The first email comes to the office from an assistant in New York and Devorah at the front desk deletes it as a scam.
The second comes nine days later from a manager, with a phone number, and Devorah walks it back to Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard’s office and stands there while he reads it.
Roxane is sixty four. One name for forty one years, nine number ones, three reinventions, a Vatican denunciation in 1989, and a hip replacement she has never confirmed. Her husband is Teodor Wick, forty one, a Danish director with two films nobody saw and one everybody did. Neither of them is Jewish. She has been photographed in a red string twice, in 2004 and 2011, and has said in an interview that she got taken by a place on Robertson that charged her forty thousand dollars for what turned out to be a subscription.
She heard about the Thursday class from Dahlia Ravitch, who sat in the last row of the Barn one Shabbos in March and has told four people about it since.
The Thursday class meets at nine at night in the room behind the coat racks. Nine men and two women. Six years running. Two of those years went to Tomer Devorah and they are now in the third gate of Nefesh HaChaim and moving at about a page a month. Barry Teitelbaum is in it. Adina Reiss is in it and has been for four years and asks the hardest question of any night about once a month. Nobody has ever recorded it. Nobody has ever written about it. It has a reputation anyway, which is how these things go.
Grossbard does not teach the material the way it gets taught in Los Angeles. He opens most years by saying that ninety percent of what is sold under the name in this city is decoration, that the light bulbs and the water bottles and the strings are a business, and that the actual literature is a technical vocabulary for the interior of a person, written by men who were terrified of it, and that anybody looking for a mood should go somewhere else and be happier.
The manager’s email offers to fly him anywhere. It offers a private class at the house in Bel Air, weekly, at a number the manager describes as not an issue.
Grossbard calls the number himself on a Tuesday, which tells you something.
He gets Roxane. She is direct and funny and better read than he expects and she does not do the thing where a famous person is charming at you. She asks four questions about Nefesh HaChaim, two of which are good.
“So can I come.”
“No.”
There is a pause on the line.
“Can I ask why.”
“You can, and I’d rather do it in a room than on a phone. Come to the parsha class. Wednesdays, seven thirty, ninety people, your husband too. Anybody can come to that one. And then when you’ve come a few times we’ll sit down and I’ll tell you the real answer, and if you decide I’m a bigot you’ll be in good company.”
She comes the following Wednesday.
The board finds out in six days.
Josh Adelman calls it the single largest institutional opportunity in the history of the shul. A member of the finance committee uses the word footprint. Two people separately float the idea of a documentary. The kiruv outfit in Jerusalem sends Grossbard a warm letter for the first time in three years suggesting a joint program.
Marla Feig, eighty one, says one sentence at the November meeting.
“He’s not going to do it, and none of you have been paying attention for twenty years.”
The refusal gets out in January and it gets out wrong.
A gossip site runs it as the rabbi who threw out a pop star. The rabbi in Teaneck writes that Grossbard has finally found a boundary and that it took a woman with a Vatican denunciation to locate it. A columnist in New York writes eight hundred words about Jewish exclusivity and quotes a professor at a divinity school who has never met anybody involved. Adina Reiss gets asked about it at work by two people who do not know she is in the class.
Grossbard says nothing publicly for five weeks.
In February Roxane’s foundation gives six hundred thousand dollars to the building fund.
He takes it. He thanks her by name from the bimah on a Shabbos morning in front of six hundred people and states the amount out loud, which the development chair has begged him not to do, and says that the money will replace the roof over the west wall and the HVAC and that anyone who wants to see the invoices can come to the office.
At the kiddush a man asks him how he can take her money and keep her out of the class.
“Because they’re two different transactions and I’m the only man in this building who knows the difference,” Grossbard says, and takes a piece of herring.
They sit down in March in his office. Just the two of them. Wick waits in the car and reads.
“All right,” she says. “The real answer.”
“There’s a traditional answer first and I’ll give it to you fast because it isn’t mine. You’re supposed to be forty, married, and full of shas and poskim before anybody lets you near this. I don’t hold by that. I’ve got a woman in there who’s thirty six and knows more than three of the men.”
“So it’s that I’m not Jewish.”
“That’s part of it and it isn’t the part that decides it.” He turns his chair. “Here’s what decides it. That class is eleven people who have been keeping this practice their whole adult lives and arguing with each other for six years. The material is a commentary. It doesn’t stand up by itself. It’s a set of notes on what happens inside a person who davens three times a day for thirty years and it means almost nothing to somebody who doesn’t. That’s the first thing.
“The second thing is that if you walk through that door on a Thursday night, my class stops existing that night and never comes back. Not because you’d do anything. Because nine men who’ve been fighting about a page a month for six years will spend the hour being interesting. Barry Teitelbaum will make a joke he’s been saving since 1991. Everybody will listen to themselves talk. I’ll do it too, and I’ll be the worst one, and I’ll know I’m doing it and I won’t be able to stop.”
Roxane sits back.
“I’ve been doing that to rooms since I was twenty two,” she says.
“I know you have.”
“Nobody’s ever told me. Forty years. People change and I watch them change and I’ve never once had a person say the sentence out loud.”
“Now you have.”
She looks out the window for a while. There is a parking structure out the window.
“So what do I get.”
“You get ten minutes right now for free and then you’re going to be annoyed with me, because the ten minutes is most of it.”
He takes Nefesh HaChaim off the shelf and does not open it.
“Before anything, there was only Him, and there was no room for a world. Not no space. No room. So He contracted. He withdrew from a point inside Himself, and the withdrawal made a vacancy, and everything that exists got made inside the vacancy. That’s tzimtzum. Every serious thing I know about people is in it.
“You cannot make room for another person by adding. There is no amount of adding that does it. A father who wants his son to become somebody has to get smaller in the house, and most men can’t, so they fill it and call the filling love and then wonder why the boy comes out flat. A man who marries and keeps all of himself ends up with a wife who works for him. A teacher who is brilliant every single week produces students who can quote him.
“And the withdrawal has to be real. That’s the part nobody wants. It isn’t a way of appearing modest. You have to take yourself out of a place you were occupying and not go back in for it, and it feels like dying, because a piece of you does die in there, and that is the price of another person existing.
“Then the second half, which is the reason the book is honest. The vacancy He made is a place where He isn’t. That’s where everything goes wrong. Every broken thing in the world is in the room He left. He knew that when He did it. He did it anyway.”
Roxane does not say anything for a long moment.
“Okay,” she says.
“That’s the class.”
“That’s the class.”
“There’s four hundred more pages and they’re all footnotes to that.”
She comes to the parsha class on Wednesdays for a year and two months. Ninety people in the room and by the fourth week nobody turns around. She sits on the left side, sixth row, next to a retired pharmacist named Yaffa who does not know who she is and who has become her friend. Wick comes about half the time and takes notes on paper.
She asks maybe nine questions in fourteen months. Two of them are the best question asked that night.
In May she stops him in the parking lot after class.
“Can I ask you something.”
“Yes.”
“The tzimtzum. The getting smaller.” She has her keys in her hand. “Do you do it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Grossbard stands there in the lot with the light over the door buzzing.
“I don’t know what’s under there,” he says.
She nods and gets in the car and drives out onto Pico, and he stands there a while longer before he goes back in to lock up.
