“I’ve never actually seen a tish,” his mom had told him. “It’s so important, the most intimate connection between the Rebbe and his Ha-sidim, that of course the Valdeners reserve it only for the men and boys. My bratty little cousins were taken, but I never even could get anybody to tell me what went on there. Except that my father once told me that, back in Hungary, the Hasidim would actually grab for the food on the Rebbe’s plate when he was done, scrambling belly-first over the tish top in a free-for-all for farfel.”
“Tish-tish.”
“My impression is that things are a bit more civilized now, with food given out instead of grabbed from the plate. But first it’s all passed through the hands of the Rebbe to get some of his holiness in it. It’s all part of the primitive folk biology mixed in with the dubious theology.” Deb Seltzer, the former Devoroh Sheiner of New Walden, delighted in describing the Valdeners in antiseptic, clinical terms. “The food that goes into a holy man must itself be holy, seeing how it’s going to become the Rebbe’s own flesh. It’s got sparks of the divine essence, which got misplaced in the great commotion that accompanied the creation of the world, little bits of God that got trapped inside matter the Rebbe tries to return to the heavens by ingesting-I kid you not. So the Rebbe shares his food, spreading the holiness around.”
“So luckshen are holy?”
“Well, not as holy as potato kugel. I bet there are tracts written on potato kugel.”
As soon as they entered the doors of the synagogue, Cass heard male voices massed together in the sumptuous folds of song. The strains of melody didn’t prepare Cass for the sensory assault as they now entered the vast room where the Hasidim were gathered for prayer. For the second time that day, the neuronal circuits of his “What” system were overloaded, transposing sights, sounds, smells, so that the melody struck his nostrils with spices he couldn’t identify, and he heard beneath it the contained roar of the vast boiling sea of black, which gradually individuated into discrete men, hundreds rising steeply to the rafters in tiered waves from the small cleared center, dazzlingly white, a rectangle of gentle foam floating in the blackened sea. It was the homogeneity of the Valdeners’ appearance and the synchronization of their motion that liquefied them, the individuating features smoothed away by the identical beards and the payess and kaputas and shtreimlach, undulating waves made up of Valdeners swaying in unison in great sweeping arcs in time to the powerful surge of their song, though now Cass could see that the four banks of tiers splayed outward and upward from a pure white platform, and that lining its perimeter were evenly spaced artifacts, ceremonial perhaps, and wavering ripples of glossy air drifted over and blurred the white rectangle, the mirage of scorching summer days, so that Cass had to peer a little longer before he could make out that the ceremonial objects were just regular plates and glasses and silverware, and now he saw it wasn’t a platform but a table, and the foam was a linen tablecloth, and those were men seated round the table, each aligned with a plate of food.
The tish! Of course! This was the famous tish! Cass had a better view of it now, pulled onto a tier by a stranger’s hand-though for all he knew the man could be a cousin, since those payess had red highlights. His arm was linked into that of the next Valdener, who was linked with the next, and he felt himself assimilated into the row and so into the room and so into the mystique of fellowship, and slipped, too, into the powerful hold of the male voices fused into a strength that was somehow also delicate, carrying the haunting melody, the niggun, that was like large hands gently carrying a fragile being, and the melody was haunting Cass not only because of the depth of its beauty but also because of its eerie familiarity, Cass knew it immediately, intimately, like a newborn knowing the voice of his mother, and he softly began to sing with the others.
From his tier he could look down on the tish, where now he could discern the Rebbe-a lone spot of color in the vastness of black. The Rebbe was resplendent in his unique kaputa-a tish bekeshe-blue velvet shot through with gleaming gold, and his shtreimel may not have exceeded all others-the one on the head of the Hasid next to him rivaled it in luxuriance-but the gold from the kaputa emanated outward with a quickening glow, so that everything about the Rebbe seemed more vibrant. The Rebbe’s chair, too, was magnificently regal, a throne of elaborately carved wood the soft brown of a pecan and upholstered in red velvet.
The black-clad men around the tish held hands and swayed, the Rebbe bisecting the ring so that both sides swayed inward toward him. The Hasid sitting to the right of the Rebbe, the one with the rivaling shtreimel, was as eerily familiar to Cass as the haunting song that he was singing. Like the niggun, Cass knew that Hasid with an immediacy and intimacy that defied explanation.
No, it didn’t defy explanation. There in the seat of honor beside the Rebbe was Jonas Elijah Klapper.
The singing changed to a different melody, slower and sadder, and the Rebbe’s eyes were closed. He gestured expansively, shrugging his shoulders, his palms facing upward and then downward, then pointing an index finger out toward the Hasidim, and then upward into the heavens, as the tune slid out of its mournful key and ascended into a soaring, ecstatic scale, bursting the constraints of mere sound, and the rows and rows of Valdeners were jumping, like one large organism they rose upward and returned to earth in perfect unity, it was a rapturous intermingling of melody and movement, the heat in the room, the density of all the people, only driving the exultation further in its ascent, and Jonas Elijah Klapper, too, had his eyes closed, there beside the Rebbe swaying, and his own shoulders also doing a dance of little shrugs and rolls, and his lips moving as if he knew the words, as maybe he did, the capacious repository that was his mind would continually astonish, two visionaries, side by side, emanations of the extraordinary, so that even when the singing subsided, and the room stopped bubbling with ecstatic men, and they quieted on a single sustained note and took their seats in unison, as if by unvoiced command, the silenced melody still hung in the air as the Rebbe began to speak.
He was speaking in Yiddish, loud enough so that each syllable could be heard by the Valdeners up in the rafters, in the very last tiers, and Cass was pressed not only by the men on either side of him but from behind as well, the Hasid behind him placing his hand on Cass’s shoulder, leaning forward, so that Cass, too, leaned forward, placing his hand on the Hasid in front of him, the entire room of Valdeners were fused into one and pressing down toward the tish, where the Rebbe spoke his words that were somehow so penetrating in their pronunciation that Cass, who knew only a few words of Yinglish, felt that he could somehow understand what the Rebbe was saying, and the longer the Rebbe talked, sometimes slapping his hand on the tish for emphasis, the more it seemed to Cass that he was getting it, until he was seamlessly understanding everything, but only, he realized a few seconds later, because the Rebbe had switched to English.