by Noah Gordon
“Ah, the Rabbi!” Ben Jacobs shouted.
Michael made his way slowly around the room.
Jake Lazarus grasped the Rabbi’s hand. “Nu, twelve more months, another year. Fifty-two shabbos services,” the cantor said, his eyes dreamy with vision and rye. “A few more years, it will be the turn of the century. Two thousand. Imagine it.”
“Imagine harder and think of Fifty-Seven Hundred and Sixty,” Michael said. “We began counting earlier.”
“Two Thousand or Fifty-Seven-Sixty, what’s the difference? I will still be one hundred and three. Tell me, Rabbi, what will the world be like?”
“Jake, am I Eric Sevareid?” He potched the cantor on the cheek, a love blow.
He reached the bar and came away with bourbon, poured generously. On one of the tables laden with food by the Sisterhood, amid platters of tayglech and cookies, he discovered a miracle, a dish of candied ginger, and he took two pieces and walked out of the hall and up the stairway.
When the door of the sanctuary closed behind him the sounds from below were coated in velvet. He stood in blackness but it was his temple and he needed no light; he walked down the center aisle to the third row, one hand curled around the rim of the glass to insure against spilling.
He sat and sipped the whiskey and nibbled at the ginger. A small sip to three or four nibbles, possibly the wrong ratio; the ginger was soon gone and much of the bourbon remained. He drank, letting his mind graze in the dark, nibbling at thoughts. Around him the darkness thinned as his eyes adjusted; he began to distinguish solid shapes. He could make out the lectern now, where in twenty-four hours he would be standing and leading the shabbos service.
How many sermons since that first sermon in Miami? So many services, so many words. He grinned in the dark. Not so many as still stretched in front of him; he felt it in his bones, he could almost reach out and touch it, a ladder of Sabbaths to be climbed into the future.
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.
Thank you, God.
Downstairs the orchestra began to play something lilting. If Leslie were here he would dance—he felt like dancing; next year they would dance.
The taste of ginger was faint now. The last faint, bittersweet taste of ginger. Don’t be afraid, Zaydeh, he said silently into the darkness. Six thousand years is not the wink of an eyelash or the beat of a bird’s wing. There is nothing new on the face of the ancient earth, and what could not be erased by bloodbaths and ovens will not be erased by changed names or bobbed noses or the merging of our blood with mysterious bloodstreams.
He should tell Jake Lazarus he knew at least that much about the future, he thought. But instead he slumped comfortably and finished the last of the bourbon, relishing its warmth and filing the thought away.
He would turn it into a sermon in the morning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noah Gordon has had outstanding international success. The Physician, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.” Shaman was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author’s other novels—The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice, and The Winemaker—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon’s novel, The Last Jew, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.