Kaaterskill Falls

by Allegra Goodman

  He lies in bed and thinks about Germany, and what was broken there. The good, and the true, and the beautiful split apart. The Kirshners there had lived rich, complicated lives, devoting themselves above all to halacha, but also to art and business, to the German language and its literature, to German music, “Torah im derech eretz,” Torah with the ways of the land, as his grandfather would say. But they had been betrayed in that conjunction.

  The Rav chose to leave, and he chose a new way, a life of greater separation. He has built a community of vigilance, a careful, cautious American generation. How strange that none of them see their piety is a way of mourning. How strange the way they embrace it in its severity. They don’t know the difference. They are born now with the severity within them, although they do not know it. It cannot be otherwise, and yet it saddens him. The Rav remembers the expansiveness of his own youth, and the feeling of possibility. He had read great and beautiful books in German. He had pursued wonderful imaginative voyages. Life was golden to him, and the world his treasure house and laboratory. He could not see it then as he sees it now, a place with neither goodness nor mercy. Where he received his beautiful education, he lost parents and sisters, a family, a people. He cannot believe in the world anymore. Only in God. There is only God.

  JEREMY does not want to come up to Kaaterskill, and yet he does. He does not want to walk up the stairs, but his legs carry him anyway. Six weeks have passed since he drove to his father’s house after candle lighting. It is now the beginning of August. Jeremy is afraid to see his father now, and yet it is too late to avoid it. He must come with all his fear and confusion, and a slight hope, very slight, that the Rav will speak gently to him. That, as happened once before, the anger won’t show itself, and give way instead to better feelings. There is so little time. He does not want it to be bitter.

  Isaiah is sitting at their father’s bedside, and the Rav is awake, sitting up against the rented hospital bed. “Isaiah,” the Rav says, and Isaiah gets up and leaves the room.

  Jeremy stands alone before the Rav. “How are you, Father?”

  “I am as you see,” the Rav says calmly. He is small and distant with all the hospital paraphernalia around him, his eyes heavy lidded. He looks at Jeremy for several long minutes, an eternity, waiting for him to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremy says at last hoarsely.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the Rav says.

  “I was late and I shouldn’t have been,” Jeremy says. He sees instantly that this is a mistake.

  “Whether you are sorry or not makes no difference,” says the Rav. “What does it matter?” He pauses and then adds, “It is characteristic of you to apologize to me for an offense to God.”

  Jeremy says nothing.

  “You have always been quick,” the Rav says deliberately. “You are accomplished. You are a scholar. A true scholar. Twice what your brother is. He will always lose himself in the details. You know what you are about.” The Rav looks Jeremy in the eye. “However, none of this matters to me. I look at you, and I see what I have always seen. You have been everywhere but where you should have been, read everything but what you should have read, done everything else—”

  “Father,” Jeremy says.

  “I knew it from the beginning,” the Rav tells him. “You were a brilliant and a selfish child. You knew what you knew, and you were hard. Hard.”

  “I was what you made me.”

  “No,” the Rav tells him. “It was there when you were three years old. Indifference.”

  “You can’t know that about a three-year-old child. You can’t simply discard a life like that.”

  “But I did know,” the Rav says. “The indifference was there. It was wrong from the beginning.”

  “There is no such thing as wrong from the beginning.”

  “Yes, there is,” the Rav says.

  “God,” Jeremy whispers in his anger and his grief to hear this. Even now his heart is confused. The bitter, confident voice within him is laughing at the hope, the very idea, that he would come to his father and they would forgive each other.

  The Rav sees the pain in his son’s face, but he does not alter his words. He believes, from the depths of his loss, in an immutable evil in the world, and a hard grain of evil in the worldly. To what has Jeremy devoted himself? Never to God, never to the holy and the eternal.

  “You know nothing about my life,” Jeremy says.

  “You did not direct your soul to what is good,” the Rav says. “The rest does not mean anything.”

  “I didn’t come here for you to berate me like this,” Jeremy cries out.

  “Go,” the Rav tells him.

  Then Jeremy runs down the stairs and out of the house, and he turns his face so the others won’t see the tears in his eyes.

  CHANI is breathing hard, pedaling up the street. She feels the importance of her message, and the heaviness of the day weighing on her. She gets to Hamilton’s store and practically throws her bike down in front. She runs up the front steps two at a time. Her face is streaky and her hair disheveled. “Mommy,” she calls out as she runs to the back of the store, and then, with a winded gasp, “he’s dead.”

  Elizabeth starts, and Mrs. Lerner, who had been buying meat asks sharply, “What did you hear?”

  “I saw people walking down from his house,” Chani says, “the doctors, a lot of them, and I asked what happened, and they said, he’s dead.”

  Mrs. Lerner lets out a cry and she bursts into tears. Elizabeth does not cry, but steadies herself against the high table she uses as a counter. She seems to Chani determined not to cry. Tired and pale, but determined. Chani stands there, relieved of her burden, glad to have said it. Relieved as well that her mother is not sobbing like Mrs. Lerner. She feels somehow that if her mother had cried she would have too. Chani hadn’t known what to do. She had raced all the way, not only to tell her mother the news, but to see how to respond to it.

  Chani has only seen the Rav from a distance. Pushed aside by his black-suited aides, she has glimpsed his old old face, white as a moon caught in the black branches of trees. He was a great figure to her, a commanding presence, a tower of learning, but never a person.

  THE funeral is in New York, and the Rav is buried in the family plot next to his wife, Sarah. The family sits shiva in the city as well. They sit on low benches in the Rav’s apartment and receive the streams of downcast silent mourners. Rachel and Isaiah, along with Isaiah’s cousin, Joseph, and the Rav’s other nephews, each of them rabbis. Jeremy comes each day as well, but he remains somewhat apart. He does not speak to anyone, but sits with his mouth set, as if willing himself to stay. When the week is over, the family returns to Kaaterskill, but Jeremy does not come with them.

  The Rav’s memorial service is on a Sunday afternoon in Kaaterskill, and not only the Kirshners, but the whole community of summer people, walk up the hill to the white synagogue. It is a cloudless day, and as the mourners walk, the sun warms their backs. But the Kirshners bow their heads as if bracing against a cold wind. They are bereft. They are a people without a leader. They do not yet see Isaiah as their Rav. Isaiah has worked in his father’s shadow for so long that they cannot suddenly view him that way. The Rav alone kept them together. He was both their navigator and their memory. Until the end he was their guide, and even in the last stages of his illness, he never abdicated his authority. He did not leave instructions for the future, or even indicate that he meant his son to take his place. While Rav Isaiah is now the de facto leader of the Kehillah, he never received a public sign from his father. Until his father’s death he remained the heir apparent, but never the anointed.

  When it came to the end, when Isaiah stood beside his father, there was no final blessing, no sign, or even hint, that Isaiah was to become the future Rav. Everyone knows this, and, of course, Isaiah is aware that they know. He had been afraid, even at his father’s bedside, that the Rav would not give him his blessing. Isaiah stood with his wife and cousins by the Rav’s
side during the last moments, and he asked his father for some words. Just to speak to him once. Isaiah asked, in agony that the Rav would not speak at all, that he would not even utter his name. But when at last the Rav opened his mouth, it was not to endorse his son, or even to encourage him. He simply said, “I am tired.” And then later, “I have been very angry. I have been angry at your brother.” And those were his last words. Even at the end the Rav’s passion was spent on Jeremy. Isaiah, who had always been at his father’s side, was never an object of concern. Isaiah thought of this on the day his father died. Somehow Jeremy’s sins were more important than Isaiah’s loyalty. The disappointment in Jeremy’s academic vocation, more compelling than any of Isaiah’s rabbinic scholarship. Always the Rav thought about what hadn’t been. He did not once consider what Isaiah himself had become.

  The shul is crowded for the short afternoon service, and the building hot. The men pack the seats, and spill into the aisles where they daven, sweating in their dark suits and hats. The youngest of them, long limbed and angular, perch like blackbirds on the window-sills. In the back, behind the glass-topped mechitzah, the women press against each other and lift the edges of the lace curtain that blocks their view. Isaiah stands with the dignitaries on the bima, all rabbis; his own cousins and his brother-in-law, and other rabbis as well, the leaders of other small and strict communities. They have all come to speak about his father, but the Kirshners are crowding the synagogue, waiting to hear what he has to say. Each of the other rabbis will give a drash, but the Kirshners are waiting for Isaiah.

  Pesach Lamkin speaks first. He is the youngest of the rabbis, only a young man, and only the director of the summer camp, but he is also the rabbi of the Kaaterskill shul, and so he is allowed to begin. In deference to the more senior rabbis who will speak after him, Pesach limits himself to just a few minutes. He talks of sorrow and of consolation, and although his words are not freighted with experience or erudition, they are coherent. His beard wispy and his eyes eager, he speaks of the wicked thriving like grass, but the righteous enduring forever. He talks about eternity with a rapture in the moment. He is entranced to speak in this convocation with these hundreds of men and their families, and to be heard by these rabbayim, the heros of his generation. “The Rav, olav hashalom, was a great light on earth, and his qualities will endure. Truth and goodness and the word of the Torah will last throughout time. The tongue that never utters a word of evil, the mind that never swerves from learning, all will outlast the wicked or the flawed heart; they will pave the way for the Temple, may it be rebuilt in our day.”

  Isaiah’s cousin, Rav Joseph Butler, speaks next. He is a slight man of fifty with a strong voice, dark hair, and heavy brows. Isaiah has always known his cousin to be his rival. The Rav never liked his nephew Joseph, but Joseph has a vital role in the Kehillah as the director of the yeshiva. The directorship is a post of tremendous influence, and Joseph uses it. He is popular with the young men. A charismatic teacher, close, perhaps too close, to his students. When he eulogizes the Rav, he speaks with an extraordinary energy, as if he were arguing a case before his audience. He declares that the Rav was a Tzaddik, a saintly man, a chosen one, almost an angel on earth. He speaks as a flamboyant advocate for the Rav’s righteousness, and his rhetoric and passion are extreme. But Isaiah understands the real argument, because it is an argument against him. The Rav is a Tzaddik, and he cannot be replaced. The Kehilla should not shift its loyalty to anyone else, but should continue to serve the Rav’s memory. Isaiah watches the men drink in this performance; they are eager for it, stirred by it. They are susceptible, because the Rav, when he was alive, never allowed them to indulge themselves in this way. He scoffed at this kind of talk and reined in speculations about his holiness. Now, in their grief, the Kirshners’ adoration wells up within them, the more intense because it was repressed.

  What will Isaiah say to them? How will he answer this? For it is a challenge to him, a direct challenge, pitting his father’s memory against his own new authority. Reb Moshe Feurstein is speaking now, a tiny man, no more than five feet three inches, the head of a small Hasidic community that vacations every summer in Kaaterskill. With his frock coat and great beard, his hands clasped behind his back, his face lifted up, Reb Moshe’s self-important voice belies his little body. He is speaking of the great tree in the midrash from which, if you shake it, abundant fruit will fall. Was not the Kirshner Rav like such a tree, from which his fruit, his mitzvos, would fall for all to partake? Isaiah hears Reb Moshe talking, but his own questions course through him rhythmically. What will he say to them? How will he answer this? He will have to rise up and plead his own case. He will stand before them as his own counsel.

  Rav Yaakov Guttman, Rachel’s brother from Brooklyn, is speaking about the Rav’s scholarship, about the deep friendship between the Rav and Rabbi Guttman, Yaakov’s father. The depth and breadth of the Rav’s learning and his precise rendering of the text, his devotion to truth and his ability to impart that truth to his students. Isaiah only hears half of what his brother-in-law is saying. Already the blood is rushing to his head; his cheeks are hot. He must speak next, and he must speak well. He has never spoken before such an audience, never stood before his people as their Rav. In the next moment his fate will be decided. When his brother-in-law finishes, Isaiah will stand to prove himself before his father’s community. And yet he is not afraid. Isaiah is not an experienced speaker or a charismatic man, but he knows what he knows. For years he has thought about the Kehilla and the role he would play in it if he had the chance. For years he has imagined this time—not, God forbid, his father’s death, but his father’s retirement. He has waited to come to his people, and say the words he has so long held in his heart.

  When Rav Guttman takes his seat, Isaiah rises to speak as in a dream. He sees the men looking at him on this day of mourning with expectant eyes, with a kind of hunger in their grief, as if the death has set them loose, and all their reverence is now turned wild. But Isaiah is strong, as he stands before them. He opens his mouth and the words come.

  He speaks about constancy despite change, and unity despite the pressures of the outside world. He talks of dedication to Torah, not merely as something learned, but as an instinct, so that there is no hesitation and no question about its teachings. He quotes the most famous of verses: “V’ahavta et adoshem elokeha, b’kol levovcha, uv’kol nafshechah, u’v’kol me’odechah”—And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might—and he talks about this kind of love as deep within them, in their blood. That their observance should be a second nature to them, habitual. He talks about what must be inconceivable to them—that they should ever compromise their beliefs, that they should ever give way to any pressure or temptation.

  “The world is full of false gods and enticements,” Isaiah says. “But it should be impossible even to imagine serving them. Our work is to build the Kehilla like a fortress, so strong that inside it each member can devote himself to God; not to struggling against the outside, but to striving within. Our energies should not be wasted on defense against what is false. What is false should be understood without saying; our energies should focus on what is true. Halacha permits no compromise and no negotiation, but if it is the center of our lives, then we are free. We are free to dedicate ourselves to God. This is what it means to love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. Nothing is wasted on the extraneous, or the evil, or the false.”

  He talks about his father and the example of his life. His father as the architect of a community which is precious but also unfinished—a Kehilla left of necessity to the future, for all its members to uphold and perfect in each of their lives. And, as he talks, Isaiah feels his words charge the air; his voice penetrating the stifling room. He knows, as he talks, that he is not just speaking well, but with a sudden brilliance. It is not that his words are so powerful intellectually, but rather the way they come from him, with such force and
clarity. They seem to catch fire in the room and flare before the Kirshners, dazzling their eyes.

  It is exhilarating to hear Rav Isaiah talk this way. In the sweating, dark-suited audience of men, Isaac listens intently, and he is proud of the new Rav’s drash. The message is strict, perhaps even harsh. Isaac himself would never express himself this way, and yet the drash is everything he could hope for. A rallying cry, a call for unity and strength. There is a sense in which Isaac expects his Rav to be a soldier and to maintain a defense against the outside world. For the Rav stands guard over the bulwarks his followers take for granted. It is he who provides the security that allows for dedication from within, and that is why so much depends on his presence, his powerful stance, a voice strong and confident, ideas unwavering. Rav Isaiah is going to maintain the community; he will ensure its safety and consistency. That is what he has come before them to declare. Isaac listens, and he is relieved.