I knew. I knew. I knew the torment, I knew the liberation, and I knew so much more.
I knew before I reentered the study, before I opened the holy books that were strewn across the desk, that the rabbi had consulted (or pretended to consult). I knew before I unearthed my rusty Hebrew, cleaned it and oiled it and used it to delve into those ancient tomes. There was no way, not within Jewish law, that Hyman could be allowed to touch his wife while she was staining. Not during her period. It was a cardinal sin, a violation of all the tenets and codes, tantamount to eating on Yom Kippur, and worse, far worse, than eating pork, worse than violating the Sabbath, the penalty for which is death.
The rabbi was cutting corners. No, that was an understatement. Rabbi Weissman had completely dumped Jewish law — at least any law that made life inconvenient, difficult, or painful for its followers.
And, sitting in his chair, I thought I understood. “You do not understand a man until you’ve stood in his shoes,” so say the rabbis. Sitting in Rabbi Weissman’s chair was enough.
The stream, the endless stream of sorrows and pleas, the burden of being spokesman for a God of dread and restriction, of rules and penalties, when inside, it was all crumbling, the demon of doubt growing, consuming him, chasing him from pulpit to lectern to podium to sing the praises of the faith in flawless Hebrew and propound its mystery and its wonder. To sing to himself, to that part of himself that held the memory of swastikas and babies’ blood, still raw, still screaming from within the void.
Yes, I knew. I knew the demon and I knew its devil’s pact: escape. As I had escaped into the world of the goy, the non-Jew, into the police force, into the arms of women, and into restaurants that served pork and milk together, and my parents had mourned me as dead — as I had so escaped, so had he. He had taken a more courageous step, mourned as dead because he was dead. Dead, I was now sure, by his own hand.
But how? No suicide note, no murder weapon — how could someone shoot himself in the head and conceal the murder weapon with such skill?
The answer lay in this study, it had to. This was his home, his abode, his haven, and his prison. Someplace here, there was a clue, there had to be. I searched again, crawled along the floor, peered in every corner. Nothing.
Desk drawers: nothing. Floor: nothing. Bookshelves: nothing.
I sat down again, moving things around on the desk. If I were Rabbi Weissman, and I was tense, beleaguered, strung out, persecuted, what would I do? Where would I turn? Not to prayer; God had abandoned me, had abandoned six million of my brethren. Not to the holy books; they held nothing but torment.
Then I remembered what the Modern Son had said. Whenever his father needed to relax, he read Sherlock Holmes.
There was a bookmark in Sherlock Holmes and I opened to the story “The Problem at Thor Bridge.”
And there, in the story, was the answer. No suicide note needed. The story was enough. A suicide plan right there, all laid out.
Like the woman in the story, Rabbi Weissman had a gun. Who knows where he got it? It really didn’t matter. He had tied a string to the gun, weighed it down with a rock which he hung out of the window. Immediately after shooting, he let go and the gun was whisked out of the window, away, away, into the muddy pond below.
So I went. Schwartz the desanctified Jew who knew exactly what to do, I went there.
And saw the pond yield its muddy evidence, then, as I dragged it, and that terrible testimony surfacing.
The gun, complete with string and rock.
Suicide.
But, oh, the shame and stigma of a suicide in the Orthodox community. The rabbi’s grave would have to be dug up so he could be buried outside the cemetery, outside the community, a sign of his sin, that he had disposed of himself, damaged a life and a body not his own but God’s. His secret wrenched and paraded before the congregation, the merciless light of truth glaring upon his remains, upon the remains of his widow, his children, upon the ruins of their temple of memory and faith.
But that is not what happened, because it was not what I decided I would tell them.
Instead, this: Let this crime be filed as unsolved (another rabbinic dictum rising to the surface, evidence muddy but unmistakable: “One can alter the truth for the sake of peace.”). Let MacAllister grumble, let the rebbetzin mutter about police incompetence, but let the dead remain buried intact, let the living hold on to their illusions.
And so I entered that house of mourning, that shivah, again, the mourners flanked by congregants who parted as the waters of the Red Sea to let me through.
“No answers,” I told them, the sobbing rebbetzin, the somber sons, the murmuring congregants. “Hit-and-run driver makes the most sense. We’ll never know.”
She nodded, they all nodded, then shook their heads, a swell of Yiddish and Hebrew and Aramaic growing louder, louder, until the earlocked son glanced at his watch. He stood up. “Mincha!” he announced. “Time for afternoon prayer.”
The women took off like frightened rabbits while the earlocked son did a count. “Seven, eight, nine... not enough for a minyan.” Not enough for a prayer quorum, which requires ten adult men. He turned to me. “Can you be the tenth man?”
Me? Apikores, apostate, sinner. Me?
Me, a Jew. Still a Jew, always a Jew.
I took the prayer book, opened it to the correct page, memory casting aside disuse, words ancient and terrible rising, arcing from my throat, words I swore I’d never recite again.
But this was right. Somehow, this was right, to participate in this one last act of prayer. I could do it, I had to do it. A memorial to the dead. Not to the dead rabbi, no, he was beyond memorials, beyond tributes, he was someplace where none of that mattered. No, this was a memorial to his faith, now dead, shattered, dissolved in a blast of gunpowder and blood. A memorial to his faith, that broken vessel of light, its sparks scattered and lost.
And to mine.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabboh.
May I be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Crime without Equity
by Donet Meynell Clayton
© 1996 by Donet Meynell Clayton
There are two murderers in my room,
Day and night waging silent war:
Two illumined hands on a field of time.
I can shut my door against disaster,
I can close my heart against war,
But I can never escape
The tick of their stealthy weapons.
The sins of the silver sword are manifold;
He murders minutes.
But the shorter rogue is the greater villain;
Steady and cautious, with infinite precision
He thrusts his dagger into the full breast of a poignant hour.
The Dead Dog
by Hayford Peirce