The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “You’re a rabbi, for God’s sake. And people are fluid. You need to dance with them, get playful.”

  “Walter called it a messy brew of imposed grace.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” asks Sol.

  “Let me try it,” says Rosalie.

  “What?”

  “Being you. Next Shabbat. I’ll give the sermon. Just a few remarks. I’ll put myself in your shoes.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Shh. I’m not replacing you. I’ll just give my own talk, a little teaching from the rebbetzin. Hannah’s tears, Miriam’s tambourine—I’ll wing it. And no one would ever compare me to you.”

  Rosalie phones Walter that night and asks what she should talk about.

  “Think about what your father taught you. Mine your own life for material.”

  “Got it,” says Rosalie.

  Sol walks into the kitchen as Rosalie hangs up the phone.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “No one. I’m just casting about for ideas.”

  “The phone won’t help you but an open volume of Talmud could lead you somewhere.”

  Rosalie smiles.

  “I have what I need now,” she says.

  Sol introduces Rosalie as his first lady who has some words she would like to share. She approaches the bima in a skirt she crocheted herself, a matching silk blouse, and a new hat. At first she speaks about her children, how Philip sometimes asks if they can keep Shabbat on Wednesday and if God knows the days of the week, and then Rosalie stops herself because she thinks of the congregants who don’t have children and maybe she shouldn’t speak as a mother, parading her private bounty.

  “When I was young my father shared a teaching from the Ishbitzer Rebbe that has stayed with me all these years,” she says. “The human experience—the story of your life—is a prism of God’s desire. Think about how your eyes adjust to daylight when you first wake up; this is an entry in God’s personal diary. The way you hand the dry cleaner your ticket and thank him for your pressed suit—also an entry in God’s diary. And how you deny or respond to the dreams that tug at you until you find a way to make them come true—this, above all, is written in God’s diary. Our lives are fodder for the great sacred story. Every moment.”

  She suddenly stops speaking. Nathan and Missy lean forward in their seats. Bev wraps her arm around her father’s shoulders and looks up. Charlie and Philip sit in the back row with their friends, barely containing their laughter. Rosalie peers down at the congregants and feels as if she and the Ishbitzer have been standing on a distant planet, trying to emit a signal that will penetrate the silent darkness between the bima and the folding chairs. Mars to Earth. Jupiter to Saturn. Rosalie to everyone. She tugs on her skirt, adjusts her hat.

  “Thank you for listening,” she says. “We will now return to your regularly scheduled program.”

  Sol proceeds with services and after the final line of Adon Olam Bev tells Rosalie that her speech was just beautiful. Missy tells Rosalie that she cried. And Sol whispers in her ear, “Thank you. Maybe some of them will come back next week.”

  Rosalie spends her days behind the wheel of the Dodge, looping the circumference of Westchester County: soccer practices, dentist appointments, visits to the mall, and Lenny’s trumpet lessons, an hour’s drive each way. If these miles were spread out over an actual highway, she thinks, I would be on the other side of the country by now. I would have actually traveled somewhere. The force field of motherhood is unyielding; some weeks Rosalie cannot sit down long enough to read a magazine or write a letter. After dinner, if she stops washing dishes and daydreams out the kitchen window, Lenny stands close to her and takes her face in his small hands. Earth to mom, he says. Come back to us. Philip once drew a portrait of his family that showed Sol and the boys sitting at the table and Rosalie standing at a sink, washing a dish. She was of them and outside of them, their center and their distant star.

  Rosalie believes Sol is showing improvement on the bima. Since she gave her speech, he asks her for insights on the Torah portion and uses her ideas. The congregants seem more attentive, less distracted. But she has no idea that Sol visits the wrong hospitals and drives to the wrong cemeteries, looking for a funeral he is scheduled to conduct at some other grave.

  Sol’s undoing is subtle at first. At an unveiling service in the rain, the pages of his Rabbi’s Manual tumble into a muddy puddle. On the way out of the cemetery, he tosses the soggy remnants of the book into an open grave to fulfill the mitzvah of shaimos. But he never replaces the Manual, believing he has memorized all the prayers. Most of the congregants don’t know Hebrew well enough to realize that Sol recites joyful psalms at burial services, and sings psalms of mourning at weddings.

  Alone in his office one night, Sol turns out the lights, closes his eyes and lies on the floor. Maybe, he thinks, a lost rabbi is a question seeking an answer, a she’elah waiting for a teshuvah. His mind alights on a psalm and he tries to imagine Walter lying beside him, reciting the same words, but he can’t find Walter’s voice and even if he could, Walter would say, This is not my way, rabbi. Keep your psalms to yourself. I am becoming a master of forgetting, he thinks. A rabbi without memory, a teacher without channels, a man without a chavrusa, lying on a cold floor, waiting for a voice that doesn’t arrive.

  The following week Nathan tells Sol that the board wants to break the terms of his contract.

  “You have one more year to win us over,” says Nathan. “I tried to negotiate for more time, but it didn’t go well. I’m sorry.”

  Sol lowers his eyes. Be less remote had traveled so far in the other direction that he could have been preaching from Bora Bora.

  “Ask Rosalie to help you. Missy still talks about her speech. Maybe she can lend you a hand.”

  Sol thinks of Rosalie standing on the bima, how at first he cringed when she spoke of keeping Shabbat on a Wednesday. But then she said something about God’s diary and the sanctuary seemed to come alive with silent rapture.

  “Yes,” says Sol. “Perhaps there is a way.”

  Every Saturday Walter stuffs his unopened mail and papers into a book bag, drives to Big Sur, and takes a table closest to the cliff’s edge at Nepenthe Restaurant. It is not lost on him that while Rosalie and Sol are keeping their Sabbath on the other side of the country, he is enveloped in the Pacific fog.

  He has not heard from Rosalie in months. He helped her find ideas for her speech, and then assumed she would keep calling him at night, after Sol and the boys were asleep. Walter phoned the house once, expecting Rosalie to answer, but Sol picked up. “What a surprise, Walter! I wish you would call me more often.” Then Sol asked him to explain the phrase from Mishnah Peah, the things in this world that have no measure, and Walter snapped and replied, “If you stop measuring the cubits of your house and the liters of water in your kashering pot, maybe you would tell another story.” To which Sol said, “Then I would be another kind of rabbi.” And Walter said, “Yes, that’s my point.”

  Walter wonders how much Sol knows. How much of Rosalie is permitted to him by Sol? Walter was never good at math and this arrangement seems to have something of a Venn diagram in it, with overlapping areas. Sol and Walter here, Walter and Rosalie here, Rosalie and Sol here. She is the perfect mate for him: The wife of his first American friend. The wife of a man who kissed him in the upper geniza, a man who looked at him and cried on a Jerusalem street, a man who considers his life through the lens of a text just like a groom gazes at his bride through a veil.

  Quite a destiny, eh, Sonia?

  He sorts through the pile of mail, opening each envelope with a butter knife. Paul is starting an ashram in southern California. My own Shantiniketan. I’m naming it Eden Ranch. A student has mailed him a final paper two weeks late: a comparison of Tagore and Heschel. Weakly argued, but not without merit. “Faith is the bird that feeds the light and sings when the dawn is still dark,” wrote Tagore.
And Heschel: “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” Walter finds the shared threads intriguing and gives the student an A for the concept and a B for lateness.

  He returns to the mail pile: three academic journals, the Partisan Review, a book on the Hindu prophetic tradition he has promised to endorse, and a letter marked with the return address of Temple Briar Wood.

  June 8, 1969

  Dear Walter,

  When we spoke on the phone about the things in this world that have no measure you didn’t give me a chance to explain myself. You assumed that I would bore you with an explanation about cubits and liters—and maybe once I would have. I didn’t expect you to call me, but when I heard your voice I reached for a text that might suggest the depths of my despair, and that line popped out. When a musician loses his intonation, he can no longer play in tune; the same applies to a rabbi. I fear I’ve lost my ability to hear the music—if I ever had it at all.

  When I saw you in Jerusalem I remembered what we created together—I’m not talking about the geniza, but I miss learning with you. Did all these years of academic life detract from the wisdom you once had, or did they endow you with an extra portion? I think of your words often—the messy brew of imposed grace—and understand that you were peering into my quite broken heart. The demands of my job have rendered the texts I love into an unforgiving clutter of words I no longer understand. I don’t know where my faith lies. God? Law? I miss the certainty I once had, and I miss you.

  In friendship,

  Sol

  If Sol begins writing in July he can stockpile twelve good sermons before the holidays touch down in September. But he doesn’t go to his office all summer; every afternoon Sol draws the shades in the den and watches Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, and As the World Turns. The boys arrive home from their respective day camps and summer jobs, and barely notice that their father has grown a beard and lolls around in T-shirts, shorts, and slippers. He stops washing his hair before Shabbat and rehashes material from outdated sermons.

  One evening in mid-August, Sol abruptly leaves the dinner table and runs upstairs to their bedroom. Rosalie follows.

  “Let them fire me now,” he says. “It’s over.”

  “An inevitable crisis of faith,” she says. “You’ll get through it.”

  “I thought—”

  “That you would be immune?”

  “I wish it were simple,” says Sol. “What once seemed so true to me has become as flat as the K’tonton stories you once read to the boys. What am I doing this for? And for whom? I stand on the bima, stare at those hungry faces, and no longer believe the words that fall from my lips.”

  “No one is asking you to believe, Sol. No one even cares. You just need to demonstrate faith that everything matters. This Torah, these words, every moment of their day—”

  “I can barely summon meaning for myself; I have nothing in my pockets to give them. And why do they look at me with such longing? I can’t stand it.”

  “They are in shul. Who else are they going to look at?”

  “I once bought it all.”

  “A long time ago, Sol. When you were a boy.”

  “No. After.”

  “Didn’t anyone warn you about this in rabbinical school?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Didn’t you and Walter wrangle with this?”

  “We were so young, Rosalie.”

  “That we were.”

  “I’m an immoral scam.”

  “We all are.”

  “Not Bev,” says Sol.

  Rosalie smiles. “Everyone except Bev. The exception. One righteous person per shul; a common statistic, I’m sure.” Rosalie imagines frizzy-haired Bev witnessing their conversation. You inspire all of us, rabbi, she would say. Your teachings help me understand my life. Thinking about Bev’s sincerity makes Rosalie feel like crying.

  “I’m simply empty,” says Sol. “I need your help.”

  “I’m not giving another speech.”

  “You were very good, Rosalie. Better than I could ever be. I wish I could channel some of your words, make them come out of my mouth. Your words and—”

  Rosalie sits beside Sol, lays her head on his shoulder, and reaches for his hand. Her husband chose an unbearable profession. People all over the world blindly follow faith healers, gurus, and missionaries, while a suburban rabbi is asked to inspire without daring anyone to change, to dig deep, to claim some pearl of meaning that could alter the course of their lives. How can anyone be good at this? It’s impossible. Her father knew this, and Sol is finally catching on.

  “Who were you talking to on the phone that night, Rosalie?”

  “What night? When?”

  “The night before you gave your speech. Who did you call? Honest to God, Rosalie, you weren’t dialing your father in the World to Come.”

  She turns away, glances at her watch.

  “I have a lot to do,” she says. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

  “I’m asking you a question,” says Sol.

  “Do you really want the answer?”

  “Yes.”

  Rosalie sighs. “Walter called you that night and I picked up the phone. I asked him what he thought I should talk about.”

  “That’s it? Why didn’t you tell me he called? I ache to hear—”

  “Ache?”

  “Walter brought out the best in me, unraveled insights I didn’t know I was capable of. He took me places—”

  Rosalie gazes down at her hands. Something we both share, my beloved husband. Our first bond, before the synagogue, before the children. She closes her eyes and summons the smell of turmeric in the lower geniza, the yellow stains on her fingers and his, then on her hip, her lower back.

  “Maybe Walter could save my pulpit,” says Sol. “He could find the words that elude me.”

  “So call him.”

  “Walter doesn’t know my audience. He wouldn’t get the right tone for my Jews.”

  “You could help him with that.”

  “Or you, Rosalie.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you asking me to fly out to Berkeley?”

  “Yes, I am. Walter knew me when I was strong. He will channel what I once was, give you the right words.”

  “Why don’t you go? If that’s what you want, why send me?”

  Sol stares at her.

  “Nu?” asks Rosalie.

  He runs his fingers through his hair and pinches the skin on the backs of his hands. “How could I possibly get away, Rosalie? I have a board meeting and a class to teach, and things are so precarious now—”

  “And I have boys to look after.”

  “I can’t go!” he shouts. “Don’t ask me to explain—”

  “Calm down. Let me get this right. It’s almost Rosh Hashanah and you’re asking Walter and me to write your sermons for you? Who do you think I am, Moses?”

  “You will be doing all of us a great service—the boys, me, the shul. You get this, Rosalie. Think of it as a business trip. I’ll make a hotel reservation for you—”

  “Sol—”

  “I need ten of them! Make it twelve, enough to last through Sukkot. As many as you can write together. I’ll call Walter and explain the details.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Sol grabs her fingers and brings them to his lips.

  “I need this from you,” he says.

  Rosalie closes her eyes, allows herself to think of Walter’s hands, his face. Another reunion, this one granted with permission. She touches the folds of her dress to make sure she is not dreaming.

  THIS IS NOT A SERMON

  August 1969

  Rosalie tells the driver to wait for her in front of the sprawling Claremont Hotel. She signs herself in, pockets the room key, and then asks to be driven to the address she has kept folded on a piece of paper for all these years: 23 Rose Terrace.

  The driver drops her off at the crest
of a hill, where she spots a deer sauntering through nearby woods, a hawk circling above. Rosalie clutches her bag and smiles. The studio matches Walter’s description: the black-framed picture windows that resemble a pair of eyeglasses, the bougainvillea that reminds her of Madame Sylvie’s courtyard. Walter’s entire home could fit inside their garage.

  A peacock brushes past her and she shrieks.

  “Shoo, Adelaide,” says Walter. “Rosalie is our honored guest.” He takes her bag.

  “My new friends,” he says. “They escaped from an upscale restaurant and settled up here. The pretty one is Liberace. He has no idea that his beautiful gown of feathers sweeps the sidewalk, sparing me the trouble.”

  “I never thought you would have house pets,” says Rosalie.

  “They are free to come and go.”

  “Of course they are.”

  Rosalie marches into the studio and collapses onto a chair.

  “I’m here to work,” she says. “We have a mission and not much time.”

  “Sol called with specific instructions. Twelve sermons, at least.”

  “At least.”

  “My words and yours. A partnership.”

  “Did Sol call it that?”

  “He said we are to collaborate; let ourselves become true chavrusas.”

  Rosalie scans the studio. A futon piled high with pillows lines one wall; a long workbench stretches opposite; pencil cans are jumbled together with jars of coriander, garam masala, cumin, and cinnamon. She spots his sil batta. The spice man is still in his garden, she thinks, dipping her fingers into a jar of turmeric.

  “Love or Torah, what comes first, rebbetzin?”

  Rosalie shrugs. She is here to complete a writing assignment, preserve her husband’s job, and save her family. They have to smear words of wisdom on paper, imagine the longings of every congregant’s soul and pitch their message just right. Twelve speeches. Two days away from her husband and children. A holy mission.

  “Torah! We barely have time, and so much to accomplish—”

  “Be honest with me, Rosalie. Would you have come out here without Sol’s misguided prompt?”

  “Do you think I would have dared?”