The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “I’m always up for a round of Ask the rabbi,” she says.

  Rosalie remembers how one of her father’s students would show up at the apartment, sit beside her father, and lean close. The student would whisper a she’elah—a personal question about faith or practice. After a few moments, her father would respond with a teshuvah—a ruling, an explanation, or a sideways answer that left the student hungry to ask something more.

  “Remember: the answer lies between the lines,” says Sol.

  “Of course. My father taught me. So, rabbi, what’s your she’elah?”

  “How does a man know if he is intended to be a rabbi?”

  “Teshuvah,” says Rosalie. “If the man yearns to live in the place where the words of the texts brush up against real life, maybe it’s meant to be.”

  “Good one!” says Sol.

  “And how would you answer the question, rabbi?”

  “Teshuvah,” says Sol. “Do not ask if the man knows his way around a text. Better to ask if he burns with passion for his intended wife. As it is written, the only calling is the calling of love.”

  Rosalie laughs. “You sound like some kind of romantic. Did those strange visitors sprinkle you with fairy dust?”

  Sol takes her face in his hands and kisses her nose.

  “I’m in love,” he says. “With you.”

  In the Radish’s intermediate Talmud class, the students are required to stumble through an entire Aramaic passage aloud, correct each mistake, read through the text again, then offer a translation. Sol sits in the front row. He is the only student who does not refer to Rabbi Radnitsky as the vegetable he most resembles, especially when a passage in the text—usually concerning bodily emissions—makes him blush.

  Walter sits in the last row, leans back in his chair, and stares out the window.

  “Read, Westhaus!” yells the Radish. “Take a turn with your brethren.”

  Walter slowly articulates the first three words, the easy ones that bear no message but announce the opening of a gate:

  “Rabban Gamliel omer. Rabbi Gamliel says.”

  Walter looks up at the Radish. “That’s all I know.” He stands, closes his book, and exits the classroom.

  Sol casts his eyes around the room, waiting for someone to follow Walter, but no one moves. The Radish continues with the class, and Sol stares at the page of Talmud, wondering where oddball Walter had vanished. He hears Rosalie’s voice whispering in his good ear, Opportunities, Rabbi Kerem. You have to start behaving like a holy man.

  After class, Sol finds Walter in the hallway. “Has anyone claimed you yet?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Everyone needs a study partner. A chavrusa. You’d be good for me.”

  “I’m only visiting here.”

  “I want to learn with you,” says Sol. “The others are ambitious and smart but you have the gall of someone who doesn’t care.” He thinks of what Rosalie said in the park. “Maybe you can teach me something.”

  “Your school is a temporary shelter for me,” says Walter. “I am not one of you.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m asking,” says Sol.

  Rosalie spreads a blanket over a snow-laced boulder in Central Park. She has brought plates from her mother’s house and places a pastrami sandwich on each one.

  “Leave it to you to propose a winter picnic,” says Sol.

  “It’s not officially winter and a sandwich is not quite a picnic. Did you bring the wine?”

  “It’s not the Sabbath,” says Sol. “I prefer to save my blessings.”

  “You are the master of saving everything for another time. Picnics for spring, wine for the Sabbath, sex for marriage.” Rosalie sighs. “Does it ever stop?”

  Sol wraps his arms around her. “Be patient with me.”

  She rests her head on his shoulder and spies a man and woman kissing on a nearby bench. The man’s hand reaches inside the woman’s skirt.

  “I just wish,” says Rosalie.

  “Wish what?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend to be naïve. The other students don’t follow these rules. It’s the Seminary, Sol. The Conservative movement, not some crazy Orthodox yeshiva where men and women are forbidden to touch before marriage—”

  “I’m not like other men.”

  “Clearly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you think this is easy for me? I touch myself at night and think of you.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m counting the days.”

  “Look at those two. We could be enjoying ourselves right now. No leap of time, no waiting. We decide the course of our lives, free of prescriptives.”

  “But—”

  “The law doesn’t have to be a fence,” says Rosalie. “It wasn’t for my father.”

  “I’m not like your father.”

  Be free of him; be devoted to him. Rosalie closes her eyes. Give yourself over to your rabbi, see where it goes, she thinks. Rosalie Wachs soon to be Rosalie Kerem. Kerem means vineyard. Rosalie Vineyard. Where grapes are saturated with light and grow into their fullness in time. Rosalie rests her hand in Sol’s palm.

  “We have this,” he says. “What is suggested is more arousing than its fulfillment.”

  “Sometimes I feel it’s all too challenging and lofty and—”

  “And?”

  Rosalie closes her eyes. The woman on the bench knows the man she kisses; she studies him through his touch. Necessary information. But Rosalie knows so little about Sol; he is filled with words that Rosalie cannot translate. And yet he is her bashert; she knows this. Intended, perfect, inevitable as rain.

  She’elah: What can the body teach the mind?

  Teshuvah: The body delivers its truth without words.

  Sol and Walter sit side by side at a table in the beit midrash, a tower of books stacked before them. Walter reaches into his pocket, pulls out a bag of yellow spice and inhales.

  “Want some?”

  “Don’t get your powder on the books! If they get ruined, we’ll have to bury them.”

  Walter laughs. “These books were written under the influence of all kinds of spices, Sol. Just imagine your beloved ancient rabbis picking at the roots of plants and sniffing with abandon. They craved all kinds of knowledge, just like you do.”

  Sol opens tractate Berakhot and scans the pages. He begins to sway.

  “Oh, look,” he says, his voice falling into the cadence of Talmudic singsong. “Rabbi Meir says that to love God with all of your soul means that you should love God with your good inclinations and your evil ones too. And Ben Azzai says, with all of your soul means you should give your soul to the commandments.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” says Walter.

  “But there’s more to the story,” says Sol. “Ben Azzai was engaged to Rabbi Akiva’s daughter. He broke it off because he wanted to devote his life to studying Torah.”

  “Idiot,” says Walter. “What a waste.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Sol. “Yearning can be that deep.”

  “For a woman. Not for the words of a book.”

  “And God?”

  “What does God have to do with this? I’m not a believer, Sol. You’re wasting your time with me.” Walter stands and gathers his books.

  Sol pulls at Walter’s sleeve. “Please stay,” he says.

  “Ben Azzai was scared,” says Walter. “Just like you.”

  Sol stares at the page of Talmud and bites his lip. “Let’s move on,” he says. “Your turn to crack the Jastrow.”

  Walter perches on the table and flips through the pages of the Talmudic dictionary. “I hate looking up words,” he says. “I’m a miserable foil for a promising rabbinical student. You cursed yourself by choosing me.”

  Sol pulls the dictionary from Walter’s hands. “I’ll look up the words. Then we’ll be free to learn.”

  By the end of the week, Sol and Walter no longer study the text in any prescribed order. They open volumes of Ta
lmud at random, choose sentences out of context, and conjure their meanings.

  “Look at this one,” says Sol. “A slave belongs to its master forever.”

  “How long is forever? How long does it last?”

  “The rabbis suggest that forever lasts until the Jubilee. That’s fifty years.”

  “But does forever refer to a unit of time or a condition of the heart?” asks Walter.

  They spend hours like this, throwing snippets of text between them like the finest baseball players, pitching and catching with playful perfection. Sol offers Walter a translation—any string of words will do—and Walter sets off on a tangent. When they learn the laws pertaining to lost objects in Bava Metzia, Walter talks about lost thoughts and how an isolated human idea can survive for generations. When they peruse the dictionary, Sol remarks how the Hebrew word zeman means time and invite and opportunity, their connotations perfectly linked like a string of pearls. They riff on how people’s lives are written into the Hebrew language, and how the ancient words are never static.

  One afternoon Sol writes out the words of the Shema and asks Walter to ponder their meaning.

  “It’s a haiku,” says Walter. “Three lines. Five syllables, then seven, then five. She-ma yis-ra-el. Five. A-do-noi El-o-hei-nu. Seven. A-do-noi Ech-ad. Five. It works out perfectly.”

  “Nu?”

  “A haiku asks us to reenvision the object it describes. A simple frog becomes more green, more moist, more embodied; a white butterfly becomes an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a celestial being.”

  “And the words of the Shema transform how we understand God at any given moment,” says Sol.

  “As you wish. But God is not a noun.”

  “Is God a verb?” asks Sol.

  “God is a parenthetical thought, rabbi. A commentary you add to your days; something to justify the karma of your actions.”

  “I wish I could ride on your caravan of brilliance. My mind would be so open.”

  “Your mind is beautiful just the way it is,” says Walter. “You wear your learning well. It doesn’t constrict you.”

  Sol smiles at him. In just a few weeks, Walter has morphed from a dirty-haired stranger to an intriguing friend. He still dresses in his green kurta, but his hair is clean and when he remembers to wear a yarmulke, it no longer sits awkwardly on his head.

  “You could be one of us if you wanted,” says Sol. “You would be a good rabbi.”

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  To Sol, the refugee’s lack of faith challenges him to sharpen his own. After they learn together, Sol sits alone in the beit midrash and thinks of ways he can counter Walter’s arguments, prove to him that God is really a noun. He wishes he could see Walter as Morris does: a lost soul, an illiterate Jew who wears the wrong clothes and sniffs yellow powder. But Sol loves what Walter teaches him; together they release interpretations as if they are breaking open pistachio nuts and savoring the sweet green meats. With Walter as his chavrusa, Sol believes he will never stray as a rabbi; he will always know how to unlock kernels of passion and meaning.

  “She’elah: If a man claims a chavrusa in his youth, are they destined to learn together in the future?” asks Sol.

  “Teshuvah: Everything is explained in the World to Come,” says Walter.

  Sol thinks of Rosalie and Walter as milk and meat, requiring separate dishes and a designated lapse of time that must pass between eating one or the other. Rosalie is his bashert, his soulmate, who insists on wearing a flapper dress to their wedding. At night before sleep he imagines their first time together. Like he did as a boy Sol practices kissing the back of his hand, only now he imagines how he will kiss her down there, as the Radish explained during an impromptu counseling session. Sol has no idea what to expect but he believes Rosalie will guide him well. She is that kind of woman.

  Wife here. Chavrusa there. Another set of dishes. His father had once said to him, I left behind my chavrusa in Poland and he was the love of my life. God only knows what happened to him. If you have a chavrusa keep him close and he will sustain you as a husband sustains a wife. Day after day Sol and Walter envelop themselves in the words that carry them to ancient study halls, steamy bathhouses of men and Hebrew letters dancing together in an eternal tango. Whatever sex may be, thinks Sol, nothing beats the frolic of two men’s minds, this holy fire, thought merging with thought in perfect knowing and boundless joy.

  IN THE GENIZA

  December 1946

  A December blizzard blankets the city with three feet of snow. Classes are cancelled and Sol invites Rosalie to the Seminary for afternoon tea. She arrives early and steps out to the courtyard, a silent field of white. Rosalie digs her boots into the knee-deep snow, steps forward into the middle of the yard, opens her arms, and spins. This is happiness, she thinks. This cushion of snow, this gray shawl of a sky, and Sol, the man who will escort her into the future. She is ready to cast aside any lingering doubts and buy a wedding dress. Rosalie picks up a twig and writes:

  SOL

  ROSALIE + SOL

  ROSALIE

  She spins again, opening her mouth to catch the falling flakes, and spies Sol standing at a window. He runs out to the courtyard, pulls her by the waist, and leads her to the arcade where they kiss in the shadows. Rosalie opens her eyes and notices a man without a jacket standing beside Sol.

  The man shivers and Rosalie turns to him.

  “You must be freezing!”

  She pulls on Sol’s lapels. “Give this man your coat!”

  “This is not any man,” says Sol, smiling. “Rosalie, meet Walter Westhaus, my beloved chavrusa.”

  Sol drapes his coat over Walter’s shoulders and clears his throat. “You sneaked up on us. Walter. Meet Rosalie, my fiancée.”

  “At last!” says Rosalie. “I have been waiting for this. Sol adores you! I hope you’ll tell me about India and the ashram and how you got here—Sol is so secretive.”

  Walter glances from Rosalie to Sol and then back to Rosalie. “You make a beautiful couple,” he says.

  “Thank you,” says Rosalie. “Don’t you have any boots?”

  When the arrangements were made for Walter to study at the Seminary, he was assigned a dorm room that was infested with mice. Walter would be awakened by a mouse nibbling on his arm and another one slinking up the sleeve of his tunic. Rather than ask the other students how they tolerate the infestation he scouts out other places to sleep. He samples every closet and crawl space in the building, choosing a different place to lay his head each night. No place in the building is rodent-free, but he never returns to his room.

  On cold nights Walter sleeps in a basement boiler room, huddled in the warmest corner. When he wants to study he camps out in attic rooms crowded with Hebrew books, some torn and used, others stored in their original boxes. He opens volumes at random, forcing himself to decipher the meaning of the words. On nights when he can’t sleep, Walter finds an empty classroom and takes a seat. He imagines a rabbi who would not teach law and textual criticism as the real rabbis do. Walter’s rabbi would pull away a curtain and reveal Sonia to him. Sonia would not appear as she was in this life—blond hair cascading down her back, her voice poised for Brahms—this Sonia would step out from the curtain and escort him on his American journey, explaining the meaning of things. Then the rabbi would vanish and Sonia would become the rabbi. Instead of lieder she would sing wordless songs and answer all his questions.

  She’elah: Why do these men wear leather straps that tear into their arms?

  Teshuvah: The straps are a ladder to the infinite. They spiral on the arm and twist around the middle finger because one day the body will lie in the ground but the spiral goes on forever.

  She’elah: Why won’t I wear those straps, no matter how many times the rabbis insist?

  Teshuvah: You can’t cross your own boundaries, schatzi. The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer. But you will help them understand their strange tribal ways.

  She’elah: W
hy did you die and I am here?

  Teshuvah: I left the bedroom to look for crackers. I was shot instead of you. And now you are alone in this building where Paul Richardson dropped you off like a parcel of laundry.

  As he sits in the empty classroom Walter feels certain that Rabbi Sonia has touched his shoulder but when he looks up he remembers that he is alone. This building where men learn about God and Torah is the only home he has.

  On Friday nights the rabbinical students dress up in bow ties and serve dinner to one another in the dining hall. Sol is an eager waiter. He escorts Rosalie to an empty table and pours her a glass of water. She spots Walter standing in a corner, perfectly still.

  “Walter!” she calls.

  He nods and smiles at her. He looks so thin, she thinks. So very lost. She walks over and offers her arm.

  “Open spaces in this building make me wary,” he says. “I can’t always make my way across the wide foyers.”

  “But you live here. Didn’t they give you a room?”

  “Overrun by mice. I find other places to sleep.”

  “Sol didn’t mention—”

  “Your Sol doesn’t know me as well as he thinks.”

  Rosalie escorts Walter to her table, now occupied by Morris and two other students. Walter’s leg trembles under the tablecloth and Rosalie places her hand on his knee to keep it steady. Morris glances at them and nods.

  “Gentlemen and Rosalie,” he says. “I have a burning question, an inquiry that will affect the course of Jewish life in America. Maybe our refugee friend can answer.”

  Walter turns to Morris. “Go ahead, rabbi.”

  “On Shabbat is one allowed to dip a tea bag in a cup of hot water? Or—and here is the clincher—should the hot water be poured over the tea bag?”

  “Is this religion?” asks Walter.

  “Every detail,” says Rosalie. “Art lives in the minutiae.”

  “Then religious practice is an art form,” adds Walter.

  “You remind me of Professor Heschel,” says Morris.

  “I hear he’s teaching here now,” says Rosalie. “He was my matchmaker! Any of you in his class?”