There’s this old joke. In front of the whole congregation the rabbi knocks his breast and proclaims, “I’m nothing, I’m nothing.” Then the president of the synagogue starts smacking himself around the bema and says he’s as insignificant as lint. They’re really beating up on themselves, these two, and the temple’s janitor is very moved that two such holy, scrupulous men should get up in front of everyone and carry on like that, so he too gets up in the shul and starts to rap himself in the heart. “O God,” he says, “I’m unworthy, I’m beneath notice, I’m nothing,” and the rabbi turns to the president of the synagogue, nudges him, points to the janitor, and whispers, “Look who says he’s nothing.”
You get around, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve been to the hospitals and must surely have noticed those names sandblasted into the marble over the entrance to the nifty new wings, or seen the plaques in the temples, under every window in the sanctuary. The sanctuary? The toilets — the stalls and the urinals. Trees in Israel, waves in Waikiki, moonlight in Vermont. For a people wary of blowing God’s horn — saying His name, I mean — we’re not so reluctant to memorialize the monikers and to-do’s of our loved ones. Not a sparrow falls, as it were. We’re the backbone of the customized CAT-scan industry, the personalized Intensive Care Unit one. So right there’s the clue. To his knocked-down-dragged-out, solid-gold, championship, world-class grief. Because what are we dealing with here, Arlington National, Flanders Field? The military rows, lanes and aisles of some close-order-drilled death with Stars of David and simple white wooden crosses like a kind of punctuation? Lud International — my little joke — is as makeshift finally as any other project of pioneers. It’s zoned for death, sure, but otherwise as gerrymandered and catch-as-catch-can as any boardwalk or world’s fair. Did you ever try to find someone in one of these places? They’re mazes. Vaults and sepulchers, tombs, cairns, barrows and mausoleums all mixed in with each other. Obelisks and grave pits. Indiscriminate. There seem to be no codes or ordinances. A cemetery is kind of like a boom town, I think. Anyway, the point is that usually everything in one of these places is as carefully marked and labeled as your kid’s socks when he goes off to camp. Which is why I suspect what we’re dealing with is some really spectacular grief.
So this is the thing. Buckskin or no buckskin, pales and pickets or no pales and pickets, they had some incredible artisans back in those days. You think they couldn’t build a monument? They could build a monument. And when they wanted to they could build a monument like nobody’s business! It would be a match for anything in the Old World. So this fellow, this founder Jew I’m talking about, sends out the word, gets all the best craftsmen in the city together, the best draughtsmen, the best architects and engineers, and commissions a mausoleum that practically looks at you it says, “Money’s no object.”
You get around. (Ain’t Newark Airport a stone’s throw? Ain’t LaGuardia a hop and a skip? JFK?) I’m talking about humility. Sure. I’m speaking in my rabbi mode here, and I’m telling you. This is a nice theological point. That joke I told you? That’s an unrighteous joke. You heard me. Most people, they get a kick out of that story they have no more idea what they’re laughing at than the man in the moon. Because the point ain’t that the rabbi’s puffed up, or that the big-shot president of the congregation is. And it’s not on the janitor, either. No. That’s a joke that mocks God. Because where, in Torah, is God’s name? Where is it written? God, Jehovah, Lord and Yahweh. All aliases — the nicknames, noms de plume and a.k.a.’s of Agency, your basic top-secret, undercover, cloak-and-dagger, off-the-record, ambush-laying Pussyfoot. Peekaboo to you from the burning bush! God likes to make a big deal of this sort of thing. So in the view of the Rabbi of Lud, that joke is a commentary on God’s humility. Look, a Jew isn’t a Christian. Jesus says, “Follow me,” and the church makes a big thing out of the imitation of Christ. Not by us. On an individual level, by us there’s a real distinction between church and state. We’re supposed to keep the dishes for meat and the dishes for dairy strictly separate. What do you think that’s all about? It’s about place, that’s what that’s all about. So “Look who says he’s nothing” is, to a Jew, just about the most serious charge you could bring against him. You’re accusing him of playing God, and what’s so wicked about that old joke is that it accuses God of playing God, too! (I’m wasting my time in New Jersey.)
So, given the background, can you at least begin to understand the grief of that founding New Amsterdam Jew with the fancy tomb, that marble miracle of seventeenth-century know-how with its state-of-the-art arches, piers, cantilevers, columns, finials and traves? He had to have been beside himself! He must have been! Not a mark on it anywhere to indicate who was who! Nowhere the family name! Not a Sarah, not a Joe! Nowhere a Darling Daughter! No place a Beloved Son! As if God, God forbid, Himself had died! Grief so great it didn’t matter anymore about keeping the appearances up. An out-and-out proclamation that not only am I nothing, but that my wife is nothing too, my sons and my daughters. All. All nothing. Denying the Creator. Denying Creation. I’ll tell you something. Grief that immense has got to be a lesson to me. Yes, and a comfort, too. Because whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself, whenever I’m blue or feeling down because I’m only the Rabbi of Lud and haven’t a real congregation but am just this pickup rabbi, God’s little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey, I like to wander out by our seminal, primal monument, that ahead-of-its-time memorial to nothing, just to get my bearings again and put things in the proper perspective.
I’ll be frank with you. If I don’t sound to you like the Rabbi of even Lud, maybe it’s because I never had a true calling in the conventional sense. Sue me. The fact is our Christian friends have the music and that’s half the battle right there. I’m not even thinking about plainsong, Gregorian chants, the hardcore liturgical stuff. I discount madrigals, chimes, ding-dongs from the carillon. I’m not even thinking of the dirges, dead marches, oratorios and canticles. Just ordinary hymns! Forget the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Where in the Judaic tradition do you get an “Amazing Grace”? A “Rock of Ages,” a “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”? So never mind hymns. Where are your Jewish Christmas carols? We don’t have “The Little Drummer Boy.” We don’t have an “Angels We Have Heard on High.” And did you ever hear of a Jewish spiritual? Of course not, even though the Jordan is our river, Jewish water from the word go. We don’t even have good chants. There are saffron-robed kids in the airports with better. What do we have, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”? So if it isn’t the calling, the compelling musical inspiration, I mean, maybe it’s because I’ve always been just a little bit more spiritual then the next guy.
Take away the cemeteries, here’s what Lud looks like:
I’m not a world traveler and don’t put myself forward as an expert in these matters, but ever since I first saw it it’s always struck me that downtown Lud is a lot like the buildings and stores that line the highways of western towns like a peddler’s fruit stands, garment racks and card tables. It’s a, what-do-you-call-it, a strip, and Lud, like Las Vegas or Hollywood or Washington, D.C., is essentially a one-industry town. Only it’s even less diversified than those other places, and though there’s nothing to see, it’s even something of a tourist town. It’s amazing how it’s all linked together. The cemetery came first and was out here on its own for a good many years like, oh, say, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, but then somebody had the bright idea of bringing all death’s service-related industries together under one roof, so the town’s long main street has two monument companies where they cut and engrave the monuments. It has two funeral homes, a nursery, a landscaper, Pamella’s flower shop and a dry cleaner’s.