I don’t have to remind you—you’re a journalist, you’re an educated man—what Solomon says in Proverbs about women: a good one, he says, has got to cost you a lot more in the end than pearls. And still, someone in the family has to think about money and the boys getting brides. That’s the second point. The first point is that I’m a human being and a Jew, two different things maybe, and I’ve got the right to speak for all human beings and for all Jews.
On top of that, I’m a Jewish father with three full-grown sons here on Venus, and if you want to do an injury to your worst enemy, you say to him, “Listen. You’re Jewish? You got three sons? Go to Venus.”
And that’s the third point. Why I, Milchik the TV man, am telling you this, and why you come all the way from Earth just to listen to me. Because I’m not only a Jewish father, but I’m also—Listen. Could I ask you a question? You won’t be offended? You sure you won’t be offended?
You’re not Jewish, by any chance? I mean, do you have any Jewish ancestors, a grandfather, a great-grandmother maybe? Are you sure? Well, that’s what I mean. Maybe one of your ancestors changed his name back in 2533—2533 by your calendar, of course. It’s not exactly that you look Jewish or anything like that, it’s just that you’re such an intelligent man and you ask such intelligent questions. I couldn’t help wondering—
You like Jewish food? In twenty, twenty-five minutes my poor old tired module will pull us out of this orange dust and into the Darjeeling air lock. Then you’ll sit down to a Jewish meal, believe me, you’ll kiss every one of your fingers. We get almost all of our Jewish food shipped here from Earth, special packaging and special arrangement. And, naturally, special cost. My wife Sylvia makes a dish, they come from all over our level just to taste: chopped reconstituted herring. It’s an appetizer and we like appetizers in our family. So what I’ve been telling you, after all, is only an appetizer. I have to get you in exactly the right mood for the main dish, the big story you came for.
Sylvia makes all the food we eat in the shul—our synagogue. You know, the hamantashen, all that. She even prepares the formal Saturday morning breakfast, the bagels and lox and cream cheese that all the men must eat before they say their Sabbath prayers. We’re all orthodox here and we practice the Levittown rite. Our rabbi, Joseph Smallman, is superorthodox Levittown: he wears a yarmulka, and on top of the yarmulka a black homburg which has been passed down from father to son in his family for I don’t know how many centuries.
Oh, look how you’re smiling! You know I’ve moved from the appetizer to the main dish. Rabbi Joseph Smallman. It’s only Venus, and it’s maybe the seventh or eighth Darjeeling burrow listed on the map, but have we got ourselves a rabbi! To us he’s an Akiba, a Rambam.
More than that. You know what we call him when we’re alone, among ourselves? We call him the Great Rabbi of Venus.
Now you’re laughing out loud. No, don’t apologize: I heard a chuckle come out of you, like a belch, you should excuse the expression, after a big dinner.
This Milchik the TV man, you’re saying to yourself, he and his neighbors in the burrow they come to maybe seventy or eighty Jewish families, they’re making a living, with God’s help, out of the holes in each other’s pockets—and their rabbi is the Great Rabbi of Venus? The littlest hole in the ground claims the biggest fire?
It’s impossible, maybe? Is anything impossible to the Most High, blessed be His Name? After all, as the Sages tell us, “The last shall be first.” Just don’t ask me, please, which Sages.
Why is he the Great Rabbi? Well, first of all, why shouldn’t Rabbi Smallman be a Great Rabbi? He needs a certificate from the Great Rabbi Licensing Bureau? You have to graduate from the Great Rabbi Special Yeshiva to become a Great Rabbi? That’s first of all: you’re a Great Rabbi because you act like a Great Rabbi, you’re recognized like a Great Rabbi, you make decisions like a Great Rabbi. And you must have heard something of how he acted and how he decided when all the Jews in the universe held a congress right here on Venus. If you hadn’t heard, you wouldn’t have come all the way from Earth for this interview.
Other people had heard, too. They’d heard of his piety, learning, and wisdom—of his modesty, of course, I say nothing—long before the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference on Venus. People heard and people talked, and they came from as far away as the Gus Grissom Burrow to ask him for rabbinical decisions.
You’ve got the time to listen to just one example? Sure you’ve got the time: you’re driving through a heavy dust storm in a module that’s coughing its guts out, a module that knows Milchik the TV man gives it the best of everything—charged-up power cells, a brand-new fan belt—even if it means that he can’t afford to put food on his own table. For Milchik, the module will keep going no matter what, when by itself it would ask for nothing better than to lie down and die in comfort. And the module also likes to listen to Milchik expounding Halacha, the holy rules and laws.
About five years ago, something terrible happened on the eve of the Passover. There was an explosion aboard a cargo ship on its way to Venus. No one was hurt, but the cargo was damaged and the ship arrived very late, just a couple of hours before the first seder was to begin. Now on this ship was all the special Passover food that had been ordered from Earth by the twenty-four Jewish families of the Altoona Burrow, and the special food was in cans and airtight packages. When the delivery was made, the Altoona people noticed that the cans had been banged about and dented—but, worse than that, most of the cans had tiny holes all over them. Disaster! According to the Rabbinical Council of 2135 on Space Travel Kashruth, food which is in a punctured can is automatically unclean, unclean for daily use, unclean for Passover use. And here it is almost the seder and what can they do?
These are not rich people: they don’t have reserves, they don’t have alternatives, they don’t even have their own rabbi. If it’s a matter of life and death, all right, anything goes; but it isn’t life and death, all it means is that they’ll have to eat humetz, non-Passover food, they won’t be able to celebrate the seder. And a Jew who can’t celebrate the Deliverance from Egypt with matzo, with bitter herb, with charoseth, with Passover wine, such a Jew is like a bride without a wedding canopy, like a synagogue without a Torah scroll.
The Altoona Burrow is connected to the Darjeeling Burrow; it’s a suburb of ours. That’s what I said—a suburb. Listen, I know we’re a small place, but where is it written that small places, no matter how small, are not entitled to suburbs? If Grissom can have fourteen suburbs, we can have two. So naturally the Altoona people, white-faced, worried, their mouths opening and closing with aggravation, brought the problem to our Rabbi Joseph Smallman. Nothing was leaking from the cans, they said, but the result of the one test they had conducted was bad: as recommended by the Rabbinical Council of 2135, they had taken a hair from somebody’s head and poked it into a hole in a can—and the hair had not visibly curled back out. Did that mean that all the expensive food shipped across space had to be condemned, no seders in the Altoona Burrow?
Well, of course that’s what it meant—or would have meant to an ordinary rabbi. Rabbi Smallman looked at them and looked at them, and he scratched the pimple on the right side of his nose. He’s a pretty good-looking man, Rabbi Smallman, strong and chunky with a face like a young Ben-Gurion, but he does always seem to have a big red pimple on the side of his nose. Then he got up and went to his bookcase and took out half a dozen volumes of Talmud and the last three volumes of the Proceedings of the Rabbinical Council on Space Travel. And he looked in each book at least once, and he sat and thought for a long time after each passage. Finally he asked a question: “Which hair did you use and from whose head?”
They showed him the hair, a fine, white hair from the head of the oldest great-grandfather in the Altoona Burrow, a hair as thin and as delicate as a baby’s first sigh. “So this hair did not curl back,” he said, “from a hole in that particular can. So much for your test with a hair of your selection. Now for my test with a h
air of my selection.” And he called over my oldest boy, Aaron David, and told him to pluck out a hair.
You’re not blind, you can see my hair, even at my age, how heavy and coarse it is. And believe me, it’s thinning out, it’s nothing to what it was. My boy, Aaron David, he has the traditional hair of our family, each one twice, three times as thick as a normal hair, his head always going up into a black explosion. When he comes with me, as helper on a job, the customer usually says something like, “With a head of hair like that, what for do you need to carry around coaxial cable?” I say to them: “Bite your tongue. Maybe Haman or Hitler would have used his hair for coaxial cable, or that unholy pair, Sebastian Pombal and Juan Crevea, they also liked to take our heads as raw material in their terrible factories, but don’t you talk like that in the year 2859 to a Jewish father about his Jewish son.” The Eternal, blessed be He, may demand my son of me, but to nobody else will I be an Abraham who doesn’t defend his Isaac. You know what I mean?
So when Rabbi Smallman picks up a dented can and pokes Aaron David’s hair at a hole, the hair comes back right away like a piece of bent wire. What else? And when he tries it with another can, again the hair won’t go in. So Rabbi Smallman points to the first can they brought him, the one they tested with the old man’s hair, and he says, “I declare the food in this can unfit and unclean. But these others,” and he waves his hand at the rest of the shipment, “are perfectly acceptable. Carry them home and enjoy your seder.”
They crowd around him with tears in their eyes and they thank him and they thank him. Then they gather the cans together and they hurry back to their burrow—it’s getting late and it’s time to begin the search for the last bits of humetz that you have to do before you can turn to the Pesadikeh food. The Altoona people rush out, in a few minutes, I tell you, it was as it says in the Second book of the Holocaust: “There was none left, not one.”
You understand, I hope, wherein lies the greatness of this decision? Jews from all over Venus discussed it and everyone, everywhere, marveled. No. I’m sorry, you’re wrong: the greatness did not lie merely in a decision that made it possible for some poor Jews to enjoy their own Passover seders in their own homes. That’s based on a simple precept—that it’s better to have a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew. Try again. No, that’s not right either: using a thick hair from my son’s head was not especially brilliant—under those particular circumstances, any really good rabbi would have done the same. For that you don’t have to be a Hillel already; you just have to avoid being a literal-minded Shammai. The point still eludes you, right? Goyische kop!
My apologies. I didn’t mean to speak in a language you don’t know. What did I say? It was just a simple comment about, well, how some people are intended to be students of Talmud, and other people are not intended to be students of Talmud. It’s kind of like an old saying amongst us.
Sure I’ll explain. Why great? In the first place. Almost any decent rabbi would have seen the importance of that food being found fit and clean. And in the second place. A good rabbi, a first-class rabbi, would have found a way to do it, a hair from my son, a this, a that, anything. But, in the third place, only a truly great rabbi would have examined that many books and thought that long and hard about the matter before he announced his decision. How could they really enjoy the seder unless they had perfect confidence in his decision? And how could they have perfect confidence unless they had seen him wrestle with it through nine separate volumes? Now do you see why we called him the Great Rabbi of Venus, even five years before the Neozionist Congress and the great Bulba scandal?
Now I didn’t go so far in Talmudic study myself—a man has a family to support, and closed-circuit TV repair on a planet like Venus doesn’t exactly help your mind in clearing up the problems of Gemara. But whenever I think of what our congregation here has in Rabbi Smallman, I think of how the Sages begin their argument: “A man finds a treasure …”
You shouldn’t get the impression, please, that a treasure is a treasure to everyone. Almost all the Jews on Venus are Ashkenazim—people whose ancestors emigrated from Eastern Europe to America before the Holocaust and who didn’t return to Israel after the Ingathering—but there are at least three kinds of Ashkenazim, and only our kind, the Levittown Ashkenazim, call Rabbi Smallman the Great Rabbi of Venus. The Williamsburg Ashkenazim, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us, the black-gabardined Ashkenazim who shake and pray and shake and pray, they call Rabbi Smallman the lox-and-bagels rabbi. And on the other hand, the Miami Ashkenazim, the rich all-rightniks who live in the big IBM Burrow, to them a rabbi is a girl who hasn’t yet gotten married and is trying to do something intellectual with herself. It’s said that the Williamsburg Ashkenazim believe in miracle-working, that the Levittown Ashkenazim believe it’s a miracle when they find work, and that the Miami Ashkenazim don’t believe in miracles and don’t believe in work, they only believe in the import-export business.
I can see you’re remembering I said before that I was through with the appetizer and ready to serve the main dish, the story you came for. And where, in all that I’ve just been telling you, is the main dish, you want to know? Listen, relax a little. Figure it this way: first I gave you an appetizer, then, after that, for the last few minutes, you’ve been having a soup course. You’re through with the soup? Fine. Now we bring out the main dish.
Only—just a second more. There’s something else you have to have first. Call it a salad. Look, it’s a very small piece of salad. You’ll be finished with it in no time. Now please. You’re not the cook; you’re only a customer. You want a story that’s like a sandwich? Go someplace else. Milchik serves only complete meals.
That night, after the seder, I’m sitting on a bench outside our apartment in the Darjeeling Burrow. To me, this is always the best time. It’s quiet, most people have gone to bed, and the corridor doesn’t smell from crowds. All through the corridors, the lights are being turned down to half their wattage. That’s to let us know it’s night on Earth. Exactly where it’s night on Earth, what part of Earth, I have no idea. Darjeeling, maybe.
As I sit thinking, Aaron David comes out of the apartment and sits down near me on the bench. “Papa,” he says after a while. “That was a great thing Rabbi Smallman did today.” I nod, sure, certainly it was a great thing. Aaron David puts his hand up to the part of his head where he pulled the single hair out. He holds his hand tight against the spot and looks across the corridor. “Before this,” he says, “I just wanted, but now I more than want. I’m going to be a rabbi.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Me, I’m going to be the Viceroy of Venus.”
“I’m serious, Papa. I’m really serious.”
“I’m joking? I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll one day be appointed by the Council of Eleven Nations Terrestrial, and the Presidents of Titan and Ganymede? I’d do a worse job than that hooligan we got right now, his heart should only explode inside his chest? All right,” I say to him, “all right,” because now he turns and looks at me, with his eyes that are Sylvia’s eyes, and eyes like that, let me tell you, can look. “So you want to be a rabbi. What good is the wanting? Anything you want that I can give, I’ll give. You know I have that little insulated screwdriver, the blue one, that was made in Israel over five hundred years ago, when Israel was still a Jewish state. That precious little screwdriver, it’s like the bones of my right hand, that I’ll give you if you ask for it. But I can’t give you tuition money for a yeshiva, and more important, I can’t even find the transportation money for a bride. A tradition, now, it’s hundreds of years old, ever since the Jews began emigrating into space, and a Levittown bride must come from another planet—and it’s not only you, it’s also your two brothers. A rational creature, boychik, has to worry in an organized way. First the bride money, then we talk about yeshiva money.”
Aaron David is close to crying. “If only—if—” He bites his lip.
“If—,” I say. “If—You know w
hat we say about if. If your grandmother would have had testicles, she’d have been your grandfather. Consider the problem: if you want to be a rabbi, especially a Levittown rabbi, you have to know three ancient languages even before you begin; you have to know Hebrew, you have to know Aramaic, you have to know Yiddish. So I’ll tell you what. If. If you can learn enough beforehand, maybe if the miracle ever happens and we can send you to a yeshiva, you can go through faster than usual, rapid-advance, before the whole family goes bankrupt. If Rabbi Smallman, for example, gives you lessons.”
“He’ll do that,” he says excitedly. “He’s doing it already!”
“No, I’m not talking about just lessons. I’m talking about lessons. The kind you have to pay for. He’ll teach you one day after supper, and I’ll review with you the next day after supper. That way I’ll learn too, I won’t be such an ignoramus. You know what the Sages say about studying Talmud: ‘Get thee a comrade …’ You’ll be my comrade, and I’ll be your comrade, and Rabbi Smallman will be both our comrade. And we’ll explain to your mother, when she screams at us, that we’re getting a bargain, two for one, a special.”
So that’s what we did. To make the extra money, I started hauling cargo from the spaceport in my module—you notice it drives now as if it’s got a hernia? And I got Aaron David a part-time job down on the eighteenth level, in the boiler room. I figured if Hillel could almost freeze to death on that roof in order to become a scholar, it’s no tragedy if my son cooks himself a little bit for the same reason.
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