The Kabbalah Master Read online

  ALSO BY PERLE BESSERMAN

  NOVELS AND COLLECTED FICTION

  Kabuki Boy

  Widow Zion

  Yeshiva Girl

  NONFICTION

  Grassroots Zen

  The Shambala Guide to Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism

  A New Kabbalah for Women

  A New Zen for Women

  Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers

  The Kabbalah Master: A Novel © 2018 by Perle Besserman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles and reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Nita Ybarra.

  Book design by Colin Rolfe.

  eISBN 9781939681935

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-939681-93-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Besserman, Perle, author.

  Title: The Kabbalah master : a novel / Perle Besserman.

  Description: Rhinebeck, NY : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006419 (print) | LCCN 2017061375 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939681935 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939681928 (softcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Middle-aged women--Fiction. | Life change events--Fiction. | Jewish way of life--Fiction. | Jewish fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E7829 (print) | LCC PS3602.E7829 K33 2018 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006419

  Monkfish Book Publishing Company

  22 East Market Street, Suite 304

  Rhinebeck, New York 12572

  (845) 876-4861

  www.monkfishpublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY PERLE BESSERMAN

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Through awe we come to love.… There is only one degree more elevated than that of awe and that is love. Love contains the mystery of the unity of God. It is love that links the higher with the lower degrees; it is love that lifts everything to the level where all must become one.

  —Rabbi Moses de Leon, from the Zohar

  A woman can be proud and stiff

  When on love intent

  But Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement…

  —William Butler Yeats, from “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”

  For my brother Larry

  ONE

  IT WAS THE FIRST MONDAY AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1972. The Coney Island sky was overcast, the air gray, soft, and humid; the low-lying clouds fairly tumescent with rain. Hardly a day for a walk along the beach—an intermittent, fetid breeze from the water, where even the waves seemed to hang back, the ocean a stagnant pond of floating beer cans, ice cream wrappers, orange rinds, and a thousand and one other varieties of summer detritus from the city. The right day, the right time for purse snatchers, unemployed muscle builders, and those too frequent human hulks of indeterminate sex, clad to the eyes in their winter woolens, rag-puttees, and fingerless gloves poking around in the litter baskets flanking the boardwalk’s few open food stands. Certainly not the kind of day Sharon normally would have chosen for such an outing—not after working without sleep from the Sabbath sundown straight through to Monday morning at five in her hot, cramped cubbyhole with the small desk fan that she dared not use for fear of scattering to the winds Rabbi Joachim’s precious Kabbalistic notes, secret mystical formulas that were too powerful to trust to the typewriter and had to be copied by hand. Still, though she was bone-tired, Sharon had deliberately chosen not to return home after work, but to walk—after a breakfast of three cups of black coffee and nothing else all day—to the beach instead. The rabbi had kindly offered to drive her home, but Sharon had refused. Spending two days alone with him, helping to extricate the rainbow emanations of his faith from the black morass of ancient Hebrew letters and mystic symbols bequeathed to him by a long line of Kabbalists was hard enough. And then, beyond that, silently loving him, straining to control the forbidden urges of her flesh whenever he leaned over her shoulder and grazed her arm with the lapel of his jacket, not daring to steal so much as a glimpse of his averted eyes. As an Orthodox married man, Rabbi Joachim was prohibited from looking directly upon the face of any woman other than his wife or, for that matter, working alone with a woman in his tiny office. But he was a Kabbalah master, and Kabbalah masters had their own way of being Orthodox—like his lineage of Lithuanian Hasidic saints known for their capacious healing powers and frequent run-ins with the rationalists in the traditional rabbinic establishment. A dapper modern cleric in his fifties who’d been a dentist before consenting to the growing call of the Lord, the rabbi was reputed to be a happily married father of two boys and an infant daughter. In his dark, tailored suits and rakishly angled slouch hats, he was certainly not “rabbinic looking”—hardly a candidate for mystical visions or, Sharon thought as she sat down on a broken bench facing the beach, the sensitive and tender kind of man she’d been fantasizing about since her divorce from her clodhopper husband Barney.

  Feeling isolated and curious about the growing popularity of spiritual practices available since the late Sixties, she’d joined a yoga class where she met a group of women “spiritual seekers.” It was Malina, the leader of the group, who’d invited her to attend one of the rabbi’s public lectures on the Kabbalistic Path to Self-Knowledge. Seated in the front row and twice receiving his enigmatic, grace-bestowing smile, she’d become an instant devotee. As the lecture ended and the audience was lining up at the table in front of the dais to enroll in Rabbi Joachim’s Center for Mystical Judaism, Malina pushed her forward. “Wow, Sharon, did you see how he picked you out from the crowd? You two must have a strong karmic connection!” Thrilled at having caught the rabbi’s eye and being somehow special, Sharon had immediately signed up as a member. With her enthusiasm for the mysteries of the Kabbalah enhanced by Rabbi Joachim’s continuing attention, she’d abandoned her yoga classes and become a regular at the Center, religiously attending his every seminar and workshop, and remaining afterward to erase the blackboard and turn out the lights. Within a year, she’d graduated from these simple chores to become his secretary. By then, having lost their taste for the Kabbalah, her friend Malina and the original group of women spiritual seekers had moved on to Tibetan Buddhism, never to be heard from again.

  It was hotter now that a milky sun had parted the cloud cover and was blazing down on the flat, open expanse of the boardwalk. Behind her, an occasional blast of music wafted from the depths of a stand where a man in a chef’s toque was selling popcorn and cotton candy. Coney Island, a festering wound on the leg of the city—most of it boarded up now, even the Whip. How she’d loved that wild, electric ride as a child; her head snapping forward to the terrifying false starts engineered by the pimpled teenager working the switches. That boy in the dark blue, sleeveless t-shirt, had tormented the screaming riders with the promise of speed, waiting until he�
�d wrung their last shred of patience and only then throwing the magic lever, setting them all on a collision course, crashing head-on, whirling in every direction across the spark-crackling steel floor.

  Sharon pushed off one shoe and dangled it from her big toe. Her life had been a lot like riding the Whip, the denied promise of pleasure providing an odd little island of pleasure all its own—inexplicably leading to her as yet unrequited love for her mentor. And something, of course, to do with the fact that Rabbi Joachim had steered her out of a spiritual blind alley into the radiant light of the sages and committed her to “God’s greater cause.”

  Should she slip off both shoes? A modest Jewish woman, the secretary to the president of the Center for Mystical Judaism, did not go barefoot in public. Briefly wiggling her toes, she slid her foot back into the shoe. God, it was hot. She could feel the sweat coursing down in streams under the arms of her long-sleeved white blouse, her heavy black weskit sticking to her ribs like the mustard plasters her mother would stick on her chest at the slightest sign of a sniffle when she was a kid. Impulsively, Sharon laid aside her purse, quickly unsnapped the weskit, pulled it off, and kicked off both shoes.

  Pinnie would be angry with her for not coming right home. She’d complain for hours about the terrible habits of the children: “Paulie ate Fritos for lunch again, Sharon. You know, his teeth are getting black from all the candy he shoves into his mouth. If you don’t watch out, he’ll be smoking before you can turn your head around. And you should only hear the language he uses with me! From a yeshiva boy, yet! He talks more like a truck driver than an eleven-year-old boy from a religious family. And Phyllis, poor little doll, she misses you so much she hardly eats at all.”

  Whenever Pinnie mentioned Phyllis, she would place her index finger on her cheek and her thumb on her chin, an inadvertent gesture betraying her preference for her compliant granddaughter over her unruly grandson.

  “She cries, ‘When is my Mommy coming home?’ all day and all night. And she’s right, God bless her. Who in her right mind leaves a little girl alone like that?”

  “But you’re with them, Pinnie,” Sharon would answer. “You’re the beloved grandma who wipes their noses and lives here rent-free while their big, bad Mommy has to go out and earn the money to buy them Fritos.”

  Then Sharon would turn away from her mother and go off to brood, or sleep, resolving to call Barney, her ex, the next day and plead with him to send the alimony check on time because she was down to seventy-five cents by mid-month and the landlady downstairs was not exactly threatening but was giving her a certain mid-month look which meant the kids wouldn’t be sharing the big rubber pool in the yard. But invariably, she would not call Barney after all, but would walk to Coney Island instead, and sit on the same bench on the boardwalk in front of the shuttered building where the ghostly echo of the Whip had lured her with its childhood promise of denied pleasure.

  Pinnie would have a fit if she could see her now, sprawled out on the bench, fair-skinned and hatless, inviting sunstroke in the furious, damp heat of noon, her weskit flung down beside her, her purse carelessly tossed on top of the weskit. Out on the water, the flat-snout prow of a tanker pierced the haze, and a few feet away from where she sat, the Parachute ascended and disappeared into the clouds, leaving behind a fragile trail of half-hearted screams from the girlfriends of sailors on leave.

  Why couldn’t Barney cooperate and send the alimony on time just this once—as a birthday present to her? Her birthday was next week, her thirty-fifth already—her life seemed to be careening past her on the nerve-mangling iron wheels of the eternal Whip. How old could the Rebbitzen Joachim be? Twenty-six? Thirty-two? Rumor had it that Rabbi Joachim had been married late, to a much younger woman. Sharon had never met the Rebbitzen. Had the rabbi, for that matter, ever again mentioned his wife after answering Sharon’s one tentative question about his family? Not that she could recall. “My wife and children live in Israel, Mrs. Berg, where one day, with God’s help, I plan to move the Center entirely,” he had said. After that curt dismissal, emphasizing the singular I, there had been no further talk of his wife and children, and Sharon retreated into embarrassed silence.

  She allowed herself to stew in the heat. She could always quit her job and never see Rabbi Joachim again, try working at the library instead. Or maybe not, since you needed a degree in library science, and she only had a secretarial school certificate. Her father, a prolific reader and magnetizing storyteller, had taught her to read when she was four. Sharon had always loved the library, since she was a kid, and visited it often, proudly coming home with her arms filled with books. Then her father had died and she’d gotten married and stopped reading—stopped everything. Still, heeding Pinnie’s folksy advice had worked once before, with Barney: “If you have your health and your years”—that was her mother’s way of saying youth—“you can just pick up and start again no matter how dark it looks to you.” Fed up with her husband’s television addiction, his dandruff, and his grunts for “good morning,” “good night,” and “I love you,” Sharon had packed up without warning, moved herself and the kids to a new apartment, enrolled in a six-week shorthand refresher course, and, after retrieving her mother from her widow’s canasta circuit, resumed living. Well, at least she had resumed a way of living that was far more bearable even in its loneliness than exile in the company of a slug. After years of toying with the idea of divorce and thrusting it aside at the prospect of foundering alone “out there” as a single mother, she knew she could not trade security with Barney for her freedom. In the end, it had been her determination to carve out her very own special slice of life for herself that had carried her through.

  Suddenly a man sat down at the other end of the bench. Sharon quickly slipped her feet back into her shoes, pulled on her weskit, and set her purse in her lap. The man looked harmless enough, and disinterested, but you could never tell. Not that she had any money in her purse to speak of—there was less than five dollars left after yesterday’s grocery shopping. Harry, the Center’s accountant, sent her paycheck to her direct deposit account at the bank every month and she’d hidden her credit cards in a drawer after her divorce, so there wasn’t much worth stealing in her wallet. But there were personal things there, irreplaceable things, including a lock of Phyllis’s golden baby hair squeezed into a plastic folder that also contained a precious faded snapshot of her father as a young man, standing arms akimbo against a sepia Prospect Park tree, his dark, curly hair worn long over his forehead, gazing out of the photograph with the same look of failed ambition in his eyes Sharon had inherited; a religious talisman inscribed with blessings for health and fortune given her at the Center’s orientation ceremony; a red thread to protect her against the evil eye; her Social Security card; and a free, still unused movie pass for two. She decided to sit just a few minutes longer so as not to give her bench mate the impression that she was afraid of him. Only the very brave and the very crazy took to the benches of Coney Island alone these days. Sharon could hear Pinnie’s chastising voice: “You take your life in your hands when you go to sit on the Boardwalk.”

  Clutching her purse, Sharon stole a stealthy glance at the man sitting at the other end of the bench. He looked to be in his late twenties, and was rather swarthy, wearing a pink dress shirt open down to the breast bone. His bare chest was brown and hairless at the V of the shirt’s opening, and he wore a heavy ivory skull with fake ruby-studded eye sockets hanging from a long silver chain. He had a handsome sort of face—if you cared for the Warren Beatty type—the same regular features, square chin, blue eyes, and shock of dark hair. From the little that Sharon could see without turning to face him or moving closer, he’d taken up a pad and pencil and begun sketching. Every so often he would look up from the pad toward the beach, but not at her. Well, thank God for that.

  The screams coming from the descending Parachute were louder now. She would count to two hundred and fifty and then leave. She’d stewed in the heat long enough for tod
ay; tomorrow she would go back to work again, taking Rabbi Joachim’s dictation on the seventeen variations of the Holy Name. After only a short while the sun had purged her of her desire for the rabbi to place his mouth on her ear as she called out the numbers at the upper right-hand corner of the coding cards. What would she do come autumn and winter if this insanity persisted? The winter cold might freeze her passion. But the crisp and lovely days of autumn, when her body was more dangerously alive than ever—what then? Autumn was only two short months away. Hopefully the rabbi would be visiting his family in Israel. If fate was kind to her, she might even meet someone new by then. (She hadn’t been touched by a man for over a year.) Then again, if she persisted in wandering around Coney Island alone after the summer ended, she might be mugged, beaten, or even raped and murdered, her body discarded under the boardwalk, like that woman whose hideously decaying corpse had been featured on the front page of The New York Post less than a year ago.

  Sharon mentally counted the passing seconds: two hundred and thirty-nine, two hundred and forty—she was unbearably hot and thirsty now, even a little dizzy. The thought of a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator at home urged her on. She counted faster: two hundred and forty-one, two hundred and forty-two. Sharon had reached two hundred and forty-seven when a gang of young men materialized seemingly out of nowhere and approached the bench mumbling a barrage of Spanish curses.

  “Hey, Baybeeee,” their leader addressed her loudly in English, “I wanna ast you a question!” He was about nineteen, short and round as a beer cask, bare-chested and wearing oversized surfer shorts, high-top basketball sneakers, and a black wool beanie on his head. In addition to the leader, there were four similarly dressed bare-chested young men now clustered around her, one of them carrying a baseball glove. Frantically looking around for the accompanying bat, Sharon was so relieved at not seeing one that she almost burst out laughing. Still, the incongruous combination of basketball sneakers and baseball glove frightened her. Only a week before, over lunch at the Chelsea Bagel Shop, gazing at her through purple-tinted cat-eye glasses, Sharon’s streetwise sister Arleen had warned, “You know those high-top basketball sneakers those gang members wear? They’re not just a fashion statement. They wear them so they can run away at top speed after they’ve mugged you, the bastards.”