Shuli laughs at the memory, and this is what gets the boy talking. Gavriel asks him why.
Reb Shuli shifts his weight forward so that the chair creaks. “What? You sit there quiet, and I’m supposed to tell you my secrets?”
And like that Shuli watches him clam up.
“I laughed because I was being nostalgic,” Shuli says. “It’s what happens when you’re old. But we’re not here to figure me out. This is so we can understand what’s going on with you, and why you do the things you do.”
“Which things?”
“You tell me.”
And again, there’s silence.
“Listen, I’m not here to punish, or make trouble. I’m here because I see a miserable kid, getting more miserable and acting out. And what I want is to see you happy and maybe, chas v’chalilah, even having a good time”
“That’s why you’re here? To see me happy?”
“Fair enough,” Reb Shuli says. “I’m here to see you happy and also to address some things. There’s a rumor that has come to me. Others—your peers—they say that maybe you didn’t study for Friday’s test. That maybe, God forbid, you tore the page from the Gemara itself and taped it inside your desk—not only cheating, but desecrating something holy, as would the enemies of Israel.”
“They said that?”
“They did,” Reb Shuli admits, as much as it pains him. “But I told those who whispered, I said, ‘I know this Gavriel. He is a good person, with a kind heart.’ I told them, ‘It’s impossible that he’d do such a terrible thing, and it must be you boys making up nonsense.’ ” Reb Shuli, satisfied with his delivery, gives a good tickle to his own chin, hidden beneath his beard. “You know, I could ask for your copy of the masechta myself, to check for the missing page. But why would I want to try to prove something that I already know can’t be true?”
The boy turns red, squirming in his seat.
“Can I go now?”
“Soon. After we spend a little while studying a daf that you maybe didn’t learn so well.”
The boy turns his eyes toward the ceiling, as if he can see the sounds of recess gathering above and raining down.
Shuli joins him in looking up, while pulling his chair around to Gavriel’s side of the desk. He then opens his Gemara and presses his finger to the Tosafot.
With that finger steady, Reb Shuli finally draws the boy’s gaze to his own, only to find tears swimming in Gavriel’s eyes.
“Would you like to tell me what else is going on? You can’t be this sad because you’re missing out on kicking a ball.”
“On the weekend,” Gavriel says, “when my mother was gone, I took money from her drawer—I stole it. And then I went to the corner, to the store, and I ate treif.”
“Treif!” Reb Shuli says, truly startled, the confession catching him off guard.
“A candy I wanted to taste. I ate it.”
“Why even do such a thing when there are so many kosher candies? Why not eat one you’re allowed?”
“Theirs,” the boy says, meaning the Gentiles’, “theirs look so much better than ours.”
“So you wanted to know?”
The boy nods, and a tear falls onto Shuli’s desk.
“So, nu?” Reb Shuli says. “How do they taste?”
“So much better,” the boy says, his voice full of despair.
Reb Shuli laughs a heartfelt bellow of a laugh.
It’s inappropriate for him to tell the child that, yes, their food tastes so much better. That Shuli had, for many years, lived—and eaten—in their world.
What he says instead is “Sometimes things are as we expect them to be. You had to know, and now you do.”
Reb Shuli closes the book and leans in close to the child. “Rabbis, we are not priests. We don’t have to hear your secrets to fix you. We don’t dispense forgiveness on God’s behalf.”
The boy stares blankly and maybe also curiously. The tears are gone from his eyes.
“You steal,” Shuli says. “You eat a candy that you shouldn’t. You maybe even—I don’t believe it—cheat and tear a page. So what? Who cares? It’s not the troublemaking that matters. It’s the sadness behind it. That’s what I want to fix. Is it the yetzer hara doing this? What’s in you?” Shuli asks, terrified the recess bell will ring at this critical juncture. Time is not on his side. “I’m asking seriously. Do you feel driven by the evil inclination? Or is it just ants in your pants?”
“In my pants?” the boy says, confused.
“I’m saying, I’ve seen you be better and be happier. I’ve seen you look at a challenge in the Gemara, and then your hand shoots up with the answer. I want to know what happened to that kid.” When Gavriel offers nothing, Shuli talks tachlis. “You think I don’t know what it means when the others rat you out? Are you getting bullied? Do you have any friends? Is that the issue?”
“Not so many. But it’s not that.”
“All year, it’s been like this with you. I’ve asked your other teachers, and they see it too. Did something happen over the summer, maybe at camp?”
“I guess,” the boy says, “when the boys were away, and, you know, in the same bunk—”
“You weren’t in the bunk?”
“I was.”
“So why say ‘when the boys were away’?”
“I was with them the first month—in the bunk. When my father died, my mother came up to get me.”
Reb Shuli feels his head shaking back and forth of its own volition, a physical rejection to what he’d just heard, manifesting as a sort of odd tremor.
Reb Shuli tries to stop his head rattling atop the stalk of his neck—literally pressing his hands to his temples. He fights to act his normal self, while feeling as blindsided in a classroom as he’d ever been.
The child’s father dead. Such a thing for Reb Shuli not to know.
It was a failure of the system. How did the mother not call—God help her? Or if she did, even worse, how might the rosh yeshiva not have filled the boy’s rabanim in on the tragic news? And what of his friends, who don’t share that, but have time to tattle about cheating?
As he settles himself, Shuli blames no one, and nothing, beyond the curse of living in a big city.
If the yeshiva was in some small town, they’d all be buried at the same graveyard. They’d all pray at the same shul. The loss of a father would be shared by everyone. But here, in Royal Hills, his poor, hyperactive Gavriel swipes his student MetroCard to make his way on public transportation to Royal Hills every day. This child, commuting from Midwood. It might as well be the moon.
Even so, how could it be that Gavriel does not stand up at school when it is time to acknowledge the dead during morning and afternoon worship? He sits through the Kaddish, like all the fortunate living-fathered boys.
Reb Shuli says, “Baruch dayan emet,” an invocation for the deceased. Then he says, “Tanchumai,” offering his condolences. “I did not know,” he says. “I’m so sorry. You have brothers and sisters, yes?”
“You taught two of them.”
“Way back,” Shuli says. “Yisroel and Leib. They are much older than you.”
“I’m the youngest by six years.”
“Was it a surprise, the death?” Reb Shuli instantly regrets how the question came out and asks Gavriel more gently, “Did you have any idea, before camp, that your father was ill?”
“He was having heart attacks.”
“More than one?”
“He was supposed to be OK for the summer. Then he had a pulmonary embolism.”
The boy sounds as grown-up as the rabbi has ever heard him. For this child even to know such a term, a shanda.
Shuli looks to the clock on the back wall. It was a charm in the necklace of pictures that circled the room. All the great rabbis, framed and hung to inspire thi
s new generation.
He watches the second hand move its last short stretch. Then the bell rings, calling the others inside and signaling an end to this, the first round of their match.
“Can we talk again?” Reb Shuli asks. “There are some important things I want to discuss.”
“Like what?”
Here a laugh seems to Shuli appropriate, and so he laughs. The directness with which this child operates, it was a joy.
“Fair enough,” Shuli says, yet again. “I want to explain how, though you and your friends are all young and I am old…or you are all gangly and fast, and I am turning fat and hairy-eared and slow…I want you to know that you may think I’m the one most different from you in this room, but there is one thing that makes us the same.”
“That we have no fathers?”
“That we have no fathers. Yes.”
“That’s it?”
“No. That’s not all of it.”
“It kind of sounds like it will be.”
“And yet, it isn’t,” Reb Shuli says.
Gavriel stands up and begins to scrape his chair along the floor toward his desk. Reb Shuli—surprising himself—grabs the boy’s arm.
“Sorry,” Reb Shuli says, letting the arm go. “I just. I was thinking—how about this? What if I give a double recess tomorrow….” Then, shaking his head (this time of his own volition), Shuli raises a hand and wipes the first offer away. “No, no. What if it’s a triple? If I give an extra recess to make up for the one you missed today, and then the regular one for tomorrow, and then a third, so that I won’t steal a minute of your playtime while we meet. Does that sound fair?”
“I guess,” the boy says, making perfect sense of it. “Fine.”
And like that, the others tumble through the door.
VIII
Shuli struggles through his day of teaching, distracted. He says nothing in front of his own children that evening. He acts his normal fatherly self at bedtime, though he asks for an extra kiss and hug. And what father wouldn’t, haunted by the notion of his early demise?
In bed, he lies with a book on his chest, waiting for Miri. She comes out of the bathroom in a long nightgown. To Shuli, it looks as if she’s floating as she moves his way.
He opens his mouth and then thinks better of it. What news does he actually have to offer? An update on a student? A half story? Some conversation he’d only just started when the bell brought it to an end?
If he dragged every schoolboy sadness and disappointment into their bedroom, if he carried home every trouble, like a cat with a bird in its mouth, what kind of gift would that be to drop at Miri’s feet every night? When would they ever find peace?
He tells himself that nothing bad has happened. That there’s nothing worth sharing as he and Miri lay side by side.
He stares up at the ceiling, trying to feel heartened about the next morning, excited to talk to Gavriel about the choices the boy has lately made. Shuli lies like that, forcibly trying to cheer himself, until Miri begs him to turn off the light.
“I’m thinking,” he tells her.
“And I’m tired,” she says. “Think in the dark.”
“I’m looking at the ceiling—it calms me.”
“Then look at it in the dark. It’ll be the same. There’s nothing, on a ceiling, to see.”
Reb Shuli takes his pillow down to the living room to look at a different patch of ceiling, and to pull from the shelves any books that might have the wisdom he’s seeking.
After some hours, Shuli hears the creak of the floorboards, and then sees Miri’s bare feet on the stairs. She stops midway, leaning over the banister and addressing him from above.
“You need to sleep, Shuli,” she says. “You have the Weider wedding tomorrow, after school. A tired rabbi doesn’t make a nice ceremony.”
The very mention of the obligation makes Shuli want to scream.
“I told them I’m only staying through the chuppah. As soon as the chassan stomps on the glass, we’re gone.”
“Well, I ran into Daphna Weider, and she asked if we’d stay and eat, and bring the kids. I think it’ll do you good. There are extra tables. And you can’t say no to the mother of the bride.”
This turns Shuli despondent, and Miri goes over to sit beside him on the couch.
“What is it, husband?” she says.
Like that, Shuli tells her everything that has transpired. He takes his wife’s hand and gazes at her, calmed just watching her process what he’s shared.
He can see that she’s doing what she does best when a problem overwhelms him—Miri organizing his addled thoughts, lining them up in her head, so that she might help her poor husband think straight.
Miri says, “You’re upset that you didn’t know the boy’s father was dead?”
Shuli nods.
“And you’re also upset to learn that this child is now fatherless, his mother a widow?”
Shuli nods.
“And you are, of course, unsettled to learn that your student—a death from the summer—hasn’t stood for Kaddish during minyan all year.”
This too was upsetting Shuli, absolutely.
“But he’s twelve, yes?”
“Yes,” Shuli says.
“Then that last one is not a worry. A boy, not yet a bar mitzvah, doesn’t need to say Kaddish. He’s sinless. There is no aveirah there.”
“But reciting Kaddish is the highest praise to God that one can make,” Shuli says. “Even if a child were a sinner and did nothing more than answer to the y’hei sh’meih rabba, he’d get a ticket into Heaven for that alone.”
Miri considers, and Shuli isn’t sure if she’s doing it to be polite, pretending for her husband that she doesn’t have her answer at the ready.
“And right there is the irony,” is what she says. “Children aren’t obligated to do anything, even if we leave them something as important as the Kaddish to recite. The Shulchan Aruch goes as far as saying that even though the Kaddish aids the departed in Heaven, it’s far more important that a child walk in the path of righteousness than utter those words.”
Shuli thinks this over, hugging his pillow. He says, “So Gavriel does nothing wrong.”
“Can we talk about what this really is and isn’t about, my husband?”
“Yes,” Shuli says, his voice breaking.
“That boy is not you,” Miri says. “You did your t’shuvah long ago. For how many years since do you light a candle on your father’s yahrzeit? For how many do you stand for the Kaddish, putting forth your whole soul?” Miri leans her head on Shuli’s shoulder. “Your whole soul for his.”
Shuli turns and hugs her, burying his face in her neck.
“This boy at twelve is not you back when you were thirty, stoned and lazy, and wasting a life in advertising—”
“Branding,” Shuli says, lifting his head and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his pajamas. “It’s part of advertising. But branding is its own thing.”
“The point is,” she says, “you spending your days selling junk, and your nights trying to catch an STD to bring to this marriage, was necessary at the time. You needed to run away from yourself, to run from the obligations that you’ve since taken on, so that you might achieve ten times—no, a hundred times!—more than what you might ever have done without leaving. We should all be thankful that you, for so long, strayed.”
IX
At the first of the special recesses, Reb Shuli and Gavriel sit as they had the day before, facing the Gemara on the same side of the desk, with Shuli’s finger pressed to the commentary they’re meant to learn. He doesn’t begin teaching, instead launching back into their conversation as if not an instant has gone by.
“Why don’t you stand in davening, sweet child?” Shuli asks. “Why don’t you stand for the Kaddish?”
“I do
,” Gavriel says.
“You do?”
“Sometimes at night. For Maariv. With my brothers.”
“With a minyan?”
The boy answers matter-of-factly. “You can’t say it without.”
“But at school? Why not here? There must be a reason.”
And Shuli hears it in his own voice, the agitation—revealing an upset he didn’t mean to share.
As if swapping roles, as if Gavriel is suddenly concerned only with alleviating Reb Shuli’s unease, he says, “You want to know if I’m acting bad on purpose?”
“Yes. That’s what I was trying to find out. If maybe you do what you do out of anger. Or if for some other reason. Because with rebellion, it can also be a way to acknowledge the importance of the thing we rebel against.” Reb Shuli stops himself there, but Gavriel doesn’t respond.
“What I’m trying to say is, sometimes the rejection is a way to let people know that the thing we reject truly matters. It is its own kind of faith, even if it’s the opposite of faith.”
Gavriel perks up. “You’re saying it’s OK if I don’t eat kosher? Because the candy, I also snuck some home. There’s more.”
Shuli lets out an “Oy” that makes the boy blush.
“No. It’s not OK to eat treif. And if you do, why bring it into your mother’s kosher home?” Reb Shuli rubs his face with both hands and starts again. “Listen. It’s a mature thing I’m going to tell you. Because I know that somewhere in there is a very mature young man. So let me ask you, do you know what is kadosh—what it means?”
“Holy,” Gavriel answers.
“Yes, holy. Exactly. But the root of the word, it can also be used in the opposite way. In the Torah, in the book of B’reishit, our father Yehuda is looking for someone—I won’t say who, because why spread such an accusation, even now. Yehuda asks if anyone has seen this certain woman, this ‘kadeshah’ is what he says—meaning a prostitute. The same letters used to make up ‘holy’ are also used for the opposite of what is holy.”
Reb Shuli has read that line in the Bible ten thousand times, pondering the roots of words, and of actions, their malleable meanings. He wants this half-orphan to understand that Shuli’s own bitter misdeeds, fierce as they were, came from a place not of enmity but of deep, deep love.
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