“Well, I’ll bet we do need them,” Debbie said.
“I’ll take that bet,” said Miriam Jacobson.
“All right, big shot,” Debbie said, “what are the stakes?”
“For every chair we need over three hundred I donate ten dollars to Trees for Israel. For every chair under three hundred you donate ten dollars.”
“You’re on,” Debbie Grunwald said. “Who holds the money?”
“Why don’t we just put it down on the ground here where it can blow away?” Miriam Jacobson asked triumphantly, as Debbie Grunwald, knowing she’d been both set up and out-sported, blanched.
As it turned out, Debbie Grunwald would have had to pay Trees for Israel a hundred and twenty dollars if I hadn’t disallowed the bet.
It was just the sort of thing I was up against, the point of my missionary’s message to them. It was sin. Such pride and vainglorious strut and vaunt and bluster. Put brag by, friends, I would have told them. Put by swagger and swank and grandiloquence. Knock it off with all swelled-head big britchery, all that high and mighty of the soul and hot air of the heart. You don’t six-pack God, smarty-boots, I would have told them. I would have. In my sermon. If I’d gotten that far.
Because I wasn’t surprised. It was Shavuoth. I wasn’t surprised. I practically almost expected not only that just about a third of those two hundred and eighty-eight seats would be filled with Athapaskans, Tshimians and other assorted fisherfolk, hunter-gatherer and totem-pole types, and that ordinary blue-collar Baptist, Methodist, Adventist and Mormon drillers, drivers and sappers would take up still another third or so — it was Shavuoth, after all; it was Shavuoth, come one, come all — leaving another ninety-six for the outright Jews in attendance. I wasn’t surprised. I counted on it. It was those Russian Orthodox Cossack Eskimo momzers up on dogsleds with whips I hadn’t figured!
Because this was June, for God’s sake. D-Day. (Could they, I wondered, be opening up some second front?) There wasn’t even any damned snow on the ground! Yet there they were. In full fur. Mukluk to parka in the June heat. Tricked out with their harpoons and ulus by their sides, the sharp, curving knives the women used to gut fish. The dogs, sprawling on the ground in their complicated harness, seemed at some lazy, ceremonial equivalent of parade rest, but at a signal from their masters, some tug of the reins, I suppose, which rolled along their gear like a wave, they rose to a sort of attention. I made some announcements, called out the preliminary blessings (thanking God for restoring the body, for dressing the naked, for opening the eyes of the blind, for freeing the captives, for giving the rooster the intelligence to distinguish between the day and the night, and for making me — I couldn’t keep my eyes off those Eskimos — an Israelite), and began the service.
I’d just finished the Akdamut, the ninety-verse alphabetical acrostic praising the greatness of God and the excellence of Torah (and concealing the name — Meir bar Rabbi Yitzchak — of the poem’s author and father) you recite on Shavuoth before you open the Torah.
I went toward the ark. I proclaimed the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel,” I announced, “the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” opened the ark, withdrew the Torah, took the silver crowns off its wooden handles, undid the soft, fine cords that bound it, removed the velvet parochet that covered it, and laid it down on the bema. Since this was a Torah that had never been used, all its slack was taken up. The scrolls were set at the beginning, like a rental cassette from a video store. I would need someone to help me roll them to the portion for Shavuoth, and I beckoned David Piepenbrink to come up beside me.
“What?” he said.
“This is a virgin Torah,” I told him from the side of my mouth. “I’m laying a very high power aliyah on you here. You hold on tight to the left side while I roll up the right. It should be about a third of the way through.” He started to say something. “Don’t,” I warned, “don’t you dare mention money.”
“The dogs,” he said.
“What?”
“The dogs!”
The huskies, urged on by their Cossack Orthodox Russian Eskimo masters, were pulling the heavily laden sleds over the dry, stony ground. “Quick,” I told Piepenbrink, “take up the slack. The slack! We’ve got to save the Torah from them. Quick, Piepenbrink, this is an even higher honor than that first one I gave you.”
“What,” he said, “protect this? It’s a crib, a trot. It’s a pony.” He was speaking conversationally now, all the nervous, customary stage inaudibles, the directions and quiet, cryptic promptings that flow back and forth between a rabbi and a bar mitzvah boy, say, and which ordinarily aren’t heard in even the first row — why is this, I wonder, what special physics protects our grit-teeth, iron-jaw arrangements? — his voice normal, audible, clear, punched up as a broche.
“What do you mean, a crib?” (And my voice normal too, as clear as Piepenbrink’s.) But I saw what he meant. I’m such a lousy rabbi. When I’d chosen the Torah in the black velvet mantle to bring with me to 5 Mile, I didn’t even look at it first. It wasn’t Hebrew but a phonetic transcription of Hebrew, a transliteration in English. It was Wolfblock’s work. It was old Rabbi Wolfblock’s work, the man who’d written out my tiny haphtarah passage in English for me when I was bar mitzvah, the shortest of the year. I’d have recognized his printing anywhere.
And all they ever meant, the Eskimo Russian Cossack Orthodox momzers, was just to come closer, and the dogs too very likely, who were probably called, someone suggested later, when I sang out that Sh’ma!
I went out again, on Tish’a b’Av. McBride was there, but not an Eskimo, who were gentlemen, was to be seen.
Tish’a b’Av commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples, and also the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The year I’m speaking of it fell on Thursday, August first, and I’d chosen Toolik camp, maybe two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, as the venue for our services. The Jacobsons had dropped out, Dave Piepenbrink of course, Arnie Sternberg, maybe a quarter of the Jews. Of course Tish’a b’Av was never your most popular holiday anyway. What’s it got going for it? All negatives. Two acts of high vandalism and the blackballing of an entire people from a major country. That’s Tish’a b’Av. What’s to celebrate? To tell the truth, I think it should be taken out of the canon altogether. Too defeatist. Why, it’s like celebrating the date the first Jew wasn’t admitted to a country club, or the first time his name showed up in an ethnic joke. And the destruction of those temples? Commemorate swastikas painted on the walls, why don’t you? Crosses burning on your lawn. Also, it always falls in the hottest part of the summer. People are out of town.
It was a packed house anyway. Gentiles and Indians made up for the defection of the Jews and Eskimos. And Deb Grunwald was there. Shlepping chairs, offering her optimistic body counts.
“You’ll see, Rabbi,” she told me the night before the services, “there’ll be an even bigger turnout than last time.”
“Sure. They’re coming to see how I’ll screw up.”
“No,” she said, “really. They never heard such davening. Once you found your place, you whizzed along like a champ.”
“I read from a crib, Deb.”
“Who knew?”
“After Piepenbrink stepped down? Half the congregation.”
“It was beautiful.”
“Well, you’re kind,” I said. “Thank you.”