by Deen, Shulem
“Nu, gei shoin!” the attendant shoved my arm when I hesitated at the door. “Go already.” There was no time to be awed; others were waiting. Berish stood off to the side as I handed the rebbe the kvittel and watched as he read it: Shulem Aryeh the son of Bracha. For blessings and redemptions.
Berish stepped closer and told the rebbe why I had come: a girl was proposed, and I was here to seek the rebbe’s advice. The rebbe looked at me for a moment, and then, with a flash of recognition, grew animated.
“Ah, yes, yes, yes. Of course!” He’d been consulted about it by the other side, he said. “A good match, a wonderful match. Yes, yes. Wonderful, isn’t it?” The rebbe smiled, his eyes twinkling, crinkling along the edges.
“He isn’t sure,” Berish said softly. “He has some doubts, some questions about it.”
The rebbe regarded me from above his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and raised his bushy eyebrows with a look of surprise. “Questions?” he asked. “What kinds of questions?”
What were my questions? Here I stood in front of the righteous foundation of the world, who was asking me to tell him why I might not desire a match that he had already declared “wonderful.” I looked from the rebbe’s inquiring eyes to the heavy brocade tablecloth to the piles of kvitlech, but the words did not come. It was then that I realized, I didn’t have questions, not really.
I just didn’t want this match.
I knew in my heart that it was not the right one, that the things that were not said about Gitty Goldstein were as significant as those that were, and that I was unlikely to hear anything that would change that. Perhaps I had been hoping that the rebbe would tell me something new and delightful about this match, but what I really wanted was permission to refuse it. I wanted the rebbe to say that if I did not want it, it was OK, that something better would come along and that saying no was not shameful, or cruel, even as I knew that Gitty Goldstein was at that moment anxiously awaiting word from the matchmaker. I wanted the rebbe to tell me that I did not need a reason to say no but a reason to say yes. But the rebbe had already declared the match wonderful; one did not tell the rebbe what one wanted to hear. One listened, and accepted.
The rebbe waited with raised eyebrows, then looked back at the kvittel in his hand, then back to me. Finally, he spoke: “Chaim Goldstein is a very fine man with a very fine family.” And, the rebbe added, he had heard very good things about the keren. “The keren is a good keren,” the rebbe said.
Keren is the principal sum in a financial investment, and it took me a moment to grasp what he meant. But of course, the rebbe would not say “girl,” a word so blatantly feminine that to speak it was improper. Instead, the girl was the keren, the principal. This investment, the rebbe was saying, was a good investment.
“It’s a good thing, this keren,” the rebbe said again, and waved his hand with a sweeping, exuberant motion. “A good keren. A fine keren. Eh. Nothing to worry about.”
He reached for my hand with his fingertips. “May the one above bestow you with good graces. May the match be concluded favorably.”
Several days later, I sat in the backseat of a car, on the way to the home in which my bride and I were to meet. It was early December, the third night of Chanukah, and a snowstorm had come early that year. Snowdrifts were piled along the side of the road, and I watched as children sledded down a driveway on Lincoln Avenue.
“Nervous?” Berish asked from the front passenger seat.
I shrugged, avoiding his gaze. I was not nervous, not in the way that he meant it. I had been told they wanted me. I was not concerned about being rejected.
The car pulled over to the curb. The front door of the house was slightly ajar, and through a thin curtain I saw people milling about inside. My mother, in the foyer when I entered, looked at me with what looked like forced cheer.
“She’s a lovely girl,” she said, smiling.
There was a hint of sadness in her voice, as if she sensed the heaviness I felt, but she, too, knew that refusing the match was no longer an option. The rebbe had given his blessing. There was nothing left to say.
Chaim Goldstein appeared from one of the back rooms. He smiled and shook my hand, and then he and Berish led me into the dining room, with my mother following behind.
The girl, my future bride, stood at the far side of the table, next to her mother. Her hair was short and curly, dirty blond. Her clothes were simple, a long pleated skirt, a V-neck button-down sweater over a white blouse and ruffled collar. She looked away as I entered, and only after a moment did she let her eye wander toward me, offering a stiff smile, then looking away quickly.
Our elders left the room, and Gitty and I sat down on opposite sides of the table. For the past five years, all conversation with girls had been forbidden, and it felt odd being in a room alone with a girl, vaguely inappropriate. I had been told that it was my role to initiate conversation, but the strangeness of the circumstances left me bewildered. For a full minute, I could not think of a single thing to say.
“Smile from ear to ear,” a friend had said to me earlier that evening. I had confided that I was having my beshow that night, and I needed some tips. “Smile from ear to ear. The whole time. You must show her you’re happy to be there.”
“The whole time?”
“From ear to ear, the whole time.” He was certain of it.
I wasn’t sure what to make of his advice. Smiling from ear to ear would require an unnatural stiffening of the facial muscles, which would be impossible to maintain for the full fifteen minutes of our meeting. Also, it would make me appear insincere. Yet it was all the advice my friend had to offer. He’d used it himself, he said, and he could vouch for its success. When I asked for topics of conversation, he said, “Talk about anything.” But what does one talk about to a girl who has never studied Talmud, never attended a rebbe’s tisch—whose life, in fact, seemed so far removed from mine that we could not possibly have anything in common? My friend didn’t know, he wasn’t sure, he no longer remembered, really, his own meeting was so many months ago. Anyway, he said, in his case, the girl did most of the talking.
Gitty, however, was not doing much talking at all. Fumbling for conversation topics, I finally asked about matters I already knew: whether she was still in school, how many siblings she had, whether she wanted to remain living in the village after our wedding. No, she shook her head, she’d already graduated some months earlier. Eleven siblings, she mouthed in a barely audible whisper. Yes, she nodded, she wanted to remain living here. I offered a few remarks about myself. I said that I hoped to continue my studies after we married, at least for a couple of years. She nodded in response. It was a given. Two years of study was mandatory for all married men in the village.
She kept her eyes downcast at the table in front of her. When she glanced at me at one point, I quickly flashed the ear-to-ear smile my friend had advised, and she returned it stiffly. I thought she might offer a few questions or remarks of her own, but she seemed to have none. Soon I ran out of questions, and we sat in silence until Chaim Goldstein entered the room.
“Are you done?” he asked.
It wasn’t a question. Clearly, we were done. I had imagined a fifteen-minute meeting, but this couldn’t have been more than seven minutes. I was relieved it was over.
We rode to the rebbe’s home, a short distance away, Gitty and I in separate cars. A few close friends and relatives milled about and greeted me cheerfully. They had been notified already, and they seemed happy for me. The rebbe’s attendant smiled, too, his usual gruff manner set aside for this joyous occasion, a new engagement.
The men entered first and the women followed, while the rebbe smiled and waved his hand in a gesture of joy. The men gathered around the table, clearing a space so that the rebbe had a view of the bride, who stood among the women against the far wall.
The attendant closed the door.
“Mazel tov, mazel tov!” the rebbe said. “May it be a steadfast union. May you merit lasting seed to br
ing forth upstanding and blessed generations.”
The engagement was final, the rebbe’s blessing like a judge’s gavel.
The attendant placed a small tray of chocolate pound cake in front of the rebbe, and the men lined up to receive their portions from the rebbe’s hand while the women watched from the edge of the room. The men sipped from small cups of wine and lined up for blessings of l’chaim, “to life.” As the person of honor, I was first, and the rebbe held my fingertips for a long moment, mumbling a blessing, the same one he had mumbled to thousands of grooms before me. It felt cold and impersonal, the rebbe’s eyes shifty and restless as they searched for and then lingered on my bride, as if to include her from afar. I told myself that this was what I truly wanted. The rebbe had approved of the match. I told myself that I was pleased with it, that I must be pleased, because clearly the rebbe was pleased. I told myself what we, the rebbe’s followers, always told one another: The rebbe cares about us more than we do ourselves. Our joyous occasions bring him more joy; our sad occasions, more sorrow. I believed this, had repeated it to myself countless times, and had made myself believe this. I knew it must be so.
Chapter Three
The first time I saw the rebbe, I knew little about him. I was thirteen years old, a student at the Skverer yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when I was told: “The rebbe is coming.” I responded with a shrug, and watched, amused, as a frenzy of anticipation took hold among students and staff. Broken table legs in the study hall were frantically repaired. Floors were cleaned and waxed. Guatemalan day laborers worked overtime to replace the wainscot paneling in the hallways and repaint the lecture rooms. We were instructed to scrub our dorm rooms clean. Even the bathroom stalls were cleared of graffiti: Reb Moshe Lazer is a chazzer. Touching your bris is worse than smoking.
I had enrolled at the yeshiva not as a follower of the rebbe, like most students, but because the Skverers didn’t ask too many questions, and I needed a yeshiva in which few questions were asked. While most of my elementary school friends had sought Talmud academies with reputations for producing impressive young scholars, my own goals were less lofty. I had heard of the entrance exams at the more prestigious institutions, hour-long oral exams covering many pages of Talmud along with their major commentaries, and the tales inspired dread in me. The summer after my bar mitzvah, after my friend Chaim Elya told me that the Skverers were in need of students for their modest-size Williamsburg yeshiva and that they weren’t very selective and administered no entrance exam, I told my parents that I wanted to study with the Skverers. My father looked doubtful, curious about my uncharacteristic initiative; but ultimately, he was pleased. “They’re ehrlich people, the Skverers,” he said. Ehrlich. Pious. Good Jews.
But the Skverers and their ways were strange to me. I had spent my childhood mostly among the Satmars. The Satmars, too, had a rebbe, but I’d seen and heard little of him. My Satmar schoolteachers rarely spoke of him. My father embraced the teachings of the previous Satmar rebbe, the firebrand Reb Yoel, who died in 1979, but never visited his successor.
“Ah! The rebbes of old!” my teachers would exclaim, and from them I learned that modern-day rebbes were only quaint relics of a once-glorious era. There was a time back in the old country, in the towns and villages that speckled Russia’s Pale of Settlement and the mountains of Carpathia, when a rebbe could make an anti-Semitic landowner perish in a freak accident, make a childless couple bear children well into old age, gaze into the eyes of his followers and see every one of their deeds, good or bad, past and future. But times had changed, it was understood.
There were rumored exceptions. Reb Yankele from Antwerp, people said, performed miracles so great and so frequent, they were near daily occurrences. There was talk of the Tosher, near Montreal, who was good for marriage blessings—it was his specialty, they said. But these rebbes and their Hasidim were not in Brooklyn, and so they didn’t seem quite real to me.
Now, observing the Skverers as they prepared for the rebbe’s visit, it was clear that they thought their present-day rebbe to be of equal stature to the great rebbes of old, and all I could do was scoff inwardly.
“Did you see your name on the lottery list?” Chaim Elya asked one day. Anticipation was mounting as the rebbe’s visit drew near.
“What lottery list?”
“The lottery for the rebbe’s visit,” he said. “The lottery for who gets to do what. You won Psalms.”
As I was to learn, a lottery had been held in which all students were entered for the privilege of serving one of the rebbe’s needs: opening the doors to the rebbe’s shiny black Cadillac on his arrival, holding his sterling-silver pitcher and washbasin, pulling out his chair when he stood or sat. It seemed as if the rebbe did not move an inch or raise a finger without a predetermined set of assisting maneuvers. I won the privilege of handing the rebbe my book of Psalms, from which he would recite five chapters at the end of morning prayers.
At first, I was indifferent. Sure, I thought, the rebbe could use my Psalms if he wanted to, although it was just the same to me if he didn’t.
“Can I see your Psalms?” a classmate asked the next day.
Several students gathered around as I withdrew the modest faux leather-bound volume—a bar mitzvah gift from a family friend—from my navy-blue velvet tefillin pouch. My friends leaned in to examine it, but with one quick glance at its puny ordinariness, they shook their heads. It was not the right kind, they said.
“What’s the right kind?”
“The rebbe uses only a Shloh prayer book.”
The Shloh prayer book was a special prayer book for the mystics and the ultra-pious, filled with kabbalistic commentary in the margins. Because the rebbe used one, most self-respecting Skverer Hasidim used one, too. I, of course, did not.
One of my classmates pulled me aside. “I’d be happy to exchange privileges.”
“What’d you get?”
He bit his lip. “Holding the towel after tefillin—but the rebbe can’t use your Psalms anyway.”
Chaim Elya, my source for all things Skver, explained it to me: “When you hold the towel,” he said, “the rebbe wipes his hands, and that’s it. The towel is still the rebbe’s. But with Psalms, it’s your Psalms. You make a note inside that the rebbe used it. You get to keep it for life.”
Other students, too, offered to exchange privileges, always making sure to emphasize that the rebbe couldn’t use my Psalms anyway, and so I’d best take what they offered or I would end up with nothing.
Suddenly, my indifference was gone. I had won the privilege fairly. I approached the dean, Reb Chezkel, to ask if my Psalms was good enough for the rebbe, and he waved his hand to dismiss the critics. “Your Psalms is fine. The rebbe won’t care.”
Still, some of the students would not let the matter rest. “You’re not even a Skverer Hasid,” one argued, “What does it matter to you?”
One student offered me ten dollars in exchange for the privilege, and for a moment I wondered whether I might capitalize on the affair, sell it to the highest bidder. I thought of the chocolate Danishes at the corner grocery store, the shelves of Yiddish books at the Judaica shop on Bedford Avenue, the hot dogs turning in the window of Landau’s delicatessen on Lee Avenue. But selling the Psalms privilege would be unseemly, an insult to the rebbe. Besides, now it all seemed like a pretty big deal. I was keeping my privilege.
I stood with the rest of the student body, lined up in the study hall waiting for the rebbe to appear. The door opened slowly from the outside.
“Shh, shh,” the crowd hushed.
An elderly man with a salt-and-pepper beard and bulbous nose, looking both morose and self-important, appeared, and it took me a moment to realize that he was not the rebbe but his attendant. He began brushing away imaginary specks of dirt on the floor with the tip of his shoe and shoving aside students whose elbows stuck too far into the cleared path. Several paces behind him came a stout man with a reddish beard gone slightly gray, his brow wrinkle
d, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead, his eyebrows narrowed into an insistent scowl. This, evidently, was the great man himself: His Honorable Holiness, Our Master, Our Teacher, Our Rabbi, the Righteous Foundation of the World, the Rebbe of Skvyra, May He Live Many Good and Long Days.
He did not look like a rebbe. He did not look regal, he did not look scholarly, he did not look rebbish. His beard was not white, and not nearly long enough—fist-length, at most. He did not sport long flowing white sidelocks but small reddish ones, and he kept them tied in a small knot in front of his ears. I had always thought rebbes were supposed to have a languid air, eyes downward or lightly closed or rolled upward, otherworldy. But this rebbe’s eyes looked shrewd and present. When he walked, his head pointed forward, but his dark eyes, under thick, slanted eyebrows, shifted with alertness. He said not a word and made no unexpected gestures, and yet, his presence in the room was thick; I felt it in the utter silence, in the unblinking, staring eyes and the bated breath of all around me. The rebbe approached the special lectern prepared for him, then whipped his densely woven prayer shawl out of its cowhide pouch and flung it in one sweeping motion over his head and torso, sending a gentle breeze over our sweaty foreheads.
Prayer began moments later. We stood in a tight semicircle around the rebbe, whose face was obscured, only the bulk of his large, swaying body visible from behind. A handful of burly students were stationed in the front row, creating a force field of empty space around the rebbe while behind them the rest us elbowed for a better spot.
He who makes peace among the heavens, may He make peace among us. The prayer leader called out the last verses of kaddish, and I readied myself with my little Psalms.
With the last chorus of “Amen,” I pushed my way through the tight semicircle and approached the rebbe. My hands trembled as I laid the book on the lectern and watched as the rebbe’s thick hands reached for it. From behind the folds of his tallis, his eyes met mine for a quick second, piercing me with their silent scrutiny. I took several steps backward and watched as he glanced at the volume, flipped the front cover, and read my gold-embossed name. For a moment I held my breath, waiting for the rebbe to turn and say that it was not the right kind. Instead, he glanced once again in my direction, and I saw a hint of a smile, as if an acknowledgment of my boldness in offering a volume so ordinary. I felt a flutter of victory.