The Kabbalah Master Read online

  Unlike her sister Arleen, Sharon hadn’t left home, taking off from Brooklyn for Manhattan, claiming she was an artist and needed space to work in, Arleen had declared her independence by living in a coldwater loft on the Lower East Side, with nothing but a mattress on the floor to sleep on. But even if Sharon had been lucky enough to paint or write, or daring enough to model nude for her rebellious younger sister and her artist friends, she would have somehow managed to remain closer to home. It was ironic. Here she was, having married in her twenties and divorced in her early thirties, living with her mother as the good daughter, the “normal” one whose marriage had simply come off badly—a fact of life that even middle-class Brooklyn modern orthodox Jews no longer frowned upon. Yet hadn’t Sharon truly strayed as far away from home in spirit as Arleen had in the flesh? Hadn’t her grandmother left her mark, imprinting her with a craving to appease an underlying hunger to penetrate the mysteries of what white-haired Bubbe Clara had called “the next world?”

  RABBI JOACHIM DID NOT CHOOSE to disclose the particulars of his secret new project until every envelope containing the lists for his work on the Holy Name had been sealed and sent off to Israel. Carting them in a mailbag in a wheeled wire basket to the Post Office, Sharon had delivered the lot as instructed. There, scholars at the original Center for Mystical Judaism—the one founded by the disciples of Rabbi Joachim’s late uncle—would collate the material and print it as a soft-covered book in a limited Hebrew edition to be followed six months later by another, in English. It was a clumsy procedure and, because of the distance and the language difficulties they’d encountered, fraught with misunderstandings that had delayed publication. Still, notwithstanding all the hardships, their total dependence on donations from wealthy disciples, and the assistance of a theosophical book publisher, Rabbi Joachim’s increasing American success had resulted in the publication of three newly translated English editions of three fifteenth-century Aramaic Kabbalah manuscripts within one year. Modestly, the rabbi had claimed no credit for himself, ascribing the success of the enterprise to the intervention of his late uncle’s spirit. Except for one whimsical reference to “smuggling photocopies out of the Vatican Library like an espionage agent,” which Sharon had taken as one of the rabbi’s rare attempts at a joke, he remained dead serious about his uncle’s ongoing participation in the Center’s affairs. Curious, since he’d never mentioned it, Sharon had asked if his master was a traditional rabbi before becoming a Kabbalist.

  “Not was, Sharon—IS!” he exclaimed. “You must understand that although you cannot see him embodied in flesh, he is as close to you now, in this very room, as I am. When we speak of a spirit like his, there is no death,” he continued peevishly, glaring at her. Then, softening a bit, putting his hand to his temple as if chastising himself for his impatience: “But forgive me, Sharon. How could you understand this? You are so young yet; someday the clouds of illusion will disappear for you, too, you’ll see.” That was the first time Rabbi Joachim had called her “Sharon,” and the first time she had a dream about him that turned out to be a premonition.

  THE NEW PROJECT, THE RABBI EXPLAINED, could not be described there in the office. To really understand what it was all about, they needed to drive to New Jersey and experience it firsthand. Afterward, there would be scheduled appointments, first with the Center’s theosophical Delancey Street publisher, and next, if time allowed, with an herbalist in the neighborhood.

  Sharon was intrigued, and happy to be quitting the office. The telephone hadn’t stopped ringing and filling the morning with bad news: Leon Berkowitz, one of their most generous donors, in the process of searching for a building in which to relocate the Center, had scouted properties in a dangerous neighborhood and been mugged and robbed of three-hundred dollars and was recuperating from a fractured knee at Lenox Hill Hospital, and a shipment of explanatory brochures addressed to a Reform Temple in Orlando, Florida, had come back from the post office marked Insufficient Postage.

  Thus it was that Sharon found herself—like in her dream—sitting alongside Rabbi Joachim driving through the midday muck of the Holland Tunnel. An elderly patron had rethought her will and at the last minute, transferred ownership of her car to the Center: a big red Volvo sedan with cream-colored leather seats and matching carpet throughout. Rabbi Joachim was unfazed by the flashy luxuriousness of the car. After uttering a short prayer of thanks to the generous intervention of his uncle, he’d sprung behind the wheel and driven off, screeching to a stop at red lights, narrowly avoiding rear ending the cars in front of him. Nothing fazed him out on the road, either—not the grizzled truck drivers looking down and cursing at him from their cabs, nor the startled pedestrians who jumped back onto the curbs swinging their fists in his wake. Safely wrapped in the spiritual embrace of his miracle-working uncle, Rabbi Joachim remained oblivious to their curses.

  The traffic broke as they sped out of the tunnel onto the ramp and climbed toward the Palisades Parkway. The heavy, rainless humidity plaguing the city had turned into a thick haze blanketing the Manhattan skyline, making it almost invisible from the New Jersey side of the Hudson. The Palisades Parkway was eerily empty. For ten minutes they drove north, passed only by one other car—a state trooper, as it turned out, who seemed oddly unaware of the speeding red Volvo. Suppressing the urge to warn the rabbi that the trooper might be planning to pull him over and ticket him for speeding, Sharon focused instead on the direction they were taking. About half a mile from the Nyack exit, Rabbi Joachim pulled the car onto the grass shoulder, where a sign informed him it was illegal to park. Motioning for her to follow him, he opened the door of the car, and after removing his jacket and throwing it on the front seat, got out and strode briskly toward the Palisade cliffs. Following behind, Sharon assessed the rabbi’s body as he plodded along like a bear looking neither left nor right. For a man who ate so little, he was broad and lumpy. Yet, seeing him out in the open, wearing his usual old-fashioned, white-on-white shirt with the pen-filled pockets and gold cufflinks, only made Sharon desire him more.

  The grass closer to the river was wet and high. Sharon gazed at the emptiness around her and wondered where her mentor could be heading to with such determination. She was too busy looking around to notice that the terrain had dipped, allowing Rabbi Joachim to suddenly disappear from view. Hampered by her thick-heeled shoes, and at the same time curious, she pushed forward.

  “Here—here it is!” she heard him call just as she caught sight of the top of his head.

  Rabbi Joachim had taken off his hat and was kneeling near a very large boulder, one end of which protruded steeply over the river, the other flattened benignly against a plateau.

  Sharon was struck by a surge of panic. What was she doing here? Was it because her life with Barney had been so irritably sane? Was that the reason she was perched insanely behind Rabbi Joachim on the New Jersey Palisades on a steamy Wednesday afternoon in July? Had he sensed enough of her own hidden madness to bring her here in the first place? What cosmic lesson was the rabbi trying to teach her this time?

  “Here—here is the plant I’ve been looking for,” he called out. “I knew I remembered the spot. Come, Sharon, quickly, we’re running out of time.”

  “Where, Rabbi? I don’t think I can make it down there with these shoes,” she protested.

  Since it was not Rabbi Joachim’s habit to indulge her questions, Sharon wasn’t surprised when he ignored her now. Even in the best of circumstance it wasn’t unusual for him to maintain long stretches of silence before acknowledging her presence at all. When, and if, he was ready to talk, the rabbi would summon his words carefully, as if from a distance, marshaling them into his own strange semblance of order before presenting her with an explanation. He would begin slowly, like a medium speaking from a trance, his body stiff and his voice guttural, his words gradually gaining momentum until they tumbled over each other, the marvelous Rs rolling off his tongue like a verbal caress. But today it was different.

  “Hur
ry, we haven’t got all day here, and I need your help,” he said, annoyed.

  Only a few more steps down a slight decline and over a ridge, and there, at the edge of the immense boulder, perilously close to falling into the river, was the rabbi picking flowers!

  Better not look down. Turning her gaze away from the murky water, Sharon knelt beside him. There must be a reason for this, she assured herself. He’s never done anything like it before, so there has to be a very good reason for us to be in this place.

  As if reading her thoughts, Rabbi Joachim turned to her and said, “Don’t be afraid. The ground is safe here; I’ve been here before.” Still, he did not extend his hand to steady her. “This is our next project,” he said, pointing to a clump of purple clover neatly stuffed into his hat.

  “But—”

  “To look at it, you’d think it was nothing, just a simple herb growing in the crevices of these rocks,” he said, glancing just past her as he spoke. “But, like all the wonderful secrets God has put before us here on Earth, it is so obvious as to be hidden from gross eyes.”

  “It looks like clover,” said Sharon, relieved that he had returned to his familiar didacticism.

  “Yes, nothing but a bunch of clover, a weed—but containing a great mystery.” He sat down on the grass. Tired of kneeling, Sharon modestly tucked her dress under her knees and sat down across from him. A yellow butterfly fluttered past the rabbi’s head.

  “Sharon, this little plant is going to make a fortune for the Center. What would you say if I told you that it will cure mental illness, and even drug addiction?” he asked, his face glowing with excitement.

  Knowing full well that the rabbi didn’t really want an answer but was waiting for a sign of her unconditional faith in his judgment, Sharon nodded. What did she care about the alfalfa or clover or whatever it was that her dearest love was now holding out for her to admire? What she wanted was for the rabbi to graze her cheek playfully with the fuzzy tips of those purple flowers before tossing them aside, pushing her tenderly onto the soft wet grass and bringing his body down on hers, his hard, brightly colored pens pressing against her breasts.

  But he was still speaking to her: “…when the idea first came to me. Strange, isn’t it?”

  I love you, my darling. Deafened by the voice inside her head, Sharon had missed the first part of the rabbi’s sentence.

  “I was driving on the West Side Highway when I first saw them—no, not once, but twice, first uptown and then downtown. They were standing in the island dividing the highway, two little Chinese ladies in blue aprons, bent over, actually, gathering what looked like ordinary weeds and putting them into a pair of wide straw baskets. At first I mistook them for sanitation people, you know, the ones who pick up highway litter with a pointed stick. But, no, they were two little Chinese women, just as I’d thought, gathering weeds along the West Side Highway.”

  Why don’t you kiss me now? Why are you babbling about Chinese women and pointed sticks?

  “Sharon, are you listening?”

  “Rabbi Joachim, I—I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  The rabbi frowned. “There’s nothing to understand, Mrs. Berg. It’s as simple as today’s being Wednesday,” he shrugged. Then, turning his back on the gross world she inhabited, he mused gently to himself: “I was reminded by the sight of them of something I had read in a work by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Chayim Vital, a fragment that deals with curative herbs. And it suddenly struck me that the one herb he describes for curing addiction and other mental derangements is really nothing more than a form of clover!

  “On my way to Monsey one afternoon, I stopped near here to think about it further. The image of those two Chinese women haunted me. I had to put together the pieces of this puzzle. Then, as always when I have been most deeply engaged in solving a problem, my master helped me. It was he who spoke to me, guiding me to this place.

  ‘My son, why do you worry so about money for the Center when you are standing this very minute on a gold mine—and more importantly, on the very answer to one of man’s worst afflictions?’ As soon as the master had finished speaking to me, I started to search the grass—foolishly at first—looking for gold. After an hour of pointless searching the answer came to me—clearly, so clearly!”

  Rabbi Joachim pulled a stalk of clover out of the ground and handed it to her. “Here it is, Sharon, our new project—CLOVER!”

  THREE

  IT HAD BEEN A DAY OF INADVERTENT FASTING so Sharon was famished by the time Rabbi Joachim pulled up to Priceman’s Bookstore on Delancey Street and parked the car in front of a tow-away zone notice. Except for having one tepid cup of coffee before leaving the Center that morning, she had eaten nothing. But then, neither had Rabbi Joachim, to whom it had never seemed to occur that she, a less enlightened mortal, might be hungry. He’d probably assumed that she, too, fed on the “manna” of the spirit, and that her excitement about the new project had, like his own, obliterated most of the baser necessities. The rabbi’s single trip to the bathroom to wash his hands before ritually blessing his Styrofoam cup of black coffee would have been too short for him to pee. By contrast, as if proof of her own spiritual shortcomings, Sharon’s single cup had prompted three trips to the toilet.

  Attributing her now painful surge of hunger to the three greasy non-Kosher frankfurters she noticed rotating on a spit in the window of a neighboring diner, Sharon averted her eyes and followed Rabbi Joachim into the bookstore with her stomach growling. Working six long, feverish days each week in a perennial race against printing deadlines while living on the rabbi’s diet of coffee and an occasional hardboiled egg, she’d dropped ten pounds since starting her job at the Center, which, given the fact that she was tall, thin-legged, and narrow-hipped to begin with, made her as thin as a model. Before meeting Rabbi Joachim, Sharon wouldn’t have thought twice about going into the diner and ordering a non-Kosher frank, but that was no longer possible. She’d barely worked for him a week when, to reinforce her observance of Jewish law, he’d come to her apartment, and after ritually “Koshering” the kitchen by reciting the libun purification blessing as he scalded the sink, stove, pots, pans, and cutlery with boiling water, he’d forbidden her to touch non-Kosher food from that day forward.

  Throughout the ritual, Pinnie had watched the rabbi noncommittally. Though she’d never brought ham or bacon into the house and only ate Chinese food “on the outside” with her canasta friends after Sharon’s Bubbe had died, Pinnie had, technically at least, kept a Kosher household, even if she had been fairly loose about mixing meat and milk dishes and silverware. But until recently, Sharon—led at first by her transgressing sister Arleen, and later by her nonobservant Jewish husband—hadn’t bothered keeping Kosher at all. This made her wonder how her children, who were used to eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and pepperoni pizza for lunch, would react to the latest dietary changes. Falling back on packaged frankfurters stamped “Kosher” had been her temporary solution to the problem.

  But now that she was thinking about food, Sharon found it odd that she’d never seen the rabbi eat anything but a hard-boiled egg or drink anything but black coffee. She’d once seen him almost eat a croissant at the home of a rich, widowed patron who’d pledged ten thousand dollars toward building a center affiliate in Los Angeles—but that didn’t count because he’d never actually taken a bite. The visit had been prompted by the widow’s frantic telephone call one Sunday morning. Sharon had answered the phone and been bombarded by the hysterical woman’s demand that Rabbi Joachim come to her home immediately and perform an exorcism. Claiming to be tormented by what she believed were “spirit noises,” the widow, Mrs. Wolstein, said she believed that the spirits were malevolent because they always appeared as she was sitting down to meditate on the Holy Name—and since her two Persian cats had refused to emerge from their hiding place under the sofa for three days, she was convinced that the spirits were starving them to death.

  Taking the telephone from Sharon,
Rabbi Joachim had calmly informed Mrs. Wolstein that Jews were prohibited from dealing with spirits from the time of King Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor and recommended posting mezuzahs containing the Sacred Name of God over every door of her home. When his advice didn’t calm Mrs. Wolstein sufficiently, the rabbi reluctantly agreed to go in person to see what he could do—taking Sharon along as a buffer against the widow’s onslaught.

  Dressed in a stunning purple silk suit dress, the bejeweled Mrs. Wolstein opened the door of her opulent Upper East Side townhouse herself and invited the rabbi in for tea. Sharon was swiftly rewarded for having accompanied her mentor by the familiar sound of his cough of disapproval. Following the widow, Sharon entered the library and sat down on the sofa, pretending to examine a book on wildflowers on the coffee table.

  “Don’t lose my place, dear,” Mrs. Wolstein said, flashing a frigid smile.

  Sharon turned a page, leaving a nasty fold directly across the page showing an illustration of the root of a wild sweet pea. Looking up from the book, she noted that the rabbi was standing in the opposite corner of the room with his back to Mrs. Wolstein, studying a Ben Shahn line drawing of a Hasidic Jew in a black beaver hat. From the tilt of his head, Sharon could tell that he’d left the everyday world and was mystically absorbed in the higher realms, and she relished the intimacy of his gesture. Except for his wife, she was the only woman who, if even for the briefest moments, knew him in a way she was sure Mrs. Wolstein—for all her money—never would.