“Building the tip,” I think they call it. Building the tip. Whatever you do to create interest, demand. The dancing girls in their scanties in promissory, there’s-plenty-more-where-this-comes-from undulation outside the tent. The you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yets. The no-obligation-examine-in-your-own-home-for-ten-days-frees. All that primed-pump, water-cast bread that gets the juices rolling. Free sample. Words to the wise.
I was building the tip. That’s all those Friday night services were to me. Who had this hunch (not even articulated) that real Judaism consists not of the ingrained and the daily, the taken-for-granted, steady-state ritual attentions one pays to God, but comes in jolts of enthusiasm, in fits and starts, in great waves of stored-up sanctity and the piecemeal pious. In feelings released — released? escaped, exploded; I hadn’t been a burier of the dead all these years for nothing — on great occasions. Not just on any ordinary Sabbath like a magazine you get once a week in the mail, but on our most sacred holidays, our movable feast days and festivals.
I would have come before them heavy-laden, burdened as a priest, a doctor, blackly bagged, making a house call. I would have brought them, I mean, the jeweled tools of my trade, the branched candelabra with all its official, thou-shalt-made cups and knops, set up my shittim-wood ark like some holy swing set knocked together, and hidden — wrapped like a mystery in the velvet, masculine mantle with its great, rampant, applique lions and weighty crowns — the Torah there, and spread my heavy cloth before them on the bema, the sterling silver yad like the major piece in a place setting. Above the ark I would have burned whale oil for them in eternal lamps.
So it’s a Shavuoth I’m shooting for, a Pesach, a Purim, my Friday nights only God’s little loss leaders, as Mother’s or Father’s Day, say, are only your jerry-built festivities of the historically lackluster months. And what I’d really like to have given them was something spectacular, honored the creation of the world, say. (The reason, I think, Christianity has the numbers — though I’d be the first to tell you it’s not numbers alone that make a great religion, ideas have something to say about it too — is that Christianity has heavier holidays. Real concept occasions. What’s Christmas but your birth of God, Easter week but those seven action-packed days from the time he first pulled into town to the time he got killed and resurrected? Succoth, which is only a harvest festival, pales in comparison. Chanuka, our famous festival of the lights, which commemorates a victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians, does.) There are marvelous untouched holidays there for the plucking. I myself could have come up with a dozen new reasons to praise God. We might have celebrated heart bypass operations, Chinese take-out, record-setting Wall Street rallies. The Festival of the Cruise we could have. The Feast of the Successful Children. Yes, and heartbreakers too, heavy and solemn as anything Christians put on — The Fasts of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen. The Festival of the Holocaust, say.
It was Shavuoth. Now Shavuoth is a fairly important holiday. It commemorates both the revelation of the Law up on Mount Sinai and the celebration of an ancient wheat festival. Something for everyone, Shavuoth is. That year it fell on June 6, so I picked up D-Day too.
It wasn’t as if I was surprised at the turnout. The factors were all there. They were in place, I mean. Well, I’d been building the tip. And there was the money thing. (Did I say how I was reminded of the engraved-invitation revolution back in the forties? The construction of the pipeline was a little like that.) And then, of course, when you weren’t actually working there wasn’t a whole lot to do. So church — I speak generically — became your entertainment. As lots of other things did. (I remember reading, for example, that in the seven major Alyeska camps the men pumped over a million dollars a month into the pinball machines. Of course, that was at Alaskan prices. A game was a dollar, a free game cost you fifty cents.)
So of course I wasn’t surprised. The other way round, really. I would have been surprised if they hadn’t shown up, if all those Tshimian and Athapaskan Indians, if all those hunters and fishermen and totem-pole carvers and ivory scratchers from King and Little Diomede islands hadn’t shown up. If all those blasters, heavy equipment operators, jackhammerers and acetyle-nists hadn’t. What, and miss Shavuoth? Frankly, I’d have been less surprised if Karen Ackerman, Milton Abish, Debbie Grunwald, Dave Piepenbrink, Arnie Sternberg, Howard Ziegler or the Jacobsons failed to show. But that’s a figure of speech. Of course they were there. Dave Piepenbrink met my plane. He was waiting for me out on the 5 Mile camp landing strip. (The different camps had begun to submit sealed bids to see who would host the services, proceeds to the Trees for Israel Fund. You have to understand something, none of this was my idea.)
“Good yontif, Rabbi.”
“David.”
“You had a pleasant trip?”
“Very nice, thank you, David.”
“Thank God! Alevay! Kayn aynhoreh!”
“Could you lend me a hand? The makings for the ark are still in the plane, the Torah and accessories.”
“The Torah? You brought a Torah on the flight with you? Oh, let me carry it. Please, Rabbi, please. I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your trees if you do.”
“Enough with the trees already, David.”
“You said trees,” Piepenbrink protested. “Trees for Israel was your idea. I never thought trees was a hot idea. Trees is just another place for Arab snipers to hide themselves and take potshots at us. So tell me, Rabbi, if not into trees, where then should we put our money? You’re the rabbi, you tell me.”
“Nowhere. It was a bad idea. But everyone’s so hipped up here on throwing their money around. On being a good sport. I shouldn’t have to charge people to get them to help me out. I’m not selling indulgences. Of course you can carry the Torah. It’s in the duffel.”
I took the smaller duffel, into which I’d transferred a Torah out of Philip’s duffel before I left Prospect Creek camp that morning, and held it out to Piepenbrink. He’d lost his enthusiasm. Oh, he carried it, but now that it wasn’t costing him anything all sense of ceremony had gone out of it for him, even decorum. He practically brushed it along the ground.
“Hey,” I said, “watch what you’re doing. That’s a Torah in there. You don’t shlep it along like it was a bowling ball.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and hiked his burden up a few inches. “I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who thinks he can get a ticket for flying a torn flag.”
It was true. I did think I could.
Karen Ackerman, Abish, the Jacobsons, Debbie Grunwald, Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler were already setting up the chairs for services the next morning.
“I don’t know,” Debbie Grunwald said, stepping back, considering. “You think it’ll be enough?”
“Oh, sure,” Milton Abish said. “Hey, there’s three hundred chairs here. For Shavuoth? Three hundred chairs? Sure it’s enough. What, are you kidding me?”
“I don’t know,” Bill Jacobson said, “we were out at the airstrip earlier and there was an unusual amount of traffic landing for a Monday morning. Isn’t that right, Miriam? Didn’t you think so?”
“I sure did, Bill.”
“We could always put more out if we need them,” Arnie Sternberg said.
“Absolutely,” Howard Ziegler agreed.