The Rabbi of Lud (24 page)

Too late it occurred that I hadn’t thought all this through but had engaged in some pretty fair leap-before-looking kamikazics of my own. Too late it occurred that the real founder of the feast may have been on board, sitting back, watching me, waiting on my green light before springing through his. To
jolt
my Hebrew ass. But then I realized that spurious mercies was what it was all about in the first place, and took my chances.

“Folks,” I said, collecting their attention, “folks?” And cupped my hands to shout our situation to them through. Concluding, “FAA regulations require a community decision on this one. Who wants to divert to Anchorage? May I see hands?”

Relying, you see, on the kindness of strangers. On their generosity ransoming my generosity. Which, of course, in those flush times, it not only had to do but did. The nays had it, and forty minutes later the pilot turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign and was about to illuminate the No Smoking one in preparation for our landing in Juneau when the real six-packer stood up and identified himself. “Go back,” he demanded, “go back to Anchorage. Turn this fucker around and let’s go
get
that liquor! What say, fellows,” and, pointing at me, said, “my friend here is thirsty!”

And this time the ayes had it. Because of the
fuel
situation.
Because we just might not have had enough to make it back to Anchorage, and risk and foolhardiness were generosity too, a sort of princely largesse and lavish bounty when what you’re giving is your life!

Never mind my humiliation. My humiliation wasn’t even in it. Not at these prices. Not for those stakes.

In all fairness, did I say, what else could be expected of me? In all fairness, did I answer, nothing, nothing at all?

What could I do?

Well, I could become a missionary.

I became a missionary.

Taking advantage of my company plane privileges, and sending my posters and announcements on before me, the purple mail I didn’t bother to go in for myself when it turned up in the rabbi trailer, I began to fly to the other crew camps. I flew to the camps at Prudhoe Bay and Toolik, Galbraith Lake and Happy Valley. I flew to Dietrich and Coldfoot camps, to 5 Mile and Fairbanks. And though I was gone from it now more often than I was there, Prospect Creek continued to serve as the base camp for Mother Church. Except for the topography (and even the topography was more or less the same, the guiding principle of the pipeline geologists being, I suppose, to lay as straight and low a line as possible Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, sea level to sea level), the camps could have been gas, food and lodging stops just off an interstate.

Preceded, as I say, by my purple mail campaign, that one-sided indigo correspondence based on all those already failed, in-house missives I had for model—the memos, bulletins and announcements I insisted (as those I myself received, and which I not only ignored but, if I saw them at all, regarded merely as a kind of neutral fallout, like dead leaves in a gutter, say, dry and past their color, are a neutral fallout, looking on such sad-ass stuff as mere second-per-second hype, insisted they would mine) would change, though I didn’t even know them yet and only had their names off Alyeska’s Address-o-graph machine, their lives. Borrowing (though I don’t believe I knew this) from my Christian friends the mystic possibilities, coming on strong with joy for joy, arms opened wide in forgiveness. Ahead of my time in the forgive-and-forget department, wiping their slates of incest and child abuse, fornication, drunkenness, wife bashing and all the rest of the seven deadlys, inventing customized, Jewish, no-fault sin.

Signed Jerome Goldkorn, Chief Rabbi, Alaska Pipeline.

And climbed down from my airplane at Prudhoe, at Toolik, Happy Valley and Galbraith Lake, at Dietrich, at Coldfoot, at 5 Mile, at Fairbanks, not only ahead of my time but out in front of theirs, too. Or what would have been theirs if there’d been enough Jews waiting out on the tarmac for me or in the presecured Atco units, the card rooms and chapels, dining halls, clubs and theaters to constitute a them. It was all right, I told myself, Rome wasn’t built in a day either, and went off to look for them in the infirmary, tracked them down in their trailers, or out on site where they worked. If you’re going to judge only by—what?—the sock hoppers I managed to sign up or got to agree to go on retreat or come to services, I don’t suppose I was much of a success (although Alyeska had no cause for complaint and, I’ll say this much for them, they never did, and this much for myself—I worked my ass off), but I was planting the seed, laying the groundwork, showing the flag, and when I returned, dropping like Santa out of the sky, I had food for them, the recipes for which Shelley gave me over the phone and which I passed on to Alyeska’s bakers and chefs.

“Here,” I would say, dispensing mandel bread, dispensing kugel, dispensing kishke, kasha and varnishkes, holding putchah out to them (a sort of jellied calves’ hoof), thermoses of full-fledged chicken soup, gefilte fish made from arctic char and salmon, dispensing macaroons, “from the kitchens of Prospect Creek! Enjoy, enjoy! Will we be seeing you come Chol Hamod? Can we count on you this Lag b’Omer?”

If anyone had actually liked this stuff I guess it would have constituted a kind of vote fraud.

But, as I say, I wasn’t much into corruption. I had taken (because I couldn’t afford not to up there) a Christian’s view of things, forgiving their debts as they forgave their debtors, and willing to go them, the Christians, one better, forgiving even the sin of final despair. Though who asked me?

To tell the truth, no one. Asked or was expected to. It wasn’t my job. No, my job was organizing the picnics and volleyball games, the Jewish retreats and Jewish discussion groups (where we would talk about what we always talked about—“The State of Israel,” “The Palestinian Problem” [there was none], “Anti-Semitism” [rife, it existed everywhere, under the bed, out in the hall, wherever people gathered, wherever grown men strolled by themselves down country lanes, everywhere], “Hebrew Education,” “Cross Marriage,” “Marriage and the Family,” “Judaism: Race or Religion?”). But they knew me now. And if I accomplished nothing else I’d accomplished that at least. I taught them, that is, their rabbi’s name.

I made a nuisance of myself. Hey, no problem. It pays to advertise.

Because by now, even if they weren’t showing up for actual services, I’d begun to put together a small cadre of kapos, little Hebrew helpers, Jewish or not, you see them everywhere, dressed to the nines in stockings and heels behind their aprons, female or not, volunteer minutemen, male or not, smoothers of the way, chipper chippers-in and general all-round good sports who not only supervised the music, lettered the signs, put up the crepe-paper decorations, prepared the eats and mixed the punch, but stayed on afterward to return the records to their jackets and, hunching the state of the treasury, lay by money and string to turn economies right and left, taking the crepe paper down and folding it, pouring the punch out of the bowl and into a jar and, waste not, want not, making up doggy bags from the uneaten scraps. Then, God bless them, they went over the signs and erased the words and dates they deemed it unlikely we would be using again.

I had Karen Ackerman, I had Milton Abish. I had Bill and Miriam Jacobson, Debbie Grunwald and David Piepenbrink. Arnie Sternberg and Howard Ziegler from the motor pool were with me. These were my good Jewish sports from the early days. These were the folks who knew me when.

It was time.

I’d had my second brainstorm—my personal Marshall Plan, the food giveaway, was my first—and it was time. (It was obvious, really. If it had taken the kindness of strangers to get me off my duff in the first place, that infectious, killer generosity that I took to be the hitch and hinder, blemish, chink and defect that flawed their characters and made seconds of their souls, why hadn’t I also seen that if epic profligacy was what got you
in
to trouble, wasn’t it only poetic justice then that what ought to get you out of it again was more of the same? A taste of their own medicine. A hair of the dog. Which was when I stopped the flow of just ordinary purple mail, all those announcements for parties and invitations to kick the Jewish issues around, and started to send out barefaced pledge cards, requests for money, pleas for bucks, your outright give-till-it-hurts pressures and appeals. The money
poured
in.)

So it was time.

I gathered my prayer books together—I don’t understand it, but for a people of the Book we Jews use our Torah less cost-effectively than any religion I know of uses its own scriptures; strictly speaking, it’s not required at all, really, save on Monday and Thursday mornings, on Shabbes and on the holidays—and flew to Coldfoot where I conducted Friday night services for those by this time good old boys Arnie Sternberg, Dave Piepenbrink, Karen Ackerman, Debbie Grunwald and Milton Abish, among my kapos only Howard Ziegler and Bill and Miriam Jacobson no-shows and holdouts. I knew, however, that when next we met (in Prudhoe Bay the following week), I would have not only Ziegler and the Jacobsons in the congregation but a considerable portion of the Alaska pipeline Jewish population as well.

Because it was easy now. Because it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Because it was Prudhoe Bay, the farthest north of Alyeska’s camps, and they would have to inconvenience themselves, put out money, and charter a plane to get there (and it had been a difficult spring, the weather foul that year, powerful storms, high winds, low ceilings, lousy visibility).

Even more successful than that. More successful than I had any right to expect. Because once the word got out, and the non-Jews learned that the Jewish Jews had found a whole new way to six-pack the house and dispose of money, the gentiles dropped by too. And actually even volunteered a collection when they saw I was not going to take one up myself!

“No,” I objected. “No, no,” I protested, “you don’t understand. I’m quite well paid. The company pays me. Alyeska does. I’ve a quite good rating. As high if not higher than the most highly skilled laborers among you.”

And when they overrode my objections and insisted I keep it anyway I told them, well, oh, all right, if they wouldn’t take no for an answer, I’d hold on to it and donate it in their honor to the Trees for Israel Fund.

“
What
,” someone shouted,
“there’s a Trees for Israel Fund?!”
and wrote out a check right then and there for two hundred dollars. It was Jack Nicholson, the man I’d seen in the motel that first day, the one they called Spike. Peachblow was there too, and Ambest. The money
poured
in.

“Building the tip,” I think they call it. Building the tip. Whatever you do to create interest, demand. The dancing girls in their scanties in promissory, there’s-plenty-more-where-this-comes-from undulation outside the tent. The you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yets. The no-obligation-examine-in-your-own-home-for-ten-days-frees. All that primed-pump, water-cast bread that gets the juices rolling. Free sample. Words to the wise.

I was building the tip. That’s all those Friday night services were to me. Who had this hunch (not even articulated) that real Judaism consists not of the ingrained and the daily, the taken-for-granted, steady-state ritual attentions one pays to God, but comes in jolts of enthusiasm, in fits and starts, in great waves of stored-up sanctity and the piecemeal pious. In feelings released—released? escaped, exploded; I hadn’t been a burier of the dead all these years for nothing—on great occasions. Not just on any ordinary Sabbath like a magazine you get once a week in the mail, but on our most sacred holidays, our movable feast days and festivals.

I would have come before them heavy-laden, burdened as a priest, a doctor, blackly bagged, making a house call. I would have brought them, I mean, the jeweled tools of my trade, the branched candelabra with all its official, thou-shalt-made cups and knops, set up my shittim-wood ark like some holy swing set knocked together, and hidden—wrapped like a mystery in the velvet, masculine mantle with its great, rampant, applique lions and weighty crowns—the Torah there, and spread my heavy cloth before them on the bema, the sterling silver yad like the major piece in a place setting. Above the ark I would have burned whale oil for them in eternal lamps.

So it’s a Shavuoth I’m shooting for, a Pesach, a Purim, my Friday nights only God’s little loss leaders, as Mother’s or Father’s Day, say, are only your jerry-built festivities of the historically lackluster months. And what I’d really like to have given them was something spectacular, honored the creation of the world, say. (The reason, I think, Christianity has the numbers—though I’d be the first to tell you it’s not numbers alone that make a great religion, ideas have something to say about it too—is that Christianity has heavier holidays. Real concept occasions. What’s Christmas but your birth of God, Easter week but those seven action-packed days from the time he first pulled into town to the time he got killed and resurrected? Succoth, which is only a harvest festival, pales in comparison. Chanuka, our famous festival of the lights, which commemorates a victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians, does.) There are marvelous untouched holidays there for the plucking. I myself could have come up with a dozen new reasons to praise God. We might have celebrated heart bypass operations, Chinese take-out, record-setting Wall Street rallies. The Festival of the Cruise we could have. The Feast of the Successful Children. Yes, and heartbreakers too, heavy and solemn as anything Christians put on—The Fasts of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen. The Festival of the Holocaust, say.

It was Shavuoth. Now Shavuoth is a fairly important holiday. It commemorates both the revelation of the Law up on Mount Sinai and the celebration of an ancient wheat festival. Something for everyone, Shavuoth is. That year it fell on June 6, so I picked up D-Day too.

It wasn’t as if I was surprised at the turnout. The factors were all there. They were in place, I mean. Well, I’d been building the tip. And there was the money thing. (Did I say how I was reminded of the engraved-invitation revolution back in the forties? The construction of the pipeline was a little like that.) And then, of course, when you weren’t actually working there wasn’t a whole lot to do. So church—I speak generically—became your entertainment. As lots of other things did. (I remember reading, for example, that in the seven major Alyeska camps the men pumped over a million dollars a month into the pinball machines. Of course, that was at Alaskan prices. A game was a dollar, a free game cost you fifty cents.)