. “Better, let’s switch to English, so instead of me not understanding you, you can have the pleasure of not understanding me.” Katz shows Shuli his palms and wipes the slate clean. “Let’s start again. You’re saying it’s the Internet that brings you by us?”

  And what is Shuli to do but proceed?

  He holds his cigarette out to the side, before taking a deep, smokeless breath. Shuli says, “There is a site. It’s for Jews who need to say Kaddish for a loved one but don’t want the responsibility. Through this service, they hire someone. They can employ a student to say the prayers.”

  And from Katz’s expression, Shuli’s not sure if the rosh yeshiva understands English at all. But then he sees it’s the idea of it that Katz is stuck on.

  “What kind of mamzer skips out on such a responsibility? What kind of dog would do that to the dead?”

  “Well, it’s not ideal,” Shuli says. “But we can agree, the person who does that—at least he doesn’t abandon. He does his duty! To find someone else, a shaliach mitzvah—which is perfectly kosher—it’s so much better than the alternative.”

  “Is it?” Katz says. When Shuli doesn’t answer, Katz points two fingers his way, the cigarette pinched in between. “Those who do nothing are truly ignorant. Or truly don’t care. Or they are the ones whose hearts have been hardened by God, as He did with Paroh. It’s very easy to see how their limitations might leave them without fault. But the person who’d arrange such a meshugena thing, it means that he knows how important it is, yes? It means he understands what he should do, and yet tries to wiggle out from underneath, as would a snake. To take such an action, it is worse than inaction. To me, the people who’d do it are even lower than those who’d leave a body unburied for wild animals to eat.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Shuli says, sweating profusely, so painful is the insult. However distressing it would be to hear this charge laid directly against him, it’s ten times more hurtful when coming at him unadulterated and theoretical, a wise man’s belief.

  “Bottom line,” Shuli says. “It’s still better for the deceased’s soul to have someone—anyone—saying the Kaddish.”

  Katz twists up his nose. He’s not having it.

  “Then why do we say ‘Blessed is the True Judge’ if the dead will not be treated fairly? The soul is judged based on the actions of a life.”

  “Let’s not get into that. Forget the soul—”

  “Forget the soul? What else is there?”

  “In this instance,” Shuli says. “I’m saying, for us to look more harshly—as judges, human judges—on one who takes steps to remedy, who tries in his own way to see that good is done…I’m simply asking, can’t you see the beauty in that?”

  Katz points to the house in front of the yeshiva.

  “Pretend this house is on fire. Say I throw my cigarette down and the structure catches fire when we walk away. Pretend it’s all wood, not plaster and stone. Pretend it burns easily, and—God forbid—there are people inside; those are the souls.” He pauses to make sure Shuli is with him. “Now we put two bystanders outside. One does nothing, watching, useless, with his hands on top of his head, his eyes open wide—frozen that way. The other, knowing t
he gravity of what’s taking place, knowing that someone must do something, approaches and spits once into the fire and then walks off. Which of them looks more beautiful to you? The one who does nothing, or the one who knows the size of the emergency and offers such miserly help?”

  The cruelty of it—it’s uncalled for. It’s too much. “Miser?” Shuli says, nearly yelling. “To say ‘miser’ is unfair!”

  “Misers! Why not?” Rav Katz says, unmoved. “It’s a very good word.”

  Shuli, dizzy with hurt, remembers—yes—Rav Katz, if he’s in charge of it all, in charge of the site, wouldn’t he want to throw someone like Shuli off the scent? Couldn’t this be on purpose?

  Maybe others had shown up in the past wanting to undo a kinyan, or even to bring a gift and offer thanks. How many must want to meet the one who’d played such an extraordinary role in their lives? Yes, of course, why hadn’t he thought this when he was sitting with sweet Gavriel in Brooklyn? How many such letters as Shuli’s did Katz receive every day?

  Katz smokes another cigarette in silence. Shuli can tell, with their heated talk, that the rabbi is taking Shuli’s measure a second time. “Shaul,” he says, “you really think we have such a site? That we take money for such a thing from the demons who’d pay?”

  “Did I say that?” Shuli says. He can feel the door he’d opened closing on him.

  “The website. You did say that. That we have one.”

  “No, no, I didn’t. I was still speaking Hebrew. A misunderstanding. I was trying to tell you about a friend, a friend who builds websites—”

  “You didn’t say that. Not at all.”

  “A hundred percent, I meant to! I was trying to explain to you about a neighbor I said Kaddish with, when both of our fathers died—”

  The true confusion on Katz’s face has Shuli worried that he really may have arrived at the wrong yeshiva on the right block. The thoughts race and Shuli catches himself mumbling.

  “Are you all right?” Katz says. “Everything OK in there?”

  “Yes, yes.” Shuli smiles a weak smile. “It must be the jet lag. It’s like falling asleep on one’s feet. Also, the cigarette. I haven’t had one in a very long time. In America, they make it much more difficult to smoke.”

  “As well they should,” Katz says. “It’s a sin to poison one’s body. I know that I myself must put up a better fight.” He looks to the ground and grinds the butt he’s already dropped into the dirt.

  “About my friend,” Shuli says, “the website friend. When he lived in Israel, he used to learn here, at your beit midrash. Maybe fifteen years back. Even twenty! Quite some time ago.”

  “You’re in luck, then,” Katz says. “Do you know how long I’ve been here? Since I was their age.” He gestures to the students inside. “I grew up in this place. First I came to study, and then I returned to teach.”

  “Like me!” Shuli says, with an incredible amount of relief. It was a blessing to find a personal link. “I also am a rabbi in the yeshiva where once I was a boy. What are the chances?”

  “This former student. Your friend,” Katz says. “What’s his name? If he’s less than a thousand years old, I should know him myself.”

  Shuli doesn’t see any other way to play it. He says “Chemi” aloud.

  The rabbi keeps his cool, staring off as if running through his own mental census.

  “A Chemi?” the rabbi says. “A Chemi that was a student here?”

  “Yes, definitely. Definitely a student, and definitely here.”

  “We’ve had probably a hundred Yossi’s and twice that many Moshe’s. But over my whole tenure, a single Chemi, I can’t recall.” The rebbe seems to return for a moment to the list he’d conjured. “There was a French boy who came to us both for his Shanah Aleph and Shanah Bet. A baal t’shuvah. That one, he was a Remy, not a Chemi. Anyway, when he left after the second year, he was already for a long time going by Baruch. But I’m sure, it was Remy when he arrived.”

  “No, the name is as I say it,” Shuli says. “I know it was Chemi—absolutely, for sure.”

  Shuli stands open and vulnerable under the rabbi’s gaze. He presses his hands together before him. “Would you maybe try one more time?” Shuli asks, openly pleading. “Can you, as a kindness, think back?”

  XXI

  A crushing wave of foolishness leaves Shuli unsteady on his feet. He very nearly says “What have I done!” to Rav Katz before mumbling “jet lag” once more and hustling out past the little house and through the front gate. He hasn’t been so undone since he’d run off from the wedding in Royal Hills.

  Shuli knows there’s no other yeshiva camouflaged on that alley or on the parallel street at the top of those stairs. He knows it’s not modesty that has Katz keeping kaddish.com hidden. The facts are the facts. Shuli had found the yeshiva he’d been looking for, but there was no team of students praying for hire, and no minyan for mourners in some secret place. There was nothing there to match what he’d flown around the world to find.

  Still, Shuli believes—as much as he believes in anything—that kaddish.com is nearby. And he trusts that his naughty Gavriel, with his hand-drawn map, had put the “X” on the right spot.

  Thinking of the places right before our eyes that we cannot see extinguishes in Shuli whatever hope he’d had. For wasn’t everyone in the world aware, right then, where the Garden of Eden waits? Wasn’t it mapped out in the Bible as clear as can be, as clear as Gavriel’s “X”? Couldn’t Shuli right then make his way to the rivers flowing from it, the mighty Tigris and Euphrates, marked on Google Maps with the same names God gave them?

  But if God doesn’t intend for one of His servants to succeed—if kaddish.com was Shuli’s very own Eden, an earthly ideal from which a flawed Shuli was rightfully expelled—it would, as with the other, remain a paradise concealed before him in plain sight.

  He knows he should go back to his hotel, grab his passport and Nava’s knapsack, and fly straight home. He could throw himself on Davidoff’s mercy and be back in class that very day. Shuli could tell the whole truth, opening up about his failures, old and new. Who wouldn’t feel compassion for him in his plight?

  Shuli climbs the far stairs and follows the route up the hill, toward his hotel. When he reaches the top of the midrachov and spies all those happy people going about their business along the cobbled street, when the breeze brings the laughter of the high school kids, hanging out, and the lively sounds of the tourists discovering what’s been discovered endless times before, Shuli thinks it might do him good to disappear himself, to be invisible for a little while in their midst.

  Shuli hadn’t given himself a moment away from his crusade. And the atmosphere cheers him instantly. Feeling hungry, he goes to the kosher Pizza Hut, its own kind of thrill. He sits outside and eats his pizza and drinks a gallon of Coke.

  He watches everyone darting about with their plastic shopping bags, filled with hippy-dippy Tzfat candles, and DON’T WORRY AMERICA, ISRAEL’S GOT YOUR BACK T-shirts, and candy bars with Hebrew names. He sees a little pisher sprint by carrying a spiral shofar as tall as he is. Shuli remembers the presents for his family. If he was going home without the one thing he’d come for, at least he should bring gifts.

  Shuli roams into a shop with a mountain of yarmulkes on display, all too small in diameter for anyone who truly fears God. He pokes around, picking up the hamsas and blue-glass talismans, and fiddles with the stone mezuzot and dreidels, the Armenian pottery, and the bottles of colored sand.

  He’s about to take another spin when he hears his name. Not “Shaul” but “Reb Shuli.” And who is it—he’d literally just been thinking about the wedding—but Daphna Weider, the mother of the bride.

  “I bump into your family everywhere,” she says. “I saw Miri the day of the chuppah. And now, to see you here? B’otot u’bmoftim,” she says, with a wink. And, turning serious, “This
can’t be vacation with school on. Who’s minding the store? The children must run wild.”

  “I came to learn for the week. A kind of sabbatical,” Shuli says. It comes out as naturally as anything he’s ever uttered. “And what about you?” Shuli asks, feeling light.

  “The newlyweds are here. And me and Zev tagged along. We have an apartment in Rechavia that we don’t get to near enough.”

  “Crashing your daughter’s honeymoon, that’s impressive—even for a Jewish mother.”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds, I promise. Tal is starting up at kollel and we came to check in for a month, maybe two, while they get settled.”

  “Well, remember to let the happy couple breathe.”

  “I promise they get plenty of time alone. And”—she winks again—“I don’t need you to mother me.” Daphna goes off, buying nothing. Shuli watches her disappear into the crowd.

  This is how it is for so many in their community, back and forth to Israel, as if it’s nothing, as if one could take the Lincoln Tunnel and find Jerusalem on the other side. Shuli was much more likely to bump into someone from Royal Hills on Ben Yehuda Street than strolling around Madison Avenue at home.

  Regardless, the odds of seeing her when he’d only just staggered away from the yeshiva, recalling her daughter’s wedding of all things, is more fate than accident. He also knows that it’s not the meeting but what she drew out of him that matters.

  Shuli had lied to her. But the way it came out, the ease with which he’d said it, made Shuli reconsider. Did it have to be a lie at all? Wasn’t he here on a sabbatical, to be used how he wanted? Hadn’t Davidoff sent him off, and Miri supported the trip, and hadn’t Shuli, from arriving in Israel, learned with vigor—with kavanah—from morning to night? And so…why not, yes, learn for one more day l’shem Hashem? He wasn’t like the parents of his students, his well-off neighbors, with their apartments in Tel Aviv and Netanya, with their frequent-flier miles to spend. How often was he here? How clear was Daphna’s message?