The Rabbi of Lud Read Online Free

I’ll tell you that maybe not the majority but many of us, many of us would just as soon put by showbiz and do away with the shindig part of it entirely and close down after the kid says his piece in the temple. So vulgar ? Sure, if love is vulgar.—And this is the lesson of the rabbi!
    (Who was not a rabbi yet and who’s still trying to explain the roundabouts of his mysterious calling.)
    Speaking of whom, well, it was the rabbi himself who came up to me, us, me and the older cousin with whom I was slow dancing, the parents and grandparents watching, taking it all in how yesterday’s klutz and this morning’s man had lickety-split discovered sex, beaming, getting their money’s worth from the showcased kid. First I thought he wanted to move us apart, then that he meant to cut in. Then—oh, youth’s tender, indiscriminate imperialism that assumes such tribute—merely that he had forgotten to give me my present and couldn’t wait for the band to stop playing to make amends. Which would he be, I wondered in the split second he’d left me to consider the question, a handshake stuffer or a mock valet?
    “Jerry,” he said. “Miss,” he told the girl, “please. Excuse us.”
    “Oh, Rabbi Wolfblock,” I said, “you didn’t have to. Don’t you remember? You already gave me The Illustrated History of the Tallith.”
    He guided me to a chair at an unoccupied table. “Jerome, you impressed me this morning. The broches could have melted in your mouth.”
    “Thank you, Rabbi.”
    “No, I mean it. I think you could have done it even if I hadn’t written it all out for you in English.”
    “Thank you, Rabbi.”
    “You used your extra months to advantage.”
    “Thank you, Rabbi.”
    “One good turn deserves another. You know this expression?”
    “Of course, Rabbi.”
    “Good boy,” Rabbi Wolfblock said. The band finished a set and some of the people whose table we occupied had started to drift back but were pulled up short when Wolfblock held up his hand. “A moment, friends,” he said, and turned back and lowered his voice. “What you have to understand, Jerry, is that I’m the fellow who found that eensy miniscripture for you that we waited for it to come round like people waiting on a solstice.”
    “I know that, Rabbi.”
    “Jerry,” he said, “that some thirteen-year-old pisher becomes a man when he’s bar mitzvah is only a legalism. With all due respect it’s probably a holdover from the time before penicillin when most people didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of making it past twenty-nine and were already middle-aged by the time they were eighteen. Methuselah lived nine hundred years? Days is more like it. Weeks! Listen, Jerry, Jewish people practically invented cancer and heart conditions. And what about anti-Semitism? That had to shave something off the life expectancy. And those momzers weren’t fooling around. I’m not talking about country clubs you couldn’t get into or nasty jokes in the observation car with ‘kike’ in the punchline. They violated the women and children and shot to kill. So of course little boys got to go around like their seniors. Of course they did. A legal fiction.—In a minute, friends.
    “Rabbi Wolfblock doesn’t say these things to make you feel bad. To make you feel bad? When he scoured Torah to find your itty-bitty portion? Was that to make you feel bad? No, it was so an ignorant, backward boy could be bar mitzvah like anybody else and have a nice affair with a band and lovely presents and a bunch of strangers to cheer him on to remember all his life. Jerry, promise me.”
    He recruited me, a thing someone with my record of rotten attendance and demonstrably lousy skills could never, had no right ever to, have expected, for his minyan.
    In addition to our attendance on people just bereaved who were supposed to stay in their homes during the mourning period, the compulsory seven days of shiva, we had additional assignments.
    You have to understand