Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  His brow wrinkled as he considered those words. “This is so profound I don’t know where to begin interpreting. I’ll leave it for you to ponder. Remember, you are no different than anyone else. You hang over the same abyss as everyone else. Don’t let the abyss swallow you. Do not surrender to the beast. Without the Torah, you will be treading dangerous waters. These are hazardous waters with the Torah. Without it, the peril is far greater. Only a morally sturdy person can withstand the abyss. Even with the Torah there are those among us who fall into that dark hole. Be careful, Nachman, I beg you.”

  With that he rose from the leather chair. I also stood. The Kobliner Rebbe extended his arms, reaching for me. He hugged me warmly and firmly, kissing me on the cheek, revealing a physical strength I wouldn’t have imagined. He whispered something in my ear in a language I did not understand. Clumsily, I hugged him back. He let go of me and took a small step back. The piercing eyes now glistened. Tears perhaps.

  “Be very careful, Nachman Friedman.” Saying no more, he exited through the door from which he had entered, pulling it softly shut behind him.

  I never reached out to Rabbi Schmeltzer. But those eyes gazing into mine with the commanding sense of security that could move one to action or tears stayed with me always. Considering how utterly embraced I felt at that moment, why I couldn’t yield to those eyes, become a devotee of this man, I never understood.

  That card, now yellowed and tattered, rested still in my wallet. Never on a Shabbat nor any other day did I call that number. I nonetheless kept that card, moving it over the years from old to new wallet, even after a heart attack took the Rebbe a couple of years ago at age eighty-eight.

  But that meeting was a very long time ago.

  All my life I have dangled over the abyss. I haven’t given in to the beast and plummeted down, sure, but there have been times when I nearly succumbed, moments when I sank low enough to feel the mire grazing at my back.

  CHAPTER 21

  END OF ETERNITY

  THOUGH I HAD NO further personal contact with the Rebbe, he sent me brief handwritten notes in Hebrew mailed to my university address whenever I published something about his crowd or their philosophy. He’d always congratulate me on the article. Along with the letter, he’d include a piece he’d recently written, a biblical or talmudic commentary, or a speech delivered to his Hasidim on a Friday night after the Sabbath meal. I came to expect his letters within a week after a piece saw the light of day, regardless of the journal, obscure or popular, and I was never disappointed—always a few sentences on a small card, always ending with the Hebrew words heneini b’nee: I am here, my son.

  An old friend from my yeshiva days, Leibel Berliner, now the Samuel Rattner professor of astrophysics, joined the Kobliner Hasidim during his college days, having made a practice of frequenting the Kobliner Center on campus while an undergraduate. We occasionally ran into each other, sometimes by accident crossing campus or at an event, and, sporadically, by design. He’d keep me abreast of day-to-day Kobliner adventures, directing me to an event, article, or Internet site I might otherwise have missed.

  About three or so years ago, he visited me at my office. He entered with great melodrama, shoulders hunched, as if he were fleeing someone pursuing him and he needed a hiding place. He quickly shut and locked the door, grabbed a chair at a table, pulled it to my desk and sat hard upon it with a loud grunt.

  He had a high forehead atop which sat the fedora Kobliner men always wore. He pulled at his graying beard, untrimmed and wild. As I sat behind my desk fascinated by all of this odd movement, from his shirt pocket Leibel extracted a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Without permission, and against university rules, he lit one with a cheap lighter and took two deep drags that burned the cigarette nearly halfway down. He pushed his hat back, revealing the full height of his forehead. Smoke poured furiously from his mouth and nose, and the aroma of burning tobacco filled my office.

  “NB,” he whispered, using the name that had become current among some of my colleagues. “You’re not going to believe this.” He took another drag. “They’re starting to say the Rebbe is the Moshiach, the Messiah.” He leaned back and once more pulled at his beard, his eyes wide as if delivering revelation from the heavens. He sat puffing his Camel, awaiting my reply. When I didn’t answer straightaway, he added, “I mean so many of them it would blow your mind.”

  To me this came as no surprise. “About time,” I answered. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”

  My studies had taught me never to be surprised by anything in the evolution of any religion. In the name of God or the gods or stars or trees or water or fire or rocks or doorjambs, people invent the most dim-witted concepts and elevate them to the heavenly heights, or the satanic depths. A few always devote themselves to this new belief. In so many cases, a rising number of true believers hold forth on the new reality with the confidence of a just-proven mathematical theorem.

  With incessant repetition and the passage of time, with the appearance of prophetic dreams and miracle stories, what seemed the height of stupidity becomes the rage among millions not terribly long after that inanity first flowed from the lips of the prophet of the new idea. People want to believe; the more preposterous, the better.

  So, too, with the declaration that the Messiah had come in the form of the Kobliner Rebbe. I’d been awaiting the public appearance of this conviction ever since I read a piece by Reb Yudel Strauss in The Jewish Post —the same Reb Yudel who welcomed me into the Rebbe’s office back then. Standing before a packed audience at the meeting of the Northeast Council of Kobliner Emissaries in the Javits Center, he declared that yemot hamashiach, the days of the Messiah, were imminent, for the man to do the job was already living among us and doing the job. All that awaited was the arrival of the proper worldly conditions, and they were just around the next bend in the spiritual road. Without mentioning who was intended by his remark, Reb Yudel’s listeners knew. Through conversation, writing, through mental telepathy for all I knew, they readied themselves for surrender to the same leader, but at a new height of his existence.

  According to Leibel, the many members of this Hasidic sect believed the witching hour had arrived. With emissaries dwelling from here to eternity, the word spread. Their rebbe was the redeemer of the Jews, the millennial wait nearing its end. The one tasked with shepherding the sons and daughters of Israel to the next level of spiritual advancement dwelt in a dilapidated building in Lower Park Slope.

  “The Kobliners have been around for over two centuries,” I said. “Six rebbes, four continents, and some of the most influential Jewish religious literature of modern times. Have you ever studied Sefer Koblin?”

  “I studied it and read your book on it. Not a bad book either, yours, though I don’t agree with everything,” Leibel said, throwing in the requisite scholarly critical comment, still puffing away on a Camel.

  “And now they’re going to flush themselves down the crapper with this nonsense,” I said.

  “He’s not the Messiah,” Leibel said. “I know because the Messiah will never come. The Messiah’s always just behind the next door. He’s never there when you open it.”

  With the wisdom of scientific rationality, we two university professors sighed at the folly of men as our skepticism was borne out. The wads of money formerly pouring in from all over the world now dribbled in at glacial speed. The respect in which the Kobliners had been widely held disintegrated. But the widespread public disapproval scarcely deterred the Kobliners from broadcasting the Rebbe’s new stature. A year or so into this lunacy, a clear majority of the Kobliner community, and many outsiders as well, embraced the Rebbe as their Messiah.

  About a year and a half after all of this began, my meetings with Leibel had become habitual. He came for my office hours on Mondays. I’d long before acquired an ashtray for his ashes and butts.

  “It puzzles me that the Rebbe hasn’t made
any public pronouncements about this whole business,” I said to Leibel one Monday.

  “He says nothing about it,” Leibel replied. “I see him on Shabbos giving a drush, a commentary. He says nothing but the drush. Nada. He comes into the room, says his Torah, leaves.”

  “That’s what I’ve written about in my most recent article on the subject. I can’t find a statement from him anywhere, not in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, or English. Total silence. He neither affirms nor denies.”

  “Meanwhile, it’s everywhere now. Here, let me show you something,” Leibel said. Placing a cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, he reached into his attaché case and pulled out a comic book. I hadn’t seen this issue. He handed it to me.

  “Hot off the press. I picked it up in the bodega down the street from the Center.”

  It was the latest edition of The Adventures of Aaron the Golem of Prague. The cover was taken up with a large iconic image of the Rebbe, his forceful blue eyes peering magisterially off the page. Beneath the picture was the caption Welcome Melech HaMoshiach, our Rebbe. King Messiah.

  “More of the same,” said Leibel. “This time aimed at bar mitzvah boys.”

  “Where do you suppose this is all headed?”

  “Can’t say,” he said. “If he announced himself to the world, that would be one thing. If he rejected it, another. But silence, that I can’t decipher.”

  “Why doesn’t he say something?”

  “Do I know? He’s got to be aware what’s going on.”

  “Can’t you ask him?” I said. With ordinary mortals this would not be a peculiar notion.

  “You don’t engage the Rebbe in casual conversation. And, anyway, if I did go up to him, he’d answer with a verse that could be taken any which way. When he wants to make something known, he’s quite clear about it. For some reason he wishes to stay out of this.”

  “And no one knows why.”

  “No one I know.”

  False messianism has been one of the great pitfalls of the Jews, and there have been, oy, so many that one would think we’d have learned. But no; so attractive is the possibility of redemption, of apocalyptic deliverance from this ball of misery we call the world, that this phenomenon continued to visit itself upon us with astonishing regularity.

  As for the Kobliner Rebbe’s silence—it provided insufficient knowledge, a poor way to settle an argument. Perhaps the Rebbe intended his silence as assent. Then again, maybe not. A poor way to settle an argument, indeed.

  I asked, “What’s going on with Reb Yudel?”

  “You know I sit nowhere near the inner circle, Nick.”

  “You must hear things.”

  “I hear, I hear, but only rumors. They’re all over the spectrum.”

  “He must know something, don’t you think? He’s the man’s personal secretary, for years.”

  “I’m not that high in the hierarchy.”

  “Know anyone who is? Know someone who knows someone? There can’t be more than a couple of degrees of separation to get to anyone in the organization.”

  “Why do you care?”

  I thought about my meeting with the Rebbe, about his letters to me, about the disintegrating card sitting in my wallet like an inactivated good luck charm.

  “I have my reasons,” I said.

  A week after my article appeared, I received the Rebbe’s note. Only this time the letter was written in Yiddish. “Dear Nick,” it read. “Ich bin; auber ich bin nicht. I am; also I am not.” Always with the riddles.

  But that was the end. A week after I received that peculiar note, the Kobliner Rebbe died. Heart attack. One moment he was exploring yet again the inner secrets of Sefer Koblin, the next his immortal soul was elsewhere, his body an empty vessel. They found him at his study table, his tefillin still on his arm and forehead, his face nose down in the book. Surely a peaceful way to go, pious even, a Jewish cowboy dying with his boots on. Leibel asked me if I wanted to attend his funeral. Politely, I declined, though more than 35,000 gathered outside and all around the Kobliner Center. Notables included the governor and mayor, and the vice president of the United States.

  But not me.

  ***

  The sudden death of the Rebbe at age eighty-eight should have been the end of it. All that messianic mumbo jumbo should have gone beneath the earth along with his corpse.

  The man lay underground no more than a month when the Kobliner Hasidim began to dispute whether the Rebbe had a flesh-and-blood future. Now the matter no longer centered on whether the late Rabbi Schmeltzer was the Moshiach b’hazarah, the Messiah who would return in his old fleshy self, or whether he was gone for good. In either case, Schmeltzer had become the Moshiach.

  Leibel came to dislike removing bits of tobacco from his lip, he said, and switched to Marlboros. He was sucking one down in my office. As usual, I sat across from him, sipping peppermint tea, awaiting whatever news he’d brought this time.

  “Christ, Nick. Now they’re saying he’s going to rise from the grave. From the fucking grave. He’s dead. Not exactly. Now they’re saying he’ll be coming back sometime soon. Any day now. There’s no shortage of predictions when.”

  “Who’s doing the saying?” I asked.

  “Everyone, anyone, I don’t know. It’s all over the place. The believers in his return are preparing for it, too, lighting candles, giving charity, making and freezing matzoh balls for the big soup fest the day he arrives.”

  “Hasn’t anyone reminded those good folks that Judaism took a stand a couple of millennia ago rejecting another fellow a few thought had been resurrected?”

  Leibel sat for a moment as if trying to determine my historic reference.

  “Yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “They usually respond something like, ‘He wasn’t real, but the Rebbe is.’” Leibel continued. “Some have taken to asking questions to the Rebbe’s books—you know, holding one of his books, asking a question, then letting the book open to a page and finding the answer there.”

  “That proves anything you want,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  A quarrel of this magnitude naturally spilled over into the New York press, the Israeli press, then all over the globe. Soon the world knew the weight of opinion within the movement. Had he died for good, or was he due back any day on the D Train?

  About eight months after the Rebbe’s death, I completed an article on this business. It was a fairly long piece solicited by Modern Judaism, entitled, “Man or God, Dead or Alive? The Post-Mortem Travails of the Late Kobliner Rebbe.”

  I had literally just pushed the send button propelling the piece out into the grey world and sat back enjoying that sensation of completing a piece of writing, when a knock on my office door interrupted my reverie. Leibel.

  With that familiar demeanor approximating delirium, hunched down, he strode in and sat. “You’re not going to fucking believe this, Nick. You’re not. You’re going to think I’ve left my senses in some Brooklyn sewer,” he said, the Marlboro between his right forefinger and thumb. “You remember Yitzi Menkies?”

  I didn’t have to think very hard. “Ratsy Yitzi? Sure. He’s a Kobliner since our yeshiva days.”

  “Right. Quiet as a mouse,” Leibel said.

  “A rat,” I corrected.

  “Always with the bits of hair for a mustache he let grow.”

  “Squinting eyes, and a twitching nose like something disagreeable was hanging in the air. What about him?”

  “Nick, this is about to get weird.”

  “Leibel, an eighty-eight-year-old man passes on to the great beyond and his followers begin keeping watch for his return from the bone yard. And you’ve got news for me that’s weirder than that?”

  “My friend, you’re about to hear some weird fucking shit,” he said, employing language unusual for him.

  “Press on,” I said.

&n
bsp; He leaned back, blew a smoke ring, and Leibel Berliner, my nicotine-addicted buddy and Kobliner informant, proceeded to weave a tale that the term weird could not adequately approach.

  “I’ve assembled what I’m about to tell you from several accounts I heard over the weekend, Nick. You know how much actual truth is normally available from such an endeavor. Still, I think the gist of it is pretty close to what actually happened late last Friday just as Shabbos began.”

  And this was the story.

  ***

  On the previous Friday night, Yitzi Menkies, Ratsy Yitzi, a perfectly ordinary member of the Kobliners, ran breathless into his synagogue, apparently just shy of hysteria. He proclaimed that he’d had a miraculous experience at dusk.

  An old Jewish legend had it that at the end of the sixth day of Creation, the eve of the first Sabbath in history, God sowed the seeds of numerous biblical miracles. As the Sabbath was being ushered in late Friday afternoon, the sun completing its final course in the sky, a mystical moment presented itself. Bein HaShmashot it is called, literally “between the suns”—not yet dark, but no longer light either, a moment when the space between heaven and earth narrowed and what is possible up there is momentarily possible down here, the upper and lower realms briefly kissing. At this moment, for example, God created Moses’s staff, the instrument that defeated Pharaoh and split the sea, as well as the jackass that would eventually give the pagan prophet Balaam his comeuppance.

  Menkies, unmarried, lived alone. He had just lit the Sabbath candles. He sat in his living room awaiting the time for the evening service, studying the weekly Torah portion from an edition that included pesukei d’radbam, the Rebbe’s commentary to the Bible.

  “I wasn’t at the service last Shabbos,” Leibel told me. “I’d gone to visit my cousin in Queens. From what I’ve pieced together, Yitzi claims that there was a knock on his door. He opened it. Who should be standing on the other side? The Rebbe himself.”