Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “Are you insane?” Shmulie said to me when I told him my plan. “He’ll guilt you so bad you’ll pee in your pants and you’ll sign on to become one of them like Menkies did. You’ll go to their rabbinical school and he’ll send you to some God-forsaken corner of America, like Billings, Montana, where you’ll feed moose and dine on snow eight months a year.”

  I assured Shmulie I had no interest in winding up feeding moose or kangaroos or elephants should I become one of his rabbis, which I absolutely would not.

  “Don’t be so sure, man. I hear the guy’s got eyes that hypnotize, and the next thing you know you’re humming little Hasidic melodies and dancing with the Torah out in the middle of the streets of fucking Lower Park Slope on Simchat Torah.”

  I assured Shmulie I’d watch out for the Rebbe’s eyes, that I’d return home undamaged.

  “In case you don’t come back, Nicky,” he said, “can I have your bike?”

  “If I’m not back in time for dinner, you can have everything,” I said, picturing his fat ass on the seat of my twenty-speed Fuji.

  Properly warned and expecting no tangible results, I called the Kobliner Center and explained that I wanted an appointment with the Rebbe to the youngish male voice on the other end of the phone. He insisted I provide a detailed explanation of my agenda, and, too slow witted to concoct a reasonable lie, I explained my purpose. After holding for perhaps ten minutes, to my surprise I received an appointment with the Rebbe.

  “He’ll see you tomorrow at eleven,” said the voice, reeking of disdain. “Make sure you’re on time. No one keeps the Rebbe waiting.”

  Thus, on a sunny autumn morning in late October, I set out by bus from Midwood to Lower Park Slope for my visit with the Kobliner Rebbe.

  ***

  The bus stopped by a bodega, which bore a sign in front for coconut soda in a stylish plastic bottle. Most of the pedestrians looked Hispanic, as befitted the population of the neighborhood. A significant minority of men and women, by their attire, were Orthodox Jews, the Rebbe’s congregants—men in black suits, sporting lengthy beards, some with hats, some with large, black yarmulkes, the women in long skirts or dresses, sleeves to their wrists, the married ones with their heads covered with ill-fitting wigs.

  I looked half a block to my right and spotted the Kobliner Center. As I approached, I observed that the place was exceedingly shabby, like most of the neighborhood. Little attention had been paid to the exterior, which lacked plants, shrubs, trees and suchlike.

  I pulled the heavy door open and entered a huge, gray, poorly lit cave. Not much consideration had been given to the quality of the furniture, which consisted of threadbare couches and chairs, scratched tables, and lamps without shades. No artwork of any kind graced any wall, except for a fancy pushka, a charity box—a wonderful brass ritual object crafted in the shape of what someone imagined a house looked like back in Eastern Europe, which hung on the nearest leftward wall. I dutifully pressed a dollar into it as I passed, a thank-you for the Rebbe’s time and with hope for a successful visit.

  I spotted an office across the room, an open space lit by a fluorescent light dangling dangerously by a couple of wires. I started toward it. As I reached the counter, a boy of perhaps fifteen with a newly sprouting beard looked up from the text he was studying.

  “May I help you?” he asked. His voice could not have registered greater annoyance at my very presence in his life.

  “I’m here to see the Rebbe.”

  “Your name?” he asked, pulling a calendar toward him.

  “Nick Friedman.”

  He looked at his list, then up at me with pure disgust. “Oh yeah. You’re the apikorus,” he said matter-of-factly. Apikorus was the Hebrew word for heretic, for someone who enjoyed himself just a little too much.

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” I answered.

  “Second floor to the left,” he said, perfunctorily, returning to his text.

  I climbed the stairs. Only one door presented itself. I knocked. A short, dark man with jet-black hair and a close-cropped graying beard opened the door. Not the Rebbe.

  “Please sit,” he said. “I’m Reb Yudel, the Rebbe’s personal secretary. The Rebbe will be with you shortly.” He directed me to a torn, black leather chair set parallel to an identical chair. With that, Reb Yudel left the way I had come.

  The room was small and its appointments inelegant. There was a large inlaid mahogany desk—perhaps the most stylish object in the entire building—upon which sat a black phone and a fancy silver cigarette lighter, a worn-out couch, and walls filled with thousands of books: Jewish books in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, and German; books concerning philosophy, mathematics, history, physics, biology, chemistry. A copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra lay open on the desk to about the middle.

  I sat alone savoring a sense of tranquility. The room itself radiated peace.

  A door on the other side of the desk opened, and the Rebbe entered.

  I was surprised. He was a man of below average height, and I was expecting a giant. His white beard was stained with traces of yellow, a clear indication that the man smoked. He wore the characteristic black fedora I’d seen in every photograph. On his left arm and on his forehead sat his tefillin, his phylacteries. Evidently, he was in the practice of wearing them into the day as he studied, well past their required usage for morning prayer, not unusual for a man of his piety.

  As he approached I thought, Yeah, this guy’s just a human being,made of flesh like everyone else. Yet there was a glow about him, an abiding presence of peace of mind. He was human, yes, but before he spoke a word, his singularity shone through.

  He approached me slowly. As I rose from my chair, he grasped my hand with both of his. He gestured that I sit as he sat in the matching leather chair. Our knees nearly kissed.

  “You’re Nicholas Friedman?” he asked in English thick with Yiddish.

  “Yes,” I answered lamely.

  “You speak Jewish?” he asked in Yiddish.

  “Not much,” I answered in English.

  He returned to English. “But you’re a yeshiva bachur, no?”

  “Where I study we learn in Hebrew.”

  “Ah, that’s right. You go to the Yeshiva of Midwood,” he said in a pretty good if oddly accented Hebrew.

  “Yes,” I answered in my pretty good if Americanized Hebrew.

  “You’ve got a Hebrew name?”

  “Nachman.”

  “A good name, Nachman. The comforting one. Very nice. I don’t imagine you’re feeling much comfort at the moment, are you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I understand your restlessness. My secretary tells me you came to see me because you want to leave the Torah and go out alone into the world. This is correct?”

  He sat back and pushed his black hat to the back of his head. He possessed the eyes Shmulie had spoken of. Open wide, they pressed down on me, entering my brain, like Superman’s X-ray vision. I pulled the bobby pin from my yarmulke and adjusted it slightly.

  “I’m not sure what I want. That’s why I came here to talk with you.”

  He smiled as though I’d told a mildly funny joke. “You thought I could change your mind?”

  I tried matching his gaze but blinked. “No . . . Yes . . . Well, I guess I was hoping you could help me. I heard you did that. Help people.”

  Those eyes held me.

  “From me you were hoping for a nice little Hasidic melody you could maybe la-la your problem away?”

  I couldn’t pull away. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess, something like that.”

  “How can I help you, then?” he asked, without any signs of magic. “I could tell you about God and the Torah and the Jews. I believe that God gave the Torah to the Jews for safekeeping and to bring good into the world for everyone. I believe we’re supposed to repair the world until it is perfected
enough so the Messiah can reveal himself. I believe God watches over us at all times to care for us. But these things you already know, don’t you, Nachman Friedman?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Everything at the yeshiva stands on top of those ideas.”

  “You don’t believe your teachers, God forbid? You no longer believe in God?”

  “I’m not an atheist. I have trouble accepting everything that’s forbidden by the Torah should be forbidden to live a good life.” Like Saturday bacon and eggs.

  “You can’t accept what’s forbidden should be forbidden?” The Rebbe’s face lit up, and he smiled. “That’s a good one. So, what do you think is forbidden to you by the Torah that’s so valuable you’re willing to give up the Torah so you can do it?”

  “Knowledge.”

  The Rebbe leaned forward and tented his fingers. “The Torah doesn’t forbid knowledge, Nachman. Look at me. I studied biology and philosophy in Paris and Berlin.”

  His secular education was well known.

  “My Torah beliefs didn’t hinder me from investigating non-Jewish ideas. Jews don’t censor. You want to read something? Read it. Anything you want. Where’s the problem?”

  He pulled his eyes away and slowly gazed across his immense library. I followed the scan of his collection, in awe of the quality of the mind that could absorb those millions of words. That mind was sitting in front of me.

  “In my case,” he said, “I could reject what I saw as wrong in Gentile philosophy. And what was right helped me better understand the Torah. These studies trained my mind like talmudic study trained my mind.”

  Our eyes met again. “I guess I mean a different kind of knowledge then,” I said.

  “Do you mean the knowledge of what it’s like to eat pork on Yom Kippur afternoon or bacon every Saturday morning?” he asked with a smile.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Because if you mean that kind of thing, you don’t mean knowledge at all. You mean transgression. Transgression is the absence of knowledge, the opposite of knowledge. Transgression is life in a moral vacuum.”

  “What about experience?” I asked. “The chance to see what it’s like outside of the Torah’s world. I’m willing to risk transgression for that.”

  “You don’t mean you’ve stopped believing in right and wrong, do you, Nachman Friedman?”

  “Oh no. That’s not it at all, Rebbe. I’m just not convinced everything the Torah forbids me is necessarily wrong. And I’m not convinced all wrong is so wrong I shouldn’t take some risk for the sake of experiencing it.”

  “Have you known someone who followed this path you are suggesting?”

  I didn’t know anyone well. Most seniors followed the recommended road of a yeshiva year in Israel before college. But there was one who went his own way.

  “Heshie Ostreicher went to India when he graduated, to a university in Delhi. He’s disappeared. I don’t think anyone’s heard from him.”

  The Rebbe rose and went over to his desk. He took a small pad and a pen. “Heshie Ostreicher, you say?”

  I nodded, and he wrote down the name.

  “We have a center in Delhi. I’ll see what I can find out.” He returned the pad and pen to the desk. “This, you see, is what I worry about when a bright young man such as yourself tells me he wants to go off on his own. There is grave danger in losing you in Delhi or Bangkok . . . or Greenwich Village.”

  I took a breath and opened my mouth to protest, but he pointed his left hand, the one with the tefillin on his forearm, at me like a traffic cop stopping a line of automobiles.

  “There is no room for objection here,” he said, voice quiet but stern. “Every Jewish soul is precious. Every Jewish soul lost is a tragedy, and we’ve only just pulled ourselves away from a world of endless tragedy. Our tolerance for tragedy has ceased.” He stood and went back to his desk and reached for the silver cigarette lighter. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels. He put one between his lips, lit the cigarette with the lighter, and exhaled a rain cloud of smoke.

  “First one today,” he said. “All the time my people are telling me to quit, but for this chore I lack the will.”

  I had to respond. “Rebbe, I’m not going anywhere like India, and at Columbia University it’s impossible to get lost.”

  “Very little in this world is impossible, my son. I’ve seen too much in my time to vouch for the impossibility of things. The minute you say it can’t happen, it happens. I know this like I know the Psalms.”

  The Rebbe leaned toward me again. He removed his glasses. He idly cleaned them with his jacket, and stared at me, barely blinking. The glow I observed upon his entry into the room remained, framed now by the cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling.

  “I know what you mean, Nachman. You want to sample wine and food and not worry about dietary restrictions. Why not? They taste good and honest men have toiled to prepare them. You want to see plays and read books and not worry about how to square them with the yarmulke that would be sitting on your head. You want to meet Gentiles and not worry if they’re sympathetic to the Torah before you engage them in discourse. You want to see women and enjoy their company. And you want to do it without constraint. To you the Torah has become a constraint.”

  He had just given voice to what until that moment I had never quite discerned. His fears for me rang in my ears.

  He looked at me with those blue eyes, knowing, hypnotic, and comforting. But they did not draw me in. In some recess, I had come hoping the eyes would capture me, the encounter would compel me to join the Kobliners, and I’d become one of his Hasidim just as Shmulie had warned. I would put on the black suit, white shirt, and a black hat and move to this neighborhood to await the coming of the Messiah, or move to whatever remote corner of the world I was sent.

  The Kobliner Rebbe continued. “Nachman. Listen. You’re not the first nor will you be the last Jewish boy whose loss to the Jewish people I will fear. You’re wrong about what awaits you out there. But we won’t reduce our time together to shouting. We could debate the Torah’s views and why you should stay with them until your foreskin grows back.” He paused at his little joke. “But I see I couldn’t dissuade you from your convictions, no matter how eloquent and rational my arguments, or how angry I might pretend to become. You’ve probably already made up your mind to go out into that great world you see beckoning you, even if you didn’t know it yourself.”

  My heart was beating fast and my stomach hurt. We’d reached a juncture, and I knew I was about to cross over as certain as the sun sets.

  “You’d made up your mind,” he said, “and yet you came to see me. I’m very flattered. But I have no magic to give you, Nachman Friedman, no song, no prayer, no potion, no piece of magic, just my few words, and them you seem unprepared to accept.” He stood and paced slowly about the office, smoking and thinking. I sat still. After a few moments of this, he turned to me from the other side of the room and said, “But since you came to see me, three small gifts I will give you.”

  “Yes?”

  He sat again. “The first is that you should always feel free to call me. I’m a very busy man, much too busy, they tell me, to spend time with an apikorus like you. But I tell my advisors if I can help a Jew return to the Torah, that’s what I was put in Brooklyn to do. I will worry for you, the boy from that Hebrew-speaking yeshiva who came to meet me. From now on, Nachman, to me you’re a priority. My top priority. You call, for you I will always answer the phone.”

  “Thank you, Rebbe; thank you very much,” I said, touched at the offer. “And the second?”

  “To remind you that just as I will wait for your phone call or visit, all the more so does the Master of the Universe await your return. HaShem is always there, just beyond you, waiting for you. I am a very patient man, Nachman, but God is infinitely more patient. This you know already. But you can’t
only know it. You must believe it deep in your heart, and I do not think that you believe what you know.”

  He sat back and lit another cigarette. “And the third—”

  “Yes?”

  “I sense in you a special quality. A mazel, a bit of luck. For you the sea will always split when you need it to.”

  He leaned into me and put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me toward him so that our foreheads nearly touched. His eyes radiated that vast intensity. I wanted to be able to carry that light inside of me when I left and take it with me forever. But I had to go it alone, without this man as my spiritual companion.

  With a palpable mix of warmth and sadness, he said, “So go, my young friend. Go into the world you imagine lies beyond your door. Go to the schools, the museums, the films. Go see the plays. Enjoy the food and drink, if you must. When you’re ready to return, call me here and we’ll talk some more.”

  And then he did something extraordinary. He reached into his back pocket. He produced a wrinkled business card with nothing but a phone number written on it.

  “Call me at that number if you want to talk to me on Shabbos. To me your call is pikuach nefesh, saving a life.” For the Rebbe, using a telephone on the Sabbath was inconceivable except for an emergency. To me he would talk on the telephone even on Saturday.

  His eyes lit on Also Sprach Zarathustra. “Have you read this book?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It’s a remarkable piece of writing, you know. Nietzsche eventually went mad. The burden of the world he was helping to make was just too great for him.” At this questionable assertion, the Rebbe sighed. “Before he left his senses, he wrote wonderful books. Here, look at this,” he said, and stood and picked up the book and pointed to a passage in German. He translated it into Hebrew. “Listen,” he said. “‘Man is a rope tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.’”