Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard made the Tuesday rule in 2011, out loud, at the kitchen table, in front of one witness.<\/p>\n
No shul. No phone. No hospital unless somebody is dying, and dying counts, and sick does not. No learning. No God.<\/p>\n
Dina said at the time that a man who has to declare a day off does not have one. He told her it was in section two. It is not in section two.<\/p>\n
He wakes at 6:40 without the alarm, which he has done every day for thirty one years, and lies there while she gets up and dresses and makes coffee. She teaches fourth grade and leaves at 7:10. He hears the car go.<\/p>\n
The house at 7:15 is very quiet.<\/p>\n
The imaging place on Roxbury takes him at 8:15. Stress echo, ordered in April by a doctor who does not go to shul anywhere, rescheduled twice by Grossbard, and he has told no one about it, including his wife, including the office, and he has scheduled it on a Tuesday for that reason.<\/p>\n
The intake woman asks him to spell Grossbard. She asks his occupation and he says clergy and she types six letters.<\/p>\n
The tech is a young man named Devin with a beard trimmed to the millimeter, and he puts the leads on and explains the treadmill and Grossbard says, “So this is the part where we find out whether the community gets what it wants,” and Devin says, “Sir, if you feel chest pressure or dizziness you tell me right away.”<\/p>\n
It dies. There is nothing in the room to catch it.<\/p>\n
He walks eleven minutes at increasing grade with wires on his chest while a stranger watches a monitor and says nothing to him at all. Somebody will call in about a week.<\/p>\n
At 9:50 he is in the parking structure with his shirt buttoned wrong and eleven hours in front of him.<\/p>\n
He drives. That is what he does with the first part of it. He goes down Olympic to Bundy and up to Sunset and out toward the ocean and back, and the city on a Tuesday morning belongs to gardeners and pool men and delivery drivers and women in workout clothes walking dogs the size of cats. The light before eleven is the good light. Nobody in any of these cars knows a rabbi.<\/p>\n
He goes to the 11:10 at the theater on Pico, some picture about a submarine, and there are nine people in the room, and he sleeps from about the twenty minute mark to the seventy minute mark and wakes up during a scene where two men are yelling at each other in the dark and never learns what the argument is about. He stays to the end anyway. He would like to say he stayed out of respect for the craft.<\/p>\n
At the Glattmart on Pico at 1:40 a woman by the melons looks at him twice and says, “Are you the rabbi from the video?”<\/p>\n
“No,” Grossbard says.<\/p>\n
She apologizes. She says he looks exactly like him.<\/p>\n
“I get that,” he says.<\/p>\n
He stands in the parking lot afterward for a while with the bag in his hand. Thirty years and that is the first time.<\/p>\n
He eats at the counter of the place on Beverly at two in the afternoon. Tuna, rye, coleslaw, pickle. He tries something on the waitress about the price of the coleslaw and she says the coleslaw comes with it, which is the correct answer and the end of the exchange.<\/p>\n
At 2:40 he drives to Detroit Street.<\/p>\n
The shtiebel is still there. It is a converted duplex with a ramp somebody built badly in the nineties and a sign in Hebrew and English and a security camera that has never worked. His father walked in that door at nine at night for thirty nine years, four nights out of five, and Sunday mornings at seven, and came home at eleven and sat in the yellow chair.<\/p>\n
There is a minyan there on weekdays. It has let out. Four old men stand on the sidewalk in the sun the way old men do, at the exact distance from the door where a conversation can go another twenty minutes, and one of them is telling the others something with both hands.<\/p>\n
Grossbard parks across the street and turns off the engine.<\/p>\n
He knows two of those men. Neither of them would know him. They are eighty five years old and they have no phones and they do not read the Journal and they have never heard of any of it.<\/p>\n
He watches them for eleven minutes. Then he starts the car and goes.<\/p>\n
He does not go in and there is no reason he can give.<\/p>\n
At four he turns the phone on in the driveway. Sixty one emails. A vendor about the fire inspection. Three about the bar mitzvah calendar. Josh Adelman about a term sheet Grossbard has no opinion about. A man in Toronto who has written to him every Tuesday since 2019 about the Documentary Hypothesis and who does not know it is his day off.<\/p>\n
Nothing has happened. Nobody has died. Nobody needs him and the machine is running without him and it will run without him tomorrow too.<\/p>\n
He turns the phone off and sits in the driveway.<\/p>\n
Dina gets home at 4:30 on Tuesdays and turns around at five to take her sister to the eye doctor in Encino, and the house at 5:20 is very quiet again.<\/p>\n
He goes to the shelf and takes down his father’s Mishnayos with the cracked spine.<\/p>\n
He sits in the good chair by the window with the light going and opens to where he left off in his mother’s room in April, and he starts, out loud, in the singsong.<\/p>\n
Eleven minutes.<\/p>\n
It dies at eleven minutes. He hears his own voice in a room with nobody in it and the sound goes flat and he loses the thread of the argument twice and then a third time, and he sits there with his thumb on the page.<\/p>\n
In his mother’s room he did eighteen minutes without effort and could have done ninety. One old woman with a candy in her cheek and a crossword in her lap, and the whole thing held.<\/p>\n
He closes the book. He does not make a note of this. He does not compose the sentence about it, and the not composing takes work.<\/p>\n
At 7:50 he drives to a shul on Pico he has never been inside, a Persian congregation with a daf yomi at eight in a side room with a water cooler and eleven chairs.<\/p>\n
Six men. The maggid shiur is a jeweler named Nasser who has been giving it for four years.<\/p>\n
Grossbard sits in the back and says nothing.<\/p>\n
Nasser is not very good. He is prepared, which is more than most, and he is warm, and he mangles a Rashi at the twelve minute mark in a way that turns the whole sugya around backward, and none of the six men notices, and they go on for another thirty five minutes on a foundation that is upside down.<\/p>\n
Grossbard sits on his hands.<\/p>\n
It is the hardest work he does all day and there is no one in the room who knows he is doing it.<\/p>\n
At the end Nasser says the kaddish and a man of about eighty next to Grossbard takes a tin of mints out of his jacket, opens it, and holds it out without looking over.<\/p>\n
Grossbard takes one.<\/p>\n
“Thank you,” he says.<\/p>\n
The man nods and puts the tin away.<\/p>\n
He is home at 9:35. Dina is at the table with the crossword folded in eighths.<\/p>\n
“How was your Tuesday.”<\/p>\n
“Fine.”<\/p>\n
She looks up. He hangs the jacket on the chair and goes to get a glass of water and that is the whole report.<\/p>\n
The imaging place calls Thursday afternoon. Everything is normal for a man his age. They want him back in a year.<\/p>\n
He never mentions it to anybody, which is the hardest thing he does that week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard made the Tuesday rule in 2011, out loud, at the kitchen table, in front of one witness. No shul. No phone. No hospital unless somebody is dying, and dying counts, and sick does not. No learning. No … Continue reading