36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [82]
Tish is the Yiddish word for “table.” In Hasidism, tish refers to the Rebbe’s table, and, metonymically, to the public event of sharing a meal with the Rebbe, or in any case watching him and his family and closest associates consume a meal and then receiving the shirayim, or remains. The shirayim consists of small portions of food-of fruit or kugel, or a glass of wine-that are distributed from the hand of the Rebbe. It’s a peculiarly Hasidic custom. There’s nothing like it in mainstream Judaism, and it underscores one of the stickier arguing points that separate the two: the locating of the Rebbe on a different scale of being, as possessing both a soul and a body closer to the divine than that of other mortals. In mainstream Judaism, the position of intermediary between man and God is left conspicuously vacant. In Hasidism, it’s occupied, and the major qualification is heredity.
“I’ve never actually seen a tish,” his mom had told him. “It’s so important, the most intimate connection between the Rebbe and his Ha-sidim, that of course the Valdeners reserve it only for the men and boys. My bratty little cousins were taken, but I never even could get anybody to tell me what went on there. Except that my father once told me that, back in Hungary, the Hasidim would actually grab for the food on the Rebbe’s plate when he was done, scrambling belly-first over the tish top in a free-for-all for farfel.”
“Tish-tish.”
“My impression is that things are a bit more civilized now, with food given out instead of grabbed from the plate. But first it’s all passed through the hands of the Rebbe to get some of his holiness in it. It’s all part of the primitive folk biology mixed in with the dubious theology.” Deb Seltzer, the former Devoroh Sheiner of New Walden, delighted in describing the Valdeners in antiseptic, clinical terms. “The food that goes into a holy man must itself be holy, seeing how it’s going to become the Rebbe’s own flesh. It’s got sparks of the divine essence, which got misplaced in the great commotion that accompanied the creation of the world, little bits of God that got trapped inside matter the Rebbe tries to return to the heavens by ingesting-I kid you not. So the Rebbe shares his food, spreading the holiness around.”
“So luckshen are holy?”
“Well, not as holy as potato kugel. I bet there are tracts written on potato kugel.”
As soon as they entered the doors of the synagogue, Cass heard male voices massed together in the sumptuous folds of song. The strains of melody didn’t prepare Cass for the sensory assault as they now entered the vast room where the Hasidim were gathered for prayer. For the second time that day, the neuronal circuits of his “What” system were overloaded, transposing sights, sounds, smells, so that the melody struck his nostrils with spices he couldn’t identify, and he heard beneath it the contained roar of the vast boiling sea of black, which gradually individuated into discrete men, hundreds rising steeply to the rafters in tiered waves from the small cleared center, dazzlingly white, a rectangle of gentle foam floating in the blackened sea. It was the homogeneity of the Valdeners’ appearance and the synchronization of their motion that liquefied them, the individuating features smoothed away by the identical beards and the payess and kaputas and shtreimlach, undulating waves made up of Valdeners swaying in unison in great sweeping arcs in time to the powerful surge of their song, though now Cass could see that the four banks of tiers splayed outward and upward from a pure white platform, and that lining its perimeter were evenly spaced artifacts, ceremonial perhaps, and wavering ripples of glossy air drifted over and blurred the white rectangle, the mirage of scorching summer days, so that Cass had to peer a little longer before he could make out that the ceremonial objects were just regular plates and glasses and silverware, and now he saw it wasn’t a platform but a table, and the foam was a linen tablecloth, and those were men seated round the table, each aligned with a plate of food.
The tish! Of course! This was the famous tish! Cass had a better view of it now, pulled onto a tier by a stranger’s hand-though for all he knew the man could be a cousin, since those payess had red highlights. His arm was linked into that of the next Valdener, who was linked with the next, and he felt himself assimilated into the row and so into the room and so into the mystique of fellowship, and slipped, too, into the powerful hold of the male voices fused into a strength that was somehow also delicate, carrying the haunting melody, the niggun, that was like large hands gently carrying a fragile being, and the melody was haunting Cass not only because of the depth of its beauty but also because of its eerie familiarity, Cass knew it immediately, intimately, like a newborn knowing the voice of his mother, and he softly began to sing with the others.
From his tier he could look down on the
