his mentor in all seriousness, “Is that what’s important? The shtupping?”
“What else?” said the rabbi breezily. “Sex is for the poor man his davening. Of course, there’s the eating and drinking and the chutzpedik movement of the bowel, but ah, the shtupping! I’m shtupping almost every night, almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday…”
The ladies tittered like glockenspiels.
Feeling bludgeoned, Bernie endeavored to remind himself that this was his own Rabbi ben Zephyr, the wonder rebbe he’d salvaged from the deep freeze and in whom he placed his implicit faith. “Lou Ella…,” he tendered, and immediately wished he could take back her name.
“A shiksa?”
“Does it matter?’
The rabbi grinned again, his false teeth glistening like eggs in a nest, and rolled his eyes to indicate the diversity among his attendants.
Cautiously appeased, the boy proceeded with his confession. Was this what he’d come here for? “I think I love her,” he stated under his breath, aware that the ladies were cupping their ears, “but I can’t, like, y’know”—he nodded in a way that caused the rabbi to nod in sync—“because every time we start my spirit takes off for points unknown.”
“Hmm.” The old man frowned like a doctor hearing doubtful sounds through a stethoscope. “Then maybe with the sacred you should break already your connection, so you ain’t no more torn.”
Bernie looked at him with incomprehension. “But isn’t torn what I’m supposed to be?” For this, as the texts agreed, was the human condition.
“Not at all,” replied Rabbi ben Zephyr, dismissing, as Bernie saw it, the fundamental tenet of his creed. “Look at me, how at peace I am with the world.”
“Which world?” wondered the boy, all at sea.
Up went the crooked finger again. “That is the question.”
Again Bernie groaned as the rabbi chortled and took from a tiny gold pillbox a pinch of snuff—at least the boy presumed it was snuff. “Rabbi,” he submitted, “you’ll forgive me, but these things are easy for you to say. You’re”—Did he still believe it?—“an enlightened saint.”
“Nifter-shmifter,” said the rabbi, and sneezed into one of several proffered hankies, “I finished with all that saint business when I was alive.”
“But you are alive,” insisted Bernie.
The rabbi grinned, and Bernie waited for the words he was thankfully spared, though variations—in no sense, innocence—resonated in his head all the same.
“You see,” the old gaffer continued, “the rebbe that I was never waked up from on ice his dream, which it’s a long nightmare I don’t have to tell you. His neshomah that it never returned to his breast. But me myself, Eliezer ben Zephyr, what I realized, I am born again in heaven like I was on earth. Here, nothing is written, everything is permitted. Feel good in yourself is the whole of the law.”
It occurred to Bernie that such heterodox pronouncements might be merely for the benefit of shocking him, though he rejected the notion as precisely the kind of self-centered thinking that Lou was forever upbraiding him for. “What about the mitzvot?” he asked, knowing the question probably no longer applied.
“When I was alive in my life,” came the refrain, “all six hundred thirteen precepts I observed; I was tamim, a perfect master. Tiqqun ha-kelali I practiced to preserve the sex continence, and all my years I never looked once at my shwantz. I would read in a flash your tzelem, what you call the genealogy from souls. Were legendary also my disciples for their piety; about us tales were told all over Galut. Did you hear the one how I hired a person just to keep the names of God before me? How I outwitted the Angel of Death and captured the devil Samael, but let him go so there would still be in the world evil and therefore free will? Then in the flood I died and woke up in Paradise, where it’s my reward there’s nothing I got to observe anymore. So I’m telling the gantser klal, gentiles included, this is heaven already on the planet of Earth. It’s all in my book.”
Bernie reflected that the exploits the rabbi alluded to bore a marked similarity to those of the masters in Martin Buber’s Legends of the Hasidim. “This is what you teach your students?” he asked.
“Peace of mind I give them to trade in the gilt-edge security and refinance the adjustable mortgage, that they should feel good in themselves and not guilty that they beat der kinder, cheat on the wife, or betray the friend. Then I give to them a bisl divinity so as