The Book of Faith by Elaine Kalman Naves

Author:Elaine Kalman Naves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2015-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Part Three

I sang “Come, O Sabbath bride” on Friday nights with a bridegroom’s fervour.

—Yehuda Amichai

1

According to the gospel of Mordecai Kaplan, modern Jews live in two civilizations. On the one hand, they swim in the swirling waters of mainstream society. On the other, they cling with varying degrees of tenacity to the shores of their idiosyncratic particularity. Overall, Rabbi Nate enjoyed this tension. However, as his eyes skimmed over the gathering in his dining room from his spot at the head of the table, he reflected that it was a little trying when New Year’s Eve happened to fall on a Friday night and January 1st on a Saturday. Tomorrow morning he would have to preach a sermon about the millennium—as fundamentally un-Jewish a concept as could be invented. Tonight, arrayed around his lace-covered table, bathed in soft incandescence, were eight guests assembled—as it were—by the dybbuk of Y2K. Although, of course the invitations had been issued by no other gremlins than himself and Reisa.

How was he to have known that she was asking Abigail Rosen at the very moment he was on the phone with Moish Stipelman? Reisa should have touched base with him before placing that call! He distinctly remembered having a discussion with her about the invitations. They agreed two weeks ago that it would be a mitzvah to have a set of old-timers for Friday night/New Year’s Eve: the Stipelmans or Abigail. Naturally they were motivated by a spirit of chesed—loving kindness—though, to be honest, neither he nor Reisa would have been broken-hearted if turned down.

Both Moish and Abigail had accepted with alacrity, Abigail requesting to bring along her daughter visiting from Victoria. Moish was of course accompanied by the stern and censorious Sylvia, now glaring at Abigail across the table.

If Reisa’s head weren’t perpetually in the clouds of Jewish mysticism—she taught a course on Kabbalah at McGill—she would have recalled that in the interlude between Moish’s first marriage and his second, well before Nate’s connection to the shul and her own, Moish and Abigail had had a torrid affair, the steamy details of which were to be found in “Song of Delight,” a sonnet interred in Part One of Abigail’s Collected Works.

Grinning unnervingly at some private joke of their own (or perhaps merely relishing the image of Moish’s and Abigail’s intertwined limbs and hearts with which the sonnet had ended), Helen and Jeff Stern sat together, on Nate’s left. Helen was wearing a most peculiar outfit, black elephant pants crowned by a strapless spangled top demonstrably contrasting her white chins with her bronze head. Wiping the smirk off his face with difficulty, Jeff began interviewing Abigail’s daughter Cynthia about her job in market research. A heavy-set woman with big hair and dark bulging eyes, Cynthia responded in monosyllables while turning her fork over and over with one hand.

Thank God for Susan and Aaron Leibovitch, without whom this evening would be nothing but a penance. The original idea—and it had been a good one—had been to

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