Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard does forty of these between 8:20 and ten o’clock on erev Rosh Hashanah, at a folding table in the back room of the Barn, with the coffee urn going and a laminated card that has been on that table since 2011 and has a ring on it from somebody’s cup.
The procedure takes three men. A man stands in front of them and reads off the card and says he regrets his vows, and the three of them say mutar lach, mutar lach, mutar lach, and he is released. Then he sits down and becomes one of the three for the next man. The released do the releasing. Barry Teitelbaum has a problem with how loose this gets by 9:15, when the third chair is whoever came back from the bathroom, and he has said so for eleven years, and every year Grossbard tells him the halacha does not require a genius in that chair, it requires a body that understands what a vow is.
Zalman Fried takes the left seat at 8:20 and does not get up. He is not on the schedule. He has never been on the schedule.
Michael Danziger is fourth in line and does it in forty seconds. He reads at the speed of a man initialing a lease.
“You regret them,” Grossbard says.
“Deeply.”
“You have no idea what you’re regretting.”
“That’s why it’s deep,” Danziger says, and Grossbard gives him the three words and Danziger is out the door with a coffee.
This is most of it. Men come in because their fathers came in, and they read the card, and the card covers vows they don’t remember making and customs they took on twice and are now stuck with under a rule about repetition that none of them could state. A man who has bentsched from the same laminated card for six years has, by one opinion, obligated himself for life. The procedure exists so he can stop without it counting as an abandonment.
Between petitioners Grossbard talks to Barry, because Grossbard talks.
“Look at what this is. Somebody sat down and looked at us and concluded we make promises we can’t fund. Not once. As a species, on a schedule, every year. So they built a window. And then ten days later, on Kol Nidrei, they annul next year’s before you’ve opened your mouth. They discharge a debt you have not yet been stupid enough to take on.”
“There’s a machlokes about that,” Barry says.
“There’s a machlokes about everything and we say it three times anyway with the aron open and the room standing.”
At 9:40 Danny Perlmuter comes in.
Perlmuter is fifty-one and sells commercial liability out of an office on Olympic with his name second on the door. He is at the 6:20 minyan every morning. Grossbard has seen him there for five and a half years and has thought about him maybe four times, which is the honest number.
He does not pick up the card.
“I need to get out of something.”
“Sit down,” Grossbard says.
“I’d rather stand.”
Barry slides the card toward him. Perlmuter puts two fingers on it and moves it back.
“March of 2021,” he says. “Elana was on the sixth floor and they had her on the vent and they weren’t letting anybody up. There was a line of tape on the floor by the elevators and a girl in a chair with a clipboard, and that was as far as anyone got. I stood at that line and I made a neder. Out loud. I said the words. Three tefillos a day with a minyan for the rest of my life.”
Barry stops moving.
“She lived,” Grossbard says.
“She lived. Eleven days later she was breathing on her own and in May she was home and in September she was back at work, and she has been fine for five years, and I have not missed a minyan since March 14, 2021.”
“Not one.”
“I missed my daughter’s meet in Fresno. I did mincha in a parking structure at a wedding in Palm Desert with two waiters and a valet and it wasn’t ten and I stood there until it was. My father died in Chicago in 2023 and I found a minyan the morning of the funeral and the morning after. I did it in Cabo. I found a Chabad in Cabo.”
“How long is the drive from your house to the 6:20?”
“Nine minutes. Fourteen if the light at Beverwil is out.”
“And you have done it two thousand times.”
“Two thousand and eleven,” Perlmuter says. “I keep the count. I don’t want to keep the count. I keep it.”
Zalman Fried has not moved and has not looked away from him.
“Say what you want,” Grossbard says.
“I want out. I want to sleep on a Sunday. I want to go to Fresno.” He stops and starts again in a different voice. “Elana doesn’t know about it. She has never known about it. She thinks I came out of that hospital and got frum in a way she didn’t order and doesn’t like, and she has been polite about it for five years, and last month she asked me if I was happy, and she wasn’t asking about the minyan. She doesn’t know she’s the reason. I never told her, because if I tell her she’ll say stop, and if I stop because my wife said stop, then what was it.”
Barry Teitelbaum goes to work because that is who Barry is and because somebody at that table has to.
“You need charata me’ikara,” he says. “Regret from the beginning. You have to be able to say that had you understood the matter fully at the time, you never would have made it. Do you say that?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see a release.”
“I’d make it again,” Perlmuter says. “Standing right there at that tape, tomorrow, with what I know now, I’d make the same neder. That’s the problem, isn’t it.”
“That’s the problem,” Barry says.
Grossbard sits back.
“There’s a second problem,” he says. “Yiftach.”
Barry knows where this is going and lets him have it.
“Yiftach goes out to fight and he vows that whatever comes out of the door of his house will go up as an offering, and his daughter comes out of the door. And the tradition looks at this and does not say he was trapped. It says the release was available in the next room. Pinchas was alive. Yiftach could have walked to him and been let out of it in four minutes. And Pinchas thought a judge in Israel should come to him, and Yiftach thought a kohen should come to a judge, and neither man walked, and a girl died of two men’s dignity.”
“That’s aggadah,” Barry says.
“It’s aggadah with a warrant on it. The lesson they drew is that the man who will not go and ask is the one who kills somebody. Perlmuter walked in here. That’s the part Yiftach didn’t do.”
“He still needs an opening.”
“I know what he needs.”
Grossbard turns his chair to face Perlmuter square, which he does about six times a year.
“When you said it at the tape, what did you think you were buying?”
“Her.”
“For how much?”
“Everything. Anything.”
“No. Listen to the question. At that line, on that day, did it enter your mind that you were buying her eleven days on a vent and five years and then a marriage where she sits across from a man who leaves the house at six and won’t tell her why? Did you price that in, or did you think you were buying her and you would still be there when she came home?”
Perlmuter’s mouth goes and nothing comes out of it.
“Because if the second one, then the neder you made and the neder you have been paying are two different instruments, and I can open that.”
“He didn’t say he regrets it,” Barry says.
“He regrets the form. He doesn’t regret the intention. He’s allowed to have those in separate hands and I’ll take the responsibility for saying so.”
Barry sits with it for a while. He is not a soft man and he is not a cruel one and he has been doing daf yomi since 1981.
“Then there’s the wife,” he says. “A vow that touches another person can’t be undone without her in the room. If this neder was made for her, she has an interest in it.”
“It was made to Heaven,” Grossbard says. “She’s the subject. She’s not the counterparty.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It’s correct. It happens to also be convenient. Write in the minutes that the rabbi ruled it.”
There are no minutes. Barry writes nothing.
They release him.
Perlmuter reads the card in a voice that goes at the third line, and the three of them say mutar lach three times, and Zalman Fried says it with the other two, and it is over in under two minutes.
He stands there.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“You’re not supposed to,” Grossbard says. “It isn’t a sacrament. It’s a discharge. The bank does not weep when it releases the lien.”
“So if she gets sick again.”
And here is where Grossbard could take the fee. The room is his, the man is open, and there are eleven sentences available that would make Danny Perlmuter feel that a professional has handled this and that the accounts are in order.
“She might get sick again,” he says. “She might get sick again on Thursday. It will have nothing to do with the 6:20 and nothing to do with this table. You did not hold your wife’s lungs open for five years with an alarm clock. You are not that strong and neither is anybody, and the reason the tradition built this table in the back of a room with a bad urn on it is that men keep thinking they are.”
“Then what did I do for five years?”
“You kept your word. That’s not nothing. It’s just not medicine.”
He is at the 6:20 the next morning. Grossbard sees him from the bimah and does not react.
He is there the morning after that, and through Sukkos, and into November, and Grossbard stops watching for it around the second week of Cheshvan.
Elana Perlmuter finds out in December. Danny tells her in the car coming back from a dinner in Encino, all of it, the tape on the floor, the words, the count, the three men at the folding table on erev Rosh Hashanah, and he tells it as good news, because he has been released and he has stayed and now it is a gift he is giving her.
She does not take it as good news. She takes five years of a man leaving the house in the dark and no vote in any of it, and a beis din of three men in a back room she has never seen deciding what she had standing to be told. She is right about the standing. Grossbard, when he hears it in January from Marla Feig, who has it from her sister-in-law, says out loud that she is right and that he ruled it the other way and that he’d rule it the same way in September.
Then he goes and sits in the coat room, which is the only room in the building with no chairs and no windows and where he goes when the answer he gave is the answer he wanted.
Zalman Fried comes in for his coat at ten past five.
“You took the left seat at 8:20,” Grossbard says. “You’ve taken it every year since I’ve been here. You’ve never once read the card.”
Zalman puts his coat on and gets the sleeve on the second try.
“1994,” he says.
He does not say anything else. He does taharas on Tuesdays and Thursdays and whenever the phone goes at night, and he has done it for thirty-two years, and Grossbard knows now what it started as, and knows the man has sat at that table forty times a year for three decades saying mutar lach to other men and has never asked for it himself.
“You could get out of it,” Grossbard says. “I’d sit. I’d get Barry. Four minutes.”
“I know,” Zalman says, and goes home.
Ten days later the room is full and the aron is open and Grossbard stands up front with a sefer Torah in his arms and the shul says Kol Nidrei three times, low, then louder, then loud. All vows and prohibitions and oaths and bans, from this Yom Kippur until the next one. Annulled before anybody makes them. The tradition, having watched us for a long time, declines to wait and see.
Danny Perlmuter is in the fifth row on the left, standing, with his eyes closed.
Elana Perlmuter is upstairs on the women’s side in her mother’s seat, and she is standing too, and she has her own account of the last five years, and nobody has asked her for it, and she says the words with everyone else.
