Few contributions to our “American Scene” department have evoked a greater response from our readers than Grace Goldin’s memoir “I Remember Tulsa” in the March 1948 COMMENTARY. Now, Mrs. Goldin takes us to “Stillwater Falls”—and points far beyond.
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Reba Grossinger was one of the wealthiest women in Stillwater Falls. It was at her home that I met the new rabbi. She was a high-stepping, good-looking redhead, and he was a nice guy and a nebbich. He had just landed the job at Stillwater Falls—accepted the call, as they say—and Reba gave a cocktail party to celebrate his arrival. Her main object, so far as I could see, was to get Rabbi Saberski drunk. The rabbi could drink as well as a real man, and knew how to stop with three, but the three at Grossingers’ were deliberately loaded—double, triple what they should have been. In half an hour Rabbi Saberski excused himself, dodged outdoors, and rendered unto Reba’s frozen flowerbeds what had been Reba’s. The next morning his hostess, with rings under her eyes and a frantic headache, ran into Rabbi Saberski; he was light of foot, calm of glance. From that moment, Reba saw her rabbi as a man not quite of this world; and she made him her mentor.
“I’m not smart like you, Rabbi,” she would say earnestly, “but I do believe in certain things . . . .”
What Reba believed in was mailed to her in mimeographed form by the National Zionist Office. She was women’s district chairman of our mid-West region. Night after night she sat up late in bed learning the facts National had set before her. She took her degree in Judaica by correspondence course. Day after day she travelled to her communities in her fancy hat—pleading with them to inform themselves. “If I can learn all this, anybody can!” she encouraged them after luncheon or high tea. “It’s all written down here—all you have to do if you have questions is write National—they’ll be more than glad to send you information.” She talked well and intensely; she was an asset to National and an inspiration to her regional flock.
One day Reba came to Rabbi Saberski’s study and asked him to read to her out of Midrash.
“What Midrash?”
“Oh, stories.”
Delighted to find that the rivers of Zionism had led her to this sea, he recounted tale upon tale with a warming enthusiasm. But after three quarters of an hour Reba stopped him.
“Thanks a lot, Rabbi,” she said, “but won’t do.”
Saberski tumbled down seventeen hundred years. “What won’t do?”
“I need a story for a donor’s luncheon on Wednesday in Kansas City,” Reba replied, “but I’m afraid none of your stories quite fit.”
Some months later I got a letter from Reba Grossinger, when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the Jewish state seemed certain. Reba was lost. The end was achieved. What next? “Anyway,” she wrote, “I’m not sorry I took up with the Zionists. Zionism made me what I am today. If it weren’t for National I wouldn’t know anything about Judaism—not a single thing!”
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What Reba Grossinger drew from Zionism, Reuben Saberski found in Talmud, in the Siddur, in the Temple at Jerusalem and other such archaeological oddities. I can remember him standing all by himself once in a field, at some picnic or other—long of torso, short of leg, hands clenched behind him and gaze fixed on the ground.
When I spoke to him, he said he was reviewing Talmud; his old rebbe used to admonish him: “Learn a lot of Talmud, learn it by heart. Then when you lie in your grave waiting for the Resurrection, you needn’t lie idle: you can review a page of Talmud every now and then and keep your mind occupied.” And Rabbi Saberski turned on me his mournful eyes. Nothing in his experience, nothing in Stillwater Falls, justified the expression of his eyes. I was reminded of it lately by a photograph in the Schocken volume, Polish Jews, captioned “Petitioner.” Shave off the beard and sidecurls, leave a little bushy moustache, and there you have the very look of Reuben Saberski, whose mother brought him to this country from Poland when he was ten months old.
From the first he was destined for the rabbinate, because his mother kept a strict Jewish home. As it is said, “In the old country if you walked four ells in the morning before washing your hands you were a heretic. In America if you can make a motzi— if you can say the blessing before food—you’re a rabbi.” Saberski became a rabbi at Schechter’s Seminary, and was as happy in his post as most men are. “They pay me seven thousand dollars a year,” he once remarked to me, “and buy me body and soul.”
I saw Saberski really gay just once. We were walking home from shul on a Friday night—the rabbi, my husband, and I—when talk veered to the number of modes in which the Kaddish can be sung. My husband and Reuben Saberski began to swap tunes, chanting heartily, challenging each other to variations. There was the ordinary Kaddish for rounding out a section of the synagogue service; there was the everyday mourner’s Kaddish; there was the great Kaddish for Yom Kippur, and a festal Kaddish for holidays; there was the Spanish-Portuguese Kaddish for Tisha b’Ab, and the ordinary Spanish-Portuguese Kaddish; there were a couple of Kaddishes from Germany; there was a Kaddish to be read upon completing a scholarly work. All in all, between them, they cited fourteen tunes for the Kaddish and vowed there were many more.
As Saberski rollicked with his Kaddish down the dark streets of Stillwater Falls, I was reminded of the year we got our garden. The garden came with the house, and I had an awful time distinguishing weeds from flowers. One afternoon I relentlessly tore out by the roots every Canterbury Bell I owned, convinced by the look of the buds that they must be weeds. One uprooted Canterbury Bell caught on the back fence and there, waterless, hanging head down for two whole weeks, it bloomed. It was an intense blue. Reuben Saberski, blossoming in his Kaddish, was a lot like that.
Yet our rabbi’s Friday evening sermons were bad—deliberately bad, I often thought. He despised the late Friday service. “That’s not a service, it’s a smörgasbord!” he’d snort. His Sabbath sermons, based on the Biblical portion of the week, were welcomed with delight—by the old men.
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His Yom Kippur service I thought wonderful, though nearly everybody in Stillwater Falls disagreed with me on this point.
Then he laid his main stress on the Avodah, that painstaking recitation of the acts and moves of the High Priest in Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement. But on all sides you heard: “Why doesn’t he interpret the rituals for our time?” “It’s the spirit of atonement we need.” “It’s not what goes into the mouth but what comes out of it that counts” (that old emetic principle). Yes, the Still-water Falls congregation did not noticeably flock to their rabbi for his annual High Priest sermon.
But for me it was an opening of the door.
I always had difficulty getting into rapport with Yom Kippur. Perhaps it was because we had a shul in our own home when I was growing up, a shul that seated only thirty worshipers. Those who came for purely social reasons circulated in the living room, the hall, and the den. I am sorry to say that one of my earliest recollections of the Great Fast is of myself and a cousin, about nine or ten years old, weaving about in the living room among our adult relatives with a sugar bowl. I cannot now remember why we thought dry sugar a particularly seductive food, but we would gulp heaping teaspoonfuls of it under the eyes of our relations, exclaiming: “Delicious! Don’t you wish you had some?” Later on, when I myself was fasting and supposedly pious, I brought to shul a copy of the Psalms in English to stimulate a penitential mood: I was old enough to enjoy the King James David but found I could not respond to the marvelous supplications in the Yom Kippur prayer book—particularly when I discovered with glee that one of Israel Zangwill’s translations had been tricked out in the meters of Swinburne:
The worlds He upholds in their flying,
His feet on the footstool of earth . . . .
Not until I heard the Avodah service under Rabbi Saberski’s auspices—that very dry, meticulous enumeration of the offices and bodily functions of the High Priest—did I begin by indirection to find direction out, and comprehend what Yom Kippur was invented for.
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When the cantor—oddly enough named Kantor—approached the Ark for a confession of personal inadequacy at the outset of the Avodah, he could scarcely be heard by those at the back of the hall.
“Look on me,” he whispered in a very sweet tenor, “look on me, bankrupt of merit, trembling, in terror of my life before You who live within the praises of Israel—God of Abraham, God of Isaac and Jacob, Lord, Lord; merciful and gracious God! O make safe the roads by which I walk, and come, and stand before You, seeking mercy for myself and for those who sent me! Do not hold them guilty for my sins, charge them not with my wickednesses, for I am a sinning man. Do not cause them to suffer for my transgression, and do not let them be ashamed of me, nor make me ashamed of them.”
Presently he broke out into full voice with joyful assurances: “I will hope in the Lord, I will come before Him, I will implore Him to loosen my tongue! For the heart’s readiness is man’s, but from the Lord the tongue’s responses.”
Then, after we had been softened, as it were, Rabbi Saberski came forward and began to read out in English the service of the High Priest.
He started by taking his listeners to Jerusalem, and so vividly, so passionately did he describe the scene, that in me at least he awoke a sense of historical continuity, a true conviction of likenesses between people then and people now, or (as the rabbi would have put it) between Jews then and Jews now. When he spoke of old men tottering up to the Temple Mount, men too old for the climb yet reveling in their difficulties, I thought about Old Man Rabinowitz, who before he came to our town used to travel once a week from the Bronx to Brooklyn, to the only kosher delicatessen in New York City that he would trust.
Old Man Rabinowitz moved to Stillwater Falls upon the death of his wife, arriving on his daughter’s doorstep there with a chalah under one arm and the roots of a pickled tongue under the other. He kissed the mezuza and his daughter, he pushed past his son-in-law straight back to the bedroom; only when he had made sure there were twin beds did he come out to the living room and sit down (see Lev. 15:19 ff.).
In Stillwater Falls, Old Man Rabinowitz pursued two tasks. He expounded the Laws of Israel in foreign-accented English, and he acquainted his three grandsons, whose father was a Kohen, with sufficient Judaism to qualify them to duchan on holidays—to bless the congregation with the ancient priestly blessing. Year after year Nathaniel, Simon, and Edgar Cohen stood before the congregation in their socks, arms outstretched, faces covered, until one by one they disqualified themselves for the high office to which their grandfather had elevated them: Nathaniel intermarried, Edgar got into mischief, and Simon just didn’t care.
Thereafter Old Man Rabinowitz devoted himself wholly to the Laws of Israel. He would have been a saint in days when it was the job of saints to say of the clean: it is clean; and of the unclean: it is unclean. For me, he shed a new light upon hardboiled eggs: in a kosher pot, three must be boiled for two that are eaten, the third egg absorbing the inadvertent impurity of the other two; in a non-kosher pot, all eggs acquire impurity from the pot. Oh the white of an egg, outwardly spotless, shot through nonetheless with ritual impurity! It made me shudder, sometimes, to think how kosher were the inward parts of Old Man Rabinowitz.
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On Yom Kippur, said Rabbi Saberski, the Temple Mount was jammed, and the rest of Jerusalem must have looked like a college town during homecoming game. A vast mob squeezed into the three concentric courts of the Temple, and yet, as my English translation assures me, “there was always room for a Jew to be prostrated.”
The Rabbi led us briefly through the outer court of the Temple, the Court of Gentiles, and up a flight of steps through the first inner wall, past which no one but a Jew might venture except upon pain of death, and not even Jews in a state of ritual impurity. Rabbi Saberski did not question our eligibility. Even pots, he would say, whatever their past, if they have lain neglected three years may be used again for kosher foods; how much more so we, whose ritual impurity had lain neglected two thousand years! So he ushered us in among the Israelites in the Women’s Court, where Jews of both sexes congregated—all, in fact, who had no priestly or Levitical blood. But the crowd on Yom Kippur, overflowing, pressed up a second flight of steps to the Court of the Men, the Priestly Court, which they entered through a gate with double gold doors donated to the Temple by one Alexander of Alexandria. And as we were pushed through those doors, I thought again how all ages are the same: what was Alexander of Alexandria but the Julius Plost of his generation?
Julius Plost was president of our shul in Stillwater Falls, a wrinkled and rubicund little Jew. I remember how he carried on at the first Rosh Hashanah service Rabbi Saberski conducted. Some quirk of the rabbi’s Seminary training had imposed upon us, in English, that hymn beginning, “All the world shall come to praise Thee”—another Zangwill translation. Around the second verse I became aware of a little figure marching up and down the aisles—it was Mr. Plost, hissing at anybody who would hear: “Salvation Army! Salvation Army!”
When we needed a Hebrew school, Julius Plost donated one. Yes, singlehanded. When the school had to have teachers, Julius Plost went to New York and picked them out. When there was an “affair” at shul, Julius Plost phoned the guests, arranged the chairs, hired the waiters. When the waiters failed to show up, Julius Plost served the tables, an apron around his middle, a happy smile on his round face.
And if the handyman decamped before the party was over, Julius Plost swept the floor. That shul was his baby. He is not a young man, and some day his presidency will kill him. On the other hand, he had been president for twelve years already when we left Stillwater Falls, he is president today, and if you took the job away it would kill him too.
Then Julius Plost is the soul of the fund-raising dinners. Every yeshiva in America blesses his name. Jewish defense organizations batten upon him. The tubercular patients of Denver, the spastic children of Des Moines, recognize him on sight from his portrait in their dining halls. He once won a four-door Ford sedan at a Community Fund raffle: he had bought up a quarter of the tickets. He provides relief for Jewish refugees in Shanghai and for respectable aged indigent females in Stillwater Falls. He is a Big Brother, a Seaman’s Friend. He contributes to American Pioneer Trails and India Famine Relief, the Society for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the Society for the Prevention of Asphyxial Death, thus confirming what is said: “What a people is this people Israel! They are asked to give to the golden calf and they give willingly. They are asked to give to God’s tabernacle and they give willingly also!”
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But to return to that earlier Plost, Alexander of Alexandria, and his two gold doors. Just beyond Alexander’s gate, in the Priestly Court (said Saberski), rose three stone steps where the priests stood to duchan—in their socks? But no, the rabbi deals with this question too, and informs us that they went barefoot, keeping a physician on hand to cure an intestinal disorder that arose precisely from this walking barefoot on cold stone.
Within the Priestly Court, the principal object to meet our eyes is one most barbarous—a huge stone altar, really a slaughter table running with blood; and nearby an abattoir, that is a slaughter-house, with the carcasses of the day’s sacrifices hanging head down. What a mixture this is of a place of solemn worship and a butcher shop! Over at one side the priests expertly flay and disjoint dead bullocks and sheep. I am accustomed to having my butcher shop hedged round with religion, but that our worship once partook of the butcher shop is a stranger fact.
Rabbi Saberski never minimized reality, but he did not keep us long at the foot of that altar, so eager was he to point out what rose beyond—our Temple itself. He described the walls, alternate layers of granite and dark marble, seeming from afar like waves of the sea. He furnishes details: a special roof construction to drain off rainwater and drive away ravens; a row of little windows, high up; twelve stone steps mounting to the main doorway, which was curtained with a linen curtain, blue, white, scarlet, purple. And in a second story, equal in size to the first, the Jews stored weapons of all kinds. Here I thought of Alberto and his German guns.
Alberto was professor of printmaking at the University of Stillwater Falls—at thirty-four, one of the world’s great printmakers. Baron de Hirsch brought his parents to the Argentine, Perón had already sent Alberto forth from there. We often heard him talk politics, or art. And he would tell us eagerly how the horses make love in his country. They do not settle down together at once, in a dull way; no, they run together for months across the pampas, run and run with their magnificent bodies, and in nearly every print of Alberto’s you’ll find a horse somewhere. “The beautiful horses of my country!” Alberto exclaimed, kissing his fingertips. He did not often introduce a Jewish theme into his work, and we were surprised when he invited us over to hear records of the beautiful, the fantastic voice of Cantor Rosenblatt. Alberto’s wife went right along with Cantor Rosenblatt when he sang flamenco (known to the trade as hazanut). “It make the hair on my arm stand up!” Elena shivers. Elena was a Catholic girl, but Alberto says there was not in Argentina any problem about intermarriage, like what he has heard about in our country.
That night, Alberto told us he had bought two guns for Palestine—German guns, seized by some American soldier in the war, that had the word Jude scratched in the wood of their butts. “When I see this,” he affirmed, “something inside me burst. What you do with these gun? Either you burn him up, or you send him over there to shoot back. They have to shoot back. That is the only thing for such gun!”
Alberto’s mother was horrified that her son learned to shoot. A Jew doesn’t do such things. So far as I could find out, Alberto’s Jewish learning ended when his cheder teacher threw a prayer book at him and broke his nose; but he shoots squirrels to this day in Stillwater Falls when the hunting season comes around. “You will see,” he used to say. “If they come for me, I will be ready for them. They will have to kill me, baby. Is not so easy!”
Alberto stood one hundred per cent behind the Jewish army in Palestine. “For an eye, an eye!” he cried. “We have to win these battle for the country. After that, I don’t care what will happen.”
“What do you mean, you don’t care what will happen!” my husband demanded. “How do you disclaim responsibility like that?”
“The world have to know that the Jews can fight,” Alberto responded firmly. “After that, is not our business.”
“Our!” my husband mocked. “Do you want to make me a goy like you?”
“Oh baby, Professore,” Alberto flashed back. “What a goy you would be!”
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But Alberto wasn’t a goy. He was a Jew—the splinter of a Jew. And sitting there in shul I thought how Judaism, the living phenomenon, which for centuries rolled along as a unit, had—still very much alive—exploded in our midst here in America, leaving one Jew with a Jewish openheartedness, one with meticulous piety, one with stubborn militancy, one with a need for study, and one with the taste for gefilte fish. I thought of Selma, whose father got her into a very exclusive California school. The school’s official quota was one Jew for every hundred girls; that year there were only twenty-seven students in the whole place. “Officially,” Selma remarked to me, “only my left leg went to finishing school.” There are Jews whose left leg alone is genuinely Jewish. I remembered the story of a fellow with no more than a Jewish toenail, who said to his valet the day before Yom Kippur, “Tilson, tomorrow is a Jewish holiday. Go buy some matzos.”
I thought of Stillwater Falls’ many fragmentary Jews. For instance, Iz Goldberger. Iz was an oil man, who wore a gold mezuza on his watch chain. But when our rabbi called on him for his contribution to the United Jewish Appeal, Iz handed over a check for $500. “Iz!” protested Saberski. “The family of Julius Plost is giving $30,000 this year!” “Maybe he can afford it,” snapped Iz Goldberger.
Pious he isn’t. I remember him complaining to Rabbi Saberski one Friday night that somebody had swiped his cigar; he left it in the dirt of one of the potted palms in the vestry, before services, and when he came back the cigar was gone. “Rabbi!” he remonstrated. “In a shul! On Friday night!”
“I never thought Iz Goldberger was human,” Saberski once told us, “until the day of his son’s Bar Mitzva. The kid said his maftir all right and won his fountain pens, and his father sat there facing me in the second row of the congregation, crying his heart out. When the service was over Iz Goldberger came up to me, and do you know what he said? ‘I want him to be a good Jew, Rabbi!’”
I thought of Emmy Adler, who fascinated me because I had never before met a completely pious Jew almost totally divorced from the orthodox forms of Judaism. The God of Israel I had always thought a bit more approachable through Hebrew, or, by long habit, Yiddish; Emmy Adler never found any difficulty making him understand her English. She talked to him long and intimately over her Sabbath candles. For her, I am convinced, prayer and charity will sufficiently avert the evil decree; she was one of the few people I ever knew who could affirm wholeheartedly, without any mental reservation, after the death of six million Jews: “Young I was, and now am old, yet never saw the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging for bread.” For her benefit the entire Tsenah Renah— the women’s meditations—ought to be translated out of Yiddish into English; yet she expressed this wealth of devotion through just two symbols: her candles, and her Jewish National Fund box.
What his harp was for David, that blue charity box was for Emmy Adler. To every Hadassah meeting she came with a box stuffed full of bills; to every Pioneer Women meeting (in the mid-West many women belong to both) with a second box equally full: thirty, forty dollars month after month in each. A dollar for Mrs. Brodsky’s baby, two dollars for her niece’s operation, three dollars because the Temple burned on Tisha b’Ab; she solemnized nativities and deaths with equal lucre. I suppose Plost gave infinitely more; Emmy could not singlehanded have caused the name of Stillwater Falls to be added to that great honor roll in Hadassah Hospital.
But I always felt that they knew Miss Adler in Jerusalem. And when Rabbi Saberski escorted us into the Temple that Yom Kippur, and against the ceiling of its small vestibule pointed out a gold vine where the devout hung precious gifts, I pictured Emmy Adler running forward with her offering.
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In that vestibule, the Rabbi taught us, stale shewbread was kept and knives for the slaughtering. With a flourish, he stepped beyond; opened for us the great hall of the Sanctuary, and showed us its walls carved in more than Oriental splendor with cherubim, doves, lilies, palms; located the altar of incense, topped by beaten gold, the twice-five tables for fresh shewbread, the famous seven-branched candlestick that ended its career in effigy on Titus’ Arch. Over all the scene Reuben Saberski cast his heart’s readiness—as our old colored cook used to put it, “he was lying in his luxuries.”
But an immoderate indulgence in things of this world is not for a good Jew. Rabbi Saberski broke off here in his description, fingering no more the gold of the Temple furnishings and removing his nose from the vents of the incense-burner, to lead us out once more to the Priestly Court, where the High Priest himself was just emerging from behind an outstretched sheet after his third complete immersion that day.
The High Priest had painstakingly been made ready for this moment. For seven days he had dwelt in the Temple precincts under close supervision, another priest standing by in case ritual accident should befall the chief performer. The night before Yom Kippur they would not let the High Priest sleep, lest he defile himself; they kept him awake by reading out enlivening texts—Job or Chronicles! They adjured him not to forget his part, to alter nothing of what he had been taught; and they wept to think he might forget, and he wept to think they thought such thoughts of him.
Now he comes forth: he has completed his morning ceremonies; he is arrayed in festal white from Pelusium, worth eighteen manims. As he appears a shudder goes through the people to think how pure, how terribly pure within and without, is their High Priest.
It was disappointing to be told that on this day the High Priest would not flaunt his breastplate. There was a full-color reproduction of that breastplate in our big Webster at home, with tribal names written out in Hebrew on each stone; I remember how impressed I was as a child that Hebrew had penetrated even the English dictionary. Since the breastplate was a cumbersome thing, some assistant carried it along before the High Priest when it was required; meanwhile, on this day, the High Priest moved unencumbered in his whites toward the bullock, which was to receive his sins. “He lays his hands upon its head”—Rabbi Saberski read directly from the Avodah service—“his sins he confesses, he does not conceal them within his own breast.” Thus he speaks:
“I pray Thee, Lord:
I have sinned
And I have done wickedly;
I have transgressed before Thee, I and my
house.
I pray Thee, by Thy name.
Forgive the sins,
The wickednesses
And the transgressions
That I sinned and I was wicked in
And that I transgressed before Thee, I and
my house.
As it is written in the Torah of Moses Thy
servant:
“‘On this day shall atonement be made for
you, to purify you of all your sins
before the Lord.’”
He calls upon the Lord by His true name—syllables that occur these days in all the history books but in that time were never pronounced save by the High Priest, thrice, on the Day of Atonement. Hearing the Name spoken out loud everybody falls down to the ground in terror; the congregation with one accord falls korim and cries, “Blessed be His glorious Name, whose Kingdom endures for ever and ever!” The Priest prolongs the Name of the Lord till they have responded and ended; then he says to them: “You shall be clean.”
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Next, our Rabbi tells us, the High Priest turns around to the waiting twin white goats. He casts lots to determine which shall serve as scapegoat and atone for Israel’s unknown sin, and which shall be slaughtered then and there to atone for the sins of the Temple personnel. On the head of the destined scapegoat, he ties a red and shining thread; then he comes to his bullock again, lays his hands on its head, and confesses upon it the sins of the entire priesthood.
Afterwards, each movement prescribed as in a dance, he kills his bullock. Rabbi Saberski urged us to believe that the shedding of blood in this context must seem to us a fitting principle, binding the holy thing more firmly to the earth, not letting it shrivel up amid pews, and hymns, and a dead decorum. Nowadays, he would say, we find on the one hand so much bloodletting, on the other so much good will, high sentiment, and interfaith work: maybe it was wise of our ancestors to join realism with high fervency. The High Priest hands a bowl of blood to his acolyte, who keeps it stirring lest it congeal.
Now the High Priest seizes a light censer of parwah old, very long-handled, heaping three kabs if burning coals therein; he fills his two hands full of the finest incense and pours that into a large gold spoon; carrying the censer in his right hand, the spoon in his left, he approaches a second linen curtain—blue, white, scarlet, purple—separating him and all the world from the Holy of Holies. He pushes the curtain aside and enters.
In old days, the Rabbi said, before the Babylonian Captivity, the original Ark of Moses lodged in the Holy of Holies. Nothing remains now but a little upraised ledge of rock, upon which the High Priest sets his censer down. He throws the incense over the live coals, making a billowy black smoke in that dim place. Then he darts out through the curtain and snatches the bowl containing the bullock’s blood; returning within, he sprinkles the Holy of Holies, once on high and seven times toward the ground—“not as though he were aiming,” the Mishnah recalls, “but as though he were wielding a whip.” He counts, as Jews have counted every Yom Kippur since: “One. One and One. One and two. One and three. One and four. One and five. One and six. One and seven.”
Then he kills his goat and purifies the curtain inside and out with goat’s blood; but in all he hurries, scarcely lingering within the Holy of Holies to mutter a brief prayer, lest Israel be terrified by his long absence. “He came in in teror of his life, he goes out in terror of his life.” When he is done sprinkling and purifying every part, he lays his hands upon the scapegoat to confess the sins and arrogance of Israel:
I pray Thee, Lord,
They have sinned
And they have done wickedly
They have transgressed before Thee, Thy
people, the house of Israel . . . .
As the people hear God’s name in this final context, they fall korim a third time, in pure terror. This time as they rise they find reason to hope that, heavy as their sins were, they have been lifted, and are laden entirely upon the head of one scapegoat. They stand up straighter, calm of glance, light of heart. I am convinced these were in the main imperfect Jews, some of them mere splinters. But they worked out a way, a way from without, to surmount their imperfection once a year, and to rejoin wholeheartedly the congregation of Israel. I envy them.
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Naturally enough, interest shifts at this point from High Priest to scapegoat As the animal is led from the Temple area, certain Babylonian Jews—ancestors of Iz Goldberger, no doubt—slap his rump and shout: “Bear our sins and begone! Bear our sins and begone!” By ten fixed stations one of the priests leads the scapegoat to a ravine outside Jerusalem. Some congregants rollick along with it part way, others bring back word of its progress, but he who attends it must take the final stage alone. This priest divides the crimson thread, ties half to the animal’s curly head and half to a rock; and he pushes the scapegoat down the steep. Afterwards this priest must sit alone at the ravine until nightfall to recover from impurity.
When news reaches the High Priest that the scapegoat’s bones have been crushed, “like the potter’s vessel,” he rises, bathes, and puts on golden garments to perform the last sacrifices. He wears his white linen robes just once again, to fetch forth his incense pan from the Holy of Holies; after that he lays them away forever. And from some simple book—for the High Priest, though immensely purified, was not often a learned man—he reads aloud to the congregation in the women’s court.
This was his great day. His face shines like the sun in its strength, for he has brought his people the only kind of redemption that can be measurably complete. A ritual atonement proceeds in accordance with law and measure, it dreads no failure of the human spirit. Automatically, the red becomes as white as snow. A perfect people, white as snow, carries the faithful messenger home on its shoulders, shouting, dancing in the streets. “They are adorned with salvation, and covered with the cloak of righteousness.”
Happy the people that is in such a case!
Happy the people whose God is the Lord!
He, their High Priest, prepares a feast for friends in his own home, as a token of his gratitude. For he stood before God, and was not consumed.
Happy the eye that saw all this:
Oh even to hear of it makes our soul sad!
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Even after Rabbi Saberski has taken us in hand, I wonder: for me and my kind, does the Day of Atonement utterly atone? We wear our new hats and we go to shul, we disturb the sermon with our minds rather than our minds with the sermon, and send our fancy woolgathering during the catalogue of sins. In wartime it is terribly affecting to read, “Who shall live? And who shall die?” But by and large we are ignorant of the meanings of the prayerbook and too selfconscious to atone. For us, sometimes, even the miracle of the Land’s rebirth is insufficient, though the proclamation of the State of Israel has sent an electric shock to our furthest outposts and caused such a one as Karl Shapiro to write, brilliantly:
When I think of the liberation of Palestine,
When my eye conceives the great black
English line
Spanning the world news of two thousand
years,
My heart leaps forward like a hungry dog,
My heart is thrown back on its tangled chain,
My soul is hangdog in a Western chair.
I mailed a copy of this poem from the New Yorker o Rabbi Saberski, who wrote back, “Only a bad Jew, an apostate, could have made that poem. Look how he reduces the whole Judaic experience to an admittedly irrational instinct, a tribal urge!”
When I see the name of Israel high in print
The fences crumble in my flesh . . . .
Some of us can lay down our fragmentariness and depart for Israel, where the land and the victory have at this moment power to absolve from sin. Others of us are like the Omaha woman I heard of recently, a very ardent Zionist worker for thirty years, whose only son embarked for the war in Palestine. “What did you expect?” her friends asked the distracted mother. “You raised him in this spirit from infancy on. What did you intend him to do?”
“Not this!” she wailed. “Not this!”
When I think of the battle for Zion I hear
The drop of chains, the starting forth of feet!
Rabbi Saberski used to say: The Temple after Maccabean times was a dead form; it split open, but the Synagogue was there to take its place. Now, he would complain (being as well placed as any man to make the observation), the Synagogue is a dead form, ready to split open. From the break, what new thing will emerge?
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