For Money

The Barn used to sell sectional sofas. It holds four hundred people now on pine folding chairs under exposed ducts painted matte black, and on a good Shabbos morning the overflow stands along the west wall where the old loading door still shows its rail. The espresso cart in the lobby runs on Friday afternoon and Saturday night, never in between, and the man who runs it collects residuals from a sitcom that ran two seasons on the WB. The mechitza runs down the center instead of the side, cost eleven thousand dollars, and took nine months of committee. Nobody wears a tie. Two men wear Rick Owens. One woman wears a hat that cost more than the ark.
Rabbi Shelly Grossbard comes out at 10:40 in a gray suit he bought at an estate sale in Hancock Park off a dead orthodontist, and he stands there until the room quiets, and then he stands there longer.
“Terumah,” he says. “God has just delivered the law at Sinai. Fire, smoke, the voice, the whole production. And what does He ask for first? Gold. Silver. Copper. Blue and purple and scarlet yarn. Acacia wood. Ram skins dyed red.”
He lets that sit.
“He asks for money. Before He asks for anything else, He asks for money. And every rabbi in Los Angeles stands up on this parsha and tells you the money is a metaphor for the heart. I want to tell you the heart is a metaphor for the money.”
Josh Adelman, forty-one, sold his company in March, third row on the aisle, laughs once, alone.
“I want to say something and I want you to hear the end of it before you get angry, which you will, because getting angry is the best entertainment available to you on a Saturday morning at no charge.” He puts both hands on the shtender. “I would not learn a page of Gemara if nobody paid me. Not one page. Not one line. I would sleep in. I would take up tennis.”
The room makes a sound it has not made before.
“And neither would you,” he says. “You get paid too. You get paid in being the guy at the kiddush who knows what the Ramban says. You get paid in your daughter’s shidduch. You get paid in the feeling that comes over you at eleven at night when you close the sefer and think, I am a serious man. That is a salary. Mine has withholding taxes. That is the only difference between us and I am the only man in this room who prints his rate card.”
Ezra Malik, sixteen, stands at the west wall and says the last ninety seconds back to himself under his breath until he owns them.
Saturday night Ezra Malik puts on his father’s gray sport coat and does the ninety seconds into his phone. He has the hands right. He has the pauses right, which is the hard part. By Sunday afternoon it has two million views. By Monday the Jewish Journal has a piece. By Tuesday a rabbi in Teaneck has written eleven paragraphs about the crisis of the celebrity pulpit and a woman from Miami has emailed Grossbard a photograph of her father’s yahrzeit candle with the subject line HE LEARNED FOR FREE.
Grossbard answers every email. He answers the Miami woman at 6:15 in the morning: Your father sounds like a great man. He was paid in you.
He goes on three podcasts that week. He is better on the third one.
“Shabbos,” the host says. “You’d keep Shabbos anyway. Come on.”
“I would not keep Shabbos if nobody paid me.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s arithmetic. I have a contract. Section four. But take the contract away and I still get paid, because there are eleven people in this city who would notice if my car moved on Saturday, and their noticing is worth more to me than the drive. That’s a payment. You’re calling it faith because faith sounds better on a plaque.”
“What about your wife?”
“Dina.”
“Would you have married a Jew if you weren’t paid?”
“Absolutely not,” Grossbard says. “The rebbetzin comes with the position. A rebbetzin is a company car. Except the car depreciates and Dina has gone up every year for twenty-six years, which is a bad deal for me and I want that noted.”
“Your kids? The bris?”
“I circumcised my sons under duress from a coalition I depend on for everything I have. So did you. The only man who cuts his son for free is a man with no friends, and I have checked, and there is no such man.”
“God, Rabbi. Do you believe in God?”
“On Tuesdays, no. Tuesday is my day off.”
The clip of Tuesday runs on a morning show in Israel. Somebody makes a T-shirt. Grossbard buys forty of them and gives them out at the youth minyan, which costs him $721 and gets him a second news cycle for free, and he mentions the $721 from the bimah so that nobody can accuse him of generosity.
The line about being paid to learn comes from Stanley Fish (b. 1938), a literary critic who said he would not read a poem if the university stopped his check. Grossbard has never hidden this. He teaches it in his Wednesday class. He photocopies the interview. When Marla Feig, seventy-three, whose father put up half the money for the building in 1979, corners him at the Chanukah party and says you took this from a goy at Duke, he says, “I took it from a goy at Duke and I improved it, and you are welcome to check my work, and if you find that I have improved it you may not tell anyone, because my whole thing depends on people believing I am a thief.”
The board meets in the back office on a Thursday night. Six people, a plate of rugelach from Delice, a bottle of Diet Snapple that nobody opens. Adelman runs the meeting. Marla Feig sits with her purse in her lap like a woman waiting for a bus she has already decided to miss.
“Two families left,” Adelman says. “The Bergs and the Steins. That’s ninety-four thousand in annual.”
“The Bergs were leaving,” Grossbard says. “Their son got into Harvard-Westlake and they’ve been shopping for a shul with better parents since October.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s the only point. You want to price my mouth. Fine. Price it. But price it against the ninety-one units we added in eighteen months, and price it against the fact that three hundred people under forty come here on a Saturday morning in a city where three hundred people under forty do not go anywhere on a Saturday morning.”
“They come to watch you set yourself on fire,” Marla says.
“They come to watch me set myself on fire and then they stay for mussaf. I’ll take it. Rav Kook would have taken it.”
“Don’t.”
“He would have hated it and he would have taken it.”
Adelman rubs his eyes. “We have to put out a statement.”
“I’ll write it,” Grossbard says.
“You can’t write your own condemnation.”
“I write the best condemnation in this room. Give me eight minutes.”
He writes it in six. It runs eleven sentences. It calls his remarks corrosive. It says that a rabbi who reduces avodas Hashem to a transaction has forgotten the widow at the back of the room who has nothing to transact with. It says the board holds him to a standard he taught them. Marla reads it twice and puts it down and looks at him for a long moment.
“This is good,” she says.
“I know.”
“Do you agree with it?”
“Entirely. And I’ll say the opposite on Shabbos and mean that too. You people think a man has one position. A man has a portfolio.”
The statement runs Friday. Six hundred and forty people come Saturday, which is a record, and Grossbard opens by reading the board’s condemnation from the bimah in its entirety, and then he says, “That was written by me,” and the room comes apart, and Marla Feig, who has not laughed in shul since her husband died, laughs into her purse.
Bernie Klausner takes eleven days to die at Cedars in a room on the sixth floor with a view of a parking structure. He has a nephew in Portland who does not come. Grossbard is there for nine of the eleven days. He is there the night the nurses change shift twice and nobody else visits, and he sits in the vinyl chair with a Mishnah he does not open, and around three in the morning Bernie’s mouth goes dry and Grossbard swabs it with the little green sponge on a stick, and he does this every twenty minutes for four hours, and he says the Shema in Bernie’s ear at 6:40 with the light coming up gray over the parking structure, and then he goes home and showers and teaches his Wednesday class at nine.
Ezra Malik’s mother is a hospice nurse on that floor. She tells people. It gets around, the way things get around, and by Shabbos a woman named Adina Reiss who converted four years ago comes up to Grossbard at the kiddush with her eyes wet and says, “You sat with him for nine nights. That’s who you are. All the rest of it is a bit.”
Grossbard takes a piece of herring off the tray.
“They pay me,” he says.
“Rabbi.”
“One hundred and ninety thousand plus housing. That’s the number. A death in the community is a core deliverable. It’s in section two.”
Her face changes. He sees it change. He sees the thing he has just done to her and he does not enjoy it, which surprises him, and he puts the herring down.
“Adina. Sit for one second.” She sits. “You paid eleven thousand dollars in conversion fees, mikveh, tuition for the class, and you sold a car to do it. You are the only person at this kiddush who knows to the dollar what her Judaism cost. That makes you the most honest Jew in the building and it makes me the second. Everyone else here is running a play and calling it a soul.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
“You sat with him for nine nights.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
“Because they pay me,” he says, and then, after a moment, “and because I have never learned how to be somewhere else.”
Dina Grossbard, fifty-six, teaches fourth grade at Emek and has heard every word of this for twenty-six years. Tuesday night she is standing at the counter cutting a melon and he is telling her about the podcast in London that wants him in April, and she says, without turning around, “You’d have married me for free.”
“That’s slander.”
“I was nineteen and I had a Chevette with a hole in the floor and you followed me around Jerusalem for five months and nobody was paying you anything.”
“Deferred compensation.”
“Shelly.”
“There was equity. It vested.”
She cuts the melon. “You know what’s funny about you,” she says. “You tell everyone the truth about money so you never have to tell them the truth about anything else.”
He does not answer that. He carries the plate to the table. Later he tells the London podcast that his wife is the smartest person he knows and that he pays her nothing, which is the great scandal of his household, and the clip does four hundred thousand.
In March the board votes four to two to suspend his salary for sixty days pending a review of the contract. Adelman calls him at home to tell him. Grossbard says thank you for calling personally, and asks after Adelman’s father, who has a stent.
Saturday morning Grossbard comes out at 10:40 in the dead orthodontist’s suit.
The room has heard. The room has heard within eleven minutes of the vote, because this is a shul and not a submarine. Six hundred people watch him walk to the shtender and nobody breathes.
Ezra Malik stands at the west wall with his lips already moving.
Grossbard puts both hands on the wood.
“I have been informed,” he says, “that I am not currently being paid.”
He lets it sit longer than he needs to.
“You are all sitting there thinking you have caught me. You have not caught me. You have made a category error, and I want to walk you through it, because if you leave here today with a bad argument in your head I will have failed you as a teacher and that is also in section two.”
He holds up one finger.
“I said I would not learn Torah if I were not paid. I am paid. I am paid in six hundred faces doing exactly what your faces are doing right now, which is the highest-margin compensation available to a man in this economy. I am paid in Marla Feig coming this morning to watch me suffer. Hello, Marla. I am paid in knowing that Ezra Malik has the first two sentences already and will be doing me in his father’s jacket by nine tonight, and that a rabbi in Teaneck will have it in eleven paragraphs by Tuesday, and I want to say to that rabbi, in advance, that I have read all eleven of his paragraphs and that paragraph seven was strong.”
He opens the chumash.
“What is in dispute between me and the board is a payment schedule. Nobody in this building disagrees with me about the underlying theory. They disagree with me about saying it out loud on a Saturday, which is a disagreement about manners, and manners are what a community uses instead of thinking.”
He looks down at the page. He looks up.
“Ki Tisa,” he says. “They take off their gold. They bring it to Aharon. Everybody always asks why they built the calf. Wrong question. They had just been paid, in gold, on the way out of Egypt, and this is the first thing they do with a windfall, and I want to talk this morning about what a man buys when he suddenly has money and no idea who he is.”
He teaches for forty minutes. It is the best thing he has done in two years and about ninety people in the room know it.
Ezra Malik does it that night. The jacket, the hands, the pauses.
It does fourteen thousand. Nobody shares it. The comments are about the suit.