And my father became pale.
Amit had told me that when my father was still at yeshiva, he killed a mugger in the middle of the night by setting him on fire. Amit said that that’s why my father became a lawyer—to defend himself in court.
When I heard the story, I asked my mom about it. She told me, “Became a lawyer to defend himself over some fire? It is nonsense.” Her answer seemed like it had loopholes, like that comma that might or might not be there in Noach, when, after the flood,
Hashem said in His heart: “I will not continue to curse again the ground because of man, since the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again continue to smite every living being(,) as I have done.”
With the comma, it might be a promise to never again destroy the world, but without it, it’s only a promise to never again destroy the world by flood. Sometimes there’s a comma and sometimes there isn’t, and even though my mom’s answer seemed tricky, I’d never asked my dad about the fire story; partly because he didn’t like to talk to me about his days as a Torah scholar, but mostly because I wanted to believe he set fire to a man who tried to take something from him and I worried he’d tell me it wasn’t true.
“The fire!” Yuval said to the table. “He already knows,” he said to my father.
My father said, “We’ll see what he knows, Yuval, and when it turns out he doesn’t know what you think he knows, we’ll allow the subject to drop.”
“Agreed,” said Yuval.
“I’m not asking,” said my father. He turned to me. “Tell us what you think you know,” he said.
His voice was quieter and harder than I’d ever heard it.
I said, You set fire to a mugger. I said, Then you became a lawyer to defend yourself.
“There,” my father said to Yuval.
“It’s dropped,” said Yuval.
“It’s not true, what you heard,” my father said to me.
“Yet it has true pieces,” said Yuval’s Sara. That sentence was so pretty, and if I weren’t so in love with Esther Salt, I think I would have fallen in love with Sara Forem, just for her nervous Israeli English, but I wanted to hear the story right, so I told her to tell me in Hebrew.
I said, Tell me in Hebrew. And my dad said, “Gurion,” but my mother, who’d spent the last few minutes as quiet and content as the rest of us to watch the two giant fathers tease each other, spoke up. She said, “Know your son, Judah. He can hear this story now, in front of us, from the daughter of your oldest friend, or he will ask around the neighborhood until he will ask someone at that synagogue, and few will know the story he is hoping for, yet all of them will have something to say of you, and, unable as your son is to believe that anyone could harbor true contempt for his aba, he will be open to every twisted bobe-mayse any of these hundreds of local mamzers who would like to see you ruined will tell him. And it is not you he will ask to corroborate their whispered half-truths. He will ask me to do so, Judah, and I will, as I have, do my best to confuse him, and soon he will stop forgiving me for it. And soon after that, he will do exactly what you fear. Look on the face of your son and notice the smoothness around the orbits. There is not a trace of a line to be found. He sees everything, and can hear just as well, but he has not yet learned to squint. He has never squinted once.”
It was a very dramatic speech to hear in the middle of the most dramatic Seder I’d ever been to. It is very dramatic to hear your mom call everyone at your shul a mamzer and then say you don’t squint and that she confuses you on purpose and your dad is afraid of something, and I wanted to squint and tell everyone that my father was not afraid of anything, but before I could do that, Sara Forem was already saying, “I will tell you, but in English, because my smaller sisters don’t understand well.”
Her sisters understood that, though, and they began to cry, so Yuval told them, “Girls, go find the afikomen. Ma, Papa, Rochel—get them outta here, please.” The girls’ tears stopped falling, and their grandparents and their mother led them away, to further parts of the house.
Sara said, “What about us?”
“Would you rather look for matzo in an envelope, Gurion?” said Yuval.
No, I said.
“You,” Yuval said to Sara, “are twelve years old.” = “You’ve been bat-mitzvahed and the afikomen is no longer yours to find.”
Sara said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I forgot.” Then she told the story in Hebrew because her sisters were already running around out of earshot, looking under and between things throughout the house. “Years before we were born,” Sara said, “my father and your father were returning to the yeshiva from Litberg’s with the shmendrick Rolly, when they came to an alley where there was a very bad struggle between two men and a girl. Our fathers and the shmendrick went to help the girl. One man, he turned to them with a pistol, while the other man, he struggled with the girl. These men should have run from our fathers, but instead there was this pistol in the hand of the one and the girl was still struggling against the other, so there was nothing else to do, so your aba said some words that no one else can pronounce, and this man with the pistol, he was covered in fire. When he fell he was dead and then he was ashes and then he was nothing, he blew away. The shmendrick and my father, they struck the other man’s neck and held him against the ground, and then your father gave his coat to the girl, and he said some more impossible words, and she fell asleep against his shoulder, and he carried her home while my father and the shmendrick brought the man who struggled with her to the police, who put him in jail for the rest of his life.”
I said to my father, For the rest of his life?
It was proof I could squint, but no one seemed to hear me because my father was saying to Sara, “Go look for the afikomen.”
Yuval nodded to her that it was okay, and once she left the room, my father said, “All this narishkeit from you about keeping secrets, but you lied to your own daughter?”
“Not lied. Made a lesson,” said Yuval.
My father dropped his head on the backs of his hands and made air-sounds with his mouth.
Yuval stood up and was wobbly. He leaned on the table. He said, “She’s a child. What good is a complicated story to a child? What kind of protection does that offer?”
“Why tell it at all, then, Yuvy? Why are you like this?”
Yuval said, “Don’t start with the Yuvy why are you like this. This is what I’m like and it’s a good story about a good man doing good and there are very few of those, so I told it to my daughter. In a slightly simpler form.”
Now my father stood up, unwobbling, and he told my mother, “We’ll be back soon,” and to Yuval he said, “Keep my wife company,” and to me, “Let’s you and I go look for Elijah.”
We walked six blocks in silence, to Litberg’s. My father knocked on a door in the alley, and a black man wearing a paper boat on his head and a pin on his shirt that said CARL came halfway outside. Carl said, “Who is this?”
“My boy.”
“Hello his boy—two tonight?”
My father held up two fingers, and Carl ducked back inside.
My father said to me, “You knew that second man didn’t go to prison.”
I said, Yes.
My father said, “How did you know that?”
I said, Because you don’t go to prison for life for anything less than murder or treason, and Sara said the man went to prison for life, so I thought he probably didn’t go to prison at all.
Carl reappeared with two hot poppyseed bagels and my father gave him money and he went back inside. The bagels smelled delicious, and I was about to bite into the one my father handed to me when I remembered it was Passover.
I said, This is chometz.
“So don’t eat it,” said my father.
It’s chometz, I said.
“I’m your father,” he said.
I didn’t know what to do. We just stood there holding bagels for a minute, then started heading toward the cemetaries on Weste
rn Ave.
My father said, “How do you know the man didn’t kill her?”
What? I said.
My father said, “You knew the end of the story was false—how did you know the way it was false? How did you know that the lie was about the man going to prison and not about what the man did to the girl?”
I said, Yuval would never tell the story if the man had murdered the girl.
And my father said, “How do you know that?”
Because he said he told the story to make a protecting lesson for Sara, I said, and he would not have thought to make a protecting lesson of a story that ends with a girl being killed. He would only think to use the story if the lesson was there somewhere.
And then I said, The part about the fire, though—that was true, right? You did it with the ten sephirot? You rearranged the syllables? You can tell me and you don’t have to worry that I’ll do the same thing. I’m pretty sure I could figure out how, but I’ve never tried, and I won’t if you say not to, and I probably wouldn’t even if you didn’t say not to.
“Don’t,” he said, “ever.”
I said, I told you I won’t. I said, Tell me what happened, though.
Instead of telling me what happened, my father bit into his bagel and began to chew it. I didn’t want him to, but he was my father and I could not tell him what to do. He led us into the cemetary. It was not the cemetary that his parents are buried in, but the one beside it that he sometimes confuses for the one his parents are buried in when we go for walks together at night and talk about things.
The first time we did that was a week after his father died, the night he told me what Rebbe Schneerson whispered to him at Yuval’s wedding.
The Rebbe had led my father to a table at the back of the shul where there were challahs and wine, and whispered: “Destiny is a Greek and muddled business, Judah. The story Avram read in the stars was, ‘Avram will father no children by Sarai,’ and as you know, it was true: Avram would father no children by Sarai. And so Hashem changed Avram’s name to Avraham, Sarai’s name to Sarah. And of Avraham and Sarah, the stars told a different story. By augmenting a name with a single syllable, Hashem rendered a ninety-nine-year-old man the patriarch of patriarchs, and by altering a vowel-sound a childless eighty-nine-year-old woman the matriarch of matriarchs. He made them the parents of Isaac.
“One wonders why, if the stars tell true stories, Avram did not, in the stars, read the story of his new name. It was surely there, the story of Avram’s name being changed, but Avram on the ground did not see it. And so bearing in mind that his story was available and that he was capable of reading it, one can only conclude that he didn’t find that story because he wasn’t looking for that story. It follows: His mind was on babies, why should he look for a story about names?
“Don’t speak yet, you haven’t heard me out. We haven’t talked about Yakov. When he wrestled the angel, and when, as daybreak came, the angel begged to be set free, Yakov demanded a blessing, and the angel gave him the name Yisrael. Of course, Yisrael is a combination of the words yisra (to overcome) and El (the divine), and the angel tells Yakov that he is being granted this new name because he has overcome the divine and man. Now, I know that you know these things, Judah, I’ve dreamed of you, and I know there are a number of things you know, probably too many things you know—too many, I say, not because any kind of knowledge has the capacity to be bad in itself, but rather because certain kinds of knowledge, particularly those kinds we often describe as arcane, can, by way of their very arcanity, serve to obscure the knowledge-bearer’s understanding of the mundane. And we need to talk about the mundane, you and I, but you’re receiving me as a particle physicist would a man who asks him for help building a bridge. The physicist, he thinks, ‘Who cares about a bridge? We know all there is to know about bridges. Ask me about quarks and the pathways of neutrinos, or ask me nothing.’ The difference between you and the physicist is that he does know how to build a bridge—he doesn’t make the mistake of believing that what he once learned about building bridges somehow became false after he learned about subatomic particles—whereas you, Judah, ever since you began plumbing the arcane, you have, in increments, forgotten, if not dismissed, what you knew before. You have not lately considered the story of Yakov. And you need to. So lower your eyebrows, and let me get you in the mood; indulge me in this reconstruction, this brief blow-by-blow.
“According to Torah, Yakov and the angel wrestle all through the night, and then, as dawn is breaking, the angel perceives that he cannot overcome Yakov. What does the angel do then? He punches Yakov in the socket of the hip—hard, really mangles Yakov’s hip, dislocates it. But Yakov holds on. Dislocated hip, dislocated blip, he’s not letting go of the angel. Yet, at the same time, he doesn’t strike the angel. One wonders why. And I submit that it’s because he can’t, simple as that—he has the angel in a hold, and if he lets up to punch or kick or throw the angel, the angel will get the better of him. If these were two men wrestling, we would call this situation a stalemate, a draw. No one’s winning, no one’s losing; they’re stuck in this hold.
“It’s not two men wrestling, though. It’s a man wrestling with a divine being. It’s a man wrestling with God. And before dawn breaks, God does not perceive that he has been overcome by Yakov; what he perceives is that He cannot overcome Yakov. Yet he names Yakov Yisrael. Thus: To overcome God is to reach a stalemate with Him. It’s the best you can hope for, Judah. A stalemate. And no one ever told you it was otherwise. That you began to suspect it for yourself, to suspect that one could overcome God as one would a man—that’s unfortunate, an overreaction, I’d imagine, to a long-since learned sense of helplessness, a sense that you would always be overcome as you were overcome as a boy in a world run by men, as we were all overcome as boys. And that may be my fault, the fault of all your elders, for teaching you to obey and praise and worship even as you had defiance in your heart. We were chosen because we allow and even encourage one another to question God, to do so incessantly—to be defiant—but maybe with you this wasn’t expressed early enough. I don’t know, because I don’t really know you, Judah. I don’t know your father, or your mother. I’ve only dreamt about you, and only last night. And I fear that what’s happened to you is permanent. I fear that because men like me have failed to let you know how good and righteous a deed it is to wrestle God, you, having wrestled God with the intention of defeating Him, believe that you were rebelling against us, as well as Him, when after all you were doing exactly as you should have done. And I fear that you will walk away from us, and from Him. That you will choose to waste your life overcoming men, which will be easy for you, you who were able to reach a stalemate with God at so young an age, which is the best you could have hoped for, if only you knew—it was the best you could have hoped for, Judah, the best any of us can hope for… In the end, what I fear matters very little. You’ll do what you will. I’m here as a signpost and only as a signpost—a signpost to point you to other signposts, at that. I am but a messenger sent to alert you that messages are coming, and my message is this: Destiny is a Greek and muddled business, and, lost as you are, names will be the only signposts available to you. Understand that you’re neither Avram nor Yakov, and that you’ll never be renamed. Know that you are Judah irrevocably, and, like Judah ben-Yisrael, you will make mistakes that the mother of your son will have to repair by means that will be unseemly to you. For your own good, though, Judah, avoid making at least one of the mistakes Judah ben-Yisrael made: Do not scorn your son’s mother. Upon meeting her, know not only who she is, but that she is meant to be your wife. And marry her well.”
“And how will I know who she is?” said my father, brimming with indignation despite the Rebbe’s notoriously calming presence, despite the evidence that he was worth time out of the dreamlife of Menachem Schneerson, and despite being told what anyone else, faithful or not, would smile at having been told by any revered seer: that there was someone he was actually meant to be with… Ju
st despite and despite and despite some more, my father. His soul was so bright with defiance that if he had not, with all his heart, believed there was such a woman as the Rebbe spoke of (despite himself, my father did believe there was such a woman, and with all his heart, and exactly as the Rebbe envisioned her, however the Rebbe envisioned her), he would have prayed to Adonai—Who at that time he did not love at all—to create her, for how could he ever get to experience the thrill of disobediently scorning her if she didn’t exist?
He asked Rebbe Schneerson, “How will I know who she is?” and Rebbe Schneerson who, signposts pointed to and message delivered, was already making his way back to the chupa, looked over his shoulder and said, “I’ve told you everything already. You’ll know.”
So it was a great blessing that my parents fell in love at a distance. From 11:30 to 11:40 a.m. each Monday and Wednesday of the fall quarter of his first year at law school, my father’s blood would jump and jump as he, on a bench across the street, pretending to prep for his 11:45 Introduction to Contracts class, watched my mom smoke cigarettes at the corner of 57th and Ellis while she waited for the university shuttle to take her to her field-placement at the hospital.
“The sight of her made me stupid,” he begins, whenever I get him to tell me the story. “Twice a week for eight weeks, I’d spend ten minutes convinced I would die if she boarded the shuttle before I had a chance to speak to her, but at the same time, the idea that I could, in some complete and final way, screw up by saying the wrong thing kept me haunted in stillness on my bench. She made me so stupid, your mother, that it didn’t even occur to me that I could get closer to her without saying anything—I mean, she was at a shuttle stop. Why did I not think to cross the street and wait beside her for the shuttle and let things ‘take their course’? That would have been the smart thing to do. If I crossed the street and nothing took its course, then I could worry about what to say and how to say it, you know? But I was so stupid I didn’t even think to act like I had a shuttle to wait for… And I don’t mean to give you the impression that I didn’t think your mother was interested in me. If I’d thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much—the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see. But she was such a cool character, your mother, and with the carriage of a princess, that long striking neck of hers, the perfectly straight posture that nonetheless seems relaxed, like her skeleton is made of something stronger than bones. She’d light her cigarettes in strong winds, yet it never took more than a single match. I thought about that a lot. On the third or fourth Monday—we’ve never been able to agree on which it was—she switched to a disposable lighter, and I thought that was such a shame.”