The Rabbi of Lud Read Online Free Page B

his depth, in over his head? Corruption—don’t get me wrong, it’s an example, I’m not corrupt—almost goes with the public trust. Even a starting pitcher who can go the full nine innings is a rarity. So why should I carry on just because I happen to read a halting Hebrew and am a little rusty in the ritual and custom departments? Isn’t my heart in the right place?
    All right, you’re going to find out sooner or later, so I’ll make a clean breast right now and be done with it. You’re asking yourselves, if his Hebrew is so bad how did this improbable guy ever get to be a licensed rabbi? Well, you know those offshore medical schools where people sometimes go if they haven’t got the best grades in the world? Places like Grenada and St. Lucia and along the Pacific rim? All right, I attended an offshore yeshiva. It was on this tiny atoll in the Maldive Islands a few hundred miles southwest of India. What are you going to do, arrest me? I’m a person whose calling came about, at least indirectly, through a postwar boom in the engraved bar mitzvah invitation industry. Don’t be so quick to judge. (I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here.) Isn’t it only fitting I received most of my religious training abroad, among Sikhs and Hindus—all the queer castes with their sacred cows and trayf human beings? Only fitting that an almost charter member of Rabbi Herschel Wolfblock’s all-boy minyan and original Little League davening society should pick up his Hebrew lore somewhere closer to the road to Mandalay than the Wailing Wall? My God, my brothers, my God, my sisters, we were like the von Trapp Family Singers, Quiz Kids, famed vaudeville chimps.
    Norman Sachs, Donny Levine, Ray Haas, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stanley Bloom, Jake Heldshaft, Al Harry Richmond and I were Wolfblock’s first team, and though we had understudies, kids who could be called upon to stand in if one of us was out of commission, the odd thing was we never got sick. Once we signed with Wolfblock’s special forces we never came down with flu or fell victim to the kid diseases.
    Now maybe you can explain this, but at the time it was as difficult to account for—and Wolfblock the first to point out what was happening, not crying miracle, understand, just underscoring our strange run of good health—as it was for us to fathom the wonders of the Ouija board or the dynamics that worked the little pendulum that hung from a thread which we used to swing above one another’s palms in circles or verticals and that it never occurred to us we controlled.
    So why not New Jersey? Why not Lud?
    The world isn’t plotted like a model city, isn’t laid out on a neat grid for the convenience of tourists and postal employees. There really was a Diaspora, you know, and shipwrecks and castaways, folks lost in deep woods and in the higher elevations and not everywhere filled up with the symmetrical quotas of Caracas and Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, New York. Anomalies abound. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel weren’t all found. Or weren’t found where you might expect. There are frontiers, outposts if not of empire then at least of likelihood. I’m speaking of queer parishes on the high seas, congregations in the wilderness. And this isn’t my rabbi mode. I’m not being mystical here, I’m not suggesting martyrs slugging it out with the elements and with themselves in the jungles and along the frozen wastes, and I’m not being glamorous either, only practical. I’m speaking, I mean, of accepting what’s left after the plummy assignments have all been awarded. Practical, we’re practical men we rabbis of Lud, compliant, comers to terms with our oblique, improbable lives. Yes, and if you troubled to press us you’d find that there isn’t a man among us who doesn’t dream of the splashy yellow architecture of some temple in Cleveland. Hey, I know a rabbi who conducts services on a cruise ship that often happens to find itself in the