kaddish.com

by Nathan Englander

  “These selfless individuals at kaddish.com are tzaddikim. We are dealing with the righteous of the righteous, busy with their holy job. They want no thanks, no praise, no accolades of any kind. Nothing beyond fair payment—which makes it even more kosher—while they perform the work that they do in the name of God.”

  “OK,” Gavriel says.

  “It’s more than OK. It’s a relief,” Shuli says, absolutely beaming. “Do you know what is another word for ‘tzaddikim’?”

  “In Hebrew?” the boy asks, though he very obviously has no answer to give.

  “The word,” Shuli says, “is nastirim. From l’hastir, to hide. They, the nastirim, are the hidden ones. The man I look for has made himself invisible in his modesty.”

  “So you don’t need to find him anymore?”

  “L’hefech!” And Reb Shuli, playful, puts a hand atop the crown of the hat on Gavriel’s head. He presses it down, until the boy’s ears bend under the brim. “It’s the opposite. Now that I know he strives to live quietly among us, I understand that I must redouble my efforts if I’m ever to obtain what is rightfully mine.”

  XIV

  At lunchtime, Reb Shuli sits at the same terminal with the book of Vayikra open and propped up against the screen. He looks to Moses to better apprehend what drives the meek to answer a call, spurred on by the morning’s advance.

  He’s starting to get nervous, when Gavriel comes through the door, dragging his feet and eating a peanut butter sandwich.

  “Did you find the boy from Yellin’s shiur?” Shuli says.

  “He’s an eleventh grader. He pushed me into a locker and was going to close it. Then I told him a teacher sent me—but without giving a name.”

  “Good, good. What did he say?”

  “He said if you used them before and they wrote back, why not reply to the old e-mail?”

  Reb Shuli lets out a snort, full of disgust. “Children!” he says. “None of you can imagine what it’s like for time to go by. Do you know how long ago 1999 is in computer years? Do you even know what is Eudora or WorldCom?”

  “No.”

  “How about MindSpring or MCI?”

  “My grandmother uses BellSouth for e-mail. Is it that?”

  “Businesses come and go. Fashions change. If I still had the account, I’d already have pulled up the letter and hit send.”

  “OK,” Gavriel says. “He said to tell you that first, just in case.”

  “Well, it’s not the case.”

  “So then it’s about finding the ISP.”

  Here it begins, Reb Shuli thinks, preparing for the barrage of acronyms whose meanings Reb Shuli can’t even begin to guess at, all the roshei tevot of the modern world.

  “What is ISP?”

  “Well, not the ISP. That’s the Internet Provider. But the ISP address. That’s what I mean. The Internet is kind of everywhere all at once, like—” and Reb Shuli freezes, terrified the boy might compare the Internet to the Holy Spirit. What he says instead is “It’s, like, just in the air. But to get onto it, if you want to interface—”

  Gavriel pauses to see if his teacher is keeping up.

  “Yes, yes,” Shuli says. “I understand. ‘Interface,’ it’s just a regular English word.”

  “You have to get onto it from somewhere. You know, from a physical place. Even if where you’re surfing to is virtual.”

  “The information highway,” Reb Shuli says. “Entrances and exits.”

  “So to zero a person. To find them. All you have to do is get someone from the site to write us back, but to our server.”

  Shuli raises up one of his giant eyebrows.

  “This boy told you that?”

  “Eitan did. That’s his name. It’s pretty simple. He says we need to put a GIF in an e-mail—just a tiny image, like the school logo—and if they answer, we get the IP address on our server and also the Lat Long. Which is just like it is on a map. It’ll give us the computer’s exact place. I don’t even mean just the house. I mean what room it’s in.”

  The way Gavriel explains it—the confidence radiating from the boy—it really makes a teacher proud. Reb Shuli is now hopeful not just about locating Chemi, but for a good and bright future for the child.

  What he didn’t understand was how they would get a reply to a second letter with the logo, if the righteous at kaddish.com were never going to answer the first. Shuli’s face falls.

  “Don’t worry, Rebbe,” Gavriel says. “I already know how I’m going to get them to write us. It’s my idea,” he says. “Not Eitan’s.”

  “You think I don’t know you’re smart? Lazy is why I pick on you. Smart, I never doubted.”

  “Why not just pretend someone new is dead? Make up a person, and a new e-mail address. Act like you’re hiring them for real.”

  “To invent a loss?” Shuli says. “It would be a lie. And, God help us, a sure way to court the evil eye.”

  “So let’s use my father. He’s already dead.”

  Reb Shuli’s jaw drops at the inappropriate and unethical nature of Gavriel’s proposal. It’s a uniquely horrible way to employ the assistance of this child.

  But Reb Shuli also recognizes its simple genius. He considers the idea, his mouth open, as if preparing to swallow Gavriel up.

  Gavriel stares back at him, proud.

  “I could bring in a picture of my dad. We can upload it as the GIF if we get an answer, and if they write back one more time—”

  “We get the ISP,” Shuli says.

  “And the Lat Long! So even if they’re hiding from you…”

  “We’ll still know right where they are.”

  This child, every instant anew, proves cleverer to his teacher. So much so that Shuli turns to Gavriel not for technical advice but for actual wisdom, his defenses completely down.

  “Isn’t it spying?” Shuli asks, now worried over the thorny ethics of ferreting out the location of a yeshiva that wants to be hidden.

  “It’s just data. If you can get it, it’s totally fair,” Gavriel says. “Eitan’s just showing us how to mine what’s already there.”

  “It still feels a little like stealing,” Reb Shuli says. “Can we maybe sleep on it first?”

  “Whatever you want,” Gavriel says. “I’m a kid. I have to come to school tomorrow either way.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, Shuli puts on his pajamas and climbs into bed. He closes his eyes and drapes a heavy arm around Miri. Like that, like a regular person, he drifts off to sleep.

  At school the next morning, he waits for Gavriel on the building’s front steps. He feels refreshed and well rested. Out of nowhere he remembers that he’d dreamt the loveliest dream of his own lost father. He takes this as a sign.

  Up in the computer room, the two fill out the form together, with Gavriel answering the questions truthfully. In the field specified for anecdotal material, the boy shares a touching story about a father-son visit to the aquarium at Coney Island. It melts Shuli’s heart.

  When they’re done, Gavriel reaches out and then stays his own hand, his finger hovering in the air.

  “Do you want to do it?” he asks his teacher.

  “No, you,” Shuli says.

  Gavriel presses the button, and the computer’s speakers give off a satisfying whoosh.

  * * *

  —

  By afternoon prayers, an answer from the site’s administrator is already waiting in Gavriel’s account.

  They find that they’ve been matched with not one but four different students, among whom they’re invited to choose.

  Each scholar has a different price attached based on years of learning, and, on top of that, different packages are available. The bereaved can sign up to have extra study dedicated to the deceased’s memory, or have a yahrzeit cand
le lit for five, ten, fifteen years….

  It’s all much more advanced, and expensive, than the program for which Reb Shuli—that is, Larry—had, so long ago, signed up.

  Gavriel takes a passport-sized picture of his father out of his wallet and hands it to his teacher. Shuli scrutinizes the man in the photo, and then the snapshot itself—fresh and uncreased. What would it look like when this poor ragamuffin reached Shuli’s age?

  Gavriel takes the picture back and heads over to the scanner, while Shuli stands by the classroom door, his face pressed to the sliver of window, steaming it up and keeping an eye on the hallways, terrified another rabbi might stroll by.

  It’s no more than a minute before the boy is seated again, and another two before Gavriel is completely done.

  “That’s it?” Shuli says.

  “I asked if we could pay by check and stuck in the GIF with my dad. If they write back, we’re good.”

  XV

  Shuli doesn’t bother trying to sleep that night. He lies next to Miri, attempting to calm himself off the rhythm of her breath. When that doesn’t work, he tiptoes into each of the children’s rooms to stand, as he has since they were born, at the end of their beds. Their peace, his peace.

  He goes down to the kitchen and the terrible emptiness returns. Shuli puts on the kettle, opening the spout to keep it from whistling. He lugs a pile of holy books to the kitchen table. He eats half a babka over the sink and then digs into his studies with a mug of hot water and lemon, cooling.

  Shuli doesn’t search for a practical solution to end his suffering. That, he already has. He must reacquire what he’d squandered—he needed his birthright back. What he spends the night exploring is why such agony had been brought into his life.

  Shuli happens upon the explanation in the Ramban’s Shaar HaGemul, a monograph on death. Sometimes punishment is meted out to the living, not because of sin but because of a deficit of positive deeds. His misery was just the kind delivered to a son who sat idle in this world, while his own father was judged in the next.

  Shuli leaves the house before anyone wakes and gets caught in the rain on the way to school. He arrives soaked through.

  When Gavriel shows up to the computer room as ordered, he finds his teacher’s clothing hung on the backs of the chairs. A tie on one. A jacket on the other. Even Shuli’s dress shirt is off. His teacher stands barefoot in his drying suit pants, and with his undershirt and tzitzit wet and clinging to his chest.

  Gavriel blinks but makes no comment, sitting down and signing on to his e-mail account. He finds not one but two letters waiting.

  Shuli is far too anxious to read the e-mails himself, and asks Gavriel to tell him what they say.

  The first, in response to Gavriel’s fake inquiry, sends condolences for his loss and confirms again that someone would be available to start praying immediately upon receipt of payment, but unfortunately they couldn’t accept a personal check. The second was an auto-reminder, letting Gavriel know that his credit card information had not been received. Both were signed “The kaddish.com Team.”

  “So, nu?” Shuli says, waiting for Gavriel to get working.

  “I kind of need Eitan’s help with this part.”

  “No help,” Shuli says. “Just us. Go learn what to do, smart boy. Take him from davening to teach you, if need be.”

  “From davening?” Even naughty Gavriel can’t believe it.

  “Pikuach nefesh,” Reb Shuli says. “To save a life, all is permitted.” And he does not go on to say that it’s his own that hangs in the balance.

  Gavriel runs off, leaving his rebbe to his pacing.

  The boy returns with a spiral notebook, from which he works, following the instructions that Eitan has scribbled inside.

  As Gavriel hunts for a physical address, Reb Shuli moves back and forth between the hallway window, which he nervously checks, and the street-side view, where he finally settles. He doesn’t stare down at the playground but turns his gaze eastward, toward Jerusalem, the direction in which they pray.

  When he first entered this miserable room and found his way back onto the Web, Shuli had prided himself on the belief that all knowledge was contained inside the Torah. And now, as he waits for Gavriel to pinpoint the exact spot on the planet where this hidden yeshiva stood, he’s forced to admit that inside this terrible machine is a different kind of all-knowingness. A toxic, shiftless omniscience.

  To unlock the secrets of the Torah, one had to be disciplined. One had to work and to think. But this? If one only knew how to ask the question, all knowledge was lazily yours.

  Looking over at Gavriel, Shuli can remember being this boy’s age, and the kinds of thoughts he’d had. He can recall sitting on the front stoop and watching his busy neighbors rushing by. Shuli would ponder what it meant for God to know where every living person was at any given moment, tracking what they were doing, what they were eating, their every action and urge. He’d count up all the people he could name, trying to hold them in his thoughts all at once, and, his head actually aching with the strain, Shuli would then picture those people multiplied again and again until they equaled every single person on Earth. Then he’d wonder what it would be like to keep up with the goings-on of all those beings, along with what they’d done before and what they were planning for the future—tabulating everything simultaneously in a singular Godlike mind.

  And here in these machines is that exact knowing—for the advertisers and for the governments and for those with good and bad intentions to use as they saw fit. It’s all accessible, your wants and dreams, your sins and secrets, so that Gavriel, tapping away at the keys, can tell where someone around the world sits right then—a humble, hidden someone who does not want to be found. But the Internet knows, and it has no compass to guide it and no will to guard what was meant only for the Maker. Here, it all waits to be plucked out of the air by a child.

  Shuli’s head aches from the thought, as it had back on that stoop. And so he does as he did back then. He closes his eyes and, palms to his cheeks, presses his fingers against their lids, pressing and pressing, until the darkness sends colors rushing toward him, as if he’s hurtling through space. He stops only when he sees, like fireworks, beautiful glints of light.

  In them, Shuli recognizes the source of it all. The flashes of pure energy firing through cables under the ocean, soaring up, and making their way to satellites turning in the heavens. All the world’s understanding transformed into waves of light and sound, to modulated impulse and frequency, everyone’s deepest desires broadcast in an ever-expanding and invisible net. He can feel them pulsing through his body, dappling the very air he breathes.

  Gavriel cries out. He does so with the full force of a eureka moment, startling Reb Shuli from his reverie. He follows this with a happy sort of squeal and jumps from his chair. He runs to the window and excitedly, maybe even lovingly, grabs Shuli by his belt, pulling him back over to the machine.

  A satellite picture of a neighborhood is pulled up, an image taken from the sky. It is, Reb Shuli can already tell, a section of the Holy City as seen from above. A God’s-eye view of Jerusalem.

  The boy clicks and clicks, zooming in. Shuli warms at the sight of those red rooftops, and the dusty gray ribbons of road. Yerushalyim rising up to meet him.

  “Rebbe, it’s here, the yeshiva,” Gavriel says. “Eitan’s thing. It really works.”

  Shuli wants to sound wise and to sound confident, but he can’t seem to speak. He steps back from the computer, retreating toward his window.

  “It’s not right,” Shuli says. “To see such a thing.”

  “It’s a satellite picture. It’s free. It’s public!”

  “Spying,” Shuli says. “Sneaking around. Peeping into someone’s life.”

  “We’re not looking into their windows or anything. I mean, we sort of can. There’s a street view. We c
an do a virtual walk-by.”

  “No,” Shuli says, trying to process what the boy has just done, what Shuli has facilitated, horrified and exhilarated in equal measure. “Enough technology,” he says. “Enough screens. Enough deception. We tricked them into making contact when they expressly wanted to be left to their labors. Write them back and tell them the truth. Do it now! A good lesson for teacher and student, both.”

  Gavriel looks crestfallen. He’d worked hard and succeeded. And now Shuli was telling him to throw it all away.

  And what, Shuli thinks, does the boy see looking back? His pale, exhausted rebbe, practically in his gatkes—half naked, and clearly in pain. Yes, this must be what he sees, for Gavriel goes into his book bag for his pencil case. He takes out a highlighter and a marker and a pen. With that spiral notebook in his lap, he turns to a fresh page and begins to draw. Sounding like a grown man, he says to Shuli, “Look out your window, Rebbe. Take a rest.”

  Shuli frowns a happy, doting frown, accepting this advice.

  He stares out the window, peering over the playground to the other side of the street. He cranes his neck trying to find a space between buildings, even an inch of horizon, so that he might stare across the six thousand miles, draw a bead on that computer in the Holy City, and on the man who sits in the glow of its screen.

  “Can I show you what I’ve done?” Gavriel asks. “On paper, not the computer at all.”

  Without turning to face the boy, Reb Shuli politely declines. “I don’t need to see anything. I don’t want to know. If one has been treated honorably one should act so in return.”

  He then asks the boy to type an e-mail on his behalf and from his personal account. Shuli—no longer using Gavriel as a proxy—dictates the letter, while the boy hunts and pecks at the keys.

  Shuli wants the fine folk at the yeshiva to know that he is sorry. And that he, and his student, Gavriel, both feel great appreciation for the wonderful options offered, but that the services of kaddish.com were, in actuality, not needed. Shuli asks that his own deceit be forgiven, and Gavriel’s excused—for any fault was, as the responsible adult, wholly his own. There were extenuating circumstances that Shuli was hoping might be overlooked. Really, the whole ruse had been thought up to find a former scholar, surely long gone. Again, he only wants to make contact so that he might offer thanks and facilitate the return of something that was meant to be his. If the unseemly way they’d reached this point muddled things, Shuli hopes they might still believe that it is with deepest respect that such a request is being made.