* * *
—
The letter of condolence to Eli’s parents was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write, including the letter I sent my father in 2007 and the darkest parts of this book you are reading now. I put it off for days, for weeks, appalled and ashamed at my own silence but still unready to face up to what had happened, for it to be real and true. Eventually Eli’s father, John, wrote to me. He said a lot of generous things about my role in Eli’s life and what I had meant to Eli as a teacher. I sat at my desk and cried for a while, knowing that this was the moment when the ice around my heart and in my throat would melt. It would simply have to melt. And so it did.
I wrote back to John. I told him how talented his son had been. What it had meant to me to know him, first as a student and then as a writer and a friend. As I wrote, I realized that this was Eli’s grad school rec letter, the one that had been forming itself in my mind for a couple of years now, waiting for the day it would be asked for. But instead of sending it to Iowa or Columbia, I was writing it as an inexcusably belated letter of condolence to his parents. A reply in a Gmail thread.
* * *
—
In the months after Eli’s death, I learned a lot about where he came from, how he got to be as special as he was. More than I probably would have had occasion to learn had he lived. When I wanted to publish a second story of Eli’s in The Literary Review, John and Dorothy gave me their blessing. When Dad died they were among the first to send a note to me. Anika told me that John and Dorothy had been hosting groups of Eli’s friends at the family home in Northampton; they’d invite everyone up for the weekend, or they’d come down to New York for a day and take them to dinner.
Eli’s family was determined to make the best they could of the worst thing that had ever happened to them. And they insisted on remembering their son not as some hazy angel but rather as the unique and irreplaceable person he had actually been: promise, flaws, ambitions, mistakes, struggles; all of it. At every turn they tried to memorialize him in a way that he would have appreciated. They helped one of his friends establish a scholarship for aspiring writers at his old high school, and staged a weekend of performances and writing workshops in his name. They lovingly talked smack about his punk-rock vanities, his pretense of having grown up working-class. John is especially funny when ragging on the South Boston accent that Eli seems to have taught himself around the time he relocated to New York City, and that it took me three years to realize was bullshit. In this way they became my teachers. In those first hard months after I lost Dad, I looked to them as a model. I thought about their honesty and integrity and love and endurance and set it as the standard for myself.
* * *
—
The same week that I moved to Hattiesburg, in August 2017, I received a note from Eli’s family, announcing that the unveiling of his headstone would take place on Sunday, September 10. I was stunned by this. Sometimes Eli’s death felt as fresh as the front page of the morning paper. Other times it was hard to remember that there had ever been a time before his absence was a fact. I could not decide what I could not believe: that it had nearly been a year or that it had not even been a year. I tried to think back to last October: before Hattiesburg, before Indiana, before Dad’s death, before Trump’s election, before Eli’s overdose. I thought of a line from Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson too was alive a year ago): “That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?”
As it happened, I was already scheduled to be in New York that weekend to participate in a writing conference. They were flying me up there, but all my obligations to the conference would be finished on Saturday. I made arrangements with Anika to drive to Northampton from Brooklyn together. I told John that I would be there.
Strong Theft in Northampton
The maggid of Mezritch said: “Every lock has its key which is fitted to it and opens it. But there are strong thieves who know how to open without keys. They break the lock. So every mystery in the world can be unriddled by that particular kind of meditation fitted to it. But God loves the thief who breaks the lock open: I mean the man who breaks his heart for God.”
—MARTIN BUBER, Tales of the Hasidim
In June 1995 I was bar mitzvahed. I hated the whole bar mitzvah year. Hated dressing up, was scared of the boy-girl dances. Could not abide the emptiness of the ritual. This last sounds anachronistic, an adult’s revisionist reading, but it isn’t. After seven years of twice-a-week Hebrew school that was basically afternoon daycare, I thought haftorah study was where, finally, we were going to get into the good stuff. Instead, the cantor only wanted me to memorize by ear. He gave me a cassette tape of himself singing the portion and told me to follow along with the transliteration until I knew it by heart. The deepest conversation we ever had was about space aliens. I had come to my lesson wearing one of those oh-so-’90s T-shirts with a big alien head on it (glow-in-the-dark, natch). The cantor took note of my alien and asked if I thought such things could be real. He said that he hoped so, because something like that would be pretty cool. (Within two years I would be buying pot from his son.) I realized with a sinking heart that he was just some guy with a career, no more a man of God than my stockbroker father.
I was arguing with my parents about the bar mitzvah thing, and I got so angry I thought my head was going to explode. I was telling them I didn’t want to go through with it and they were telling me I had to, and I did not know how to explain to them that the problem wasn’t (as they believed) that I didn’t take it seriously, but rather that it seemed to me nobody was taking it seriously enough. I ran out of the house and grabbed my bicycle and pedaled as hard as I could, though I didn’t get very far. I didn’t try to get far. I went to a friend’s house, seeking something like sanctuary, assuming in my naïveté that another set of parents might be made to understand what mine had not.
By the time I got to my friend David’s house I was a mess. David was the only Jewish kid I knew who wasn’t in Hebrew school and wasn’t having one of these gauche blowouts. (In fact, he was to be bar mitzvahed that summer at Mount Masada on a family trip to Israel, but I didn’t see why that might make his parents anything other than my natural allies here.) I remember knocking on their door and the housekeeper telling me, in Spanish, that David wasn’t home. But I spent a lot of time at that house and she knew me, and she could see I was upset. David’s parents found me in their kitchen: hyperventilating, twelve years old, trying to explain to them that I didn’t want to be Jewish and didn’t think it was fair that I had to be. I don’t know now whether the disgust on David’s father’s face was real or whether I’m imagining it, but I can see it clear as anything.
When I was calm enough, David’s mother made me call my parents. My father was either too angry to get on the phone or too angry for my mother to let him near it, so she took the call, expressed her mortification at the scene I’d caused and the things she assumed (rightly) that I had said. I’d been gone from the house for less than an hour, traveled approximately a mile. Did I need to be picked up or would I come home on my own? That was her only question. I would come home, I told her. And I did.
* * *
—
Here, in his own words, is my father’s explanation of why I must be bar mitzvahed.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe or don’t believe. You do it because of who else has done it before you, who else is doing it now, and who else will do it in the future. You do it to be with them because you are them and they are you, whether you like it or not.”
At the time, this only confirmed my darkest suspicions about the hollowness of the traditions, the faithlessness of the faith. But curiously, it was enough to get me to cease rebellion. Call it Jewish guilt or just being outnumbered: I wasn’t going to take on all those people. All of us
, past, present, future, and you can’t do this one thing which anyway is throw you a party? Well, when you put it like that.
Dad also stressed to me over and over how important the bar mitzvah was to my mother. I held this against her, in a low-grade way, for years, until I was old enough to figure out that she probably couldn’t have cared less one way or the other, that all things being equal she almost certainly would have rather been spared the headache and the expense. It was always Dad who wanted it, but characteristically he could not own that desire, that need. Only someone else’s needs (real or projected) were a good enough reason for any given thing to actually happen.
So I had the bar mitzvah. My haftorah portion was Naso, from Judges, which tells the story of Samson. I memorized the Hebrew phonetically and learned the cantillation from the cantor’s recording. On the day of the ceremony I would chant my portion before the congregation, and then deliver a speech—in English—analyzing its lessons.
In the months leading up to the bar mitzvah service, Dad and I sat at the kitchen table for hours, night after night, going over the Samson story, forming opinions and generating ideas, which he took down on a yellow legal pad. He typed up the notes and I shaped them into a rough draft, which I then printed and read aloud to him. We both made notes on the hard copy for further adjustments to word choice and style. (He was teaching me how to edit and revise: The process I’ve just described is essentially the same one that I still use today.)
I have copies of two of our interim drafts and so can see just how closely we worked, as well as what our process was like. A sentence describing Samson’s “superhuman strength and abilities” appears in the earlier draft, but is cut from the later draft because the description is rendered redundant by a change we’ve made elsewhere in the text. The sentence “This led to a bet and a riddle with the Philistines at his wedding feast” is revised to read “a riddle and a bet” instead. This construction distributes the short “e” sounds of “led,” “bet,” and “wedding” more evenly throughout the sentence, adding a bit of music and making the whole thing flow more smoothly.
Ours was a revisionist reading of the Samson story. We argued—provocatively, in the context—that this great Jewish hero was not a hero at all, but rather “a classic, flawed, failed, tragic figure,” whose “fall from grace, his slide down the ladder from great beautiful protector to pathetic spectacle was predictable if not inevitable. […] Had he better used his power and managed his life, the benefits to him and the Jewish people could have been much larger.”
The speech took more than ten minutes to deliver, which if you’re wondering is way too long for this sort of thing. But I was a strong performer and we had rehearsed it down to every stress and pause and punch line. I gave the speech to an audience of several hundred people, and when it was over I received a standing ovation, which is all but unheard-of in a conservative synagogue on Shabbat morning. The rabbi, who’d had reservations about the speech and almost refused to approve it, was floored. He said he’d never seen anything like that reaction in all his years.
Because I’d agreed to fulfill the obligations of the bar mitzvah service, Dad said that the reception could be as goofy and irreverent as I liked. Most of my friends’ bar mitzvahs had been formal affairs, black tie optional on a Saturday night. Mine was jeans casual at a beach-themed nightclub that we’d rented out for the afternoon. There were video games and sumo-suit wrestling, some kind of human gyroscope thing you climbed inside to get spun around. The invitation itself had been full of jokes, which Dad and I wrote together. Directions to the venue started with Earth’s position in the solar system. The souvenir T-shirt (there’s always a souvenir T-shirt; don’t ask me why) depicted a lizard riding a surfboard.
My memories of the party are a blur of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents; all my friends and my parents’ friends. And how happy Dad was. He loved my bar mitzvah. He remembered every single thing that happened that day and loved to relive it. He’d tell the story, get this wistful, proud tone in his voice. What I said before, about how unheard-of a standing ovation was and how shocked and impressed the rabbi was—that’s all him talking. He told me that stuff so many times, my own narrative of the day owes less to my firsthand experience of it than it does to his, the story that he turned it into and what that story meant to him. So forget for a second what the bar mitzvah did or didn’t or does or doesn’t mean to me. It was one of the best days of my father’s life.
* * *
—
They baffle and incense you, the old masters of fringe Judaism, those riddling rabbis. The maggid of Mezritch chooses theft and heartbreak as his metaphors, then finds in them the locus of God’s love. There is no assimilating this wisdom, no taming it. And they would not wish to see it tamed because they knew that God is wild. I don’t mean that wildness is an attribute, a character trait, of His, though there’s ample enough evidence in the Torah for that as well. Ehyeh asher ehyeh, God tells Moses: I am that I am, though the Hebrew also allows for a less reflexive translation: I am that I shall be. In either case it is clear that His immanence is inherent in His presence.
God is the wild, or He is wildness itself. Everything unknown and overmastering: the stifling dark desert as well as the pillar of fire we follow through it, if we do follow. Kabbalists and tzadiks and hasidim and maggids; they speak in parables that do not resolve to lessons. Though their tales take the form of stories and often offer something like an epiphanic moment, they are closer to koans than to fables. They only ever suggest definitive answers by way of teasing, and even if a given tale achieves something like lucidity or conclusiveness, it will be contradicted by the next story told. These guys knew better than to offer answers. They knew that there are no such things as answers—not to life, not to death, not to God—and this unanswerability is, at bottom, the truest lesson, the only lesson, that they have to teach. A mystery is only ever unriddled after it’s over. The only answer to life is more life and the only answer to a story is another story.
* * *
—
Northampton, Massachusetts, is, optimistically, three hours from New York. Anika had borrowed her boyfriend’s Toyota 4Runner. She picked me up from my friend Robin’s apartment at 8 A.M. on Sunday, September 10, 2018. In the car with her was another former student, Madison, who had been in Anika’s cohort at Pratt, and a couple of their other friends whom I’d never met before.
It was a long day, a hard day, but it was also a good day. We shouldn’t hesitate to say that. There were at least a hundred people gathered around the grave. The stone was shrouded in a cream-colored sheet. The ceremony was brief. The rabbi explained that there’s actually very little in the way of specifics about what to do at an unveiling; it’s basically a folk tradition that over the eons has become mainstream.
* * *
—
Jews don’t think much about the afterlife. It isn’t where we focus our faith. Nevertheless, we do have a concept of judgment and of the eternal, which is reflected in much of our liturgy and prayers. We believe that the soul is judged by God twelve months after the body dies. It is for this reason that the headstone is unveiled in the eleventh month after death, so that mourning concludes before judgment is rendered. This is understood as an expression of our faith in the justice of whatever judgment God may pass, but also of our faith that the departed will be judged righteous. If we mourned through the twelfth month, this would be an expression of doubt in the Creator’s wisdom, and perhaps, too, a form of campaigning for divine clemency, which would itself be an expression of doubt in the integrity of the one who was lost. This was why my friend Joshua had said Baruch dayan ehmet to me when I told him that Dad had died.
Blessed is the true judge.
* * *
—
I’m talking about all this like I’m some expert, but all that I am telling you I learned that day. That perfect New
England autumn day, 72 degrees and cloudless, the bluest sky anyone could ask for, the small cemetery nestled among tall trees, mourners standing elbow to elbow, to be as near to one another as we could be, determined to translate our sorrow into remembrance and celebration.
* * *
—
After the unveiling, everyone was invited to a new community arts center that Dorothy had spent the last several years working to get built. We ate and drank and had an open mic in a bright, spacious room in the basement (a room that, a year later, would be named for Eli). Eli’s family read from his writing. His friends from home told stories about growing up, getting into trouble, about how Eli’s house was always the place you could go, where there was no limit to the number of kids who were welcome to stay for dinner, to sleep over, to hang out. His friends from Pratt read poems they’d written for him; there were inside jokes and a few cryptic allusions, and I had the sense that amid all the public tributes something more private was occurring: It wasn’t just Eli they were laying to rest, but also whatever had happened in the chaos around his death, the hole that had been gouged into the center of these kids’ collective life. You could feel the broken threads beginning to knit back together. Or I thought that I could, though it really wasn’t my business, and so, not knowing precisely what was happening, I tried to let it be enough that it was happening—and to leave it to those to whom it belonged. I read the parable of the Strong Thief, the same text that stands as the epigraph to this chapter, which I had handy because the first time I’d encountered it, years earlier, I’d saved a copy of it on my phone and have kept it with me ever since. (I suppose if I were the kind of person who made altars, I would print it out on a card and place it by the crystal and the patch.)
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