The Rabbi of Lud

one

THEY SAY IT’S FLAT as sea level and, so far as the eye can tell, it sure looks like it — some great, blunt stub of the earth, level as a table, as if the Creator had meant to mimic in dirt and pure planes of real estate the dark ascensions and black declinations of space, all His monotonous deep celestials. Heaven on earth, so to speak. Or, to hear me tell it — I’m Jerry Goldkorn, the Rabbi of Lud — under earth, either.

Well, this part of Jersey’s not known for its mountains. The Jersey flats, they call it, that stretch between Hoboken and Newark, the upper reaches of the Garden State Parkway and the Hudson River, and though it’s built up now, condos and malls, industrial parks and factory outlet stores, and the skyscrapers of New York in the middle distance like another country altogether, it must once have looked like scorched earth or the kind of terrain where two opposing civilizations came to grips, just the sort of undistinguished, insignificant but bloodied parcel where the battle park goes or historic field where important papers were signed.

Which doesn’t, when it comes right down, preclude. Ain’t it bloodied? That bunch of our dead, I mean. And at least legal if not out-and-out historical? I mean all those contracts, notarized papers, the official documents, certificates and reciprocal pledges.

Legend has it — this would have been sometime in the tenderloin of the seventeenth century, pre-Colonial times, New Amsterdam days — that some founding Jew lost his wife and all his male and female children to one of those cyclical miniplagues that used to hit the New World from time to time. (Listen, usually the missionaries and imperialists take the rap, the troops and camp followers good for the fall. But pox is a two-way street. Disease is just as often a tradeoff. I’ve got nothing against the red man per se, but all you hear about is the white guy’s syphilis and TB, smallpox on the blankets, typhoid in the orange juice, and other assorted germs of the paleface. Let’s be frank here. The Indians dished it out pretty good themselves. There was your maize, there were your bark and berry poisonings. There was your bad peace pipe, your war-paint cosmetics and other fatal allergies. Death by the digestive and the killer contact rashes.) Forgive and forget, I say. Live and let live, why not? But the fact remains, the van Feldmaans and van Gildbergs, or whoever, came to grief along with other of their Dutch neighbors. So, sooner or later, the need arose. Say what you will, pioneers are generally rotten city planners. Many are the reasons for this, but in the case of the Jewish peoples, living on the leading edge of the Diaspora, there’s usually so much else on their minds. They have to pick out a ghetto, they have to put a reliable minyan together. In a radically new environment like New Amsterdam must have been, they probably had to do a whole classification number on the flora and fauna, checking the trayf factors in the deer and the turkeys, in the catfish and tortoises, in the newfangled salads, the pumpkin pies and cranberry candies. (I’m no expert in the matter — I don’t say I shouldn’t be, I say I’m not — but it’s a pretty good bet that those founding Jews were probably a very choosy chosen people, more Orthodox than anything we see today, if not hounded then at least closely questioned, at least scrutinized, and maybe hounded, even by their old Old World coreligionists, who would have looked on them, even in those old gabardine times, as a separate branch or sect or even cult, or otherwise why would they have bothered to make the trip in the first place? So who knows what must have been on their minds or what they would have made of all the what-have-you of the buckskin life?)

Anyway, when the sickness — we’ll call it New World fever — broke out and made its way under the pales and pickets and over the posts of their little Jewish stockade, and the Angel of Death took off with most of his family, the founding Jew guy was probably caught short. Not only didn’t he have a family plot, there wasn’t a consecrated cemetery on all Manhattan Island. What did he see? His gentile neighbors taking their particular dead off in canoes to Queens. (Because the New Amsterdam Jews were only a small contingent and were not as prepared as their Christian brothers and sisters who, outnumbering them probably a hundredfold in life, quite naturally were way ahead of them in death, too, and were already in possession of a place to bury their dead.)

Which is when, it’s said, someone — the name is lost to history — crossed the Hudson and discovered Lud — the vast, once and future compound of departed Jews to come. Maybe it was the treeless soil, maybe just the brown, dead look of the place, or it could be he saw a correspondence between the blank, fresh page of that open plain and the charged, historic enterprise of making something out of what wasn’t just a new country this time but a new continent too.

Though the latter, I’m the first to admit, is probably just the rabbi in me talking, the opportune poetry of my sacramental, laureate occasions. I’m leaving a couple of things out here anyway — the mounds and the grief. Hey, I’m no expert. Maybe I’m thinking of a different tribe altogether. Maybe the Mounds Indians never even came East. But the subject is still savages, people buried upright or sitting in the earth like schoolchildren at their lessons, in mass graves, or left out to dry like laundry on platforms in trees. But, whatever, interfacing, impacting on a people who came from Holland by way of Poland out of Prussia and from Prussia by way of Spain out of North Africa. The whole Jew thing a wandering minstrelsy. Assimilated a dozen times before they were chewed up and spit out, covered in cultures like a snowball rolling downhill, fattening. Except that these couldn’t even have been Jews as we know them, a cult, a clan, a sect, a faction, their beliefs — I’m a rabbi, I should know these things but here I’m speculating — on the lintels of their log cabins and on their gates, and as frontlets in their beards, say, and even their skullcaps — no disrespect — improvised, improbable as the headdress of the Indians themselves. But, whatever, by this time so culture-shocked out, and outraged, too, that they — he, the founder Jew, or maybe the lookout, shotgun-riding, scout-emissary-agent Jew for him — felt strong enough about it to shove off in the old birchbark and out into the wide and whelming Hudson — this would have been after the winter thaw, during the spring plagues — not just to seek out Lud but to get their dead as far away from the redskin dead as possible. And from the Dutchmen dead too, all those borough-of-Queens-grounded Katrinkas and Jans, Wilhelminas and Hauke Pjeters, as if they needed to put not just one but two rivers between their different theologies, almost, I mean, as though life is one thing and it’s all right to walk around on the surface of the earth together without losing any sleep over it or doing any lasting damage, but death, which lasts longer, and isn’t just any only make-do, temporary arrangement, is another thing entirely, and you have to do whatever you have to do in order to defend your remains against their remains.

On the grief side the ground is less shaky.

That founding Jew, the one who lost his whole family. His grief, at least, is documented.

Well, documented. I say “documented,” but you want to know something? Not even their names have come down to us. (Now, as you know, the whole graven-image business is a Jewish thing — the idol taboos, the no-other-gods-before-Me arrangements, all that forbidden working-model, doll-and-dummy iconography that so exercised Moses when he came down the mountain and found the Jews disporting with the golden calves.) And that’s the key to it — those missing names.

There’s this old joke. In front of the whole congregation the rabbi knocks his breast and proclaims, “I’m nothing, I’m nothing.” Then the president of the synagogue starts smacking himself around the bema and says he’s as insignificant as lint. They’re really beating up on themselves, these two, and the temple’s janitor is very moved that two such holy, scrupulous men should get up in front of everyone and carry on like that, so he too gets up in the shul and starts to rap himself in the heart. “O God,” he says, “I’m unworthy, I’m beneath notice, I’m nothing,” and the rabbi turns to the president of the synagogue, nudges him, points to the janitor, and whispers, “Look who says he’s nothing.”

You get around, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve been to the hospitals and must surely have noticed those names sandblasted into the marble over the entrance to the nifty new wings, or seen the plaques in the temples, under every window in the sanctuary. The sanctuary? The toilets — the stalls and the urinals. Trees in Israel, waves in Waikiki, moonlight in Vermont. For a people wary of blowing God’s horn — saying His name, I mean — we’re not so reluctant to memorialize the monikers and to-do’s of our loved ones. Not a sparrow falls, as it were. We’re the backbone of the customized CAT-scan industry, the personalized Intensive Care Unit one. So right there’s the clue. To his knocked-down-dragged-out, solid-gold, championship, world-class grief. Because what are we dealing with here, Arlington National, Flanders Field? The military rows, lanes and aisles of some close-order-drilled death with Stars of David and simple white wooden crosses like a kind of punctuation? Lud International — my little joke — is as makeshift finally as any other project of pioneers. It’s zoned for death, sure, but otherwise as gerrymandered and catch-as-catch-can as any boardwalk or world’s fair. Did you ever try to find someone in one of these places? They’re mazes. Vaults and sepulchers, tombs, cairns, barrows and mausoleums all mixed in with each other. Obelisks and grave pits. Indiscriminate. There seem to be no codes or ordinances. A cemetery is kind of like a boom town, I think. Anyway, the point is that usually everything in one of these places is as carefully marked and labeled as your kid’s socks when he goes off to camp. Which is why I suspect what we’re dealing with is some really spectacular grief.

So this is the thing. Buckskin or no buckskin, pales and pickets or no pales and pickets, they had some incredible artisans back in those days. You think they couldn’t build a monument? They could build a monument. And when they wanted to they could build a monument like nobody’s business! It would be a match for anything in the Old World. So this fellow, this founder Jew I’m talking about, sends out the word, gets all the best craftsmen in the city together, the best draughtsmen, the best architects and engineers, and commissions a mausoleum that practically looks at you it says, “Money’s no object.”

You get around. (Ain’t Newark Airport a stone’s throw? Ain’t LaGuardia a hop and a skip? JFK?) I’m talking about humility. Sure. I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here, and I’m telling you. This is a nice theological point. That joke I told you? That’s an unrighteous joke. You heard me. Most people, they get a kick out of that story they have no more idea what they’re laughing at than the man in the moon. Because the point ain’t that the rabbi’s puffed up, or that the big-shot president of the congregation is. And it’s not on the janitor, either. No. That’s a joke that mocks God. Because where, in Torah, is God’s name? Where is it written? God, Jehovah, Lord and Yahweh. All aliases — the nicknames, noms de plume and a.k.a.’s of Agency, your basic top-secret, undercover, cloak-and-dagger, off-the-record, ambush-laying Pussyfoot. Peekaboo to you from the burning bush! God likes to make a big deal of this sort of thing. So in the view of the Rabbi of Lud, that joke is a commentary on God’s humility. Look, a Jew isn’t a Christian. Jesus says, “Follow me,” and the church makes a big thing out of the imitation of Christ. Not by us. On an individual level, by us there’s a real distinction between church and state. We’re supposed to keep the dishes for meat and the dishes for dairy strictly separate. What do you think that’s all about? It’s about place, that’s what that’s all about. So “Look who says he’s nothing” is, to a Jew, just about the most serious charge you could bring against him. You’re accusing him of playing God, and what’s so wicked about that old joke is that it accuses God of playing God, too! (I’m wasting my time in New Jersey.)

So, given the background, can you at least begin to understand the grief of that founding New Amsterdam Jew with the fancy tomb, that marble miracle of seventeenth-century know-how with its state-of-the-art arches, piers, cantilevers, columns, finials and traves? He had to have been beside himself! He must have been! Not a mark on it anywhere to indicate who was who! Nowhere the family name! Not a Sarah, not a Joe! Nowhere a Darling Daughter! No place a Beloved Son! As if God, God forbid, Himself had died! Grief so great it didn’t matter anymore about keeping the appearances up. An out-and-out proclamation that not only am I nothing, but that my wife is nothing too, my sons and my daughters. All. All nothing. Denying the Creator. Denying Creation. I’ll tell you something. Grief that immense has got to be a lesson to me. Yes, and a comfort, too. Because whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself, whenever I’m blue or feeling down because I’m only the Rabbi of Lud and haven’t a real congregation but am just this pickup rabbi, God’s little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey, I like to wander out by our seminal, primal monument, that ahead-of-its-time memorial to nothing, just to get my bearings again and put things in the proper perspective.

I’ll be frank with you. If I don’t sound to you like the Rabbi of even Lud, maybe it’s because I never had a true calling in the conventional sense. Sue me. The fact is our Christian friends have the music and that’s half the battle right there. I’m not even thinking about plainsong, Gregorian chants, the hardcore liturgical stuff. I discount madrigals, chimes, ding-dongs from the carillon. I’m not even thinking of the dirges, dead marches, oratorios and canticles. Just ordinary hymns! Forget the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Where in the Judaic tradition do you get an “Amazing Grace”? A “Rock of Ages,” a “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”? So never mind hymns. Where are your Jewish Christmas carols? We don’t have “The Little Drummer Boy.” We don’t have an “Angels We Have Heard on High.” And did you ever hear of a Jewish spiritual? Of course not, even though the Jordan is our river, Jewish water from the word go. We don’t even have good chants. There are saffron-robed kids in the airports with better. What do we have, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”? So if it isn’t the calling, the compelling musical inspiration, I mean, maybe it’s because I’ve always been just a little bit more spiritual then the next guy.

Take away the cemeteries, here’s what Lud looks like:

I’m not a world traveler and don’t put myself forward as an expert in these matters, but ever since I first saw it it’s always struck me that downtown Lud is a lot like the buildings and stores that line the highways of western towns like a peddler’s fruit stands, garment racks and card tables. It’s a, what-do-you-call-it, a strip, and Lud, like Las Vegas or Hollywood or Washington, D.C., is essentially a one-industry town. Only it’s even less diversified than those other places, and though there’s nothing to see, it’s even something of a tourist town. It’s amazing how it’s all linked together. The cemetery came first and was out here on its own for a good many years like, oh, say, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, but then somebody had the bright idea of bringing all death’s service-related industries together under one roof, so the town’s long main street has two monument companies where they cut and engrave the monuments. It has two funeral homes, a nursery, a landscaper, Pamella’s flower shop and a dry cleaner’s.

Let’s see, there’s a barber, a notary and a PIP instant printer that does a land-office business in death certificates. There are a couple of lawyers, a limo wash, a draper, a tiny hotel and coffee shop, a post office, and an office with a telex machine that can send obituary notices to any newspaper in the country. There’s also a gas station that has a wrecker on twenty-four-hour call and a trucker named Pete who hauls stone from the quarries. We have a little Jewish notions shop that stocks greeting cards, prayer books, yarmulkes and yahrtzeit candles for the funeral homes, and an agency that provides day laborers to the town’s cemeteries. Also there’s a small office, not connected with either the cemeteries or the funeral homes, that deals in the buying and selling of deeds, graves, plots and all the rest of the real estate of death. And everything done in that brick and white-trim style designed to make you think you’re back in Colonial Williamsburg or Federal Philadelphia during the Revolution. The rest is residential, a staggered half-dozen houses on either side of Route 43—we live in one ourselves — with big backyards and swimming pools and the town’s two leading cemeteries behind them like farms. (There are smaller graveyards in Lud, pockets of consecrated land that touch the town like suburbs.)

So here I am, representing — the merchants and the other rabbis don’t live here, don’t or won’t, and drive in from Ridgewood and other places in northern Jersey, and the houses are either unoccupied or turned into rooming houses for Lud’s transient gardeners and gravediggers — oh, virtually the entire Jewish population, effectively, as I say, the Rabbi of Lud. The rabbi, the mayor, the chief of police. Whatever I say I am. Because of course there’s no mayor and, except for that post office, no civil services. No police unless you count the security people who work the traffic for the funerals. No school board, no health department, no tax collector, no department of streets. We’re this company town. (There’s no company.) We’re this ghost town. (No ghosts either, but lots of potential.) And not even the Rabbi of Lud finally, because, to tell you the truth, when it comes right down to it, except for my immediate family, there’s not any Jews who live here. And every so often, in my rabbi mode again, I have to ask, How could this happen? Who shapes discrepancy? I understand about Leviathan, I know about the treasuries of the sky, but what’s responsible for our Luds, those perfectly logical closed systems outside connection? God doesn’t usually do anomaly. I’m not saying He couldn’t if He wanted, but it’s against His nature.

I say “every so often” but it’s more frequent than that. On a nice morning I might be having my breakfast on the red cedar table in my backyard and I’ll look up from my newspaper and coffee and see it spread out before me, cemetery as far as the eye can see. The earth-drowned Jews of Lud, New Jersey. Our crowd. How did there get to be so many? There are graveyards in New York now, of course, in every borough except Manhattan, and new places opening up in Connecticut all the time, in Stamford and other poshy venues and climes even farther out, but Lud still gets more than its fair share. It doesn’t take a back seat even to the cemeteries you see out your taxi window coming in from the airport through Queens. You know what land is like in New York. They look that crowded because they’re so close together. We’re more spread out and, according to the Journal of the American Funeral Association, we have fewer people but more families. My God, I sound like a booster!

How could this happen? I’ll tell you how this could happen. As the twig is bent, that’s how it could happen. There I am, a kid in Chicago. Not from a particularly religious family. On top of the world, in the middle of the middle class. Ten years old and an only child. The war over half a decade and the good guys winners. Absolutely content. Not looking for trouble — and where could I find it if I was? — and coming into consciousness postwar. This is the end of the 1940s, before the X-ray machines in shoe stores could irradiate your toe bones, before cigarettes could kill you with cancer, before blacks, before projects, ghettos and changing neighborhoods, before juvenile delinquency even. This was a golden age when wholesale was wholesale and your edge was real. I’m living the good life on Chicago’s South Side. My daddy’s rich and my ma is good lookin’.

Let me interrupt myself here a minute. You know what’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America? In America. Not closing the camps, not the new state of Israel. What’s largely responsible for the increased popularity of Judaism in America was the development of the printed invitation. I mean things like when raised lettering came within the price range of the middle classes. I mean when they perfected that transparent tissue paper. Because it isn’t only necessity that’s the mother of invention. Sometimes it’s boom and amplitude. Take Miami, that town’s flush days when they were throwing up buildings right and left and they’d advertise, “Come to the Fabulous Such-and-So — This Year’s Hotel.” It was like that back at the end of the forties. Money relatively easy to come by and the printed invitation revolution moving in to take up the slack, people excited and trying to outdo one another with celebrations, with their weddings and bar mitzvahs and what-have-you’s.

Which goes toward explaining how I’m reading comic books one minute and studying in the cheder the next. Plucked and translated out of my customary ways and haunts by parents who were already thinking about what the invitations would look like three years down the road when it was time for their only son to be bar mitzvah’d, what wondrous concoctions would be coming onstream to amaze the neighbors and confound the relatives.

I don’t scorn them. I don’t cast aspersion. This isn’t any easy satire I do. Because God does too move in mysterious ways, and ain’t that the truth, wonders the Rabbi of Lud from his plain in New Jersey. Mysterious? Byzantine. He wants me in Jersey, He arranges raised lettering and transparent tissue paper spinoffs from Second World War R & D. (I’ve got to think I’m doing the work of the Lord or I’ll plotz. — Excuse me. Bust. This other is still a second language to me. I don’t have it right, the rhythms, the Yiddish singsong ways.)

But that ain’t the half of it. Taking a secular kid from a secular family in Chicago and throwing him into Hebrew school ain’t the half of it. Here’s the miraculous, mysterious part. I’d never been more bored! I stuttered and hemmed and hawed myself through those lessons like a dyslexic, like someone disadvantaged, Job Corps material, volunteer Army, Operation Headstart — all broke-will, underfunded, bust-hope beneficiary. God’s little own welfare cheat. I had no aptitude for what was finally just another inscrutably foreign language to me and not the ordinary, conversational vulgate of God Himself. The superheroes in those comic books had more reality for me than all the biblical luminaries and shoguns in Pentateuch. And this is who He chooses to ride shotgun for Him in New Jersey?

As my thirteenth birthday approached my teachers started to sweat. My haphtarah, the passage from Prophets that bar mitzvah boys read for their bar mitzvahs, was too long for my poor skills, and they postponed the ceremony for three months, finding another haphtarah for me, the shortest of the year. All the time plotting, conspiring with His sense of the dramatic, arranging His improbable, mysterious scenarios, having taken the secular kid from the secular Chicago family — which, when it came right down to it, was probably more Chicago than Jewish — and putting him through paces that he never understood — that he was never interested enough to understand — finally bar mitzvahing the kid, the bozo Jew, to less than rave reviews, and getting ready to uncork the real and final miracle — to give me, just me, a calling, passing over my classmates, the bona fide buchers, those little ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-old keepers of the flame to whom Hebrew script did not look like the business end of so many heavy, old-fashioned keys. (Let alone worry about the problem of God, being at that stage in my theological development where whether He sported a long white beard was still an issue.)

So I became a man on the Shabbes of the year’s shortest haphtarah passage, and if I felt any different it was strictly in a material way. The newfangled invitations had done their job. My bar mitzvah attracted over two hundred and fifty people. Family and close friends, of course, but a sort of papered house of the more distantly connected — the rabbi, big shots from the temple, my dad’s bosses and colleagues, his competitors and customers, certain featured gentiles (you could not, in those days, even think of throwing a big affair without their little ecumenical presence), my ma’s cleaning lady, everyone, possibly, for whom they could obtain a good address. I did all right. I did better than all right. I cleaned up. Because now, in those boom times, a spinoff of the spinoff, checks and money began to come in envelopes tricked out like little paper billfolds and later, in the hotel, it was practically de rigueur to slip a bar mitzvah kid — or a bridegroom, or a bride — his gift in one of them, working it into a handshake or a pocket of the kid’s suit, throwing maybe a wink into the mix and making the cloak-and-dagger razzle-dazzler’s or card sharp’s or pickpocket-in-reverse’s almost invisible feints. It was a sight to see. Really. A sight to see. The way one moment some guy you weren’t even sure you knew might be brushing your lapel for you and the next you felt the flap on a pocket of your suitcoat lifted and heard the soft susurrus of money changing not hands but actual clothing. It might have looked vulgar for a freshly decreed all-grown-up man to go around like that, paper hanging from him like the tags on new ready-to-wear, except that every so often my mother or father came up to take my envelopes to hold for me. I pulled in over eight hundred 1949 dollars. (Question, Rabbi: Which is more vulgar, if the proceeds from a bar mitzvah exceed or do not meet expenses? Answer: I’m here to tell you this isn’t even a good question. First of all, a man who throws an affair with a view toward making money from it has to be out of his head. Consider the price of the hall, the cost of the catering. Don’t forget what they charge for flowers, don’t forget what you give for a band. And what about those fancy invitations, what about the postage to send them, the stamps for the RSVPs? Plus you have to remember the incidentals. Also there’s an ostentatious element that takes pleasure in outspending the guests. That’s only happy if the numbers make no sense at all, if the very idea of cost effectiveness is thrown out altogether. Admittedly, this has always been a distinct minority, never higher than a couple of percent. For the vast majority of us, the money outlay is only the necessary expense of doing business and the real payoff and genuine pleasure come from showcasing the kid. It’s the kid’s day, his or hers, he or she, whoever’s up to bat that Saturday. I’ll go out on a limb here. I’ll tell you that maybe not the majority but many of us, many of us would just as soon put by showbiz and do away with the shindig part of it entirely and close down after the kid says his piece in the temple. So vulgar? Sure, if love is vulgar. — And this is the lesson of the rabbi!

(Who was not a rabbi yet and who’s still trying to explain the roundabouts of his mysterious calling.)

Speaking of whom, well, it was the rabbi himself who came up to me, us, me and the older cousin with whom I was slow dancing, the parents and grandparents watching, taking it all in how yesterday’s klutz and this morning’s man had lickety-split discovered sex, beaming, getting their money’s worth from the showcased kid. First I thought he wanted to move us apart, then that he meant to cut in. Then — oh, youth’s tender, indiscriminate imperialism that assumes such tribute — merely that he had forgotten to give me my present and couldn’t wait for the band to stop playing to make amends. Which would he be, I wondered in the split second he’d left me to consider the question, a handshake stuffer or a mock valet?

“Jerry,” he said. “Miss,” he told the girl, “please. Excuse us.”

“Oh, Rabbi Wolfblock,” I said, “you didn’t have to. Don’t you remember? You already gave me The Illustrated History of the Tallith.”

He guided me to a chair at an unoccupied table. “Jerome, you impressed me this morning. The broches could have melted in your mouth.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“No, I mean it. I think you could have done it even if I hadn’t written it all out for you in English.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“You used your extra months to advantage.”

“Thank you, Rabbi.”

“One good turn deserves another. You know this expression?”

“Of course, Rabbi.”

“Good boy,” Rabbi Wolfblock said. The band finished a set and some of the people whose table we occupied had started to drift back but were pulled up short when Wolfblock held up his hand. “A moment, friends,” he said, and turned back and lowered his voice. “What you have to understand, Jerry, is that I’m the fellow who found that eensy miniscripture for you that we waited for it to come round like people waiting on a solstice.”

“I know that, Rabbi.”

“Jerry,” he said, “that some thirteen-year-old pisher becomes a man when he’s bar mitzvah is only a legalism. With all due respect it’s probably a holdover from the time before penicillin when most people didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of making it past twenty-nine and were already middle-aged by the time they were eighteen. Methuselah lived nine hundred years? Days is more like it. Weeks! Listen, Jerry, Jewish people practically invented cancer and heart conditions. And what about anti-Semitism? That had to shave something off the life expectancy. And those momzers weren’t fooling around. I’m not talking about country clubs you couldn’t get into or nasty jokes in the observation car with ‘kike’ in the punchline. They violated the women and children and shot to kill. So of course little boys got to go around like their seniors. Of course they did. A legal fiction. — In a minute, friends.

“Rabbi Wolfblock doesn’t say these things to make you feel bad. To make you feel bad? When he scoured Torah to find your itty-bitty portion? Was that to make you feel bad? No, it was so an ignorant, backward boy could be bar mitzvah like anybody else and have a nice affair with a band and lovely presents and a bunch of strangers to cheer him on to remember all his life. Jerry, promise me.”

He recruited me, a thing someone with my record of rotten attendance and demonstrably lousy skills could never, had no right ever to, have expected, for his minyan.

In addition to our attendance on people just bereaved who were supposed to stay in their homes during the mourning period, the compulsory seven days of shiva, we had additional assignments.

You have to understand something. This was Chicago at the end of the forties, the war over four years and the terrors of the Holocaust still fresh. In those days certain older people wouldn’t leave their apartments at first light or walk abroad at dusk to go to synagogue for the sunrise and sunset services. They believed that Jew-haters, familiar with the broad outlines of our religious practices, waited and watched for a lone Jew to leave his home and come into the streets, where they would be hiding themselves, posing behind kiosks perhaps, where they sold newspapers, or skulking about the gangways between apartment buildings. It was a familiar nightmare, a common delusion among old people. So these old Jews, some of them even Orthodox, wouldn’t or couldn’t get to shul. And it wasn’t that long after the war, remember. The agencies still verifying the identities of death camp victims and the Defense Department still closing the books on MIAs, each day making grief official. So it wasn’t as if there was any shortage of relatives to mourn. And they were old, infirm, handicapped. A lot of these people couldn’t have gotten to temple even if they’d wanted to. (And, let’s face it, they didn’t all want to. The invitation revolution just didn’t have the kick that some of these old IWWs and Trotskyites and ILGWUs were accustomed to.) So we delivered. Rabbi Wolfblock’s Traveling Minyan. We were like Meals-on-Wheels. Like the Postal Service. It was neither rain nor snow nor dark of night by us too.

We were not comforters, not eulogizers — most of the time we didn’t even know the people whose souls we were commending to God, vouchsafing to God as if we were cosigning their loans — and I wish I could say there was something embarrassing about sweeping into the homes of people who had just been widowed or lost a father, say, a mother, a brother, a sister, a child, who hadn’t yet had time to take in the implications of their ceremonial or blood bond so surprisingly destroyed, and inviting them to override their grief not only with ritual but with ritual made suspect by having it served up by mere legalisms, a troupe — that’s what we were — of thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah pishers. We were, what? Rabbi Wolfblock’s Children’s Crusaders. Ten little men, thirteen to fifteen years old, ten little Infants for Orthodoxy against a background of the new calligraphy — so ornate it might itself have been a kind of Hebrew — on the new invitations, who minstreled the South Shore of the South Side, Shachris to Marev, administering Sh’ma, administering Shemoneh Esray, administering Kaddish, administering, that is, what any grown quorum often bar mitzvah’d Jews — God does not hear the prayers of nine Jews — would administer. I wish I could say I was embarrassed. There was certainly enough opportunity — the mirrors covered with sheets, the mourners’ stools and low, hard, makeshift benches, the rumpled clothing, bad breath and sour smells of the bereaved, as if a little at least of death were contagious, its sloven, unshaven, caught-short essence. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but the fact is, I loved it, and loved the articles about us in the weekend supplements. I ate it all up like a Hitler Youth and loved saying prayers for the dead and guiding people five and six times my age through the mazes of Jewish death. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, but I was more embarrassed on the bema reading my haphtarah.

And anyway you don’t look a calling in the face. For this was it, the real, genuine, miracle calling — me, Jerry Goldkorn, God’s little card trick, His will, take it or leave it, revealed. Working, as ever, with chaff, His by-this-time familiar, boring, inferior materials, His … Ech, to hell with it. And if we’re going to plumb the depths of all this, untangle the ironies, is it really, come to think of it, such a wonder after all? Is it the first time someone has found himself in too deep, out of his league, out of his depth, in over his head? Corruption — don’t get me wrong, it’s an example, I’m not corrupt — almost goes with the public trust. Even a starting pitcher who can go the full nine innings is a rarity. So why should I carry on just because I happen to read a halting Hebrew and am a little rusty in the ritual and custom departments? Isn’t my heart in the right place?

All right, you’re going to find out sooner or later, so I’ll make a clean breast right now and be done with it. You’re asking yourselves, if his Hebrew is so bad how did this improbable guy ever get to be a licensed rabbi? Well, you know those offshore medical schools where people sometimes go if they haven’t got the best grades in the world? Places like Grenada and St. Lucia and along the Pacific rim? All right, I attended an offshore yeshiva. It was on this tiny atoll in the Maldive Islands a few hundred miles southwest of India. What are you going to do, arrest me? I’m a person whose calling came about, at least indirectly, through a postwar boom in the engraved bar mitzvah invitation industry. Don’t be so quick to judge. (I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here.) Isn’t it only fitting I received most of my religious training abroad, among Sikhs and Hindus — all the queer castes with their sacred cows and trayf human beings? Only fitting that an almost charter member of Rabbi Herschel Wolfblock’s all-boy minyan and original Little League davening society should pick up his Hebrew lore somewhere closer to the road to Mandalay than the Wailing Wall? My God, my brothers, my God, my sisters, we were like the von Trapp Family Singers, Quiz Kids, famed vaudeville chimps.

Norman Sachs, Donny Levine, Ray Haas, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stanley Bloom, Jake Heldshaft, Al Harry Richmond and I were Wolfblock’s first team, and though we had understudies, kids who could be called upon to stand in if one of us was out of commission, the odd thing was we never got sick. Once we signed with Wolfblock’s special forces we never came down with flu or fell victim to the kid diseases.

Now maybe you can explain this, but at the time it was as difficult to account for — and Wolfblock the first to point out what was happening, not crying miracle, understand, just underscoring our strange run of good health — as it was for us to fathom the wonders of the Ouija board or the dynamics that worked the little pendulum that hung from a thread which we used to swing above one another’s palms in circles or verticals and that it never occurred to us we controlled.

So why not New Jersey? Why not Lud?

The world isn’t plotted like a model city, isn’t laid out on a neat grid for the convenience of tourists and postal employees. There really was a Diaspora, you know, and shipwrecks and castaways, folks lost in deep woods and in the higher elevations and not everywhere filled up with the symmetrical quotas of Caracas and Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, New York. Anomalies abound. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel weren’t all found. Or weren’t found where you might expect. There are frontiers, outposts if not of empire then at least of likelihood. I’m speaking of queer parishes on the high seas, congregations in the wilderness. And this isn’t my rabbi mode. I’m not being mystical here, I’m not suggesting martyrs slugging it out with the elements and with themselves in the jungles and along the frozen wastes, and I’m not being glamorous either, only practical. I’m speaking, I mean, of accepting what’s left after the plummy assignments have all been awarded. Practical, we’re practical men we rabbis of Lud, compliant, comers to terms with our oblique, improbable lives. Yes, and if you troubled to press us you’d find that there isn’t a man among us who doesn’t dream of the splashy yellow architecture of some temple in Cleveland. Hey, I know a rabbi who conducts services on a cruise ship that often happens to find itself in the Caribbean of a Friday evening. (Well, you say, but that’s glamorous. Oh? He’s hooked on Dramamine and, though he’s not yet forty, the ship’s doctor informs him his beautiful tan is only an early stage of skin cancer.) And wasn’t I myself once Chief Rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline?

Because there isn’t a place that ain’t covered, or at least that a man of the cloth couldn’t get to on six or seven hours’ notice given good weather and the right bush pilot.

So why not Lud? Why not Lud, New Jersey? Why not this funerary, sepulchral, thanatopsical town?