by Steve Stern
2001.
On his way to see the rebbe, Bernie Karp observed the elongated shadow (his own) that preceded him along the dappled sidewalk. He’d transferred to a crosstown bus in order to reach a neighborhood on the city’s southern periphery, which was not unlike the one he lived in, a recent subdivision of overblown houses in a medley of architectural styles, none distinctive enough to allow the eyes any real purchase on the past. The streets were bordered by mulberrys and forsythias, oaks and elms in their scrawny infancy, peppered by fusillades from sprinkler jets. Approaching Rabbi ben Zephyr’s New House of Enlightenment, Bernie noted that his shadow was becoming shorter, and his feet, as he proceeded, seemed to have advanced from the shadow’s base to its knees. Then he stepped over the waist, chest, and shoulders, trod upon the head, and walked away from the shadow—which, when the boy turned around, was no longer there. Grown accustomed to the uncanny over the past few months, Bernie said to himself, “Easy come, easy go.”
These days the physical world was forever inviting incursions from zones that did not always conform to the laws of cause and effect. Such phenomena, he suspected, owed something to the influence of Lou Ella Tuohy, whose ministrations helped to integrate Olam haBa, the beyond, into Olam haZeh, the here and now. Her presence in his life was an assurance that, when he returned from his mystic adventures, some of the sights still clung like thistledown to his brain. As a consequence, Bernie found that his affection for Lou was often indistinguishable from his affection for Creation itself. There was sorrow in this loss of a particular focus, of the tension between his desire to ascend to celestial heights and his longing to be near the girl.
“You make it too easy for me to leave you,” he complained, if only because Lou Ella herself was so uncomplaining. Not only did she lend a literal hand in facilitating his spiritual leave-takings, but she patiently guarded his physical well-being when his spirit was not in residence, and welcomed him home again as a hero.
The girl, who had recently dyed her hair the green of pure Mercuro-chrome, thought this over. “It’s the truth,” she agreed without acrimony. “I’m an enabler of the most selfishest smuck in the world.”
“It’s shmuck,” corrected Bernie, apologizing once again for having returned empty-handed from his sorties into hidden dimensions.
Meanwhile, although the old man was virtually AWOL from Bernie’s life, the boy still regarded Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr as the progenitor of his expanded consciousness, a figure of unimpeachable authority. This despite the monkeyshines allegedly taking place within the confines of his New House of Enlightenment. For Rabbi ben Zephyr and his popular spiritual center had become something of a lightning rod for media attention in the Bluff City. Having hosted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the martyrdom of a black messiah, the city of Memphis was no stranger to controversy, but the antics of the unfrozen holy man had drawn the interest of a populace divided on the subject of his authenticity. Those who weren’t among the growing numbers that attended his instruction and meditation sessions were inclined to denounce him as a charlatan and imposter. It was an accusation that might have been viewed as a species of old-school anti-Semitism had not so many Jewish institutions lent their voices to the chorus of disapproval. In fact, the synagogues were more vocal than most in their righteous hostility. But if anything, controversy added spice to the rabbi’s ministry and heightened the profile of his media campaign. Commercials advertising the House of Enlightenment’s promise of the cosmos on demand were frequently broadcast on local radio and TV. Billboards featured the hoary head of Rabbi ben Zephyr in a coonskin shtreimel, declaring, “Feel good in yourself is the whole of the law,” and an Internet website posted a menu of New House programs.
It was sobering to consider how meteorically the old man had risen from his inauspicious beginnings in the Karp family rec room; but while Bernie attributed to the rabbi’s influence his own transformation from slug to apprentice adept, he also reserved the right to believe that the indebtedness was mutual: The rabbi owed him something for having attended at his reawakening. After all, it was he who had introduced the rabbi to the New World, easing his acclimation via TV shows such as Few Are Chosen (in which wealthy teens anguished over maxed-out credit cards) and America’s Funniest Videos (in which kids were caught on camera interfering with their pets). With this debt in mind, Bernie had set off once again to seek an audience with the rebbe, for the sake of asking him questions he’d yet to formulate.
He’d given up on the idea of studying for bar mitzvah with the Boibiczer Prodigy, not that he considered himself above the Law; no one was above the Law. But while he continued his delving into sacred texts, Bernie confessed to Lou that for him ritual was not an imperative. He tried in his daily life to keep the commandments according to the Shulchan Arukh, but while not averse to structuring his days along the lines of strict observance, the varieties of experience available to him tended to steer the boy in a less doctrinaire direction. The letter of the Law, he admitted, was sometimes superseded by its mercurial Spirit. But because his inconstancy (as Lou Ella saw it) did occasionally weigh on him, it remained unclear to Bernie exactly where responsibility lay. Surely the rebbe would have something to say on this score. Never mind that Rabbi ben Zephyr himself, if the newspapers could be believed, had compromised every positive value he claimed to embody. Bernie knew enough by now about crazy wisdom and the crooked paths to enlightenment along which artful sages led their disciples to understand that the rebbe must have his reasons. Still, he was aggrieved that the tzaddik’s calling had taken him so far beyond the sphere of their original intimacy. He understood that Eliezer ben Zephyr belonged to the world and had little time for indulging private relationships; nevertheless, he thought he might prevail on their shared history to speak with the great man just this once.
“So you think you got a claim on the old momzer?” Lou Ella’s vocabulary had grown exponentially during their acquaintance. “But truth is he’s got a wicked claim on you.”
Bernie allowed this was probably the case but argued that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It disturbed him, though, that Lou Ella seemed to have developed a testy attitude toward a holy man she’d never met, and that she remained a confirmed agnostic concerning the rabbi’s icebound résumé. He suspected her of jealousy; but as her jealousy also flattered him, he couldn’t be angry with her; he could never be angry with her. It was summer and, school being out (Bernie felt that for him it might be out forever), they were spending much of their time together. Between Mr. Karp’s preoccupation with his own and the rabbi’s affairs and his wife’s newfound interest in self-realization (she attended New House sessions after which she went straight to bed, exhausted from a surfeit of quietude), Bernie’s parents hardly remembered they had a son. (Or a daughter, for that matter, since Madeline had taken an art-school modeling job and resolved never to come home again.) Mrs. Tuohy worked nights and slept days, leaving her daughter to mind her baby sister, which left Lou Ella and the Karp kid virtual orphans. When Bernie wasn’t riffling his copy of The Ethics of the Fathers, which he carried about everywhere, or traveling outside of time, the two of them would cruise—on nights when she got a lift from her carpool—in Mrs. Tuohy’s rustbucket Malibu coupe.
Taking in tow the vapid Sue Lily, over whom Lou Ella never ceased fawning, they tooled along Delta roads south of the city, past the gambling mecca that had sprouted among the cottonfields like some lurid Emerald City. They drove downtown on Lou’s insistence that Bernie be introduced to the world he was forever in the process of leaving; though Bernie suspected he was merely her excuse to see the sights—the honky-tonk where W. C. Handy had penned “The St. Louis Blues,” the movie palace where Elvis Presley had ushered—which, to her disappointment, had vanished long ago. They even added to their itinerary, at Bernie’s recommendation, a deserted North Main Street from which the old Yid immigrants (excepting the holdout of a single synagogue) had long since departed.
“The past is a lost
continent,” declared Lou elegiacally, which to Bernie’s mind made the present even more of an irrelevancy.
They were hard put to define their relationship, not so much because it remained unconsummated; they were after all only sixteen, and sexual congress, even in the new millennium, was not necessarily a precondition for calling each other sweethearts. Or so Bernie reasoned. In fact he would have been happy to call Lou Ella his girlfriend had she not eschewed the label herself. “I’m your handler,” she quipped, taking a word out of the show business lexicon that she claimed was more accurate. It troubled Bernie to hear her talk that way, and he often felt he’d let her down, though she assured him he shouldn’t feel guilty on her behalf. “Just do me proud,” she charged him, leaving him to interpret what that might mean. Still, they fooled around, if gingerly due to the presence of Sue Lily, who was often wedged inertly between them. At first the tot made Bernie uncomfortable, but ultimately he learned to ignore her, an attitude that earned him Lou Ella’s displeasure. “Please to respect her personhood,” she scolded him, and when he complained, “I can’t win,” Lou would cluck her tongue in mock sympathy and consign her baby sister to the backseat.
Knowing that she was waiting for him gave Bernie the courage to travel further in his ecstasies than he’d previously dared; although, when he returned, he was often met with a terse: “Wha’d ya bring me?” When he showed his empty hands, she sullenly remarked that the earth was on its last legs, Armageddon was nigh, and still he came back from the nebulae with nothing new. “It’s the beginning of the end of the world or ain’t you noticed? and doofus that you are, you keep on hoarding all the grace for yourself.” Suggesting that she may have overstated the case, Bernie nevertheless resolved to seek the counsel of the teletzaddik Rabbi ben Zephyr, whose example he hoped to observe again at first hand.
THE NEW HOUSE of Enlightenment was situated in a stadium-size structure surrounded by crepe myrtle and lilac, atop a knoll carpeted in shaggy grass slabs like an igloo made of turf. Originally a Baptist tabernacle whose pastor had fallen from grace in a sex-for-prayer scandal, the hulking, flying saucer–shaped building had undergone few alterations since changing hands. Coming upon the place through the humid morning haze, Bernie found himself transposing it in his mind to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the rabbi’s followers dragging trussed and bleating animals up its steps for sacrifice. There was a big sign out front of the type that ordinarily proclaimed Jesus as Lord, its changeable letters now declaring LIVE ALREADY LIKE THE DAY IS HERE! What day? wondered Bernie, skeptical as to the imminence of a new age. Confronted with the sheer square footage of the rabbi’s institution, however, Bernie had to admire his ambition. His own path was so solitary by contrast. Which was why, at Lou Ella’s urging (though she may have been only joking), he had begun to think that he too, despite his tender years and lack of credentials, ought perhaps to consider starting a ministry of his own—concerning which he would also seek the rabbi’s advice. He’d come at an early hour, hoping to beat the heat and catch the old man before his day began with its busy round of self-ultimate classes and motivational talks.
Finding the glass doors to the foyer still locked, Bernie rapped on the panes, which rattled like distant thunder. Presently a broad-shouldered black man in a suit and mirrored sunglasses arrived to unlock the doors, releasing as he opened them a chilly blast from the air-conditioned interior.
“Can I hep y’all?” he asked in a voice that seemed to emanate from the bottom of an oil drum. When Bernie said he was there to see the rebbe, the man—a Bukharan kippah riding his shaven head, a walkie-talkie gripped in a hand wrapped in leather like a cestus—inquired if he had an appointment. “No,” said Bernie, “but we’re practically related,” and gave his name. “I’ll see can he see you,” said the security, looking askance at the boy, who caught his own reflection in a lens of the man’s glasses: a shnoz-heavy adolescent with a head of sprung curls, his T-shirt bellying about his much diminished frame. He checked the other lens in the hope of glimpsing a more imposing countenance, but the image was identical. The man spoke into his mobile instrument, which crackled affirmatively, after which he beckoned Bernie to follow his rolling gait past a gift shop stocked with an inventory of extravagantly priced books and arcana. They stepped into a glass-walled elevator that resembled nothing so much as a colossal ice cube. The elevator rose past the mezzanine, whose wide, sunlit corridor encircled the auditorium, to a third level, where a catwalk stretched over space to a vaultlike door. Exiting, Bernie’s escort crossed the resounding steel span and knocked. The jellyfish eye that winked from a peephole was made redundant by the sentinel camera mounted above the door, which rolled open on metal casters to reveal a zaftig woman in her middle years. She was wearing a floral print muumuu and smiling a ruddy-cheeked smile, her hair spooled about her head like pink cotton candy.
“Bernie!” She greeted him as if they were old acquaintances. “Our rebbe has told us so much about you.”
Delivered into her hands by the myrmidon (uttering a deep-toned “Peace be wicha” as he departed), the boy thought he might have recognized the woman from the old Kabbalah center in the shopping plaza, but in his memory all the ladies at the center looked alike. That impression was reinforced when another woman, similarly clad and with a face stretched tight from cosmetic surgery, took his other arm and also made over him as if he were kin. They conducted him into a commodious, cork-paneled room, the hybrid of a press box and an air control tower. Seated therein, yet another caftaned lady, headphones clamped over Medusa-like hair, manned a blinking computer terminal from which she too looked up to grin sweetly at Bernie. In front of her a row of thick windows overlooked an arena the size of a circus bigtop, its steep tiers of theater seats surrounding an Astroturfed paddock. A bank of video screens hugged the curve of the wall above the windows, each displaying a different aspect of the auditorium below. “Behold the pulsating nerve center of the House of Enlightenment,” announced the woman with the cotton candy hair in her role as tutelary spirit. Bernie had just begun to peer through the tinted glass into the amphitheater, where a trickle of devotees were beginning to assemble for the morning session, when he heard behind him a once familiar voice,
“Boychikl!” it croaked.
He turned to see Rabbi ben Zephyr himself entering from a private chamber off the control room. He was wearing a cap like a truncated mitre and a summer-weight suit of iridescent leek-green, while yet another female, trim in her tennis skirt, trailing a chestnut braid the length of her vertebrae, was placing an embroidered ephod over his head. There was a ruff of tissues stuffed into his collar to protect his suit from the makeup that the woman (really a girl) with the braid had begun to rub into his rutted brow.
“Hartzeniu,” he greeted, actually pinching Bernie’s cheek as he shuffled forward, “the prodigal returns. Looks like he could use something to eat, the prodigal. Messy…?” The cotton candy lady—whose name, the rabbi offered in an aside, was Messalina—snatched a tray of fruit danishes from a conference table in the center of the room and presented it to Bernie, who declined; his stomach was too skittish for food. Still, he was grateful for the exuberant welcome that had replaced the raillery he’d encountered on his prior visit.
“How are the folks?” asked Rabbi Eliezer, waving away the hand of the girl wielding the powder puff. “Don’t tell me. Your papa’s got up his sleeve another investment scheme, and your mama, she comes to the noon minchah meditation. A dedicated lady, is raised now her conscious almost to the third degree. Soon she don’t mind no more the hot flash or the droppéd womb. How do I know? What don’t I know,” wriggling his crooked fingers spookily. “Also, they had me last night in their house to supper. And where was you that ain’t never at home? You still with the knee-jerk assumptions to glory, or did you go back to touching yourself all the time?”
Speechless in the face of such a barrage, Bernie concluded that celebrity had improved the rabbi’s disposition. When he found his tongue, he
admitted that, yes, he did seem to be living in at least two worlds at once. “I keep, y’know, stumbling into paradise.” He chuckled self-consciously, wanting suddenly to tell the old man everything: how conventional reality now seemed to him almost negligible, except for the existence of the girl; but the rabbi was wagging a finger like a windshield wiper in front of his nose.
“Barney—”
“Bernie.”
“Bernie, paradise is where already you are.”
Uncrossing his eyes from their fix on the ticking finger, Bernie wondered if the rabbi were speaking to him in earnest or in his capacity as peddler of commercial illumination; then he scolded himself for thinking that there was such a distinction. “Still,” he submitted in a lower key, “I keep having these, y’know, experiences.”
“Hust,” exhaled the old man, and there was the finger again, this time pressed against his desiccated lips. “There’s physics you can take for them, the experiences.” Then he cackled with a hilarity that was seconded by his ladies.
A good sport, Bernie nevertheless responded with a touch of defiance. “The visions, when they come, they swallow up every part of me but my body.”
“Nu,” replied the rabbi patronizingly, his eyebrows opposing slopes, “visions.” The ladies also looked on with undue fondness. “Sweetheart,” said his mentor, “visions I dispense here like shalachmones at Purim; it ain’t so special, the visions.” Then sotto voce, “But don’t tell to my congregation this.”
The note of confidentiality heartened the boy enough to ask the first of his laundry list of questions: Did the rabbi’s “congregants” ever bring back any, um, like gifts from their meditative flights?