Luke Ford

The Reznick Family Foundation bought premium economy for eleven rabbis and coach for the videographer. Rabbi Chaim Portnoy (b. 1944) paid the difference for business out of the shul discretionary fund and did not mention it at the gate, though he mentioned the leg, which had been operated on twice.

They flew LAX to Brussels to Kigali in April 2014, the twentieth year. Marla Teitelbaum from the foundation had a binder with tabs. The tabs said Nyamata, Ntarama, Murambi, Gisozi, Reconciliation Village, Free Afternoon. There was a page of talking points and a page listing which memorials permitted photography.

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard (b. 1951) sat in 22C with a paperback of Borowski he had read four times. Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) had been dead longer than Grossbard had been alive. Across the aisle Rabbi Aryeh Kestenbaum (b. 1963) slept sitting up with his hands folded, and even asleep his chin was at an angle that would have read well from the back of a room. Kestenbaum had been a chazzan in Forest Hills for nine years before semicha. He had the instrument. Everyone knew he had the instrument.

At Brussels, waiting on the connection, Rabbi Yoni Setton (b. 1975) asked Grossbard what he was reading.

“A Polish writer. He worked the ramp at Auschwitz.”

“Worked it how?”

“Unloading. Carrying. Sorting.”

Setton thought about that. “A Jew?”

“No. A Catholic. Political prisoner.”

“So he had it better.”

“He had it better,” Grossbard said. “That’s the book.”

Nyamata is a brick church with a corrugated roof and holes in the roof where the grenades went through. Ten thousand people died there over two days in April 1994. The pews hold the clothes. The colors have gone to the same color, which is the color of dust that has been rained on and dried many times. Down the steps behind the altar there is a crypt with shelves of skulls and shelves of femurs, arranged by size.

The guide was named Emmanuel. He was thirty-five and he had been fifteen. He gave the tour in English with a vocabulary that had been sanded by repetition into something almost pleasant to listen to. He said the number. He said the two days. He said the priest and the mayor. He pointed at the altar cloth, which is stained, and at a metal rod in a case, and he said what the rod had been used for.

The rabbis stood in the aisle in their black shoes.

Kestenbaum went forward alone. He put his hand on the back of the last pew and stood there for maybe forty seconds and then he sang El Malei Rachamim.

Grossbard had heard the prayer six hundred times. He had said it himself at more funerals than he could count. Kestenbaum sang it in that church and the sound went up into the brick and came back down, and Emmanuel, who had heard everything, stopped moving. One of the Kigali drivers took off his cap. Rabbi Duvid Lasker, who was thirty-one and had eleven thousand followers, put his phone down at his side without switching it off, so that the video that later circulated has ninety seconds of Kestenbaum’s voice over a shot of Lasker’s shoes.

When it was over nobody said anything for a while. Then Terry Ochoa, the videographer, said, “Rabbi, I’m so sorry, I had you backlit. Is there any way.”

Kestenbaum’s face was wet. He said, “Of course.”

He walked back to the last pew and put his hand on it again and stood for about forty seconds and sang it again, and it was better the second time.

That is the sentence Grossbard would spend eleven years trying to write.

And Grossbard, standing there, understood something about himself that he had no use for. He wanted the forty seconds. He was fifty-two years old, he had published four books with academic presses and a hundred and forty essays, he had spent thirty years telling graduate students that no interpretation stands outside the community that authorizes it, and what he wanted in that church was to be the man at the front of it with the instrument.

At Murambi the school buildings sit on a hill above Gikongoro with a view that costs money anywhere else in the world. Fifty thousand people were told to gather there for safety. There was no water. There were no latrines. On April 21 the soldiers and the militia came up the hill.

They keep some of the bodies. They were buried in lime and the lime preserved them, and now they lie on tables in the classrooms, white and small, in the positions they were in. Children with their arms up. A woman with her legs drawn.

Rabbi Ephraim Katz went out and sat on the step and did not come back in.

The French built a camp on the hill afterward, during Turquoise, and they put in a volleyball court on top of a grave.

Portnoy said, “The French.”

Setton said, “Everybody.”

Grossbard asked the guide what the memorial paid the survivors who came to give testimony to visiting groups. The guide said it depended. Grossbard asked what it depended on. Teitelbaum touched his sleeve and said that they were behind schedule.

That night at the hotel in Kigali, which had a pool nobody used and a buffet with a carving station, they sat at a long table and drank Fanta and Primus.

Kestenbaum said, “We have an obligation to bring this home.”

“Bring what home,” Grossbard said.

“Shlomo.”

“What is the object of the verb.”

Setton laughed.

“The witness,” Kestenbaum said. “We came here. Almost nobody in our world has come here. We stand in the church, we say the words, and then we go back and we say to our people, it happened again, it happened while we were watching television, and we said never again and it meant nothing.”

“That last part is correct,” Grossbard said. “It meant nothing. It’s a phrase that has never described anything. It’s a noise a community makes to signal that it chosen.”

“You want to say that from the bimah?”

“I want to say what’s true from the bimah.”

Portnoy put down his glass. “Yoni, tell him what they’ll fund.”

Setton shrugged. “A trip. They’ll fund another trip. Bring the eleventh graders. Everybody cries at Nyamata, the parents get a slideshow, the foundation gets a report with photographs.”

“And that’s contemptible?” Kestenbaum said. He had the patience of a man who has never in his life needed to raise his voice to be listened to. “Shlomo, a boy from Valley Village stands in that crypt at seventeen. Something happens in him. You think that’s nothing?”

“I think something happens in him,” Grossbard said. “I think what happens in him is that he learns his own people’s suffering is the model for all suffering, and that he is on the right side of it, and that he has now discharged an obligation by feeling something on a Tuesday. And I think he will go home and be a slightly better person for about five months.”

“Five months is five months.”

“It is,” Grossbard said.

Later, walking back to the rooms, Kestenbaum caught up to him in the corridor. He said, “I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“You are a performer,” Grossbard said. “So am I. Mine plays to forty people.”

On the fifth day they went to the prison at Mpanga and then to a reconciliation village where men who had confessed in gacaca lived on the same road as families of the people they killed. This was Teitelbaum’s tab that said Reconciliation Village, and there was a session with tea, and a woman spoke about forgiveness, and a man spoke about repentance, and the rabbis asked questions about teshuvah and whether the Rwandan model had an analogue in halacha, and Lasker got a photograph of two hands, one of each.

Afterward Grossbard walked out past the tea and found a man sitting on a plastic chair by the wall, out of the sun, not part of the program. He was maybe sixty. His name was Théoneste. He had done eight years.

Grossbard sat down on the ground next to the chair, and asked him about the days.

Théoneste talked about the days.

There was a whistle in the morning, around seven. You went to the roadblock or you went with the group to the marshes. If you went to the marshes you took a machete and you took a bottle of water because it was hot in there and the papyrus was over your head. You worked until eleven or twelve and then it got too hot and you came out and you ate. Some men brought food from home. Some men ate what was in the houses. In the afternoon you went back in for a few hours and then you stopped around five because the light was going and you could not see in there after five. In the evening there was beer. The cows were the good part. If you were early you got a cow, and the cows were finished in the first two weeks, and after that there were only the goats and the sheet metal off the roofs.

He said the marshes were the hardest because of the mud and because people hid under the water and you had to look for the reeds moving. He said a man from his cell in prison had a bad shoulder from that month and still had it.

Grossbard asked him if he had known the people.

Théoneste said he had known all of them. He named four families. He said one of the men had lent him a bicycle pump.

Grossbard asked him what he had thought about while he was doing it.

Théoneste looked at him for the first time, the way you look at a foreigner who has asked something that has no answer, and said, in French, that it was the work of that day.

Le travail de ce jour-là.

Grossbard wrote it on the inside cover of the Borowski.

Kestenbaum’s essay ran nine days after they landed. Eleven hundred words. It ended with the roof of Nyamata and the light coming through the holes. His shul put it on the wall by the office. A network booked him. He was good on television, better than good, because he sat still and let his face do it, and afterward people wrote to him and said they had never seen a rabbi like that.

Grossbard wrote four thousand words. An editor he had published with twice asked for three changes. Cut the section about the payment schedule for survivor testimony, because it read as an accusation against the memorial and would be used by deniers. Cut the paragraph about the delegation’s own budget, because it read as an attack on a foundation that was doing good work. And soften the ending, which said that everyone in the church that morning, including the eleven men in black shoes, was made of the same material as the men in the marshes, and that the difference was position and not character.

Grossbard said he would cut nothing. The piece ran on his own website on a Thursday and got two hundred and forty readers.

He went back four times on his own money. He learned enough Kinyarwanda to know when the translator was smoothing. He interviewed a hundred and ninety-three people over seven years, sixty-one of them confessed killers, and he kept tape logs because he had been trained by an argument and he knew what an argument requires.

The book took eleven years. It is called The Work of That Day. It runs three hundred and forty pages and there are no photographs.

It has the flat register. It describes the marshes the way Théoneste described them, hour by hour, with the water bottles and the heat break and the light at five. It has the economics. It has the price of a machete in Kigali in 1993 and where they came from and how the import numbers rose. It has the cows. It has forty pages on gacaca that annoyed everyone who worked on gacaca, because he wrote about the incentive to confess and the discount for confession and the men who confessed to a good story. It has an appendix on the memorial economy, the per diems, the honoraria, the delegations, the number of foreign groups Nyamata received in a year and what the guides were paid.

And it has the delegation. Chapter nine. He put the eleven of them in the church, in their shoes, and he put Ochoa asking for the second take, and he put Kestenbaum’s throat, and he wrote the sentence about the second take being better and the man meaning it both times.

Then he wrote about his own community’s use of its own catastrophe. He wrote that the practices are identical in structure, that a canon of witness had been assembled out of the accounts that could travel and that the accounts that could not travel had been admired and shelved, and he named which ones. He wrote that the phrase never again had always functioned as a membership card. He wrote that he had carried the card his entire life and had gotten a career out of it.

The agent he had used for the fourth book returned it in six weeks. She said the writing was extraordinary. She said she could not think of the reader.

A university press in the Midwest took it and printed a first run of eight hundred.

The launch was at a bookstore on Pico on a Sunday evening in November. Eleven people came. Six were from his shul and four of those left before the questions. A woman asked whether he thought there was anything redemptive in the story he had told, and he said no, and there was a pause, and the moderator asked about his research methods.

The book sold four hundred and eleven copies in the first year.

There was one review, in a Belgian journal of African studies, by a scholar who called it the most accurate account in English of the operational texture of the hundred days and noted with regret the author’s insistence on inserting himself.

His shul held a kiddush that month for a boy’s aufruf and nobody mentioned the book. The conversation went to the parking situation on Beverwil, and then to a hospital case, and Grossbard stood by the herring and understood that he was watching a functioning organism route around an object that had no use.

His oldest friend on the board took him aside in the parking lot and said, “Shlomo. I read it.”

“And?”

“It’s the best thing you’ve written.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t teach it here.”

Kestenbaum spent three months writing One Hundred Days. He opened at a nonprofit theater downtown and moved to a two-hundred-seat house and then, in 2019, to Broadway.

It runs ninety minutes with no intermission. He plays six people. He plays Emmanuel. He plays a woman who survived under bodies for two days. He plays a French officer. He plays a killer. He plays a rabbi from Los Angeles who arrives with a binder. And at the end he stands at a wooden rail in a light the color of the light through a brick roof and sings the prayer.

The reviews used the word necessary. He won the Tony in 2020. HBO filmed it in 2021 and it played on a Sunday in April and the network put up a resource page. The film version won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 2023, and Kestenbaum, in a tuxedo, said thirty seconds of the survivors’ names and then sat down, which everyone agreed was the right call. In 2025 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the citation said he had taught a generation the meaning of never again.

Grossbard watched the HBO broadcast at home with a cup of tea going cold.

The killer Kestenbaum plays crouches. He breathes through his mouth. His eyes move to the side and he says the word cockroach three times and something happens to the muscles of his face on the third one.

Kestenbaum had gone back twice himself, which nobody knew, and he had a folder of interviews he never used. And out of all of it he had built the version that a country could receive.

Grossbard turned off the television and sat in the dark and thought about interpretive communities, which he had lectured on since 1983.

He had told students for thirty years that there is no standing outside a practice, that the criteria by which anything is judged good are internal to the community doing the judging, that nobody reads from nowhere. He had believed he was a realist. He had assumed that his own standing was a report on the quality of his mind.

It had been a match. His supply had happened to fit a demand. In 1988 the demand had been for a young Orthodox scholar who could talk about hermeneutics to people who were nervous about hermeneutics, and he had supplied it, and he had been paid.

Now he had written the truest thing he would ever write and there was no demand and there was no argument he could make against no demand, because you cannot argue with a market from inside a book the market has not bought.

Portnoy died in March 2026 in Chicago. Grossbard flew out.

At the cemetery the wind came off the lake and the men held their hats. Kestenbaum was there in a black coat, and there were two people with him who were not family and who stood at the edge of the crowd looking at their phones.

Afterward, in the parking lot, Kestenbaum came over.

“Shlomo.”

“Aryeh.”

They talked about Portnoy for a while.

Then Kestenbaum said, “I read your book three times.”

“That’s more than the Belgian.”

“I have it in my bag right now. I’ve had it in my bag for four years.”

“Why?”

Kestenbaum looked out at the stones. “Because I can’t use any of it.”

“I know.”

“I’ve tried. There are nine pages in there I would give a year of my life to have written, and I have stood in a rehearsal room with them and there is nothing to do with them. You put them onstage and the audience goes quiet, and you have lost them.”

Grossbard put his hands in his coat pockets. “Do you believe what you say on that stage?”

“Every word.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Kestenbaum laughed, one syllable, and then stopped. He said, “Nobody ever asked me for yours. In thirty-one years, not one person, not one board, not one foundation, not one donor, not one television producer, has ever asked me for yours. They asked me for mine before I knew I had one.”

The two people at the edge of the lot were looking over.

Kestenbaum took his hand and held it a second longer than the handshake needed. “Your book is the better book.”

“I know,” Grossbard said.

He meant it and it was worth nothing and he drove to O’Hare.

In the fall a student named Zevi came to his office, which is a corner of the beit midrash with a desk and two chairs and a window onto a wall. Zevi wanted to write. He had a subject. He asked what he should do so that people would read it.

Grossbard sat with that for a while.

“Find out what your readers need,” he said. “To keep being what they are and feel righteous about it.”

“And then supply it?”

“Then decide. If you can supply it and tell the truth, you’ll have a career and you’ll deserve it. That happens. It happened to me for twenty-five years and I thought it was virtue.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then write it anyway and don’t be surprised.” He turned the pencil over on the desk.

Zevi wrote something down.

“One more thing,” Grossbard said. “When you’re standing in the place where it happened, and a better man than you sings, and you notice that you want it to be you, put that in. That’s the only sentence in my book anybody will still use in fifty years.”

He looked at the window and the wall.

“Go learn,” he said.