Photo by Robert Burroughs

Max drove to the beach like a madman escaping a nightmare.

He was a psychologist overcome by dread. Dread so dark it was biblical. He had no more idea what to do or why than his patients. He was supposed to know. This was 20 years ago when people read Psychology Today to find out how to fix themselves. When psychology itself was part of a liberation movement; when psychologists were midwives of personality, mechanics of human potential, the ones who knew, the ones who had the answers. “It was all a hoax.' Max said. “If the culture said. 'Repress.’ we said. 'Open up.’ If the culture said. ‘Don’t worry.’ we said. ‘Think about it.’ It was all reactive, all relative. We didn’t know what we believed; no one knew what to believe. It was wide open.”

As soon as his feet touched the water, huge shudders of relief shook through him.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

He’d sit in his office, listening to a patient. Next door, a colleague sat in another office, listening to another patient. Max would sit and listen while his patient wept and confessed. People wanted to be free; they wanted to be spontaneous, open, loving, generous, fun-in-the-sun. But Max knew. He and his wife both knew nearly as soon as they moved here; all the smiles and all the self-indulgence, all the blonds on all the beaches were nothing but sugar pills for brain tumors. Southern California was full of foreboding; its sensuality was nothing but a quick fix for fear. Pervasive fear. Fear that rested on Max like 40 feet of water.

Daf Yomi, reading the Talmud, at Adat Yeshurun

Photo by Robert Burroughs

Max would sit in his office and counsel clients. Now and then, a scream would come through the wall from next door. Not just any scream, but a primal scream the remnant of a birth trauma, a theory and a therapy as dated today as bell bottoms and disco music. Back then. Esalen was operating seven days a week. 24 hours a day. Nude encounter groups; genital staring sessions.

Rabbi Jeff Wohlgelernter, descendent of the Seer of Lublin, a holy mystic

Photo by Robert Burroughs

Twelve people in a room; in walks a psychologist with a bag of oranges; he walks up to each person. “Pick an orange,” he says. Everyone does. "Now go off and find a place and settle down and get to know your orange. See it; smell it; feel it. Make friends with it. Learn it. Love it. Come back in an hour.” An hour later they all return. "Now,” says the psychologist, “put your oranges back in the bag.” Everyone does. The psychologist shakes the bag and spills the oranges out onto the floor. “Now," he says, “find your orange." “I started thinking,” said Max, “I was a charlatan among charlatans. It was the imposter syndrome, squared.”

While the coffee brewed and the Rabbi paced his office. Max (foreground) and the others took places at a table.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

He’d fallen in love with his wife when they were both 14. At a summer camp run by Jewish Socialists. Back East, back in New York. They’d married when he was 22. In graduate school, in Missouri, when everyone was sleeping with everyone else, professors with grad students, teaching assistants with college kids, married men with their best friends’ wives. Max had tried his best, but he’d never felt happy committing adultery. He knew he was supposed to; he knew it was good for him; he knew his conscience was an impediment, as vestigial as a tail. He knew this, but he never felt free. Guilt, regret, remorse, but no release. In his practice, a homosexual had come to him and belittled himself: he was too shy, too prudish, too cowardly to go to a bar and pick someone up. Max listened but couldn’t say anything. The man took his silence as consent. The next week he returned to Max. beaming, proud, self-congratulatory: he’d done it! Max didn’t know if he should congratulate him or offer his regrets.

He taught at the university. They’d recruited him at a convention in Las Vegas. “A suitably decadent place,” Max said. He often spoke like that: ruefully, ironically, deprecatingly. Especially about himself. As if he were both a fool and a king. Or a king who knew he was a fool. He had clients, but he also taught. One semester, he taught a course on counseling. In class, he used to play audio tapes made by a man named Richard Alport. Alport and Timothy Leary had been colleagues at Harvard. Psychologists who’d taken their own medicine. Leary had dropped out to preach LSD; Alport had made a journey to the East and come back, incarnated as a guru named Ram Dass. He began to make tapes that mixed autobiography with advice and philosophy. “Here I was,” said Alport on one tape. “At the pinnacle of academia. A psychologist on the faculty at Harvard. And I had no more idea who I was and what I was doing than the most common laborer!” Every time Max heard that, he broke into a cold sweat. Because Ram Dass could have been talking about him. Max would quickly glance around the room, afraid his students could hear his heart. No one suspected.

His wife gave birth to a son. then to a daughter. He was 33. His dread grew worse. He remembered when he was a kid. standing next to his mother on the subway platform, waiting for (he train. "The guy next to us —” he said. “The train pulled in and he took a swan dive, a perfect swan dive. Right in front of us.” Now he felt that way again: waiting for the train. Waiting for the man to kill himself. Down in a tunnel; down in the dark, down in the gloom. Except he wasn’t so much watching the man as watching himself. He began to have trouble breathing. The only thing that helped was exercises he’d learned in an aikido class. “Think about that. ” he said. "It’s a martial art that teaches you how to feel empathy for your opponent. You put yourself in his place so you can use his own sense of self against him. So you can cream him. That’s some kind of empathy!" Max was a big man, tall, fleshy, his face an oval, the sockets of his eyes ovals. A Jew who didn’t believe in anything. Except some aikido breathing exercises.

He and his family moved into a new tract house. It was what they could afford. It was adequate; it was sterile. As soon as they were in, his wife wanted to move out. There was an older house on the market; a place with more character, overlooking the sea. a better place to raise kids, more aesthetic than a concrete cul-de-sac. Max didn’t know what to do and he didn’t care. He didn’t care where he lived or if he did. Dread pressed on his chest. He breathed sips of air. No one suspected a thing.

One Friday afternoon, in the spring — it might have been around the time of Passover; he didn’t know, he'd never been bar mitzvahed — he was sitting alone in his living room, in his house, in the cul-de-sac. trembling and sweating, when he had a vision that terrified him. It was just a glimpse, but it horrified him; he was at the bottom of his own grave, looking up. as they shovelled dirt down onto him. Just that. Nothing more, but it pushed him up. out of his chair, across the room. He grabbed his keys and ran to his car.

He drove to the beach like a madman escaping a nightmare, trying to escape his own life. Through the traffic, down the curves, through the wind, in the light, a word kept repeating in his mind, and that word was “vanity.” “It didn’t mean pride,’ ” he said. “It meant, ‘in vain,’ like my life was in vain.” He roared into the parking lot, barreled into a space, and only then realized that there wasn’t a soul around. Friday afternoon, springtime, the place was always packed; the parking lot full, crowds of people, figures silhouetted against the sky, but that afternoon, there was no one, only him, all alone, covered with sweat, trembling, his chest moving like there was a rope around it. He sat in his car, waiting for something to change, but the dread was still there, so he jumped out and rushed down the cliff.

He wanted to find a safe place, a spot, somewhere to sit so he could breathe and stop the fear. He wanted to settle himself, close his eyes, and begin the aikido exercises that had saved him before. He remembered thinking, “If they ever worked before, they better work now.” He found a place and began. Then something happened.

He said it was like changing the channels on a TV, like the split second between one image and the next. There was a flash of bright, static-filled light, clear light, only light, and in that light, he didn't so much see something as feel it. It felt like he’d been lit. inside and out. He felt an emotion, but it wasn’t calm; there was no calm. He felt like he’d been fused, melded, merged with the whole world. The feeling lasted a second. “Like," he said, “when you change from AM to FM on the radio. You haven’t changed the dial, but everything’s changed; black goes white; white goes black; just one flick and it’s all switched, the music, everything you're listening to. it’s all switched, all different, just like that, in an instant.”

But there was no calm. He knew something remarkable had happened to him, but he was still frightened. One part of him was dazzled, but the other part was still terrified, and that part began to try to find some way to use whatever had happened to calm down the rest of him. It didn’t succeed.

Then he heard a voice. He realized, as soon as he heard it, that hearing a voice was a sign of extreme distress. He understood that, clinically. He still heard the voice, though. It was very distinct. It said, “Surrender is in order.”

He opened his eyes for a second. He wanted to see if someone was kneeling next to him, talking in his ear. He’d been up on a cliff face with his eyes squeezed shut, so what he saw, when he peeked out. was a (lock of sandpipers, scampering along the water. “Dumb little birds.” he said, but what he felt was an empathy he’d never felt for anyone or anything before. Then he heard the voice again. It said, "Go down to the water.”

He stood up. He was all alone, but the voice was very clear. He walked down to the sea.

As soon as his feet touched the water, huge shudders of relief shook through him. up his legs through his hips, into his chest; great, rumbling trembles coursed through him like waves, up into his shoulders. A huge weight lifted off him. He hadn’t noticed it until it was gone. He fell serene. Not calm. He felt bliss.

Then a voice said, “Love your children. Your children are your future."

He didn’t remember how long he spent in the water, but he came out different than when he went in.

He drove home and told his wife. He thought he was making sense, but, years later, she told him he’d been babbling. Until that moment, no matter how dreadful he felt, he’d always spoken rationally. He’d always sounded as if he were in control of his own thoughts and feelings. Ironic, acerbic, cool. Never, not once, had he ever used the word “God” in a sentence. Now, as he spoke, the words tumbling out, he spoke as if he’d seen God. Not seen Him. but felt Him. Not felt Him. but heard Him. Not heard Him. but.... Max didn’t know how to describe what had happened. His wife knew, though. “She thought I’d lost my marbles,” he said. Years before, in graduate school, one of their friends had taken an acid trip and never come back. As Max spoke, his wife grew more and more frightened. She knew enough to recognize his symptoms: he’d suffered a psychotic break. She let him talk, but all she could think was, “Who’ll take care of me and the kids while he’s in the hospital?"

For the next few months, sometimes for days, he’d quiet down and act normally. Then he’d start to “babble" again. His kids kept their distance. “Daddy hears voices.” they said. He tried to keep to himself. Not just because he knew the effect he was having, but because he felt like a man in a desert, holding water in his hands: no matter how still he stood, he could feel the experience leaking through his fingers. He felt as if he’d died and been brought back to life, but he didn’t know why.

He felt reborn, but he also felt as if he'd been poisoned. Then resuscitated.

He felt as if whoever had done that to him — if it was God — was still watching him, waiting to see his next move. At work, he said, he “looked so blissed-out, people got contact highs” when they walked past him. He was frightened though: something dangerous and powerful had happened to him, but he didn’t know what it was or why he’d experienced it.

He began to read anything and everything he could about religion and religious experience, books by Hindus, Catholics, Jews, and Moslems, books of Western and non-Westem cosmology; books by mystics and about mystics. He made appointments with people who taught religion at the university. He asked them earnest questions. Although they seemed to envy his experience — they’d only read about such things in William James — they didn’t know how to advise him. He knew nothing, had never known anything, so he kept asking. He had several awkward conversations with campus chaplains: whatever had happened to Max. they said, sounded like Saul at Tarsus, but the experience was completely beyond them. Blinding flashes of clear light? They were glad to talk about ethics and conduct, but revelation made them nervous.

One of the books he read was The Autobiography of a Yogi by a man named Yogi Nanda. His followers had founded an organization called the Self-Realization Fellowship. They had a headquarters in town. Max thought he ought to join — maybe. He drove over, parked, and walked through carefully tended, well-trimmed gardens to the Fellowship’s front door. The flower beds and the topiary made him nervous: he wasn’t that well trimmed himself. He turned on his heels and went home.

Next he approached his aikido teacher — an old man who had said almost nothing to him in all the years Max had studied with him. The old man smiled when Max asked him if he could speak with him after class “about matters, spiritual.” “He looked like he had been expecting me,” Max said. In fact, he began to talk to Max as soon as he walked in his office. He told him stories about a wandering aikido master named Tohei; stories that turned into homilies. “A man takes a penny from me.” said the master, “in the future a man will take a penny from him.” Once the old man began, he didn’t stop. Max edged toward the door. "What goes around, comes around” wasn’t what he wanted to hear. The old man watched Max but kept talking. Max resigned himself. “I couldn’t figure out if this guy was a spiritual master or just a gym teacher," he said. Finally, the aikido teacher offered him some advice: go out to the countryside, find a spot, sit, breathe, and be: do it every day. Max tried.

He drove to the country, found a spot, planted himself, and breathed as he’d learned. Nothing happened. The place he chose was crawling with rattlesnakes. Max kept looking over his shoulder, waiting to be bitten. He drove home, thinking he was always the wrong guy, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing: he didn't like manicured lawns; he didn't like country hillsides; no one he'd talked to had any solutions. He’d talked to Catholics and Protestants, Sufis and yogis; he'd read Vedas and Sutras. Nothing fit him; he fit nothing.

Months went by. His wife felt like she was watching a snowman melt. Max sat at the kitchen table with the Yellow Pages open to the "Religion” section trying to find someone to talk to. His wife became exasperated. “For God’s sake. Max!" she said, "You’re a Jew! Why don’t you talk to them! You’ve tried everyone else!” “It was like someone turned a light bulb on over my head." he said. He turned from “Religion" to “Synagogues.” The first entry was "Chabad House" — an outreach organization run by a sect of Hasidic Jews — mystics and ecstatics — known as Lubavitchers. Max called them. A rabbi answered. Max said he wanted to make an appointment. “Fine,” said the rabbi. “Come over, we’ll talk.” “And who are you?" asked Max. "Rabbi Rifkin,” he said. “Ask for Rabbi Zelig Rifkin."

The last time Max had spoken with a rabbi had been at his wedding. The man had also been the caterer. The food had been inedible. The rest of the wedding could have been a metaphor for Max’s Jewishness: the band had dedicated a song to the groom but didn’t know the groom was Max; the rented tuxedo Max wore had come to him so torn and stained that, when his father returned it, he threw it on the floor and, in a rage, stomped it into rags. Everything about Max’s upbringing had been like that: when he was a boy. the school he attended in the afternoon to learn Hebrew had been so incompetent that, after seven years, he barely knew half the Hebrew alphabet. To be a Jewish kid in his part of the Bronx was to be chased by Irish and Italian gangs. At the Jewish camp Max attended, he’d cringed when he’d seen signs written in Yiddish. “This is gonna get everyone in a lotta trouble,” he’d thought. “This is like the concentration camps.” For Max, to have been Jewish was to be a victim. Worse, it was to be a victim who was ignorant of the identity that put him at risk.

The Chabad House where Max went was in a neighborhood close to where he taught. The headquarters of the Self Realization Fellowship had been a lovely house surrounded by lovely gardens. The Lubavitchers had taken over an old fraternity house. They’d cleaned it up. but there was nothing lovely about it. Inside were Formica tables, folding chairs, polystyrene cups, bad coffee, and cigarette smoke. Rabbi Rifkin turned out to be a pale-skinned, black-bearded 20-year-old who smoked Larks. Max didn't know if it was Rifkin's youth or his brand of cigarettes that irked him the most. As soon as Max shook Rifkin’s hand, he wanted to leave. “I knew I was in the wrong place again." he said.

They sat down at an old kitchen table. Max knew that the Lubavitchers were led by a holy man. a Grand Rabbi, who traced descent to a disciple of a great and pious soul known as the BaaI Shem Tov — the Master of the Good Name. Two hundred years before the Holocaust, the Baal Shem had spoken with God and worked wonders in the Jewish villages of Poland. The Baal Shem had preached direct, ecstatic union with the King of the Universe. He had drawn followers and disciples to him; those disciples had had disciples; one generation to the next, they had formed themselves into separate groups and perpetuated themselves as dynasties, pious and righteous. Somehow or other, the nerd who sat across from Max was pan of that succession.

"So?” said Rifkin. sucking on his Lark. Max began to tell his story. Just after he saw the light. Rifkin interrupted him. Max was perturbed. "You're Jewish?” Rifkin asked. “Yeah,” said Max. "I'm Jewish." and went on with his account. Just as he merged with the sandpipers. Rifkin interrupted again. "Your mother?” he asked. "Your mother was Jewish?” "Yeah.” said Max. “Of course she was Jewish." Max knew enough to know that a Jew was a Jew by matrilineal descent. He continued with his story. The voice spoke to him; he waded in the water. Rifkin sat and listened without a word. At last Max finished: the bliss, the revelation. He looked at Rifkin. "So. rabbi." he said. "What do you think?” Rifkin shrugged. “Well.” he said, "it happens.” Max got angry. "What do you mean??!” he said. "I tell you all this and that's all you have to say??” Rifkin looked at him — not horrified or amazed or dumbstruck. And not impressed. He shrugged again. "You're Jewish.” he said. He paused. “It happens.”

"You're Jewish. It happens” wasn't what Max expected to hear. He didn't know if he felt relieved or disappointed. "Go home." said Rifkin. “You look tired. Rest. Then call and make an appointment. You'll come back and we’ll study together.” Rifkin stood up. They shook hands. Max left, feeling like something strangely normal had happened.

When he came back the next time. Rifkin handed him a little blue velvet bag. Inside was a pair of tefillin. small leather boxes, one-inch cubes, sewn onto stiff pads, each attached to leather straps. Max knew what tefillin looked like and what they were called, but that was all he knew. Rifkin explained;

”Tefillin contain passages from the Torah. from Exodus and Deuteronomy. They're commandments that Ha Shem gave to Moses to give to the children of Israel. ’Bind them as a sign upon your arm and let them be as frontlets between your eyes.’ "

Max understood only part of what Rifkin said. "Torah ” he knew was a word for the Five Books of Moses, but "Ha Shem" he'd never heard before. Later, he found out it meant "The Name.” "The Name” was how Orthodox Jews — and all Hasidic Jews were Orthodox — customarily referred to God. The Orthodox believed Godl had many names; some could be said without sacrilege. but most were forbidden. When Max first learned this, he thought the custom was a sign of respect. Years later, after he read about Jewish mysticism, he discovered the prohibition was much more than that: the names of God were formulas of power, equivalent to equations that both described and incorporated vast amounts of energy. “You say the wrong name in the wrong place at the wrong time,” joked Max. "and you burn down the world.”

As Max watched. Rifkin unwound the leather straps from each box. As he did. he chanted a prayer. He handed Max a skull cap. "Put this on,” he said. Max did. "Now take your whole left arm out of your shirt. Tuck your shirt in your pants, and hold out your arm.” Max felt like he was about to give blood.

The boxes of both tefillin were connected to w hat looked like leather slipknots. The straps of one were longer than the straps of the other. "This one goes on your arm.” said Rifkin. As he slipped the tefillin up Max's arm and tightened it around Max's biceps, he said another prayer. Then Rifkin tightened it more and wound the strap down and around Max's arm to his wrist. The straps felt not quite as tight as a tourniquet. Rifkin said another prayer.

“Tefillin are one of the signs of the covenant between Israel and Ha Shem, ” Rifkin said. “Do you know what another one is?” "Let me guess,” said Max. ironically. "Circumcision?” "Good,” said Rifkin. "Now bow your head.”

Rifkin slipped the other tefillin over Max’s head. He positioned the tefillin's box just above Max's hairline, opposite the space between his eyes. He said a prayer, tightened the straps, then said another blessing. Max felt like the box was grow ing out of his forehead. He noticed he could feel blood pulsing against the straps on his arm.

Rifkin wound the excess length of Max’s arm tefillin around his hand and middle finger. As he did. he turned over Max’s palm. The straps formed a pattern that looked like a W. "The straps form the Hebrew letter 'Shin,' ’’ said Rifkin. “It stands for 'Shaddai.' ” Later, when Max had learned about the names of God. he discovered thai Shaddai was one of the few that could be said safely, but with caution. Rilkin chanted more blessings, longer ones "Good." he said He was finished.

Max felt like he’d just taken part in some sort of genteel bondage ritual. “You understand why you wear them?” asked Rifkin. "Because God said so ’’ answered Max. Rifkin nodded. "But why else ’" he asked. Max didn't know. "Around the arm." said Rilkin. "is to remind us that Ha Shem rescued us from Egypt with ‘an outstretched arm.’ Am! Do on feel your heartbeat m sour arm?” Max nodded "To remind you to submit your heart and the power of your heart to Ha Shem. ” “Does that go for the head, too?’ said Max. He felt like a horse wearing a halter. Or a donkey dressed as a unicorn. “Very good,” said Rilkin. “Your soul and your mind. To dedicate them too."

‘So, rabbi, ” be said. “What do you think?” Rifkin shrugged. “Well, ” he said, “it happens. ”

Rifkin unwound Max, then rewound the straps around the leather boxes. He put the tefillin back in their velvet bag and handed the bag to Max. "They're yours. Here are the blessings.” He handed Max a sheet, one side English, one side transliterated Hebrew. “Study the prayers. Put the tefillin on every morning. for the rest of your life. It’s a commandment. If you’re a Jew, it’s what you do.”

Max wasn’t sure what he'd gotten himself into. He lifted the skullcap off his head. “Keep it on for a minute." said Rifkin. “I want you to read something.” He handed Max another sheet of paper. "This is the Shema. ” Rifkin said. “You know what this is. don't you?’ That Max knew. The Shema was Judaism's core declaration of faith. "Hear 'O Israel. Ha Shem is our God. Ha Shem the One and Only." “Deuteronomy," said Rifkin. "Can you say it in Hebrew?' Max shook his head. no. “Okay. That’s okay.” said Rifkin. “Just read the English translation.” Max did. “Congratulations," said Rifkin. “You've just been bar mitzvahed. " Max was bewildered. "I thought there was more to it than that," he said. "There is,” said Rifkin. “But for now, go home. Put on your tefillin. Do it for a week. Then come back and we’ll study some more.”

Max was glad his wife wasn't home when he walked in carrying his velvet bag. "It felt slightly obscene." he said. “Like I was carrying a pornographic video." He hid the bag under his socks in a drawer. The next morning, while his wife was in the kitchen with the kids, he locked the bedroom door and took out the bag. Then he put on his skullcap and wound the straps around himself while he read the prayers. "It felt really strange." he said. "Not just the straps. But praying. I'd never done that; I'd never done any of it. What was really weird was that, after I did it. I felt better. The next day, I did it. I fell better. Each day I did it. I felt better. Talk about strange.”

The next week, when Max went back to the Chabad House. Rifkin handed him a book. "We're going to study this together." he said. 'This is the Tanya. It was written by Reb Shneur Zalman, the founder of our movement." Zalman had been a disciple of the Baal Shem. His Tanya was a meditation on God. the cosmos, and man's place in creation. It was a cosmology that contained hints of what Max had experienced on the beach. Whenever Max mentioned this to Rifkin. Rifkin changed the subject.

“How many commandments are there?' asked Rifkin. "Ten?" said Max. “You need to study more." said Rifkin. ‘There are 613 all together.” he said. "Two hundred and forty-eight are positive: Thou shall.' Three hundred and sixty-five are negative: Thou shall not* The positive commandments exactly correspond to the total number of organs in the human body. The negative ones equal exactly the number of muscles and sinews. Why the coincidence? Which came first do you think? Man or the commandments?” "Man?’ said Max. He felt like a particularly dim-witted contestant on a game show. "No. no." said Rifkin. “First came the Torah, then came the world. First came the commandments, then came creation. The world is based on the Torah, not the Torah on the world."

While Max thought about the world based on a book. Rifkin asked him another question. “What does the Tanya say about life and death?’ "You mean about reincarnation?" asked Max. “Yes." said Rifkin. This Max knew. “The Tanya said it exists." “For what purpose?" asked Rifkin. That Max didn't know. “So that, from one life time to the next," said Rifkin. "a man has a chance to master the commandments, to get them all right. One life can never be enough. Then, when a man finally masters them, all of them, he can be released." "Then what?' asked Max. "Then." said Rifkin and paused, “you ask too many questions. You need to study. You need to learn to walk before you ask about running. Study more and we ll talk."

Max did as he was told, but slowly he grew discontent. "I was a round peg in a square hole," he said. Each time he walked into the Chabad House and saw Rifkin dressed in a black suit, wearing a black fedora, a beard covering his face to his chin. Max. clean shaven, dressed in civilian clothes, knew he could never become what Rifkin was. The more Max found out about the Lubavitchers. the more uneasy he became: their Grand Rabbi was their link to God. From God’s mouth to the Rabbi's ear; from the Rabbi's house in Brooklyn, by satellite, to Lubavitchers all over the world. According to the Rabbi’s advice, they lived. Should they marry or divorce, have one child or ten. start a business or end one. turn left or turn right? Lubavitchers listened for their Rabbi’s answers. He was their oracle. Max couldn't imagine living, like that. One week, he thanked Rifkin and never came back.

Max began his search again, but this time, he searched among Jews. He tried different congregations. asking advice, trying to learn what he'd never learned. Eventually, he came upon a large prosperous conservative synagogue. In America, there are, roughly, three varieties of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, each more or less observant than the other. For example: Reform congregations pray mostly in English; Conservative congregations pray more often in Hebrew than in English, and, although they celebrate the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. and although they read a “portion of the week” from the Torah on that day, they don’t necessarily believe that what they are reading are the words of God. The Orthodox do believe that and conduct themselves accordingly: as Rabbi Rifkin told Max, there are, in fact. 613 commandments. They form a fence that separates ritually observant Jews from everyone else. The Orthodox are happy to live behind that wall. Max wasn’t so sure. Instead, he paid an annual fee and joined a Conservative congregation.

Max hired a tutor to teach him to read Hebrew. Once he learned, he studied the prayers and rituals of the daily morning and afternoon services. Seventy years after the birth of Jesus, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. More than one million people died; 100,000 were sold as slaves. The Second Temple, built by Herod, was obliterated. All except what is now called the Western Wall. The services that Max studied were written to replace the prayers and sacrifices that priests had once performed, morning, afternoon, and evening, in the Temple itself.

Max learned as much as he could; he was on a quest, but nearly everyone else in the congregation wasn’t. The rabbi didn’t so much preach as discuss Israeli settlement policies or the plight of Soviet Jews. The men Max sat with talked about real estate and investments. When Max’s wife and children came with him, the men’s wives chatted about caterers and vacations. Max wanted to talk about God and the meaning of the world; his fellow congregants were content to live in it and prosper Only one man in the congregation had the same needs as Max. Not a rabbi, but a man so erudite he was chosen to chant the Torah aloud to the congregation each week, this man agreed to become Max’s teacher. Together, they studied books of metaphysics and religious psychology written by Jewish savants, scattered from Egypt to Italy, over a period of 700 years. Together the two men read, talked, and speculated, but Max needed more.

One Friday afternoon, late in the day, before the Sabbath began. Max took a nap and dreamed about the services he would go to after dinner. As the rabbi began his sermon about U.S. foreign policy. Max stood up. walked to the synagogue’s huge plate glass window, and threw himself through it. He remembered thinking as he hit the glass. “Maybe this’ll get a rise out of people.” He woke up before he hit the ground. “I wasn’t a psychologist for nothing.” he joked. “I knew what that dream meant.” He was lx)red to death. It was time to leave. Again.

He joined an old. well-established Orthodox congregation. There he stayed for ten years. Not that he was happy, but the men he met know things he needed to know. They had known the prayers, the rituals, and laws since they were children; almost all of them had grown old together. They were accustomed to each other and to their religion. Max was new to them, an outsider. They kept him at a distance, not just because they hadn't known him for 20 years, but because he was as raw and nervous, as curious and as needy as an adolescent. He was close to 40 by then, but he was still learning. His fellow congregants were pious, but they no longer thought deeply about what they did or why. As for Max: they treated him like a visitor. “I stayed." said Max, “because next door, there was a House of Study.” Financed by five Orthodox families, it was open to all who wanted to learn and could afford a modest fee.

Nearly 2000 years ago. a Jewish sage wrote. “These are the things, the fruits of which man enjoys in this world while the reward remains for him in the world to come: honoring one’s father and mother, performing deeds of kindness, making peace between man and his fellow man. And the study of Torah is equal to all of them." For ten years. Max sat and studied. He no longer felt as if he was at the bottom of his own grave. It had been many years since he felt one with the universe. He read all the time; he learned all he could, but he still felt restless. ”I don’t know what it was," he said, ironically. “Maybe I was looking for a home.”

Three years ago, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews believe that God decides who will live and who will die. Max found a place to rest his soul. How he heard about Congregation Adat Yeshurun (Congregation of the Upright), he didn’t remember. “San Diego," he said, “does not exactly have a big Jewish community. News gets around. Maybe I heard about it at the House of Study. I decided to give their services a try."

The congregation was very small, very new, and of very modest means. Its sanctuary was a suite in an office complex off Villa La Jolla Drive. The room where it had set up its tabernacle with its Torahs could have been the main room of a small insurance company or data-processing firm.

It was an Orthodox congregation, so down the center of its sanctuary ran a gauze curtain, called a machitza, which separated men from women. Its rabbi was a man in his prime. 30 years old, brown haired, bearded, as big as a bear, covered with a huge prayer shawl, rocking back and forth, praying. facing Jerusalem, asking to be forgiven. As Max took his place to pray, on one side of him stood a 16-year-old refugee from Iran, on the other, a bearded 60-year-old, born and raised in Cleveland. The boy nodded, the old man leaned over to show Max the place in the prayer book.

“The place was very unassuming.” he said, “very down to earth. They went out of their way not to dilute the service. They didn’t cut corners. But the rabbi took his time: he explained things; he interpreted things so everyone knew what was happening and why. It was like he understood: people were there to learn and to pray.” Max had found a rabbi and a teacher.

Max may have felt, through all his years of wandering, that his journey was solitary. that all his restless struggles, his dread and his discontent, were his and his alone. Rifkin, the young Hasidic rabbi, had implied something else: “You’re Jewish; it happens." he’d said. After Rifkin had wrapped tefillin around Max and told him he’d have to do it himself. every morning, for the rest of his life. Max had been dismayed: “What have I got myself into?” he’d thought.

In fact, what Max had embarked on was a journey as old as the sage who had written about “this world and the world to come.” Without knowing the name for what he was doing. Max had made what Jews call “a return.” The congregation he’d finally come upon in the office building off Villa La Jolla Drive had been founded by seven men who formally referred to themselves as ba'alei teshuvah, the Hebrew phrase for “those who return." “Return” implies remorse; it implies regret and renunciation, a movement from an immoral or inauthentic way of being to an active state of observance and integrity.

Modem American Jews have made a variety of returns — from a variety of predicaments to a variety of destinations: on the streets of New York, the Lubavitchers have operated Winnebago campers that park, set up loudspeakers, and troll for lost Jewish souls like evangelicals running soup kitchens. Not just in San Diego, but adjacent to university campuses across the United States, the Lubavitchers have opened Chabad Houses that welcome college students in the midst of identity crises. That Max walked into one only proves that professors can lose and find themselves as easily as students. In Israel, in the Occupied Territories, in the settlements of the Gush Emunim, among the Block of the Faithful, are other returnees, ones who have dreamed not just a Zionist dream, but a biblical one: Judea and Samaria, not the West Bank and Jordan.

The Lubavitchers and the Block of the Faithful have attracted their share of returnees, but there is a mass of American Jews — not desperate enough to believe in miracle rabbis or zealous enough to settle in biblical homelands — who have abandoned mainstream. moderate, middle-of-the-road Jewish congregations and returned, as Max did. to Orthodox synagogues “that didn't cut corners," run by rabbis who are also teachers. In New York. Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side is one such place. It has 1300 members, half of them young, college-educated singles, eager to learn about their heritage. At last count, San Diego’s Adat Yeshurun had only 120 families, but many of them are young, and all long for something morethan sermons about American foreign policy.

As a member of a large, well-established conservative congregation. Max had been so bored he’d dreamed of throwing himself through a w indow. As a boy in New York, he’d gone to afternoon Hebrew school* so educationally bankrupt that when, at the age of 13. he’d actually refused to be bar mitzvahed. his father had agreed with him. “He thought." said Max. “that my saying no’ at least had some integrity to it.". The failure of American Jewish elementary education, the transformation of religion in America from a transcendental to a civil/social enterprise — all this may have drawn Max. along with thousands of others, to make a “return.” Max's dread may have been his alone, so too the light and voice he experienced. but the nature of his journey was something he shared with others without knowing it.

There was something else Max shared as well. As a religious man. he had moved from a moment of ecstatic bliss to year after year of mindful study. Out of dread and transcendence had come a life of religious in-tellectualism. To put it very simply: Max had walked out of the ocean into a Chabad House and out of the Chabad House into a House of Study. That movement from turbulence to clarity, that choice between a religion of heart and a religion of mind had been argued — among Jews — during a religious civil war that began 200 years ago in Eastern Europe and that continues to this day. On one side were Hasidic Jews — disciples and followers of the Baal Shem Tov — Polish and Ukranian pietists who believed the way to God was through dance, song, and heartfelt prayer. On the other side were rabbinical scholars, led by a Lithuanian sage so clear-minded and rigorous that, to keep himself alert while he studied, he would immerse his feet in ice water. The scholars and rabbis who were his disciples believed the way to God was knowledge and obedience based on study. During the worst of the conflict, each side burnt the other’s books and excommunicated the other’s followers. The Hasids believed the rabbis to be arid members of a spiritually bankrupt establishment; the rabbis thought the Hasids were ignorant and deluded boors. No peace was ever declared between the two sides, but time and world history distracted them from each other.

Max had no idea that the Lubavitchers he eventually abandoned were one of the more intellectual of the Hasidic sects. Nor did he know, when he finally joined Adat Yeshurun. that the rabbi who presided over it had been trained by the intellectual dcscendents of the Lithuanian sage who had studied with his feet in icy water. Like a blind innocent. Max had crossed the border between two old enemies and never noticed their guard posts and rusty barbed wire.

The territory that Max crossed into, the subject the Lithuanian scholars claimed they knew and the Hasids did not. was the Talmud. The Talmud is a massive and intricate compendium, a multi-volume masterpiece, the result of an intellectual, legal. rhetorical, literary, moral, ethical, speculative — profoundly religious — enterprise, carried on. collectively. by generation after generation of scholars over a period of 700 years, ending in 500 A.D.

Today, there are biblical scholars. Jewish and non-Jewish. who argue, based on internal evidence, that the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was written. over time, by four different human beings: an author know n as “J,” w ho referred to God as JHWH (one of His forbidden names, known as the Tetra-gramaton); a second author called “E,” who referred to God in the plural as Elohim; a school of priestly editors known as “P,” who compiled Leviticus; and a second set of editors, known collectively as “D,” who wrote Deuteronomy.

Orthodox Jews have never believed any of this. Instead, based on the Torah itself, they believe that Moses climbed ML Sinai and, for 40 days and 40 nights, God “spoke" to him. Part of what God said. Moses wrote down. That became the Written Law. the Five Books, the Pentatuch. Beyond what Rifkin. the Hasidic rabbi, said to Max about the Torah existing before the world, mystics believe there were actually two Torahs given — a visible one. written in “black fire on white,” and an invisible one, written in “white fire on black.” its text hidden in the space between the letters of every word.

Mystics aside. Orthodox Jews believe that there was a second law given to Moses. They believe that during his time on Sinai. Moses wrote down only part of what he heard. What he didn't write down is known as the Oral Law. This he passed on by word of mouth. Throughout the history of the Jewish people, the Oral Law was never written dow n until 200 years after the birth of Jesus.

It was written down because of a series of disasters. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, a few scholars survived; these the Romans detained in a prison camp. It was those scholars, detained in this camp, who reconstituted Judaism so that it could survive in the absence of its Temple. One of their inventions was part of the liturgy Max studied after he said goodbye to the Chabad House and joined the Conservative congregation. Another invention, not so much created as legitimized by the scholars in the camp, were rabbis, men who were to function as both teachers and spiritual leaders. No matter if the Temple and its priests were destroyed. the Torah and its teachers remained.

Sixty years after the Romans burned Jerusalem, the Jews of Palestine rebelled again. The exterminations and confiscations that followed were more thorough than before. It was after all this that scholars, anticipating worse to come, began the effort to write down the Oral Law. The result was called the Mishnah. Destruction and rebellion had scattered Jews throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. The Mishnah was written for the same reason that Moses, an infant, was cast adrift on the Nile: do that or nothing would survive.

The Mishnah was meant to serve as both a codex and a reference book, a collection of legal decisions and opinions about the meaning of those decisions. Organized in synagogues, gathered in academies, Jews studied the Torah and discussed it; studied the Mishnah and debated it. Debated it not just because, as law, it governed their lives, but because, in exile. Mishnah and Torah together defined their lives, made up their lives, identified them as a people set apart, bound in a covenant with God.

Many of these debates were carried on in academies in what is now Iraq; others took place in academies in what is now Israel. All such encounters were densely layered, intricate, precise, allusive, self-reflexive, and free associative. Language was treated as if it were tangible, ideas were treated as if they were living things. Three hundred years after the debates began, they were written down. Their ebb and flow, call and query, challenge and response were compressed. The result was the Talmud.

At the center of the Talmud is the Oral Law of the Mishnah; clustered around it are the thoughts and arguments, texts and subtexts it provoked. Generation after generation of scholars — rabbinical and Hasidic — have read the Talmud as it was created — not in a solitary way. but collectively, in active groups that reconstitute the debates as they study them, revivify them as they analyze them.

The minds and voices of the Talmud are those of men. All the sages were men; the scholars who followed them were men; until very recently, every student and teacher of the Talmud was a man. By law, women were exempt from such study. Not forbidden but exempt. Just as, by law, they were exempt from obeying most of the commandments that would have required them to perform acts exactly on time. Acts like praying three times a day or reading from the Torah three times a week. Many reasons have been given for such exemptions: a woman’s primary obligation to her family; the periodic ticking of her own biologic clock. No matter the reason, the sages agreed; acts that resulted from obedience were more exemplary than acts that did not. The consequence was that, among Orthodox Jews, no woman could ever be a rabbi; since she was exempt from obeying each and every one of the 613 commandments, she could never occupy a position that required her to do what she wasn’t obliged to do.

The practical result of this was that when Max joined Adat Yeshurun, he joined the religious equivalent of a men’s club. The gauze curtain that ran down the middle of the sanctuary separated men from women; exemptions from the law separated women from the scrolls of the Torah. Three days a week, it was the men who opened the ark, removed the Torah, carried it in their arms, unrolled it, and read from it. It was the men — elevated by their obligations — who prayed the loudest, the most fervently, the most demonstratively. And, after they prayed, every morning of every day, it was the men who — if they could — stayed to study the Talmud together.

Once, not that long ago. Max had played sports and been a member of a team — a basketball team that had played for his college, the City College of New York. For four years, playing on that team had defined Max’s life. He had gone to classes, written papers, taken tests — all that had been less important to Max than being part of the team. Once he graduated, he stopped feeling so connected to other men in such a way. He knew of men who served in the military who felt such bonds. He knew of other men who drank together or hunted or played ball or raced or, now and then, even worked together who shared such respect and regard, such affection.

It wasn’t until Max joined Adat Yeshurun that he felt again what he’d felt in college. The old men at his other congregation had treated him like an outsider, but the men at Adat Yeshurun — old and young, native born and refugees, well versed or just eager — took Max in, acknowledged him, acccepted him because he had the same wants and needs as they did. Instead of games or jobs or quarry, the men at Adat Yeshurun shared study and prayer. Every weekday, a group of them came to the sanctuary to form a minyan, a group of ten. the minimum number needed to say the prayers and conduct a service in its entirety. On Saturday mornings, on the Sabbath, more came, dressed in their best, some in wonderfully tailored suits, buttoned low, fedoras on their heads, prayer shawls draped across their shoulders, capes of fine white wool or linen, broadly banded in black, trimmed with fringes, the entire garment called a tallis that, like tefillin. was a sign of the covenant between the man who wore it and God. “We come dressed like this,” said one, “because we are in the presence of a King. The King of the Universe.” Max joined them.

The man who led them, the rabbi Max had first seen, big as a bear, draped in a prayer shawl, had a name that fit his responsibilities: Wohlgelernter. Jeffrey Bernard Wohlgelernter — literally, “very learned." The name was so difficult to pronounce and so intimidating, and he himself was so eager and engaging, that he asked those who knew him to call him “Rabbi Jeff.” For a rabbi taught Talmud in a Yeshiva — an academy of higher learning — run by men who were inheritors of the diamond-sharp clear-mindedness of the sage from Lithuania, Wohlgelernter had an unusual background.

In a straight line, eight generations long, Wohlgelernter was the descendent of the Seer of Lublin, a holy mystic, the disciple of a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, the wonder worker who founded Hasidism. Many stories have been told about debates between the Seer and his scholarly rabbinical opponents, and many more about the Seer’s piety and holiness. When he died, the Seer left behind a book of mystical commentary on the Torah known as the hamar. As a mark of how removed Wohlgelernter is from the Seer but how present is his ancestor’s memory, Wohlgelernter himself tells a story: throughout his life, Wohlgelernter says, he has tried to read the hamar. Time after time he has returned to it and tried to decipher it. And time after time, he says, he has failed.

The line of revelation continued through Wohlgelernter’s great-grandfather, a disciple of a Hasid whose followers were known as illustrious. Torah scholars. True to that tradition. Wohlgelernter’s great-grandfather studied the Torah’s “white fire on black” and wrote his own learned but mystical commentary on the text. No one succeeded him when he died. Instead. Wohlgelernter’s grandfather amassed a mammoth library of Judaica and founded a Jewish day school in Toronto. His three sons

Wohlgelernter's father among them — he sent to American Yeshivas run by the intellectual offspring of the sage from Lithuania — the man who was, in his day, the greatest of the Baal Shem's opponents.

There is a story that when the sage died, the Baal Shem's disciples danced on his grave.

The trajectory of belief traced by Wohlgelernter’s family, from fervent revelation to clear-minded scholarship, outlines a course common not just to families, but to whole religions: from revelation to investigation, from ecstasy to analysis. Max himself had experienced this in his own life. What can never be predicted, though, are individual outcomes and the persistence of the past: Wohlgelernter’s grandfather may have sent his sons to Yeshivas run by rationalists, but he didn’t entirely succeed in dampening their hearts: two of his sons became erudite synagogue rabbis, but one of them became an artist, and that one was Wohlgelernter’s father.

Not only did Wohlgelernter’s father become an artist — in spite of his Yeshiva education — but he became a set designer on Broadway. When he finally, inevitably, had to choose between the profane world of the theater and his own piety, he chose a middle way: he became a maker of religious art. The tabernacle that holds the Torah in the sanctuary of Adat Yeshurun is the work of his hands. To support himself and his family, he became a teacher in a Jewish day school.

Wohlgelernter was raised in a strictly observant Orthodox Jewish home, but his father took him to baseball games, and while they watched, his father made watercolors of the scene. Wohlgelernrner studied Talmud and Torah in a Jewish day school, but he also played basketball and had girlfriends. At 16, he graduated. His mother wanted him to be a doctor, but long before he was bar mitzvahed, he had thought of being a rabbi. His parents wanted to send him to the same school his uncles had attended. a Yeshiva in New York, where he could study both Talmud and pre-med. Instead, he asked to be sent to the same place his father had gone — a Lithuanian Yeshiva in Baltimore, a very European place where Talmud was studied 15 hours a day.

He went there thinking he knew much more than he did. He was bright but he was young, two years younger than his fellow students. Worse, he was wild: the other students were pale-skinned, short-haired, and somber; he was loud, long-haired, and dressed in a red, white, and blue checkered coat. At night, he rode his bike up and down the halls; as soon as the sun set on the Sabbath, he went off to the movies. The authorities didn’t throw him out. but they did take him in hand. The place was serious, but it knew it was an American Yeshiva: all kinds of young men came to it from all kinds of traditions. Wohlgelernter was from a good family; his father was a graduate; the authorities gave him more than the benefit of a doubt: what they gave him was a study partner who was 29 years old. Like a colt hamesed next to a dray horse, they paired Wohlgelernter with a man who wouldn’t let him go astray.

His study partner was a man named Katz. That Katz had been at the Yeshiva for ten years meant nothing, bad or good; the Talmud was like a sea: some people’s voyages lasted longer than others. Wohlgelernter thought he had learned to sail at his Jewish day school, but Katz taught him differently: across from each other, they sat at a long table in a study hall full of long tables. Together, they studied the text, perhaps a page, perhaps half a page. Slowly, intently, three hours at a time, they made their way through it like men clearing mines. One would recite; the other would listen and correct. One would decipher; the other would comment and clarify. Together they would check biblical references. Then they would study the commentaries. Heads down, eyes on the page, one listening while the other read, one reading while the other listened. Back and forth, intent and alert. Sometimes the listener would stop the reader;.sometimes the reader would stop and ask the listener. If there were commentaries on the commentaries, they would read them as intently as they had the original. All this in preparation for an encounter with a rabbi who would teach by means of pointed questions, his intent not just to discover if they had studied, but to propel his lesson, question by answer, answer by question, challenge and response, along a schematic of the original argument they had inched through.

Said Wohlgelernter. “Katz gave me my Yeshiva identity.” Not so much an identity as a way of being: intense, diligent, patient, and prepared. Wohlgelernter had had plenty of energy before he met Katz. Katz taught him to focus it, all of it, like a band of light, onto the text. He taught Wohlgelernter discipline and perseverance. Then he taught him something more: “Katz made me understand," said Wohlgelernter, “ ‘Torah is our life and the light of our life.’ It’s a way to live and a way to understand how we live.” When the sun set on a Sabbath, Wohlgelernter didn’t go off to the movies anymore: he turned on his desk lamp and he studied. He didn’t stop being the young man he was: he still shot hoops and thought about girls. But now he studied 12 hours a day.

The Yeshiva had an arrangement with Johns Hopkins that permitted its students to earn college credits. Wohlgelernter’s mother still wanted him to be a doctor, but organic chemistry mystified him. In his third year, he switched to psychology, went home, and told his parents he wanted to be a teacher. His father had always been his model: he’d studied where his father studied; now he wanted to teach as he did. When his father heard the news, he was appalled: it was bad enough his son wouldn’t be a doctor, but to be a teacher! To be trapped in a classroom, chained to a curriculum, ordered around by a principal! His father threw him out of the house.

Wohlgelernter wanted to teach. He had always wanted to be a rabbi. In search of a mentor, he found one. The man was a rabbi named Yisocher Frand. What Frand taught was important, but even more important was how he taught it. In the Yeshiva, there were two kinds of Talmud study. Both took apart the text as if it were a clock; the theoretical group did it to find out how the clock worked; the practical group did it to find out the time. The theoreticians delighted in argument and anomaly. If, in the text, three rabbis argued and one dissented, they spent their time with the dis-

senter. At their worst, they were nit-pickers. At their best, they were brilliant logisticians. The practitioners didn’t care for such refinements. If three rabbis argued and one dissented, they noted the disagreement but attended to the majority. The Talmud was impossible to simplify, but it could be clarified. Clarity and meaning were what they sought. Yisocher Frand taught them how. Wohlgelernter became one of his students. He learned practical Talmud from Frand, but most important, he learned how to be a teacher.

Frand was a man in his prime, furiously in love with learning. Intense, warm-hearted, generous, and expressive. Frand taught by example. Knowledge, erudition, and insight were proofs of his humanity. To learn was to live. Mind wasn’t separate from heart: heart served mind, inspired it, drove it to greater insight, greater attention, more ardent and thorough inquiry. Instead of teaching by challenge and response. Frand handed out study guides that outlined and elaborated paths through the text.

Instead of puzzling his students, he encouraged them; instead of intimidating them, he inspired them. Katz, Wohlgelernter’s study partner, had taught him to focus his mind. Frand, his mentor, taught him to engage his heart.

After five years of study. Wohlgelernter graduated from the Yeshiva, certified as both a rabbi and a teacher. He had learned how to take apart an argument and put it back together as if he were a watchmaker. More important: he had learned to love what he did and inspire others. When, eventually, the ba alei teshuvah, the returnees, of Adat Yeshurun hired him, they found the right man for the job. As Max noticed when he first saw him, Wohlgelernter understood that people came to learn and to pray.

Two years after Max joined Adat Yeshurun, his father died. His father had owned a used truck lot in the Bronx. He’d bought and sold trucks, big ones and little ones, cherry pickers and step vans, all the delivery trucks of the Daily News, Macks, GMs, and International Harvesters. He used to drive a gigantic wrecker and haul old ones back to his yard like a great hunter dragging game back to camp. He was a man given to rages and explosive outbursts, but he was so honest and dependable in business that the non-Jews he knew nicknamed him "The Rabbi.” By birth, he belonged to the tribe of Levi, a tribe of scribes and enforcers, one rung beneath the Priests. He knew enough Hebrew to follow a service, but he never set foot in a synagogue in his adult life. When he died, Max went to New York and spoke at his funeral. “If God’s Seal is Truth," Max said, “My father will fit in just fine." When Max came back home, he brought his father’s cap with him. He began to wear it when he prayed.

Jewish law requires a son to pray for his parents for 11 months after their deaths. The prayer he says is called the Kaddish. It occurs twice in every service, morning, afternoon, and evening. Although mourners say it, it makes no reference to death or the dead. Instead it is an adulation, the words more alliterated in Hebrew than in English, said rapidly like the ringing of a bell: “Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One. Blessed is He, beyond any blessing and sin. praise and consolation that are uttered in the world....”

For 11 months every morning. Max went to services and, when the moment came, he stood and recited the Kaddish. No doubt he would have gone anyway, but saying Kaddish bound him to a routine that made him think of his father while it tied him more tightly to a liturgy that was itself an archeology of his religion. There were psalms of praise first sung by King David and declarations of faith first made by Joshua when he crossed into the Promised Land. There were recollections of Abraham and Isaac and retellings of Israel and Egypt. There were summaries of offerings and sacrifices from the days of the Temple and prayers written to replace them after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon. In the middle and at the end of it all. Max rose and said the Kaddish, but never did he say it alone: as he spoke, all the men responded — in praise of God, in memory of their own dead, in anticipation of their own grief. Every day, at the same moment. Max remembered his father.

Instead of going home after services. Max stayed to study. Others did too. While someone brewed coffee and Rabbi Wohlgelernter studied his notes — elsewhere, in other synagogues and study houses, all over the planet. Jews prepared to do exactly what the rabbi and Max and the other men were preparing to do: all over the world, groups of Jews were preparing to study a page of the Talmud together. It was an activity called Daf Yomi, literally, “a page a day.” Every seven years, participants in Daf Yomi completed a reading of the Talmud, line by line, page by page, chapter and volume, from beginning to end. In the ’80s, those who’d completed the cycle had assembled in Madison Square Garden. Planners for the next celebration anticipated a bigger crowd. It was said they’d reserved Shea Stadium. Max thought he might join them.

While the coffee brewed and the Rabbi paced his office. Max and the others opened their Talmuds and took their places at a table. The page they opened to looked like a box fitted with blocks of text arranged to form a pattern whose layout was a typography of meaning. At the center of the page, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, printed in a typeface of its own. was a passage from the Mishnah, the Oral Law, followed by a summary of the debates it had provoked in academics in Iraq and Israel, nearly 1500 years ago. These debates, compiled and compressed, were called the Gemara. Fined around this central block, printed in a different type face, set in a column that ran down the margin of the page closest to the binding, were commentaries. written in Hebrew, in the 11th century, in Southern France, by a rabbinical genius known as Rashi. On the opposite side of the page, nestled near the top, next to the Mishnah and Gemara. was a block of additional commentaries written in the 12th and 13th centuries by Rashi’s disciples and their students. These commentaries were printed in the same typeface as those of Rashi.

Fitted around these three primary blocks of text were further commentaries, all printed in smaller type faces, ail set like puzzle pieces into spaces that remained around the margins. Stacked along one side were blocks of commentary dating from the 11th through 16th centuries, written in North Africa, Egypt, and Israel. Stacked along the other were corrections and emendations made in 17th-century Poland and Lithuania, and cross references, critiques, and analyses made in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries.

All this information — primary, secondary, and tertiary; text, commentary, clarification, and elaboration; the product of minds spread across time and space — all this was compressed onto the page that Max and the others spread before them like a musical score, part symphony, part oratorio. Like members of an orchestra-chorus, they waited for thair conductor and first soloist to arrive.

Rabbi Wohlgelernter came in, balancing, polystyrene cups on an old silver tray. The coffee was black, strong, and scalding. He set down the tray, took a cup for himself, hoisting it, fingers around the rim, as if he were a crane operator. The others took cups; Max blew on his and took a sip. Wohlgelernter opened his Talmud, rubbed his hands, leaned forward, leaned back. and. slowly rocking, he began. For the next hour he rocked; now and then his legs would jiggle beneath the table, but up above, he kept a steady beat. His voice rolled out of him. His speech was rhythmic, inflected. half chant, half recitative, as if he were declaiming and reciting, half poetry, half prose. Pitch and tempo he varied with the text, but the velocity of his words rarely lessened. “And — so — Rabbi Eliezer says, according to him. it should be the following: ‘Why should there be two Passovers? Because....’ ” His voice rising and falling, his words in cadence, he sang the call and response of a very old debate.

That morning, Wohlgelernter read from a tractate concerning Passover. A tractate is more than a chapter but less than a book, more like a collection of chapters, the Hebrew word for it derived from the word for “loom.” That morning, as Max listened and thought while he followed the text with his finger and his mind, this is what the tractate wove:

According to tradition, there were two Passovers, the Second following the First by a month. One of the primary ritual requirements of the First Passover was to bring a spring lamb to Jerusalem to be sacrificed as an offering in the Temple. The failure to do this caused a man (or a woman) to be excommunicated. Or, as the Torah said, “to have his soul cut off."

There were reasons, though, why someone might be unable to fulfill the requirement. The text listed them: he or she might have had a nocturnal emission, seminal or venereal, and so be rendered unclean. Or a woman might be menstruating or a man might have had intercourse with a menstruating woman, or the person might have been a leper or the person might have had contact with a corpse. All such contacts/conditions would render a man or a woman unclean and, so. unfit to perform a Temple obligation. The text supplied other reasons as well: the person might live too far from Jerusalem, outside a certain prescribed radius (that was itself a matter of debate). Or the person might have forgotten.

For all such people, said the Mishnah. the Second Passover provided an opportunity to right the wrong. But. If the person failed to bring the lamb on the Second Passover, then that person was indeed “cut off.”

Debate followed. Based on four variant translations of a word used in the Torah to describe the original obligation and the failure to perform it. In Hebrew, the word, transliterated, was kee. It could mean one of four things. It could mean “because” or it could mean “if‘ or “wherv" or “that.” Depending on how it was translated, some argued, the meaning of the passage could read, “If (or “when” or “because” or “that") any of you or your posterity who are unclean or on a long journey would offer a Passover sacrifice to the Lord, they shall offer it in the second month...” (Numbers, Chapter 9).

Debate continued. Debate about the true function of the Second Passover. Was it, one sage asked, a festival of importance, equal to and independent of the First Passover? Or was it a festival whose only purpose was to provide an opportunity for those who failed to fulfill the requirements of the First Passover? Was it a festival that everyone was obliged to take part in or only those who missed the first one? And. of those who failed to fulfill the original obligation, who was more liable to be “cut off’? Those who were unclean and distant? Or those who had forgotten?

As Wohlgelernter chanted these debates, everyone around the table knew there was no longer a Temple or Priests or sacrifices, and no Second Passover. Everyone knew this, but it didn't matter. It didn’t matter because as Wohlgelernter inhabited one argument and then another, they entered the Talmud with him, swam into it like a school of fish entering a coral reef. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was Wohlgelernter’s voice, but.as their minds began to move through the text, the text entered them. Blood, ideas, and the rhythm of ideas pumped through them.

As they listened and read, sometimes Wohlgelernter would stop and speak to them, ask them questions and entertain theirs. They ’d pause to talk as people ordinarily did, sometimes formally, sometimes colloquially, always warmly. Then they’d return, into the text, into its tidal flow. Again and again. Wohlgelernter would switch from Hebrew to Aramaic to English and back again, so rapidly that the languages hyphenated. Again and again, the music of his voice would change, from recitative to a rhythm so rapid and percussive, it could have been scat or bop or rap. He’d dive back into the text then, until, without warning, he’d surface in sentences, his words precise, rapid, clear, and analytic. propelled by his own logic and erudition, not the ebb and flow of the debates he performed. Then back into the text he’d go. rocking and chanting until — at certain moments, when the debate turned or stopped or revealed itself — he would slap the page with the flat of his hand as the point punctuated in front of everyone. He’d look up then, amused, like a connoisseur savoring a chess move, then down again he’d go. drawing everyone after him. back into the filigree of the argument.

What Wohlgelernter did was recreate the Talmud, enter its collective mind, and fuse with it. As he did, so did everyone with him. Everyone, but particularly Max. The Talmud was like a sea, and Max had been in one before. The Talmud was historical memory and meaning, but it was more: every ritual Max had learned served to recreate and reenact the past: the tefillin. wrapped around his arm. bound him to God; the morning service took him from Abraham to the Red Sea. across the Jordan into the Promised Land. The Kaddish brought back his father. It was his father Max carried with him. in his mind, as he entered the Talmud every morning. swimming after Wohlgelernter. “It was like I was educating my father in retrospect." Max said. “My father and me, learning together. What was it the Tanya said? That book Rifkin gave me? One lifetime isn’t enough to know it all. to master it all? I figured two lifetimes were too long not to know.”