Luke Ford

The book comes to Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard in a padded envelope with no note in it, which is its own kind of note.

The Mikvah Year, by Nadia Reff. Self published in November. Three hundred and eighty pages. It has sold something under a thousand copies and every woman in a certain category in this city has read it.

He reads it in one night at the kitchen table and finishes at 2:40 in the morning.

It is a novel. It says so on the copyright page. A woman comes out of a bad life in Phoenix at thirty one and decides to become a Jew, and it takes her six years, and she does not make it.

Three of the men in it he knows.

He knows the first by a phrase. The rabbi in the book tells her that a convert has no family and that the family she has is the obstacle, and that until she can go a full year without calling her mother she is not ready. Grossbard has heard a living man say that sentence at a conference in Sherman Oaks in 2016 and has heard him say it as though it were Torah.

He knows the second by the arrangement. The rabbi in the book puts her in an apartment. He pays part of the rent out of a discretionary fund and tells her it is a scholarship and tells her not to mention it to the office. She stops working. She helps him with his correspondence. She is in the country on a tourist visa that lapses in month nine.

He knows the third by the car. Everything in that chapter happens in a car after ten at night, driving, because a car with two people in it moving through Los Angeles is not a room and does not have a door and cannot be walked out of.

He does not recognize the fourth one, and lies in bed at four in the morning working on it, and that is the worst part of the night, because it means there are four.

None of this is news to him. He wants that on the record with himself before he does anything.

He has known since 1998. He knew before he had a pulpit. Every rabbi in Los Angeles who has been here longer than a decade and has been paying any attention at all knows a version of it, and the men who run conversions know the most detailed version, and the reason is that they talk to each other.

Here is what a beit din for conversion has in front of it. A woman, usually alone, usually not from here, frequently from a bad home or a bad marriage or a bad decade, who wants something she cannot get anywhere else and can only get from the men in that room. There is no appeal. There is no deadline. There is no published standard. A dayan can tell her she is not ready and give no reason, for a year, for three years, and no one on earth can make him say why. She cannot go across town, because the men across town take his calls. Her family thinks she has lost her mind and she has stopped calling them anyway, because somebody told her to.

That is the most concentrated unaccountable power a man can hold in Jewish communal life and it is held over the most isolated person in the building.

Grossbard has said this out loud to exactly two people in twenty seven years and both of them were women he was warning.

He starts making calls on Monday.

The first is to a dayan he has known for twenty years and respects, and the conversation lasts nine minutes.

“Is there a complainant.”

“There’s a novel.”

“Shlomo.”

“There are four women in this book and at least three of them exist.”

“Is there a complainant.”

“No.”

“Then there is nothing in front of me. There is no case. There is no file. There is no procedure that begins with a rabbi calling me about a paperback.” The old man’s voice is not unkind. “Bring me a woman who will sit in a room and say it and I will convene. I have never refused to convene.”

“You know none of them will sit in that room.”

“I know.”

“You know why.”

“Yes,” the dayan says. “I have known why for a long time. Bring me a woman.”

The second call is to a colleague his own age, a serious man who runs a serious shul, and this one takes an hour and Grossbard drives to his house to do it.

The colleague agrees with every word. He names one of the same men without being prompted. He tells a story from 2013 that Grossbard has never heard and will never repeat.

“So sign something.”

“No.”

“Yoni.”

“I have four children in day school and a mortgage on a house the shul holds title to, and the president of my board davens with that man’s brother in law.” He does not look away when he says it. “I’m telling you what I am. I’m not going to dress it up for you.”

“That’s the most honest thing anybody’s said to me this month.”

“It doesn’t help you.”

“No.”

The third call is to the umbrella body, which responds within eleven days by proposing a working group on best practices in conversion oversight, and the proposed working group has seven members, and one of them is the man from the car.

At the end of two weeks he has learned the shape of the thing and it is the shape he knew it would be. Nobody is protecting anybody out of loyalty. There is no conspiracy in that room. It is simpler and worse. Half the men who could act have something of their own, and the half who have nothing have children in schools that the first half fund, and every one of them believes, correctly, that a public fight would cost him more than it would cost the men he was fighting.

Marla Feig, who is eighty two, says the sentence to him at the January board meeting.

“They won’t move for you, Shlomo.”

“Some of them agree with me.”

“All of them agree with you.” She has her purse in her lap. “You’ve stood on a bimah for twenty years telling this city that every man in it is running a play and nobody is clean and everybody has a rate card. You made it impossible to be shocked. Now you need shock.”

He sits with that for a second.

“Yes,” he says.

“You built the room you’re standing in.”

“I know what I built.”

Adina Reiss comes to the office on a Thursday afternoon in February and closes the door, which she has never done.

She converted four years ago. She is in the Wednesday class and the Thursday class and she asks the hardest question in the room once a month, and Grossbard sent her, in 2021, to a beit din he had used for fifteen years.

She tells him what happened in the eight months before her mikvah. She tells it in order and she does not cry and she stops twice.

It is not the worst version. It is the ordinary version. A hand, a suggestion, a comment about her clothes, a comment about her body, an offer of private study at night, a delay of six months after she said no, and a second man in the same building who told her the first man was difficult and that he could speed things along.

She finished. She has never told anyone. She has sat forty feet from Grossbard every Wednesday for four years.

“Why didn’t you tell me.”

“Because you sent me there,” she says. “And because you’d have done something, and if you did something I don’t get to be Jewish.”

Grossbard puts both hands on the desk and does not say anything for a while, which is not a thing he does.

“What do you want,” he says. “Whatever it is, that’s what happens. You say the word and I go to the dayan tomorrow morning and we convene and I sit next to you the whole time. You say a different word and I never mention this again as long as I live.”

“I want to finish the mesechta,” Adina says. “That’s what I want. I’ve wanted it for two years and I’m not giving it up for those men.”

“Then that’s the answer and I’ll never raise it again.”

“You’ll want to.”

“I’ll want to every day.”

Here is what he does, because it is what is left.

He stops sending anybody anywhere. Every candidate the Barn sponsors goes to one beit din whose three members he has known for thirty years and can vouch for with his own name, and when that beit din is slow, which it is, the candidates wait, and when they ask him why they cannot use the faster one in the Valley he tells them the truth in his office with the door open.

He puts a woman in the process. Every candidate meets first with Shira Belfer, who drives in from Hancock Park twice a month for no money, and no candidate ever sits alone in a room with any man in this building including Grossbard, and the door stays open, and the appointments are on a calendar the office keeps.

And at the first meeting he says a thing out loud, in words, to each woman, which is the part that nobody else in this city will do.

He gets frozen out inside a year. Two conversions he sponsors get questioned in Israel on the grounds that the sponsoring rabbi has become unreliable, and one woman has to redo eleven months of work, and she is the one who pays for what he did, which is how it goes and which he does not tell her.

He keeps a notebook in the desk drawer with names in it and it will never be published and it is not for publication. About nine times a year somebody calls him, a rabbi in Denver, a woman in Toronto, a mother in Encino whose daughter has started studying with somebody, and asks him what he knows about a particular man, and he tells them, on the phone, on the record, with his name attached, and he has been told twice by a lawyer that this is unwise.

In April a woman named Kaila Devine comes in for a first meeting. Thirty four, from Reno, works in veterinary imaging, and she has been at this for seven months with a man in the Valley and has come to Grossbard because somebody told her to.

Shira Belfer sits in. The door is open.

“Before anything else,” Grossbard says. “Some rules, and they’re mine, and you can go somewhere else if you don’t want them. You never meet a rabbi alone. Not in an office with the door shut, not in his home, not in a car, not after dark, not at a hotel, not ever, and that includes me and this door stays open. Nobody in this process tells you to stop calling your mother. Nobody in this process gets you an apartment. Nobody in this process employs you. Nobody touches you. Nobody comments on your body or your clothing except Shira, who will tell you what to wear because that’s her job.”

Kaila Devine writes none of it down.

“And here’s my cell phone. It’s on at night. If anything happens that you have to think about afterward, you call me that night, not the next week, and I will believe you, and I’ll say that part again so you have it. I will believe you.”

She sits there for a moment.

“Why are you telling me this.”

“Because a woman I know went through it and sat in my class for four years without telling me,” Grossbard says. “I’d like those four years back. I can’t have them.”

She takes the number and puts it in her phone.

After she goes, Shira Belfer stays to write up the file, and Grossbard walks out to the lot and stands there a while, and then he goes back in, because the Thursday class starts at nine and Adina Reiss is eleven pages from the end of the mesechta.

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard finds out at a kiddush in October, from one sentence, said by a woman who does not know she is saying anything.

Chava Perlmutter, seventy nine, widow of a pharmacist, tells him she asked Shmulie for eight thousand dollars out of her deposit in August for her granddaughter’s wedding, and it took six weeks, and Shmulie was so apologetic about it, and she wants Grossbard to know that she is not complaining, because that man is a saint.

Grossbard says something warm and moves on to the next person and finishes the kiddush and shakes ninety hands.

He knows. He has known for about four seconds and he will spend the next nine days confirming it.

Shmuel Berkovits, sixty seven, has run the Chesed Fund out of the back room of a print shop on Robertson since 1993. He does not draw a salary. He buried his wife in 2018 and did not miss a Sunday. He has lent to something over four hundred families in this neighborhood. Tuition gaps, medical bills, a first month and a deposit for a woman leaving a marriage, funeral costs, a man’s payroll on a Thursday when a client paid late. No interest, because that is the whole point of the thing, and no paperwork worth the name, and no bank in California would have written one of those loans.

He also takes deposits. That is how it works. A man with money sitting idle gives Shmulie forty thousand dollars because Shmulie will do more good with it than a savings account will, and the man understands he can have it back when he needs it. There is no agreement. There is no statement. There is no auditor and no examiner and no insurance and no capital requirement, and in California the state regulators treat the whole category as religious charity and stay a hundred yards away from it.

Grossbard has known every structural feature of this for thirty years. He has never once said them out loud from the bimah, because the day he does, half the good in this neighborhood stops moving.

Six weeks to get eight thousand dollars out of a fund that has never taken longer than a day.

He goes to see Berkovits on a Tuesday night.

The back room has a card table, two folding chairs, a four-drawer file cabinet, and a shoebox. The book is index cards. Green for loans out, white for deposits in, and a spiral ledger that Berkovits keeps in a hand Grossbard cannot read.

“Shmulie.”

“Rabbi.”

“How much is the hole.”

Berkovits sits down. He does not ask what hole. That is the first thing.

They go through it for two hours and forty minutes. Deposits standing at about four million one. Loans outstanding that are collectible, maybe one million six, and Grossbard makes him mark every card he has doubts about and the doubtful pile is bigger than the good one. Six hundred thousand in the account. And then the rest of it, which since 2017 has gone into a friend’s real estate deals at nine and eleven and fourteen percent, because a man who lends at zero and takes deposits at zero has to find the spread somewhere, and the deals were fine for six years and stopped being fine in 2023.

The hole is a little under one point nine million dollars.

“When did it start.”

“I don’t know.”

“Shmulie.”

“I’m telling you the truth. There’s no day. Nobody woke me up one morning.” He puts both hands flat on the card table. “Somebody needed forty for a wedding and it was sitting there. Then the Fein girl needed a deposit and Yudel Rosen’s payroll was three weeks out and the money was doing nothing in an account. Then Ari showed me his numbers and it was eleven percent and I thought, I could lend twice as much.”

“And in August, to pay Chava Perlmutter, you used somebody else’s deposit.”

“I used the Kleins’ deposit.”

“You know what that is.”

“I know what that is.”

Berkovits looks at the file cabinet.

“Do you know what I’ve done out of this room,” he says. “Thirty two years. Four hundred and six families. I put nine kids through YULA that nobody knows about. I paid for two funerals. There’s a woman living in Sherman Oaks with her children right now because I had eleven thousand dollars in a drawer on a Sunday night in 2011 and no bank on earth would have given it to her.”

Grossbard lets him say all of it.

“Am I a thief,” Berkovits says.

“You will be on Monday if you take another deposit.”

They sit with that.

“So don’t take another one,” Grossbard says. “Starting tonight. Not one dollar, not from anybody, not if a man begs you. Every card comes to me. And you don’t speak to anyone about this until I tell you to, including your son.”

Grossbard drives home and sits in the driveway for a while.

The arithmetic is not complicated and he runs it four or five times looking for a door.

If the depositors find out, they come at once, because that is what depositors do, and the fund pays out six hundred thousand to whoever gets there first and the rest of them get nothing. If it goes to the United States Attorney, a receiver gets appointed at four hundred dollars an hour billed against an estate consisting of a house in Beverlywood with a mortgage on it, a Toyota, and a room full of index cards. If it goes to a beth din, the beth din can compel testimony from observant Jews and can rule on liability and cannot subpoena a bank, cannot conduct a forensic accounting, and cannot make one point nine million dollars appear.

There is one door and it costs one point nine million dollars.

Adina Reiss comes to the office on Thursday, because he has told her, because she is the only person he tells things to before he has decided them.

“You go to the U.S. Attorney,” she says.

“And then what.”

“Then it isn’t your call anymore. That’s the entire point of the U.S. Attorney.”

“Here’s what happens. Receiver gets appointed. Bills the estate into the ground. Chava Perlmutter gets nineteen cents on the dollar in 2032 if she lives. Shmulie goes in at sixty seven and comes out at seventy four or doesn’t come out. And four hundred families in this neighborhood never see another gemach as long as they live, from him or from anybody, because nobody in Los Angeles is going to run one after that.”

“And your way.”

“My way, every depositor gets a hundred cents on the dollar inside sixty days, the fund closes, and one man walks.”

“That’s the part I can’t do.”

“I know,” Grossbard says. “That makes you the better person and me the one handling it.”

She sits there.

“People are going to say you did it for mesirah. That you wouldn’t inform.”

“Then let’s be clear with each other so at least one other person in this city knows. I would call the FBI on Shmuel Berkovits tomorrow morning and eat lunch afterward. I’ve got no problem with it and I hold by the poskim who say report and I’ve said so from the bimah twice. I’m not doing it because of the arithmetic. Not because of a teshuvah. And I’d like that on the record, because half this neighborhood is about to hand me credit I did not earn.”

He gets three noes.

The first is a man who says he would need to see something in writing, which is a no. The second is a man who says he will do four hundred thousand if others come in, which is a no. The third calls his lawyer before he calls Grossbard back and the lawyer uses the phrase aiding a concealment, which is a no with a bill attached.

The fourth is Farhad Kashani, fifty eight, who goes by Fred, who builds and holds industrial property from Vernon out to Rialto, and who has never been a member of the Barn and never will be, and whose family davens at a Persian shul in Beverly Hills where his father has a seat with a plaque on it.

Grossbard has met him three times in nine years.

They sit in Kashani’s office on Olympic with the door closed.

“How much.”

“One point nine.”

“For Berkovits.”

“For the depositors.”

“Same thing.”

“No,” Grossbard says. “One of those two I care about.”

Kashani takes a while.

“There’s a dinner on the twelfth at the Montage,” he says. “Ilan Yaghoubi is raising a fund. Second one. I want you at the table.”

“To say what.”

“Nothing. Eat the fish. It’s kosher, I checked with your office.”

Grossbard sits back.

“You want a photograph.”

“I want a photograph.”

“Say the rest of it. I’d rather we both hear it.”

“You want me to say it out loud,” Kashani says. “Fine. Every Persian man in that room knows who you are. You’re the rabbi who took the pop star’s money and wouldn’t let her in the class. Half of them can’t stand you and all of them believe you. You sit at that table for two hours and eat a piece of fish and say nothing to anybody about any fund, and forty men in that room decide Ilan is a serious person. That’s what I’m buying. I’m paying one million nine hundred thousand dollars for it. It’s more than it’s worth.”

“Is Yaghoubi clean.”

“As far as I know.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer anyone has ever had about anybody,” Kashani says. “You’ve been giving that answer for thirty years. Every man you ever shook hands with at a kiddush in front of somebody else got that answer.”

Grossbard has nothing for that.

“Why are you doing it,” he says. “You could tell me to go to hell and I’d have no complaint.”

Kashani opens a drawer and closes it again without taking anything out.

“In 1996 my mother needed eight thousand dollars and my father was too proud and I was twenty eight and had nothing. Somebody sent her to a man in the back of a print shop on Robertson. He gave her the money in an envelope in about nine minutes and he never told one person. Not one, in thirty years. I found out in 2019 because she told me on her deathbed.”

He shrugs.

“So,” he says. “You want the check or not.”

Grossbard asks for the money to come as an unrestricted gift to the Chesed Fund with no conditions of any kind stated anywhere in writing, and Kashani says of course, and both of them understand what that document is for, and Grossbard asks for it anyway.

It takes fifty one days.

Every depositor gets a hundred cents on the dollar. The letter that goes out says the fund is closing after thirty two years because its founder is retiring and no successor structure is in place, which is true in every particular and is a lie.

Chava Perlmutter gets a cashier’s check for a hundred and eighty one thousand two hundred dollars, which is everything she has, and she comes to the print shop to collect it in person, and she takes Shmuel Berkovits’s hand in both of hers and tells him he is a saint and that this neighborhood will never see another one.

Grossbard is standing four feet away. He watches Berkovits take it.

The Journal runs three hundred words in February under community services. Beloved Free Loan Fund Closes After Three Decades. There is a photograph of the print shop and a quote from Berkovits about how the community’s needs have changed. Nobody calls Grossbard and Grossbard does not call anybody.

By spring there is no gemach on the Westside that will lend above thirty thousand dollars, and a woman leaving a marriage in April cannot get first and last on an apartment in Palms in under three weeks, and she goes to a shul on Pico that sends her to a shul in the Valley that sends her to a lender at fourteen percent.

Two men at the Barn tell Grossbard to his face that he should have found a way to keep it open. One of them says it at a kiddush with people listening. Grossbard says he tried, which is the second lie, and takes a piece of herring.

He goes to the Montage on the twelfth.

The fish is sea bass and it is kosher and it is very good. He is at table four with Kashani on his left and a dermatologist on his right and Ilan Yaghoubi two seats down, forty one years old, well spoken, three questions in and Grossbard has learned nothing about him at all. Grossbard says nothing about any fund to any person. He talks for most of an hour to an eighty year old woman across the table about her husband’s family in Hamadan and she is the best conversation he has had in a month.

A photographer works the room between the salad and the entree.

The picture runs the following Thursday on page eleven of the community paper, under the fold, five men at a round table with the water glasses in front of them.

Second from left, the caption says. Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard of the Barn.

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.

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard goes to the party in the dead orthodontist’s suit with a liter of water in a canvas bag on the passenger seat.

Gideon Sonnenfeld’s novel has been optioned. A producer named Alec Ravitch holds the rights and a director attached for nine weeks and a house off Doheny with a view of the whole basin from Century City to the towers downtown, and he is throwing a dinner for forty on a Thursday in June, and Sonnenfeld has asked Grossbard to come, and Grossbard said yes before Sonnenfeld finished the sentence.

Two valets work the street with clipboards. The one who takes the car is a young man named Arturo who says good evening rabbi, because the yarmulke is right there, black suede, and Grossbard says good evening and asks how many cars he has done tonight, and Arturo says thirty one, and it is nine minutes past seven.

Inside, the glass wall stands open and the pool runs to the edge, and past it the city has started to come on.

He takes the bottle out of the bag and carries it. He does not set it down all night.

A woman in her fifties in a black jumpsuit reaches him in the first four minutes. She runs marketing at a streamer and she has decided in advance that he is about to be uncomfortable.

“I hope you’re not offended by any of this.”

“By what.”

She waves at the room.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Grossbard says. “Whose is the Diebenkorn.”

She has to go find out. She comes back nine minutes later with the answer, which is that it belongs to Ravitch’s second wife and hangs here under an arrangement, and they talk about that for twenty minutes and she does not apologize again.

He eats nothing. He drinks his own water.

A young actress named Simone, twenty six, up for the part of the gabbai’s daughter, comes at him with real questions and a notebook open on her phone. He answers all of them. When she asks what the gabbai’s daughter would have worn to a wedding in 1994 he tells her he has no idea and gives her the number of a woman at the Barn who does. He does not flirt and he does not teach, and afterward she tells two people he is the least strange religious man she has ever met.

At 7:50 Alec Ravitch finds him by the kitchen island and apologizes about the food.

“I should have gotten a kosher caterer. Gideon told me not to bother and I listened to him and I’ve been sick about it for a week.”

“He was right.”

“You’re not eating anything.”

“I’m not eating anything.”

“Is there something we can do.”

“There is,” Grossbard says. “You can stop talking about it inside ten seconds and never raise it again, and I’ll have the best night of my month.”

Ravitch laughs and stops. He tells his wife later it was the smoothest thing anybody did to him all year.

Somebody’s cousin asks whether it’s a fast day.

“No. I just don’t eat here.”

“Is that a religious thing?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” the cousin says, and that is the end of it.

He reads the room the way he reads a kiddush, because it is the same room. Twenty minutes in he could draw it. The director between projects with three people around him, two of whom are there because the third one is. The executive of about thirty four who has survived a regime change by nine days and whose laugh comes half a beat early all night. The first wife who still gets invited and has been seated at the far end on purpose and knows it. The lawyer everyone uses, who talks to no one for more than ninety seconds and touches every person in the house. And Sonnenfeld, the reason for the evening, backed into the corner by the pool and unable to get out.

Nothing here that isn’t at a bar mitzvah on Pico. Better lighting. Same arithmetic.

At dinner they put him between the marketing woman and a man named Sol Bregman, seventy eight, three Emmys in the eighties, buried his wife in 2019, who decides over the soup that he is going to get somewhere with the rabbi.

“I don’t believe any of it.”

“Neither do half my members.”

“I mean I’ve read it. The whole thing, a decent translation, cover to cover, two years ago. It’s a mess. A jealous character who drowns everybody and can’t take criticism.”

“That’s a fair reading of about a third of it.”

“So how do you do it.”

“The arguments are bad,” Grossbard says. “I want that on the table first so we don’t lose an hour. I’ve read the arguments for God, the good ones and most of the bad ones, and they don’t work. Aquinas doesn’t work. The fine tuning thing doesn’t work. If you came at me with the arguments I’d take your side and I’d run it better than you’re running it.”

Bregman puts down his fork.

“Then what.”

“I don’t believe in Him on Tuesdays.”

The table laughs, six people, and the marketing woman writes it down.

Bregman does not laugh. He waits.

“You want the other answer.”

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

“Four minutes.”

“What?”

“Four minutes of certainty in fifty nine years. Total. Cumulative. Ninety seconds of it at my father’s kevurah and the rest spread out over some mornings.” He turns the bottle a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “I built the entire thing on those four minutes and I’d do it again tomorrow. That’s the answer. It doesn’t sell and I don’t sell it. From the bimah I give them a better answer that I believe less.”

Bregman looks at him a long moment.

“That’s the first honest thing anyone has said to me in this house.”

“Wait till you hear the second one.”

They talk until the plates go and the party has moved outside without them.

Around ten he ends up at the pool with Ravitch’s wife, Dahlia, forty seven, who has kept the house between them all night and has now run out of house.

Ocean Parkway. Beis Yaakov through eleventh grade. Her father has not taken her calls since 2006 and her mother calls on Thursdays from a phone in the basement.

She tells him this in about ninety seconds, flat, the way you say a thing you have said before.

“So,” she says. “Go ahead.”

“Go ahead what.”

“You people always have the speech.”

“I don’t have a speech. I have one question if you want it and you can say no.”

“What’s the question.”

“Does your mother know about the Diebenkorn.”

Dahlia Ravitch laughs until she has to put a hand on the coping.

They talk twenty five minutes and she does most of it. He asks about her father twice and lets it go both times. He does not mention a shul. He does not mention Shabbos. He does not give her a card, and at the end she says, so you’re not going to try, and he says no, and she says why not, and he says because you’d say yes to be polite and then you’d have to avoid me for a year, and I’d rather keep the twenty five minutes.

The car comes at 11:50. A hundred and four total, Arturo says. He is nineteen and takes two classes at Santa Monica College.

Grossbard drives home on Sunset with the windows down.

He gets in at 12:35, hangs the jacket on the chair, and stands at the counter eating corn flakes with a banana cut into them, the first thing he has eaten since two in the afternoon.

Dina comes in in her robe.

“How was it.”

“I had a great time.”

“You always do,” she says, and takes a flake out of the bowl and eats it and goes back to bed.

Dahlia Ravitch comes to the Barn on a Shabbos in March. She sits in the last row of the women’s section with her coat on and leaves eight minutes before the end.

He does not see her. Nobody does.

The first complaint reaches Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard by phone on a Sunday in February from a man who runs a kashrus agency and who wants him to know that the Malik boy has gone too far.

Ezra Malik is nineteen. He has an agent, a manager, a lawyer his father made him get, and four million people who watch him do other people. He did the kashrus man in October, four minutes, the walk, the clipboard, the way he says the word standards, and it ran everywhere, and eleven mashgichim in three states have been doing the walk at each other ever since.

“He grew up in your shul,” the man says.

“He did.”

“So you can talk to him.”

“I can talk to anybody.”

“Rabbi.”

“I hear you,” Grossbard says, which is what he says.

The second complaint comes from a day school head. The third from a matchmaker in Hancock Park with a following. The fourth from a philanthropist in Beverly Hills who has given the Barn nothing and whose foundation gives eleven million a year to things Grossbard cares about. The fifth arrives on the letterhead of a rabbinical council with nine signatures, one of them from a man who ate at Grossbard’s table in 2019.

By April there have been thirty one. Two lawyers have sent letters. A donor has moved a gift to a different shul and told two people why. Somebody has called Ezra’s agent and mentioned a boycott and the agent has told Ezra, and Ezra, who is nineteen, has started asking his father whether this can hurt his sister.

Grossbard sees the whole thing at once, and what he sees is 2011.

There were forty people writing about this world in 2005. Blogs, most of them anonymous, some of them very good, one or two of them the only honest account anybody had of how the institutions ran. By 2011 there were none. Not one of them was sued. Nobody won a judgment. Nobody got an injunction. They got phone calls. They got a call placed to an employer. They got a father in law taken to lunch. They got a daughter’s shidduch that fell apart in the third week with no reason offered by anyone. Every one of them stopped, and every one of them told you he had gotten busy.

Josh Adelman wants a statement.

“Say we don’t control him,” Adelman says. “Say the Barn has no editorial relationship with a private individual. Say we support open expression.”

“No.”

“Why no.”

“Because it’s a lie, and because it’s the lie they want,” Grossbard says. “The minute I say we support open expression, every one of these people gets to ask me why I support open expression about them and not about the eleven things I killed last year. And I killed eleven things last year, Josh. I pulled a youth minyan skit in November. I told the sisterhood newsletter to take out a paragraph about a divorce. I told Barry Teitelbaum to sit down twice. There is no open forum here. There has never been an open forum here or anywhere else. There’s a set of lines and we enforce them all week long and we don’t write them down, and not writing them down is what lets every macher in Los Angeles come to me one at a time and ask me to move one.”

Marla Feig, who is eighty now and comes to every board meeting, says, “So write them down.”

“Yes,” Grossbard says.

He goes home and takes a book off the shelf that he has never admitted owning.

He bought The Purpose Driven Church in 1998 at a Barnes and Noble in Woodland Hills because he was thirty one years old and had ninety families and no idea what he was doing. Rick Warren (b. 1954) is a Baptist pastor in Orange County who wrote it in 1995 and who wrote The Purpose Driven Life in 2002 and sold enough of them to fund a small country. Grossbard’s copy is annotated in three colors. The thing he took from it in 1998, and has used every year since without attribution, is that a crowd is not a congregation and a congregation is not a membership, and that people behave differently the moment you ask them to sign something.

He calls Ezra in on a Tuesday.

“You’re going to hate the first half of this.”

“Okay.”

“One rule. You don’t do members of this shul. Anybody who holds a membership at the Barn is off the table for as long as they hold it. Everybody else in the Jewish world is a free country and I will never call you about any of them again as long as I live.”

Ezra sits back.

“You’re leashing me.”

“I’m arming you.”

“You’re telling me who I can’t do.”

“I’m telling you who you can,” Grossbard says. “Right now you can’t do anybody, because you’re nineteen and there are four hundred people in this city who can hurt your father’s business and your sister’s shidduch and none of them have to put their name on anything. Starting Friday, a man who wants you to leave him alone has to join a shul, in writing, with a check, at two thousand dollars a year, and I publish the list of members every year in the annual report like every shul in America. He has to buy it and everybody gets to see him buy it.”

Ezra thinks about it for a while. He is nineteen and he thinks about it for a long time, which is one of the reasons he is good.

“They’ll all join.”

“Most of them.”

“That’s a protection racket.”

“That’s a membership organization,” Grossbard says. “The difference is that I’m telling you what it is. Nobody told the forty guys in 2009 what it was. They just got quiet one at a time and thought it was happening only to them.”

The rush starts the second week of May.

The kashrus man joins and tells the office his wife has cousins in the neighborhood. The matchmaker joins and asks whether there is a level above the two thousand and is told there is not. The day school head joins and asks for a receipt for the tuition committee, which the office cannot provide, and joins anyway. The editor of the Journal joins, and writes an editorial three weeks later about the vitality of institutional affiliation in Los Angeles, and does not mention it.

The director of the kiruv outfit in Jerusalem that put Grossbard’s face on a cracked graphic in 2024 joins as an out of town affiliate, a category Grossbard invents on a Thursday afternoon and prices at two thousand dollars.

The philanthropist joins. His assistant calls to ask whether the membership can be in the name of the foundation and is told it cannot.

Membership runs from three hundred and ninety units in April to six hundred and eleven by October. Four hundred and forty two thousand dollars in new dues. Attendance does not move. The same eleven hundred people come on Yom Kippur. Adelman starts calling the difference the phantom shul and stops when it is pointed out that the phantom shul paid for the roof and the air conditioning.

Every Friday at noon Grossbard emails Ezra Malik the updated membership list. No message in the body. Just the list.

Ezra’s editor prints it out and tapes it to the wall.

In September a man named Nathan Sperber, sixty two, who joined in the second week of the rush and who has never been inside the building, is discovered to have been running Sperber Capital for nine years on money from later investors paid out to earlier ones. Eleven families at the Barn have money with him. Two of them have all of it.

Ezra calls at 7:40 in the morning.

“He’s on the list.”

“He’s on the list.”

“I have forty minutes on him. I have him at the Hilton in 2022 telling a room of retirees that he doesn’t take fees from Jews.”

“He’s on the list, Ezra.”

“You’re going to let a two thousand dollar membership cover a man who took the Fishbein’s retirement.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Grossbard calls Sperber in on Thursday. Sperber comes with a lawyer and Grossbard says the lawyer can sit in the hallway or the meeting doesn’t happen, and the lawyer sits in the hallway.

“Your membership is terminated as of this morning. The office will refund you nine hundred and sixteen dollars, which is the prorated balance, and there’s a check on the desk.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Article nine. The rabbi may terminate a membership for conduct injurious to the congregation, and the determination is his alone and is not appealable.” Grossbard slides the check across. “I wrote article nine in November. I wrote it for a Thursday like this one.”

“You built the whole thing to sell protection and now you’re pulling mine.”

“Yes.”

Sperber stares at him.

“At least say something about it,” he says. “At least tell me it’s about the Fishbeins.”

“It’s about the Fishbeins,” Grossbard says. “And it’s also that I want every other man on that list to spend tonight rereading article nine. Take the check.”

Ezra runs the forty minutes on the second of October. It does four million in a day. The Hilton footage is in it. A reporter at a business paper in New York watches it, makes three calls, and files in November, and the receiver is appointed in March, and the Fishbeins get back about a third, which is a third more than they had.

Nobody thanks Grossbard, because most of the room has decided he is the man who protects the mockery, and the rest have decided he is the man who allows it.

He says the true thing once, in December, to a room of forty at the annual meeting, and it goes past them like weather.

“I want this in the minutes. I am the censor here. I made myself the censor in May. Before May there were four hundred people in this city who could quietly ruin a nineteen year old and not one of them had to sign anything. Now there is one man who decides, and it’s me, and you can see me, and you know my address, and you have my email, and article nine has my name on it. That is an improvement. It is not freedom. There is no such thing available and there never was. The only question in front of a community is who does the deciding and whether you can find him.”

The minutes record that the rabbi discussed membership policy.

The rabbi in Teaneck writes eleven hundred words in January on the corruption of a pulpit that sells indulgences and names it a shanda four times. He does not join. He says so in the piece. He says a man of conviction pays for his convictions.

Ezra does him in February. Six minutes. The cadence, the pause before the word shanda, the way he holds a paperback with two fingers. It is the best thing Ezra has ever made and it is not cruel, which is what makes it unsurvivable.

The Friday list goes out at noon on March 14.

Ezra reads it in his car outside the studio on Fairfax, the way he reads it every week, scrolling with his thumb down the new names at the bottom, and he stops.

He calls his editor.

“Take him off the wall.”

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 God.

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.

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.

The house at 7:15 is very quiet.

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.

The intake woman asks him to spell Grossbard. She asks his occupation and he says clergy and she types six letters.

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.”

It dies. There is nothing in the room to catch it.

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.

At 9:50 he is in the parking structure with his shirt buttoned wrong and eleven hours in front of him.

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.

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.

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?”

“No,” Grossbard says.

She apologizes. She says he looks exactly like him.

“I get that,” he says.

He stands in the parking lot afterward for a while with the bag in his hand. Thirty years and that is the first time.

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.

At 2:40 he drives to Detroit Street.

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.

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.

Grossbard parks across the street and turns off the engine.

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.

He watches them for eleven minutes. Then he starts the car and goes.

He does not go in and there is no reason he can give.

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.

Nothing has happened. Nobody has died. Nobody needs him and the machine is running without him and it will run without him tomorrow too.

He turns the phone off and sits in the driveway.

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.

He goes to the shelf and takes down his father’s Mishnayos with the cracked spine.

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.

Eleven minutes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Six men. The maggid shiur is a jeweler named Nasser who has been giving it for four years.

Grossbard sits in the back and says nothing.

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.

Grossbard sits on his hands.

It is the hardest work he does all day and there is no one in the room who knows he is doing it.

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.

Grossbard takes one.

“Thank you,” he says.

The man nods and puts the tin away.

He is home at 9:35. Dina is at the table with the crossword folded in eighths.

“How was your Tuesday.”

“Fine.”

She looks up. He hangs the jacket on the chair and goes to get a glass of water and that is the whole report.

The imaging place calls Thursday afternoon. Everything is normal for a man his age. They want him back in a year.

He never mentions it to anybody, which is the hardest thing he does that week

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.