Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard tells the Aunt Tilly story in September and it kills.
He tells it at the Wednesday class, twenty-six people on folding chairs in the back room of the Barn, the coffee urn ticking, the good chairs taken by the four women who arrive at seven for a class that starts at seven thirty. He tells it the way he tells everything, standing, no notes, one hand in his pocket.
“Stanley Fish (b. 1938). Literary critic. He has a graduate student at Johns Hopkins who tells him she can walk into any English class in the country and get an A without reading the book. She has four or five moves. Nature against culture. Myth. The poem is secretly about writing the poem. The narrator is displacing his own fears onto the material. Any book. Any professor. It works.”
He waits.
“And then Fish says: there is one thing she cannot do. She cannot stand up and say the meaning of this poem was given to her by the ghost of her Aunt Tilly.”
The room laughs. Barry Teitelbaum laughs with his head back. Michael Danziger says something to the man next to him about a client.
“Why not?” Grossbard says. “Not because it’s false. Nobody at Hopkins has disproved Aunt Tilly. They’ve never looked into it. It’s because there’s no move to make after it. If I say the text is displacing anxiety, you can say it isn’t, and we have a class. If I say Aunt Tilly told me, we have nothing to do for the next fifty minutes but look at each other.”
Adina Reiss puts up a hand. “So it’s a rule of the game.”
“It’s the game,” Grossbard says. “There’s no game underneath it. The rules are the only thing there is.”
They love this. It’s the kind of thing they come for. Three people repeat it that week at their offices, and a man at the early minyan tells Grossbard on Thursday that he explained it to his son-in-law, who works at a studio, and the son-in-law said it explains his entire industry.
In November they learn Chayei Sarah.
Grossbard runs the November classes on the parsha because attendance holds and because the material does the work for him. Sarah dies at the top of the portion. The Akedah ends the portion before it. Abraham comes from Beersheba to mourn her and buys a field with a cave in it for four hundred silver shekels from a man who offers it to him free three times and takes the money anyway.
He gives them ten minutes and asks who has something.
Barry Teitelbaum has something. Barry has been doing daf yomi for forty-five years and holds the Artscroll on his knees with three fingers in it. He gives them the Ramban on the burial, the Da’as Zekeinim on the juxtaposition, and the question of why the Torah spends twenty verses on a real estate closing. He is careful. He names his sources and he stops when he is done. The room nods. This is a legal move and it lands, and two people write down the Da’as Zekeinim to look up.
Michael Danziger has something. Danziger is a CPA with six people under him and he reads everything as a transaction. He walks them through Ephron the Hittite, the offer, the refusal, the counteroffer, the phrase about four hundred shekels being nothing between friends. He says the parsha is about acquiring title in a country where you have no standing. He says the servant’s mission at the end is the same deal in a different market. He says the word for money appears more than the word for grief.
The room likes this. Marla Feig says out loud that she has read it thirty times and never seen it.
Adina Reiss has something. Adina converted in 2016 and beats everyone in the room, and knows it, and works to conceal it, and fails. She counts verses. The servant at the well gets sixty-seven verses and repeats his own story to Rebecca’s family at full length so the reader hears it twice. Sarah, at whose death the parsha opens and after whom it is named, does not speak. She has no line anywhere in the portion that bears her name. Adina says the subject of the parsha is what the narrator declines to say, and that the length of the servant’s speech is the measure of the silence it sits next to.
Grossbard lets that one breathe. “Say the last part again.”
She says it again.
Sarit Menkin’s daughter, home from Barnard, has something. She says the text fragments and relocates its own dread, that Isaac is missing from the Akedah’s return and missing from his own courtship, that the servant does the son’s work because the son cannot be shown. She says the word she uses is displacement. Two men in the back go still in the way men do when they have decided not to say anything. Grossbard says that’s a reading and asks her what evidence would count against it, and she says nothing would, and he says good, that’s the trouble with it, and she takes this well and the room relaxes.
Yehuda Ostreicher has something. Yehuda is twenty-three and back from a year in Jerusalem and says the real question is what each of us is willing to give up for Hashem, and whether we would walk our own son up the mountain.
The room finds this corny and lets it stand. Nobody looks at the floor. Grossbard says amen and moves on. It costs nothing.
Five readings. Five acceptances. Grossbard has been doing this since 1998 and can feel the room accept a move the way a driver feels a gear catch.
Then Ronit Farkas puts up her hand.
Ronit Farkas is sixty-one. She has come to the Wednesday class for two years and has never spoken. She sits in the fourth row on the aisle with a Koren she bought in Jerusalem after her husband Mickey died in 2019, and she keeps a pen in the gutter of it and never writes anything down. Grossbard has buried three people from her family. He knows her mother’s Hebrew name from memory.
He calls on her and something in his chest goes up, because she has never once done this.
“Sarah knew,” she says.
“Knew what.”
“That he was taking Isaac. She knew before they left. She let him go.”
Barry Teitelbaum turns halfway in his chair.
“That’s a strong reading,” Grossbard says. “Where are you getting it?”
“My aunt Fradl. She died in 2004. She came to me three nights in a row in September and she told me. She said, Ronit, the mother knew. She said that’s why the two of them never live in the same place again after the mountain. She said Sarah’s silence is the loudest thing in the book and I should stop being afraid of mine.”
Twenty-six people look at the space eleven inches in front of their own shoes. Danziger examines his phone under the table. Yehuda Ostreicher, who nine minutes ago asked them all to imagine walking a son up a mountain, has developed an interest in the coffee urn. Adina Reiss looks at Grossbard, and Grossbard watches her decide not to help.
Ronit sits with her hand still half up, as though the sentence had not finished leaving her.
Her reading is better than four of the five that preceded it. Grossbard knows this inside two seconds. The midrash has Satan going to Sarah with the news and her soul departing. The text puts her death against the Akedah with nothing in between. Abraham comes from somewhere else to bury her, and after Moriah the father and the son are never in a verse together again. Ronit has read the same silence Adina read and gone further into it, and she has done it with a source that ends the conversation.
He could rescue her. He has the material. He has Joseph Karo (1488-1575), who wrote the Shulchan Aruch and was taught at night by an angel he recorded in a diary. He has Rav Yaakov of Marvege in the thirteenth century, who put his halachic questions to heaven and got answers back and published them, and rishonim who cited him. He has the Ari. Four hundred years of men who made exactly Ronit Farkas’s move and won with it.
He does not use it. He works out why later, in the car, and it takes him the length of Pico from Robertson to Doheny.
Karo’s angel worked because other men had angels. The move was in circulation. Any one of them could go home and try it. Aunt Fradl belongs to Ronit and to nobody else in that room.
He says: “Six readings tonight. Five of them got in. One of them is the best one and it got nothing, and every person here knows which is which, and I want you to sit with what just happened, because I taught it to you.”
He tells them he gave the Achnai drasha three years ago, the one that traveled, where the walls lean and the stream runs backward and the voice comes out of heaven for Rabbi Eliezer and the sages tell heaven it has no vote. He tells them they applauded it. He tells them they applauded a story about a room refusing a message from above and that they have now run the procedure on a widow in the fourth row.
“You did it in silence, in under four seconds, and not one of you had to be rude.”
Ronit Farkas has her coat over her arm before he finishes.
The recording runs eight minutes. A woman recorded it for her husband, who had a work thing. By Sunday it is in Teaneck.
Ezra Malik, who has an agent now, does the whole class in the parking lot behind the pizza place for eleven kids, all six voices, including Ronit, and stops doing Ronit after the second time because it does not get a laugh and Ezra is a professional.
The rabbi in Teaneck writes it up on the following Thursday. He calls it “The Widow in the Fourth Row.” He writes that a certain West Coast pulpit has become a place where a grieving woman is corrected for the crime of hearing her aunt, and that the tradition of Israel has always had room for the dream, and he cites Karo and Marvege, the two sources Grossbard had loaded and left in the chamber.
Marla Feig calls the house at 7:40 in the morning.
“He’s not wrong,” Grossbard says.
“Rabbi.”
“He’s running a routine. Outrage on behalf of a woman he’s never met, using sources he looked up on Wednesday. It’s a good routine. It’s the best routine in the business right now. He’ll get four hundred shares and the widow gets nothing out of it, and if he had been in that room he’d have looked at his shoes with the rest of them.”
“Then say that.”
“I can’t say that. There’s no move after it.”
In the coat room on Shabbos afternoon Zalman Fried asks him what he is going to do, and Grossbard says he is going to go over there.
He goes on a Tuesday, which costs him, because Tuesday is his.
Ronit Farkas gives him coffee in a cup with a saucer and they sit for forty minutes and talk about Mickey, and about her son in Sacramento, and about the noise the neighbor’s gate makes. She has the Koren on the side table with the pen still in the gutter.
At the door she asks him.
“Was she wrong? My aunt.”
“I have no way to check,” Grossbard says. “I run a room, and a room can only take up what the next person in it can pick up and carry, and nobody in that room can carry your aunt.”
“So it’s the room.”
“It’s the room. It was always the room. Every yes you heard that night was the room and so was your no.”
She stands there with her hand on the door.
“Sarah knew,” she says.
“I think she did too,” Grossbard says.
He is on the 10 at Overland when he hears himself deliver the first line of it from the bimah, and by La Cienega he has the shape of the drasha, and the Fish story goes in the front and the widow goes in the middle and Karo and Marvege close it out, and he tells himself he will not give it.
He gives it in January. It goes eleven minutes and the room is silent in the good way and Ezra Malik memorizes the whole thing standing at the back with his arms folded and does it in the parking lot on Sunday in his father’s gray sport coat.
Ronit Farkas is not there. She has been going Friday nights to the young rabbi in Culver City since the week before Chanukah, where she has not spoken either.
