The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

  “Probably didn’t come to the luncheon for that reason.”

  “Sure.”

  “And she’s a big snob, holds herself very high in her own opinion.”

  Then, in the breezy, leaf-dappled shade of a fall afternoon, the Tayson regime came to a sudden end. Once again, it was the women who, though not consulted, were responsible for re-ordering events—only this time they were arrayed against him en masse. It all started when a stiffly smiling ad hoc committee of three members of the ladies’ auxiliary confronted him on the steps of the school. Elected by a majority vote of the membership, they were: a Modern Orthodox plastic manufacturer’s wife (who, it was rumored, transgressed against the commandment to observe God’s day of rest by watching television on Sabbath afternoons); the mother of the school valedictorian, whose brother, a graduate of Derech Emet, was studying for his doctorate in engineering at Bar Ilan University in Israel; and the auxiliary’s outspoken vice president.

  Confronted on the steps by the ladies’ auxiliary representatives, Rabbi Tayson ended the recess period of four seventh-grade classes with one shrill blast of his whistle. The callousness of this dispatch convinced at least two of the ad hoc committee members that the rabbi was a tyrant who had, in the most sanctimonious of bloodless coups, taken complete power over the school for himself. (Their report to the ladies’ auxiliary would later result in the addition of twenty-two women, increasing the ad hoc committee from three members to twenty-five.)

  The vice president immediately came to the point. “You won’t last two more weeks!” she said, looking directly into the rabbi’s face.

  Stunned by her disrespectful tone, Rabbi Tayson almost fell off the steps. Who was she, a woman, to be addressing him like this—and in public, no less? What insolence! Did she know she was talking to the man who had almost been appointed dean of the grand Theological Seminary of Baltimore? Never mind that the last-minute denial of his application had almost killed him. Never mind that his neck chafed daily at the collar of humiliation he was forced to wear as the lowly principal and self-titled headmaster of the Yeshiva Derech Emet of Borough Park.

  Rabbi Tayson cleared his throat and prepared to respond; then, thinking the better of it, he turned his back on the vice president of the ladies’ auxiliary and walked into the building. He was sure of one thing at least—the support of his handpicked teaching staff. Men like Otis, Abrahamson, and Knipfel owed it to him for taking them on without their teachers’ licenses. They were an Ultra Orthodox crew, accustomed to taking orders; they would stick by him, he assured himself over and over again, turning his velvet yarmulke around on his head as he paced the seven feet of space between his enormous pine desk and the window overlooking the schoolyard.

  Another week had hardly passed before two of Rabbi Tayson’s most loyal secretaries gave notice. They were followed by a flock of teachers—both licensed and unlicensed. The ad hoc committee, now grown to forty, called for the rabbi’s resignation in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar ad in the Brooklyn section of the Jewish News. Allowing him no quarter, the vice president lobbied in favor of his immediate expulsion. Several more temperate committee members recommended that the rabbi merely be docked at half pay and given time to find new employment.

  On seeing the ad, the Rebbitzen Tayson fainted and was rushed to the hospital. She was released the next day with a diagnosis of severe stress and a prescription for Valium. The rabbi alternated between public fury and private bouts of weeping.

  At a meeting called by the desperate Rabbi Tayson in his own living room, combining the all-female ad hoc committee and all-male board of trustees, two community elders got into a fist fight over a Talmudic ruling that was only vaguely related to the case and broke an expensive Israeli-crafted lamp. The rabbi pleaded for a second chance.

  “Never! It’s too late,” screamed an otherwise docile pharmacist’s wife, brandishing her fist.

  The Rebbitzen Tayson broke down and was led sobbing from the room, and the meeting ended.

  The Tayson children did not escape the fray either, and were mocked and tormented daily by their schoolmates. Discipline at Derech Emet was in a shambles.

  At the end of its tether, the ad hoc committee agreed to seek the advice of the rabbinate at large. While the board of rabbis was in session, however, a group of militant parents, vowing to tear down the school brick by brick with their bare hands if Rabbi Tayson stayed on, pooled their funds, bought the storefront bingo parlor used weekly by the Derech Emet ladies’ auxiliary, and promptly prohibited “all forms of gambling.”

  The factions grew louder and the rifts wider. Overnight, friends were estranged, in some cases, transformed into bitter enemies—even to the point of walking out on one another during the Sabbath service memorial prayers for the dead.

  The petitioned Board of Rabbis—of which Rabbi Albert Joachim was then a member—decided on a compromise. Rabbi Tayson was to resume his duties as the school’s principal until a new rabbi was found to replace him. During that time, he would cede all pedagogical decisions to the Board of Trustees. Proper channels were to be established for the school’s building, financial, and hiring policies by an elected council of community leaders. A furor ensued the ruling. And more fist fights. Women were rumored to be spitting in each other’s faces at the Kosher live chicken market. The whole Orthodox Borough Park community appeared to be running amok.

  Impressed by the quiet strength he sensed in the man, Rabbi Tayson, without notifying anyone but his wife, privately sought Rabbi Joachim’s counsel. It was during that meeting in Rabbi Joachim’s cluttered office—before his practice of mystical Judaism became public—that the association between the two men was formed. In the case of Rabbi Tayson, it was less an association than it was an outpouring of gratitude and the pledge of a lifetime’s devotion. To Rabbi Joachim, the enlistment of his first American disciple signaled the unofficial opening of a new era for the age-old wisdom of the Kabbalah.

  On the advice of Rabbi Joachim (who in healing Rabbi Tayson’s wounded ego had presented him with the opportunity to rule the Yeshiva Rav Shimon bar Yohai as he chose), the man who had come to be known as “the dictator of Borough Park,” stepped down. The community was appeased, but only momentarily, for within a month of his departure, Rabbi Tayson was again at the center of controversy. This time, however, the charges could not be proven before a rabbinical court. It began with a series of morbid coincidences involving the rabbi’s most vociferous opponents and did not end until every last one of his accusers had been afflicted. The vice president of the now defunct ladies’ auxiliary set the spiral spinning when she lost her only son in a commuter train accident. The husband of the second-most prominent spokeswoman in the ad hoc committee lost his business and was forced to declare bankruptcy. The man next in line for Rabbi Tayson’s job developed cancer of the larynx, and so on, until even the minor characters in the drama had been stricken by misfortune. There were murmurings among the women about the “evil eye,” and some even took to wearing red thread bracelets against its malefic influence. In their sermons, the neighborhood rabbis warned their congregations against indulging in forbidden superstitious practices, specifically admonishing the women for resorting to amulets. The gentler sages spoke of the Almighty’s never-ending fund of compassion, while their fiery colleagues emphasized His judgment, but neither seemed to have any effect on their female congregants. Among the elderly women seated high up in the balcony rotundas of the synagogues or behind the screens separating them from the men, words like “plague” and “retribution” and even “witchcraft” were whispered. Many of the younger women, who in the past hadn’t paid much attention to the services, began to engage in serious prayer for the first time.

  Over an outdoor roast chicken picnic at Bear Mountain Park, the interim Board of Trustees, now composed entirely of members who’d had nothing to do with the Tayson affair, voted to put the Derech Emet yeshiva building up for sale, and to disband. As soon as the property was sold and transfe
rred (to a young, innocent, red-cheeked Catholic priest, it turned out) and the building converted to a church--in fact, on the very day that a cross replaced Rabbi Tayson’s weathercock on the roof--the neighborhood misfortunes ceased.

  EIGHT

  SHARON HAD LEARNED OF RABBI TAYSON’S unsavory past from Henry Novalis in hastily gathered bits and pieces. Rabbi Joachim had quickly put a stop to the gossip before she was able to get the whole story, but that hadn’t prevented information from filtering through; the Rav Shimon Bar Yohai yeshiva was already rife with rumors about Rabbi Joachim’s second-in-command when she’d enrolled Paulie. It was no secret that Rabbi Tayson’s students didn’t like him. Nor did his cold, disapproving manner endear him to the yeshiva staff. As far as she could tell, Rabbi Tayson had few followers outside of the small group of devotees who attended his Tuesday morning “Introduction to the Zohar” classes at the Center.

  Still, Sharon did not want to think badly of Rabbi Tayson, or of anyone else connected with the Center—which Rabbi Joachim had described to her as the physical embodiment of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, its descending branches representing levels of spiritual development. To reinforce his point, after expressing his disapproval of Henry Novalis and warning her to keep away from him, Rabbi Joachim had her type up and post an announcement on the front-hall bulletin board stating that students of the Kabbalah were to refrain from gossip. Particularly in her role as his secretary, he warned, Sharon had to be careful to hold herself above the chatter circulating around the Center. After that, not even her strong desire to befriend one of her classmates, the curious, lantern-jawed Sylvia Hersh, had pressed Sharon into revealing information about Rabbi Tayson to anyone. She had to work especially hard to avoid the continuous questioning of Blossom Shatz—a notorious yenta and major competitor for Rabbi Joachim’s attention—who, flaunting the Center’s rules, polished her fingernails bright red, and then, in misappropriated acts of repentance, made a show of ladling out tiny portions of pilaf and string beans for herself on meatless weekend meditation retreats at the Leon Berkowitz estate in the Catskills. If there was one thing Sharon had learned from the Tayson affair, it was that gossip, like the evil eye, inevitably came back to harm its source.

  Rabbi Joachim’s Center for Mystical Judaism had opened a new world for her, and she did not have the right, she felt, to pick at its flaws like some other members did. Yet, she wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that everything would be perfect once she’d joined. Institutions springing up around great religious leaders couldn’t be expected to reach the spiritual level of their founders. She subscribed to her teacher’s view of the Center as a series of descending and ascending branches of the cosmic Tree of Life, with Rabbi Joachim on the uppermost branch, and the other aspirants—including herself—located closer to the Earth in which it was rooted. With this image always in mind, she could forgive most of the petty transgression around her. Even the holier-than-thou smirk of Miss Axelrod, a children’s book illustrator who had drawn a perfect replica of the stages of consciousness as described by Rabbi Joachim in a recent lecture, eliciting his initial, but short-lived rush of praise. Sharon had put the chart away in a file cabinet at the Rabbi’s instructions.

  “Not really very accurate, do you think?” he’d said, scrutinizing the illustration at arm’s length and, as usual, not waiting for her to answer.

  Rabbi Joachim’s secretary could not allow herself to get sucked into the vortex of Center gossip, nor, in her hunger for friendship, could she allow the somber, lantern-jawed Mrs. Hersh to pump her for fiscal information or the voluptuous Blossom Shatz to sigh in her ear about “Albert’s sex appeal.” Though tempted at times to commiserate with these women, she remained aloof to their probing and innuendos, while at the same time, refusing to criticize them.

  “PLEASE SIT DOWN, MRS. BERG.” Greeting her from behind his desk, Rabbi Tayson addressed her formally as the mother of one of his yeshiva students rather than as Rabbi Joachim’s secretary. “So sorry I don’t have a more comfortable chair for you. We’re in the middle of our summer inventory, as you can see,” he pointed to a chair blocked by the disarray in her path: books piled high against an iron footlocker, prayer shawls, their tassels knotted beyond untying, a basketball, and an air pump.

  Sharon sat down in the dusty high-backed chair he’d pointed out to her.

  “Yes, I saw the men in the—”

  “What do you intend to do with the boy in the light of my report,” Rabbi Tayson interrupted before she could finish.

  Battling a surge of nausea, Sharon struggled to maintain her composure. She’d never been good at showing respect for Rabbi Joachim’s closest disciple, and his blunt assault caught her off guard. There was no getting around the arrogant picture he made sitting there in his funereal black suit and vest with that superior smile under his sly black mustache, his pudgy, soft hands forming a steeple against his ample belly. Avoiding the oily puddle of his glance and silently reiterating her pledge not to argue with him, she said naively, “What report?”

  A long, dagger-like shaft of sunlight fell against Rabbi Tayson’s left cheek. There was a slight flurry of movement on his side of the desk, a scraping of wheels, and an almost imperceptible shift in his position. Without getting up from his chair, he had turned to the window behind him and closed the blinds.

  This is it, Sharon thought. Now he’s got me dead to rights.

  “Did you know, Mrs. Berg, that your son Paul is being evaluated by a child psychologist at my recommendation?”

  She did not, but it was a rhetorical question, so she kept her peace and waited for Rabbi Tayson to continue.

  “Did you know that Paul likes to duck his friends’ heads in the toilet bowl of the boys’ bathroom?” The rabbi tapped his fingers steeple against his vest.

  So the interview was to take the form of her son’s catalog of horrors. Sharon leaned her head thoughtfully to one side.

  “Were you aware that he spits out the window at passersby during morning prayers? And that he has on numerous occasions left the schoolyard without permission in order to follow Catholic nuns down the street?”

  Sharon was not aware that there were any other kinds of nuns in Brooklyn.

  “As his mother,” the rabbi continued, “I’m sure you’ll be interested to know that he sometimes does not show up in school at all? And maybe you haven’t heard yet that he was fresh to Rabbi Joachim during the bimonthly school inspection?”

  “What did he say?” Sharon asked timidly.

  “He said, ‘I hate your guts,’” Rabbi Tayson said, leaving her openmouthed. “Fortunately, Rabbi Joachim is a tolerant man, especially with children.”

  “Yes, extremely tolerant,” Sharon murmured, looking down at a loose button on her dress. It was the sixth button down; she’d have to ask Pinnie to sew it back on for her, since she was planning to wear the dress to court on the nineteenth. She looked perky in that dress, it was shorter than most of her other clothes, a hand-me-down from Arleen. Junior would like it.

  Seeing her drift off, Rabbi Tayson homed in for the kill. “Showing that kind of disrespect toward our founder is a very serious offense, wouldn’t you agree, Mrs. Berg?”

  Sharon watched the basketball roll and come to a stop at the tip of Rabbi Tayson’s pointed black shoe. Or had she only imagined it?

  “I’ll have a talk with him.”

  “I already have.”

  “And?”

  “The situation, I’m afraid, is very grave, very grave indeed.” Unlike Rabbi Joachim, Rabbi Tayson did not roll his rs; they simply fell from his tongue like drops from a leaky faucet. “You are aware, of course, that it is only because of your unique position at the Center that I have gone to such lengths to keep Paul with us here. As it is”—the rabbi paused to touch his mustache—“at great cost to the yeshiva, in view of the waiver you are getting on his tuition, the virtually free summer day camp services—”

  There was a knock at the door. “Hello, yes?” the rabbi c
alled out.

  The door opened and one of the bearded men Sharon had seen stacking books in the store room stuck his head in.

  How convenient, Sharon thought. She didn’t doubt for a minute that Rabbi Tayson had planned this interruption. She had only to look at the man awkwardly standing in the doorway to get the picture.

  “Brendel, Fortzman, whatever your names are,” the rabbi said to them, “come here, I want to talk to you for a minute.” The group of bearded men entered. There was some deferential shuffling among them, with the tall sneezer stepping out in front of the short one.

  “Rabbi?” asked the tall man.

  “A lady is coming to see me this afternoon. One of you, make sure to knock on my door after fifteen minutes. I don’t want her to overstay her time and ruin my schedule. There’s too much work to finish around here.”

  A grunt from the tall bearded one was followed by a chorus of “Okay, Rabbi.” They paused, staring at Rabbi Tayson.

  “Yes?”

  “Rabbi, you told me to remind you,” said the tall man.

  “Thank you, Brendel, you can close the door now,” Rabbi Tayson said, dismissing the bearded men from the doorway and loudly clapping an open desk drawer shut. Then leaning forward with an expression of feigned sympathy, he said, “I’m sure you understand my position. After all, Mrs. Berg, considering your own involvement with the Center—ahem, pardon me.” The rabbi coughed a raspy little cough, covering his mouth with one hand and withdrawing it again, “I’m sure you comprehend the difficulties.”

  What was he up to? Where did he think he was taking her?

  Thinking fast, Sharon pulled a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “I fully understand your predicament, I really do. In fact, I only came here today to tell you—I came to tell you that I’ve thought it all out and I’ve decided that it would be better for everyone involved if I sent Paulie back to a public school in my neighborhood. In fact, he’s already been enrolled by his father,” she lied, pretending to blow her nose.