Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(116)
“The impact is lessened by it having been prompted.”
“It’s a funeral, Julia. And thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saying I look handsome.”
Irv wore the same suit he’d been wearing since the Six-Day War.
Isaac wore the shroud in which he had been married, the shroud he’d worn once a year on the Day of Atonement, the chest of which he’d beaten with his fist: For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance on the lips…For the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly…For the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart…The shroud had no pockets, as the dead are required to be buried without any encumbrances.
A small—in number and physical stature—army from Adas Israel had passed through the grief like a breeze: they brought stools, covered the mirrors, took care of the platters, and sent Jacob an un-itemized bill that he was unable to question without requiring Jewish seppuku. There would be a small service, followed by burial at Judean Gardens, followed by a small kiddush at Irv and Deborah’s, followed by eternity.
—
All the local cousins were at the funeral, and a few older, zanier Jews came in from New York, Philly, and Chicago. Jacob had met these people throughout his life, but only at rites of passage—bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals. He didn’t know their names, but their faces evoked a kind of Pavlovian existentialism: if you’re here, if I see you, something significant must be happening.
Rabbi Auerbach, who’d known Isaac for several decades, had a stroke a month earlier and so left the officiating to his replacement: a young, disheveled, smart, or maybe dumb recent product of wherever rabbis are made. He wore unlaced sneakers, which felt, to Jacob, like a shabby tribute to someone who had probably eaten sneakers in the skyless forests of Poland. Then again, it might have been some kind of religious display of reverence, like sitting on stools or covering mirrors.
He approached Jacob and Irv before the service began.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, cupping his hands in front of him, as if they contained empathy, or wisdom, or emptiness.
“Yeah,” Irv said.
“There are a few ritualistic—”
“Save your words. We’re not a religious family.”
“It probably depends on what is meant by religious,” the rabbi said.
“It probably doesn’t,” Jacob corrected him, either in his dad’s defense or in the absence of God’s.
“And our stance is a choice,” Irv said. “Not laziness, not assimilation, not inertia.”
“I respect that,” the rabbi said.
“We’re as good as any Jews.”
“I’m sure you’re better than most.”
Irv went right back at the rabbi: “What you do or don’t respect isn’t of great importance to me.”
“I respect that, too,” the rabbi said. “You’re a man of strongly held beliefs.”
Irv turned to Jacob: “This guy really can’t take an insult.”
“Come on,” Jacob said. “It’s time.”
The rabbi walked the two of them through a few of the small rituals that, while entirely voluntary, they would be expected to perform in order to ensure Isaac’s proper passage into whatever Jews believe in. After his initial reluctance, Irv seemed not only willing, but wanting, to cross his chets and dot his zayins—as if stating his resistance was resistance enough. He didn’t believe in God. He couldn’t, even if opening himself to that foolishness might have opened him to badly needed comfort. There had been a few moments—not of belief, but religiosity—every one of them involving Jacob. When Deborah went into labor, Irv prayed to no one that she and the baby would be safe. When Jacob was born, he prayed to no one that his son long outlive him, and acquire more knowledge and self-knowledge than him, and experience greater happiness. At Jacob’s bar mitzvah, Irv stood at the ark and said a prayer of gratitude to no one that trembled, then broke, then exploded into something so beautifully unrestrained and full-throated that he was left with no voice to deliver his speech at the party. When he and Deborah didn’t read the books they were staring at in the waiting room of George Washington Hospital, and Jacob almost pushed the doors off the hinges, his face covered in tears, his scrubs covered in blood, and did his best to form the words “You have a grandson,” Irv closed his eyes, but not to darkness, and said a prayer to no one without any content, only force. The sum of those no ones was the King of the Universe. He’d spent enough of his life wrestling foolishness. Now, at the cemetery, all the wrestling felt foolish.
The rabbi said a small prayer, offering no translation or approximate sense of the meaning, and took a razor blade to Irv’s lapel.
“I need this suit for my grandson’s bar mitzvah.”
Because he didn’t hear Irv, or because he did, the young rabbi made a tiny incision, and directed Irv to open it—to create the actual rip—with his forefingers. It was ridiculous, this gesture. It was witchcraft, a relic from the time of stoning women for having their periods the wrong way, and it was an unconscionable thing to do to a Brooks Brothers suit. But Irv wanted to bury his father according to Jewish law and tradition.
He inserted his fingers into the incision, as if into his own chest, and pulled. And as the fabric tore, Irv’s tears were released. Jacob hadn’t seen his father cry in years. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father cry. It suddenly seemed possible that he’d never seen him cry.