Hyman: A Novel of the Jewish Encounter Movement

By Lawrence Bush

Rabbi Hyman Babushkin has headed and cultivated a progressive religious movement, Encounter Judaism, for half a century — but as he turns 83, he has lost his wife, his prostate, and, perhaps, his faith. The loyalty of some of the key women among his cohort is wavering, his leadership is being challenged, and he is beset by fantasies of fleeing back to the ultra-Orthodox world from which he was excommunicated during the heady 1960s.

What’s a guru to do?

HYMAN is a novel rich in humor, Jewish thought, and provocative questions about power and sexuality as it vaults back and forth through fifty years of American culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Yehuda Press
• Release date: May 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781953829832

Book preview

Hyman_front_cover.jpg

HYMAN

Lawrence Bush

Dedication

for Ted

Chapter One

in which Rabbi Hyman Babushkin, age 83, subdues an uprising

March 12, 2012 (18 Adar 5772)

There’s a rebellion

brewing in the Encounter Judaism movement, and Rabbi Hyman Babushkin hopes to quell it this very day, at his infant godson’s circumcision.

He’s upstairs with the baby and the baby’s grandfather, Babushkin’s longtime compatriot Rabbi Isaac Cantor, as well as the circumciser, young Simon, who is stuffed into a window seat with his knees drawn up.

Downstairs in Isaac’s sprawling living room, a small group of move- ment dissidents are haranguing their fellow guests about the barbarism of brit milah, the covenant of circumcision. Why should an innocent baby’s bonding to Judaism involve pain? they argue. Why surrender to the tradition on this, of all things, when we’ve been radically innovative in so many others? Of course we honor Reb Hyman, and of course we love Reb Isaac — without them, there would be no alternative to anything, no Encounter Judaism! But they should have a vote on this, not a veto!

One of the protestors is Simon’s own aunt, Rochelle Klein, a stalwart veteran of Encounter Judaism, and the skinny young mohel has been paralyzed by her presence down there.

Now Reb Hyman is leaning close and turning up the heat: "Simon — dear Simon — you are the only qualified mohel in our little movement, hm? You are our pioneer! But if you don’t do your job today, you know where it lands us? We’ll be back to importing some ultra-Orthodox characters who look down their noses at us . . . "

I wouldn’t allow them into my house! Reb Isaac hisses, cradling his infant grandson.

Hyman shakes his shaggy head and raises a finger to his lips to shush the tall man by raising a finger to his lips.

What’s more, Simon, Hyman continues, "I would not be able to lead the service, because the chasidim will not breathe the air that I breathe, hm? Listen, dear boy: This is my godson we’re talking about. Reb Isaac’s first grandchild! We are not here to hurt him. We’re not here to traumatize anyone. But we can’t surrender the mitzvah of circumcision on the basis of . . . of that!"

That is a surge of contentious voices rippling up the staircase. Isaac’s wife, Becca, is clearly having no success at quelling the protest, despite her professional skills as a therapist and mediator.

Simon blanches, shuts his eyes, draws his knees up tighter.

Okay, forget it! Isaac shouts, causing the baby to startle in his arms. "I won’t let you touch this child!"

Babushkin turns away from both men with a heavy sigh.

What should I say? Isaac implores him in a hoarse whisper. He’s completely unstrung by what, five, six people down there, out of dozens?

Shh, put your temper away, Isaac. You have a baby at your breast. Here, give him to me.

Be careful, your surgery . . .

This weight I can lift, Babushkin insists, and although the infant’s sleep is unperturbed, he rocks him and sings a Yiddish lullaby, full of lu-lu-lu.

Isaac closes his deep-set eyes for a time-out, then refocuses on Simon. Do you know how many well-wishers Becca and I have in our movement, all across this country, compared to your aunt and her posse down there?

I’m one of them, Simon replies. Your well-wishers, I mean.

"I know you are! But what we need now is not your wishes, Simon. My daughter is a single mom. She needs all three of us, three men, to be responsible. Reb Hyman makes the brit — you, the milah."

Lu, lu, lu . . . I’ll do it myself, Babushkin announces.

Isaac swings around and stares at him in alarm. You’ll do what?

"What do you think? The circumcision! The whole shmeer, soup to nuts. Ha! No pun intended. Here, take this sweet boy." Babushkin hands the bundled infant back to this grandfather and sweeps out the door.

Becca Cantor is at the bottom of the staircase, with the new mom, Shoshana, peering owlishly over her shoulder. They’re driving everyone crazy, Becca says to the descending men. Should we just tell them to leave?

Babushkin wordlessly pats her forearm as he passes into the thick-carpeted living room.

Simon sits again, this time on the stairs, halfway up.

Isaac unloads the baby to Shoshana and summons Becca with a glance. The two of them confer, leaning against the banister.

Omigod, you’re kidding! Becca cries.

From the living room, Babushkin is now summoning Isaac and the child. The hubbub has mysteriously died.

Stay here with the baby until we call you, Becca instructs her daughter, then grips her husband’s arm and walks with him towards their living room.

Rabbi Babushkin

has dropped his pants. He is standing with his brown corduroy trousers down around his ankles amid a stupefied crowd of his students, disciples, and friends. His legs are gnarly with veins, and his pelvis is swathed in an adult diaper.

Oh, Hyman! Becca entreats him, but the white-bearded, bare- legged man holds up a silencing hand.

Where is your grandson? he says. "Bring him now, his sandak is waiting. His eyes roam the crowd. They’ve asked me to be the godfather, you see, to help develop this baby’s relationship with God. Something I’ve done for a few of you over the years, hm? But what have we actually been doing, kinderlakh? We’ve been circumcising Judaism! That’s right! We’ve been circumcising our tradition: cutting away the scab that surrounds its injured heart; scraping arteries so that the energy of women can flow in; repairing valves so that the energy of kabbalah can flow in. Eventually, our work will heal and reenergize all parts of the Jewish body. This I believe!"

Flames in the fireplace pop. Babushkin nods in that direction, as if acknowledging applause. So what about you? he asks after a pause. Bobbi? Rochelle? — eyeballing and naming the most influential protestors, a pair of baby-boomer women adorned in fabrics, scarves, bracelets, earrings, and knitted skullcaps. If you believe in the importance of our work, then you know we have a responsibility not only to ourselves. We believe in a flexible Judaism, a living and breathing Judaism — but our decisions have never been based on who yells the loudest.

He grips the diaper fasteners at his waist and stands in a gunslinger stance. "So here’s the deal, kinderlakh. If you are going to insist on drowning out my godson’s cries to God, then first you’re going to see me remove this diaper and complete the work that the prostate surgeon began! Do you understand? I will remove this diaper and circumcise myself a second time, right in front of you, if you do not permit the brit milah to proceed!"

There is a long, dumbstruck silence before Rabbi Bobbi Greenbaum, a moon-faced woman of seventy with close-cropped silver hair, calls out: Stop being ridiculous, Hyman. Pull your pants up.

For a change! fumes Rochelle, Simon’s aunt, a chunky woman of seventy-three who is standing by the mantel with her arms folded across her bosom.

That’s it, Rochelle! Becca rails at her. You can leave right now!

No, Becca, please, Babushkin insists, patting the air. "No fighting. We are in this together, every person in this room. Everything should be discussed — after the bris."

Bullshit! Rochelle shouts, shaking her bracelets at him. What is there to discuss? You’re a phallic terrorist, Hyman! The crowd breaks its tension with titters. Go ahead and laugh! she scolds them. But half the women in this room know exactly what I’m talking about!

Whoa! objects a bald, shiny man in another corner of the room. Love is not terrorism, Rochelle. For God’s sake! The real issue is why you’re being so outrageously hostile!

We love you, Reb Hyman, calls a forty-something blonde woman on a pillow on the floor, and a dozen others join in, murmuring: We love you, Reb Hyman, we’re with you . . .

Bending for his pants, Babushkin grunts in pain, loud enough to startle them all into a concerned silence as Isaac takes hold of his arm.

My doctor said, no heavy lifting, Babushkin announces. An impossible injunction, in this crowd. He shakes off the assisting hand and sits on the embroidered ceremonial circumcision chair with his fly still undone.

The front door slams behind Rochelle and pushes in a cold wedge of Riverdale air. Four more of her group are picking their way across the room to make their exit. In the kitchen, Shoshana’s baby boy is now wide awake and wailing, and Simon is soaping his hands.

Four hours later

, Hyman Babushkin sits in his book-strewn apartment with a mug of coffee and his illuminated laptop, open to his letterhead:

Rabbi Hyman Babushkin

111 St. Marks Place

New York, NY 10009

[e-mail]

18 Adar 5772

To: The Honorable Yankl Ben Avram Levov

440 Milland Avenue

Brooklyn, New York 11206

A hand-written draft on a yellow legal pad lies next to the mousepad, with several sentences in Yiddish script followed by several dense paragraphs in English, with cross-outs piled like lumber:

Dear Rebbe,

In the spirit of humility and genuine teshuvah, I send you GREETINGS.

It is a full year since your poppa’s passing, or I would not intrude upon your grieving household. From afar, I have felt the Mogelyover community’s profound sorrow at losing him, our Rabbe, Avram ben Moshe Levov (khhz), as beloved leader for nearly seventy years, and I have prayed daily for you, Yankl Levov, to be comforted, and to be granted the discernment needed to fill the void left by that great tsaddik’s death.

As perhaps you remember — or perhaps you do not — your father helped to save me in Bessarabia, and became my mentor and spiritual guide in Brooklyn, following our escape from the fascists. It was he who blessed me with the title, rabbi, in 1958, and sent me out the following year as his messenger to the Jews of New York. When he thought I’d become too intoxicated with the outside world, it was he who tried to sober me by sending a squad of his chasidim to be present whenever I spoke in public. Leah Moskowitz, your cousin, was in particular assigned to confound me with difficult questions. At the time, of course, I considered them to be emissaries of the Rebbe’s vindictiveness, rather than angels of his mercy. The selection of Leah was especially irksome, for there I was, advocating the equality of women in a revitalized Judaism, and there she was, this brainy challah of a girl, all but yanking my beard in public!

Eventually, of course, I derailed your cousin by seducing marrying her. That seemed to have sealed my fate: I was placed in exile, and I have been dead to the Mogelyover community ever since.

But what, exactly, were the symptoms of the plague that I was spreading? My little movement has been variously described as New Age Judaism, Judeo-Therapy, and Encounter Judaism. But it is the Rebbe’s denunciation of me, which he offered as a footnote during his last radio broadcast in 2003, that wins the prize: Poontang Judaism, he called it.

Poontang Judaism. I imagine him flicking his great big hand as he said this, like a giant shooing a gnat, while a wave of excitement passed among his chasidim, bent by their radios and thrilling to the Rebbe’s worldliness, his wit, his large capacity for righteous contempt.

As ever with your father’s words, if you scratch at a single phrase, an entire page of commentary emerges. The word poontang derives from the French, putain, meaning prostitute — precisely the word your father used to describe me in my writ of excommunication. But poontang has a Sanskrit root, too: putra, meaning child or son. And while the Rebbe, though perfectly fluent in French, had no knowledge of Sanskrit (as far as I know), I am certain that the etymology of his phrase reveals that he considered me, until the very end of his life, to be his child. Never in my decades as an untouchable did the Rebbe go so far as to call me a goy. He broke my heart, but he did not also break my nose by slamming the door to the possibility of my return.

Return is what I now implore: for you to lift your dear father’s decree and restore me to the Mogelyover community. I have recently turned eighty-three years old. I’m being treated for cancer. I want to come home.

Fat chance, Hyman murmurs. They wouldn’t take you in a coffin, let alone in diapers — and he completes his cross-outs with a big X across the entire yellow-pad sheet. Just kidding, he says aloud as he quits the letterhead on his computer screen and closes the lid.

Chapter Two

in which Hyman Babushkin, age 31, finds love in the Atomic Age

Fifty-One Years Earlier:

June 11,1961 (27 Sivan 5721)

With three minutes

to go before the 2:30 p.m. starting time for the Sunday meeting of the Queens Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, Rabbi Hyman Babushkin is looking over his shoulder from a front-row wooden folding chair and sizing up his audience.

Three seats over in that front row, Mr. Karl Marxist sits elbows-to-knees while reading the Morgn Frayhayt, his leftwing Yiddish daily newspaper. A minyan of his comrades, retirees like himself who are active in SANE, have scattered themselves beneath the tall windows of the Jewish community center to serve as greeters and rabble-rousers. But the rabble is absent.

Five rows back on an aisle seat, a tall young man who could almost double for Bobby Kennedy, the President’s brother, glances at his wristwatch. He’s probably wondering, Babushkin supposes, if anyone his age will be attending.

Sitting in the center are two middle-aged couples who may actually hold memberships in this combination Reform temple-community center: the men, bare-headed and bald, flanking the women, bare- armed and coiffed with hairspray. After hearing about nuclear destruc- tion until about 4:30, they’ll go out together for an early-bird special at the Pastrami King on Queens Boulevard.

"Nu, Babushkin wonders aloud, where is everybody?" Even the other panelist is tardy, a Queens College professor of political science who has written recently for Saturday Review about the arms race.

The old Marxist looks over at Babushkin and shrugs. They’re all at Yankee Stadium, he says in a crackling, basso voice. "Forty, fifty thousand on a day like this, for Mantle and Maris — der ox un der ferd. If we got God himself for speaker, there wouldn’t be a full house. The American people are idiots."

Babushkin tries to be upbeat: "We’ll have a minyan, at least, counting everyone," meaning, women included.

That and a ham sandwich, the man rasps, will get you to the pearly gates.

A ham sandwich? A Jewish anti-Semite? Really? Babushkin says with a thin smile, stroking his curly brown beard. Do you think they eat pig at the pearly gates?

The old fart’s not such a wit, after all, just shrugs again and resumes reading, but Babushkin has already gotten the point, stuck to him over and over by the suspicious glances of the other elderly peaceniks. A progressive rabbi recommended by the famous poet Lou Kaplan should not look like this! He should be beardless, for God’s sake, beardless and modern and without a head covering — not a charlatan like this one, this hairy man with his rainbow yarmulke and ridiculous sidelocks, this peddler of the people’s opiate!

Under his breath, Babushkin recites the blessing for Torah study while he waits: Borukh atah adonay eloheynu melekh ha’olam . . . He usually does this aloud at the start of his presentations, to stir the hearts of his listeners. Sometimes a blessing alone, spoken in a full, unashamed voice, is enough to evoke in a wayward Jew the hunger for focus, for reverence. But with the old communists in the majority here, there’s no use wearing his spirituality on his sleeve.

B

y 2:40, Professor Victor Chenowitz and a few clumps of young people from the college have taken their seats, and Mr. Marxist stands up to begin the proceedings. He offers a growling denunciation of President Kennedy’s Big Lie about the U.S.-Soviet missile gap and bemoans the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union by U.S. military bases in Turkey and other foreign lands. He describes the monthly activities of the Queens branch of SANE, and exhorts the audience, especially the young people, to get involved and raise your voices against nuclear war. 

His own voice falters once he begins to introduce the panelists by reading from his