The Oven

The sixty days ran out in May and the money came back and Grossbard never mentioned it from the bimah, which disappointed everyone, including the board.
The Wednesday class meets at 7:30 in the room behind the coat racks that the architect drew as a bridal suite. Twenty six people. Three lawyers, a woman who does television business affairs, a periodontist, and two men in their seventies who have been learning for fifty years and know more than Grossbard does about a hundred things and less than he does about the thing he intends to do tonight. Adina Reiss sits in the front with a legal pad and four colors of pen.
He puts Bava Metzia 59b on the screen.
“The oven of Achnai,” he says. “Everybody here has heard a sermon on this. Hands.”
Nineteen hands.
“Right. And in every one of those sermons the story ends with God laughing. Nitzchuni banai. My children have defeated me. And the rabbi tells you this means the Torah belongs to us now, we’re the authors, isn’t that beautiful, please give to the building fund.” He clicks to the next slide. “The story does not end there. It runs another page and a half and it gets worse every line.”
He walks them through it. Rabbi Eliezer and the sages fight over an oven built in segments with sand packed between them. Eliezer brings every argument in the world and they don’t take it. He tells the carob tree to prove him right and the carob tree gets up and moves. You don’t bring proof from a carob tree. He tells the stream and the stream runs backward. You don’t bring proof from a stream. He tells the walls of the study hall and the walls start to come down, and Rabbi Yehoshua yells at the walls, and the walls stop halfway and stay leaning to this day out of respect for both parties, which Grossbard calls the funniest sentence in the Talmud and which gets a laugh.
Then the voice from heaven. The halacha follows Eliezer in every case.
Then Yehoshua stands up and says it is not in heaven.
“Now watch,” Grossbard says. “God laughs. Terrific. Everybody stops. Keep reading. They bring out everything Eliezer ever declared pure and they burn it. They take a vote and they put him under the ban. They send Akiva to tell him, and Akiva wears black and sits four cubits off, and Eliezer tears his clothes and sits down on the ground and cries. And the world takes a hit for it. A third of the olives, a third of the wheat, a third of the barley. Rabban Gamliel nearly drowns off the coast. And Eliezer’s wife, who happens to be Gamliel’s sister, spends the rest of her life keeping her husband’s face off the floor, because she knows if he ever gets all the way down and prays out of a broken heart her brother dies. One day a beggar comes to the door and she turns her head, and she comes back and he’s on the floor, and she says get up, you’ve killed my brother. And the shofar blows from Gamliel’s house.”
The room has stopped moving.
“So,” Grossbard says. “Ask me what it teaches.”
“What does it teach,” says Adina Reiss.
“That the text does not constrain you.” He gives it three seconds. “It can’t. It’s ink. It has no arms. Eliezer had the better argument. He had a tree, a river, a wall, and God on the record, and he lost, and he lost because the men in that room had been trained by other men in that room to hear certain moves as moves and everything else as noise, and a talking carob tree was noise. The Gemara doesn’t constrain you. Your rebbeim constrain you. Your chavrusa constrains you. The eleven people whose faces come up in your mind when you consider a lenient position constrain you.”
Barry Teitelbaum, sixty eight, forty five years of daf yomi, says, “Then it’s made up.”
“It’s made up by somebody.”
“So what’s the difference.”
“You’re not somebody,” Grossbard says. “That’s the difference and it’s the size of the ocean.”
Barry starts to answer and stops.
“And here’s where everybody goes wrong at this exact minute,” Grossbard says. “You hear that the constraint is human and you decide it must be soft. Go ask Rabbi Eliezer how soft it is. He was right. Heaven said so out loud in front of witnesses. They burned his things and cut him off and he sat on the ground for the rest of his life. The rabbis put that page in the book on purpose. They wanted you to know what they had done and what it cost, and then they wanted you to follow the majority anyway.”
Ezra Malik is not in this class. His cousin Yonatan is, and Yonatan has a phone.
The clip runs forty seconds and it is the forty seconds with the ink and the arms in it.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes about the denial of Torah min HaShamayim and reaches nine paragraphs before conceding he has watched only the clip. An outreach outfit in Jerusalem puts Grossbard’s face on a graphic with a crack down the middle. Two members quit the Barn and one rejoins inside a week because his daughter likes the youth minyan. Marla Feig calls the house, says one word, oven, and hangs up, which Grossbard takes as approval and which is approval.
Adina Reiss emails him at midnight with four questions in it, numbered. He answers all four before six.
Noam Perlstein, twenty nine, writes for a streaming show that has been renewed without a start date. He sat in the third row of the Wednesday class. He has a garage in Mar Vista with good light and a bimah his brother in law built out of reclaimed fir.
He calls it Achnai.
Nineteen people come the first Shabbos. The rule is that the community decides. The rule appears in the founding document, which is a Google Doc. There is no rabbi. There is a rotating facilitator. Noam tells a reporter from a Jewish website that they are taking Rabbi Grossbard’s teaching to its logical conclusion, and the reporter calls Grossbard for comment.
“Wonderful,” Grossbard says. “Beautiful. I give it to August.”
Week two they vote on korbanos. It carries nine to seven with three abstentions. Two of the seven don’t come back.
Week three a man moves to reconsider on the grounds that the vote happened before the late people arrived. The motion passes. They vote again. Korbanos loses.
Week four a woman named Jess asks who decided that a vote decides anything, and nobody at Achnai has an answer, because the only man who could have given her one is the man they left.
Week six they are eleven people and two of them are Noam’s parents.
Week eight it is a podcast.
The Kesslers come to the office on a Tuesday, which he does not take meetings on, and he takes the meeting.
Danny Kessler, thirty four, sells medical devices, carries his grandfather’s Hebrew name and his grandfather’s job at a bris, which is to stand there and be a kohen. Aviva Roth, thirty six, divorced four years, two boys at the day school, runs pediatric intake at a clinic in Culver City.
“We came because of the video,” Danny says.
“Everybody comes because of the video.”
“You said the text doesn’t constrain you.”
“I did.”
“So don’t be constrained. Marry us.”
Grossbard sits back.
“Say the rest. You’ve rehearsed it. Go.”
Aviva takes it. “A kohen can’t marry a divorcee. Nobody in this room believes Danny’s kohen status has been tracked accurately since Vilna. There’s no Temple. There’s no service. He has one job, which is to say twelve words at a bris and go first for an aliyah, and for that he loses me. And you stand up in front of six hundred people and tell them the law is a construction built by trained readers, and then you tell us the construction is a wall.”
“Every word of that is correct,” Grossbard says.
“Then do it.”
“No.”
Danny puts his hand flat on the desk. “You can’t say it’s all made up and then hide behind it.”
“I’m not hiding behind it. I’m standing inside it, and there’s a difference, and I’ll explain it once.” Grossbard leans in. “I told you the law gets made by somebody. You heard me say it gets made by anybody. Two different sentences. The somebody is a few thousand men over sixty generations plus about four hundred living people whose phone calls I take, and I am a rabbi because that room says I am. There’s no license from the state. There’s no exam. There’s a room, and the room lets me in.
“The afternoon I stand under your chuppah, the room stops letting me in. Hear the next part. It doesn’t make me a rebel. It makes me a man with opinions. My paper is worth nothing the minute I write on it whatever I like. So what would you be buying? A ceremony from a guy who thinks it’s fine. You can get that downtown and the parking’s better.”
Aviva does not cry, which he notes.
“There are four men in this city who’ll do your wedding,” he says. “Two of them are serious people. Rabbi Cohen in Mar Vista will do it and he’ll do it well and he’ll learn with your boys after. I’ll write the number down. I’ll come. I’ll dance. I won’t stand under it.”
“So you’re a coward with a theory,” Danny says.
“Yes.”
Nobody says anything for a while.
“That’s it? You won’t fight me on that?”
“You’ve had a hard month and you came in here to hit somebody and I’d rather it was me than her.” Grossbard writes the number on the back of a card. “Also it’s true. I’ve been a coward about eleven things in thirty years and this is number four. Take the card.”
Aviva takes the card.
The wedding is in October at a place in Malibu where the lawn runs down to nothing. Rabbi Cohen does it and does it beautifully. Two hundred people come.
At the dancing Grossbard goes in. Fifty nine years old, built like a refrigerator, and he goes to the middle and takes Danny Kessler by both hands and they go around until Danny’s yarmulke comes off, and Grossbard picks it up and sets it back on Danny’s head with both hands and holds it there a second and says something nobody hears.
A cousin films eleven seconds.
The clip does nine hundred thousand.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes that Grossbard has shown his hand at last, that the dancing endorses what he pretended to refuse, and that the refusal was theater. A shul in Santa Monica posts it with a caption about love winning. Josh Adelman forwards it to the board with a note reading legal exposure? Noam Perlstein, whose podcast has four hundred and eighty listeners, does eighteen minutes arguing that Grossbard is the most consistent man in Los Angeles and that nobody can see it, and it is the best episode he will ever record and nothing comes of it. Adina Reiss watches it twice, writes down one question, and saves it for Wednesday. Aviva’s mother, who has hated rabbis for nine years, watches it forty times.
Six readings. One video.
Grossbard sits at the kitchen table on a Sunday night going through the comments while Dina does the crossword her mother in law taught her to fold into eighths.
“You’re giving this to the class,” she says.
“Wednesday.”
“You’re going to make them feel stupid.”
“They’ll get there on their own. I’ll be in the room when it happens.”
He plays the eleven seconds again. He is in it for four of them. He thinks he looks heavy.