The Beautiful Possible (13 page)

Alone in his office one night, Sol turns out the lights, closes his eyes and lies on the floor. Maybe, he thinks, a lost rabbi is a question seeking an answer, a she’elah waiting for a teshuvah. His mind alights on a psalm and he tries to imagine Walter lying beside him, reciting the same words, but he can’t find Walter’s voice and even if he could, Walter would say,
This is not my way, rabbi. Keep your psalms to yourself
. I am becoming a master of forgetting, he thinks. A rabbi without memory, a teacher without
channels, a man without a chavrusa, lying on a cold floor, waiting for a voice that doesn’t arrive.

The following week Nathan tells Sol that the board wants to break the terms of his contract.

“You have one more year to win us over,” says Nathan. “I tried to negotiate for more time, but it didn’t go well. I’m sorry.”

Sol lowers his eyes.
Be less remote
had traveled so far in the other direction that he could have been preaching from Bora Bora.

“Ask Rosalie to help you. Missy still talks about her speech. Maybe she can lend you a hand.”

Sol thinks of Rosalie standing on the bima, how at first he cringed when she spoke of keeping Shabbat on a Wednesday. But then she said something about God’s diary and the sanctuary seemed to come alive with silent rapture.

“Yes,” says Sol. “Perhaps there is a way.”

Every Saturday Walter stuffs his unopened mail and papers into a book bag, drives to Big Sur, and takes a table closest to the cliff’s edge at Nepenthe Restaurant. It is not lost on him that while Rosalie and Sol are keeping their Sabbath on the other side of the country, he is enveloped in the Pacific fog.

He has not heard from Rosalie in months. He helped her find ideas for her speech, and then assumed she would keep calling him at night, after Sol and the boys were asleep. Walter phoned the house once, expecting Rosalie to answer, but Sol picked up. “What a surprise, Walter! I wish you would call me more often.” Then Sol asked him to explain the phrase from Mishnah Peah,
the things in this world that have no measure
, and Walter snapped and replied, “If you stop measuring the cubits of your house and the liters of water in your kashering pot, maybe you would tell another story.” To which Sol said, “Then I would be another kind of rabbi.” And Walter said, “Yes, that’s my point.”

Walter wonders how much Sol knows. How much of Rosalie is permitted to him by Sol? Walter was never good at math and this arrangement seems to have something of a Venn diagram in it, with overlapping areas. Sol and Walter here, Walter and Rosalie here, Rosalie and Sol here. She is the perfect mate for him: The wife of his first American friend. The wife of a man who kissed him in the upper geniza, a man who looked at him and cried on a Jerusalem street, a man who considers his life through the lens of a text just like a groom gazes at his bride through a veil.

Quite a destiny, eh, Sonia?

He sorts through the pile of mail, opening each envelope with a butter knife. Paul is starting an ashram in southern California.
My own Shantiniketan. I’m naming it Eden Ranch.
A student has mailed him a final paper two weeks late: a comparison of Tagore and Heschel. Weakly argued, but not without merit. “Faith is the bird that feeds the light and sings when the dawn is still dark,” wrote Tagore. And Heschel: “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” Walter finds the shared threads intriguing and gives the student an A for the concept and a B for lateness.

He returns to the mail pile: three academic journals, the
Partisan Review,
a book on the Hindu prophetic tradition he has promised to endorse, and a letter marked with the return address of Temple Briar Wood.

If Sol begins writing in July he can stockpile twelve good sermons before the holidays touch down in September. But he doesn’t go to his office all summer; every afternoon Sol draws the shades in the den and watches Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, and As the World Turns. The boys arrive home from their respective day camps and summer jobs, and barely notice that their father has grown a beard and lolls around in T-shirts, shorts, and slippers. He stops washing his hair before Shabbat and rehashes material from outdated sermons.

One evening in mid-August, Sol abruptly leaves the dinner table and runs upstairs to their bedroom. Rosalie follows.

“Let them fire me now,” he says. “It’s over.”

“An inevitable crisis of faith,” she says. “You’ll get through it.”

“I thought—”

“That you would be immune?”

“I wish it were simple,” says Sol. “What once seemed so true to me has become as flat as the K’tonton stories you once read to the boys. What am I doing this for? And for whom? I stand on the bima, stare at those hungry faces, and no longer believe the words that fall from my lips.”

“No one is asking you to believe, Sol. No one even cares. You just need to demonstrate faith that everything matters. This Torah, these words, every moment of their day—”

“I can barely summon meaning for myself; I have nothing in my pockets to give them. And why do they look at me with such longing? I can’t stand it.”

“They are in shul. Who else are they going to look at?”

“I once bought it all.”

“A long time ago, Sol. When you were a boy.”

“No. After.”

“Didn’t anyone warn you about this in rabbinical school?”

“Of course not.”

“Didn’t you and Walter wrangle with this?”

“We were so young, Rosalie.”

“That we were.”

“I’m an immoral scam.”

“We all are.”

“Not Bev,” says Sol.

Rosalie smiles. “Everyone except Bev. The exception. One righteous person per shul; a common statistic, I’m sure.” Rosalie imagines frizzy-haired Bev witnessing their conversation.
You inspire all of us, rabbi
, she would say.
Your teachings help me understand my life.
Thinking about Bev’s sincerity makes Rosalie feel like crying.

“I’m simply empty,” says Sol. “I need your help.”

“I’m not giving another speech.”

“You were very good, Rosalie. Better than I could ever be. I wish I could channel some of your words, make them come out of my mouth. Your words and—”

Rosalie sits beside Sol, lays her head on his shoulder, and reaches for his hand. Her husband chose an unbearable profession. People all over the world blindly follow faith healers, gurus, and missionaries, while a suburban rabbi is asked to inspire without daring anyone to change, to dig deep, to claim some pearl of meaning that could alter the course of their lives. How can anyone be good at this? It’s impossible. Her father knew this, and Sol is finally catching on.

“Who were you talking to on the phone that night, Rosalie?”

“What night? When?”

“The night before you gave your speech. Who did you call? Honest to God, Rosalie, you weren’t dialing your father in the World to Come.”

She turns away, glances at her watch.

“I have a lot to do,” she says. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

“I’m asking you a question,” says Sol.

“Do you really want the answer?”

“Yes.”

Rosalie sighs. “Walter called you that night and I picked up the phone. I asked him what he thought I should talk about.”

“That’s it? Why didn’t you tell me he called? I ache to hear—”

“Ache?”

“Walter brought out the best in me, unraveled insights I didn’t know I was capable of. He took me places—”

Rosalie gazes down at her hands.
Something we both share, my beloved husband. Our first bond, before the synagogue, before the children.
She closes her eyes and summons the smell of turmeric in the lower geniza, the yellow stains on her fingers and his, then on her hip, her lower back.

“Maybe Walter could save my pulpit,” says Sol. “He could find the words that elude me.”

“So call him.”

“Walter doesn’t know my audience. He wouldn’t get the right tone for my Jews.”

“You could help him with that.”

“Or you, Rosalie.”

“Me?”

“Why not?”

“Are you asking me to fly out to Berkeley?”

“Yes, I am. Walter knew me when I was strong. He will channel what I once was, give you the right words.”

“Why don’t you go? If that’s what you want, why send me?”

Sol stares at her.

“Nu?”
asks Rosalie.

He runs his fingers through his hair and pinches the skin on the backs of his hands. “How could I possibly get away, Rosalie? I have a board meeting and a class to teach, and things are so precarious now—”

“And I have boys to look after.”

“I can’t go!” he shouts. “Don’t ask me to explain—”

“Calm down. Let me get this right. It’s almost Rosh Hashanah and you’re asking Walter and me to write your sermons for you? Who do you think I am, Moses?”

“You will be doing all of us a great service—the boys, me, the shul. You
get
this, Rosalie. Think of it as a business trip. I’ll make a hotel reservation for you—”

“Sol—”

“I need ten of them! Make it twelve, enough to last through Sukkot. As many as you can write together. I’ll call Walter and explain the details.”

“Are you serious?”

Sol grabs her fingers and brings them to his lips.

“I need this from you,” he says.

Rosalie closes her eyes, allows herself to think of Walter’s hands, his face. Another reunion, this one granted with permission. She touches the folds of her dress to make sure she is not dreaming.

August 1969

Rosalie tells the driver to wait for her in front of the sprawling Claremont Hotel. She signs herself in, pockets the room key, and then asks to be driven to the address she has kept folded on a piece of paper for all these years: 23 Rose Terrace.

The driver drops her off at the crest of a hill, where she spots a deer sauntering through nearby woods, a hawk circling above. Rosalie clutches her bag and smiles. The studio matches Walter’s description: the black-framed picture windows that resemble a pair of eyeglasses, the bougainvillea that reminds her of Madame Sylvie’s courtyard. Walter’s entire home could fit inside their garage.

A peacock brushes past her and she shrieks.

“Shoo, Adelaide,” says Walter. “Rosalie is our honored guest.” He takes her bag.

“My new friends,” he says. “They escaped from an upscale restaurant and settled up here. The pretty one is Liberace. He has
no idea that his beautiful gown of feathers sweeps the sidewalk, sparing me the trouble.”

“I never thought you would have house pets,” says Rosalie.

“They are free to come and go.”

“Of course they are.”

Rosalie marches into the studio and collapses onto a chair.

“I’m here to work,” she says. “We have a mission and not much time.”

“Sol called with specific instructions. Twelve sermons, at least.”

“At least.”

“My words and yours. A partnership.”

“Did Sol call it that?”

“He said we are to collaborate; let ourselves become true chavrusas.”

Rosalie scans the studio. A futon piled high with pillows lines one wall; a long workbench stretches opposite; pencil cans are jumbled together with jars of coriander, garam masala, cumin, and cinnamon. She spots his sil batta
.
The spice man is still in his garden, she thinks, dipping her fingers into a jar of turmeric.

“Love or Torah, what comes first, rebbetzin?”

Rosalie shrugs. She is here to complete a writing assignment, preserve her husband’s job, and save her family. They have to smear words of wisdom on paper, imagine the longings of every congregant’s soul and pitch their message just right. Twelve speeches. Two days away from her husband and children. A holy mission.

“Torah! We barely have time, and so much to accomplish—”

“Be honest with me, Rosalie. Would you have come out here without Sol’s misguided prompt?”

“Do you think I would have dared?”

“You could have gotten away anytime. You could have pretended to visit Madeline and flown out to see me. This was always possible.”

“But I didn’t, Walter. And here I am now. Stuck inside this crazy riddle.”

“It seems that way, doesn’t it? Look—you have turmeric on your fingers.”

She’elah: In the world of men and women, which is stronger: Love or Torah?

Teshuvah: As it is written,
many waters cannot extinguish love
. Human love is bounded by choice; Torah is unbounded by interpretation. Love can birth generations, while Torah breeds infinite words that contradict each other for generations.

Rosalie is scheduled to fly home on Sunday night. She and Walter wait until Sunday morning to attack their assignment; they write as if they share one mind, finishing each other’s sentences. Rosalie thinks of the congregants’ geometry of faith and she makes up a story about a hardened man who sheds a tear made of light that saves an entire village from a flood. She sets the scene in prewar Poland and calls it a Hasidic tale. The words of the Ishbitzer that Rosalie learned from her father court Walter’s theories of the eternal return. Together they invent little astonishments as if Madame Sylvie is in the studio with them. As they write,
Walter and Rosalie sniff palmfuls of turmeric root. They travel the world with real and fictional spiritual masters whose words will allow Sol to linger a while longer in the holy paneled sanctuary of Temple Briar Wood.

Once the sermons are drafted, they embellish them with lines from Thoreau, Emerson, Rilke, Rumi, and Native American lore. Walter offers phrases from Tagore’s poetry and Rosalie stuffs the words into the near-finished sermons as if she is arranging raisins in a babka. Aphorisms fly out of their mouths like fireworks and Rosalie jots them in the margins.
God cannot be pinned down but peeks about in the shadows between one person and another. We are fully alive when we embrace our potential to be transformed. The meaning of a single human life cannot be decoded, only reinterpreted. The body teaches the soul its necessity. May the garden path of your life be rimmed with fresh growth! Find your boundaries, push apart their seams, and morph into butterflies!

Walter places the pages in a purple binder and labels it
SOL
’
S WISDOM
.

“We now have a book of our own,” he says. “To prove that the body does not tell our entire story.”

Rosalie arrives home six days before the Selichot service, when the first prayers of forgiveness and redemption are chanted at midnight as a prelude to Rosh Hashanah. She hands her husband the purple binder, its pages darkened with typescript and ink. Sol opens to a random page, holds it to his nose, and sniffs.

“I’m grateful,” he says. “In more ways than I can explain.”

When Sol delivers his first speech from the binder, the words
tumble from his lips with ease. He feels lighter, younger, beloved. Congregants gaze at him, surprised at first, and then attentive. After the first speech Missy Samuels says to Rosalie, “What have you done to him? He’s come alive.”

At night Sol sits at his desk and pores over the words in the purple binder. The first page is labeled
THIS IS NOT A SERMON
and contains a single, typed paragraph.

For rabbis, words are tools, as ordinary as dinner utensils. Metaphors are knives that need to be sharpened when they become blunt; words of commentary are ladled out with serving pieces that extract meaning with precision and grace. The entire biblical canon is a stew that can be stirred again and again, flavors adjusted for taste, spices added for new effect. Let the words of this binder inspire you to reach for new sensations and glorious delights.

Just when Sol thinks he has found all the aphorisms Walter and Rosalie stuffed into the sermons, he uncovers random jottings in the margins.
Unfulfilled longings become an altar for faith. Empty days are eyelashes that fall to the earth with God’s tears. Our lives are the storybooks and God is the Eternal Reader. We wrap our faith around a yearning for God, and this human yearning forms a silken pillow where God rests on Shabbat and dreams of us.
Sol reads interpretations and stories that he never could have conjured himself. In one, the gleanings of the field in the Book of Ruth are not made of barley, but symbolize the small courtesies of human discourse—
please, thank you, excuse me
—that we toss around like leftover sheaves of grain. In another, a village baker and his wife long for a baby. As the baker’s wife prays, her tears fall into a bowl of yeast
that bubbles like a small geyser, and she forms this mixture into a dough that pulses like a heartbeat. A woman passes through town, buys challah baked from this brew and nine months later gives birth to Elijah the prophet. When Elijah is an old man, he meets the elderly village bakers and blesses them with eternal life. Sol wonders if Rosalie learned this story from her father or if Walter translated it from a Hindu legend and replaced chapatti with challah.

When Sol delivers the words from the purple binder the syllables roll off his tongue and he feels as if he is soaring beyond the confines of his body. The lines make him feel endowed, charged, replenished.
Such meaningful sermons
, says Missy Samuels.
I’ve never been so moved.
With the help of the words in the binder and a psychiatrist who prescribes Elavil for his depression, Sol tells Rosalie that at last he is healed, thank God, just in time for his contract to be renewed.

At the end of October, Sol asks Rosalie for another round of material.

“But you’re better now. You don’t need help. And the holidays are finished. Such a relief, isn’t it?”

“I have too many regulars now. They are in love with the words you wrote, Rosalie. God knows their affection is not directed toward me.”

“I’m not going back to Berkeley,” says Rosalie. “It’s too hard.”

“But you must, sweetheart. Do you realize what’s happening here? The two of you are making me into a rabbi again!”

“I can’t explain this, Sol. It’s complicated and I’m so confused—”

“Trust me. Once more. For me. For us. For all of us.”

Rosalie believes that if she visits Walter now, she will never return. She wants to vanish into his studio and move her body across the futon like a snake in the desert. She wants to stand under a rain of turmeric and dye her limbs yellow. She wants to feed Adelaide and Liberace peanuts from her hands. She wants not to drive her children anywhere, not to be asked what she plans to cook for Shabbat, not to dress in a skirt and pretend to pray in a synagogue.

But when she is alone with Walter, she feels as if she has departed this world and inhabits a distant planet. She misses the antics of her sons, and the synagogue seems like a forgotten dream. When she lies in his arms, she often thinks about the congregants, these intimate strangers who make her feel tethered to something outside of her own confusion, and she relaxes. She likes to ponder their delicate geometry of faith, and consider what they truly need: Serena needs a little astonishment that speaks to the body, something that will bite her behind the knees when she least expects it. Nadine needs to know that the politician she loves will find another woman and she will survive the loss. Delia needs a prayer of healing that she can repeat like a mantra during chemotherapy. Marv needs to marry his son’s teacher. And Missy Samuels needs to wear less makeup and quit her job as a Weight Watchers group leader.

Rosalie knows more about these people than Sol ever could. When Delia began chemo, Rosalie delivered casseroles to her house. When Bev’s father collapsed for the last time, Sol sent Rosalie to accompany Bev to the hospital so she would not be
alone when he died.
He was the love of my life
, said Bev.
My only family
. When Serena sat shiva for her mother, Rosalie delivered the cold cuts and searched Serena’s kitchen drawers for the meat silverware, the Saran wrap, and the garbage bags. Know where a woman stores her Jell-O molds, thinks Rosalie, and you will understand the contours of her heart.

If she is away, Rosalie won’t be around to take the pulse of the congregants, look out for their well-being. The loyalists of Temple Briar Wood would be alone with their Elavilled rabbi who would be mute to their longings. They would come to shul and wait for Sol to speak, hoping for a word or a phrase they could grasp tightly when they woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night, wondering how and who and why this life instead of all the other possibilities.

“I will go,” she says. “For two nights.”

“Ten speeches.”

“No promises.”

This time Rosalie takes a taxi directly to Walter’s studio, where Liberace and Adelaide greet her like an old friend.

“We work first,” says Rosalie. Books are scattered all over the floor: Rumi, Tagore, Heschel, anthologies of American poetry, Hindu scriptures, Kabbalah, Hasidic tales, and world mythology. Rosalie takes a seat and eagerly digs in. Together she and Walter move their fingers across the pages like pianists, lingering on the phrases that could possibly resonate in the paneled sanctuary.

“Here is one from the Chandogya Upanishad,” says Walter.
“I first read this in Shantiniketan.
Wind has no body. Clouds, thunder, and lightening have no body. But we are all gods, all fixed in a single self.
”

“That won’t play in Westchester. How about Rumi? We used one of his lines in the purple binder and they went wild for it.”

What is the body? Endurance.

What is love? Gratitude.

What is hidden in our chests? Laughter.

What else? Compassion.

“Yes,” says Rosalie. “Rumi is good for my Jews.”

“Here’s another,” says Walter. “
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
”

“Emily Dickinson! I learned that as a girl.”

“And another:
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy
.”

“Who wrote that?”

“Abraham Joshua Heschel.”

“My matchmaker,” says Rosalie. “When he lectured at YIVO, I sat between Sol and a man who reeked of sauerkraut. And everything began.”

“My rebbetzin of the between places.”

Rosalie smiles. “So it seems.”

“I would have liked to meet Professor Heschel,” says Walter.

“I believe we were otherwise occupied.”

He places his hand on Rosalie’s neck and leans in for a kiss.

“Not yet,” she says.

“When?”

“Let’s finish. Please.”

Walter opens another book. “
When a man and a woman
unite, and their thought joins the beyond, that thought draws down the upper light.
”

“
Iggeret ha-Kodesh
. Thirteenth century. A steamy time, obviously.”

“You didn’t learn that from your father.”

“Nope.”

Rosalie holds out her hand. “
The rebbetzin’s learning comes from fountains the eye cannot discern.
”

Walter runs his finger along the rivers at the center of her palm.

“My unwritten tractate,” she says.

He licks her hand, lightly bites the tips of her fingers.

“I want what you hold in here,” he says.

Rosalie sighs. “I want and I want and I want—”

For two days they move between the pages of the books, the sentences they compose, and the pages of their bodies, opening and closing and opening again on the studio floor. Just before her taxi arrives, Rosalie begins to cry.

“I feel as if I’ve been dropped inside a riddle that’s impossible to solve,” she says.

“One day it will make sense.”

“You and your damn karma,” says Rosalie. “Just keep kissing me so I don’t think about how tawdry our little affair has become.”