The 614th Commandment

Spiritual leaders, psychologists, diplomats, fundraisers, educators, handymen--Rabbis have to be a great many things at once. So many, in fact, they forget what is perhaps their holiest role--lover.

By Michael Oren

No one told him the requirements. educator, fundraiser, psychologist and family counselor, a diplomat, warrior, undertaker, a comedian, a coach. Nobody intimated, when he was a wide-eyed wunderkind at rabbinical school, that someday he’d not only have to lead services but keep them moving apace, discipline the unruly, castigate gossipers in the pews, read from the Torah and correct the reading of others. A pre-school teacher, a budget-balancer, the hirer and firer of staff. No class on Gemara, no shiur, no hevrutah, prepared him to be a community organizer, a lobbyist, a politician, and, with unnerving frequency as the synagogue aged, a handyman. Nobody taught Rabbi Nahum Eichenwald that taking on a pulpit meant hoisting, Atlas-like, a world, though his knees had gone wobbly and arms daily ached. Nobody warned him that the life of a spiritual leader meant giving up much of that life and extinguishing that spirit, with hardly a hiss, like a Havdalah candle dipped into wine.

For years, throughout his thirties and forties, Rabbi Eichenwald smiled as his congregants shuffled into the shul. He waved to some, nodded to others. Teenagers received a thumbs-up. Here were yet other rabbinical roles. The mood-raiser, the joke-teller, the smoke-a-cigar-taste-the-latest-single-malt one of the guys guy. The secret keeper.

He often wondered what had happened to the real Humi, as they called him in his pre-pulpit days. The rebel, the rascal, the brat—“Bandeet,” his rabbi, the ancient Applebaum, branded him. The snarky kid who’d break into the kiddush wine cabinet and cop a swig or two. The Talmudic prodigy whose mind would nevertheless wander from tractates on Temple sacrifices and master-slave relations to thoughts of what Shayna Mendelsohn, his next-door neighbor, a year younger but already sprouting breasts, would look like if the shades of her bedroom window, opposite his, were ever open.

His life might have taken a different turn—away from religion, abandoning community—if he hadn’t excelled academically, if not for the scholarship his family, of meager means, guilted him into accepting. By the time he received smicha, ordination, all thoughts of rebellion had been driven from him, and then permanently exiled by Mivatzeret.

Not a match, not formally at least, but a suggestion from her father, a distant relative. An expectation. Yet he didn’t need prodding. Mivatzeret—Mivi, to him, from the start—was heart-faced, freckled, petite, and gleaming, with eyes green as a telescope lens that gazed right through him to the life they would surely share. Mivi, with an expression, soon revealed beneath her wedding veil, of wisdom and warning but above all of warmth. Of heat. For not only would his wife keep him focused on carrying out his clerical duties, on the upholding the 613 commandments, but on meeting their other needs.

Especially on Shabbat. The day of rest, steeped in holiness and sex. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth,” it began, with the reciting the Song of Songs. “The king has drawn me into his chambers. We will find love more fragrant than wine.” The day of bliss, when the conjugal meets the divine, when husbands and wives fulfilled the one unwritten commandment, the 614^th. “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door...I rose up to open to my beloved.”

With the door to their bedroom closed and the blankets cast off, Mivi would come to him. Restored to purity after a menstrual break, cleansed physically and spiritually by ritual bathing, Mivi would shed her muted synagogue dress, her strata of underclothes. Even after delivering him five children, the last of whom—Benjamin—a bruiser clocking in at nine pounds plus, she remained slight, bigger breasted but trim. And desperate for him.

So Rabbi Eichenwald believed. A handsome man, he’d heard it said, salt-and-pepper beard and unwinnowed bristles to match, “Moses-like,” they said, tall and naturally lean, with Mivi he felt more than merely revered. He became, for those precious hours, craved. No longer a Jacob, but an Esau, Ismail instead of Isaac, even a Cain. The two of them like Abraham with Sarah—no, like David and Bathsheba, ravenous. His multiplying tasks—time-keeper, sermonizer, Bar Mitzvah boy flatterer—vanished. Mivi’s telescopic eyes fixed on the searing stars of his own.

Week after week, year after year, through child-rearing and holidays high and minor, they reenacted God’s love for Israel by ravishing one another. In the hours between the morning and afternoon prayers, between the second and third meals, they merged. Then she became his teacher, instructing him in delights not even he was certain were permitted under Halacha, Jewish law, and he, her helpless student. And when, at twilight, he became once again Rabbi Eichenwald and she, his wife, the Rebbetzin, they retained a not-quite-concealable glow. Mivi, always modest, fretted whether it showed after they’d returned to shul for the Havdalah prayers, marking the sabbath’s end.

Weather permitting, they were held in the synagogue’s courtyard, in the darkness singing praises to the Prophet Elijah, sipping wine and sniffing a spice box, separating the sacred from the mundane. There, Rabbi Eichenwald would light the Havdalah candle, braided like lovers’ bodies, its twin flames illuminating his congregants’ faces, revealing which looked flushed and becalmed. Which of his members, he swore he could tell, had performed the one unwritten commandment, the 614^th.

So, too, he saw the blush on Mivi’s cheeks—there was no hiding it—the rash his beard had raised on her neck and chin. Her eyes, he imagined, retaining the image of him only a short time before, not in robes, prayer shawl, and kippa, not a clergyperson or interpreter of Jewish law, but as a raw and elemental man. His face, no less than hers, would retain that radiance well into the prayer over the Havdalah candle, as she proffered her fingernails to reflect its light. In that final gleam, he beheld the contentment, the satiation, before plunging the wicks into wine dregs.

An architect, a gardener, an accountant and clairvoyant—faster than their anniversaries, his burdens accumulated. Though the children had grown and the house often stood silent on Shabbat, he spent most of its afternoons visiting the sick and comforting the bereaved. There was Braverman couple, whose only son succumbed to an overdose, and the never-smiling Daniel Greenspoon—the tax lawyer left even more unsmiling by the premature passing of his wife, Tova. Hand-holder, cheerleader, fundraiser, florist. He was rarely at home at all, it seemed. He still observed the commandments, all 613, scrupulously, with diminishing devotion to the last.

Mivi also took her Rebitzin responsibilities more seriously. Chairwoman of the Women’s Club, spearhead of various charities, the listener to the problems too small or too time-consuming to claim the Rabbi’s attention. Following her husband’s path, she similarly sat beside the bedridden, brought solace to the Bravermans and Shabbat meals to the still-mournful Daniel Greenspoon. Her face revealed by Havdalah light showed many things—determination, exhaustion—in place of the previous joy.

Shabbat after Shabbat, Havdalah after Havdalah, the Eichenwalds strode piously into their sixties. Patriarch and matriarch, the community thought of them, Tzaddik and Eshet Hayyil—the Righteous Man and his Woman of Valor. The Glatt kosher couple, some joked, though even that out of respect. Between them, though, the thirst they once slaked in one another had subsided, the gnawing hunger quelled. No longer a braided candle, their lives were like the rods of a torah scroll, perfectly aligned and silver-crowned, forever separated by parchment.

Media manager, medical advisor, a commentator on the political issues of the day—was there no end to a rabbi’s roles, he asked? As if keeping those 613^th commandments were not sufficiently onerous, he had to take on the yokes of the world.

Wearily, now, he led the Havdalah service. In the lightless courtyard, the wine cup felt heavy in his hand, the spice box increasingly leaden. Finally, he found the strength to raise the candle, to signal the end of holiness, the cessation of sanctified desire. He watched as its beam alit on faces left abraded and serene, vibrant and spent, by fulfilling the 614^th. And for the first time in years, Rabbi Eichenwald saw that same sleepy bliss emanating from his wife, Mivatzeret, the cloudy lens of her eyes. For the first time ever, he saw Daniel Greenspoon smiling.