Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard first hears the name in the checkout line at the market on Pico, from a woman who has been at the Barn eleven years and who puts her hand on his forearm to tell him that her daughter has started going to a young rabbi in Culver City and that he is a beautiful person.
“Beautiful,” Grossbard says.
“You should meet him. You’d love him.”
“I’d eat him.”
“Rabbi.”
By November he has heard the name forty times.
Rabbi Yoni Belfer, thirty four, Teaneck by way of the Gush, six foot two, runs the loop at Cheviot Hills four mornings a week, and has a full head of hair that he does not appear to know about. He and his wife Shira started Ahavas Reim in a storefront on Washington between a pilates studio and a shop that sells CBD chews for dogs. Sixty families now. Young ones, priced out of Pico, pushing strollers eleven blocks each way because there is nowhere closer.
He takes forty thousand dollars a year. He mentions this only when asked, and he is asked constantly.
He cried on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in front of two hundred people, in the middle of his own drasha, about his grandfather, and he did not apologize for it or turn it into a joke, and the room loved him. Nobody at the Barn has ever seen Grossbard’s face do anything he did not schedule.
The rabbi in Teaneck publishes a piece in December called The Rabbi We Deserve. It does not name Grossbard once and it is about nothing else. He was Belfer’s rabbi growing up. He has found his weapon and he intends to use it for a decade.
Belfer emails Grossbard the day it runs. Subject line: I’m sorry. Body: I didn’t know he was writing that, I asked him to take it down, he won’t, and I wanted you to hear it from me. Grossbard reads it twice and forwards it to nobody, which for him is an act of enormous restraint.
Belfer comes to the Wednesday class in January and sits in the back with his coat on.
Grossbard is doing the first mishnah in Kiddushin, and he has the room where he wants it, and at the end Belfer raises his hand and asks a question that is earnest and about half a question. Barry Teitelbaum turns around in his chair to watch what happens next.
What happens next is that Grossbard takes the question seriously for four minutes, finds the good version of it, gives Belfer the credit for the good version, and waves off two better questions from the front row to stay with it.
Adina Reiss writes one word on her legal pad and underlines it.
They go for coffee afterward at the place on Robertson that stays open, and Grossbard runs the bit at him for twenty minutes, because he cannot help it and because he wants to see what the kid does with it. Section two. The rate card. The forty thousand is a salary, Yoni, it gets paid in being the man who takes forty thousand, and every person who tells you they admire it has just made a deposit.
Belfer stirs his coffee.
“You sat with Bernie Klausner for nine nights,” he says.
“They pay me.”
“Okay,” Belfer says.
Grossbard waits for the rest. There is no rest. Belfer drinks his coffee and asks about the eruv, because Culver City doesn’t have one and he is about to spend four years getting one, and he wants to know who at the city Grossbard called.
Nobody has ever done that. Everyone argues. Thirty years of people arguing, and this one says okay and moves on, and Grossbard drives home on Robertson at eleven at night having decided that he likes him, which is inconvenient.
The Journal runs the piece in February. Two Rabbis, Two Los Angeleses. A photograph of Belfer in a folding chair in the storefront holding one of his kids, and a photograph of Grossbard at the bimah with his mouth open. Ezra Malik, seventeen, starts doing Belfer along with Grossbard, and the Belfer is warm and gentle and outperforms the Grossbard, and Ezra’s agent tells him to lean into the Belfer.
At the federation panel in March they put the two of them on a stage with a moderator from a think tank, and four hundred people buy tickets, and every one of them has come to watch Grossbard eat him.
He could do it in a sentence. He has the sentence by the eleven minute mark, when Belfer says something about learning for its own sake with three holes in it, and the sentence would be the funniest thing said in Los Angeles that year, and half that room would tell the story for twenty years.
He sets him up instead. He asks about the strollers on Washington. He gets Belfer talking about a family with a son in a wheelchair who moved from Beverlywood so they could walk to a shul on the flat, and Belfer tells it without weeping and without performing, and by the end of it four hundred people have forgotten there was supposed to be a fight.
Marla Feig finds Grossbard by the coat check.
“You had him.”
“I had him.”
“Why.”
“I liked what he said about the wheelchair.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“No,” Grossbard says. “It isn’t.”
Belfer calls the house in June. Not the office. The house, at nine at night, which is how Grossbard knows.
They meet at the Coffee Bean on Pico at 6:30 in the morning because that is when Belfer is up. Grossbard has not been awake at 6:30 without a levaya in four years.
Beth Yeshurun in Hancock Park has offered Belfer the pulpit. Four hundred families, old money, older building, a shul that has buried three rabbis and outlived two more. A hundred and sixty five thousand plus the house on Detroit Street. They want an answer in three weeks.
“Shira’s due in October,” Belfer says. “The landlord on Berryman is selling. Four kids, forty thousand dollars, and my father in law has paid the day school tuition for two years and calls it a gift.”
“How much of it does he tell people.”
“All of it,” Belfer says, and looks at the table.
Grossbard lets it sit.
“So take it.”
“I built Ahavas Reim out of nothing. Sixty families. Eleven of them moved to Culver City because I told them to. I told the Kaufmans to buy on Berryman, in my kitchen, to their faces.” He turns his cup around. “I stood up on Rosh Hashanah and said things about what a shul is, and two hundred people heard me say it. If I go to Hancock Park for money, every one of those things becomes something I said before I got a better offer.”
“Correct.”
“So tell me what to do.”
“You want me to tell you what to do.”
“I want the truth,” Belfer says. “You’re the only man in this city who gives it. That’s why I’m sitting here at six thirty in the morning.”
Grossbard looks at him a long time.
Here is the truth, and it takes eleven seconds. The forty thousand is the best asset the kid owns and he does not know he owns it. Every dollar he leaves on the table comes back at four to one in the coin he spends, which is being the rabbi who leaves it. He has built a following out of a renunciation he believes is not a strategy, and the belief is what makes it work, because a man performing humility gets found out in ten months and Belfer has never performed anything in his life. He should take the money and stop pricing his soul in a currency his children cannot eat. And by fifty, if he stays, he will hate those sixty families for what they let him do to his own kids, and he will not know that is what he feels, and it will come out sideways at his wife.
A minute. It would take a minute to say.
It would also take the man apart, because what comes out the other end of that minute is a rabbi who knows he has been running a play, and Belfer running a play he can see is worth nothing to anyone, starting with the wheelchair family on Washington, who are getting the real article this morning for free.
“Yoni. Look at me.”
“I’m looking at you.”
“Ahavas Reim doesn’t need you anymore. Nobody’s told you that. You built it and it’s built. Sixty families who walk eleven blocks will walk eleven blocks whether you stand there or not, and if you stay ten more years the only thing that changes is that they get used to you.” He leans in. “Beth Yeshurun has four hundred families and three dead rabbis and nobody home. Nobody. They’ve run on a building and a cantor since 2009. Four hundred people sitting in the dark in a beautiful room on Detroit Street. That’s your wheelchair family. There’s four hundred of them and they’ve been waiting seventeen years.”
Belfer stares at him.
“You think I should go for them.”
“I think you’re the only man in this city who’d go for them.”
Belfer puts both hands over his face. When he takes them down his eyes are wet and he does not apologize.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Grossbard drives to the Barn and sits in the lot six or seven minutes before he goes in.
Dina asks that night how the coffee went.
“I lied to a rabbi.”
“Which part was the lie.”
“None of the parts. Every sentence was true.” He hangs up his jacket. “The arrangement was the lie.”
“Did it help him?”
“It’ll hold for about fifteen years.”
“Then it’s fine,” Dina says, and goes back to the crossword.
Belfer takes Beth Yeshurun in July. He tells Ahavas Reim from the bimah on a Shabbos morning in a storefront on Washington with the air conditioning failing, and he says that a community that can only exist while he stands in the middle of it was never a community, and that there are four hundred people on Detroit Street who have sat in the dark since 2009, and he says it the way he says everything, like a man who has never had a second thought in his life.
Grossbard stands at the back by the door and listens to his own argument come out of a better looking man’s mouth and watches two hundred people receive it as revelation.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes that Belfer has been called to a greater vineyard. Ezra Malik does the drasha that night and it goes to two million, and Belfer’s version becomes the version, and it will be quoted at Belfer’s funeral.
He is very good at Beth Yeshurun. Better than anyone expected, better than Grossbard expected, and Grossbard expected a great deal.
Three years in, at a bar mitzvah kiddush in the social hall on Detroit Street, Rabbi Yoni Belfer tells four hundred people that nobody in the room does one single thing for free, himself first, and gets a big laugh.
He does not know where he got it.
