At a certain age in Yeshiva, the child is weaned off of vowels. The rabbis look for signs that the child is prepared for this process; signs which we apparently exhibited. No one of us knew what these signs were, but we all had informed ideas. I was sure that it was because my feet had started to smell sour after basketball. The smell, which I could not decide if I wished gone or wanted more of, was what chiefly stood in the way of my fulfilling Lev’s request. I had other plans for my prayer wish, and the Messiah might just have to wait.
The new books had no vowels.
Pictures of the Lubavitcher Rebbe hung everywhere in the halls and rooms of the school. He was the George Washington of our civics class, the Shakespeare of our English class, and the map of the world in our geography class. His beard was fuller than any rabbi’s at the school, in the way that the Capitol vertex is higher than any other building’s apex in the District. The photo was a bust with no chest. It was all face and beard, in color, but black and white because those were his only two colors. A thin black frame with no matte provided the space in which his face could suspend on the wall above the class. The Lubavitcher Rebbe stood in silent authority in the front of the room, above the clock, looking forward with an air of deserved dignity. Beside every intercom in every room, he smiled silently to us in the crease between his mustache and beard.
No one spoke his name, only his title. Perhaps it was in keeping with the Jewish tradition of adhering to a strict distinction between the sacred and profane. Our mouths being profane, his name sacred.
***
I had heard it said more than once that if I visited him in Crown Heights, he would give me a dollar to give to charity.
I had plans to visit him. And I had plans for that dollar.
***
Chesed was the word they used to speak of the Rebbe. I was told that there was no translation to this word, and I left it at that. Rumors about the Rebbe’s chesed spread from the back of the class, where Yechiel, Allon, and David formed a powerful trio. Yechiel’s reputation was built upon the axiom that he had never indulged in nose picking. Though none of us would voice our marvel, for fear of giving away a dirty little pleasure, we each knew the burden that Yechiel lived with every moment that he stood bored at the urinal.
Allone was a type of tree, he would say, amused that the Hebrew meaning of his name was different than its English homonym.
David had a well-accepted theory that if one was touched an odd number of times by the same person, he would stop growing. The textual proof was apparently rooted in the Midrash, while the actual proof took shape in Lev—the shortest boy in the class. Allon swore that Rabbi Loebenstein touched Lev’s shoulder once goodbye before transferring to a New York yeshiva when we were in second grade. I questioned his memory silently, but he would add that a tree never forgets.
David’s theory made the playing of basketball at recess difficult. One had to privately keep a tally of incidental brushes, touches, and taps, where each is equal to one and only one. At the end of recess, as we were called in, each boy collected a final count, different than the final scores and had to make up the difference on the way back to the classroom. The walk back from recess was a complicated dance of incidental touches, not amenable to a zero sum. A touch, a tap, a smack, a grab, a push, a bump, they were all allowed. There were a variety of ways to even out the oddities of one’s dealings with every other. Everyone had unfinished business with every other, that had to be settled by the time we were seated in class. But one touch always engendered more touch, as your evening made someone else odd.
As I returned from recess in the afternoon, I considered Lev’s earlier plea on what to silently pray for during the next day’s morning prayers. He had pulled me aside and asked me to pray that the Messiah would never come. Lev had been bothered by the rabbi’s earlier mention that there are as many commandments as the seeds of a pomegranate. He had known already that there were 613 commandments—we had all known—but this strict analogy bothered him. That day he asked me rhetorically if I had ever seen how many seeds were in a pomegranate. Later, with his tiny hands outstretched for effect, he asked me if I realized how many seeds were in a pomegranate. Now, with fingers dyed red from a secret evening count, he asked me for this secret favor.
I stayed the question for later as I tried to even my own count before class. After one accidental bump into Rafi and Shmuel, I returned to my desk. I quietly decided that the Messiah would have to wait. Sitting slanted was a new Bible at my desk.
The new books had been distributed to every boy in the room, and we were told that our old books—which were now missing—could only take us so far. I made a joke to my best friend Yechiel that this must be how the goyim must have felt.
The Hebrew language is all consonants, with vowels added in to aid those who would either make too much or too little of linguistic ambiguities. As a child, one accepts the vowels as gifts of legibility and certainty. At a certain age, the rabbis begin to pull them away.
The new books had no vowels, just strings of consonants broken up with grammatical marks that appear as errant Hebrew vowels. The words became meaningless, as they demanded so much from us. They relayed only a series of hard points, and we were supposed to be able to add movement and turns to these serial stops. I sat in my chair and was unready to give. A general shame descended on the room, as we each became illiterate, unable to remember the last time we sat in such ignorance.
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