The Tale of the Lustful Rabbi
by Jennifer Anne Moses
Rabbi Abramovich had a problem. He knew he had a problem, too—how well acquainted he was with the yetzer ha ra!—but no matter how ferociously he fought it and how desperately he tried to squelch it, the voice of the evil impulse grew louder and louder in his ear. So tormented was he, his days filled with raging, his nights with torment, his waking and sleeping equally unrestful, that in the end, who could blame him when, mortal man that he was, exhausted, anxious, and beaten, he gave in?
As it is written: A righteous man falls down seven times and gets up.
Despite his torment, Abramovich was a leading Talmudic scholar, known not only for his mastery of Mishna, Gemara, and Rashi, but also for his scholarship on the Arabic commentaries of the Saadia Gaon. Not only that, but while others lost their Jews to the ravages of secularism on the one hand and black-hat extremism on the other, Abramovich had not only kept but increased the size of his traditional Orthodox shul in his center-city neighborhood of handsome brick row houses.
He was, in short, a big shot. He issued decrees and presided over important occasions both holy and political. By his word alone a person could be declared a kosher Jew and thus permitted to marry in accordance with the Mosaic law in the Holy Land.
He was, in short, a big shot. He issued decrees and presided over important occasions both holy and political.
Who would question the word or intentions of such a man? Traveling Jews who on a Shabbos found themselves in his city, found their way to his shul even if they had to rise before sunrise in order to keep the commandments, just to hear his drash. It was then that he’d ascend the bimah to unravel the complexities of the most unyielding knots in tosafot or unpack a page of the Zohar, his great big brain swelling with unusual and unique insights into matters of holiness, humanity, and the Divine Principal itself. His discourses were passed from mouth to mouth up and down the East Coast and sometimes as far as Chicago or even Los Angles. And it wasn’t just ordinary Jews he attracted to his shul either, but the very crème de la crème of society itself! Federal judges, United States Senators, Cabinet Secretaries, editors and publishers of important publications, television personalities, real estate magnets—they all came. Many he knew well enough to be invited to their summer homes in Vermont or the Eastern Shore, and even then, he drew those who wanted to study and learn. He was as formidable in his person as he was in his intellect, with a great, broad-shouldered trunk, thickly veined neck, high forehead, curved nose, immense gray eyes under thick gray brows, a small rosy mouth obscured by a thick gray beard, thinning hair that made his high forehead appear to be as a dome in Solomon’s Temple, and a slight tremor in the corner of his left eye, which was said to be the physical manifestation of the pain he felt for the sufferings of humanity.
The rabbi had a wife. Like most wives, his wife had once been young, buxom, bosomy and blooming, and now, like him, was getting on in years. The daughter of a down-on-his-luck rabbi in Queens, in recent years Mira had grown bored with her role as Rebbetzin. Tired of being in her husband’s enormous shadow, and after much consultation with various of her women friends, she had gone back to school to get a master’s degree in social work, so she could, as she said: “Get off my backside and actually do something to help other people.” As if being the social glue that kept the family and the shul running wasn’t enough!
Alas, the marriage had produced only one child, a daughter, who (like all daughters) had grown up, fled the nest, and moved to the other side of the world—in her case, to New Orleans, which was not a suitable place for the pious daughters of famous rabbis, but maybe Julia (his wife had insisted that their daughter have a modern name) wasn’t so pious, something her father didn’t want to know about. No matter, Julia lived in New Orleans, where she taught high school history and dabbled in ceramics, and Myra spent her days counseling pregnant teenagers, and talked to her friends on the phone about fulfillment and happiness.
Fulfillment! Happiness! As if such concepts were anything more than puffs of wishful thinking, curls of smoke! What was happiness but a trickster, a lothario, a goy? Whereas the path of the mitzvot, careful study, attentive devotion to the Master of Masters…
And so he consoled himself, even as his thoughts ran like frightened roaches in a million different directions…
And so he consoled himself, even as his thoughts ran like frightened roaches in a million different directions and Mira grew stouter and stouter as her once-dark-now-gray hair grew blonder and blonder and she spent more and more of her time counseling pregnant teenagers or having lunch or going shopping or to a museum with the other social workers she met in the maternity wards of the public hospital. He let her go. He had no choice. How well she knew him! If he were to so much as admit that there might be something amiss within him, she was bound to ferret it out, make him confess, and even, God forbid, see a therapist! “Our secrets make us sick,” was one of her favorite maxims.
Still, and as it is written: Whosoever causes the multitude to be righteous, over him sin prevails not; but he who causes the multitude to sin shall not have the means to repent.
Thus, even if the rabbi was drawn deeper and deeper into the vortex of transgression, not only allowing his inner visions to run riot but actually, after a time, encouraging them, how could sin prevail upon one such as he himself was, with his years of helping Jewish men and women delve deeper into the tradition, study, and understanding of Torah, embrace what could not be forced, and even convert? Obedience to the unenforceable. And so it was that his inner world would remain hidden, secret, furtive, intimate—and after all, he had convinced himself that his was a victimless crime.
* * *
Among the shul’s wealthy and important members, there was one in a particular who over the years had made so much money building shopping malls and sports arena that he was able to single-handedly provide funds for the shul to expand, renovate its existing building, and build what would be the first new mikvah in the city since the last one had been inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century. A cause for celebration, the mikvah was—and not just for the women who immersed themselves in its flowing water, but for the congregation as a whole, which, with the addition of the state-of-the-art, streamlined, and elegant mikvah was drawing younger and younger members, men and women at the start of their married lives who yearned for what they thought to be the purity and simplicity of their forebears. A life without the messy complexities of following every trend and keeping up with the latest power grab or policy shift. The women, pulled as they were between home and their careers, felt it the most deeply, and longing—at least on Shabbos—to focus solely on the Ineffable. And how best to express such purity of heart than to immerse oneself in the mikvah? As if being washed in the tears of Ha Shem, so it was for these women to immerse themselves in the pure flowing waters of the newly built Central City mikvah.
As if being washed in the tears of Ha Shem, so it was for these women to immerse themselves in the pure flowing waters of the newly built Central City mikvah.
Unfortunately for Rabbi Abramovich, the opening of the new mikvah presented an opportunity too great, too enticing, and altogether too much for him to so much as consider resisting his yetzer ha ra, and so it happened that what had once been confined to his fevered and unhealthy imagination began, ever so slowly at first, to be acted out.
But. Nu. By now the reader is becoming impatient, wanting to know just what it was that the rabbi did or thought of that was so frightful that it required being banished, especially as, as all Jews know, it is the deed and not the thought that is sinful. On the other hand, is it not by studying Torah and inclining one’s heart and mind always to the Creator, by doing his Mitzvot and by obeying his Laws, that the evil inclination is starved, and the sinner led to greater and more good deeds? And as for Rabbi Abramovich himself: did not his great prestige and influence in the community come in part from his deep understanding of human nature, his modern understanding of psychology, and his ability to live both in the world of the messy here-and-now and within the ancient embrace of Judaism? For his was neither the counter-scientific and anti-modern Judaism of the Hasidim (whose manners he abhorred), nor the clingy, romantic, inward-turning, and ghettoized world of the non-Hasidic Heredim, with their appalling ideas regarding the State of Israel and their refusal to recognize those outside their tribe; worse still, of course, were the religious Zionists—zealots, bigots, and xenophobes was more like it! And anyway, what was all of Jewry, including its more traditional end, than a large squabbling family? And so! Let them squabble! He and his would seek truth and justice, equanimity, and hope by the light both of Torah and the accumulated knowledge of all the peoples of the earth… baruch ha Shem.
Still, and as it is written: One who wishes to warm himself remains a certain distance away from the fire; if he approaches too near, he is burned.
The mikvah was a great success. The congregation rejoiced and grew. New babies were born; newly converted husbands were led to the chuppah, and newly converted wives gave birth to kosher Jewish children. As the shul grew, the need for security grew too. This because even in America where Jews were free to worship as equals among the nations, there were evil people, cruel and criminal people, who hate Jews and seek to do them harm.
The Board hired a security firm to install security cameras over each of the entrances to the building, as well as in its kitchen, library, front office, and religious school. And this is when the Rabbi’s fervid and fetid imaginings flew out of the confines of his skull and into the dark night.
Women and girls, half-dressed, their clothes in disarray as if ripped off them by wild beasts, strode through his mind, their breasts standing up, as if in salute. Milky breasts and veiny breasts; dark-nippled breasts and pink-nippled breasts. Small and large, flat and flaccid, young and old. Lobes, lobules, areoles, bulbs. He couldn’t get enough. Sometimes when he was very anxious, he envisioned breasts swollen with milk, and then saw himself as a kind of giant baby—his left arm wrapped in tefillin and a prayer shawl drawn around his shoulders—suckling. And then, maybe, nu—he might fall asleep, his stumpy lumpy stout wife of forty years snoring quietly beside him.
And so it went, a parade of soft porn, self-invented, as if conceived and encouraged by an acne-ridden boy finding release for his urges in the outhouse or behind the garage, until the confines of his inner eye could no longer hold all that was in it, and he branched out. The internet was an endless compendium—in its own way an inverted Talmud—of cross-referencing pornography. There was nothing one couldn’t gaze at there, no depravity, no unholiness, that wasn’t offered up like the rarest of rare steaks. Meat was what was on display there, none of it remotely kosher, none of it remotely satisfying let alone nourishing, and yet–and yet! The rabbi was riveted, spending hours and sometimes whole days fixated on the jumping and pulsating pixels on his Optiplex 7479 AIO. Password protected, and then password protected a second time, and encoded with a digital lock.
Why shouldn’t a rabbi be staying up late at night, toiling away in the twelve-by-twelve office that for more than two decades he’d been filling with yet more books and ancient tomes?
How he suffered, suffering both the torment of his flesh and how much more so the torment of his soul, and his soul’s soul, which with each viewing of sweating or swelling or swollen pink or brown, freckled or tattooed flesh, died a thousand agonized deaths. Over and over he died, in this way alone, from the moment the urge took him to the quiet and meticulous planning of how he would, undetected, find his way to his office to the lock door behind him and, in the privacy of the unlit room, lose himself in the internet. And if some stray congregant or another were to walk by the shul at night and, glancing up, notice any activity or human presence, well then, what of it? So his thoughts ran. Why shouldn’t a rabbi be staying up late at night, toiling away in the twelve-by-twelve office that for more than two decades he’d been filling with yet more books and ancient tomes? And not just in English and Hebrew either, but with ancient Greek and Aramaic as well as German, Yiddish, and a sprinkling of Spanish (this better to study the works of Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabriol, and ah—all of Andalusia until it was washed in rivers of Jewish blood). Should he ever be asked, he had the answer ready: “I was so deep into the beauty I lost track of time—! Did you know that Dunash ben Labrat—not only did he write work of unparalleled beauty, but he had a wife—did you know?—and she too wrote, a miracle, her work.”
And then he would quote a verse or two, in Hebrew.
הֲיִזכוׂר יֵעֲלַת הַחֵן יְדִידָהּ
“Will her love remember his graceful doe?”
Such a moment never came to pass. No passerby looked up at night to notice the glow of the rabbi’s computer screen, let alone his furled and hunched profile or his intelligent and sensitive features transformed into something demonic or worse. He preyed on pixelated women in utter secrecy, with not a soul—not an ant, not a fly—as witness.
Rabbi Yochanan observed: if the Torah had not been given, we could have learned modesty from the cat, honesty from the ant, chastity from the dove, and good manners from the rooster, who first coaxes and then mates.
Rabbi Abramovich consoled himself: He was not going to prostitutes. He was not corrupting the young. He was not even engaging in the sin of Onan! His hands stayed on his desk. His feet remained firmly planted on the floor. And his seed—lest anyone think otherwise—was not spilled other than within the marital bond. How much more so, then, was Rabbi Abramovich pulled more and more deeply, more and more tightly, into the web of his own compulsion, for, as he reasoned: What was the harm? What was the crime? And since he continued observing his marital obligation: Where was the victim? And even if there were victims, how was he responsible, or complicit in, their victimization? They’d be doing what they were doing with or without his participation, which wasn’t participation at all, but rather, passivity itself.
As he burned with shame within, he convinced himself that as it was only his eyes that participated, and only through a refracted and virtual distance, his obsession left less than a passing shadow.
* * *
Many years had passed since Myra regularly visited the mikvah, and in her case, when her time came due, she’d have to shlepp all the way to the other side of the city, to the ancient and crumbling Litvak shul that had since been taken over by a bunch of lunatic Breslovers. Some months after the opening of the new mivkah, however, Myra experienced a small trickle of blood. She described it as “more pink than red,” which was far more than Rabbi Abramovich wanted to know. In the years since she’d become a social worker working among unmarried and teenage mothers, she brought such stuff into the home more and more often, as if instead of talking about a detached placenta or a victim of oral rape who’d developed herpes, she was merely passing on news from the supermarket: strawberries were on sale, and guess who you’ll never guess I ran into in the dairy aisle?
Now she said: “I don’t want you to worry, but this shouldn’t be happening.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“I have an appointment to see my gynecologist tomorrow.”
Another word, and subject, he didn’t like. Myra used to speak in implications and allusions, but ever since her foray into the maternity wards, she tended towards the bluntest and most nakedly medical of terms: “Gynecologist” instead of “O.B.,” “Vagina” instead of “my female parts,” “ovaries” instead of “eggs,” and so forth. It was upsetting.
“Don’t you even care?” she said.
“Of course I care.”
That was the end of it until a week later when she announced that, though there was no sign of cancer, her gynecologist recommended that she have her ovaries removed for this and the other reason to do with her family’s genetic history, her age, and other things that made Rabbi Abramovich feel itchy, like there were bug bites inside his lungs and small Chinese noodles filling up his chest cavity.
“It’s a beautiful thing to behold,” she said. “A powerful experience of faith and purity, such an immersion is. I’d almost forgotten.”
The upshot being that after Myra recovered from the procedure, she took herself to the new mikvah, as per strict Halachic interpretation. At which point, she could barely contain herself. “It’s a beautiful thing to behold,” she said. “A powerful experience of faith and purity, such an immersion is. I’d almost forgotten. But even better is to know how the younger women, the new brides and the young mothers, are experiencing this mitzvah, many for the first time in their lives.”
“As it is intended,” her husband intoned.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to immerse myself every year, on the day before Yom Kippur,” she announced.
But he was no longer paying attention. Why should he when it was she—his wife and the mother of his own only child—who was the one whom Ha Shem Himself had apparently chosen to bring the reality of the mikvah not just into his circle of concern, but into his home? The locus of his most private thoughts and deeds, the place where he lay down his head at the end of the day and, on occasion, mounted his wife as was the custom and obligation in Israel?
* * *
And then what happened, the curious reader asks? What happened? But you already know what happened! Eventually it was in all the newspapers, not just the Jewish press either, but carried in the back pages of the New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and from there onto a thousand-thousand websites and gossip zines: How with his own hands the rabbi had installed a beautiful round clock in the women’s changing area in order to ingeniously and innocuously record them as they dressed and undressed. How the secret camera installed within the beautiful round clock transmitted live-stream video to his computer, allowing himself to gorge on images of naked women in all their variation: those with pendulous breasts threaded with visible blue veins and tipped with brown or pink nipples; those who with barely any breasts at all, and stomachs so flat they could be boys; and everything in between, up and until the cessation of the menstrual flow. Until one day some years later, the clock fell off the wall, its secret camera ejected, its red light bright and blinking like the eye of an exotic insect on the pristine tile floor.
And then, of course, the uproar! The women, how furious they were, how hurt, how traumatized. They claimed they’d been victimized, their flesh turned to meat, their personhood something to be consumed, their dignity trammeled, their trust torn to shreds! Memory cards; hidden cameras; secret devices; chips and firewalls; and yet in the end, none of it kept him from being more exposed than all the women in the world, until, in the words of one of the many articles about him, he was “A pariah among not just Orthodox Jews, but the entire Jewish community.” His wife left him. His daughter refused to acknowledge their kinship. Former friends turned their backs.
All but one, that is. The same man who had provided the funds to build the mikvah—a tall, thin man with a beak like a baby bird’s and a round head so bald and shiny it resembled a large swirly marble of streaked permeable pink—came to see him in the minimum security prison to which the judge at his trial had sentenced him for six years. Here he was beset upon from all sides with crooked lawyers, cheating investors, Congressmen and CEOs convicted of fraud, embezzlement, extortion, insider trading, copyright infringement, forgery, identity theft—the full panoply of greed.
“I never laid a hand on a woman who was not my wife, or stole so much as a paper clip,” he told the man. “Yet I too am considered a criminal.”
But as the man sighed with enormous and powerful pity, it came to Rabbi Abramovich that he’d stolen something far greater than money, and in that moment, as he sat with the benefactor whose generosity had led to his downfall, Rabbi Abramovich cried out in pain, crying, first in Hebrew and then in English, as it is written:
הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ אָבִינוּ לְתוֹרָתֶךָ. וְקָרְבֵנוּ מַלְכֵּנוּ לַעֲבוֹדָתֶךָ וְהַחֲזִירֵנוּ בִּתְשׁוּבָה שְׁלֵמָה
לְפָנֶיךָ. בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’, הָרוֹצֶה בִּתְשׁוּבָה
“Avinu malchenu, forgive me, God and God of my fathers, for my sins are as numerous as the stars!”
Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Man Who Loved His Wife, short stories in the Yiddish tradition. She's also a painter.
