February 1969
Rosalie lies awake and imagines Walter’s room in the American Colony Hotel. She conjures the sultans and sheiks who have since slept in the bed that marked their reunion, how the traces of their bodies were washed away with the traffic of other lovers. She listens to Sol snore beside her and thinks about the woven braid that Madame Sylvie described to her. Some nights the braid is made of ribbon, wool, and wires; on other nights fish swim between the strands of hair and she has to shoo them out of her ears. A nasty conundrum, a riddle with no solution. Good sex in Jerusalem in exchange for a useless vision from the renowned kabbalist. Perhaps it was a ploy: had she not arrived at Madame Sylvie’s with Walter she would have received an astonishment that would mean something to her now. But she waltzed into the courtyard holding hands with the very emblem of her betrayal and there was no fooling Madame Sylvie. Best now to obliterate the memory of that single episode, instead of wondering when they will meet again, and how does he see her when his eyes are closed and he explores her body like a blind man who can read with his hands?
The flow of holidays marks the seasons and Rosalie is carried along with the calendar’s demands. Depending on the month, she shapes floured dough into a kreplach, a hamentashen, or a Passover noodle made from potato starch. The house pulses with the antics of her three boys who shred bedsheets to make flags of surrender for their raucous games. On Shabbat afternoons they wrestle each other in the yard until one of them—usually Philip—gets pummeled into the grass. At night Lenny calls to her and asks for another story, always another story. Rosalie sets her tales in Madame Sylvie’s courtyard. In some, children climb the garden wall like cats and morph themselves into cheetahs that run wild around Jerusalem and uncover artifacts. In others, a boy and girl lie together under a flowering tree and press their ears to the ground, listening to the voices of the ancient past bubble up into their ears. Lenny falls asleep before Rosalie finishes and she sits on the edge of his bed and basks in the silence. Month follows month: stuffed knapsacks and leather mitts pile up in the foyer, dirty clothes are washed and clean clothes folded, meat marinates for weeknight dinners and chicken is roasted for Shabbat, and when it arrives, Rosalie and Sol lay their hands on their sons’ heads, blessing them with long lives.
After Sol and the children are asleep, Rosalie sits on a stool at the kitchen counter and dials Walter’s number. The time difference gives them hours to themselves. She speaks softly into the handset and winds the black phone cord around her arm as if it is a strap of tefillin. Her ordinary kitchen at night seems like an immense ocean and Rosalie is a ship afloat on its surface, drifting from one shore to another.
One night she tells Walter that she wishes he would get married.
“Make it possible for me to turn away from you,” she says.
He laughs. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do and I don’t. You deserve so much more—”
“Don’t question what we have, Rosalie. We are creating something bigger than we are.”
“Of course you’d think that,” she says. “Talking about karma is your livelihood. You can justify anything.”
“And you have religion, Rosalie. The karma game is all I have, and it is enough for me.”
Rosalie never asks Walter about the woman in Madame Sylvie’s astonishment. She doesn’t pry into his past, and can sum up his known biography in two sentences: He followed a man off the ship and that man was Paul Richardson. He went to Bombay and Shantiniketan and then to New York, where they found each other. He is her personal Torah, written for her alone, a small necessary story that rings in her bones. The two of them can only live in the present tense. They are a word, a hyphen. Turmeric rubbed on a hip. Something faint and then lasting and then vapor. From the pulpit Sol speaks about the flow of Jewish history. The stories course through our bloodstream, he says. Jacob’s headrest made of rock is the foundation of our homeland; Joseph’s dreams are linked to our eternal longing for image and interpretation. Rosalie wonders if her love for Walter is an echo of an ancient story she hasn’t yet learned.
A new housing development and good public schools have brought more Jews to Briar Wood, and new members to the shul. Sol offers Ask the Rabbi Anything to a fresh crop of pre–bar mitzvah students, and they also find their way to the wooded area behind the parking lot to get high. The only two girls in the Hebrew school skip class and teach each other how to French kiss in the girls’ bathroom. The elderly Hebrew school teacher sits in the stairwell and weeps, not because the students mock her, but because the money she earns doesn’t cover the cost of the trains and taxis that bring her to the suburbs twice a week. The shul is everyone’s laboratory, the testing ground for what life holds on the outside.
On a winter Shabbat morning, Rosalie stands in the back of the sanctuary and watches the congregants shift in their folding chairs as they listen to the words of Sol’s sermon. He explains how Jewish survival relies on core beliefs that stand the test of time but history judges a peoples’ survival with fickle eyes. She has no idea what her husband is talking about, and neither do his congregants.
Sol is failing them, she thinks. New congregants, same old rabbi. His sermons are impersonal, his words obscure. How could anyone be moved? Why would anyone care? Yet still they arrive in this paneled room. Rosalie watches Bev who stands behind her father’s wheelchair, smoothes the tallit over his sloping shoulders, and turns the pages of his prayer book. She watches Serena whose eyes dart nervously around the room. She finds Marv, who Rosalie knows is having an affair with his son’s fifth-grade teacher, and Nadine who carries on with a local politician. She looks at Delia, who has breast cancer, and Missy Samuels, who swears by Weight Watchers and nibbles on carrot sticks during kiddush. Rosalie loses herself in watching them. She searches for the fragile broken center in each congregant, tries to name the one thing that makes anyone want to show up in this synagogue when the world offers so many other choices, so many better places to go.
Rosalie measures the distance between the yearnings of these people and her husband’s words. She views this as a geometry problem. What is the length of the line between Nadine’s love for the politician and Sol’s words about the double meaning of the name Yisrael? The distance between high-strung Serena and Sol’s sermon about the minor fast days? Between the hunched shoulders of Bev’s father and Sol’s hands that thump on the lectern like a heartbeat? Where does anyone’s desire meet the pastoral response? She sees the sanctuary as a room full of gaping hearts that cannot be healed or touched by Sol’s words. And yet, still they come, week after week: Bev and Serena and Nadine and Marv and Delia and Missy Samuels with her bag of carrot sticks. Missy winks at Nathan who stands in the back of the sanctuary. He fingers the fringes of his tallit and ponders his own geometry problem: the popularity of the rabbi and the duration of his contract.
On Sol’s day off, Nathan asks Sol and Rosalie to meet him at the duck pond at the center of town. Rosalie carries a bag of leftover challah and tosses chunks into the water.
“Let me get to the point,” says Nathan. “We—the board and I—want you to take a leave of absence.”
“I don’t need a vacation.”
“Just a little break. Go back to Jerusalem and study for awhile. Every rabbi needs to hone his skills, fill in his gaps.”
“I’m in my prime,” says Sol. “So many new members. I just ordered new prayer books—”
“Real estate,” says Nathan. “Housing prices. Public schools. The Cosmos Diner.”
Rosalie stops walking and tosses the entire bag of challah into the pond. She glances at Sol and wishes he wasn’t brushing tears from his eyes in front of Nathan Samuels.
“I’m good. You got one of the best.”
“I know, Rabbi Kerem.”
“So give me a chance.”
Nathan turns to Rosalie. “Maybe you can help him out. Lend some inspiration.”
“I’m the rabbi,” says Sol. “You hired me.”
“Yes, we did. We believed in you then, and Missy and I believe in you now. Just find better words; be less remote. Make us care.”
“How long do I have?”
“Get back in the game and there’s no limit.”
As they drive home from the duck pond, Sol asks Rosalie what Nathan meant by be less remote. “Am I supposed to change into golf clothes and preach at the Cosmos? I thought they hired me to teach Torah, unravel meaning, make their lives better in some way. Now I utter a phrase and then cringe inside, wanting to take back what I said, but I can’t hear myself clearly and my ideas gush in all the wrong directions.”
“At least you’re sincere.”
“I stand up there on the bima, all alone, as if I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. But of what? My beloved texts are meaningless to them and they don’t have the skills to understand the patterns behind the words.”
“Then summarize. Reduce. Leave out the boring details. Serve them cake and aphorisms.”
“I can’t compromise my integrity.”
“Figure it out, sweetheart.”
“I sometimes feel as if I’m working an assembly line that doesn’t stay still.”
“You’re a rabbi, for God’s sake. And people are fluid. You need to dance with them, get playful.”
“Walter called it a messy brew of imposed grace.”
“That sounds about right.”
“What am I supposed to do?” asks Sol.
“Let me try it,” says Rosalie.
“What?”
“Being you. Next Shabbat. I’ll give the sermon. Just a few remarks. I’ll put myself in your shoes.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Shh. I’m not replacing you. I’ll just give my own talk, a little teaching from the rebbetzin. Hannah’s tears, Miriam’s tambourine—I’ll wing it. And no one would ever compare me to you.”
Rosalie phones Walter that night and asks what she should talk about.
“Think about what your father taught you. Mine your own life for material.”
“Got it,” says Rosalie.
Sol walks into the kitchen as Rosalie hangs up the phone.
“Who are you talking to?”
“No one. I’m just casting about for ideas.”
“The phone won’t help you but an open volume of Talmud could lead you somewhere.”
Rosalie smiles.
“I have what I need now,” she says.
Sol introduces Rosalie as his first lady who has some words she would like to share. She approaches the bima in a skirt she crocheted herself, a matching silk blouse, and a new hat. At first she speaks about her children, how Philip sometimes asks if they can keep Shabbat on Wednesday and if God knows the days of the week, and then Rosalie stops herself because she thinks of the congregants who don’t have children and maybe she shouldn’t speak as a mother, parading her private bounty.
“When I was young my father shared a teaching from the Ishbitzer Rebbe that has stayed with me all these years,” she says. “The human experience—the story of your life—is a prism of God’s desire. Think about how your eyes adjust to daylight when you first wake up; this is an entry in God’s personal diary. The way you hand the dry cleaner your ticket and thank him for your pressed suit—also an entry in God’s diary. And how you deny or respond to the dreams that tug at you until you find a way to make them come true—this, above all, is written in God’s diary. Our lives are fodder for the great sacred story. Every moment.”
She suddenly stops speaking. Nathan and Missy lean forward in their seats. Bev wraps her arm around her father’s shoulders and looks up. Charlie and Philip sit in the back row with their friends, barely containing their laughter. Rosalie peers down at the congregants and feels as if she and the Ishbitzer have been standing on a distant planet, trying to emit a signal that will penetrate the silent darkness between the bima and the folding chairs. Mars to Earth. Jupiter to Saturn. Rosalie to everyone. She tugs on her skirt, adjusts her hat.
“Thank you for listening,” she says. “We will now return to your regularly scheduled program.”
Sol proceeds with services and after the final line of Adon Olam Bev tells Rosalie that her speech was just beautiful. Missy tells Rosalie that she cried. And Sol whispers in her ear, “Thank you. Maybe some of them will come back next week.”
Rosalie spends her days behind the wheel of the Dodge, looping the circumference of Westchester County: soccer practices, dentist appointments, visits to the mall, and Lenny’s trumpet lessons, an hour’s drive each way. If these miles were spread out over an actual highway, she thinks, I would be on the other side of the country by now. I would have actually traveled somewhere. The force field of motherhood is unyielding; some weeks Rosalie cannot sit down long enough to read a magazine or write a letter. After dinner, if she stops washing dishes and daydreams out the kitchen window, Lenny stands close to her and takes her face in his small hands. Earth to mom, he says. Come back to us. Philip once drew a portrait of his family that showed Sol and the boys sitting at the table and Rosalie standing at a sink, washing a dish. She was of them and outside of them, their center and their distant star.
Rosalie believes Sol is showing improvement on the bima. Since she gave her speech, he asks her for insights on the Torah portion and uses her ideas. The congregants seem more attentive, less distracted. But she has no idea that Sol visits the wrong hospitals and drives to the wrong cemeteries, looking for a funeral he is scheduled to conduct at some other grave.
Sol’s undoing is subtle at first. At an unveiling service in the rain, the pages of his Rabbi’s Manual tumble into a muddy puddle. On the way out of the cemetery, he tosses the soggy remnants of the book into an open grave to fulfill the mitzvah of shaimos. But he never replaces the Manual, believing he has memorized all the prayers. Most of the congregants don’t know Hebrew well enough to realize that Sol recites joyful psalms at burial services, and sings psalms of mourning at weddings.
Alone in his office one night, Sol turns out the lights, closes his eyes and lies on the floor. Maybe, he thinks, a lost rabbi is a question seeking an answer, a she’elah waiting for a teshuvah. His mind alights on a psalm and he tries to imagine Walter lying beside him, reciting the same words, but he can’t find Walter’s voice and even if he could, Walter would say, This is not my way, rabbi. Keep your psalms to yourself. I am becoming a master of forgetting, he thinks. A rabbi without memory, a teacher without channels, a man without a chavrusa, lying on a cold floor, waiting for a voice that doesn’t arrive.
The following week Nathan tells Sol that the board wants to break the terms of his contract.
“You have one more year to win us over,” says Nathan. “I tried to negotiate for more time, but it didn’t go well. I’m sorry.”
Sol lowers his eyes. Be less remote had traveled so far in the other direction that he could have been preaching from Bora Bora.
“Ask Rosalie to help you. Missy still talks about her speech. Maybe she can lend you a hand.”
Sol thinks of Rosalie standing on the bima, how at first he cringed when she spoke of keeping Shabbat on a Wednesday. But then she said something about God’s diary and the sanctuary seemed to come alive with silent rapture.
“Yes,” says Sol. “Perhaps there is a way.”
Every Saturday Walter stuffs his unopened mail and papers into a book bag, drives to Big Sur, and takes a table closest to the cliff’s edge at Nepenthe Restaurant. It is not lost on him that while Rosalie and Sol are keeping their Sabbath on the other side of the country, he is enveloped in the Pacific fog.
He has not heard from Rosalie in months. He helped her find ideas for her speech, and then assumed she would keep calling him at night, after Sol and the boys were asleep. Walter phoned the house once, expecting Rosalie to answer, but Sol picked up. “What a surprise, Walter! I wish you would call me more often.” Then Sol asked him to explain the phrase from Mishnah Peah, the things in this world that have no measure, and Walter snapped and replied, “If you stop measuring the cubits of your house and the liters of water in your kashering pot, maybe you would tell another story.” To which Sol said, “Then I would be another kind of rabbi.” And Walter said, “Yes, that’s my point.”
Walter wonders how much Sol knows. How much of Rosalie is permitted to him by Sol? Walter was never good at math and this arrangement seems to have something of a Venn diagram in it, with overlapping areas. Sol and Walter here, Walter and Rosalie here, Rosalie and Sol here. She is the perfect mate for him: The wife of his first American friend. The wife of a man who kissed him in the upper geniza, a man who looked at him and cried on a Jerusalem street, a man who considers his life through the lens of a text just like a groom gazes at his bride through a veil.
Quite a destiny, eh, Sonia?
He sorts through the pile of mail, opening each envelope with a butter knife. Paul is starting an ashram in southern California. My own Shantiniketan. I’m naming it Eden Ranch. A student has mailed him a final paper two weeks late: a comparison of Tagore and Heschel. Weakly argued, but not without merit. “Faith is the bird that feeds the light and sings when the dawn is still dark,” wrote Tagore. And Heschel: “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” Walter finds the shared threads intriguing and gives the student an A for the concept and a B for lateness.
He returns to the mail pile: three academic journals, the Partisan Review, a book on the Hindu prophetic tradition he has promised to endorse, and a letter marked with the return address of Temple Briar Wood.
June 8, 1969
Dear Walter,
When we spoke on the phone about the things in this world that have no measure you didn’t give me a chance to explain myself. You assumed that I would bore you with an explanation about cubits and liters—and maybe once I would have. I didn’t expect you to call me, but when I heard your voice I reached for a text that might suggest the depths of my despair, and that line popped out. When a musician loses his intonation, he can no longer play in tune; the same applies to a rabbi. I fear I’ve lost my ability to hear the music—if I ever had it at all.
When I saw you in Jerusalem I remembered what we created together—I’m not talking about the geniza, but I miss learning with you. Did all these years of academic life detract from the wisdom you once had, or did they endow you with an extra portion? I think of your words often—the messy brew of imposed grace—and understand that you were peering into my quite broken heart. The demands of my job have rendered the texts I love into an unforgiving clutter of words I no longer understand. I don’t know where my faith lies. God? Law? I miss the certainty I once had, and I miss you.
In friendship,
Sol
If Sol begins writing in July he can stockpile twelve good sermons before the holidays touch down in September. But he doesn’t go to his office all summer; every afternoon Sol draws the shades in the den and watches Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, and As the World Turns. The boys arrive home from their respective day camps and summer jobs, and barely notice that their father has grown a beard and lolls around in T-shirts, shorts, and slippers. He stops washing his hair before Shabbat and rehashes material from outdated sermons.
One evening in mid-August, Sol abruptly leaves the dinner table and runs upstairs to their bedroom. Rosalie follows.
“Let them fire me now,” he says. “It’s over.”
“An inevitable crisis of faith,” she says. “You’ll get through it.”
“I thought—”
“That you would be immune?”
“I wish it were simple,” says Sol. “What once seemed so true to me has become as flat as the K’tonton stories you once read to the boys. What am I doing this for? And for whom? I stand on the bima, stare at those hungry faces, and no longer believe the words that fall from my lips.”
“No one is asking you to believe, Sol. No one even cares. You just need to demonstrate faith that everything matters. This Torah, these words, every moment of their day—”
“I can barely summon meaning for myself; I have nothing in my pockets to give them. And why do they look at me with such longing? I can’t stand it.”
“They are in shul. Who else are they going to look at?”
“I once bought it all.”
“A long time ago, Sol. When you were a boy.”
“No. After.”
“Didn’t anyone warn you about this in rabbinical school?”
“Of course not.”
“Didn’t you and Walter wrangle with this?”
“We were so young, Rosalie.”
“That we were.”
“I’m an immoral scam.”
“We all are.”
“Not Bev,” says Sol.
Rosalie smiles. “Everyone except Bev. The exception. One righteous person per shul; a common statistic, I’m sure.” Rosalie imagines frizzy-haired Bev witnessing their conversation. You inspire all of us, rabbi, she would say. Your teachings help me understand my life. Thinking about Bev’s sincerity makes Rosalie feel like crying.
“I’m simply empty,” says Sol. “I need your help.”
“I’m not giving another speech.”
“You were very good, Rosalie. Better than I could ever be. I wish I could channel some of your words, make them come out of my mouth. Your words and—”
Rosalie sits beside Sol, lays her head on his shoulder, and reaches for his hand. Her husband chose an unbearable profession. People all over the world blindly follow faith healers, gurus, and missionaries, while a suburban rabbi is asked to inspire without daring anyone to change, to dig deep, to claim some pearl of meaning that could alter the course of their lives. How can anyone be good at this? It’s impossible. Her father knew this, and Sol is finally catching on.
“Who were you talking to on the phone that night, Rosalie?”
“What night? When?”
“The night before you gave your speech. Who did you call? Honest to God, Rosalie, you weren’t dialing your father in the World to Come.”
She turns away, glances at her watch.
“I have a lot to do,” she says. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”
“I’m asking you a question,” says Sol.
“Do you really want the answer?”
“Yes.”
Rosalie sighs. “Walter called you that night and I picked up the phone. I asked him what he thought I should talk about.”
“That’s it? Why didn’t you tell me he called? I ache to hear—”
“Ache?”
“Walter brought out the best in me, unraveled insights I didn’t know I was capable of. He took me places—”
Rosalie gazes down at her hands. Something we both share, my beloved husband. Our first bond, before the synagogue, before the children. She closes her eyes and summons the smell of turmeric in the lower geniza, the yellow stains on her fingers and his, then on her hip, her lower back.
“Maybe Walter could save my pulpit,” says Sol. “He could find the words that elude me.”
“So call him.”
“Walter doesn’t know my audience. He wouldn’t get the right tone for my Jews.”
“You could help him with that.”
“Or you, Rosalie.”
“Me?”
“Why not?”
“Are you asking me to fly out to Berkeley?”
“Yes, I am. Walter knew me when I was strong. He will channel what I once was, give you the right words.”
“Why don’t you go? If that’s what you want, why send me?”
Sol stares at her.
“Nu?” asks Rosalie.
He runs his fingers through his hair and pinches the skin on the backs of his hands. “How could I possibly get away, Rosalie? I have a board meeting and a class to teach, and things are so precarious now—”
“And I have boys to look after.”
“I can’t go!” he shouts. “Don’t ask me to explain—”
“Calm down. Let me get this right. It’s almost Rosh Hashanah and you’re asking Walter and me to write your sermons for you? Who do you think I am, Moses?”
“You will be doing all of us a great service—the boys, me, the shul. You get this, Rosalie. Think of it as a business trip. I’ll make a hotel reservation for you—”
“Sol—”
“I need ten of them! Make it twelve, enough to last through Sukkot. As many as you can write together. I’ll call Walter and explain the details.”
“Are you serious?”
Sol grabs her fingers and brings them to his lips.
“I need this from you,” he says.
Rosalie closes her eyes, allows herself to think of Walter’s hands, his face. Another reunion, this one granted with permission. She touches the folds of her dress to make sure she is not dreaming.