The Eastbound Talmudic Rabbinate 

I have been riding this bus for two thousand years.

This, of course, is my interpretation. The old rabbi beside me says, “We have been riding on this bus forever. Forever implies eternity. Were we ever not riding on this bus?”

The younger man beside him, with the tattered shirt and the cloudy gaze, says, “When you say we have been riding this bus forever, you must understand both parts: for and ever. Ever meaning always, stretching both forward and backward. We have been on this bus since before the beginning of time and will still be on it after its end.”

A third rabbi leans across the aisle, with a smile on his face. “Ah, yes,” he says. “But what a wonderful bus to be on! When it is cold outside, we are warm. Even when we pass through endless night, we remain in light.”

This brings up a grumble among us; the eternal fluorescent glow of the reading lamps have become a point of contention over the past two thousand years. None of us has gotten a good night’s sleep in centuries.

“We are doomed to see the world and never step into it,” another complains, and a nod ripples up and down the line, wisely. Over our heads, the cling-straps sway gently side-to-side.

“We see the world and are unscathed by it,” corrects the optimistic man, and we forgive him his sunny disposition. He lived in what people now call the first century; they were exciting times. “We pass through wars and are not shot. We pass through famine and do not starve. We pass through water and do not drown.”

There is a dreamy sigh from the Talmudic rabbis. “Water,” they murmur. We all silently contemplate the end, and weep without tears. Because water, of course, flows beneath the Tree of Life. And we, of course, are dead.

There are a small number of us on the bus, smaller than I expected. Just thirteen. We thought at first, or hoped, that more holy men would come to join us as they died. There was never any question, even in the beginning, that we were dead; we are dried up, husks of things. We shape air with our lips, fan the embers of our debates with breath that smells of grave dust. No blood runs in our veins, no tears in our gritty eyes. If we bounce on a pothole, our innards rattle like gourds.

And so it has been for two thousand years. Always moving on, never stopping. Around us, the sun rises and sets. Night brings no relief. It merely turns the windows into mirrors, and all we can see, no matter how hard we strain, are our own gray reflections. There is no darkness to wash it away; even at night, we cannot escape ourselves.

When we woke on the bus, two thousand years ago, we began the ride as we begin everything—with an outpouring of words, a furious babble. The coach quivered in the hail of scholarly syllables. We cleared the air first of the big things: Heaven. Earth. Beginning. Ending. Life. Death. Purity. Sky. God, our God, our God. And when these been drained like pus from a cyst, leaving us deflated, we began casting about in the corners for explanations. We turned up dust, we turned up hairline fractures; we turned out our own pockets.

But after the first five hundred years or so, this, too, began to slow. We had not thought it possible. The greatest sages of all time, running out of things to say! We had with us no Torah, beyond what we kept in our minds; the bus afforded us no ink, no slabs. We created lessons out of emptiness, shaping the air with our graying fingers. But after centuries, arthritis began to set in. After centuries, arguments began to flair over the crooks of wrists, the miniscule twitches of knuckles. It got so that Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Joshua kept their hands in their pockets at all times, because if one saw even the knobby wrist-bone of the other, saw the hint of the hair curling out from beneath a sleeve, an argument would erupt so impassioned that the plastic would shrivel and wilt off of the seats nearest them and send up a toxic stink that gave everyone on the bus a migraine.

There came a period of great quiet. Weeks when no one could be bothered to open his eyes, to scratch the tip of his nose when it itched. We moved through the daily prayers quietly, almost embarrassed. Nobody wanted to be the first to admit that he wasn’t sure anyone was listening anymore.

The fear began, as all fears do, quietly.

It crept in in between the exhausted questions of kosher law, of the proper way to face for the morning and evening prayers. Casual. Almost coded. “According to the Shulchan Aruch,” (a newish law we’d heard wind of in Tuscon, seen it echoed in the mountains on a rare cloudy day) when a man wakes in the morning and puts on his shoes,” –when a boy enters the threshold of adulthood and reaches for the vestments of Jewish life — “is he not commanded to put on the right one first, but to tie the left one first?” Does this mean: he begin with a mistake? Is there a reason he leaves the right untied, does not finish what he started?

Is there a chance that we are the right shoe? That God has forgotten us, now that time has passed, and he has donned the left?

Are we, perhaps, unfinished business?

It took sixteen more years for someone to say it out loud. We were bouncing along a forgotten road in Siberia. We had been bouncing for months. Snow came up to the windows, a wall of brilliant and impassible white that burned our eyes to see; we prayed with cold lips and numb fingers, the chill creeping, despite Gamzu’s cheery claim, through the seams of the walls, through the icy windowpanes. We pressed our fingertips to our eyelids to shut out the light. The only sounds the complaints of the shocks in the driver’s seat as we hurtled over potholes and small boulders, and the whispering of ancient words through dry lips, a prayer like the prayer of trees in the wind.

The Aher’s voice cut through that cold and brilliant quiet straight through to our teeth.

“I think we have been forgotten,” he said. “I think the love of Torah is dead.”

We tried not to talk about it when we finally emerged in south Wales, as we glided aquatic through the Peloponnesian Sea. But leaving things undiscussed is something that has never come easily to us, and the Aher’s claim began to be bandied about with increasingly less caution.

We had maintained faith for so long. The argument grew increasingly fervent, and at first, I was glad. It was the first sign of life in us since we’d awakened that day so long ago, stretching our dead and stiff limbs into the aisle we didn’t know yet we couldn’t leave. The air, again, hummed with activity.

Of course love of Torah wasn’t dead.

Of course we, the scholars of the Talmud, hadn’t been forgotten.

Of course, even if we had been forgotten, the Jewish people had not been forgotten.

And their love of Torah lived on.

But then the bus bounced us through Germany in the year called 1938, and we saw the crystal shatter. And then Poland, and then France. Then Spain of the fifteenth century, and then whirling, again, back, back through time (but for us, always forward; our dead bodies aging and exhausted more every day), and then, suddenly, we were seeing the Temple fall again. The air choking with smoke. The walls crumbling like teeth.

We rushed to the front of the bus. We clung to the driver’s arm. We began to beg, in many tongues.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Let us go.”

“We have seen too much.”

“Where are you taking us? Where are you taking us?”
“Why are you doing this?”

The mute man never turned his head. He opened his mouth to sigh, and a dried powder of rust spilled from his silent lips.

I do not know how long we rode.

Time, in the Torah, is a slippery thing: the nights and days of God incomprehensible to man and to the dead. All I can tell you is this: There was evening, and there was morning, and the bus stopped.

The bus had never stopped. We all sat in our seats, trembling like the husks of leaves as the door sighed, then heaved open.

I wonder now that we did not make a rush for it. I tell myself, we were like mariners suddenly appearing on land, dizzy with the foreign sensation of stillness. But really, I know, we were afraid as footsteps fell on the stairs. And then, in the aisle.

First we saw the eyes, and then the smile. A small man, surprisingly small. Wisdom and kindness radiated from the lines of his face. We stirred, as he passed, feeling something like warmth enter us through the soles of our feet. Feeling something like peace.

He paused near me. “Friend,” he said. “I am Judah, called Rebbe. May I sit?”

“Of course,” I said. “Please.” We crowded in, and in our eagerness to touch him, to listen, our tongues spilled to life.

“What has been going on?” Gamliel asked.

“Tell us of the world,” Joshua said.

“Have we been forgotten?” I asked.

At this, his face turned towards me, bright and surprised.

“Forgotten?” he asked.

“Have all of the Jews disappeared?” Ben Azzai asked.

“Has the Torah turned to smoke?” Elazar asked.

Rebbe reached out his hands to calm us.

“Listen,” he said. “You have not been forgotten.”

And for the first time in two thousand years, darkness washes our eyes. And I think, as time falls apart, as we tumble from the past into something new, We are entering the days of God. And also, This is what looks like for history to end.

We are still dead.

But also.

Our bus driver, may he be remembered for good, winks at me as I step onto solid ground for the first time in several centuries. “Welcome,” he says, “to Paradise.”

We close our eyes as we disembark; we step into the new world blind and mute and trembling. But then there is a hand on my shoulder, human or heavenly. I turn, opening my eyes. And I see:

A small house, in a small city, drenched in rain. An upstairs room. Around a long table, students bow their heads. The voices weave themselves into a story: and then. Rashi said. And Moses sat. And a heavenly voice proclaimed. And the river stood still. And the trees began to sing. And Israel wept. We crowd around, gazing through something like mist, something like glass. Like slabs of pure, transparent marble.

Beside me, Gamliel murmurs: “They are missing the point.” The students are not debating the law. They do not concern themselves with the details of uncleanliness; we listen, with shock and dismay (and a slight smile, from Joshua) as a woman’s voice interjects itself into the scholarly chaos. Women, we murmur. Studying! Gamliel turns back towards the bus. Shimon looks, as always, grim, grips Elazar’s wrist.

“But listen,” says Rebbe. “Listen.” He says, “There is much to be learned from students. Their dreams are the texts of the future.”

We listen. And we begin to hear our names. Akiva. Resh Lakish. Ben Zoma. Gamzu. Breath stirs our names, the faint outlines of our lives. The students murmur: our successes, our failures, our tricks, our pride. Our great tragedies.

Yochanan, listening, shakes his head. “They’ve got it all wrong,” he murmurs. But there is a flush in his face, something like life. In all of our faces, it blooms. We have dwelled together for millennia, but we shift suddenly away from each other, embarrassed by this intimacy, this seeing each other daring, hoping, coming alive. We listen to the voices dissecting us as we spent our lives dissecting God’s word. I turn my face to the sky, and the water comes crashing down, drenching the leaves and the reaching, eternal roots of the sustaining Tree of Life.

________

Kendra Fortmeyer grew up in the woods and misses them. She also grew up Jewish in the rural Baptist Bible Belt, and doesn’t miss that, but is grateful for the early-in-life training that it’s not healthy to take other people’s ideas about damnation very seriously. Her fiction has won the Pushcart Prize, been recorded by LeVar Burton, and more. Find it and her magical realist novel, Hole in the Middle, at kendrafortmeyer.com.