The back porch faced out on a brief patch of lawn and a tall elm. I could not see the leaves in the darkness. But I had seen them earlier in the day during the Morning Service; they were dying with the fall.
The noise inside the synagogue poured out into the night, an undulating, swelling and receding and thinning and growing sound. The joy of dancing with the Torah, holding it close to you, the words of God to Moses at Sinai. I wondered if gentiles ever danced with their Bible. “Hey, Tony. Do you ever dance with your Bible?”
I had actually spoken the question. I heard the words in the cool dark air. I had not thought to do that. I had not even thought of Tony—yes, I remembered his name: Tony Savanola. I had not thought of him in years. Where was he now? Fighting in the war probably. Or studying for the priesthood and deferred from the draft as I was. Hey, Tony. Do you ever read your Bible? Do you ever hold it to you and know how much you love it? Do Christian Bible scholars write about Jesus the same way they write about Abraham? Do they say that it’s all only stories? Hey, Tony.
I thought of the street and the maples and the zoo and the meadow and the pond and the clearing in the pine wood. I thought of Eddie Kulanski. Hey, Eddie. Do you ever read your Bible? I wondered where he was. I hoped he wasn’t dead. I hoped he was killing Germans. That’s what you’re good for, Eddie. You’re a good killer and the war is helping you to kill the right people. Kill a lot of Nazis, Eddie. That’s what you’re perfect for. But don’t get yourself killed. I don’t hate you enough to want you to get killed. Why was I thinking of Eddie Kulanski? I could see him in front of me in the darkness, cold sleepy gray eyes, small mouth, pointed features. I felt a silent swarming in the leaves of the elm.
The door to the porch opened and closed behind me. “Davey?” It was Saul. He came over to me and we stood together near the porch rail. “It’s hot inside,” he said.
I felt his presence as a comforting warmth.
“What are you reading now?” he asked.
“Spinoza.”
“Oh, God!”
“That’s appropriate for Spinoza,” I said, laughing.
“I tried reading Kant once,” he said, after a moment.
“And?”
“I went back to the Rambam.”
“Thank God for Maimonides! The refuge of the Orthodox Jewish rebel. Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Davey.”
“What?”
“Are you all right?”
I looked up at the sky and the stars. “I’m a little frightened, Saul. I don’t know what to do.”
He was quiet.
“I’ve stopped reading all those goyishe books about the Torah. I’m really frightened of what they’re saying. Come on for a walk with me, Saul. A quick walk through the park.”
“I’m exhausted, Davey.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” I felt a sudden agitation and restlessness and a surging of blood in my ears. “Let’s go back inside.”
But once inside the noise was deafening; I felt it thickening the air through which I moved. A child riding an adult’s shoulders poked me in the face accidentally with the stick of his Torah flag. I put my hand to my face; there was no blood. I looked around and saw my father seated at one of the tables, talking with my uncle and some friends and drinking beer. There were people still dancing with the Torah scrolls. Alex was dancing again. As I watched, Saul was handed a scroll and he too entered the circle of dancers. Behind the gauzy curtain near the front of the synagogue was the women’s section. My mother and aunt were there but I could not see them. The synagogue was packed. I edged through the crowd and came outside onto the street. There was a crowd here too, but less dense. I walked quickly beneath the trees toward the park. The night was cool upon my face. The skin throbbed faintly where the stick had jabbed me. I touched my face again. No, there was no blood. I crossed 170th Street and entered the park.
The cement path led directly off the sidewalk through a wide opening in the stone wall. It curved and branched and narrowed, winding along between grassy fields. There were trees and benches and a few people walking about. I wandered aimlessly through the park, sat for a while on a bench listening to a tree in the night breeze, then walked along following a sudden steep dip in the path. Here in the heart of the park I seemed to be alone. I sat down on a bench, feeling the hardness of the slats against my back. I had been doing a lot of sitting on park benches these past years. They were good places for reading. Yaakov Bader kept saying there were too many distractions when you read in a park; he read in the school library or at home. I liked parks. I had the world visible to me while I read. It was important to have it visible so you could see how your reading changed it.
An elderly couple passed by slowly, talking in Yiddish about the war. Their footsteps made soft tapping sounds on the path. They looked at me as they went by, a gray-haired couple walking very slowly, the man leaning on a cane. Did they have family in Europe? I had never seen them before. I had lived on this street more than two years, and every day I saw faces I did not recognize. Had I known everyone on my street near the zoo? I could not remember. There were many things about that street I could no longer remember.
I looked up at the underside of a nearby tree. My eyes, accustomed now to the absence of light, saw the shifting shades of darkness as the tree responded to the breezy night air. I shivered and pulled closer to me the light coat I wore. I hungered for the comfort of my school. In its large, light-filled study hall I could lose myself in the centuries of accepted thought. We would maneuver to be audacious as we displayed our acquired wisdom and skill in the Talmud; but the paths were clear; they had been trod by prior generations. There was comfort in that and only terror in the thought of striking out alone beyond the boundaries of the past. I loved the past. Why should I leave its warmth and solace-giving strength? I wished for the festival to be at an end so I could once more be at school. I had had enough of goyim and secularists and borderline heretics. They created a world of endlessly shifting sands and I hungered for the world created by the Master of the Universe.
I walked back to the synagogue and arrived too late for the Torah reading but in time for the last prayer of the Evening Service.
The weeks that followed were among the loveliest I have ever known. Saul took his ordination exam and passed and the family celebrated his achievement with a kiddush in the synagogue and a party in my uncle’s apartment. Saul, flushed with joy, his pale face still filled with awe and disbelief at his accomplishment, was congratulated, pounded on the back, hugged, kissed. “Rabbi,” everyone kept calling him. “Rav Shaul Lurie. How does it feel? Rav Shaul Lurie.” I noticed that many of the old members of the Am Kedoshim Society were at the party. “What are you doing with yourself?” they kept asking me. And I kept saying I was going to the yeshiva and studying Talmud with Rav Tuvya Sharfman. “You will follow in the footsteps of your cousin?” I nodded. There were smiles. The paths of generations would be walked again by the young of the Lurie family. They had reason to be happy.
It was a long gentle fall with only an occasional harshness to the winds. Slowly the leaves turned and fell and the grass in the park took on its brown winter look.
I learned to love to walk that fall. Sometimes I would rise very early and if it was a sunny day I would dress and pray and eat and walk all the way to school. It was a very long walk but I had ridden on buses for so many years through these blocks that I felt them all to be my own, and easy familiarity shortened the miles. I went past the stores and the houses of 170th Street, saw in windows the blue stars that signified families with men in the armed forces and an occasional gold star that marked the war’s deadly cost.
One night I asked Alex to walk to school with me the next morning.
“Are you crazy?” he said, looking up from his book.
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll do you good. You’re the athlete.”
“You are crazy,” he said, and returned to his novel.
I did not a
sk him again for a while.
I walked and enjoyed the fall and the slow coming of the cold weather. I loved crossing the bridge to Manhattan and looking out at the city and the river below. There on the bluff stood the school, its green dome glistening in the sunlight. I hurried toward it, eager for the day.
From nine in the morning until noon I sat in the study hall and prepared with Yaakov Bader for the Talmud class. At noon we went down to the cafeteria for lunch. A little before one o’clock about eighty students entered the classroom across the corridor from the study hall. We sat crowded in it, pressing tensely forward against the old battered desk and chair in front of the room. Promptly at one o’clock Rav Tuvya Sharfman entered.
A hush would instantly pervade the room, a sudden draining of all extraneous sound. We were in the presence of the greatest Talmudist in the Orthodox Jewish world, a world in which excellence in Talmud is the highest of human achievements.
I remember with all the vividness of a photograph my first class with Rav Tuvya Sharfman. I had seen him in the school building from time to time but I had never been close to him. He entered the room and silence entered with him, together with an awesome sense of the generations of greatness he carried within himself. He was a tall, thin man in his late forties with dark hair and a dark Vandyke beard. He wore a neat dark pin-striped suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. His face was long and narrow and somewhat saturnine in appearance, with thin outward-turned lips, a sharply beaked nose, and large black eyes. He had a long thin neck and thin bony white hands. His was a lineage of Talmudists extending back in time to the period immediately following the Crusades. A rich wine merchant had turned over his business to his brother soon after a mob of Crusaders had rampaged through the nearby German countryside slaughtering Jews. He had gone off to study Torah in a distant academy of learning. The line had continued unbroken and its descendant was now my Talmud teacher. He had come to America from Eastern Europe in the twenties with ordination from his grandfather and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. I felt generations of Talmudists staring at me over his wide shoulders. I was excited by their beckoning eyes.
We were studying the Talmud tractate Berachot, which deals with various important prayers, blessings, and benedictions, the occasion and manner of their recitation, the significance of their words. He had brought in with him a dark-bound folio of the Talmud. He placed it on the desk, opened it, and surveyed the class. His large eyelids drooped somewhat, giving his eyes a hooded, birdlike appearance. I sat directly in front of him, a foot or so from his desk. He stood behind the desk and said abruptly in a faintly nasal raspy voice, “You all prepared the Mishnah and the Gemara. What is missing from the Mishnah?” He spoke English with a vague trace of an accent. “What does the Mishnah leave out?”
The Mishnah we had prepared was a series of terse legal statements describing the times one is permitted to say the Shema prayer, “Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.” It begins by asking, “From what time in the evening may the Shema be recited?” and goes on to a series of responses to that question.
I did not understand his question. He repeated it, this time in Yiddish. “Nu, what is not said in the Mishnah? The Mishnah asks ‘From what time in the evening may the Shema be recited?’ What does the Mishnah not ask?”
Most of the students had entered the classroom in a condition of panic. That condition now swiftly deteriorated into paralysis. They sat in various attitudes of frozen terror, staring blindly at their volumes of Talmud, afraid to raise their eyes and meet the large hooded black eyes of Rav Sharfman.
He waited. The air became heavy and stifling with silence.
I scanned the Mishnah once again. It had to be an absurdly simple answer, something we were all looking at but could not see. He had asked the question for effect. He wanted to make an important point. What had I heard about him? He was interested not so much in the words on a page of Talmud as in the invisible threads that tied various pages together. He was alluding to assumptions, presuppositions, the unstated scaffolding that lay behind the terse statements of law and legal skirmishing. I looked at the Mishnah and there it was, suddenly, clearly, the answer, like a singing inside my head. Keeping my elbow on my desk, I raised my right hand.
His long thin neck turned slightly inside his white collar as he looked at me and waited.
“The Mishnah does not state that we are supposed to say the Shema. It assumes that the Shema must be said.”
I felt everyone in the class looking at me. Now that I had given my answer, it sounded a little inane. But what else could he have meant?
The hooded eyes blinked once. I thought I could hear the lids go up and down.
“That is correct,” Rav Sharfman said in English with no emotion on his face. “Did you all hear that? Without that assumption, the Mishnah has no meaning.” He looked at me and said in Yiddish, “What is your name?”
“David Lurie.”
The eyes fixed themselves upon me, unblinking. “You are Lurie,” he said in Yiddish. Then he said in English, “A base hit, Lurie. Read the Mishnah.”
Saul had told me about the way he occasionally would punctuate his classroom remarks with baseball terminology. Still it was strange hearing the words “a base hit” from the lips of Rav Tuvya Sharfman. From somewhere in the classroom came a nervous giggle. Yaakov Bader gave me a smile.
I read and explained carefully the words of the Mishnah. Then I read and explained the commentary of Rashi to the Mishnah. He let me go on without interruption. Then I read and explained the long commentary of the Tosafists. Finally he stopped me with an abrupt sideways motion of his right hand and called on someone else to read the Gemara.
I sat with my eyes on the text of the Talmud, feeling a tide of exhilaration wash over me. At one point during that afternoon, as I sat there with my eyes on the page, I sensed his eyes upon me and I looked up and saw him gazing at me. I turned my eyes back down to the page and felt my face warm. It would be a good class. I was exultant.
The weeks of that autumn moved gently by. I lived in the world of my school, inside the crowded classroom of Rav Sharfman and the text of the Talmud I studied every day. My father’s business was very successful and he began to talk about opening another store somewhere in the Bronx. My mother delighted in her role as a business woman; she dealt with customers and salesmen, and answered the phone; on occasion she traveled to the Diamond Exchange downtown in Manhattan, carrying with her the black leather briefcase. Alex read novels and wrote stories and poems which he sent to magazines and received back in the mail together with printed rejection slips. Then one day one of his poems was accepted by a college magazine in the Midwest. He was radiant with joy. It was a fine autumn.
But in the middle of December the sudden German offensive in the Ardennes forest, which broke through the American lines and seemed to shatter all the advances of the summer and fall, turned the year suddenly dark. I looked at the war maps on the wall over Alex’s bed and saw again the poisoned sword of the Angel of Death. We listened to the news broadcasts on our kitchen radio.
“Stinking bastard Germans,” my father muttered.
“Where did they all suddenly come from?” Alex asked.
“How could it be such a surprise?” I asked.
“Somebody was not doing his job,” my father said.
“What does it mean, Max?” asked my mother fearfully.
“It means more months of war,” said my father. “Half a year. Maybe a year. The bastards.”
I walked to school on a cold late January morning and saw gold stars in windows where blue stars had appeared before and felt the distant war translated into discernible grief. Saul told me the brother of a girl we knew had been killed in the Ardennes offensive.
“They found out yesterday.” He was gray-faced with shock. The war had never been this close to us before. I saw her inside my eyes, a sweet round-faced cheerful girl with long brown hair and brown eyes. Her brother was dead
in the war.
I called her that night and expressed my feelings of sympathy. Yaakov and Saul and I went by subway from school to her home in Brooklyn that Sunday. The family sat in mourning. The mother, a young woman made pale and old with grief, huddled in a corner surrounded by friends. The father kept saying, “He wanted to go in. He wanted to fight the Nazis.” He was in his early forties, and he seemed dazed. “He died fighting Nazis. If he had to die, that was a good way to die. Oh, God. Oh, my God. He was such a good kid. God, God.” The girl could hardly talk but sat with tears streaming down her lovely face. We left and took the subway and rode in silence. Yaakov got off at 161st Street to change trains for his home in the West Bronx. Saul and I left the train at the 170th Street and Grand Concourse station and climbed the stairs to the street.
It had begun to snow. I pulled my collar up and walked carefully on the slippery street.
“ ‘Once God gives permission for Satan to destroy, he destroys the good together with the wicked,’ ” Saul quoted.
“Yes,” I said, talking into the wind. “I know that Rabbinic remark. I don’t understand it.”
“The remark?”
“No. The reality.”
We walked home in silence.
The cold winter weeks went slowly by. I listened to the radio and read the papers and saw the pictures and newsreels of the war. When I woke early to sunny days I would walk to school despite the bitter cold. Once I dared Alex to walk with me and he accepted the challenge and we walked together. He spent half the time rhapsodizing about Melville and the other half asking himself out loud how he had ever let me talk him into taking such a walk. I did not walk with him to school again. Once I asked Saul to walk with me. He was teaching Talmud now in the high school department of the yeshiva. He looked at me as if I were insane.