Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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was hardly worth the transgression and whatever punishment might come of it.
People unconsciously curse the assailing birds and call for more bread.
Many depend on paper. Those who have not drafted their misgivings in advance simply settle for conventional prayers and shred blank pages to consign to the water. Others have committed their pleas to writing; they arrive at the water’s edge like attorneys with briefs to file. The adults, having a greater range of error to encompass, admit their sins more generally. They have signed away “resentment,” “envy,” and “pride.” Essentially, they see their hearts as furnaces and have come to shovel out the accumulated ash. On the other hand, the kids, at least the literate among them, confess with explicitness; they forego the dissembling of simile and Hebrew, and write about the particular vulgarity uttered, the stolen gum.
I have seen older orthodox Jews, men who have not gone swimming in decades or showered with others at a gymnasium for even longer, wade in up to their knees with their papers. They assemble at a depth of about twelve inches, shivering, their trousers hiked over white legs to no avail. The rabbi, their spiritual admiral, ventures farthest out. Davening, they seem to be engaging in the sort of rickety water aerobics the elderly practice on those afternoons they take over the pool at the Y.
Doing this in company emphasizes how common our afflictions are. No one is unforgivable or exempt, so take comfort, take care. It is also a rare something outside of algebra or Monopoly for families to do together. Mothers urge their toddlers to flick their meager share of sin away. Three other members of the temple steady an old woman’s wheelchair against the rain-slick slope so she can dribble her documents in. Some pieces cling to her dress, and several hands brush at them like flies.
We send our petitions piecemeal over the water. It is an epidemic unique to our religion. This is our bad dander we shed, like the slips of fortune you find in cookies and decide to pay no mind. This is our insistent litter and supplication. Together we rid ourselves of things forbidden and annually foresworn. To the unsuspecting, it may look as though we are sending confetti after an absent ship.
The children, however, will not be daunted by the demands of ritual; nor are they deterred by the substitution of paper for bread. Being outside is too unusual and precious an event during Sabbath services for them to lose to solemnity. They have secretly twisted their pages into makeshift boats—“There is no Frigate like a Book,” Dickinson promises, and perhaps the poetry will prove out. Even though the grown-ups glower, already some of the kids are dashing ahead to see whose sins will prove swiftest or survive the current longest. Most take on water too fast and, too far from shore for bailing, become pulpy, clump, and drown.
Only the smallest scribbles, torn to pieces in a flurry of atonement, stay afloat. A few vile modifiers dangle from some overhanging brush as, here and there, improper nouns slide by. A scrap of misdemeanor snags on something secret beneath. A bit of sin gets snookered behind a stone. Parts of other repudiations find their way back ashore; wayward phrases lodge in the mud. Not all of these free-floating disavowals disperse, however, but vaguely superimpose and fuse into new indictments. Lust and covetousness collide, lending greater intensity to one another. Assorted gluttonies gather downstream. All in all, a manifesto of regret. The jettison spreads, giving God’s forgiveness a run for its money.
We can only guess how disjointed words are recollected. A mysterious syntax emerges as sodden verbs clutch at objects that the water has randomly redirected. The ad-lib of our atonement, our extravagant shame and curling, spindrift sin. Estranged clauses find one another to form bizarre acknowledgments. Lied my sister cursing even after without asking them. Took bothering in vain without returning after midnight. Fighting again that didn’t belong to despair me. Hate said only shouldn’t anyway. Wasn’t pretended to be mean to him the last piece. Sundered passions and mixed metaphors. The huddled bunch of us, drawn up like a pucker or a fist, united to scatter our faults, our crimes, and His name. Our wake is just the shape of our trespasses.
When it comes to putting you in an intricate hold, wrestlers have nothing on telemarketers. Yesterday night I succumbed to a conversation—less a conversation than a script at my expense—having to do with a credit card that I was being offered at an “embarrassingly low initial interest,” all thanks to my spotless record. (More to the point, I have incurred sufficient debt in my life to be worth the trouble of contacting.) The catch to these deals, of course, is that sooner than you expect the interest rate will skyrocket. They’re betting on your attention lapsing and your commitment to sensible spending losing steam; they’re betting that you can’t sustain virtue for six months. I have several friends who shift their debts from card to card to evade the impending crush. Financially speaking, they live on the lam. It took me a good fifteen minutes and several demurrals to escape this time.
This morning I join Joplin’s tidy contingent of Jews at Shoal Creek. According to our respective inclinations, we drop our crusts and crib sheets in. The creek is sluggish today, drowsy and imperturbable, as if to say there’s nothing new here, it’s all been said before. We’re nothing if not expeditious about our business. There is no evidence of fever in our efforts, no paroxysm of rapture in our midst. This year’s ceremony is as smoothly dutiful as shaving. For some reason even the younger kids are towing the line. They are transfixed for the moment by the illusion that they are receding from the debris they’ve left rather than the other way around.
We end up accomplishing tashlicht in less time than it took me to get off the phone last night. As we conclude, there is nothing of the sun coming cleanly out of an eclipse; it is more like stretching after a nap. Some of us look up as we climb the bank back to our cars, but I suspect that it is to consider the weather or the scenery rather than the revised condition of our souls.
I come home to poetry—specifically, the fastidious Elizabeth Bishop, whom I’m preparing to teach tomorrow. First, I examine her poem about the sandpiper, that relentless inspector of the shoreline. Like the birds that bore witness this morning, he comes to evaluate and glean what he can from the endlessly “dragging grains.” Like the rest of us, “looking for something, something, something,” both poet and bird stand for scrutiny. We would be judged kindly. We would be cherished not according to our worth.
As I read, I find a fragment from another poet drifting through my mind. It is about a different twitchy bird, another of nature’s migrant workers, who likewise wonders “what to make of a diminished thing.” Strange, what comes together in water and what comes apart.
I will also undertake “The Man-Moth” on Monday. About its origins, Bishop gives us this: “I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be ‘mammoth.’ But the misprint seemed meant for me.” What I can make out so far is a fable of failed transcendence—that much I remember, that much I’ve got—whose hero “must investigate as high as he can climb,” only to fall back. He cannot discover any Beyond beyond this world, either because there is none or because he “always seats himself facing the wrong way” on the pale subways he invariably returns to.
It must be hard for him to determine whether the train is crossing over the ties beneath him or if the ties themselves are being pulled out from under him. Point of view is everything, I guess. The principle holds true regardless.
It’s been only hours since the ritual ended, yet already I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be mammoth. Or it has changed, as is ever the case with moving water, whose solutions are only temporary. It was something about words that get mangled or miscast, sundered or absorbed, but nevertheless seemed meant for me. Something about climbing out and falling back and, guided by instinct, tradition, and the flow of others, climbing out again.
4 The History Channelers
One of the paradoxes of being an English professor at a small local college is that while you are seldom appreciated for the expertise you do have, you are also occasionally credited for expertise you do not. I was therefore not surprised to learn that when the sponsor of the junior high’s History Day competitors needed someone to direct her students in the finer points of performance, my name came up. After all, shrewdly trading on