Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(118)

“What can we say about someone about whom there is too much to say?”

The rabbi put his hands in his jacket pockets, closed his eyes, and nodded.

“Words don’t fail us, time does. There isn’t time—not from now until time’s end—to recount the tragedy, and heroism, and tragedy of Isaac Bloch’s life. We could stand here speaking about him until our own funerals, and it wouldn’t be enough. I visited Isaac the morning of his death.”

Wait, what? Was this possible? Wasn’t he just the schmuck rabbi, here because half of the actually good rabbi’s mouth had stopped functioning? If they’d stopped at Isaac’s on the way back from the airport, would they have crossed this man’s path?

“He called, and he asked me to come over. I heard no urgency in his voice. I heard no desperation. But I heard need. So I went. It was my first time in his home. We’d only met once or twice at shul, and always in passing. He had me sit at his kitchen table. He poured me a glass of ginger ale, served me a plate of sliced pumpernickel, some cantaloupe. Many of you have had that meal at that table.”

A gentle chuckle of recognition.

“He spoke slowly, and with effort. He told me about Sam’s bar mitzvah, and Jacob’s show, and Max’s early long division, and Benjy’s bike-riding, and Julia’s projects, and Irv’s mishegas—that was his word.”

A chuckle. He was winning.

“And then he said, ‘Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.’?”

This was either the most audacious heaping and steaming mountain of Jewshit ever shoveled by a rabbi or anyone, or a revelatory glimpse into Isaac Bloch’s consciousness. Only the rabbi knew for sure—what was accurately recounted, what was embellished, what was fabricated out of whole tallis. Had anyone ever heard Isaac use the word despair? Or gratitude? He’d have said, “It was horrible, but it could have been worse.” But would he have said that? Thankful for what? And what were all these miracles he’d witnessed?

“Then he asked me if I spoke Yiddish. I told him no. He said, ‘What kind of rabbi doesn’t speak Yiddish?’?”

A proper laugh.

“I told him my grandparents spoke Yiddish to my parents, but my parents would never let me hear it. They wanted me to learn English. To forget Yiddish. He told me he’d done the same, that he was the last Yiddish-speaker in his family, that the language would be in the casket, too. And then he put his hand on my hand and said, ‘Let me teach you a Yiddish expression.’ He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Kein briere iz oich a breire.’ I asked him what it meant. He took back his hand and said, ‘Look it up.’?”

Another laugh.

“I did look it up. On my phone, in his bathroom.”

Another laugh.

“Kein briere iz oich a breire. It means ‘Not to have a choice is also a choice.’?”

No, those words couldn’t have been his. They were too faux-enlightened, too content with circumstance. Isaac Bloch was many things, and resigned was not one of them.

If having no choice were a choice, Isaac would have run out of choices once a day after 1938. But the family needed him, especially before the family existed. They needed him to turn his back on his grandparents, his parents, and five of his brothers. They needed him to hide in that hole with Benny, to walk with rigid legs toward Russia, eat other people’s garbage at night, hide, steal, forage. They needed him to forge documents to board the boat, and tell the right lies to the U.S. immigration officer, and work eighteen-hour days to keep the grocery profitable.

“Then,” the young rabbi said, “he asked me to pick up toilet paper for him at the Safeway, because they were having a sale.”

Everyone chuckled.

“I told him he didn’t need to buy toilet paper anymore. It would be taken care of by the Jewish Home. He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘But that price…’?”

A louder, freer laugh.

“?‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Was there something you wanted to hear? Something you wanted to say?’ He said, ‘There are two things that everybody needs. The first is to feel that he is adding to the world. Do you agree?’ I told him I did. ‘The second,’ he said, ‘is toilet paper.’?”

The loudest laugh yet.

“I’m thinking about a Hasidic teaching that I learned as a rabbinical student. There are three ascending levels of mourning: with tears, with silence, and with song. How do we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears, with silence, or with song? How do we mourn the end of his life? The end of the Jewish epoch that he participated in and exemplified? The end of Jews who speak in that music of broken instruments; who arrange their grammar counterclockwise and miss the point of every cliché; who say mine instead of my, the German people instead of Nazis, and who implore their perfectly healthy relatives to be healthy instead of feeling silent gratitude for health? The end of hundred-and-fifty-decibel kisses, of that drunken European script. Do we shed tears for their disappearance? Silently grieve? Or sing their praises?

“Isaac Bloch was not the last of his kind, but once gone, his kind will be gone forever. We know them—we have lived among them, they have shaped us as Jews and Americans, as sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters—but our time of knowing them is nearly complete. And then they will be gone forever. And we will only remember them. Until we don’t.