On the holiest night of the year, the chorus intones the Kol Nidre when we tell God we won't keep our promises, then the Barchu when we bow to the Lord and bless Him to the world forever, then the Shema when we proclaim the Lord is One, , then the Eighteen blessings and the Vidui which is so holy we say it as we die, then the Selichot where we stretch the confessions of the Vidui to ten minutes, then the Piyyutim when we chant Byzantine poetry in acrostic, then the plead for forgiveness to our Father and King that is the Avinu Malkeinu, and finally the Aleinu and Mourner's Kaddish.
Aleinu is the common prayer which we say multiple times a day. But on the High Holidays the Aleinu is so holy that the clergy don't just bow down, they bow to the floor.
Here at Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, the prayer is considered so important that the Rabbi exclaims every year before the Holy Ark and God "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing." Then the Cantor declares "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing."
I became shamesh in 1849 of Odessa's Greycer Choral Shul, and in my first year as a shul clergy, I bowed down and exclaimed "Forgive me Lord, I am nothing!" And I heard the Rabbi whisper to the cantor:
"Nu? Look who's nothing."
I have been sexton of the Great Choral Synagogue for forty-eight years and survived three rabbis, four cantors. Every Shamesh of my generation has died off, and all Odessa's wondered when I'd retire for twenty years. Every day I awake at four in the morning, five-thirty in the winter, two-thirty at the beginning of the summer, have a breakfast of tea and a hard-boiled egg, start walk to the shul twenty minutes after I get up. It's half a Russian mile. As a young man it took thirty minutes, now it takes eighty. I never slip. When I get there I sneak a piece of cake from shabbos. Every day I sweep the entire floor: the shul floor, the women's balcony, the offices of the Rabbi, Cantor and Board members, the chapel, the hallway, coat closets and outhouses; then I mop them and change the water in every room. Twice before a wedding. That makes it just in time for the morning service. Some tired schnook slips twice a year, I get yelled at by the board, then everybody goes back to work. In the early days I would cry, and every time they would give me a raise. Around 1870 I stopped crying and since then nobody's changed my salary. Every year I spend less and less money, but all my time is spent at shul, so I have no time to spend it on.
Every weekday I lead the morning prayers, the afternoon and evening. I learn the weekly Torah portions and read the fragments every Monday and Thursday. In the early years members did it for me, but now hardly anybody knows the Hebrew and nobody's willing to put in the work, so I read it for them. In the evenings after gymnasium I teach the students their torah portions. Nu? Some of them are very nice, some of them are very smart, some of them are idyots and horrible. I yell at most of them and klap a few on the head: some fall asleep, some make faces, some try to change the subject, some don't practice; but some are interested, I kvell over them but by the time they're sixteen they don't say hello.
The two breaks I have during the week is the eighteen blessings: the Shmoneh Esrei, and Rabbi's sermon, and nu? Every rabbi's the same. Every cantor's the same. They used to make me plotz with excitement, especially the chorus of yinglach: some I tutored for their bar mitzvahs. Some became cantors themselves, or at least went to chazzan school, I even hear some of them became opera singers, but with that chorus, even the schmegegge cantors seem like they belong up there at the Bolshoi. But nu, what do they do now you didn't hear fifty years ago? Both the rabbis and cantors have their one chance a week to be a macher and shaker, and nu they use every minute of it. Shouting and shraying, spitting and shpaying. Every rabbi slouches but they grow a foot on the bimah. Every cantor skips services during the week and on the Bimah becomes Odessa's most righteous tzaddik. On that bimah, the biggest nebbish turns into a golem. I go outside, nu? No shulgoer's there, and I have my two cigarettes a week and for a while hour I hear the Rabbi here, there and everywhere. I go back in and nobody smells the cigarette because nu they all go out and smoke cigarettes while I'm layning.
Outside there are two groups. The Yiddsher schnorrers who get off work at the factory's night shift. They eat pork and trink, and the goyisher coachmen to the rich machers who go to shul by carriage. They eat pork and trink too, but they never talk to the Yids. You hear their kibbitzing, it's always the same in both groups: what they would do with the money of the Yiddisher machers in shul, whistling at the maydlach who walk by, kvetching about the wives, kvetching about the boss, kvetching about the children, kvetching about the hurs who make them sick. When somebody has money they sit at the table of the deli. They play cards and eat sausage.
But nu? I can't hear them anymore. I can't even hear the Rebbe. This year, one week I start not hearing the Rebbe. Instead I hear a yingele who would make a Rabbi sound like he sounds on Tuesday.
I know this boy. It's Yevno Zhabotinsky's boy: Volf. "Volodya" when I knew him--I can even remember when he was called "Vovka." Great student, arrogant little pischer. He'd show up, pick fights with me about religion for forty-five minutes, then layn the Torah perfectly the last fifteen. I could have let him go months before his Bar Mitzvah knowing he'd learn the whole thing, but I didn't like him so nu I made him come in every week. These days, half the smart boys in Odessa pick fights about religion with me. Zhabotinsky was the smartest. Not the smartest of the last few years, the smartest I ever taught. Some rabbi he'd be but nu he wants to be a golem all week long.
He probably got up as early as me just to study every day, but nu? What does he study? Just like all these secular Jews it doesn't matter. They go without god and suddenly it's all this thing, that thing; this cause, that cause. All this thing they call 'literature' and math and history. Nu? Whatever they learn they always use it to turn the world upside down, everything plotzes on its head and everything's gonna be destroyed.
This is what that Haskalah thing fights for: that German chazerai invades the heads of Odessa's kinder and turns them from Jews to dybbuks. Nu? We have it better here than anywhere else in the history of Judaism: in Odessa, in Warsaw, maybe even in New York, and what do we do with it? We use it to stop being Jews. And not just stop being Jews: we provoke the goyim too! Be atheists! Be socialists! Be capitalists! Be communists! Workers of the world unite! Throw away your talises! Eat pork! Make all the money! Maybe I should retire to a shtetl. At least there we mind our own business.
Every week he's out there now during the Shmoneh Esrei, and what does he preach about? All this Zionist drek about how we have to move to Palestine to make a new Jewish state in the middle of a desert. It's the usual drek about how all the Russian nobles are farkakteh thieves, the goyim are farkakteh murderers, God's a liar who doesn't keep his promises and Jews are sheep who don't fight back. So we fight back by fleeing halfway across the world? The message isn't there is no God, the message isn't even make all the gelt. It's move to the desert and parch yourself to death! Nu? There's no people there! Why? Cuz nobody wants to live there! Everybody wants to live in Odessa: so many people wanna live here nobody can get an apartment!
Everybody remembers Yevno Zhabotinsky the wheat trader: never went to shul but gave half his money here and half his money for the society for menschlechkeit so the homeless schlemiels don't freeze or starve. Nu? I hadn't seen Yevno in thirty years (back then he was Yussl) but anybody who gives money like that is either a greycer mensch or does shreklech things with his wheat.
Sawf-kal-sawf he dies. Nu? All his money given away and Vovka doesn't have a kopek for school. He and his mother and sister come every day for a free dinner and tea. We saw the Mameh wrap the cookies in the babushka every day and didn't say anything. Vovka is apparently the best gymnasium student in Odessa, from the time he's eight every Jew knows about this illui. But nu he never comes to Hebrew school, he never comes to services. Apparently he's always in the greycer library and reads everything in it but he barely speaks Yiddish or Hebrew. When I gave him lessons at twelve he quoted all these goyisher philosophers, from memory in Latin and Italian! Just to tell me Hashem doesn't exist!
And all that Latin and Italian he quoted is in his Russian as he shreks to the crowd. He writes everything down, not a word planned, but he always looks like he's looking at the paper and the Yids at the same time.
And nu? This yinger trombenik writes the most beautiful Russian I ever heard! And he yells it out for 50 minutes every week with such passion! Oy, a second Shakespeare this one! About how all the Jews will be in Israel free of pogroms, free of murder, free of fargevaltigung. Kinder able to grow up secure and happy, old people cared for and honored as mensches after a lifetime of tsuris. By the end of it I'm ready to move to Israel for about a minute and a half, then the rabbi finishes and I have go in to read the Torah and make sure no alteh macher drops it. Then I go back out for when the Cantor does the eighteen blessings.
Nu? Two weeks ago an Arabber starts going in front of the greycer shul selling his fruit, and some fruit he gives away, probably starting to rot. This week that Vovka's especially mad. He works up a greycer ruach about the Jews he hates. Nu? Would you believe it? The boy isn't just obnoxious, he's a real antisemite! He can't get through a farkakteh sentence without another kvetch about how Jews are this, Jews are that: just lambs, just superstitious, just a pack of dogs everything their noblemen owners tell them to do. Nu? If he's such an antisemite what's he care how we are and what we're doing?
Some weeks they listen. Some weeks they just eat their pork: usually the weeks they can buy sausage. This week there's no pork at all and he's got them listening. He's not even looking at them. Nu maybe he's a little nervous, but he's still shouting: all the hand motions, high voice, pretending to be banging on something, right fingers raised in the air.
Nu. He starts saying something a little dangerous. I picked up the paper he dropped, most of it's not this khutzpadik but here's what the nudnik said:
"...Ergo we must not be Jewish but Hebraus! Citizens not of God but blood! Colonizers who take what is ours as right! Who do not deign to pollute our blood with the genus of others! And we must do it before others incur the sanguine land of our blood!"
We may speak in the sonorous tones of Tolstoy and Pushkin, but through our veins courses the blood of David and Joshua that stood with robust fortitude among the spilled blood of Amalek and Canaan! Who can build his body into the salubrious chests of Goliath so he may sling his rocks not against a large opponent but against the world in total!"
Nu, seriously! I talked to him when I tutored, he was a wit in a cruel way. The Rabbi says he picked up an article of his, some fancy French word for it, and he plotzed from laughing. He showed it to me... kind of funny? I don't know much about this American poet he likes and I don't have time to read those Yiddish poets everybody kibbitzes about, but where's the vitz here?
Apparently he translated the Mayufes into Russian, but I've spoken to him, he can barely get out a sentence of Hebrew but I heard him talk to a professor at his Bar Mitzvah in Latin that flew out of his moyl twenty words a second.
"But today's Jews... the Jew of today. Today's Russians are more correct about us than our Jews! Today's Yid is little more than that word of shuddering horribilis: a Zhid! Deformed, morbid, rude, grubby, lacking in basic norms of respect and protocol, always trampled upon, despised, disrespected and deserving nothing less! Accepting the blows of the world's fate with grovelling obseqium!"
It was that moment that all the Jews threw the rotting fruit at brave Zhabotinsky all at once. And when they were done with that they went up to the Arabber's cart and pelted Volodya with fresh fruit. It probably hurt but Volf kept going...
"Today's Russian is a homo barbarus: a vulgar, ferocious, illepidous rabble of rustics to whom we hope to pledge our assimilation. We play at trying to be their friends, but we are at war with them! Spiritual war! Material war! Such is their barbarism that they will certainly come to a fatum most horrible, and until we have a land of our own we must work toward their destruction."
And the goyisher coachmen threw fruit at him too.
Nu, one hit him on the glasses and they broke. Poor Zhabotinsky had blood issuing from his eye. He dropped his paper, he looked like he was going to fall down the stairs. He had to leave to wipe the blood from his face.
But one of the Jews clapped. One of the Jews who pelted a fruit right between his eyes.
Just then I realized I was late for the Torah service. Everybody in the synagogue was glaring at me and whispering. I thought I heard 'alter kocker', 'naar', 'stupid schlob' but nu who knows what I'm hearing at my age?
I finish the Torah service, I go back out to smoke my second papiros and who do I see? It's not Volodya Zhabotinsky, it's the only boychik I can't stand more than him, that manipulative schmuck Lyov Bronshteyn.
The elters at shul just assumed to call him Leybl. He didn't correct them. He was never a pupil of mine, he just came in every morning for a couple months last year, davened shacharis, once even lead it, kibbitzed to the young people in Russian and answered the alter mensches in Yiddish that was perfect except for a strong Kherson accent. It sounded a little komisch but really he convinced us he was one of us.
After the first month he even started coming to the dawf yaymi study before the service. Everybody else was half asleep on their Talmud but within ten minutes he was lecturing us all for the whole hour in Yiddish about the succession struggle between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua-ben-Khanania and everybody was wide awake. I remember another week when he talked about Rabbi Yehoshua's dispute with Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Eliezer's excommunication. You'd think the elters would hate being interrupted, but they thrilled to this bokher. He didn't dress like a bokher but they thought they were in the presence of the next Savran Rebbe. Not even the Rabbi minded! Soon we all were coming just to hear what Leybl had to say, he was always in the Rabbi's office and all the fathers were talking about introducing Laybl to their tochters, but all the daughters got bashful around a bokher that handsome.
Weird things started small of course: He'd just bring up "Why is Hashem referred to as Adonai sometimes and Elohim others?" he'd cite Rashi and Genesis Rabba, even Midrash Tanhuma. But he didn't say Adoshem or Elokim, he said the real names, but everything comes from Heaven so nobody batted an eye.
Then he'd bring up the two different versions of the Ten Commandments in Shmot, and he explained it with Rashi and ibn-Ezra citing the pronouns of each, but then he said 'None of these pronouns make sense!' No one in there had ever heard someone question Rashi. You could hear a pin drop, but a wise person sees far ahead and nobody had ever met anyone as wise as Leybl.
Then one day he brought up that there's differing views on what happens after we die: Daniel says that there's judgement and resurrection, but Iyov and Kohelet say that afterward there's nothing and he says 'They both can't be right.'
Finally Moshe Krik says "Please, forgive me Leybl."
And Leybl said: "Please, all my best friends call me Lyov, and you all are my guter freints."
Maybe I'm wrong but maybe it's not our job to question Hashem?
And suddenly Laybl was not Laybl: "Not question the ways of Hashem? What are we doing here layning the Talmud if we're not questioning his ways?"
"I just thought..."
"Even in Menachot, God brings Moses into the future to see Rabbi Akiva's teaching and questions why God could let such a great sage be murdered so horribly!"
"But Reb Laybl,"
"Lyov, please..."
"We're not being murdered."
"I will answer your questions but you need to be silent for a moment!" Laybl even banged on the table for emphasis.
And from that moment of banging like a teapot, I knew Lyov Bronshteyn was no Jew. He wasn't even an Apikeyres, he was in this synagogue to lure us away from Torah.
He didn't seem to lure any of the Dawf Yaymi students away, but he did lure a daughter. Chava Eikhbaum, daughter of Mischa Eikhbaum, one of the richest machers in Odessa. I caught them in the synagogue balcony. I won't say what he was doing but in fifty years I have never done such a thing to my wife. I told the Rabbi. He told me he didn't believe me. I told him that if he didn't do something about it, I would tell Mischa. As he didn't want a scandal, he reported his favorite congregant to the police as a potential subversive, and Lyov would know better than to come back to the Greycer Choral Synagogue.
But there he was, and he wasn't with Chava Eikhbaum, he was with Golda Pinsker! Daughter of another macher in the Greycer Shul!
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