The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  The old man placed the dice in Yossi’s hand. He dropped them onto the board.

  “A good roll,” the old man said, moving Yossi’s pieces around the table. “Do you have mazel tonight?” the Arab man said mockingly.

  The sky outside the window was turning quickly from a deep blue to a glowing purple. The bald old man reached into his caftan, removed Devorah Bee’s mini 9 mm pistol and placed it on the table. Yossi struggled but could not move. He was held in place by three of the young Arabs. “My children studied at the revolutionary school. They drank anger and ate fury and threw stones. But they are not just bombmakers and pickpockets. They will be the leaders of this land.” The old man prodded the pistol with his index finger and spun it on the board. There was an inscription on the handle.

  “What’s this?” the old man said, “ ‘Darling Devorah: For a safe life in Jerusalem. Love Daddy.’ A thoughtful gift, and practical, may it protect her from all harm. And a very pretty name. What does Devorah mean?”

  Yossi blinked his eyes hard and fast as if he were trying to say, “Fuck you. Fuck your mother you filthy Arab.”

  The woman picked up the gun and held it against Yossi’s temple. Then she pulled his kippah from his head and dropped it to the floor. “It is almost time to pray,” she said.

  Yossi prayed to his God, wishing Moses had never led his people out of the wilderness, wishing that he had never come to this violent desert land, wishing that he and Devorah were safe in bed back in New York.

  The old man looked on, his big eyes pitying, his pink peeling head almost glowing as the sun continued to rise.

  Yossi looked at the woman, her face as hard as fireforged steel. And then the muezzin cried, calling the Arabs to prayer. “Ull-aaaaaaw-hoo-Ak-bar! Ull-aaaaaaw-hoo-Ak-bar!” And the unwelcome guests, as surprisingly as they had arrived, began disappearing into the blue morning light. The blind father, the wives, the mother, the woman, the sons, and the nephews dropped to their knees, foreheads on the floor. And were gone. The old man, too, climbed from his chair and vanished. Yossi pulled the dirty kaffiyeh from his mouth and ran to the hallway, his heart breaking in his throat. The bedroom door opened and out stepped Youssif, a tall handsome Arab in a sweater and slacks. He held a broken bottle in his hand.

  Youssif stepped past him, dropping the bloodied bottle to the floor.

  “She is not dead,” Youssif said. “She is only crying for the ghosts of her children and their children, too.”

  The sun continued to rise, the muezzin wailing in Arabic, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

  The Art of Correcting

  One morning, Rabbi Israel Frummann could not rise from his bed to say his morning prayers. It was the first time in his entire sixty-three years that the great Dokszycer rebbe did not greet the new day with prayer on his lips.

  “My back is aching,” he said to his wife, Sarah. “I can’t move.”

  “Get up. You must go and pray.”

  “Like the mortar of Egypt,” he cried. “I am turning to stone.”

  She brought him a hot towel to lie on and some ointment for his neck. He waved it away and then winced.

  “All right, my wife. Bring it here.”

  “Then you must go and pray. You are the rebbe.”

  With that, the Dokszycer rebbe pulled himself up on his elbows and then fell quickly back onto his pillows. “I cannot go,” he said.

  “But what about the minyan?” Sarah said, raising her voice.

  The Dokszycer sect was a very small order, so small in fact that without the rebbe, only nine men could appear at the Western Wall to perform morning prayers.

  “Don’t worry, they can worship without me,” the rebbe said. “They are all grown men.”

  “What do you mean?” Sarah said, horrified. “Man’s prayers are only truly heard when he prays as part of a congregation. Get out of bed now!”

  “All right, wife,” the rebbe said and began resolutely to climb from his bed, but screamed out in pain, “The Angel of Death is killing me slowly.”

  “Are you going to pray?” Sarah said.

  “His sword is wedged in my spine!”

  “Then, rest,” Sarah said, finally. “I will bring you some tea and honey.”

  “Bring me Luria!”

  Lev Luria was a local kabbalist whose mastery of amulets, prayers, and spells was known outside Jerusalem as far as Banei Brak. It was said he had once revived a dead yeshiva student who had been hit by a bus simply by breathing the word chayim, life, into his mouth.

  Pale, long-faced Luria arrived sometime after noon and found the rebbe in bed with his window curtains pulled closed.

  “The rebbitzin sent for me. What is the matter?” Luria said, stepping close to the rebbe’s bed.

  “I did not go to prayers this morning,” the rebbe said in such a sad tone that he may have been lying on his death bed.

  “Why me?” Luria asked, placing his hands in his pockets and stepping away.

  “My back feels like it has been walked on by an elephant. My spine has been a ladder for a thousand monkeys. . .”

  Luria took a step closer to the bed. The rebbe was not dying. “How are your eyes?”

  “My eyes?” the rebbe said, trying to lift his head from the flattened pillow. “They hurt sometimes.”

  “It is not your back,” Luria said, and a thin smile formed on his face. “The Talmud says a heavy step detracts one fivehundredth from the light of your eyes. Rebbe, if I may be so bold, there is nothing wrong with your back. You must simply learn to take lighter steps or else” — and here Luria’s voice fell to a whisper — “you will be blind before the year is over.”

  “What shall I do?” the rebbe asked.

  “Tomorrow you will walk. But softly. Today we must take care of your precious eyes.”

  “Yes. Yes! We must. Without my eyes I cannot read the Torah.”

  Lev Luria concocted a potion of kiddush wine, sage, egg yolk, and a sprinkle of golden Jerusalem earth to bathe the eyes of the ailing rebbe. He also placed a fist-sized stone, purplish-blue in color, underneath the rebbe’s mattress.

  “This is the Stone of Issachar. It will help cure what ails you.”

  Sarah applied the concoction to the eyelids of her husband, and stroked his hair when she was done. Then, she placed two cucumber slices on his eyes and told him to rest.

  The next day, the rebbe was in a rage. He had slept badly, tossing and turning from the pain, feeling every contour of the Stone of Issachar beneath his back. And now his eyes really did hurt. They were red and bloodshot, and he screamed at his wife Sarah to call the kabbalist to come to his bedside immediately.

  “What’s the matter?” Luria said, entering the dark room shortly afterwards. He leaned over and pulled back the rebbe’s eyelids with his index fingers.

  “Worse today,” the rebbe moaned.

  “Good, we have no time to waste. It is happening even faster than I thought. You must stand up now.”

  “But I can’t,” the rebbe said. “Termites are eating at me.”

  “Stand up,” Luria said, and pulled the rebbe’s arm.

  The rebbe slid out of bed and fell onto the floor in a heap of bones. He felt as if he was going to burst into flames. “Pick me up,” he screamed.

  “The floor is hard. Today you will sleep on the floor.”

  The great Dokszycer rebbe cried out for his wife Sarah to throw the mad kabbalist from his house. “The Dokszycer rebbe does not sleep on the floor. My father slept on goosedown, and his father on swan feathers.”

  That evening, the rebbe’s followers stood above him and performed the Ma’ariv services. From the floor the rebbe could easily see the nine smiling faces that completed the minyan. He slept better that evening, but in the morning, cried out in pain once again.

  Sarah came to comfort him with a cold towel for his forehead, and though she was not much taller than his congregation’s large Torah scroll, he believed she could cure an
y ill. “If I see that Luria again, I will beat him about the head,” Sarah said, shaking her little fist like a dried-out citron. “He is as bad as the cut-and-slash doctors. I will fix you a warm bath with Epsom salts.”

  “Wife,” the rebbe said, “how wonderful it would be to pray again at the Wall and to walk back and forth over the earth as I please. But I am afraid my spine is broken like a matchstick.”

  Sarah knelt down and he looked into her smooth, worn face and remembered her as a young girl when she still wore braids on either side of her head. Now she wore a blue snood adorned with gold stars that covered all of her still-brown hair. “You are a good wife. Bring me the bottle of wine.”

  Sarah brought an herbalist who concocted a mixture of valerian root, skullcap, and devil’s claw to soothe the rebbe’s pains, but the rebbe wouldn’t touch the murky elixir and shouted the herbalist from his home. Sarah brought a Yemenite master of prayer who offered mud and salts from the Dead Sea to rub against his skin, and a rabbi who could read cures in the stars, but the rebbe would not see them, preferring the solitude of his dark room. Sarah only entered while he slept to remove the refuse bucket from beside the bed. When she brought him food and knocked, saying, “If you chew well with your teeth, your back will find its strength,” he said he was not hungry. When she said, “You must drink,” he called out, “More wine!”

  Finally, the rebbe called Sarah to open the door. She entered, and the dark room smelled stale and musty like old books and bedsheets. The rebbe lay on the bed with pillows propped under his legs and back.

  “How does one begin a conversation with God?” the rebbe began, his voice thin and strained. “How does one start such a conversation? What does one say?”

  “You are tired,” Sarah said.

  “What does one say? And in what language?” the rebbe said.

  “You know what to do,” Sarah said.

  “I have never had such a conversation.”

  The rebbe lived every day in the shadow of his great-great-grandfather, the first Dokszycer rebbe, peace be upon him, who had summoned God to protect his village from rampaging cossacks. It is said that he stood in the village square with his eyes closed as cossack hoofbeats pounded nearer and as they reached the square hooting and howling, a giant hand reached out of the sky to pluck the riders from the horses’ backs.

  “I have been in the dark. Alone. No angels met me. No voice answered my calls. Elohim!” the rebbe screamed. “Elohim! Master of the Universe.”

  “Oh, Israel,” Sarah said. “The Lord tests the righteous. Rabbi Jonathan said the potter does not test cracked pots, because if he tapped it even once it would break. But he does test the good ones because no matter how many times he tests them they do not break. So God tests not the wicked but the righteous.”

  “You are saying that Rabbi Jonathan thinks I am like a clay pot?”

  “Turn on the light,” Sarah said, exasperated. “Yitzchak has been waiting to see you.”

  “In my distress I cried unto the Lord and he did not hear me,” the rebbe said, misquoting the first line of Psalm 120.

  Yitzchak was the rebbe’s nephew and only heir to the leadership of the Dokszycer dynasty since the rebbe’s son had left the closed walls of the community for the greener shores of New York’s Long Island. The rebbe wore his shirt torn in the corner every day as if his only son had died.

  Yitzchak was whip thin and as tall as Solomon the Wise was said to have been, though not nearly as sharp, the rebbe often observed. He entered the rebbe’s room with an unusual spring in his step.

  “How are you feeling today?” he asked. His suit was rumpled and the rebbe could see a soup stain on the front of his shirt.

  The rebbe pulled himself up, so that he sat leaning against a couple of pillows. “How am I feeling?” he asked. “Has the Messiah arrived yet?”

  “How is your back? And neck?”

  The rebbe threw out his arm in a weak backhand and released from his lips a long agonized “Aaaaaaaach!”

  “I have found someone,” Yitzchak said, smiling and then covering his mouth with his hand. His teeth were as large as those of a horse and the rebbe often joked that he should pray with his mouth closed so he would not scare God from the world. “I have found someone who can help you, Rebbe.”

  “Only God can help me,” the rebbe said, shaking his head slowly until he had to stop from the pain.

  “I have found someone,” Yitzchak repeated.

  “I’m sure you have found someone,” the rebbe said.

  “I met him at Zion Square,” Yitzchak said. “Demonstrating tricks concerning the back.”

  “No more tricks,” the rebbe said.

  “He is a healer,” Yitzchak said, picking up the edge of the rebbe’s bedside table with one shaking hand, spilling a half-full glass of water onto the floor. “Last week, I could not have lifted this.”

  An hour later Sarah entered, drew the curtains, turned on a small lamp, and led a tall pale man dressed all in white into the rebbe’s room.

  The rebbe sat propped against his pillows, wearing only his bedclothes and a black kippah on his head. He had never seen a grown man so clean shaven. He thought the man looked like a glass of milk. His hair was blond and cropped short and he wore round steel-rimmed spectacles tightly on his face.

  “Hello,” the man said. “I have come to help you. Doctor John J. McGraw. “

  The rebbe had passed the war years as a child in England and spoke English fairly well.

  “You have come to help me?” the rebbe said.

  “Have you been in bed since you hurt your back?” Dr. John J. McGraw asked. The rebbe nodded. “Sit up on the edge of the bed.”

  “Why?” the rebbe said.

  “Don’t be an old goat,” Sarah said. “He is trying to help you.”

  “I can’t. I am broken,” the rebbe said.

  “Very slowly,” the doctor said slowly. “You must get out of bed. There is nothing worse for a sore back than immobility.”

  “Nu?” Sarah said, leaning close to her husband.

  “Wife. Leave us,” the rebbe said, and then he slid to the edge of the bed.

  “Remove your shirt and stand up,” the doctor said with such authority that the rebbe didn’t question, and stepped into a pair of slippers before pulling off his shirt. Nobody had spoken to him that way since he was a child. He felt small and naked and immediately wanted to cover himself. The doctor told him to drop his hands to his sides.

  “Close your eyes,” the doctor said.

  “My eyes?” the rebbe said. “I’m sure it is not my eyes.”

  “Close your eyes,” the doctor said, and reached under the rebbe’s beard, placing his fingers beneath his chin to lift it straight. “Turn your head to the left.”

  “But it is hurting,” the rebbe said.

  “Turn your head to the left, and then to the right.”

  He could feel his nose grazing the doctor’s hand on either side as he turned.

  “Now, look straight ahead and open your eyes,” the doctor said, flatly.

  The rebbe was shocked to see that when he opened his eyes, he was not looking straight ahead but down and to the right, toward a pile of dirty laundry.

  “I can help you,” the doctor said, removing a small silver camera from his pocket.

  “What are you doing?” the rebbe said.

  “I am going to take a picture of your posture as it is now,” the doctor said, aiming the camera. “Look at the curve in your back, and the way your shoulders — ”

  “No. No!” the rebbe said. “You can’t do that. It is against the Second Commandment.”

  “Just to record your progress,” the doctor said.

  “No graven images,” the rebbe said, turning away.

  The doctor put his camera away and apologized to the rebbe. “I am sorry. I am very sorry.”

  The rebbe looked into the doctor’s eyes for the first time, and they were blue and shining like the springtime pools of his yout
h. He wore some sort of silver charm around his neck that was shaped like the English letter “t.” The rebbe shuddered and again thought back to his youth.

  “McGraw,” the rebbe said, pronouncing the name for the first time. “Where do you come from?”

  “Saint Louis.”

  “I believe there really are Jews everywhere,” the rebbe said, smiling.

  “I’m not Jewish,” the doctor said. “You can put your shirt on now.”

  “Well, why are you here?” the rebbe said, not quite understanding. He noticed that the doctor’s breath smelled like peppermint. “Why did you come to me?”

  “I practice the art of correcting,” the doctor said. “I locate spinal malfunction and fix it. Do you have frequent back and neck pain? Do you have pain in between your shoulder blades? Do you feel a numbing or tingling in the arms or hands?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” the rebbe screamed.

  “Israel, are you all right?” Sarah called from outside the door.

  “I am fine, wife.” The rebbe pulled his shirt over his head, forgetting his beard inside his nightshirt. “How are you going to help me?”

  The doctor explained how nerves connecting to the spine, when pinched or compressed, can cause pain or irritation in almost any part of the body, and how he simply, through controlled pressure, restores the spine to a more normal position, in turn reducing pain and irritation.

  “Imagine a garden hose as a nerve and the water flowing through it as the nerve impulses — ”

  “A what?” the rebbe said.

  “A garden hose,” the doctor said.

  “Do you see a garden around here?” the rebbe said. “In Jerusalem, everything is stone.”

  “But you are made of flesh and bone,” the doctor said. “We must ease the pressure on the nerve. This will take some time. Maybe a week, maybe a few months. Your spine is curving like a question mark.”

  “A question mark, huh? I have a question for you,” the rebbe said, reaching out toward the doctor. “Do you mean you can fix my back?”

  “You must have faith.”

  The doctor walked around behind the rebbe, told him to place his arms across his chest in the form of an “x.” He pressed himself close to him and reached around the rebbe. Placing one pale hand on top of the rebbe’s and one between his shoulder blades, he pulled in and thrust forward at the exact same moment. There was a pop, pop, and the rebbe screamed out.