Sam had been living in Jerusalem for nearly thirty years, so he could no longer tell how different life was there from other places. He didn’t think of Jerusalem as a single city but as fragmented into a thousand micro-societies, like one of those mirrored spheres they hang over dance floors. Circles of friends overlapped in the most unpredictable ways. You never knew whom you were going to run into at a Jerusalem gathering, but you’d always see someone you’d never guess would be there. Half the time Sam felt only tenuously or arbitrarily connected to the group he happened to be with – the one you wouldn’t expect to find there.
He’d definitely been an odd man out at a lavish wedding he’d gone to without his wife because she had another obligation. He’d known only half a dozen of the three hundred or more guests there, and those only casually – he was in the wrong micro-society. He was pleased that the groom’s parents, new neighbors whom they knew only slightly, had invited them to the wedding, though he wasn’t quite sure why they had or where they found the money to pay for such a huge event. Their son, a nineteen-year-old yeshiva student, had married a girl just out of high school.
Sam came to the obvious conclusion that since their religious principles prevented them from having sex like secular kids their age, they were rushing into marriage when they were too young to have any clear idea who they were. His own daughter had not taken the marriage route to early sexual relations, and he was glad. She’d gone through a couple of inappropriate partners, and she had lived with her boyfriend for a couple of years before they got married. That had not been the way he had entered his first marriage.
He took note of that familiar item on his mental list of the reasons why he had laid aside the strictures and beliefs of Jewish orthodoxy but still wondered why had he ever thought he might accept them. Why had his superego reached for such heavy weaponry? He had tried being “modern orthodox” for a few years, while he was between marriages and seeing orthodox women, but the woman he eventually married wasn’t orthodox, and he gave up trying to square that circle: he was modern, not orthodox. He had quite a few orthodox friends – the hi-tech world was full of them, though for some reason none of them was at this wedding. He saw how their children had chosen either to become extremely religious, like the night’s young bride and groom (assuming they weren’t just sex-starved) or to drop it all and be secular.
He stood on the edge of the crowd with a plate of hors d’oeuvres and listed anomalies to himself. Most of other guests were modern orthodox, middle-class, Ashkenazi Israelis, with a sprinkling of Sephardic Jews of the same ilk – the sort of people who lived in settlements or sent their children to live there, the ones who had worn orange ribbons to show they opposed the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
But a few of the other wedding guests were not part of the orthodox Zionist camp. Anomaly Number One: a middle-aged popular singer and television personality and his playwright wife – part of the Tel Aviv bohemian world. Sam also spotted Anomaly Number Two in this stronghold of right wing opinion: Yakov Yakovi, someone he knew from left wing political activities. Yakovi was the head of a well-endowed foundation that promoted a parochial brand of religious pluralism: mutual tolerance between orthodox and the secular Jews – hardly a left wing cause in Sam’s opinion. The groom’s father was the head of an adult Jewish studies program sponsored by Yakovi’s foundation, and the popular singer and his wife, bright people, had taken part in the program. Sam and Yakovi chatted for a few minutes until a short, young, intense religious man horned in and hijacked Yakovi’s attention, probably someone with a project that needed funding.
Sam found himself taking some breaded chicken bits from a high, round hors d’oeuvre table at the same time as the singer, and he had felt like talking to him, telling him he was a fan, which was almost true – he was so far out of touch with Israeli popular culture, that he regarded himself as a fan of any celebrity he could actually identify – but he held back. He could see in the singer’s eyes that he’d done the right thing. The singer hadn’t come to the party to be famous. In fact, he was seriously under-dressed, in sneakers and jeans, as if he had gone out to the grocery store but ended up at the wedding by mistake. He was shorter, slimmer, and older looking than Sam expected. On screen he was lively and charismatic. Obviously he’d learned the trick of turning his charisma on and off.
Of course the major anomaly was the catering hall itself: owned and run by Ramat Rachel, a secular kibbutz that had once been on the border between Israel and Jordan. This was just the sort of pluralism that Yakovi’s foundation was promoting. Once the kibbutzim were militantly anti-religious, now they were catering to kosher crowds.
“It’s good to feel bored and out of place,” he mumbled to himself as he sipped some wine. He’d driven there, so he had to be careful not to drink too much, which would have been one way of handling the boredom.
“Why is it good to feel out of place?” he challenged himself.
“Remember what the meditation teacher taught you: wherever you are, you’re still with yourself.” Sam almost started talking to himself out loud, the way he did sometimes when he was walking his dog in a park.
Although the invitation had said the ceremony would be held promptly at seven-thirty, and he’d rushed to be there at seven-fifteen, the reception went on and on, and there was no sign that the ceremony would ever be held – which was somehow normal. Sam could never figure that out. He had been to dozens of weddings, but never to one when the ceremony was actually held when they said it would be. At one wedding he had attended, years ago, the ceremony was more than two hours late, because the rabbi forgot to come, and they had to find a substitute.
Now people kept milling around in the huge hors d’oeuvre tent, overeating and trying to find something to say to one another. The bride, a sweet-looking, pale-complexioned girl, who looked like a fifteen-year-old, was camped in a corner with her high school classmates, singing boring religious songs to the accompaniment of poorly played drums, guitars, and a flute. Did the couple have any idea of what they were in for? They probably expected to be supported by their parents while they completed their educations – a return to pre-modern Eastern European customs.
Sam saw a tall, thin Chinese man he’d met briefly at another wedding and, tired of standing around by himself, he decided to get to know him a bit better. The other wedding had been that of Sam’s second cousin’s stepson – a degree of family relationship so minor that you could barely say it existed. But Sam and his second cousin had known each other well during their childhood, because their parents had been close friends. He had also become very fond of her husband, a highly intelligent, stubbornly idiosyncratic orthodox Jewish corporate lawyer who had retired in order to devote his time and boundless intellectual energy to Jewish studies. His son’s wife was a Korean convert to Judaism, which didn’t quite explain why a Chinese convert to Judaism would be at her wedding – but there he had been, and now he was at this child-marriage. Sam introduced himself, reminded him of the other wedding, and asked him what his connection to this wedding was. It turned out that the bride’s late grandfather, a scholar of Semitic linguistics, had been the Chinese man’s doctoral dissertation advisor. As if the anomaly of an orthodox wedding at an anti-religious kibbutz, and a camouflaged television celebrity hadn’t been enough, the anomaly of a Chinese man who had taken a doctorate in Hebrew linguistics and was teaching that subject at an Israeli university, a man who had taken on such stringent Jewish orthodoxy that only a woman from the reactionary fringes of the modern orthodox community would be religious enough for him (and such a woman would never marry a convert) topped them all. The Chinese convert even threw Yiddish phrases into his Hebrew.
Sam felt dizzy, as if he were crossing a deep chasm on a rope and plank bridge. The man was clearly brilliant and out of his mind, but because he’d been cagey enough to choose a form of madness sanctioned by a substantial religious community (substantial in Israeli terms – compared to the population of China, the whole Jewish population of the world was equivalent to a minuscule statistical error), he hadn’t been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
While the Chinese convert stooped over to get closer to Sam’s ear, Sam thought of a joke he couldn’t tell him. Once a woman went to her rabbi, a man famous for his rigorous piety, and told him she was worried about her son. The young man was staying up past midnight every night to engage in mystical study; he was rising before dawn every day to pray exactly when the sun rose; he spent every waking hour studying Talmud, and he was fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. They rabbi was puzzled. “That’s pretty much what I do? So why are you concerned?” “But, rabbi,” the woman said, “You do it for a living.” Perhaps only a sense of humor could save you in a society that was such a tissue of anomalies. Sam thought that Jewish humor should be part of the conversion course. Maybe it was.
Suddenly the ceremony became imminent, saving Sam from the mad convert. The groom and his yeshiva classmates, boisterous teen-age boys, led everyone outside to the lawn, where a bridal canopy had been erected. It was early autumn, and the evening was chilly and damp. The plastic chairs that had been placed in rows were all coated with dew, so the guests who had been milling about and munching hors d’oeuvres had to stay on their feet. “Standing on ceremony,” Sam mumbled to himself.
That rabbi who performed the ceremony, the head of the yeshiva where the groom was studying, chose to speak at excruciating length about Rachel, the wife of Isaac, whose tomb, if you believed that sort of thing, was within sight, theoretically, of the bridal canopy. Merely theoretically, of course, because it was dark, and mainly the lights of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem were visible in that direction. The rabbi spoke in sweeping, mystical terms about the kind of “protection” that Rachel gave to her descendants. How could anyone take that nonsense seriously? Sam wondered. Was that the sort of thing they “learned” in the boy’s yeshiva? How could anybody in his right mind claim that God (or the Matriarch Rachel) had protected the Jewish people at any time since the victory of the Maccabees?
By the end of the ceremony, Sam was tired of wrestling with incongruities, which, he suspected, he was the only one among the celebrants who cared to notice. He took his place at the table, where he had been seated with a few people from his neighborhood who he did know. There was a salad buffet, but by ten o’clock the main course hadn’t been served. Sam decided to call it a night. He’d eaten too many hors d’oeuvres anyway. So he drove home, glad to leave an event where he barely fit in, despite the general feeling of benevolence he always felt at weddings.
Three months after that wedding, he had also gone to Professor Almog’s funeral alone. It happened to be on a Friday morning, as if to make it convenient for people like him, who didn’t work on Fridays, but his wife was busy preparing a large meal for the evening. Besides, she hadn’t ever liked Professor Almog very much. Sam had done an MA in philosophy with him right after he moved to Israel, before his divorce and before taking a course in systems analysis and acquiring a profession that had proved to be quite lucrative. Almog, who had a nasty reputation, had always liked Sam, possibly because he hadn’t gone on in academics and become a challenger. In fact he was the only former teacher that Sam kept in touch with over the years.
Almog had been a pudgy, coarse man, with a strong aggressive streak, a fierce academic politician who had made a lot of enemies during his long career. But he had been retired for a while, and when he died, even his former enemies came to the funeral. He had been more than an academic. He had used his position in the university to exert influence, serving on government commissions and regularly writing sharp, center-left Op Ed pieces. He had even appeared on television regularly as a panelist on a rough and tumble political debate show, mauling his opponents with malicious relish. His funeral was well attended, and several celebrity intellectuals gave eulogies for him.
Sam was personally acquainted with a good third of the people there – this was more like his home base than the wedding at Ramat Rachel had been – and he recognized another third. He was not the only hi-tech person there. Almog’s sons were both electronic engineers and entrepreneurs, and their friends and associates mingled with professors, television people, and journalists. Only a small minority of the people who had come to see Professor Almog off on his journey to what is called “the world of truth” in Jewish tradition belonged to the orthodox segment of society.
It was a cold but sunny winter day, Almog had not exactly died young or unexpectedly, and the people were not particularly gloomy. Many subdued and dignified greetings were exchanged, and people who hadn’t seen each other in a while used the time before the ceremony began to catch up on each other’s lives. They were having a good time.
Like the wedding, which had been held in two stages – hors d’oeuvres before the ceremony and a dinner afterward – Almog’s funeral was also held in two stages: some eulogies by a mixture of families and celebrities in the ugly, bare, cold cement shed where the body was first laid out, and then a few more celebrity speeches next to the fresh grave, a slow, fifteen minute drive from there. Sam didn’t feel like driving out to the cemetery in his own car, so he took a ride with Esther Barkai, a woman he’d known since she’d been a graduate student in the Hebrew Literature Department. She had gone on to finish a doctorate and clung doggedly to the academic world. She’d been a good-looking, impressive woman at the time, and she still carried herself with conviction, though she’d put on a lot of weight. Sam had always thought of her as an intellectual fake, latching onto whatever was fashionable and acquiring a new and up-to-date critical vocabulary every five or six years, like another face-lift. But she inhabited the same micro-society as Sam, and he was always running into her. Every time he did, he was glad once again that he had left academia, so you could say that he enjoyed her company.
Helmut, an effeminate German post-doc, who had been studying with Almog until he had been hospitalized a month or so ago, also asked Esther for a ride and sat in the back. Almog had grown up in Vienna and, always relishing difficult situations, he taken his own doctorate in Frankfurt not long after World War Two, one of the few Israelis who had been willing to set foot in Germany at the time, so he had been a good mentor for Helmut.
“Have you been to a Jewish funeral before?” Sam asked the post-doc in English.
“Oh yes. In fact I am a convert to Judaism. I came first here to Israel as a volunteer with Aktionsühnezeichen, and after that I began the conversion process. I am planning to say here.”
Neither Sam nor Esther asked Helmut to explain the German word he had used. “How’s your Hebrew?” Esther asked him in Hebrew.
“No problem,” he answered, also in Hebrew.
The conversation shifted to that language, and Sam said to Esther: “I didn’t know you were a friend of Almog’s.”
“I wasn’t really. We were once enemies. He blocked my tenure the first time around.”
“So why did you come to the funeral?”
“Out of loyalty to my social class. Anyway, we put that behind us after I did get tenure. What was your connection?”
“You remember that I did an MA with him, don’t you? That’s when we met. I was married to Jane.”
“Of course. Now I remember. That was a long time ago.”
“Over the years I saw him fairly often. In an unequal way, we were friends. I was fond of him, and I’ll miss him. I used to go over the papers he wrote directly in English as a favor to him. You couldn’t exactly say no.”
“If you did say no, he could be a real bastard. He went out of his way to put down my work in literary theory, because he was a philosopher, so to speak, and I was ‘just’ a literary scholar.”
Sam didn’t want to ask her when she had said “no” to Almog, and what that had been about, and he didn’t want to tell her that he shared Almog’s disdain for what passed for literary theory. In fact, he didn’t feel like making conversation with Esther at all and drifted off into memories of Almog, who had suffered from severe asthma all his life. Whenever Sam called to ask how he was, he would answer: “Below average.” The German philosophy student also said nothing, so Esther filled the silence with a detailed account of her battle for tenure, over the head and behind the back of the late professor Almog, to whom they had come to pay their last respects.
She parked the car on the narrow road down to the “professors’ plot” of the huge municipal cemetery, and they walked down along with the others.
“I’ll look for you when it’s over,” he said.
“Fine, your place is reserved. Yours, too,” she told Helmut and went off to hunt down an academic celebrity from Tel Aviv. Sam and Helmut exchanged a little smile of relief.
Unexpectedly, Sam’s first wife and her present husband, a disciple, colleague, and rival of Almog’s, now a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, appeared at the funeral. Sam hadn’t noticed them during the eulogies. He was surprised they had made the two hour drive south for the funeral and equally surprised at the surge of rage he felt when he caught sight of them, even now, after fifteen years of a happy second marriage. “Why are all these old emotions cropping up?” he mumbled. He and his ex-wife had cooperated without overt acrimony in raising their daughter, seeing her married, and, recently, sharing the joy of being grandparents. If it had been up to him, they would still be married, but she had left him for the man she was now married to – a more brilliant philosopher, certainly, but, Sam thought with some malice, a lot poorer. The company he worked for had been bought by a huge American software conglomerate, and Sam’s stock options had made him a reasonably wealthy man. Sometimes there was poetic justice in the world, despite the conceptual defects of literary theory.
He stood close to the grave while they lowered Almog’s corpse into it from the canvas stretcher that had borne it from the dark blue van that served as a hearse. By now he was used to seeing bodies buried wrapped only in shrouds, with no coffins, the Israeli custom, but it had shocked him the first time he’d witnessed it. A black-garbed, bearded member of the burial society stood in the grave, took one end of the stretcher, slid the dead man’s feet off of it, and then the men who were holding the other end of the stretcher pulled it clear, and the body slumped into the pit. Never had Sam felt so strongly that the thing they were burying was not the person who had died.
