Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “How did he look?” was all I could think to say.

  “Not bad for having been six foot under for more than half a year.”

  So. The Rebbe had returned. Rabbi Dovid Schmeltzer had come back to the world of the living from the netherworld.

  Leibel continued. “The Rebbe strolled into his apartment, Menkies said, like it was the most natural thing in the world, took a seat in Menkies’s easy chair, and picked up the Bible Yitzi had just been studying. He started reading, humming and swaying back and forth, pulling at his beard, still long and white except for the yellow around his mouth and chin.”

  “Just like that?” I said.

  “Yes. Quite the story.”

  Leibel used this moment to fire up his next cigarette, and to wave it around like he was conducting an orchestra.

  “So Menkies tells the guys at the shul the Rebbe became agitated from his reading. He began muttering, ‘Oh that’s not right. I couldn’t have said that. What could I have possibly meant by that? Oy, the excesses of youth.’”

  “This is true?” I asked. “Schmeltzer really said that?”

  “True? What’s true? Truth has lately become a slippery commodity. But, NB, there’s at least a second-level truth here. This is the story Menkies told that night. This I couldn’t make up in an opium dream. I’m the messenger, just the messenger.”

  “There’s more to this, right?”

  “Of course. As Yitzi told it, after a few moments of studying his own work, the Rebbe lifted his head and looked at Menkies, who was nearly catatonic.”

  “Make me a cup of tea, please, Yitzi,” the Rebbe said.

  Menkies, who’d planned on eating all three of his Sabbath meals with friends, had not prepared the customary pot of hot water one finds simmering on the top of the stove in Orthodox homes during the Sabbath. And since the Sabbath had begun, it was forbidden for Menkies to boil water for the Rebbe’s requested cup of tea.

  “Menkies said he told this to the Rebbe, I imagine more than a little embarrassed at having to explain so simple a Sabbath law to his resurrected rabbi.”

  “Holy shit!” I said.

  “Holy shit on a shingle is right,” Leibel responded. “But there’s more.”

  “Of course there’s more.”

  “Yitzi, don’t you understand?” the Rebbe reportedly said. “The old Halakha, the old Law, is no longer operative. I have returned from the afterlife, my boy. Don’t you see? I have returned to make new Law. Now be a good fellow and go to your kitchen and make me that tea. I still don’t take sugar.”

  “So he makes the tea. Menkies says, ‘What else could I do?’ When he brings it, the Rebbe tells him, ‘Now go to shul, Yitzi, and give everyone the good news that I’ve returned.’”

  “That’s the story?”

  “Almost. There’s a little more.”

  “Do tell.”

  “So, after Yitzi finishes telling the people at the shul, they all go back to davenning. The minute the service ends, a large group power walks him back to his apartment.”

  “And?”

  “No Rebbe.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  “Just an empty cup of tea and a note.”

  “The note saying . . . ?”

  “This I’ve actually seen. It’s been scanned and is now ricocheting around the electrons like the clap.”

  “And?”

  “The note says something like, ‘My Dear Yitzi, Thank you for the tea. We’ll meet again. Gut Shabbos. Reb Schmeltzer (7:00 p.m.).’”

  “He wrote the time down?”

  “To indicate, I imagine, that he wrote it on Shabbos. Another broken Shabbos law.”

  This was what messiahs did. The new boss was not the same as the old boss, and the laws had now changed. A young fellow named Yeshua did something similar some 2,000 years earlier, starting a cult that got out of hand.

  Of course, the handwriting analyst they’d engaged declared the note written in the Rebbe’s authentic, if somewhat moribund hand. No reason for suspicion. Bein HaShmashot, they said. Much could happen. These were gullible times.

  From that first encounter on, there were numerous and regular Rebbe sightings, usually late at night, usually by male Kobliners walking alone (the same eight or ten if one bothered identifying them). These sightings often included a message, a new commandment or two to follow or, more likely, an old commandment or two to abrogate.

  The world rejected these wacky episodes. One well-known Jewish writer purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times, rebuking the Kobliners’ claims. But the Kobliners, with their shrill messiah-nizing, had so prepared themselves for something like this—their mystical games, their incantations, prayers, the totality of their predicting—they went berserk, wasting little time transforming themselves in light of the Rebbe’s re-emergence.

  Their rebbe had returned. He’d broken two Sabbath commandments immediately, and openly declared Jewish Law fluid. Forget that the only tangible proof was a sixteen-word thank-you note.

  About six weeks after the transformation, Leibel returned to my office. As he took his usual seat, he pulled a black cylindrical object from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. He placed it confidently in his mouth and inhaled vigorously, after which from his mouth and nose he exhaled an unparalleled cloud of milky white smoke.

  “Given up the butts,” he said in the wake of what must have been a look of pure amazement on my face at all that haze rising to the ceiling. “I vape now. More nicotine and less of the stuff that kills you. Plus, it’s so cool.”

  I nodded.

  “Comes in all kinds of flavors, you know. This one’s rugelach. It’s kosher, too. Can you imagine?”

  He settled in, took a few more gargantuan puffs, my office now foggy, and said, “I can’t believe the transformation.” He eyed the device. “It’s a Boulder, one of the more popular brands, I’m told. Not cheap for a nicotine high.” He inhaled again. “First of all, they believe—I mean they really frickin’ believe—that Reb Schmeltzer came to Yitzi Menkies and sipped tea at the onset of Shabbos.”

  “I’m flabbergasted,” I said. “How could they? And where do you stand, my friend?”

  “I’ve seen the note he wrote that night. It’s now framed and hangs in the library entrance to 896.”

  “So what?”

  And Leibel closed his eyes for an extended moment.

  “Well, NB,” he said, “it’s like this. I don’t believe a word of it.”

  He paused, puffed hard, and pulled at his beard with such force I thought he either wanted to hurt himself or actually pull the damned thing off. Specks of salt-and-pepper hairs fell onto my desk.

  “Not a word of it. But what can I do? Until now I could be the grand cynic and report all this baloney to you and it was okay. I could still go home and live among them, despite the inanity. Now things have changed at warp speed. It’s a different place. I either have to stay aboard or jump ship.”

  “Why don’t you leave? Chrissakes, Leibel. Pack your things, get on the subway, and move yourself out of the neighborhood. Find one that’s not insane.”

  He shifted in his chair and looked at the floor, plainly uncomfortable. “It’s not so easy to pack up and leave. I have friends there, my best friends, really. I have my wife and kids. They’re being drawn in. And why not?”

  “Why not? Because it’s bullshit.”

  “Maybe—”

  “Maybe?”

  He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. “This is hard to explain. We Kobliners always thought we had a special position on the planet. It’s thrilling knowing you have a couple thousand centers all over the world, I mean everywhere, and Jews seek you out. A Jew gets released from prison, he goes to a Kobliner House, not a Reform synagogue. On top of that, now we can claim divine intervention.”

  “So what? Never h
appened. It’s crap.”

  “What isn’t crap, NB? The world’s so full of rot we’re forever scraping it off our shoes at the end of the day, aren’t we?”

  “Truth isn’t crap, Leibel. It’s the only thing that isn’t.”

  “Truth seems so pliable these days,” he said. “Besides,” he whispered, “there’s this magnetic pull. I find myself drawn in, not just to the community, but to the, oh, crap! I don’t know. To the gestalt of the thing.”

  I said, “Screw the gestalt. It’s your mind fucking with you. And Menkies, for the love of God,” I said. “Shouldn’t the prophet of a new world order at least have something going for him beside a stringy mustache, a twitchy nose, and an overactive imagination?”

  “He had the privilege.”

  “What?”

  He put the device down in the ashtray that once contained his ashes and butts.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You’re talking yourself into a delusion because it’s convenient and the alternative is difficult,” I responded.

  “You don’t understand, NB.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  And he looked at me, pity in his eye. “NB, Nicky, you don’t have relationships, and I doubt you believe in anything. I don’t think you have friends, except maybe me, and we only see each other whenever I make my way here. You’re divorced. Your daughter’s in a coma. What have you got beside your work? Me, I have a life centered on that bunch of nudniks in Lower Park Slope, who have now become unbelievably energized. Would you have me surrender that? To you, relationships are unimportant. To me they’re everything.”

  “You’d stay in that community to maintain relationships and live a deluded life?”

  “Look—” His voice grew louder. “All sorts of truths populate the world, some of them wildly contradicting others. Do we really have to know the final truth all the time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean people believe all kinds of things that are observably false because it serves some other purpose in their lives.”

  “What things?” I asked, though I could construct the list as easily as he.

  “Like evolution’s phony. Like no one landed on the moon, the Holocaust never happened, the Jews control the world, the climate hasn’t changed, Paul is dead, Elvis is alive, that computers can become human. I could go on forever with the manure people believe big piles of. The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”

  “I get it,” I said. “But what does this have to do with you? You’re the goddamned Samuel Rattner professor of astrophysics.”

  Leibel moved his lips as if in prayer, or rehearsal. “I have to stay with the Kobliners,” he said. “They’re not doing anything immoral, are they? Is resurrection so strange? How many hundreds of millions of people believe an obscure man from Galilee, nailed to a cross, got up three days later and danced the jig?”

  “Because a billion people all believe the same thing, does that make it true?” I asked like I was chatting with a kindergartner.

  Leibel played thoughtfully with the device in his hand.

  “I want to believe it. I wish to believe it. My life depends on it,” he said.

  “You’re too honest for magical thinking.”

  “Don’t you understand?” He paused, staring a hole into my pupils, as if through telepathy he could explain. “I guess you don’t”—weariness in his voice.

  I was rational enough to know that all was not rationality, that the non-rational and even the irrational filled our lives with meaning and purpose, with harmless enough constructs within which we humans dwelt so as to get to bed every night and out of it the next morning. I knew it, but could not pronounce it aloud.

  Professor Leibel Berliner pressed his hands on the edge of my desk and pushed himself up, gazing at me the entire time, perhaps awaiting a response, perhaps my approval or a gesture of understanding. He sighed, pulled his gaze from me, lifted his device from the ashtray, turned and left, softly closing the door behind him. I knew he would never again return to fill my office with smoke, or vapor, and my head with news.

  Our next brief meeting would be a measure of how much things had changed. And change they had.

  ***

  The Kobliners became the Schmeltzerites, in honor of their resurrected rebbe. They transformed into an independent stream of Judaism—just barely Jewish.

  Rebbe Sightings #12 and #14 ended kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. It was now not uncommon to see traditionally clad Hasidim of Schmeltzer enter a McDonald’s and order a cheeseburger or go into a Chinese restaurant for spareribs or a barbecue joint for racks of ribs.

  As part of this upheaval, the main course of their Friday evening repast often consisted of one of several forms of pork: pork loin, pork chops, ribs, honey baked ham with pineapple rings and cloves, boiled ham, ham hock, pork sausage, Canadian bacon, you name it. Had they asked me, I would have counseled an indulgence in shellfish. They did not. More’s the pity.

  Bestowing upon Yitzi Menkies the role of head of the reconfigured group surely constituted the greatest peculiarity of all. I knew Yitzi Menkies from the yeshiva, where he was known as an unpleasant fellow, always difficult to work with, prone to fits of anger.

  A loner, he never studied with a partner during our yeshiva days, an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Guys with IQs less than stones and who smelled bad from head to toe had long-term relationships with their study partners. Everyone learned with someone. Except for Menkies. Out of compassion, Shmulie and I each tried once, but it lasted less than a couple of weeks.

  Senior year, Yitzi declared modern Orthodoxy—the Yeshiva of Midwood’s Orthodox philosophy—unsuitable. He said he needed something mystical, something rooted in Kabbalah. After graduation, he got mysticism and a good deal more when he joined the Kobliners. He got a black coat and a Shabbat hat styled after the fashion of eighteenth-century Polish nobility. He got a close community in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Ultimately fame and power, and fortune, too, came his way.

  When Yitzi Menkies joined the Kobliners, even after his ascension, I figured I’d never have anything to do with him again.

  CHAPTER 22

  TO OZ

  THE ANOINTED FIRST SCHMELTZERITE Rebbe was to be my newest partner in a growing line of Shmulie-inspired encounters. Evidently, he had authored a book that might, or might not, be the key to the riddle uttered to me by the virtual Kobliner Rebbe while tripping in the Lerbs ionosphere. That book, still sitting unread on the wooden desk in my living room, pressed upon me to return to the former Kobliner, now Schmeltzerite, Center on Fifth Avenue for the first time since my youth.

  Another gray day. An unpleasant bleakness filtered in from the outside. Mingus lay sprawled on the couch beneath a fading afghan, arms and legs akimbo, something akin to an overturned tortoise.

  I sat at the desk and looked at the screen, still in my maroon bathrobe, the final gift from my daughter. Ms. Dietrich was black and white, full faced, slightly out of focus, wearing dark lipstick, attired in a fur hat reaching down just above her right eyebrow, a speck of light in the center of each eye.

  “Maggie,” I said to the screen, “Call the Schmeltzerite Center for me, please. I need to make an appointment with Yitzi Menkies.”

  “Certainly.”

  The call picked up after the first ring. Three or so bars of something faintly klezmer filled the air. The music faded, replaced by a perky recorded female voice. “You’ve reached the Schmeltzerites. We’re here to help you.” The voice paused two beats, and continued. “If you would like to receive Reb Menkies’ latest publication, please say ‘one.’ If you would like to make a contribution of over five thousand dollars, please say ‘two.’ If you would like to make a contribution under five thousand dollars, please say ‘three.’ If you would like to receive our newly published The Philosophy of Schmeltze
r: Hasidism in the Newer Age, please say ‘four.’ If you would like us to pray for your earthly health, please say ‘five.’ If you would like us to pray for your heavenly health, please say ‘six.’ If you would like to convert to Schmeltzer, please say ‘seven.’ If you would like to learn how becoming a member of Schmeltzer can improve your sex life, say ‘eight.’ For all other inquiries, please stay on the line and an operator will be with you sooner or later.”

  Though greatly tempted to have Maggie indicate “eight,” I pressed no number. I held and in less than five minutes was rewarded by that same perky female voice, now live. “We are Schmeltzer. We got it better. Can I help you?”

  “May I speak with Rabbi Menkies?” I asked.

  “And who may I say is calling?”

  “My name is Dr. Nick Friedman.”

  “Hold a moment, please.” The wailing clarinets and lively, syncopated violins of klezmer music poured out.

  After a reasonable wait, she returned. “He’s unavailable now, Nicky. But if you’d like to come early this afternoon, the rebbe said he’ll be available. He’d love to speak with you.”

  “Should I make an appointment?” I asked.

  “The rebbe rarely makes appointments. Hardly ever. Well, actually, never. Appointments are too old-world, he says. He just goes with the rhythm of the universe as the universe expresses itself to him. If the time is right for him to meet you, he will. He told me to tell you the rhythms so far today are good. Why not come on by?”

  “No particular time, then, I take it?”

  “Whenever your flow tells you that the time is right, the time is right. With luck your rhythms will match the rebbe’s and things will be copasetic for both of you at the same moment.”

  We said our goodbyes. A field trip to Oz. “Maggie,” I said.

  “Yes, Nick.”

  “I’m off to see the rebbe.”

  “Doesn’t prudence require you read his book first?”

  I hefted Menkies’s book and turned it over. No snippets of high praise from well-known scholars graced the back, only a photo of Menkies in his rebbe garb, a white robe and a tall, white yarmulke. Some gibberish about the miracle of the Rebbe’s Return and something called the New Thought Idea filled the space beneath