In general – that Saturday was an exception – I would go with the family to shul, the commodious Walm Lane Synagogue which, at that time, had a congregation of over two thousand. We would all be scrubbed and excessively clean, and dressed in our ‘Sunday’ best, and walk down Exeter Road following our parents, like so many ducklings. My mother, along with various aunts, would climb to the women’s gallery.
When I was very young, three or less, I would go with her, but as a ‘grown-up’ boy of six, I was expected to be downstairs with the men (though I was always stealing glances at the women upstairs, and sometimes tried to wave, though I was sternly forbidden to do so).
My father was well known in the congregation – half of whom were his patients, or my mother’s – and had the reputation of being a staunch supporter of the community and a scholar, though his scholarship was nothing, he told me, to that of Wilensky across the aisle, who knew every word of the Talmud so thoroughly by heart that if a pin were stuck into any of the volumes, he could tell you what sentence it would pierce on every page. Wilensky did not follow the service, but some internal program or litany of his own, always rocking back and forth, davening, in his own way. He had long ringlets, and payes down his face – I looked at him with awe, as something superhuman.
It was a very long service on Saturday mornings, which even with high-speed praying took a minimum of three hours – and the praying was, at times, incredibly fast. One silent prayer, the Amidah, had to be said standing, facing toward Jerusalem. It was, I supposed, about ten thousand words long, but the front-runners in the shul could do it in three minutes flat. I would read as much as I could (with frequent glances at the translation on the opposite page to see what it all meant), but I had scarcely read more than a paragraph or two before the time was up, and the service rushed ahead onto something else. For the most part I did not try to keep up, but wandered through the prayer book in my own way. It was here that I learned about myrrh and frankincense, and the weights and measures used in the land of Israel three thousand years ago. There were many passages which attracted me with their rich language, or their beauty, their sense of poetry and myth, detailing the odors and spices that went with some sacrifices. It was evident that God had an acute nose.[39]
I liked the singing, the choir – where cousin Dennis sang, and Uncle Moss presided – the virtuosic chazzan, and some of the savage, rabbinical speeches, and occasionally the sense that all of us actually formed a single community. But by and large, the synagogue oppressed me; religion seemed more real, and infinitely more pleasant, at home. I loved Passover, with its preliminaries (removing all the leavened bread, the chometz, from the house, burning it, sometimes communally with our neighbors), the special, beautiful cutlery and plates and tablecloths we used for its eight days, and the rooting up of the horseradish that had been growing in the garden, its grinding which led to copious tears.
We would sit down fifteen, sometimes twenty, to the table on seder nights: my parents; the maiden aunts – Birdie, Len, and before the war, Dora, sometimes Annie; cousins of varying degree, visiting from France or Switzerland; and always a stranger or two who would come. There was a beautiful, embroidered tablecloth which Annie had brought us from Jerusalem, gleaming white and gold on the table. My mother, knowing that sooner or later there would be accidents, always had a preemptive ‘spill’ herself – she would manage, somehow, very early in the evening, to tip a bottle of red wine onto the tablecloth, and thereafter no guest would be embarrassed if they knocked over a glass. Though I knew she did this deliberately, I could never predict how or when the ‘accident’ would occur; it always looked absolutely spontaneous and authentic. (She would immediately spread salt on the wine stain, and it became much paler, almost disappearing; I wondered why salt had this power.)
Unlike the shul service, which was gabbled as fast as possible, and largely unintelligible to me, the seder service took its time, with long discussions and disquisitions, and questions about the symbolism of the different dishes – the egg, the salt water, the bitter herb, the haroseth. The Four Boys mentioned in the service – the Wise One, the Wicked One, the Simple One, and the One Who Was Too Young to Ask Any Questions – were always identified by me with the four of us, though this was especially unfair to David, who was neither more nor less wicked than any other fifteen-year-old boy. I loved the ritual washing of the hands, the four cups of wine, the recitation of the ten plagues (here, as one recited them, one would dip an index finger into the wine at each plague; then, after the tenth plague, the slaying of the first-born, one would throw the wine on one’s fingertips over one’s shoulder). I, as the youngest, would recite the Four Questions in a quavering treble; and later, try to see where my father hid the middle matzoh, the afikomen (but I could no more catch him doing this than I could catch my mother maneuvering the wine spill).
I loved the songs and recitations of the seder, the feeling of a remembering, a ritual, which had been performed for millennia – the story of the bondage in Egypt, the infant Moses in the bulrushes being rescued by the pharaoh’s daughter, the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. I would be transported, we all would, into a mythic realm.
The seder service would go on past midnight, sometimes to one or two in the morning, and as a five-or six-year-old, I would be nodding off. Then, when it finally broke up, another cup of wine – the fifth cup – would be left for ‘Elijah’ (he would come in the night, I was told, and drink the wine left for him). Since my own Hebrew name was Eliahu, Elijah, I decided that I was entitled to drink the wine, and in one of the last seders before the war, I slipped down at night and drank the whole cup. I was never questioned, and never admitted what I had done, but my hangover the next morning, and the empty cup, made any confession unnecessary.
I enjoyed all the Jewish festivals in different ways, but Succoth, the harvest festival, especially, for here we would build a house of leaves and branches, a succah, in the garden, its roof hung with vegetables and fruit, and if weather permitted, I could sleep in the succah, and look through the fruit-hung roof at the constellations above me.
But the more serious festivals, and the fasts, took me back to the oppressive atmosphere of the synagogue, an atmosphere that reached a sort of horror on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when all of us (we understood) were being weighed in the balance. One had ten days between New Year and the Day of Atonement to repent and make restitution for one’s misdemeanors and sins, and this repentance reached its climax, communally, on Yom Kippur. During this time, of course, we had all been fasting, no food or drink being allowed to pass our lips for twenty-five hours. We would beat our breasts and waiclass="underline" ‘We have done this, we have done that’ – all possible sins were mentioned (including many I had never thought of), sins of commission and omission, sins deliberate and inadvertent. The terrifying thing was that one did not know whether one’s breast-beating was convincing to God, or whether one’s sins were even, in fact, forgivable. One did not know whether He would reinscribe one in the Book of Life, as the liturgy had it, or whether one would die and be cast into outer darkness. The intense, tumultuous emotions of the congregation were expressed by the astonishing voice of our old chazzan, Schechter – Schechter, as a young man, had wanted to sing in opera, but never in fact sang outside the synagogue. At the very end of the service, Schechter would blow the shofar, and with this the atonement was over.
39
‘The compound forming the incense,’ the Talmud prescribed in almost stoichiometric terms,
… consisted of balm, onycha, galbanum and frankincense, in quantities weighing seventy manehs each; of myrrh, cassia, spikenard and saffron, each sixteen manehs by weight; of costus twelve, of aromatic bark three, and of cinnamon nine manehs; of lye obtained from a species of leek, nine kabs; of Cyprus wine three seahs and three kabs: though, if Cyprus wine was not procurable, old white wine might be used; of salt of Sodom the fourth part of a kab, and of the herb Maaleh Ashan a minute quantity. R. Nathan says, a minute quantity was also required of the odoriferous herb Cippath, that grew on the banks of the Jordan; if, however, one added honey to the mixture, he rendered the incense unfit for sacred use, while he who, in preparing it, omitted one of its necessary ingredients, was liable to the penalty of death.