Questions

17 Sep, 2024

On Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first of the month of Elul, Rabbi Hecht called me around eight-thirty at night. I was just barely finished cooking pasta for myself, with a tomato sauce I stewed with poblano peppers and coriander. I hadn’t even sat down to eat it yet.

“Shalom Aleichem, Yishai. Are you around?”

Only Rabbi Hecht called me Yishai. Everyone else in my life used the English ‘Jesse.’ To be fair, I had introduced myself to him as Yishai. It made me feel wiser.

“I’m around,” I paused. “Aleichem ha-Shalom,” I added, which was the customary reply.

“Yes, yes. Can you come at nine?”

I looked at the pasta in the pot, which was steaming in little serpentine coils, and I looked at the sauce in the separate pan. There was no moon tonight on account of it being the first, but there were no stars, either. It was late summer, September, and the windows of other apartments were illuminating Seventh Avenue to give it an indigo kind of color. My windows were open and I could feel the watery, depthful dusk. It was cool.

I must’ve paused again.

“We have eight.” The Rabbi said, meaning that they were only two away from a minyan.

“Okay. I’ll come.”

“Thanks.” He said gruffly, then hung up.

I was a young physicist, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine at that point, and in more ways than one I had lived a split existence up until then. America abided by, if it knew it or not, the realist metaphysics cultured by Aquinas and Newton. People were made of organs, organs made of cells, cells of molecules of atoms, and atoms lived, unconsciously, in an absolute space and time which was infinitely extended and static. Time flowed forwards, with or without us, as something truly akin to a clock with hands and gears. Our minds, although they had the capacity of reason to illuminate all of this, were constantly in the process of being swallowed up by illusion, myth, distemper. At our best, we could see things as they were, but at our worst we were hopelessly lost. It seemed to me that America, at least the America I knew in the universities, was always vacillating between these religions of pure objectivity and solipsism. But Rabbi Hecht’s America, Yishai’s America, had always been oblivious to these things. To Rabbi Hecht, the mind was no meager mirror, but in fact it was in effectual conversation—some might say argument—with the world. Time was a circle which flowed according to our own circadian rhythms, and without us, space would have no purpose. And at that moment, it was crucial for the continuation of the universe that I go help with the minyan.

For my part, I felt that it might be nice to take a walk in the indigo air. Moreover, I was still wrangling with the idea that dusk was when my own soul found its deepest expression, that somehow I was only true to myself under the quiet friendship of the darkening sky. In truth, I was still playing with new ways of living, my own ‘experiments in truth,’ which was a freedom almost certainly accorded to me on account of my split and equivocal upbringing. I was even seeing how it felt to directly pray to the moon, literally to the stone, out of a conviction that there had to be something closer than the invisible god of the Torah and the infinite extension of Newton. The two, more often than not, seemed to me to be in cahoots, conspiring to keep quiet as a kind of beautiful, inhuman joke.

“Thanks.” I repeated to myself, as I combined the deep red tomatoes with the pale pasta and moved the pan into the sink. I covered the pot and watched the wicks of steam rise up and fold against the glass lid. My research so far had to do with the dynamics of fluids, of which these wicks were a delicious example. For the previous two years I had been involved in the question of how water striders glided so effortlessly and accurately on the surface of water, a question which only in those most recent three months began to blossom. The answer itself was still dim, but in some of my preliminary flow visualizations I found that these fantastic insects spun up tiny ball vortices, like those shed by a spoon suddenly flicked across the surface of tea, at each of their six feet as they glided. At that point, the how or why eluded me, but I had a mysterious sense that these vortices were necessary to their propulsion. I pictured a water strider clicking and dancing over the swirled surface of steam under the lid. Classical physics like this was already by then very much out of fashion, because in many ways it was already all ‘solved,’ but to me, it meant that the outstanding questions had the character of invisibility: not only were the answers concealed, but the very nature of the concealment was itself concealed. In other words, who could even fathom that the gait of these tiny creatures appeared to be violating all of the known laws of physics?

The side doors to the shul were just cracked, and an ancient-smelling yellow light outlined a half-rectangle against the now purple bricks. It was just before nine, and the calls of nocturnal birds from the park were mixing with the occasional whooshes of cars, and laughter. Some mysteries are so well-hidden that they appear as answers without questions. I heard what sounded like a cross between a whip-poor-will’s distress call and a tree-branch snapping.

I heard the first question even before I walked in:

“Let’s say that the moshiach comes tomorrah,” it was Eliezer’s voice, “and I’m an amoral man.” There was a pause for a response, but none came.

“Well let’s say I’m an amoral man, maybe I’m a cheatah,” he lifted the penultimate syllable up high and dropped the last so that it came out as a temperamental ‘ah.’

“If the moshiach comes,” at this point I had passed through the hand-washing room and entered the kiddush room where everyone was. The kiddush room was underneath the main sanctuary and strewn with a combination of yellowing siddurs, plastic tables, and children’s toys. “Will I turn moral then and they-ah? Or will I have to learn slowly, like everyone else does?” Now I could see that Eliezer was pacing slowly, his hands holding the weekday siddur behind his back, and he was asking this all to the Rabbi, who was on his phone.

Rabbi Hecht was clearly texting the other community members because, and this is what really had struck me first, there were only four of us in the room, not nine.

“Not now.” Rabbi Hecht grunted in reply as he swiped and tapped. Both looked at me briefly when I came in. The Rabbi was around sixty and Eliezer was closer to eighty, it seemed. The Rabbi still had a tightness to his features, which gave him the look of being what some might call “high-strung” but what I felt was a lived-in urgency. He even treated joviality—and you knew this when you saw him drink—with an apocalyptic importance. His beard was sparse, wiry, and light grey. It was close to his face, he didn’t wear visible peyas, and he was always reaching up to push his black hat back. He had extraordinarily high cheekbones and closely set black eyes.

“Hiyishai” he said to me, saying the two words together as one. He was dressed in a black coat over a wrinkled white shirt.

Eliezer, on the other hand, was wearing an orange, brown, and beige flannel, loosely fit but tucked into his jeans. He seemed to be lost in pontification, his question only dimly reflecting the length and freedom of his ambling. The question seemed off-base to me, as if it weren’t the question he meant to have asked—speed seemed like a particularly shallow category, especially with regard to teshuvah, but one could tell that his faculty of speech was behind him. The skin on his face and hands was spotted and slightly translucent, and over his pale grey eyes were two upwards-tilted eyebrows, expressing a mix of absence and playfulness. Eliezer was also a physicist, from what he’d told me he was primarily a lecturer at one of the city colleges.

There was a pudgy young man in the other corner of the room as well—I couldn’t tell what his relationship was with the Rabbi, since I’d never seen him before, but he had his wireless earbuds in and was playing on his phone. He squeaked back and forth in little black sneakers. It may have been the case that the Rabbi just pulled him off the street for the minyan, but he didn’t seem uncomfortable in any way. In fact, he seemed to be at peace. Regardless, he hadn’t paid Eliezer’s question, or the fact that a question was asked at all, any mind.

“Oh, it’s you,” Eliezer said, not stopping but redirecting his paces in a wide, slow, arc towards me.

“You don’t come every night,” his emphasis was on ‘come,’ “what made you decide to come tonight?”

“Rabbi called.” I replied, which was technically true, but since the Rabbi called everyone every night this didn’t quite answer the question. I could hardly articulate to myself why I came, and although my ideas about trying out materialistic prayer bubbled up, I was struck with the prevailing feeling that it was just comforting to be around old souls, and I was in need of comfort. At the moment, I was soothed by Eliezer’s apparent reconciliation between the concepts of messiah and what physics called ‘eternity.’

“You don’t get—” I started to add, but Eliezer had returned to his wandering:

“Rabbi, Rabbi,” he turned. Rabbi Hecht was still on his phone, as cataclysmic in his age as Eliezer was resplendent.

“Rabbi, I have another question.” He paused again, as I walked over to the table with the water heater to make myself tea. Usually there was something non-caffeinated in the multi-chambered wooden tea chest that sat next to the heater, but I had slowly been drinking all the ‘wild cranberry’ bags, night by night, and tonight I had to rummage behind the other counter next to the table with the heater. I had a feeling that there would be something good underneath a pile of boxes of stale cookies and tealight candles, if only because it seemed as if there were a little of everything underneath that pile.

It was then that Eliezer picked his second question up again:

“Is teshuvah a sefirah?” He asked. My eyes went to Rabbi Hecht. The answer to Eliezer’s question was ‘no,’ but the consequences of that ‘no’ were not trivial matters. Eliezer was asking if teshuvah was actually one of God’s ten mystical emanations. The question was abjectly verifiable, dogmatically plain, even, but it seemed to me that Eliezer was too lost wandering for the question to have just been a theosophical clarification—the ‘no’ seemed close to his heart.

“No.” This time, the Rabbi’s dismissal was less opaque, softer, but it had a character of purposeful aloofness to it too, as if he were distancing himself from the simplicity of the word. It was late now, and it almost seemed as if he were using the immediacy of summoning a minyan as a shield against expounding on Eliezer’s question. Certainly, the Rabbi had more to say here than ‘no.’ I figured that five of the original eight had either canceled or been deemed unacceptably tardy, because the Rabbi started to stir from his phone to begin the individual’s maariv prayers. It occurred to me that at this juncture he could’ve given a minute to Eliezer, but instead moved swiftly into the shul’s kitchen to grab his gartel. Regardless, I had indeed found the lone remaining package of ‘wild cranberry’ tea underneath the pile of boxes and, seeing the Rabbi getting ready for prayer, was myself reminded to brew it.

Immersing the tea bag caused tendrils of dark, rindy red tea to cascade out of the bag from its corners and slowly fall to the bottom of the paper cup where they began to pool. On the way down, the heavier tea became unstable and broke up into finer and finer vortices in the lighter water. It was a fitting prelude to prayers. I thought of my water striders. I thought of the miles-wide eddies in the ocean and then I thought of the tides and of the moon who pulled them.

“Why isn’t Chesed enough?” Eliezer asked suddenly, and this time with a moral gravity that told me he had finally caught up with himself. He brought his siddur out from behind his back but held on to it as if it were a walking stick. His motions were was airy as before.

Rabbi Hecht’s reply came out graveled, as if he were just roused from a nap.

“Whatdyou mean?” He had stopped wrapping his gartel midway through, so that his hands were bound up by his hips. The tips of his ears had turned pink.

“I mean, why doesn’t it just go… Ein sof, then Chesed, then… listen, if teshuvah isn’t a sefirah, then that leaves Chesed,” he paused on the word ‘Chesed,’ as if to expound in his silence the depth of the possibility that love alone could span the distance between the nothingness, the inarticulable nothingness that in the opinion of the medieval kabbalists preceded even the distinction between nothingness and being, and human life. The same pause filled the room with the awareness that it was Eliezer’s own life—his teshuvah, his love—which was at stake at the root of his question. It had the indelible taste of an apology being made.

“That could be all there is, even.” As he finished his question, he opened up the siddur and began to flip to the barchu as he walked back to the table with his shtender. The Rabbi was standing still, hands on his hips, head down and slowly turning from side to side. He rocked like this for some while before speaking.

“Everything has a purpose, Eliezer. Judgment is so that our errars have meaning. Errars, so that we know who we are,” and with those words, began to finish his wrapping. The way he said ‘errors’ sounded like ‘eras.’ Rabbi Hecht turned to me.

“You’re a scientist too, no?”

I was standing towards the middle of the room, towards the back. I was using the vapor from the tea to warm my hands. I nodded. The Rabbi addressed me:

“I was teaching some boys earlier. I was explaining to them about the human body. When you put your coat on your bed, the bed doesn’t heat up. When you put a coat on your own body, however, you get wam.” He didn’t pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘warm’ so that it sounded more like ‘wom,’ with an ‘o’ vowel full of pebbles and running water. Insects, even.

“Right.”

“Why is that?” His emphasis was on ‘that.’ “That’s because the human body is always emitting steam, no?”

“That’s true.” I could tell that he wasn’t referring to sweat, but to some kind of vital heat. I decided it wasn’t too far off to conceptualize that as a kind of gaseous aura.

“Well, one of the boys asked me why it is that when the coat is wet, when it’s full of water, it doesn’t keep you wam.” I couldn’t fathom what this had to do with the Rabbi’s earlier answer. “I couldn’t explain to him why that was. Could you bring it down for me?” He used the expression ‘bring it down,’ which is ordinarily used with respect to exegetical responsa, as in, to bring some piece of wisdom down from on high. It was a sign of reverence, and I was flattered but somewhat unnerved. I didn’t know what wisdom was contained here. In fact, I was still balancing out the non-sequitur.

“Water carries heat well,” it took a moment for me to find the word ‘carries’ as a substitute for ‘conducts.’ It felt more human a word, more in tune with the possible meanings of the Rabbi’s question, “and so, when your coat is wet, that water carries the heat away from your body into the air. When your coat is dry, all the air between the fibers of the cloth keeps that heat in,” pausing to scan my own words for any esoteric significance.

“Air doesn’t carry heat very well.” I added.

“Mmm…” the Rabbi hummed, nodding in approval. Eliezer was facing the empty space between the Rabbi and myself, and from his expression I couldn’t tell if he was paying attention or not. This was introductory college thermodynamics, and I didn’t see why the Rabbi included me when it was Eliezer’s question he was, at least nominally, answering. I was bordering on the suspicion that he saw me, moreso than Eliezer, as a member of the secular world, someone who could shed light on the inert mechanisms which, in his view, clothed the more fundamental, inner dynamicisms of the true, living world. I also saw that he had his doubts about Eliezer’s lucidity.

“Well then, Yishai,” he cracked a smile, “what do we learn from this?” I don’t know what kind of face I made at that moment, but it was such that the Rabbi’s smile began to reveal, at its corners, lily yellow teeth.

“Come, tell us, tell us.”

There were muted clunking noises coming from outside, as if someone were dropping books. If he was playing with me, I thought I would at least try to surprise him:

“The Etz Chaim brings down that the divine soul contains both elements of fire and water.” The Rabbi’s smile tightened, becoming more focused but hiding the teeth once more. His cheekbones seemed to move closer to his nose. “The two, which correspond to the heart and the brain, can dampen one another, as in the wet coat.”

“Mmhmm.”

“But, as in the coat, the two elements are just moved around, carried from one form to the next. The diminishment of one by the other is only an effect of each becoming less and less recognizable.”

“Mmm…”

“Nothing is lost, only hidden,” I decided to push my luck with their reception so far. “If it were true that Chesed alone were sufficient, this would only be because the other nine sefirot were…” I moved my left hand over my cup, pausing for a moment, “…so attenuated that they appeared nonexistent. Rav. Freud knew this well enough.”

Eliezer started to laugh a quiet, happy, laugh, as if someone were tickling him.

“Rav. Freud…” he giggled. I couldn’t tell if it were me who was being tested, or him who was being chastised through me. I couldn’t tell if it was this last proposition which had lightened the room, or if was always light.

“Etz Chaim, yes…” the Rabbi muttered, “I didn’t think of that…” His words had a diminutive but lapping tone. In truth, I had only read the bit from the Etz Chaim as it was referenced in Tanya, two or three weeks prior, but I was convinced of the connection to Freud. “That’s very good. Does that answer your question, Eliezer?”

“I hope so,” he replied, again lifting the penultimate syllable so that the word ‘hope’ came out rattled and lemony. It came across, to me, as deferred.

“Alright then. Maariv.” The Rabbi said.

In the morning, when I was walking to the laundromat to move my clothes from the wash to the dryer I was waved down from the other side of the street by two Hasidim. The air had a clear blue tint. I was cold in a tee shirt and sandals, but last winter had been uncharacteristically warm, and I finally felt exhilarated. There was neither sun nor moon in the sky, the former being obscured by the buildings, and so the blue had an authentic kind of solitude about it.

“Hey, d’ya wrap tefillin today?” The skinnier of the two men asked. He had an Australian accent.

“Not today.” I had been on and off with wrapping tefillin, the fallout of a superficial battle between its apparent meaninglessness and the importance of that meaninglessness. The last time I had put it on was a couple of months ago.

“Well then, we were destined to meet!” He started taking his tefillin bags out of a black plastic shopping bag. “My name’s Ariel. Joel, hold this. This is Joel.” Whereas Ariel was dressed in regular Hasidic garb, Joel was wearing a blazer over a tee shirt, with shorts and black dress shoes. He had a gold magen David necklace hanging out on top of the shirt, and his beard was so closely cut as to be almost invisible. Ariel was a thin guy, and pale, but Joel was well-built and dark.

“Which arm d’ya write with?” He spoke quickly. I could tell immediately that he was going to start me from absolute zero, which was a fair assumption given that wrapping tefillin was one of the most central and most basic commandments for a Jewish male.

“Right.” I raised my left arm. After Ariel raised the Shel Yad over my elbow, he put the leather straps into Joel’s free hand.

“Hold this. There.” From the way Joel held on and from Ariel’s vocal cues, I could tell that Joel had some slight degree of mental retardation. Ariel fixed the Shel Rosh over my head.

“Ready? Let’s close our eyes. Shema.”

“Shema.” I repeated.

“Yisroel.”

“Yisroel.”

“Adonoi.”

“Adonoi.”

“Eloheinu.” The bounce of his accent made itself particularly pronounced on this word, so that I almost instinctively repeated it back to him with his own accent. I had to pause.

“Eloheinu.” Mine sounded harshly syllabic in comparison.

“Adonoi.”

“Adonoi.”

“Ehad.”

“Ehad.”

“Alright! Done. Joel, hold this. You know it’s a very special time, now, right?”

“Elul.” I said.

“It’s the month of—oh, you know everything already. Well, Elul just started, you know that?” I nodded. His eyes were a wicked yellow brown, and his nose seemed to stretch down in front of his mouth as he spoke. “Every other month, the king is well-guarded in his castle, deep in his innermost courtyard,” I recognized the parable immediately from my elementary Hebrew school classes, but as he retold it now it held an air of secret, “but in Elul, he’s out in the field with the peasants. They talk to him and ask him for things. He tells them how he intends to change things.” Ariel must’ve been around my age, but his long, wispy beard and dark outfit made him look much older. It seemed to me then that we could’ve been good friends. I heard a mourning dove call, maybe an avenue away.

“You can ask God for anything right now,” he said, motioning to the tefillin. This, I had never heard a Hasid say to me.

“Literally! Go ahead. Close your eyes again. I’ll wait.” He said, ‘your eyes’ as one word, the low-point in the bounce between ‘close’ and ‘again.’ I closed my eyes.

I felt the morning wind on my legs, but it had the character of nighttime. I heard Joel, a man I’d never met, fumble with and clutch the leather bags for the straps which hugged my body. That felt good. I saw five or six water striders dip and click across my field of view, propelled by mysterious forces. Feelings of insecurity and inferiority followed, as my thoughts tumbled to the technical state of my experiments and my early career, but then the thought that I was supposed to be asking God for something arose. I conjured the night before for a moment. Then it occurred to me that it was a new month, and then it occurred to me that the moon was really still there, just darkened. The mourning dove called again, but it was more distant this time.

I opened my eyes. It was then that I saw that Ariel had closed his own eyes, and his head was tilted downwards, beard crushed into his shirt.

“D’ya ask him?” He asked.