“So why shouldn’t Naftali Asher play at his neighbors’ weddings?” Rabbi Kessler asked, startling Sacha. “Not that he was the most upbeat guy I’ve ever heard blow a hora, but still . . . playing at weddings is what klezmer is for. And a pious Jew puts family at the center of life. There’s something . . . un-Jewish about this whole idea of turning klezmer into concert music.”
Mo Lehrer looked confused and bewildered—not an uncommon state of affairs, since Mo was not even remotely in the Kessler league in terms of arguing talent. “Wait a minute,” he said, turning to Rabbi Kessler with a sad and betrayed look on his face. “You’re agreeing with her?”
“Of course not,” Sacha’s grandfather quipped without skipping a beat. “She’s my daughter-in-law. I never agree with her, even if I have to change my mind to not do it!”
Sacha laughed so hard at this that he snorted up a lungful of tea and his father had to pound him on the back until he coughed it up.
“Look on the bright side,” Danny Kessler said when Sacha had his breath back. “If the strike happens and your mother and sister lose their jobs, maybe Goldfaden’ll hire your grandfather at the Hippodrome.”
The idea of Rabbi Kessler doing a vaudeville comedy act was so ridiculous—and yet at the same time so strangely plausible—that Sacha choked on his tea all over again.
“The thing I can’t believe,” Mo was saying when Sacha recovered, “is that the police haven’t dragged Kid Klezmer into the investigation already. Talk about a shande far di goyim! Hanging out with gangsters and hired killers—”
“I’ve known Meyer Minsky’s mother for years!” Mrs. Kessler insisted. “And he’s a nice boy, no matter what anyone says. So don’t talk to me about hired killers!”
Sacha swallowed and started to explain about Wolf’s trip to see Minsky at the Café Metropole.
“Too late,” Mordechai cried. “I already told them all about it!”
“All about what?” Sacha asked in a perfectly calm tone that made him feel that the ensuing gale of laughter was thoroughly unreasonable.
“Oh,” Mordechai said blithely, “you, me . . . the fair Miss Astral.”
“In other words,” Bekah told him, “you’re never going to live this down.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A Soul Like Clear Water
THE NEXT MORNING, Sacha woke up to the comforting Sabbath ritual of walking to synagogue and walking back home again for a long, rich, lazy lunch. This was Rabbi Kessler’s busiest day of the week, of course—and one that taxed his waning strength to its limit—so everyone waited on him hand and foot. But he seemed to take a special pleasure in having Sacha serve him.
In fact, Sacha was almost beginning to feel that it was a perverse pleasure. The old man had practically made a habit out of forgetting his prayer shawl and tefillin when he went to synagogue and making Sacha run back to fetch them. For months, Sacha had been telling himself it was just a coincidence, but lately he was starting to wonder. Could his grandfather possibly know about the terrible thing Sacha had done with them last summer?
He had known even as he was summoning his dybbuk that it was the worst thing he’d ever done in his life. Indeed, he’d spent the week before Yom Kippur last year half believing that God would strike his name from the book of life for such a crime. Yom Kippur had come and gone, and he was still alive. Yet week after week, when his grandfather forgot his prayer shawl, or asked for help with his tefillin, or just looked at Sacha with his quick, bright birdlike eyes, Sacha felt certain that the old man could see how ashamed and miserable he felt.
He had examined the prayer shawl and phylacteries more than once for any sign of damage. There was nothing that he could see. But he had a nasty feeling that he must have contaminated them in some invisible way, so that all his grandfather’s prayers were as nothing—blown away like dead leaves before the wind.
“Put my prayer shawl away, would you?” his grandfather said as soon as the rest of the family had gone out on their Saturday afternoon walk and the two of them were alone together. “It’s right there.”
Sacha started guiltily. He looked around and saw that the prayer shawl was hanging over the bedstead. What on earth was it doing there? It wasn’t like Rabbi Kessler to be careless with it. Had the old man discovered Sacha’s crime after all? And if so, how could he still be speaking to him—let alone smiling and joking with him?
He picked the prayer shawl up and began to fold it hurriedly, eager to get it safely into the drawer and out of sight for another week.
“No, no, not like that!” Rabbi Kessler said. “What do you think you’re doing, crumpling up a hot dog wrapper to throw it in the garbage?”
Sacha sighed and refolded it more carefully.
“That’s better,” his grandfather said approvingly. But when Sacha started to get up to place it in the special drawer next to the Elijah cup and the other small family treasures, his grandfather put out a hand to stop him.
“That’s a funny Torah portion we read this morning,” the old man said after a moment.
“Oh? How so?”
“Well, what was it about? In its essence, I mean—not on the surface.”
“Oh, Grandpa, you know I’m no good at this! Don’t you remember what a struggle it was just to get me through my bar mitzvah?”
“Nonsense. You’re a late bloomer, that’s all.”
“Well . . . I guess it was about forgiveness.”
“Yes! Exactly! It’s really the sort of thing you’d expect to be reading before Yom Kippur, isn’t it? And yet here we are at the dog-end of winter, starting to think about spring cleaning and Passover. It makes me think I need to talk more about forgiveness this Passover.”
“I wouldn’t think there was much forgiveness to talk about in a holiday that celebrates God smiting our enemies with boils and frogs,” Sacha said.
“Ah, but there is! And the older you get, the more you’ll see it. Forgiveness is at the heart of our faith. Christians believe their god can wash away men’s sins. But we believe that God can only forgive sins against Himself. When we sin against another person, we must make peace with the person we have wronged before we can hope to stand right with God again. We are all our brother’s keeper, you see. Our immortal souls are in one another’s hands—for who can go through this world without needing to forgive and be forgiven? Hey, listen . . . get me a cup of water, will you?”
Sacha crossed through the slanting mid-afternoon sunlight that filled the little kitchen to scoop a glass of water out of the bucket that his mother always kept covered with a clean cheesecloth in the corner behind the stove.
Grandpa Kessler muttered the appropriate prayer and drank deeply. “Ah!” he sighed as he set the glass back on the table. “Is there anything more satisfying than a glass of water when you’re thirsty? What was I saying just now?”
Sacha felt a brief twinge of hope that his grandfather might have forgotten what they were talking about, but he should have known better.
“Oh, right. Forgiveness. The rabbis of old were so convinced of the power of forgiveness—freely asked for and willingly offered—that when anyone did them a wrong, they would find excuses to be near that person, do little things to remind him of his crime, not to make him feel guilty but to give him a chance to confess and ask for forgiveness.” Rabbi Kessler smiled ruefully. “I, unfortunately, am not as patient as the rabbis of old. I’m getting tired of remembering to forget my tefillin every week. And I’m getting even more tired of having my only grandson act like someone died every time he has to spend half an hour alone with me. So I’m just going to ask you now: what spell did you work when you stole my tefillin and my hidden books last summer?”
Sacha’s hands went numb, and he felt the ancient cloth of the prayer shawl sliding through his fingers. Rabbi Kessler caught it before it hit the floor, and they sat like that for a moment, both leaning forward, their hands on the prayer shawl and their faces no more than a handbreadth away from each other.
&nbs
p; “Don’t lie to me,” his grandfather said softly. “There’s nothing you could have done that I won’t forgive you for. But if you lie to me now, you’ll break an old man’s heart.”
So Sacha took a deep, shaky breath and told him everything. He told him how he had summoned the dybbuk to his grandfather’s little shul on Canal Street because he was furious at Lily and desperate to prove that it wasn’t his dybbuk after all. He told him how he had fought the creature—and how it had seemed to become stronger and more solid with every minute he struggled against it. He told him about Morgaunt’s plot to frame him for Edison’s murder, and about how the dybbuk had killed Antonio’s father and almost destroyed Antonio himself when he tried to avenge his father’s death.
Rabbi Kessler seemed to sink under the weight of the horrible tale. “This is very bad,” he said when Sacha was finally done. “This creature has hurt many people, and I fear will hurt many more. And you . . . you’ve made some terrible mistakes. But you didn’t summon it, Sacha. All you did when you stole my books and my tefillin was let the creature know where you were.” He shuddered. “It was Morgaunt who committed the unforgivable sin. And yet perhaps, after all, it is not unforgivable. You are the only one who can say. Remember what I said about holding one another’s souls in our hands?”
“As if Morgaunt would ever come to me for forgiveness!”
“Stranger things have happened, my child.”
“But how could Morgaunt have had the power to summon it?” Sacha said, brushing aside his grandfather’s talk of forgiveness. “He’s no Kabbalist.”
“You don’t have to understand fire to burn a house down! And that’s all Morgaunt is: a child, playing with matches. Men like him have the greatest power in the world—the power of greed and ignorance.”
“But still,” Sacha said, unable to quite give up hope. “Maybe the dybbuk isn’t a real dybbuk. Or . . . or maybe Antonio killed it.”
“No, child, I’m afraid your shadow is real enough. And for it to have taken your shape so clearly—to have become a sort of doppelgänger—it must have been very, very close to possessing you entirely. And once a dybbuk has come that close to possessing a man, it never leaves him. I fear that mastering this creature will be the great work of your life. And though such struggles make for some of the profound lessons in the lives of the Kabbalists, I would not wish one on any man.”
Sacha stared at his grandfather in mute despair. The old man sat silent for several minutes, then shook his head and laughed bitterly.
“I blame myself for this,” he said at last. “I blame myself more than you can know. What a judgment it is on my vanity! It broke my heart that neither of my sons had the talent to follow in my footsteps—or rather, I thought in my youthful pride that it would break my heart. And then when your father defied me over your mother, I was furious. Yet still . . . I knew her father was a powerful wonderworker. And when I learned that she had borne a son, I began to dream, almost without admitting it to myself, that you would be a fitting heir to both your grandfathers. You see, Sacha, this is how God rewards the vanity of old men! Never let anyone tell you He doesn’t have a sense of humor!”
“Did you never meet my mother’s father?” Sacha asked.
“Once,” Rabbi Kessler answered, “long ago, when your parents were both still children. But later on, we were both too pigheaded to meet again, and, well, you know the rest of the story.”
Indeed, Sacha knew every line of the story, for it was the same one his grandfather told every year at Passover. He always began the tale by saying that he had been the firstborn son of one of the great Ashkenazic rabbinical dynasties and that he had been raised to be pious and learned—but also to take overweening pride in his noble lineage. But then his firstborn son had defied him by running off to Moscow to go to the university. And worse still, the young Danny Kessler had run afoul of the Czar’s secret police, been kicked out of school, and fallen in love with the daughter of a humble Hasidic wonderworker — a man who stood for everything the Kesslers had always despised. That was the last straw. Rabbi Kessler had threatened to disown his son if he married the girl. (“Boy, was I a jerk back then!” Grandpa Kessler always exclaimed at this point in the story.)
Danny Kessler hadn’t even tried to argue with his father. He’d just walked out of the house and vanished. (“And I was an even bigger jerk,” Sacha’s father always said when Rabbi Kessler got to this part of the story.)
He didn’t come back for six years—not until a wave of pogroms swept the land and thousands of families were being burnt out of house and home. Then he walked back into his father’s library one night, looking like he’d been sleeping in a ditch for a week. He pulled out his pocket watch, laid it on the rabbi’s desk, and told him he had fifteen minutes to pack whatever he wanted to take to America.
“Where’s your wife?” the rabbi asked.
“Hiding in a field outside of town with your grandchildren.”
“And what will she say to taking a slow old man along with her to America?”
“She’s the one who made me come get you in the first place.”
This was where the story always ended. The Rabbi would hold up the Elijah cup—an ancient Kiddush cup that had been passed down from Kessler to Kessler for centuries. “This is the only thing I took with me,” he would say. “I spent the next three months walking across Europe. And during that walk, I watched the girl I disowned my son for marrying save my grandchildren’s lives a hundred times over. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be any Kesslers left to hand this cup down to. So I thank God for delivering me from Egypt—and for giving my son a far better wife than I ever could have chosen for him.”
“Put my shawl away now,” Rabbi Kessler said. “And get the Elijah cup out while you’re at it. I want to look at it. It’s foolish to take comfort in pretty things. And yet . . . perhaps there is some comfort to be had there.”
Sacha went back to the dresser, lifted out the carefully folded cloth that held the cup, and carried it to his grandfather. The old man unwrapped it and held it up so that it glistened and flashed in a slanting shaft of afternoon sunlight. It was a pretty thing: a small, slender-stemmed silver cup covered with an intricate filigree of twining grapes and pomegranates.
“This cup was made in the Loire Valley, where our family went after they were expelled from Spain. It first belonged to a very great scholar—a man who was said to have been a student of Isaac Luria himself. From that time on, it has passed from son to son in our family, even as we fled from France to Germany, from Germany to Russia, from Russia to America. Many great scholars have held this cup—and some who would have known how to undo the damage Morgaunt did when he summoned your dybbuk. It is their wisdom you must look to. The wisdom of men who made it their life’s work to repair the universe. That is where your answers lie, and not in the rough spellsmithing of men who see magic only as a tool to slake their selfish appetites.”
“Then help me,” Sacha pleaded. “Teach me!”
“But how can I help you? What am I to teach you? There’s a reason those books you stole are hidden in the back of a closet and not left unguarded in the shul where anyone can read them! There’s a reason that the great Kabbalists refused to teach men until they were so steeped in the study of Talmud that they had some defense against the overwhelming temptation to misuse such power!” Rabbi Kessler shook his head. “I have racked my brain for knowledge that might help rather than harm you, but it is hard. It is very hard.”
It was several minutes before Sacha’s grandfather spoke again. And even then, he picked his words with painful caution, as if terrified of accidentally revealing more than he intended to say.
“Perhaps after all, I was right to think of the Elijah cup,” he said at last. “Tell me, Sacha, have you ever heard anyone speak of the doctrine of gilgul ha-neshamot?”
Sacha shook his head no.
“But you understand the Hebrew?”
“Neshama is ‘soul,’” Sac
ha said hesitantly. “And gilgul . . . is that the word for ‘wheel’?”
“So you do have room in your head for something besides baseball,” his grandfather said with a dry chuckle. “Yes, that is the bare meaning of the phrase. The wheel of souls. Or, as Isaac of Luria called it, the doctrine of rolling souls.”
“But I thought that was just superstition.”
“You mean the saying that a soul lives as many lives as it takes for it to fulfill all six hundred and thirteen mitzvot?” Rabbi Kessler asked. “Well, yes, that does seem a little too neat and tidy. But there’s a fine line between little superstitions and great truths. And the one great truth about dybbuks that I can tell you is this: when someone asked Isaac Luria what a dybbuk was, he said that spiritual possession was one of the deepest mysteries of our faith—and that it was inextricably entwined with gilgul. Under this doctrine, at least in the way that Luria taught it, there are harmful possessions — dybbuks, or clinging ghosts. But there are also beneficial possessions—which he called ibbur. Luria and many other Kabbalists throughout the ages have actively sought ibbur by prayer, fasting, and study, sometimes even by sleeping on the graves of holy men. And the belief also survives in the folk superstition of ordinary Jews, who will often name a baby after a dead relative whose good qualities they hope to see reborn in the child.”
“But how does that help me?” Sacha asked. “It doesn’t change anything!”
“Ah, but it does. Morgaunt may have called forth this clinging spirit. But he did not make it. Magicians can make golems and such earthly creatures. But a soul can only be made by God Himself. And each soul has a purpose in creation that no human mind can encompass. Morgaunt will never grasp that truth. But such wisdom is part of the birthright of every Kessler who has ever raised that cup at a Passover Seder. Morgaunt may think that the dybbuk is his creature. But you must remember that a soul belongs only to itself and to God. And if you do remember that—if you can bring yourself to think of the dybbuk not as a curse inflicted upon you but as a child of God, with its own destiny to fulfill in the world— then I do not see how it can ever entirely devour you.”
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