Orchard (9780062974761)

by Hopen, David

  “I’m just wondering whether Sophia or even Davis—”

  Rabbi Bloom crossed his legs. “Is it your preference to include Mr. Davis? I assumed you’d enjoy excluding him.”

  At this, Amir fell silent. Oliver snorted.

  “So what’s the deal here?” Noah asked. “This is basically, like, a book club?”

  “Of sorts, Mr. Harris,” Rabbi Bloom said. “Let’s call it a book club centered on life’s pressing questions, disguised as innovative discipline and designed specifically with you five in mind.”

  Oliver twitched in his seat, readying himself to stand. “Yeah, but no thanks, Rav. This is mighty generous of you and all, but I’m already up to my ears in reading.”

  “I’ve been teaching for quite a number of years, gentlemen, longer than I care to admit. It is my professional opinion that you may very well be the most irreverent bunch I’ve ever come across.”

  Noah laughed. Amir looked devastated. “Oh, stop it,” Oliver said. “You’re making us blush.”

  “My suspicion, however, is that your irreverence has as much to do with doubt, let’s call it, as it does personal unhappiness.” Rabbi Bloom removed his glasses, wiped the lenses. I looked around our circle. Evan, eyes to the floor, gave a slight nod, as if he’d been waiting patiently for this sentiment to finally be shared. “So, scoff at your own risk. You’re free to make your own decision, of course. I warn you, though, that if you decline to participate I will be forced to consider more traditional forms of discipline if presented with continued misconduct.”

  Evan smiled. “How did our forefathers put it while God threatened them into accepting the Torah by holding Mount Sinai over their heads? Na’aseh V’nishma.”

  “But our other classes?” Amir asked. “How will we make up the work?”

  “You wouldn’t need to,” Rabbi Bloom said, “if your commitment proves sufficiently serious.”

  “So,” Evan said, “just to make sure we understand: you basically believe you can show us some great texts and magically fix us?”

  “Actually, that’s right, Mr. Stark. I do believe I can fix you.”

  Evan stood and offered Rabbi Bloom his hand. “When do we start?”

  * * *

  APPARENTLY THE BIGGEST EVENT OF November was Remi White’s birthday. For the last several years, Noah explained, the Whites rented Miami’s newest nightclub, access to which was otherwise virtually nonexistent, for a lavish celebration: bottle service, photographers, cage dancers, B-list celebrities with whom her father did business. “All the stops,” Noah raved. “Ice sculptures, DJs, open bars.”

  Invitations had been mailed—heavy, cream-colored letters requesting a formal RSVP—which, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to intercept from my mailbox.

  “What’s this?” My mother held an enormous rose-gold envelope displaying Remi’s initials in elegant calligraphy. “A bar mitzvah?”

  “I’ll take that, thank you,” I said, trying to grab it from her.

  She opened the envelope. “Remi Alexandra White’s eighteenth birthday celebration, hosted at Elation in Miami? What in the world is Elation?”

  I shrugged.

  “Sounds . . . tawdry.”

  “Tawdry? It’s the most upscale place in Miami.”

  “I thought you didn’t know what it was?”

  “I, uh, I’ve heard rumors.”

  She studied the invitation some more. “So which one is Remi?”

  I thought about how Remi had vomited on the very floor on which my mother and I now stood. “You haven’t met her,” I said.

  “Who are her parents?”

  “Don’t know. Her father’s some mogul.”

  “Oh, right. I think Cynthia’s mentioned them.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, it’s supposed to be fun.”

  She hesitated, her maternal instincts running a quick analysis of the prospect of her son attending a birthday party in some Miami nightclub. “I think I should probably discuss this with Abba.”

  I tried projecting calm indifference. “What’s to really talk about, though?”

  She didn’t answer. She read the invitation yet again.

  “Abba doesn’t believe anything other than Gemara is appropriate,” I said, pressing further.

  My mother looked up from the invitation to give me an uncharacteristically choleric look. “Aryeh. Don’t mock him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” I said, after an uneasy pause, “that he regrets leaving Brooklyn. He doesn’t want any other life, and you know that better than I do.”

  I watched her look about the living room, evading my gaze. She looked at our shelves of seforim. She looked at our framed family pictures. She looked at the couches and dusty lampshades and discarded Shabbat shoes and miscellaneous self-help books that she loved and a misplaced pair of reading glasses and a lonely argyle cardigan. With tired eyes, she looked at all these things that combine to make a family.

  “Imma,” I said, deliberately pressing a nerve, “you like it here, don’t you?”

  “Of course I like it here—”

  “Know why?”

  She frowned. “Tell me why, Aryeh, since you have everything figured out.”

  My phone hummed in my pocket. We both pretended not to hear it. “Because we’re a different breed than he is. We’re adapting. We relate to what’s here. He just—he doesn’t have what we have in us.”

  A horrified look of recognition passed through her face, only to dissolve into blankness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said hastily. It was the first time we’d ever quarreled even slightly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You’re absolutely right. I did want something different,” she said. “I wanted you to finally push yourself in a classroom. I wanted to see you make friends you could actually tolerate being around. I wanted you to, chas v’shalom, have some innocent fun for once. I wanted you to experience romance. I wanted you to realize a larger world takes place outside the four walls of the Beis Medresh. And you know what? As your mother, I wanted to see you become just a drop happier.” At this I blushed, without quite knowing why, as if she’d exposed a secret we’d never previously acknowledged. “Don’t forget that I took on Abba’s life, I wasn’t born into it, and so yes, maybe it is complicated and unusual, maybe I do still miss some things. Things I want for my kid. But if any of that comes at the expense of seeing my one child give up crucial parts of himself? I won’t want any part of it ever again.” She handed me the invitation and left the room.

  * * *

  WE BEGAN WITH LUCRETIUS.

  “Epicurus believed unhappiness was the fault of the gods.” Rabbi Bloom spoke softly, differently from how he usually lectured, as if returning to a life before Kol Neshama. We were seated around his conference table with copies of De Rerum Natura. “Godliness is something we humans naturally oppose. What, for Epicurus, is the central root of our resistance?”

  “Fear,” I said. “We fear God’s wrath.”

  Rabbi Bloom nodded. “And can we be blamed? We suffer misfortune and tragedy and loss, all at the hands of the divine. Isn’t it natural to be scared? Hence Epicurus’ mission: to remove fear and therefore chip away at human unhappiness. To do so, to convince us we need not fear God any longer, he set out to prove that divinity remains wholly indifferent to our virtues and sins. What was his proof, Mr. Samson?”

  “Atomism,” Amir spat back.

  “By which he means?”

  “That the universe as we know it,” Evan said, cutting in before Amir could answer, “materialism, our senses, everything tangible, has little to do with God.”

  “Precisely.” It was strange seeing Evan and Rabbi Bloom interact in this non-adversarial way, teacher and student. It was, I imagined, the norm before Evan’s mother died. “The mixing of elemental particles created our world, not the will of God. That was his argument, and this is where Lucretius comes in, to make this idea—that we
exist by virtue of natural laws, divorced from the intervention of Supreme Beings—attractive enough to ease our prodigious unhappiness. His purpose, in other words, was to set us free.”

  Evan gnawed at his pen. “But isn’t that where he goes wrong?”

  Amir snorted. “You would question Lucretius.”

  “I mean it,” Evan said. “Acknowledging that we fear God, setting out to free ourselves from Him—I think that part is right. It’s good insight.”

  “Thanks for your approval,” Amir muttered.

  Rabbi Bloom sipped tea. “So what troubles you, Mr. Stark?”

  “We can’t free ourselves by removing God,” Evan said. “That wouldn’t work.”

  “But why not?” I asked. “If one were to legitimately believe that God had no role in our development—”

  “Because whether God participated in creation doesn’t matter.” Evan removed the pen from his mouth and began jotting illegibly in his notebook. I craned my neck to try reading over his shoulder but could make out only a series of jumbled phrases. NECESSITY OF SEEING. IGNORING/VENGEANCE→INEFFICACY. I noticed Noah trying, too. “Once you concede even the peripheral presence of some divine manifestation, whatever that might mean, you’re toiling in vain by ignoring it. It’d be like closing your eyes, willing away the world and thinking that it actually worked, that everything melted away.”

  “Then I think you realize the alternative, Mr. Stark,” Rabbi Bloom said.

  “Yeah, I do,” Evan said. “Turning toward God, not away. But to do that, of course, you’d first need to actually believe.”

  “Well, yes,” Rabbi Bloom said, “that does strike me as rather crucial.”

  Evan chewed further on his pen. “So then let me ask you this, Rabbi. Have you ever doubted God?”

  Rabbi Bloom didn’t blink. “Hasn’t every sentient person?”

  “You know what I’m asking. Has your doubt ever made you consider giving it all up? Do you reason with creeping suspicions, or do you ignore them?”

  Rabbi Bloom paused, stirring his tea with a plastic spoon before closing the book before him. “How about this? I’ll answer with a story.”

  “Finally,” Oliver said, slapping Noah’s back. “We have an easier time with stories.”

  Rabbi Bloom pushed away his teacup. “What do you gentlemen know about Pardes?”

  Amir frowned. “Pardes? Like, the method for Torah study?”

  “It’s also a myth,” I said. “From the Gemara.”

  “And what do you remember about this myth, Mr. Eden?”

  I thought back to a fourth-grade mishmar with Rabbi Herenstein, whose shuir on the topic, though hazy now in the annals of my memory, had reduced Shimon to tears. “That it’s bleak.”

  Rabbi Bloom loosened his tie. “As Mr. Samson alluded, the word pardes is an acronym. There’s Peshat, the surface level. There’s Remez, the allegorical meaning beneath the literal. Derash, the midrashic meaning. And, finally, Sod, the esoteric, granted through revelation. Together, these make up our four dimensions of knowledge.”

  “So far, doesn’t sound like much of a story,” Noah said.

  “The story,” Rabbi Bloom continued, “involves the four who entered Pardes, the paradisal orchard of Torah knowledge. Some claim this was purely allegorical: as in, the rabbis exhausted the four levels of study to unlock the deep secrets of the Torah. Others, like Rashi, insist it was a real journey embarked upon by the four holiest men alive.”

  “This sounds kind of important, actually,” Oliver said. “How have I been in Jewish day school for eighteen years without hearing about this until now?”

  Rabbi Bloom cleared his throat. “First to enter was Shimon ben Azzai, an expert judge so consumed by his devotion to Torah study that he neglected the sensory world, even refusing to marry. In Pardes, he gazed upon the secrets of the deep but was unable to bear the revelations of this higher world. Shimon ben Azzai looked at God and died.

  “Next to enter the orchard was Shimon ben Zoma, master of Halacha, responsible for many of the axioms we use today. Ben Zoma became obsessed with the opening chapter of Genesis. Creation was all he thought about, to the point that he was accused of voyaging outside the limit of what’s permissible to contemplate. He suffered terribly for whatever he saw and left the orchard insane.”

  “Could be a fair price,” Evan said quietly, “for learning the secrets of God.”

  “Third was Elisha ben Abuya, who afterward went by Acher—‘Other One.’ Acher’s one of the most intriguing figures in our tradition, and perhaps the least understood. Little is known of his youth or career, but we do know that his downfall was his love for learning. Acher, you see, was enamored of worldly things, things forbidden to him—horses, wine, architecture—but most of all Greek philosophy, so much so that he’d stash illicit works in his clothing while in the Beit Midrash. When Acher entered the orchard, he abandoned everything and left a heretic, destroying the plants of the heavenly garden, as the Gemara tells us. Most interpret this to mean he not only surrendered his faith but actively participated in rebellion by luring away the youth from Torah.

  “Last, of course, was Rabbi Akiva, Rosh LaChachamim, chief of the sages, humble shepherd-turned-giant through painstaking dedication to Torah. He’s the one on whom history looks most fondly. His biography is legendary, taught to every child in yeshiva. Rabbi Akiva, like his companions, saw God, and yet he survived unscathed. And so, of the four who entered the orchard, all of whom were generational leaders, all of whom were dazzlingly holy men, only one managed to leave untouched.”

  Silence fell over us. “Wow,” Noah said eventually, straightening in his chair. “Heavy stuff.”

  I watched Evan transcribe a flurry of notes. “What did Acher see to make him stop believing?” I asked.

  “The Gemara,” Rabbi Bloom said, “says he saw Metatron—”

  Noah held up a hand. “Wait, who’s Metatron? A divine robot?”

  “The archangel,” Amir said, “the heavenly scribe who records all human actions.”

  “Hopefully not all our actions,” Oliver said, elbowing Amir in the ribs.

  “But doesn’t God take care of that kind of stuff?” Noah asked. “Recording our actions, who will live, who will die, who will get Christmas presents?”

  “Not if God’s busy,” Oliver said. “Or taking a midday nap.”

  Rabbi Bloom kneaded his left temple. “Mr. Bellow, a modicum of respect.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Oliver lifted his palms peacefully. “For what it’s worth, I do think it’d be a well-deserved nap.”

  “Anyway,” Rabbi Bloom said, shaking his head, “Acher saw Metatron sitting, despite the fact that only God is permitted to sit in Heaven. And if Metatron could sit, Acher reasoned, perhaps there existed two gods. For this, he was given sixty lashes of fire and all of his merits were erased.”

  “Jeez,” Noah said, “doesn’t that seem like overkill?”

  Amir itched his eyelids. “Yeah, I mean, everything was erased? What happened to divine justice?”

  Rabbi Bloom offered Amir a smile that fused admiration with pity. “And what, pray tell, are the tenets of divine justice?”

  “I don’t know, how about fairness?” Amir said.

  “Reward,” Oliver said, flicking a paper football at Amir.

  “Goodness,” Noah said.

  “Forgiveness,” I said.

  “Retribution,” Evan said.

  Rabbi Bloom played with the spine of his book, opening the front and back covers until they cracked and then returning them to a resting position. “A heavenly voice announced that all humans are allowed to repent, except for Acher. And that, I’m afraid, was divine justice.”

  I tugged at my collar. “Just because he questioned?”

  Rabbi Bloom moved over to his shelves and rummaged around, returning to the table with the Kuzari. “‘The third fell into bad ways,’” he read when he found the page, “‘because he ascended above human intelligence and said: “Human action
s are but instruments leading to spiritual heights; having reached these, I care not for religious ceremonies.”’”

  “Nietzschean,” Evan said. I didn’t look Evan’s way. Neither did Rabbi Bloom. Evan blinked. “Okay, I’ll ask it, then. Why Rabbi Akiva? What made him special enough to see God but leave unscathed?”

  Rabbi Bloom rapped his knuckles against the table. “Unfortunately, Mr. Stark, the Gemara provides no such answer.”

  Calmly, Evan placed down his pen and scanned over the pages of his notebook. “Then you need to give us an answer. What did Akiva do to survive?”

  Rabbi Bloom leaned forward, focusing his attention only on Evan. “I wanted you to hear this for a reason.” He removed his glasses, biting the temples. “This story teaches us two things. It reminds us that, even while we stumble through the duller side of conventional expressions of religious observance, even when we don’t feel the burning need to attend minyan or keep Shabbat or wait between eating meat and dairy, a higher realm does exist. Which is to say, never lose sight of the grander depths. But at the same time, it also reinforces an equally critical lesson: don’t chase too obsessively after those higher realms. Don’t discard the smaller but equally vital parts of Judaism in favor of supernatural myths, because without our basic rituals and customs and structures, without our daily love for and connection to Hashem, we are left with nothing but blind visions.”

  A few moments of silence, until Evan slammed shut his Lucretius. When Rabbi Bloom remained quiet, Evan stood from the table. “You didn’t answer my question and you know it.”

  “Oh?” Rabbi Bloom said, allowing Evan to walk out. “Didn’t I?”

  * * *

  IN THE END, MY MOTHER never mentioned Remi’s party to my father. When the night came, I told my father I had a basketball game. To this, he nodded indifferently and returned his head to his Gemara, failing to notice as my mother slipped me pocket change, a move I interpreted as a conciliatory gesture. I wore my only suit for the occasion—navy, embarrassingly frayed—at the behest of Noah, who strongly advised me not to dress the way I usually did.

  Elation was in the lower lobby of a resort, everything marble, white, glimmering. There was billowing smoke, a ceiling covered with mirrors, red fur on the couches, silver stages for dancers, walls lacquered in metallic gold, tables decked in glossy-red fabric, a massive glass bar at the center of the room. Only half our grade had been invited—“It’s a pretty exclusive event,” Oliver told me while working on his third cocktail, “which begs the question: how the fuck did you get in?”—and there were dozens of people I didn’t recognize: French girls Remi knew from summers in the Côte d’Azur, wealthy cousins with that distinctive, sharply upturned nose, a former third-string Laker.