Kabbalah

KABBALAH

DAVID SCOTT MILTON

A Novel

OTHER BOOKS BY DAVID SCOTT MILTON:

Iron City

The Fat Lady Sings

The Quarterback

Paradise Road

Skyline

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Copyright 1980, 2012 by David Scott Milton

Originally published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

If You Need Me

Words and Music by Robert Bateman, Wilson Pickett, and Sonny Sanders Copyright 1963 (Renewed) COTILLION MUSIC, INC.

All Rights Reserved Used by Permission of Alfred Publishing Company, Inc.

Out Of Time

Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards Published by ABKCO Music, Inc.

Copyright 1966 Renewed ABKCO Music, Inc.

Used with permission

When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again by Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan

Copyright 1941 by Peer International Corporation Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.

Preface to the new edition of Kabbalah

It’s probably not a good idea for a writer to reveal the elements from his life that have gone into his work. I’ve always felt that writing a novel was akin to performing a magic trick. The writer knows where he wants to go and by misdirection and astute juggling takes the reader one way and then, zap! — suddenly turns everything around and if one is adroit and fortunate the reader is dazzled and delighted. Revealing the elements that have gone into the work is pulling the screen aside and letting the reader in on the magic.

Nevertheless, as my early novels are reissued I have a compulsion to take the reader behind the magic curtain. Why? Perhaps the dexterity of the tricks seems not so important and the life behind the tricks nags at me. Why was I so concerned about these things that I had to write about them? I’ve always felt vaguely fraudulent, that the act of creation was somehow thin and spurious, and I am now coming clean.

Since I was a small child, I’ve been abundantly skeptical. Don’t ask me where this skepticism originates. It always seemed to be there. I was forever annoying my parents by poking holes in common wisdom. When I was no more than four I startled and dismayed them by declaring I had no use for religion. Why would God choose to show himself to the Jews, this tiny tribe living in a desert, the Jews and only the Jews? What about everybody else? Why didn’t he choose the Eskimos? Or those little pygmies in Africa? If He really was God would he show favorites like that? And take the people who believe in Jesus. If God is God why does he need a son? I don’t think that makes any sense. And which religion is the right religion? They all can’t be right. Why would God do such a dumb thing?

My parents were not amused. Whatever answers they offered up were conventional and not at all convincing. I saw my mother exchange a look with my Dad that said, what is this? We believe in God, because, well, we just believe in God. Now eat your vegetables.

As I grew older, my skepticism grew. If there is a faith gene, I certainly didn’t possess it. I had no patience with mystical occurrences or miracles. All religion seemed to be myth and fairy tales.

And yet—and yet— the genesis for Kabbalah, the events leading up to the writing of it, had unsettling resonances, synchronicities, that stunned and confused me.

These coincidences have stayed with me all these years, have remained as a kind of echo in my life, unsettling, dissonant. All of us, I’m certain, have a sense at times that our life is a dream. Kabbalah fed that sense, nurtured it, increased the feeling that our life is in some essential way a shadow of something else. But what? And why?

When I was a kid, nine, ten, I was a compulsive thief. As such, I was a bad influence on other kids my age, forever leading them into criminal hi-jinks. Nothing major. The usual childhood shoplifting and such. I have no idea, now, why I did this. I never really stole anything of value. It was always candy or doughnuts or small toys. By age twelve I had outgrown the habit.

This drive for criminal adventure may be in some atavistic way innate. Teaching in the California prison system, I became aware of how limited adult criminals were; they seemed, frozen in time. They were not really grown men. They were not even teen-agers. I sensed that emotionally they had never made it past early childhood. They would talk and write about their crimes and I felt as though I were with ten-year-olds at an amusement park riding the roller coasters or whipping through the funhouse. As one long-term con told me, If I had all the money in the world, I’d still choose to be a thief. It’s just too much fun. That’s the way I felt about shoplifting as a ten year old.

No one did I mislead more than Aba Leiter. He was my sidekick, my accomplice in skullduggery. Aba, an Orthodox Jew, came from a distinguished family. His father, Wolf, was considered by many in the Orthodox community to be one of the great rabbis of the 20th century.

In our neighborhood, however, to be an Orthodox Jew was not considered a great thing. The neighborhood, indelibly secular, was filled with Jews who were essentially Conservative or Reformed. As a result, Aba suffered a good deal of ridicule. He wore a hat to school and would not take it off. He would eat only kosher food and I remember his mother would pack banana sandwiches for his lunch. He was awkward and fat.

I became his best friend. He became my shadow. I turned him into a thief.

After school we would hang together. I taught him how to play chess and he became an expert, quickly and vastly outstripping me in the game. Later, he took up tennis; he became a first-rate player. When he graduated high school and entered the yeshiva, he was lean and athletic.

But at age nine, he was chubby and awkward and a thief with me.

Across from our grade school, Colfax, in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, was a candy store. It was owned by an old Italian couple, the Cuas. Everyone assumed they were married. As it turned out, they were brother and sister, a fact learned by most only after Mr. Cua was murdered.

He was a handsome, gray-haired man in his early sixties. He always wore a dark blue, button-up sweater and dark gray trousers. He was always kind and gentle, if somewhat formal, with the kids in the neighborhood.

Cua’s candy store, with red wax lips, wax bottles of sweet colored liquid, licorice dots, marshmallow bananas, was a magical place for us kids, a playground of crime for Aba and me.

We would challenge each other to see who could get away with the largest objects, the most objects, the most expensive swag. I was very competitive in this. I thought of myself as a master thief. Poor, sweet, honest Aba, struggled to keep up with me, struggled to retain my respect, struggled to belong.

One day I had gone too far, stuffing four boxes of doughnuts under my jacket. I can imagine how ridiculous I must have looked, edging toward the door, my mid-section square from the shape of the doughnut boxes. Mr. Cua didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to catch me. Aba, unsettled by my apprehension, came forward and, unprodded, confessed to also pilfering doughnuts.

Mr. Cua, holding each of us by an arm, walked us across the street to the school. His grip was soft and gentle.

Our teacher, Mrs. Strachler, was not amused, nor was the principle.

Mrs. Strachler was a favorite teacher in the school. Her third-grade class was highly coveted by the kids. She had a talent for making learning fun. Having Mrs. Strachler for a teacher meant school was not school, but games, laughs, and love. And I had disappointed this lovely, kindly woman.

I babbled a confession, owned up to everything. I had misled Aba. I was guilty. Send me to reform school.

Punishment was not so onerous, but it was bad enough. I was transferred out of Miss Strachler’s class, where school was imaginative and fun, into Mrs. Strueve’s class where all was serious learning. This was during the Second World War. Mrs. Strueve’s husband was a Commander in the Navy. She ran the class with military precision. There would be no laughs in Mrs. Strueve’s class.

And so I was separated from Aba. Banished. I would no longer be a bad influence on the rabbi’s son.

In addition, my parents were contacted and some form of restitution worked out with Mr. Cua. My mother marched me back to his store and I was forced to apologize. He smiled at me, patted me on the head. He was a man who was truly kind, who had only, after observing my chicanery for months, taken me to task for my own good.

I graduated Colfax school when I was twelve. I never saw Mr. Cua after that. When I was in my early twenties, I learned that he had been murdered.

A Jewish kid from our neighborhood had walked into his store and for no apparent reason, shot him dead.

The killer awaited trial in the Allegheny County jail. He requested a chaplain. Aba Leiter, who was now a rabbi, served the Jewish inmates and became the counselor to the kid who had murdered Mr. Cua.

I heard about Mr. Cua’s fate when I was living in New York and I was haunted by it and disturbed by the irony that my old companion in filching was now the murderers’ chaplain. I thought about Aba and Mr. Cua and Mr. Cua’s murder and his murderer a great deal. I became obsessed by it and, at a distance, tried to learn as much about it as I could. I would talk to my brother and parents and friends and, when I visited Pittsburgh, talked with Aba about Cua, his murder, and his murderer. Aba didn’t have much to say about the killer except that the killing was senseless and the boy was disturbed.

The years went by, I lost touch with Aba—he had married and moved from Pittsburgh— but Mr. Cua and his fate remained with me. I wondered if I might write something about them.

I was in my late twenties. I had not yet published a novel. I had not yet had the success as a playwright that I would have later. I lived in a cold-water flat on East 73rd Street in Manhattan; the bathtub was in the kitchen, the toilet in the hallway leading to the street. I was struggling and depressed most of the time.

My future seemed anything but promising. And I was thinking about Aba Leiter and Mr. Cua and all that swirled around that, our youth together, thieving, Mr. Cua’s ghastly murder.

It was a mid-week night. I was trying to read. But I was thinking about the days of my youth. My phone rang. I remember it was late, but I was not yet ready for bed. I usually stayed up all night, watching television, reading, writing, brooding.

It was perhaps two or three in the morning. I answered the phone and a quiet voice said, Mr. Cua is dead.

Who is this? Silence. I did not even hear the hang up.

I was wide-awake. I have never had a problem imagining things that aren’t there. I have never heard voices or hallucinated in any way. I’ve always been, if anything, extraordinarily sane, clear of thought, rational. And so, hearing this quiet voice say very simply, Mr. Cua is dead, was deeply disturbing. I was shaken.

Over the next days, I couldn’t get the phone call out of my mind. I tried to imagine who would call me and say such a thing. Who? Why? My brother, would he be playing a trick? No, I would recognize his voice and what sort of trick would that be? Some other friend? Who? What would be the purpose of the trick? Would something follow it up?

A week or so went by and I was walking down Second Avenue, not far from my apartment. It was mid-afternoon, a winter day, cold and gray, and I was deep in thought, going over my life as I did so often in those days, chronicling failure, my barely existent career, and thinking about Aba Leiter and Mr. Cua and the peculiar phone call.

I reached the comer of 73rd Street. Someone was walking quickly toward me, smiling broadly.

For an instant it didn’t register on me who it was. Why is this geeky guy in stained Burberry and baseball cap grinning at me? He said, Dave! in a very jaunty way and I just stared at him beyond being stunned. I had trouble getting my breath.

It was Aba Leiter. At that time, I hadn’t seen or talked to him in perhaps ten years. Aba—what are you doing here?

He was living in the mid-west, Minnesota. He was in New York for a religious conference and decided to see if he could find me. He had learned from my brother that I was on the Upper East Side.

We had coffee in a nearby diner and talked about our lives. And we talked about Mr. Cua and his murder.

He tried to dredge up things about the murderer, but he really didn’t know very much. He was just an average kid, oh, eighteen or so, who seemed at that time depressed and disturbed. He knew nothing about his family, or remembered nothing about them.

I told Aba about this weird coincidence, my running into him after all these years just days after receiving an ominous phone call, Mr. Cua is dead. He wasn’t impressed. It didn’t matter much to him beyond being coincidental.

We talked about chess and about the days years before when he was attending at yeshiva in New York and he and I would meet on 42 Street and he would hustle chess. And we talked about other things, about family matters, his father, his brothers and sister. One brother had become a rabbi, another, a successful fashion photographer; his sister had been in and out of mental hospitals. When she was out, she would spend time with my mother who had become a link for her between the secular world and the world of Orthodox Judaism.

And then Aba left to go about his business.

And I knew that I would write a novel about Aba, myself, and Mr. Cua.

It was some years later when I finally got around to working on it. By then I had published two novels, had a major film produced, had a play on Broadway. Aba at that time was a rabbi with a synagogue in Manitowoc Wisconsin. I contacted him and told him what I was trying to do. He invited me to visit with him. He now had a wife and several kids.

He seemed to be living a pleasant life, though he told me he was unhappy with the congregation he served. They were not serious Jews, but social Jews. I’m not a serious Jew, I said.

But you don’t pretend to be anything you’re not, he said.

A fierce winter wind howled in off Lake Michigan, rattling the windows. His wife served us tea and pastries and his kids, who were quite small, scurried about the comfortable apartment. I told him my book would be a crime novel. Someone would kill Mr. Cua and no one would know why and the book would become not a whodunit, but a whydunit. I only had the sketchiest of ideas about the book then and I told them to him and he seemed interested, but only mildly so. Mr. Cua and his murder obviously didn’t mean as much to him as it did to me.

I asked him if there was some theological underpinning that I could use for the book. A main character would be a rabbi very much like him. I knew very little about rabbis and the religion. He really was my deepest link to Judaism. Why would the rabbi become involved with the life of a murderer, I asked him?

He began to talk to me about Kabbalah. And he drew me in. He said whatever we think God is, He isn’t. He said that in the Kabbalistic tradition the salvation of one soul is the equivalent of saving the world. He spoke to me about Moses Chiam Luzzatto, great Kabbalist of the early 18th century, The Ramchal, as he’s known. He told me that Luzzatto, a writer of religious essays of enormous power, also wrote secular poetry and drama. He was a stunningly gifted Hebrew stylist, Aba said. His writing is so tight, it’s as though it’s carved in stone. You cannot fit an extra word into anything he ever wrote.

He quoted to me from Luzzatto’s The Path of the Just: ‘On the basis of justice alone it would be dictated that the sinner be punished immediately upon sinning, the punishment be a wrathful one; and that there can be no correction for the sin. How can a man straighten out what has been made crooked? If a man killed his neighbor, how can he correct this?’ But then he had asked: ‘What function does the attribute of mercy perform?’ And answered: ‘The attribute of mercy is the mainstay of the world.’

And then I knew how I would write my book.

For more than a year after that visit to Aba, I read everything I could get my hands on about Kabbalah. He gave me a list of books to read, Gershon Sholem and Moses Chiam Luzzatto and Miamonides. More and more. I was educating myself and it was difficult, particularly to someone not versed in Orthodox Judaism. As I read and studied I realized that the pertinence of Kabbalah to the story I had to tell was deep and astonishing. I almost said miraculous.

The book was not easy to write. Of everything I’ve worked on, Kabbalah was by far the most exhausting and draining. At times it almost felt like digging ditches, like physical labor. I slept badly. My muscles ached. When I was doing my final revisions, I would often wake in the morning after a night of tossing and turning and bad dreams sick to my stomach. I would throw up before I went to the typewriter.

I am not usually a writer who agonizes over what I write. I’ve always felt that there should be joy in the act of creation. Not with Kabbalah. Kabbalah was onerous and debilitating. I was dealing with the souls of human beings in the book and in doing so I had touched my own soul and looked into it and was disturbed by what I saw.

I wish I could tell you that the book changed my life and the way I looked at God and the universe, but it would be not be true. I’m too hard a case. The book did affect me deeply; the events leading up to it and after, increased the uneasiness that I’ve always felt about the world and my place in it. I’m still haunted by that mid night phone call, Mr. Cua is dead and then my meeting Aba some days later, his jaunty smile, the weird coincidence of it.

And in my study of Kabbalah I found myself in a labyrinth of mirrors, a funhouse, that tricked me up at every turn. I found myself rushing this way and that, turning in circles, racing in a maze. I felt that if I let down my guard of rationality, I would never escape from this house of mirrors, this theological maze.

I didn’t become religious. Instead I became even more aware of chaos swirling about me, swirling, ever-increasing as I get older. I yearn for meaning in this chaos, but I find none. I often think, though, if I were capable of belief I might look to Kabbalah. I might find solace there. But my inability to stop questioning everything will not permit it. I fear the house of mirrors, even if it’s God’s house.

David Scott Milton

Tehachapi, California

December 2006

There is in God a principle that is called Evil, and it lies in the north of God. And what principle is this? It is the form of the hand, and it has many messengers, and all are named Evil, Evil. And it is they that fling the world into guilt, for the tohu is in the north, and tohu means precisely the evil that confuses men until they sin, and it is the source of all man's evil impulses.

--The Bahir Kabbalah

KABBALAH

This day is poised in time.

Two boys not yet twelve years old sit on the grassy hillﾭside of a park. Below is a river and beyond that, seen through a scrim of hazy smoke, a row of black steel mills.

It is a warm afternoon in late summer. The boys, one blond, one dark, sit lost in thought. Summer's end is unimaginable.

Tell me about Kabbalah, the blond boy says.

The dark boy gazes up at the clouds, magical forms, scudding by: swans, elephants, giraffes.

Time yawns with drone of summer flies, grasshoppers Hitting through the fireweed, sweet odor of goldenrod and rose mallow, churn of brown river, hum of far-off mill.

It is an hour for telling stories.

There is a great distance between us and God, the dark boy begins. "He wants us to reach him. He has given us something like a map. Sometimes it takes the form of a tree and we call it the Sephirot. Sometimes it’s in the shape of a man, and this we call Adam Kadmon—the first Adam, even before Adam of the Bible/'

But Adam was the first man—

The dark boy knits his brow, ponders. Before him was a perfect Adam, but God felt that was too easy so He made an Adam with a flaw. He gave this Adam a choice: good or evil. If Adam had made the right choice, we would all be perfect.

I want to be perfect, the blond boy says.

Then you must follow Kabbalah. This map. The dark boy takes up a twig and draws a figure in the ground. It’s made up of ten lines, forming thirty-two paths. And each leads to an attribute of God. And you must come close to these attributes. And then you will come close to God.

I want to come close to God, the blond boy says. I want to be perfect.

The map, though, the Tree of Kabbalah, has another side. If you were to look at it in a mirror, you would see the other side.

That is the bad side?

The dark boy nods. God has given us this choice, good Kabbalah or bad. And they are both here at the same time. One is a reflection of the other. The dark boy’s voice is soft, serious. If a man follows bad Kabbalah, he will be lost. He will spend his days in loneliness and pain. He will wander from town to town, shunned by everyone but the most miserable, the evil ones like him. He will be stupid like a golem. His life will not be his own. He will suffer and he will cause suffering.

A shiver passes through the blond boy. I don’t want to be stupid like a golem.

You must follow good Kabbalah.

I wish I was smarter, the blond boy says plaintively. I’m strong, but I’m not as smart as I’d like to be.

And I want to be strong like you, the dark boy says.

You don’t need to be strong. You have me to take care of you, the blond boy says. He is silent for a while. Promise me you will show me the right Kabbalah.

I promise.

Forever?

Forever

The great, sharp disk of the sun slices behind the mill tops. Dusk gathers like smoke in the woods below the park. The day grows cool. The sky beyond the river is fiery with flame from the mills.

The blond boy puts his arm around the dark boy's shoulder as they stroll tom the park.

At a corner opposite a granite school building they enter a candy store.

This day is poised in time.

PART 1

Chapter 1

MIRROR STREET. He had been haunted for some time now by the conviction that his life was a fun house mirror. Or a show seen on television, the reception not always clear. Curved, distorted, fragmented, a war of reflections, it often filled him with horror and a terrifying sense of impotence.

He strolled past Mirror Street, where he had spent a part of his youth, walked along Murray Avenue, and turned up the hill, moving in the cold dusk. Harsh lines of neon cut the buildings, slashes of blood palpitating in his gaze: JIFFY LUNCH where the Hot Puppy Shoppe had been; THRIFT DRUGS in place of the Murray Avenue Pharmacy, FORWARD AVENUE BOWLING remained from the past, its sputtering sign sad and remote, its dark exterior a lie to him: he could not shake an apprehension that the insides were gutted, that nothing existed beyond the facade.

The world of his youth was real, the time of his present a fun house. Fun house mirror. Mirror Street.

In his mind now he saw a dying bird. He was eight years old, pressing against the leg of his mother, weeping. And there was a fragrance of flowers. After that he had run from the house . . .

The street was empty. The Squirrel Hill movie house lights were on, but the marquee had not yet been set with the week’s attraction. A jumble of meaningless letters created something like panic in him. He tried to make out a message, but if it was there, it was much too arcane, dense consonants, brutal configurations. He moved on.

The street was cold. He pressed his hands deep into the pockets of his pea jacket. His right hand gripped something that felt colder than the cold outside and he squeezed it to bring warmth to it. Squeezed. It should be warm, he thought.

He was possessed of an idea of himself as The Destroyer. He had visions of an ancient man with long, flowing beard and prayerful hands peaked together at the fingertips, eyes of no color, expression menacing in its emptiness. He dreamed about this man and he thought about him often. The old man had sent The Destroyer out into the cold autumn night.

His right hand was warm now. What it held burned now in his grip.

He turned and moved on past the high school, Taylor Allderdice. Pale, cold, dirty yellow brick. Beyond the high school, where Shady Avenue angled left, was the old synagogue, the Ohave Zedek, built from what appeared to be the same dirty yellow brick as the high school.

An old Jewish woman, the first person he had seen since leaving the streetcar at the bottom of Mirror Street, moved down the steps from the synagogue.

The woman caused him to shudder. It was a Jewish neighborhood and Jews upset him. Old Jews upset him most of all. He didn’t like stooped, dark people. He was tall and blond, his eyes a washed blue, eyes the color of clouds.

He glared at the woman in her dark, formless coat, mud- gray stockings sagging about her calves, her face the texture of aging newspaper. Frightened, she looked away and hurried on past him up Tilbury Street. Had she recognized him? He weighed the possibility: he had spent more than half his life in this neighborhood. At one time everyone had known him.

He walked past the fence surrounding Colfax, the elementary school. In the school yard a gang of teen-age boys was tossing around a football. One of the boys stared at him. He did not acknowledge the look. The boy grew emﾭbarrassed, dropped a pass, jogged about awkwardly, shaking his head.

The blond man with gray-blue eyes watched the boys playing football for a while. They were not very good. Had he been in the mood, he could have shown them a few things.

A sudden feeling of enormous, impenetrable, chilling loneliness came over him, a feeling that no one on earth mattered less than he. The boys were stealing glances at him, and he realized how awful he must look, thin, pale, needing a shave, his clothes—ragged pea jacket, khaki trousers, workboots—old and torn. His long hair was dirty blond, scraggly, knotted. There was a time when it was golden blond. The boys were looking at him with pity and the disgust he felt for himself was almost overwhelming.

He moved off toward the candy store.

It was directly opposite the school, run by an old Italian, Cervino. What would Cervino look like now? In the days when he attended Colfax, Cervino had seemed elderly. How must he look now? Ancient, ancient. Bearded man with eyes of no color? No, Cervino had been clean-shaven. His skin had been pink.

He remembered a time when Cervino had held him. He had been surprisingly strong with muscles like stone.

Would he recognize him? Thousands of kids had spent their after-school days in Cervino’s, browsing among the comic books, buying penny licorice, orange soda, banana mallows. Years and years of kids. Why would he recognize him?

Would Cervino recall that once, a long while back, they had had a few moments together? It was a