CHAPTER 21

END OF ETERNITY

THOUGH I HAD NO further personal contact with the Rebbe, he sent me brief handwritten notes in Hebrew mailed to my university address whenever I published something about his crowd or their philosophy. He’d always congratulate me on the article. Along with the letter, he’d include a piece he’d recently written, a biblical or talmudic commentary, or a speech delivered to his Hasidim on a Friday night after the Sabbath meal. I came to expect his letters within a week after a piece saw the light of day, regardless of the journal, obscure or popular, and I was never disappointed—always a few sentences on a small card, always ending with the Hebrew words heneini b’nee: I am here, my son.

An old friend from my yeshiva days, Leibel Berliner, now the Samuel Rattner professor of astrophysics, joined the Kobliner Hasidim during his college days, having made a practice of frequenting the Kobliner Center on campus while an undergraduate. We occasionally ran into each other, sometimes by accident crossing campus or at an event, and, sporadically, by design. He’d keep me abreast of day-to-day Kobliner adventures, directing me to an event, article, or Internet site I might otherwise have missed.

About three or so years ago, he visited me at my office. He entered with great melodrama, shoulders hunched, as if he were fleeing someone pursuing him and he needed a hiding place. He quickly shut and locked the door, grabbed a chair at a table, pulled it to my desk and sat hard upon it with a loud grunt.

He had a high forehead atop which sat the fedora Kobliner men always wore. He pulled at his graying beard, untrimmed and wild. As I sat behind my desk fascinated by all of this odd movement, from his shirt pocket Leibel extracted a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Without permission, and against university rules, he lit one with a cheap lighter and took two deep drags that burned the cigarette nearly halfway down. He pushed his hat back, revealing the full height of his forehead. Smoke poured furiously from his mouth and nose, and the aroma of burning tobacco filled my office.

“NB,” he whispered, using the name that had become current among some of my colleagues. “You’re not going to believe this.” He took another drag. “They’re starting to say the Rebbe is the Moshiach, the Messiah.” He leaned back and once more pulled at his beard, his eyes wide as if delivering revelation from the heavens. He sat puffing his Camel, awaiting my reply. When I didn’t answer straightaway, he added, “I mean so many of them it would blow your mind.”

To me this came as no surprise. “About time,” I answered. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”

My studies had taught me never to be surprised by anything in the evolution of any religion. In the name of God or the gods or stars or trees or water or fire or rocks or doorjambs, people invent the most dim-witted concepts and elevate them to the heavenly heights, or the satanic depths. A few always devote themselves to this new belief. In so many cases, a rising number of true believers hold forth on the new reality with the confidence of a just-proven mathematical theorem.

With incessant repetition and the passage of time, with the appearance of prophetic dreams and miracle stories, what seemed the height of stupidity becomes the rage among millions not terribly long after that inanity first flowed from the lips of the prophet of the new idea. People want to believe; the more preposterous, the better.

So, too, with the declaration that the Messiah had come in the form of the Kobliner Rebbe. I’d been awaiting the public appearance of this conviction ever since I read a piece by Reb Yudel Strauss in The Jewish Post —the same Reb Yudel who welcomed me into the Rebbe’s office back then. Standing before a packed audience at the meeting of the Northeast Council of Kobliner Emissaries in the Javits Center, he declared that yemot hamashiach, the days of the Messiah, were imminent, for the man to do the job was already living among us and doing the job. All that awaited was the arrival of the proper worldly conditions, and they were just around the next bend in the spiritual road. Without mentioning who was intended by his remark, Reb Yudel’s listeners knew. Through conversation, writing, through mental telepathy for all I knew, they readied themselves for surrender to the same leader, but at a new height of his existence.

According to Leibel, the many members of this Hasidic sect believed the witching hour had arrived. With emissaries dwelling from here to eternity, the word spread. Their rebbe was the redeemer of the Jews, the millennial wait nearing its end. The one tasked with shepherding the sons and daughters of Israel to the next level of spiritual advancement dwelt in a dilapidated building in Lower Park Slope.

“The Kobliners have been around for over two centuries,” I said. “Six rebbes, four continents, and some of the most influential Jewish religious literature of modern times. Have you ever studied Sefer Koblin?”

“I studied it and read your book on it. Not a bad book either, yours, though I don’t agree with everything,” Leibel said, throwing in the requisite scholarly critical comment, still puffing away on a Camel.

“And now they’re going to flush themselves down the crapper with this nonsense,” I said.

“He’s not the Messiah,” Leibel said. “I know because the Messiah will never come. The Messiah’s always just behind the next door. He’s never there when you open it.”

With the wisdom of scientific rationality, we two university professors sighed at the folly of men as our skepticism was borne out. The wads of money formerly pouring in from all over the world now dribbled in at glacial speed. The respect in which the Kobliners had been widely held disintegrated. But the widespread public disapproval scarcely deterred the Kobliners from broadcasting the Rebbe’s new stature. A year or so into this lunacy, a clear majority of the Kobliner community, and many outsiders as well, embraced the Rebbe as their Messiah.

About a year and a half after all of this began, my meetings with Leibel had become habitual. He came for my office hours on Mondays. I’d long before acquired an ashtray for his ashes and butts.

“It puzzles me that the Rebbe hasn’t made any public pronouncements about this whole business,” I said to Leibel one Monday.

“He says nothing about it,” Leibel replied. “I see him on Shabbos giving a drush, a commentary. He says nothing but the drush. Nada. He comes into the room, says his Torah, leaves.”

“That’s what I’ve written about in my most recent article on the subject. I can’t find a statement from him anywhere, not in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, or English. Total silence. He neither affirms nor denies.”

“Meanwhile, it’s everywhere now. Here, let me show you something,” Leibel said. Placing a cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, he reached into his attaché case and pulled out a comic book. I hadn’t seen this issue. He handed it to me.

“Hot off the press. I picked it up in the bodega down the street from the Center.”

It was the latest edition of The Adventures of Aaron the Golem of Prague. The cover was taken up with a large iconic image of the Rebbe, his forceful blue eyes peering magisterially off the page. Beneath the picture was the caption Welcome Melech HaMoshiach, our Rebbe. King Messiah.

“More of the same,” said Leibel. “This time aimed at bar mitzvah boys.”

“Where do you suppose this is all headed?”

“Can’t say,” he said. “If he announced himself to the world, that would be one thing. If he rejected it, another. But silence, that I can’t decipher.”

“Why doesn’t he say something?”

“Do I know? He’s got to be aware what’s going on.”

“Can’t you ask him?” I said. With ordinary mortals this would not be a peculiar notion.

“You don’t engage the Rebbe in casual conversation. And, anyway, if I did go up to him, he’d answer with a verse that could be taken any which way. When he wants to make something known, he’s quite clear about it. For some reason he wishes to stay out of this.”

“And no one knows why.”

“No one I know.”

False messianism has been one of the great pitfalls of the Jews, and there have been, oy, so many that one would think we’d have learned. But no; so attractive is the possibility of redemption, of apocalyptic deliverance from this ball of misery we call the world, that this phenomenon continued to visit itself upon us with astonishing regularity.

As for the Kobliner Rebbe’s silence—it provided insufficient knowledge, a poor way to settle an argument. Perhaps the Rebbe intended his silence as assent. Then again, maybe not. A poor way to settle an argument, indeed.

I asked, “What’s going on with Reb Yudel?”

“You know I sit nowhere near the inner circle, Nick.”

“You must hear things.”

“I hear, I hear, but only rumors. They’re all over the spectrum.”

“He must know something, don’t you think? He’s the man’s personal secretary, for years.”

“I’m not that high in the hierarchy.”

“Know anyone who is? Know someone who knows someone? There can’t be more than a couple of degrees of separation to get to anyone in the organization.”

“Why do you care?”

I thought about my meeting with the Rebbe, about his letters to me, about the disintegrating card sitting in my wallet like an inactivated good luck charm.

“I have my reasons,” I said.

A week after my article appeared, I received the Rebbe’s note. Only this time the letter was written in Yiddish. “Dear Nick,” it read. “Ich bin; auber ich bin nicht. I am; also I am not.” Always with the riddles.

But that was the end. A week after I received that peculiar note, the Kobliner Rebbe died. Heart attack. One moment he was exploring yet again the inner secrets of Sefer Koblin, the next his immortal soul was elsewhere, his body an empty vessel. They found him at his study table, his tefillin still on his arm and forehead, his face nose down in the book. Surely a peaceful way to go, pious even, a Jewish cowboy dying with his boots on. Leibel asked me if I wanted to attend his funeral. Politely, I declined, though more than 35,000 gathered outside and all around the Kobliner Center. Notables included the governor and mayor, and the vice president of the United States.

But not me.

***

The sudden death of the Rebbe at age eighty-eight should have been the end of it. All that messianic mumbo jumbo should have gone beneath the earth along with his corpse.

The man lay underground no more than a month when the Kobliner Hasidim began to dispute whether the Rebbe had a flesh-and-blood future. Now the matter no longer centered on whether the late Rabbi Schmeltzer was the Moshiach b’hazarah, the Messiah who would return in his old fleshy self, or whether he was gone for good. In either case, Schmeltzer had become the Moshiach.

Leibel came to dislike removing bits of tobacco from his lip, he said, and switched to Marlboros. He was sucking one down in my office. As usual, I sat across from him, sipping peppermint tea, awaiting whatever news he’d brought this time.

“Christ, Nick. Now they’re saying he’s going to rise from the grave. From the fucking grave. He’s dead. Not exactly. Now they’re saying he’ll be coming back sometime soon. Any day now. There’s no shortage of predictions when.”

“Who’s doing the saying?” I asked.

“Everyone, anyone, I don’t know. It’s all over the place. The believers in his return are preparing for it, too, lighting candles, giving charity, making and freezing matzoh balls for the big soup fest the day he arrives.”

“Hasn’t anyone reminded those good folks that Judaism took a stand a couple of millennia ago rejecting another fellow a few thought had been resurrected?”

Leibel sat for a moment as if trying to determine my historic reference.

“Yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “They usually respond something like, ‘He wasn’t real, but the Rebbe is.’” Leibel continued. “Some have taken to asking questions to the Rebbe’s books—you know, holding one of his books, asking a question, then letting the book open to a page and finding the answer there.”

“That proves anything you want,” I said.

“No shit.”

A quarrel of this magnitude naturally spilled over into the New York press, the Israeli press, then all over the globe. Soon the world knew the weight of opinion within the movement. Had he died for good, or was he due back any day on the D Train?

About eight months after the Rebbe’s death, I completed an article on this business. It was a fairly long piece solicited by Modern Judaism, entitled, “Man or God, Dead or Alive? The Post-Mortem Travails of the Late Kobliner Rebbe.”

I had literally just pushed the send button propelling the piece out into the grey world and sat back enjoying that sensation of completing a piece of writing, when a knock on my office door interrupted my reverie. Leibel.

With that familiar demeanor approximating delirium, hunched down, he strode in and sat. “You’re not going to fucking believe this, Nick. You’re not. You’re going to think I’ve left my senses in some Brooklyn sewer,” he said, the Marlboro between his right forefinger and thumb. “You remember Yitzi Menkies?”

I didn’t have to think very hard. “Ratsy Yitzi? Sure. He’s a Kobliner since our yeshiva days.”

“Right. Quiet as a mouse,” Leibel said.

“A rat,” I corrected.

“Always with the bits of hair for a mustache he let grow.”

“Squinting eyes, and a twitching nose like something disagreeable was hanging in the air. What about him?”

“Nick, this is about to get weird.”

“Leibel, an eighty-eight-year-old man passes on to the great beyond and his followers begin keeping watch for his return from the bone yard. And you’ve got news for me that’s weirder than that?”

“My friend, you’re about to hear some weird fucking shit,” he said, employing language unusual for him.

“Press on,” I said.

He leaned back, blew a smoke ring, and Leibel Berliner, my nicotine-addicted buddy and Kobliner informant, proceeded to weave a tale that the term weird could not adequately approach.

“I’ve assembled what I’m about to tell you from several accounts I heard over the weekend, Nick. You know how much actual truth is normally available from such an endeavor. Still, I think the gist of it is pretty close to what actually happened late last Friday just as Shabbos began.”

And this was the story.

***

On the previous Friday night, Yitzi Menkies, Ratsy Yitzi, a perfectly ordinary member of the Kobliners, ran breathless into his synagogue, apparently just shy of hysteria. He proclaimed that he’d had a miraculous experience at dusk.

An old Jewish legend had it that at the end of the sixth day of Creation, the eve of the first Sabbath in history, God sowed the seeds of numerous biblical miracles. As the Sabbath was being ushered in late Friday afternoon, the sun completing its final course in the sky, a mystical moment presented itself. Bein HaShmashot it is called, literally “between the suns”—not yet dark, but no longer light either, a moment when the space between heaven and earth narrowed and what is possible up there is momentarily possible down here, the upper and lower realms briefly kissing. At this moment, for example, God created Moses’s staff, the instrument that defeated Pharaoh and split the sea, as well as the jackass that would eventually give the pagan prophet Balaam his comeuppance.

Menkies, unmarried, lived alone. He had just lit the Sabbath candles. He sat in his living room awaiting the time for the evening service, studying the weekly Torah portion from an edition that included pesukei d’radbam, the Rebbe’s commentary to the Bible.

“I wasn’t at the service last Shabbos,” Leibel told me. “I’d gone to visit my cousin in Queens. From what I’ve pieced together, Yitzi claims that there was a knock on his door. He opened it. Who should be standing on the other side? The Rebbe himself.”

“How did he look?” was all I could think to say.

“Not bad for having been six foot under for more than half a year.”

So. The Rebbe had returned. Rabbi Dovid Schmeltzer had come back to the world of the living from the netherworld.

Leibel continued. “The Rebbe strolled into his apartment, Menkies said, like it was the most natural thing in the world, took a seat in Menkies’s easy chair, and picked up the Bible Yitzi had just been studying. He started reading, humming and swaying back and forth, pulling at his beard, still long and white except for the yellow around his mouth and chin.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“Yes. Quite the story.”

Leibel used this moment to fire up his next cigarette, and to wave it around like he was conducting an orchestra.

“So Menkies tells the guys at the shul the Rebbe became agitated from his reading. He began muttering, ‘Oh that’s not right. I couldn’t have said that. What could I have possibly meant by that? Oy, the excesses of youth.’”

“This is true?” I asked. “Schmeltzer really said that?”

“True? What’s true? Truth has lately become a slippery commodity. But, NB, there’s at least a second-level truth here. This is the story Menkies told that night. This I couldn’t make up in an opium dream. I’m the messenger, just the messenger.”

“There’s more to this, right?”

“Of course. As Yitzi told it, after a few moments of studying his own work, the Rebbe lifted his head and looked at Menkies, who was nearly catatonic.”

“Make me a cup of tea, please, Yitzi,” the Rebbe said.

Menkies, who’d planned on eating all three of his Sabbath meals with friends, had not prepared the customary pot of hot water one finds simmering on the top of the stove in Orthodox homes during the Sabbath. And since the Sabbath had begun, it was forbidden for Menkies to boil water for the Rebbe’s requested cup of tea.

“Menkies said he told this to the Rebbe, I imagine more than a little embarrassed at having to explain so simple a Sabbath law to his resurrected rabbi.”

“Holy shit!” I said.

“Holy shit on a shingle is right,” Leibel responded. “But there’s more.”

“Of course there’s more.”

“Yitzi, don’t you understand?” the Rebbe reportedly said. “The old Halakha, the old Law, is no longer operative. I have returned from the afterlife, my boy. Don’t you see? I have returned to make new Law. Now be a good fellow and go to your kitchen and make me that tea. I still don’t take sugar.”

“So he makes the tea. Menkies says, ‘What else could I do?’ When he brings it, the Rebbe tells him, ‘Now go to shul, Yitzi, and give everyone the good news that I’ve returned.’”

“That’s the story?”

“Almost. There’s a little more.”

“Do tell.”

“So, after Yitzi finishes telling the people at the shul, they all go back to davenning. The minute the service ends, a large group power walks him back to his apartment.”

“And?”

“No Rebbe.”

“I’m shocked.”

“Just an empty cup of tea and a note.”

“The note saying . . . ?”

“This I’ve actually seen. It’s been scanned and is now ricocheting around the electrons like the clap.”

“And?”

“The note says something like, ‘My Dear Yitzi, Thank you for the tea. We’ll meet again. Gut Shabbos. Reb Schmeltzer (7:00 p.m.).’”

“He wrote the time down?”

“To indicate, I imagine, that he wrote it on Shabbos. Another broken Shabbos law.”

This was what messiahs did. The new boss was not the same as the old boss, and the laws had now changed. A young fellow named Yeshua did something similar some 2,000 years earlier, starting a cult that got out of hand.

Of course, the handwriting analyst they’d engaged declared the note written in the Rebbe’s authentic, if somewhat moribund hand. No reason for suspicion. Bein HaShmashot, they said. Much could happen. These were gullible times.

From that first encounter on, there were numerous and regular Rebbe sightings, usually late at night, usually by male Kobliners walking alone (the same eight or ten if one bothered identifying them). These sightings often included a message, a new commandment or two to follow or, more likely, an old commandment or two to abrogate.

The world rejected these wacky episodes. One well-known Jewish writer purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times, rebuking the Kobliners’ claims. But the Kobliners, with their shrill messiah-nizing, had so prepared themselves for something like this—their mystical games, their incantations, prayers, the totality of their predicting—they went berserk, wasting little time transforming themselves in light of the Rebbe’s re-emergence.

Their rebbe had returned. He’d broken two Sabbath commandments immediately, and openly declared Jewish Law fluid. Forget that the only tangible proof was a sixteen-word thank-you note.

About six weeks after the transformation, Leibel returned to my office. As he took his usual seat, he pulled a black cylindrical object from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. He placed it confidently in his mouth and inhaled vigorously, after which from his mouth and nose he exhaled an unparalleled cloud of milky white smoke.

“Given up the butts,” he said in the wake of what must have been a look of pure amazement on my face at all that haze rising to the ceiling. “I vape now. More nicotine and less of the stuff that kills you. Plus, it’s so cool.”

I nodded.

“Comes in all kinds of flavors, you know. This one’s rugelach. It’s kosher, too. Can you imagine?”

He settled in, took a few more gargantuan puffs, my office now foggy, and said, “I can’t believe the transformation.” He eyed the device. “It’s a Boulder, one of the more popular brands, I’m told. Not cheap for a nicotine high.” He inhaled again. “First of all, they believe—I mean they really frickin’ believe—that Reb Schmeltzer came to Yitzi Menkies and sipped tea at the onset of Shabbos.”

“I’m flabbergasted,” I said. “How could they? And where do you stand, my friend?”

“I’ve seen the note he wrote that night. It’s now framed and hangs in the library entrance to 896.”

“So what?”

And Leibel closed his eyes for an extended moment.

“Well, NB,” he said, “it’s like this. I don’t believe a word of it.”

He paused, puffed hard, and pulled at his beard with such force I thought he either wanted to hurt himself or actually pull the damned thing off. Specks of salt-and-pepper hairs fell onto my desk.

“Not a word of it. But what can I do? Until now I could be the grand cynic and report all this baloney to you and it was okay. I could still go home and live among them, despite the inanity. Now things have changed at warp speed. It’s a different place. I either have to stay aboard or jump ship.”

“Why don’t you leave? Chrissakes, Leibel. Pack your things, get on the subway, and move yourself out of the neighborhood. Find one that’s not insane.”

He shifted in his chair and looked at the floor, plainly uncomfortable. “It’s not so easy to pack up and leave. I have friends there, my best friends, really. I have my wife and kids. They’re being drawn in. And why not?”

“Why not? Because it’s bullshit.”

“Maybe—”

“Maybe?”

He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. “This is hard to explain. We Kobliners always thought we had a special position on the planet. It’s thrilling knowing you have a couple thousand centers all over the world, I mean everywhere, and Jews seek you out. A Jew gets released from prison, he goes to a Kobliner House, not a Reform synagogue. On top of that, now we can claim divine intervention.”

“So what? Never happened. It’s crap.”

“What isn’t crap, NB? The world’s so full of rot we’re forever scraping it off our shoes at the end of the day, aren’t we?”

“Truth isn’t crap, Leibel. It’s the only thing that isn’t.”

“Truth seems so pliable these days,” he said. “Besides,” he whispered, “there’s this magnetic pull. I find myself drawn in, not just to the community, but to the, oh, crap! I don’t know. To the gestalt of the thing.”

I said, “Screw the gestalt. It’s your mind fucking with you. And Menkies, for the love of God,” I said. “Shouldn’t the prophet of a new world order at least have something going for him beside a stringy mustache, a twitchy nose, and an overactive imagination?”

“He had the privilege.”

“What?”

He put the device down in the ashtray that once contained his ashes and butts.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You’re talking yourself into a delusion because it’s convenient and the alternative is difficult,” I responded.

“You don’t understand, NB.”

“What don’t I understand?”

And he looked at me, pity in his eye. “NB, Nicky, you don’t have relationships, and I doubt you believe in anything. I don’t think you have friends, except maybe me, and we only see each other whenever I make my way here. You’re divorced. Your daughter’s in a coma. What have you got beside your work? Me, I have a life centered on that bunch of nudniks in Lower Park Slope, who have now become unbelievably energized. Would you have me surrender that? To you, relationships are unimportant. To me they’re everything.”

“You’d stay in that community to maintain relationships and live a deluded life?”

“Look—” His voice grew louder. “All sorts of truths populate the world, some of them wildly contradicting others. Do we really have to know the final truth all the time?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean people believe all kinds of things that are observably false because it serves some other purpose in their lives.”

“What things?” I asked, though I could construct the list as easily as he.

“Like evolution’s phony. Like no one landed on the moon, the Holocaust never happened, the Jews control the world, the climate hasn’t changed, Paul is dead, Elvis is alive, that computers can become human. I could go on forever with the manure people believe big piles of. The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”

“I get it,” I said. “But what does this have to do with you? You’re the goddamned Samuel Rattner professor of astrophysics.”

Leibel moved his lips as if in prayer, or rehearsal. “I have to stay with the Kobliners,” he said. “They’re not doing anything immoral, are they? Is resurrection so strange? How many hundreds of millions of people believe an obscure man from Galilee, nailed to a cross, got up three days later and danced the jig?”

“Because a billion people all believe the same thing, does that make it true?” I asked like I was chatting with a kindergartner.

Leibel played thoughtfully with the device in his hand.

“I want to believe it. I wish to believe it. My life depends on it,” he said.

“You’re too honest for magical thinking.”

“Don’t you understand?” He paused, staring a hole into my pupils, as if through telepathy he could explain. “I guess you don’t”—weariness in his voice.

I was rational enough to know that all was not rationality, that the non-rational and even the irrational filled our lives with meaning and purpose, with harmless enough constructs within which we humans dwelt so as to get to bed every night and out of it the next morning. I knew it, but could not pronounce it aloud.

Professor Leibel Berliner pressed his hands on the edge of my desk and pushed himself up, gazing at me the entire time, perhaps awaiting a response, perhaps my approval or a gesture of understanding. He sighed, pulled his gaze from me, lifted his device from the ashtray, turned and left, softly closing the door behind him. I knew he would never again return to fill my office with smoke, or vapor, and my head with news.

Our next brief meeting would be a measure of how much things had changed. And change they had.

***

The Kobliners became the Schmeltzerites, in honor of their resurrected rebbe. They transformed into an independent stream of Judaism—just barely Jewish.

Rebbe Sightings #12 and #14 ended kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. It was now not uncommon to see traditionally clad Hasidim of Schmeltzer enter a McDonald’s and order a cheeseburger or go into a Chinese restaurant for spareribs or a barbecue joint for racks of ribs.

As part of this upheaval, the main course of their Friday evening repast often consisted of one of several forms of pork: pork loin, pork chops, ribs, honey baked ham with pineapple rings and cloves, boiled ham, ham hock, pork sausage, Canadian bacon, you name it. Had they asked me, I would have counseled an indulgence in shellfish. They did not. More’s the pity.

Bestowing upon Yitzi Menkies the role of head of the reconfigured group surely constituted the greatest peculiarity of all. I knew Yitzi Menkies from the yeshiva, where he was known as an unpleasant fellow, always difficult to work with, prone to fits of anger.

A loner, he never studied with a partner during our yeshiva days, an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Guys with IQs less than stones and who smelled bad from head to toe had long-term relationships with their study partners. Everyone learned with someone. Except for Menkies. Out of compassion, Shmulie and I each tried once, but it lasted less than a couple of weeks.

Senior year, Yitzi declared modern Orthodoxy—the Yeshiva of Midwood’s Orthodox philosophy—unsuitable. He said he needed something mystical, something rooted in Kabbalah. After graduation, he got mysticism and a good deal more when he joined the Kobliners. He got a black coat and a Shabbat hat styled after the fashion of eighteenth-century Polish nobility. He got a close community in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Ultimately fame and power, and fortune, too, came his way.

When Yitzi Menkies joined the Kobliners, even after his ascension, I figured I’d never have anything to do with him again.