Wisdom Among the Gentiles

Michael Orbach
I could watch Kelly dive forever. The way she snuck away from our group when Annie, the head counselor, wasn’t
watching; the way she sashayed over to the diving board when she had a free minute during our swim session; the way
she ran the top of her manicured teal toes across the high diving board with one foot, as if to test it out; and the way
she arched her body midair in her one-piece bathing suit; and finally, the way her body slid straight into the water
with barely a splash. What was that law of water displacement? Whatever it was, she broke it.
And then just as soon as it began, it was over. She hauled herself over the side of the pool or swam in a breath under
the rope to the shallow end of the pool. I wouldn’t have been surprised had the pool water split, the water forming two
solid emerald walls so she could walk between, dry and pristine, while all of us were soaked. The Gemarah in Megillah
says that each shidduch, marriage, is as difficult for God as the splitting of the Red Sea. The good Egyptians sank like
stones to the bottom of the sea; the worse ones, like straw, tossed and turned until they drowned.
“Forgot my towel,” she called out to me. I was on “points,” so I was out of the water. A clipboard in my hand, my back
leaning against the cement wall.
“Attention Jeremy!” I heard someone call out from the water. The call meant that I should make a check mark in the
box several rows down under our camper Jeremy’s name. One of my tzitzit was caught in the clipboard’s clasp and I
brushed it away. The blue of my techalet string matched the pen’s blue ink. Another counselor called out teasing, a
twenty-point infraction.
“My towel is on the wall,” I said to Kelly. “Take it.”
Even if I was on points, I brought a towel to the pool. Usually one of our campers forgot theirs. They got a demerit for
that, but in the hubbub that surrounded changing-time it always happened and it was better than seeing one of our
campers shivering like a wet cat.
“Attention Jeremy!” I heard the voice, belonging to Lauren, a drop more irritated.
“I heard you the first time,” I said, doing my best to sound somewhat pleasant. I made an X in the top quarter of a box
divided in four, under Jeremy’s name. Every fifteen minutes a camper had to answer a question about what was going
on if they wanted to receive the 10 points for attention. An X meant they knew the answer, a 0 meant they didn’t. The
attention row now looked like a game of tic-tac-toe.
“Thanks.” Kelly took the towel off the hook, plopped it over her shoulders and on to her hair. “Hello, frizz. My hair was
not made for this humidity.”
“You look perfect anyway,” I said not looking up, stretching out the vowels in the word “perfect” to make it sound like
the joke it wasn’t.
“Thanks.” She wrapped the striped towel around her square hips. “I’ve got a Jewfro now.”
“You’re not Jewish.”
“Stepdad was.”
It was the summer before I was to become a rabbi. My last free summer, so to speak, before I embarked on a grueling
rabbinic ordination track, semicha. The next few summers I’d spend at different shuls across the country, in rabbinic
internships, delivering daily classes, honing my techniques before I eventually had a kahal, a congregation, of my own.
My longterm plan? Marry, make Aliyah, run a shul on a settlement for American expatriates searching for spiritual
fulfilment with half a dozen of my own children.
The job was a quick way to raise some money before the program began. There were stipends available for rabbis-in-
training, but as King Solomon said, Sonai matanot yichye, He that hates gifts shall live. I had gotten the job by
answering a Wanted ad in the local newspaper. The camp was run by a hospital and housed in a military prep school off
the edge of the Bronx. Our campers all had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder or some other
vague sensory disorder. A kid named Dave in another bunk was severely autistic; he flapped his hands when no one was
looking as if he were to take flight. Most of our campers were the spoiled and troubled children of the wealthy.
Materialism, gashmeus, was an empty prize. I didn’t need to look any further than the parents who arrived on the first
day in Mercedes and Bentleys and terrified of their own children. Though there were some have-nots scattered through
the program on scholarships, like Darius, who was picked up each day by a therapist from the homeless shelter where
he lived with his mother.
“Are you certain this is the right thing for you to do?” My rebbe had asked when I told him about the job. My yeshiva
peers spent their summers in Jewish camps or in summer kollels, the only sound the steady hum of the air conditioners
while we darshaned one sugya after another. Not me. I could interact with the secular world, I told my rebbe; I could
elevate it. We could be holy and a part of the modern world. We need not barricade ourselves like the chasidim who
came to our shuls to beg for change. Plus, as the Midrash Eicha Rabba said, Yaish chochma b’goyim, there was wisdom
among the gentiles. The camp was run on a behavior modification system. Each time a child did something good, they
received points; something negative, they lost. It was a practical version of the Jewish concept of sachar v’onesh,
reward and punishment. Occasionally the points system took on a Talmudic-like complexity. Was kicking the already-
broken air conditioner on the side of the walkway really destruction of property? Was taking another camper’s lunch
and eating it, stealing, destruction of property or both? If a camper tried to shlug his peer but missed, was it really
fighting?
At the end of our lives, all our good deeds and bad deeds were added up and weighed against each other. For the
campers, it was more immediate. At the end of each week, all their points were tallied. Children whose score was ten
percent higher than it was the week before were on level one; identical scores were level two; those lower were level
three and the worst of the bunch were level fours. No one was ever on level four since the psychologists said that it
would damage their self-confidence. We were always worried about their self-confidence. We envisioned it as a half-
filled pitcher, always on the verge of spilling its watery contents over the floor.
The only hitch was Kelly. Before the summer began, I didn’t understand how Samson didn’t just walk away from Delilah.
After, I wondered how I could have ever thought walking away was possible.
After swim ended and the campers changed in the locker room, we sat in a circle and began the group discussion that
occurred before and after each activity. First came the rules of the group discussion (“Raise your hand.” “Sit in a
circle”), then a discussion of how the swim went.
“Okay Ninjas, say something nice about each other,” Annie said. Arms as thin as blades of grass shot up in the air.
Each of the four bunks had a name: the youngest were the Chocolate Chips (Every few minutes a counselor yelled:
“Chocolate Chips!” And the children shouted “With Milk!”) We were the second-to-oldest bunk, the Red Ninjas, named
after a group from an anime that our campers watched.
“Malcom did a really great dive.”
“Me and Justin did a great backstroke.”
Kirby raised his hand.
“Darius isn’t very smart, but he’s a good swimmer.”
“Kirby teasing! Darius ignoring,” a counselor snapped. I marked it down.
Poor Kirby meant well but could never get it. The other counselors stifled a laugh. Darius glanced up, unsure of what
had happened. Ignoring, short for ignoring a negative stimulus, was worth 25 points, the most points a camper could
receive and all they had to do was nothing. Not fight back, not insult the person who insulted them; let it wash and roll
over them, turn the other cheek. Most demerits took off 20 points, double what a positive gained. The deck was
stacked against the campers, but still they managed to succeed, partially on the input of one of the psychologists that
followed each group. Each time our campers had a cumulative negative score, I thought of the line from the School of
Hillel: Better man to not have been created. But since he was created let him examine his deeds.
“But I was complimenting him!” Kirby shrieked. It really was a shriek: high-pitched, piercing, something lost that
could never be regained.
“Calling out Kirby.” Another counselor said while poor Annie tried to get their attention back to the task at hand. I
made a hash mark in the row that said calling out in Kirby’s column. His column was a list of bad behaviors: calling out,
name-calling, swearing, stealing and fighting. It was almost a wonder that this was his first meltdown of the day. Annie
made eye contact with Kelly and tilted her head. A strand of Anne’s strawberry blond hair static-stayed in the air. Kelly
moved to head off an imminent Kirby-explosion.
“I won’t be on level one! I won’t be on level two!” Kirby screamed, Kelly already took his small hand in hers and led
him away from the group. With his free hand, Kirby pulled off his Mets cap and threw it to the ground and stepped on
it, twisting his ankle to get the cap deep into the dirt. That could’ve been destruction of property, an automatic
timeout. “I’ll be on level three! Let me go! Let me go! I might even be level four or six or eight! Level million!”
Children on level one went on the Friday trip and got a prize, those on level two got the trip but not the prize. Children
on level three stayed back and had a normal day at camp. Level fours joined the maintenance staff for a day. Usually,
we’d tell a child to not call out; when they’d call out again, we’d give them a non-compliance. If they called out a
third time, they got a time-out. They got time-outs for repeated non-compliance, fighting or stealing. Most of the time
the system worked, except for Kirby. Our campers started out crazy and became better. Not Kirby. One timeout led to
another and then he was in timeout for the entire day. Kirby started the summer out relatively normal—a fourth grader
with a high IQ and a penchant for cornering other campers to talk about obscure details of the Boeing 747—but he had
gotten progressively worse. Four weeks in to the two-month program, he seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
I wasn’t certain, but I thought I saw him tremble when he got off the van each morning.
I heard Kelly repeat the timeout script that we had all memorized. “If you go to timeout now, you will only serve five
minutes, if you refuse you will spend ten minutes in time out.”
“But but but but but but but,” Kirby’s nasal voice whined.
“Butts!” a camper called out.
“Teasing Jeremy.”
“Timeout will only begin when you walk to the assigned area.”
Kelly wasn’t Jewish. She wasn’t anything. She had grown up in Hawaii and moved to New York for a boarding school and
then college. God didn’t enter into the equation for her. I wondered how she made sense of the days that passed
without believing herself part of a great destiny or feeling that she was in touch with the divine. Her on-and-off
boyfriend lived in Chicago and she flew to him most weekends. She’d take a red-eye on Monday morning. I covered for
her if she needed to sleep through a period, stretching herself out, cat-like, before falling asleep on one of the yoga
mats we kept in the school’s lab that doubled as our counselor room.
The next activity was kickball. I did a quick doublecheck on the points sheet before putting it under the clipboard. The
next point sheet already listed the activity and had Lauren’s name on it. I handed the clipboard to her without saying
anything and the only acknowledgment she gave me was a flicker of her gaze. Lauren was Jewish too, but she hated
me. “I have a problem with Orthodox Jews,” she told me the first day of training at the hospital’s offices in Great
Neck. “I have a problem with nonOrthodox Jews,” I said because I couldn’t let things go. Her father owned a bakery
and she brought us in cookies and cake on the final day of training. “They’re kosher,” she informed me. No piece of
rainbow cake has ever been identified with that much disgust.
“Group transition,” Annie called and the kids dutifully lined up.
The week before, we had taken them to the aquarium. Each camper had returned with a stuffed killer whale. All the
prizes were identical yet each camper knew which one belonged to them. I wondered if I had missed something; then
again, the military high school students we’d seen running through the campus with their shaved heads were all
identical to me. Kirby had been level three last week and after sobbing for half an hour had been upbeat. “Since I was
bad this week, being good next week will be super easy,” he told me. Kelly and I had stayed back with Kirby and the
two other campers on level three. The whole day Kirby had spoken about his level three in near reverential terms. “I
did bad to do good.” Unknowingly he was echoing another concept. In the place of a repented sinner, few men could
stand, Chazal said. I myself was a ba’al teshuva, a returnee to the faith.
I had grown up a high-holiday Jew; visiting the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, watching as my father
mumbled along with the service. Unable to read Hebrew, I just held the siddur open before me and scattered my gaze
through the pages. My father had grown up the only child of Holocaust survivors in Washington Heights. He had married
into a Jewish-Waspy family that could date their time in America to the founding of the Touro synagogue. My mother
died when I was young. My father hadn’t remarried, and our house had been a shrine to his once great love. That had
been the sole rebellion in his life. Once it was over he was content to just go through the motions, watching Holocaust
documentaries and wearing an Israel flag pin on his cheap suit jacket. I went to Lawrence public school, had a nerdy
non-Jewish girlfriend and was part of the literary magazine. In my sophomore year I found NCSY, a Jewish organization
for teenagers. They took me in, showered me with love, gave me scholarships for all the weekend retreats and summer
programs in Israel. I was a part of the Jewish nation, B’nei Yisrael, they explained. All those Jews around me were my
brothers and sisters. The religious Jews I saw walking the streets all bloomed open before me.
I went from Sam to Shmuel and even began using a Hebrew version of my middle name, Shmuel Yaakov, something that
I probably hadn’t been called since my circumcision. The local Orthodox community welcomed me in as well. I was
invited out every Shabbat. I didn’t mind, though most of the food was terrible: identical platters of deli, naked salads
and the same greasy noodle kugels and cholent each week. I had gone to Israel for a year and then a second year and
then a third. I went from not being able to read Hebrew to being able to shteig, as we put it, to pick up any volume of
Gemarah and be able to piece the story out. I went from a no one to someone the Roshei Yeshiva sized up for their
daughters. It was a wonderful life. The only reason I came home was my father’s illness. He had gotten better, but I
had stayed, found a yeshiva and planned out the rest of my life. Every Friday night, I walked with my father to shul. He
shuffled, his four-legged cane placed in front of him, the sidewalks endless. I walked him back home and joined
another family for Friday night dinner. He preferred to eat alone; to enjoy his two small challah rolls, his cup of grape
juice, a perfect oval of gefilte fish, a store-bought bowl of vegetable soup, a piece of barbecue chicken; a long trek up
the stairs and bed before nine.
Each day I watched Kelly dive; ach day I repented for it, hitting my chest extra hard during the slach lanu part of the
shemonah esrei at the 5:50 minyan I went to each morning. Forgive us father for we have sinned, pardon us, our king
for we have transgressed, striking myself when I came to the word for we have sinned and again for the word we have
transgressed. I hit myself so hard that people turned. In a strange way, I was happy about it. While I hadn’t missed a
prayer, hadn’t failed to pray with a minyan in six years, I always felt disconnected to tefilah, sensing a gap where I
should have had that mysterious feeling we called kavanah. Now that I was actively doing something I knew was wrong,
it gave me something, some kind of sensation about the Hebrew words I said. Yom Kippur was only a few weeks away
and I looked forward to it intensely. I imagined I’d be married within the year, preferably to a girl with yichus, a
rabbinic heritage, like the rest of my yeshiva friends.
Half of all the sports we played were devoted to training sessions; the other half were actual games. My station was
kicking, Lucas catching, Justin’s base-running. Neither Kelly nor Kirby had returned, meaning a meltdown had
commenced. I saw one of the psychologists scurry off to the pool. I checked on Lucas, another counselor who was
running a fielding training. He lined up his three campers a few feet away from each other and had them toss the ball gently to each
other. Lucas resembled a peach. He was hopelessly inept socially and wanted to become a psychologist. I feared for his
future as I feared for the futures of our campers. I felt Hashem’s hand guiding my life. We believed there was a special
providence for us Jews, but not for the rest of the world. Though even that was up for debate: the Rambam,
Maimonides, thought that Hashem only led the important people and the rest He left up to chance. That possibility
frightened me. Lauren hated Lucas as well. She hovered over his group, hoping for disaster
“This is booooorrrrriiiinnnngggg,” Eric called out.
“Complaining Eric,” Lucas called out. But by then the other two children in the group had picked up the chant. Lucas,
flustered, called out name-calling before correcting himself to complaining. He scratched the thin hair on his head;
even from a distance I could see the red mark it left.
“Maybe spread them out,” I suggested. Lucas nodded. Lauren sauntered over, putting the clipboard down. Each kid
moved a few feet apart and began throwing the ball to another and the activity resumed. Annie blew the whistle she
kept around her neck and the groups switched. In a few days, we planned to switch kickball for baseball. Eric joined my
group. He was blond and athletic, adopted from Sweden. He had a mean temper and struck the nearest person when he
got angry and started off the summer a maniac. Now he was our model camper, our golden child. He kicked the ball up
not far from where another camper stood.
“Jason catch it!”
Jason was our resident space cadet. He was nine but looked barely over six. He was sweet all the time, except for the
explicit notes we received each day from his mother. “Jason punched me in the vagina and told me I was a filthy, filthy
cunt,” she’d written this morning. Last week’s note recounted how he told his sister, “she should die and called her the
N-word.” When we told Jason that he didn’t get the points we gave out for behaving at home, he looked at us
obliviously. The ball bounced off Jason’s chest, he clasped his arms together a second afterward and gave me a beatific
smile, his only adult incisor dangling over his lip.
I pitched the ball fast at Eric and he kicked it straight up. I moved a step to the right, watched the ball block the sun,
then caught it with one hand, letting it roll down the crook of my arm before pitching it again.
“Jason who just kicked the ball?” I asked. All the counselors were asking their version of the same question.
“Daniel?” Jason looked up at the sky.
“There are no Daniels in the group, Jason,” I said. At the staff meetings we’d recount some of his best answers:
Superman, Danny Devito, Pamela Anderson. “No attention, Jason.”
“Robert?” Jason tried.
“It was me,” Eric said. “But good try Jason!”
“That was a nice compliment Eric,” I said. “Complimenting Eric!” We were taught to be incredibly specific with our
praise.
“Ninjas!” I yelled. “Karate chop!” They all responded. We yelled out chants throughout the day. It worked to center
the children, like prayers. The mild summers of my youth had disappeared, replaced by a humid beast that made each
step feel like it was taken underwater. Each day promised rain; each day the clouds gathered and then moved on,
foretelling another day of thick and heavy air. At day’s end, our lungs felt charred.
Kelly and Kirby returned, his cheeks striped bright red. His skin was an iridescent shade of white. With a sunburn, he
practically gave out light. Every few minutes, he dabbed himself with a slop of suntan lotion from the small bottle he
kept keychained to his shorts. The therapists said that it was his OCD and we shouldn’t stop him from putting it on.
Among all his problems it seemed the slightest. Whenever we had to restrain him, his skin was slippery. We spent the
rest of the day wiping our hands on our shorts in vain trying to get its invisible traces off our fingertips. We heard from
the psychologists that he had been breastfed until he was nine. I felt for him, ever since in the first week he had gotten
a prize of a private hang-out with a counselor and had chosen me. Nature and nurture had both had their ways with
him.
“Kirby, go join Sam’s group,” Kelly said. “Sam heads up. Compliance Kirby. Great listening.”
“Kirby we’re kicking, you can go after Eric.”
“He can go before me,” Eric said, offering Kirby a high five. At that second, I almost wanted to run over and hug him.
“Sharing Eric!” We’d had a discussion earlier in the month and decided unanimously that letting another camper go
before you was sharing instead of helping.
Kirby sniffled and rubbed a red eye, his face shaded by the brim of his cap. I rolled the ball slowly to him and he kicked
it off the side of his foot. “A foul,” 21 `I explained. Kirby nodded. A second pitch. The ball bounced twice before
coming to rest in an unseeded patch of dirt. Nearby were the two Chinese kids in our bunk. Both were the sons of
diplomats, studious and polite to a fault. They were brilliant, extraordinarily well-behaved and didn’t belong in the
program.
“Good kick!”
“Great compliment Eric. Complimenting Eric again!”
A quick game of kickball followed. Kids and counselors were divvied up. The game itself went smoothly. Adrian kicked a
high pop that turned into a homerun. Sebastin rounded the bases. Taylor threw himself in front of a ground ball and
somehow rolled himself close enough to second base for Gregory to tag Jacob out. Kirby kicked the ball directly to Eric
who stood on first base. He gave us all a thumbs-up after we told him he was out and we breathed a collective sigh of
relief.
During the group discussion, I took Darius with me to pick up the lunches. We walked towards the building. I was usually
on lunch duty, picking up the decorated cardboard box that our campers put their lunches in after they got off their
buses. There was a hierarchy to the lunches: brown bags to insulated coolers to fully catered endeavors with cut
vegetables and dips. We were the last lunch pick-up and the fridge was empty save for the cups of hummus with
pretzels that the waif-like female counselors in the other bunks munched on throughout the day. My lunch was a tuna
sandwich in a transparent bag. We saw another counselor in the break room.
“Hey Amanda,” I called out. “Did you buy tickets to the gun show?”
“No,” she played along.
“Good, because the gun show is right here!” Darius and I pulled down our sleeves and made muscles. Amanda cracked
up. It was a familiar gag that we did. Darius was tiny for his age. He slipped a few of the straps of the insulated coolers
over his shoulders, while taking his own brown-bagged lunch in his hand. A counselor made his lunch each morning in
the breakroom. I told him to hold up before we left the building and made a quick dash to the men’s room, where I
kept a plastic cup. I washed my hands, twice on the right, twice on the left while Darius watched, then said the
blessing as soon as I exited the bathroom. One wasn’t allowed to say brochot in bathrooms.
Darius asked me something, but I held up my hands until I unwrapped my sandwich and took a bite.
“Sorry, Darius, I was washing. Religious Jews wash their hands before eating bread.”
“Why?”
The real answer had to do with ancient prohibitions on impurity or fears; Rav Assi, interpreting a verse in Mishlei,
likened eating bread without washing to sleeping with a prostitute. “It’s just to remind us that there is a God above
us,” I said. “And that we should not act without thought.”
Darius stopped after we left the building. He took a plastic plate out of the cardboard box and put it on his head. “Look
I’m Jewish. I’m a rabbi.”
I smiled. Darius’s life ahead would be hard and brutal. There would be no place for weakness of any kind. Who knew
what awaited him?
We walked to the picnic area where Annie said lunch would be. The group sat on the lawn, campers talking to each
other.
“Helping times two for Darius,” I called out to Kelly who held the clipboard.
She walked over. “Shit hit the fan.”
“What happened?”
“Kirby exploded again. He took off.”
I did a quick survey: our only other problem child, Malcolm, collected leaves and twigs. Lauren walked over.
“Annie needs another counselor. She told me I should go as soon as you were here. You need to stay here,” Lauren said.
“You stay,” I said and took off before she could complain.
***
Kirby stood by the pier. Annie stood to one side. Two other counselors from another bunk were on the other. Beyond
him, the ocean splashed against the pier and continued to the horizon.
“It isn’t fair.”
Annie was calm and collected. She once told me that she threw a tantrum in the mall and a random woman had asked
her mother if she could slap her. Her mother had allowed it. I admired Annie as much as I could admire someone who
wasn’t like me.
“Kirby you can come back to the bunk and we can talk about it. Maybe we can work something out.”
“I don’t want to be judged. Everything I do is judged. Kirby complaining. Kirby teasing. Kirby is fighting. Why are you
hitting Sebastian, Kirby? Why don’t the counselors lose points? Why aren’t the counselors called out?” The last question
was a cry of pain.
He was ten feet away from me. I figured I could grab him before he jumped. I thought of the prayer of Unetanah Tokef:
All created beings pass before you like a flock of sheep,
“Annie calling out. Lauren fighting. I’m always losing points. I can’t win.”
“You also do things that get you points. Remember when we went on that first trip together?” Every camper had gone
on the first trip. It seemed like a distant place.
“I just want to be,” he said. Even from yards away I could see the white worms of spittle on the corner of his lips.
“That’s okay Kirby, come back to the bunk and we can talk about it.”
“Will I get a time-out for leaving?”
A flicker of doubt crossed Annie’s freckled face. “Well, Kirby, we know the rules. We get time-outs for leaving the
group, fighting—”
“Stealing and repeated noncompliance,” Kirby finished.
“Yes.”
“No.” Kirby said. He turned towards the water and took off. I was faster than Annie and the other counselors. I saw it
happening in advance, but even with that, I wouldn’t catch him. He was by the walkway, then the grass, the ocean
infinite in front of him.
He leapt.
***
The day finally ended. Kirby had gotten his wish. His mother had picked him up from the nurse’s office and he would
not be coming back the next day or ever. The psychologists felt that the program wasn’t working for him and would be
detrimental if he stayed. He would no longer be judged, at least by us. The rest of us—and our campers—weren’t as
fortunate.
That morning, I drove extra early to the mikvah in Far Rockaway. I stepped into the water while nearby a reformed,
tattooed chasid, naked save for his beard and pais, waited behind me. What a life he must have led before he
returned. His body was an amalgam of lines and images: Van Gogh’s skeleton sneaking up on his neck, tigers embracing
over his arms, a blue Buddha over his chest and three teardrops under his eyes, the words love and hate emblazoned on
his knuckles and the year of his birth, 1989, in script over his navel. I tried not to stare. Both of us were latecomers.
“Have a good Shabbos James,” I’d say, leaving the mikvah. He would nod, mentally calculating the 613 times, one
time for each of the 613 mitzvot, he would dunk himself. I only dunked seven times, one for each day of creation. I
would have to drive home to make it before Shabbos began. In the summers, Shabbos began late, around eight. But
there was always traffic on the way home. I picked up my bag before heading to the room where we counted all the
points.
“Nurse Sunshine asked me to friend her daughter on Facebook to see what she was up to,” Kelly said as she walked in.
She wore a white tank-top and blue split-side pants with a white stripe near the buttons.
Nurse Sunshine’s real last name was Sunshine. I didn’t know her first name.
“Creepy,” I said. Kelly leaned on one of the high lab tables and I sat next to her. Outside the window, a group of high
school students were sitting on the lawn. A radio blared the summer’s top song: They call me Stacy. That’s Not My
Name. A heavy drumbeat announced its beginning. With nothing to consider they forget my name.
“Christ, what a day,” Kelly pulled herself up to the black lab table. She let her feet dangle free from her flip-flops. She
had a filled-in compass tattoo on her right foot.
I told her what happened with Kirby. She probably already knew what had happened but I felt the urge to repeat it.
The moment that Kirby jumped, his small body leaping into the water, a hand had reached up from below and grabbed
him and pulled him down, caught him midair. It was none other than Lucas. The ground had sloped so that Lucas could
see what was happening, but Kirby and the rest of us couldn’t see him. Lucas, for all his uselessness, had been
crouching there waiting for Kirby.
“There is no more Kirby now.”
“I liked Kirby. I’ll miss him.
“Me too. I feel like we’re making our kids into robots,” This was the discussion we were perpetually having.
“Isn’t that how you succeed? Following the rules? At least in this world?”
“As opposed to the next?” She smirked and I smiled too. Not about the next life, but about those Jewish people in my
neighborhood who put on bumper sticks that read “My other car is in Shamayim,” Hebrew for heaven.
“It helps that they’re rich. Or at least most of them.” I looked over to another table: a jumbo-sized bag of Lay’s potato
chips, a box of Ziploc bags, a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of peanut butter; all the makings of Darius’s skimpy lunch.
This was probably the best summer he would ever have.
“I know,” she said.
“What are you doing after the summer?” This was another perpetual conversation among the counselors. Some of us
were debating about graduate school, others contemplated starting work. I was one of the few with concrete plans.
“I’m going to be a rabbi,” I told her, or I told myself. It meant to her that she was off limits. That our futures didn’t
intersect at all. I took out a plum from my bag and made a quick bracha over it. I bit into it and was unready for its
unexpected sweetness.
“I know,” she said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll go back home for a while. See my mom and meet husband
number three.”
Her phone buzzed. A flash of red on the small screen of her flip phone. “An angry message from my asshole dad.”
I thought of my father then. He would be at home, like he always was, sitting on the plastic chairs in the kitchen that
we had never replaced, reading Newsday, stewing about something or raging helplessly to himself about Democrats and
liberals and the changing mores of society, crumbs of the Raisin Bran that he ate for nearly every meal stuck to his
face.
“My mom’s second husband was Jewish. I didn’t see much of him since I was in boarding school. But whenever I’d ask
him what his religion was about, he’d tell me the same story. How does it go? A man came to a sage to know all the
Torah. Whatever you think is bad don’t do to others.”
I didn’t correct her. The story is of the sage Hillel and what Hillel told a man who asked him to teach him the whole
Torah while he stood on one foot. “That which is evil to you, do not do to others. The rest is all details.” But what
everyone forgot was that the story had a first part. The same person visited Shammai, Hillel’s much stricter
contemporary. When he asked Shammai the same question, Shammai smacked him upside the head and sent him away.
In the hundreds of conflicts between Hillel and Shammai and the respective schools named after each sage, we
followed Hillel. That is, we would follow him until the Messiah arrived. Once the Messiah arrived, all rulings would be
harsher, all in Shammai’s favor.
“I always liked that story too,” I said as I gave her a faint smile. I took another bite of the plum. I looked at it; it wasn’t
the red of sweetness, but the dull yellow that meant it had rotted from the inside. I tossed it into the garbage a few
feet away.
“Swish,” Kelly said.
Outside the window, the gray clouds finally broke. The promised storm had arrived. It was one of those humid summer
storms that drench everything and then disappear, the rain on the pavement evaporating, leaving no trace. I looked
through the window at the rain streaming down the panes. So near the ocean, the twisted tree limbs looked like the
bent legs of ballet dancers. The high school students scurried for cover. A breeze filtered in through an open window.
Kelly shivered. She leaned her body against mine. Her short hair, parted in the middle, smelled of rain and sweat. I put
my arm around her shoulder and I almost felt a flicker of electricity pass between us.
***
I never did become a rabbi.
Kelly, how can I tell you that this was the moment I finally understood that you, I, and all our tiny misbegotten
charges would one day die?