The Gift of Asher Lev (35 page)

“I don’t know. I’m between things now.”

“Dawn between things or dusk between things?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“The life of an artist, eh? Glamour, romance, security, the fast track. Come, I’ll show you where you’re staying.”

He picked up the heavy bag, and I took the attaché case and followed him out of the office. He was my age, short, stocky, goodhearted. His brown beard turning gray; his brown velvet skullcap slanted forward at a jaunty angle, the way my father used to wear his when I was a child, before my mother’s illness, before her brother’s accidental death, before my father began his rise through the Ladover hierarchy. A wave of memory rose before me: my father’s anger over my poor schoolwork; the hot humiliations of classroom mockery over my endless drawing. I followed Shaul Lasker through the entrance hallway to the courtyard and then into a long corridor. We went up a flight of curving metal stairs, our footsteps echoing, and stopped at a door. He put the suitcase down and fished in a pocket for the key.

“We only have one spare room in our apartment,” he said, “and I gave it to your father. Otherwise you’d be staying with us.”

He opened the door.

The room was small and narrow and furnished with a single bed, a small desk, an empty bookcase, a bureau, and two wooden chairs. A tall window looked out on a cement yard and small flowered lawns and the backs of buildings. On the wall over the desk hung a framed color photograph of the Rebbe. He looked the way he did when I was a child and he would go walking in the night beneath the trees of Brooklyn Parkway and I would be awake and standing at the window of our living room, looking down at the lamplit world below.

“The back door is always left open on Shabbos,” Shaul Lasker said, putting the key on the desk. “You can leave the key with the caretaker when you go out. And now I need to get ready for Shabbos.” He went to the door. “I’m sorry you can’t stay with us in the apartment. Eight children, thank God, they take up a lot of room. I’ll see you later in shul, Asher.” He closed the door quietly behind him.

I stood there in the sudden silence inside the room.

Someone knocked on the door. It was Shaul Lasker, looking sheepish and holding a white envelope.

“The most important thing I forgot,” he said in Hebrew, and handed me the envelope. “Your father asked me to give it to you.” He turned and walked away.

I closed the door and looked at the envelope. It was from the office of the Rebbe.

I went over to the desk and opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was handwritten. The writing—Yiddish and Hebrew in black ink, slightly tremulous but bold and clear—slanted across the creamy white paper, the personal stationery of the Rebbe. There was the Hebrew date in the upper right and the indication of this week’s Torah reading. And then the body of the letter:

To My Dear Asher Lev, Greetings and Blessings:

Your father, may he live a long and healthy life, will bring this letter to you, with the help of Hashem, blessed be He.

You and your family are very much in my mind and heart. I see before my eyes your pale and weary face and I know what an artist endures inside himself no matter how cheerful his demeanor and how loud his laughter. And you, dear Asher, endure not only the torments of your art but also the burden of your responsibility to the Ladover. We have hurt you, yet you love us. We have exiled you, yet you are tied to us. “Though He slay me, yet will I have faith in Him.”

All men of wisdom know that there are endless worlds and spheres, and in each sphere there are tens of thousands of heavenly creatures, beings without end, without number, all emanating from the single act of creation. The mouth cannot utter it, the mind cannot fathom it. And among the heavenly beings
themselves there are gradations and categories without end, higher and higher—and all are possessed of wisdom, and all acknowledge their Creator. But our little world, our suffering world, in its closeness to the lowest of the spheres and with its mixture of good and evil because of the sin of Adam and Eve—how does our world continue to exist? What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? That, my Asher, is perhaps the most difficult riddle of all.

Asher Lev, our teachers tell us that this harmony is the special creation of individuals who engage in certain deeds for the sake of the deeds themselves. Such deeds rise as a song, as the greatest of art, to all the spheres. And when the heavenly beings hear this song they take upon themselves gladly the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and they exclaim in unison, Holy! Holy! Holy!—and there is peace in all of creation, and peace to all of Israel, and the beginning of an end to the exile.

Asher Lev, in the name of my father and my father’s father before him, in the name of the sacred Rebbes who speak through me and act through me, I give you my blessing for wisdom and strength. May the final redemption come soon for the people of Israel and for all the world. Amen.

And he signed his name.

I sit in the silence of that small room, with its dim light and stagnant air, and read the letter again.
What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? … deeds for their own sake … rise as a song, as the greatest of art …

I fold the letter and slide it back into its envelope. I open my attaché case and insert the letter into the drawing pad and close the attaché case and leave it on the desk. I haul my suitcase onto the bed, open it, and begin to prepare for Shabbos. The Rebbe’s face gazes down at me from the wall over the desk.

The synagogue of the Ladover yeshiva in Paris was a near-duplicate in miniature of the large Ladover synagogue in Crown Heights. Double doors led to it from the main entrance hallway, diagonally across from Shaul Lasker’s office. Dark wood paneling,
chairs, prayer stands, long tables, the curtained-off women’s gallery in the rear, the center bimah, the lectern, the dark wood Ark in front with its deep-purple velvet curtain, and, against the wall to the right of the Ark, the tall dark leather chair with its own prayer stand, but without the sectioned-off area in which the Rebbe sat. As I entered through the double doors, I half expected to see Cousin Yonkel close by the bimah, staring at me with rage in his eyes.

My father stood near the dark leather chair to the right of the Ark. Before him were about a dozen students of the yeshiva and a group of older men, some white-bearded. All wore dark suits and dark hats; some had on ties. My father saw me enter and beckoned me over to him. Heads turned. The group before him stirred, moved, divided. A path opened for me and I went through, feeling their eyes upon my face. My father embraced me. I felt the strength of his arms, smelled the soap he used, saw the white hairs of his long beard, the thick arcs of his eyebrows, the lines in his forehead and around his eyes, and the care with which he had knotted his dark tie beneath the collar of his starched white shirt.

“It is good to see you, Asher,” he said quietly. “Your mother sends her love. Devorah and the children are well.”

“How is Avrumel?”

“Avrumel is very well, thank God.”

I stepped back into the crowd, and my father resumed his conversation with those around him.

They were talking about the Arab riots in the territories occupied by Israel. One of the students asked if the Rebbe had said anything recently about making peace with the Arabs by returning territory. “The Rebbe says we must give back nothing,” my father said. “It is the sacred land promised by God to the Patriarchs. We have no right to give back any of it.”

Shaul Lasker stood nearby, looking at my father. They were all looking at him and listening intently. Someone asked how Russian Jewry was affected by
glasnost,
and my father said more was going on now in the Soviet Union than most people knew, and he could not talk about it but there was reason for hope. Someone asked about relations between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, and he said it was uneasy but there had been a decrease in street crime
since the start of the Ladover night patrols. Someone asked my father if he could repeat for them the Rebbe’s talk on the previous Shabbos, and my father said the Rebbe had not been in the synagogue the previous Shabbos. A hush fell upon the group. Glances were exchanged. There was an uneasy shuffling of feet.

An old man stepped up to the lectern in front of the Ark and began the Afternoon Service. It is a brief service and was soon over. One of the yeshiva students who had helped me earlier with my bags, the one who didn’t like what I drew and painted, began to lead the service that welcomes the Shabbos.

There were about eighty men in the synagogue. Our voices filled the room: chanted words warm and ascending through the innumerable spheres to the celestial beings and thereby uniting all of creation. The greatest of art. I heard clearly from time to time my father’s strong and slightly nasal voice rising above the others. He prayed with his eyes fixed upon the prayer book on his stand, swaying slightly back and forth. In his dark suit and white shirt and dark tie and hat, he appeared an austere and regal presence. I noticed the way people would glance at him, the subtle cues they would take from his motions and demeanor. Far away from the presence of the Rebbe, beyond the aura of the Rebbe’s luminescence, my father suddenly seemed bathed in a light of his own. I turned away from him after a while and gazed fixedly at my prayer book.

In Shaul Lasker’s apartment later that evening, in air still thick with the aromas of recent cooking, we stand around a dining-room table laden with food and crowded with children as my father chants the Kiddush. Then we wash our hands and Shaul recites the blessing over the braided breads. The children speak French and Yiddish and are clearly on their best behavior in the presence of my father. They are all awed by him and begin to relax only when he starts telling stories about the deeds of the Rebbe during the early years of the Second World War. He tells them how the Rebbe helped get the great artist Jacob Kahn out of Paris the day before the Gestapo came to his studio to arrest him; how an art dealer arranged a meeting between the Rebbe and Picasso, and they met in Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, and to this day no one knows what they talked about; how the Rebbe, before
he left Paris, established a secret Ladover yeshiva that operated all through the war. Then my father suddenly asks for a length of previously tied string and one of the children brings it to him and he proceeds to play cat’s cradle with the younger children. During the main course—roast chicken, peas and carrots, noodle pudding with raisins—he gives the older ones a riddle to solve. “Listen carefully and see if you can find the answer,” he tells them, his eyes shining with pleasure. “An old Hasid called his sons together and told them that he wished them to divide his property in a certain way after he departed for the True World. The oldest son was to take one-half; the next son, one-third; the youngest son, one-ninth. Soon afterward the old Hasid was called by the Master of the Universe to his eternal rest. The sons wished to obey their father, but they discovered that their father’s property consisted of seventeen goats, and seventeen cannot be divided by one half or one third or one ninth. They didn’t want to kill any of the goats and divide it, because each goat was much more valuable alive than dead. And so they went to the Rebbe, and in his wisdom the Rebbe immediately solved their problem. What did the Rebbe tell them?”

They puzzle over it excitedly and unsuccessfully for the rest of the main course, and then, over tea and sponge cake, my father turns again to the older children. “I have another riddle for you. Are you ready for another riddle? All right. There was a Hasid who owned a little lamb, a big cat, and a big dog. It is known that big cats can do great harm to little lambs, and big dogs can do great harm even to big cats but will never hurt little lambs. The Hasid cared for his animals, was with them always, and prevented them from quarreling and, God forbid, harming one another. Now it happened that one day there was a terrible storm, and the river rose outside the home of the Hasid and threatened his life and the lives of his animals. The Hasid had to get himself and his animals to the other side of the river, where there was a hill that would protect them from the rising water. But he had only one little boat, and in that boat he could only take with him one animal at a time. How did the Hasid get the animals across the river in such a way that they did not harm each other when they were left on the riverbanks without him?”

I listen to him, sense clearly the light and ease that surround
him, the soft and certain grace in which he is bathed, and I wonder where it all was when I was growing up and sitting at Shabbos meals with him and my mother in our apartment in Brooklyn. Was I so preoccupied with my own self that I never saw it? Had he pushed the softness away because he needed to appear strong in the face of my mother’s illness and during all the hard journeying years that followed? I loved him, but we never showed each other love. Why? That was perhaps the most bitter riddle of all.

Miriam Lasker—trim, blue-eyed, wearing a lovely pale-blue dress, her head covered with a kerchief—moved efficiently back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, helped by the two oldest girls. No one started a course until she took her place at the table. She participated in the conversation: Torah talk; tales about the Rebbe; concern about the nascent power of the right wing in the recent French elections; the efforts of the Ladover movement to influence the forthcoming elections in Israel. She had majored in political science in Brooklyn College and thought the movement would do best in the small development towns of Israel, especially among the alienated religious Sephardim. Years back she had worked as a buyer for the Printemps department store on the Boulevard Haussmann, but now she was home all the time with the children. Shaul had told me earlier that she was once again pregnant—in her second month with their ninth child. I looked at her and thought of Devorah and the crippling of her life during the years of terror in the sealed apartment with Max Lobe and his family, Devorah and the miscarriages, Devorah and the tenacity with which she wrote her children’s books, Devorah and her passionate caring for Rocheleh and Avrumel.