“And then?” Alec asked. He was on the edge of his seat.

  “She looks down into the bucket and sneers. Didn’t blanch at all. Then she reaches in and pulls one out. She holds the raw, dripping thing in front of her face, dangling it by the little vein. And she looks around the table at us and, totally deadpan, mind you, she asks ‘whose is this?’ ”

  “Gross!” Alec shrieked.

  “None of us knew what to say. We were in awe. Guys were crossing their legs and looking down. Then she swings the ball around like a little lasso, tosses it in her mouth, and swallows it in one bite.”

  8

  Contracts and Covenants

  I n anticipation of their victory on my father’s contract referendum, the Executive Board of Whitestone Temple had kindly prepared a settlement offer that they delivered to him, by FedEx, 81 the Monday before the Web vote was scheduled to take place. If Samuel resigned his position effective immediately, the temple would pay him a severance of one year’s salary.

  Of course, the only reason they made the offer was to keep themselves in good standing with the Hebrew Union 82 —the puppy mill for new rabbis, to whom they’d be applying for a more liberal leader once my dad was gone. The quieter this went down, the better for all.

  They were asking my father to take the kind of self-effacing step that I suspected gave people cancer, and I didn’t want him to have any part of it.

  On the other hand, it was a bit gratifying to see him finally buckling under to the wave of economic expansion that I now had the power to surf for sport. I, more than anyone, knew what it was like to wither in his self-righteous gaze. Why would anyone subject himself to it voluntarily every Sabbath? We weren’t Catholic Mafiosi with a need to confess the hits we’d ordered. Just successful people, having a bit of fun.

  I had been visiting home so infrequently that I was half afraid my appearance would make my father think there was even worse news we were keeping from him—like when a famous baseball player shows up at a kid’s bedside in the hospital, signaling by his very presence that death is imminent. So I scheduled a meeting with Jude and Reuben at home that same afternoon, as my mom suggested. It would give me a pretext to see my dad, and the domestic location might lend an air of sincerity to my business dealings—which were anything but.

  Predictably, Sophie ordered a box of cinnamon rugelach from Silverman’s, and a full plate of the dense pastries was awaiting my arrival that afternoon. While Samuel composed a sermon on legal pads in his customary fashion, thick volumes of Midrash spread out all around him, my sister and I enjoyed the refreshments at the other end of the dining-room table.

  “So what’re you gonna talk about, Dad?” I asked.

  “You really want to know, Yossi?”

  “Sure, I do. Tell me. It’s gonna be about Pesach, right?” I knew my dad would appreciate my use of the Hebrew word for Passover.

  “You were never interested before.”

  “Before what?” As if I didn’t know.

  “I want to hear, Daddy,” Miriam pleaded.

  “Very well,” Samuel said, putting his pen down. “I’m going to explain why God didn’t let Moses into the land of Canaan. Do you remember why that happened?”

  I always hated when my dad treated us like Bible students, but today I actually felt myself enjoying Samuel’s patronizing tone.

  “Didn’t it have something to do with not having faith? Or breaking a rule?”

  “Close, Yossi. It had to do with his faith, but it had even more to do with his age.”

  “What? He was too old? Those guys lived like four hundred years.”

  “It wasn’t old age. It was old thinking,” Samuel said, drifting into his practiced, oratory style. “The Israelites were in the desert, at Horeb. Exodus. They’re tired, sick, hungry, and, most of all, thirsty. ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt just to die of thirst here in the desert?’ they asked him. It was the first Jewish joke: ‘We could have died just as easily in Egypt, and there, we’d have water!’ So God told Moses to raise his staff and strike it against a rock, for water to come rushing out. And he did so. He tapped his staff against a large rock, and out gushed water for all the people and their herds.”

  “Yeah, Moses did miracles like that all the time, right?”

  “Moses parted the Dead Sea!” Miriam said.

  “The Red Sea.” Samuel lovingly corrected her. How will they take care of her after he’s sacked, I wondered. I could probably help out, if they’d let me.

  “But later,” my dad continued, “years later, the people cried to Moses again, ‘we have no water. Surely we will all die of thirst.’ And God told him, ‘Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water.’ But Moses didn’t do as he was told by God. He didn’t speak to the rock. No, he raised his staff and then struck the rock twice. And the water came gushing out as it had before.”

  “What’s the big deal with that?” I asked. “He used the proven method.”

  “It worked, sure. But he didn’t do as God had instructed him. And God told him so.” Samuel found the appropriate passage from his notes. “ ‘And God said, “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.” ’ ”

  “That’s pretty rough, though. Banging on the rock with his staff is still a major act of faith. Beside, it worked before. And it sounds like he was under considerable pressure to perform.”

  “But Moses was relying on his experience, rather than the word of God. He didn’t have faith that his words alone would bring forth the water.”

  “And God got mad over that? After everything Moses did?”

  “I don’t know that God was mad, exactly,” Samuel said, pensively. “I don’t think God was testing Moses as much as proving something to him. That Moses was of the wrong generation to lead the people in their new land. He still understood things in the old way. He understood the power of the staff, but not of his words. That’s why he couldn’t lead the younger generations. He wasn’t one of them.”

  “Sounds like an upgrade problem,” I tried to make light. I knew my dad was talking about himself. He was preparing a farewell speech.

  “Explain it to me,” he asked, innocently.

  “Well, legacy systems, they . . . When you want to use a new piece of software, it . . .” I couldn’t find a way to bring him up to speed.

  “I guess that makes me a bit like Moses, too,” he smiled. “You can’t even explain to me what’s going on in that virtual head of yours in a way that I can understand.”

  “No, Dad, really—”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jamie. It doesn’t make me feel bad—just ready to move on.”

  “You’re not getting fired, dad. We’ll work this out.” He used my American name. He must’ve been really depressed.

  “Sometimes we have to trust what life brings us.” Samuel motioned to the plate of rugelach. I passed it across the table to him. He took a piece and ate it in several small bites.

  “I know I’ve been hard on you about your job. Your choices,” he said.

  “You haven’t, Dad,” I lied. “You’ve tried to be supportive.”

  My mom, who must have been listening in from the kitchen, stood in the doorway to better hear our exchange.

  “No, I haven’t been supportive at all,” Samuel said, shaking his head. “Not like Morris. But it’s not because I don’t trust you. It’s just because I don’t understand. All this talk of networks and money and business. I only fear it because I don’t understand it.”

  “But it should frighten you, Dad. It’s scary stuff. I don’t want you to accept it like Uncle Morris does. No one knows where it’s all going. And no one’s in charge.”

  “You’re in charge, Jamie. That’s what I have to accept.” He looked around at his books. “Sometimes I think the Torah was written for parents. Or rabbis.”

  I wanted to confess to my father right then and there. That I’d gotten into something beyond my control. That I had eaten the testes of a baby bull. That I was about to sell my friends up the river. That I was going to help Tobias Morehouse launch a stock-trading website that could hypnotize its users into making more transactions. That I was part of a band of market fascists who meant to monetize humanity itself. But the doorbell rang before I could say another word.

  “Somebody’s at the door!” shouted Miriam. She ran to open it.

  “That must be the Epsteins,” said Sophie, nervously running after her daughter.

  The Epsteins were what are known in rabbinical circles as “returnees.” Wealthy, bored, and in existential despair following the death of Mr. Epstein’s mother, the couple had returned to the religion of their youth in the hope of finding a sense of connection to something more authentic than the faux-antique facades of the South Street Seaport shopping mall. A forty-thousand-dollar donation to renovate the sanctuary earned them seats on the board, and Samuel hoped their commitment to traditional values would swing a few votes to his favor.

  But returnees do not return without bringing back problems of their own.

  “Good afternoon, welcome!” Sophie greeted them as she opened the door.

  “Shalom, Rebbetzen,” the middle-aged man said, “Shalom!”

  “Why of course, Mark,” she corrected herself. “Shalom!”

  “Actually,” he said, kissing the mezuzah on the doorframe, “I’ve decided to use my Hebrew name from now on. Meyer. Meyer Epstein ben Moshe v’Rivka.”

  “How wonderful!” Sophie clapped. My mom knew the drill. “Shalom, Meyer Epstein!”

  “You know my wife,” Meyer introduced her formally, “Shoshana Irit.”

  “Shalom, Rebbetzen.” The woman bowed like a sushi chef. “I never learned my real Hebrew name,” she said sadly, “but we looked in a book and picked out the ones closest.”

  “Well please come in Shoshana Irit, Meyer,” Samuel said, rising from his chair. “You’ve met my daughter, Miriam?”

  Miriam took Meyer’s coat, revealing the white fringe known as tzitzis sticking out from the front of his pants.

  “Chabad!” she exclaimed, innocently mistaking him for one of the Lubavitch 83 orthodox who usually wore such garb.

  “No, no,” Meyer said sweetly. The whole congregation knew of her disability. “Just a good Jew.”

  “Come, come.” Samuel gestured to the dining room. “Let’s sit down and get to work.”

  Mr. Epstein had decided to get bar mitzvahed a second time, now that he knew what the ritual was really about. His superfluous ceremony would take place in a week in front of the whole congregation, and my father was preparing him privately from home rather than at temple with the other thirteen-year-olds. Meyer had taken a crash course in reading Hebrew at an Orthodox shul in the city, and now proceeded to race through the text of his Torah portion, holding his hand over the English transliteration just to prove he was reading from the real Hebrew characters. 84

  “Excellent job,” Samuel praised him when he was finished. “Terrific, really. You know, Judaism is the only Western religion where the initiation, the bar mitzvah, amounts to a demonstration of literacy.”

  “Of course I still have no idea what I’m actually saying,” admitted Meyer.

  “It’s still very commendable, Mr. Epstein,” Samuel said. “It’s a fascinating passage,” he continued, demonstrating his rabbinical expertise, “because it shows that the slavery in Egypt actually symbolizes an enslaved state of mind.”

  “But we were really slaves in Egypt, too,” Shoshana Irit added as she nibbled on a rugelach.

  “Some Israelites most likely were, in a sense,” Samuel said, “but the release from slavery is presented here more as a culmination of Abraham’s covenant with God. People often take the plagues quite literally, but they are meant more symbolically. The slaying of the Egyptian firstborn really represents the slaying of the firstborn civilization. The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which translates as ‘a narrow place.’ ”

  “But the plagues really happened, right, Rabbi?” Epstein insisted.

  “Well, the story we read in the Haggadah was written during the Roman occupation,” I came to my father’s aid. “The Jews needed the tale of revolution to give them hope of overcoming their oppression and winning back the temple.” I surprised myself with that one. Maybe I was still a Jew, after all.

  “That’s quite right, Jamie,” my dad said. “The Haggadah was regarded as a subversive document. But, more importantly, it’s a lesson on how to escape slavery of the mind. Or the soul. The way we can enslave only ourselves—by building pyramids to false gods.”

  Meyer seemed quite unsettled. He hadn’t paid $40,000 to be thrown into doubt about his heritage.

  “And isn’t it important now of all times,” he complained, “that we affirm the literal truth of our history? Many people calling themselves Jews don’t even believe that Moses existed!” Shoshana Irit nodded emphatically with each of her husband’s words.

  Samuel took a deep breath. He was torn between serving as a genuine rabbi for these overzealous returnees—which would mean helping them temper their extreme views—and exploiting their conservative bias in order to secure his own position at the shul. As always, Samuel’s higher obligation won out over self-interest.

  “Okay, Meyer,” the rabbi said. “Let’s look at the story a little more closely, then. Why were the Israelites down in Egypt in the first place?”

  “The famine!” Miriam shouted.

  “Excellent, Miriam,” Samuel said. “And why is it they were allowed to immigrate to Egypt?”

  “Because Joseph was prime minister,” Meyer answered quickly, as if he were competing with Miriam on a game show.

  “Right. He had been betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery. But his ability to prophesize earned him a place as Pharaoh’s right hand man. He lived like one of the Egyptians. And his people followed him into what eventually became slavery, building pyramids to the Egyptian gods.”

  “That’s terrible!” Shoshana said.

  “He forgot he was an Israelite. But four hundred years later, Moses—an Egyptian nobleman—remembers. When he sees a slave being killed by a guard, he is inspired to act.”

  “Damn right, he acts!” Epstein clapped his hands. “He killed the guard on the spot!”

  “True enough. He witnessed such cruelty that he was pulled from the dream. He was liberated, and he set to liberating his people.”

  “And now you’re saying this never happened?” Meyer looked up at the ceiling, as if God were witnessing this blasphemy.

  “No, Mr. Epstein,” I tried to bring it all home for my dad. “He’s saying that it’s still happening. It’s happening every day.”

  My dad and I looked at one another for a moment, Samuel’s eyes beaming with newfound respect for me, while I tried not to cringe from the undeserved admiration. I liked it better when my dad criticized me. His faith made me feel suddenly adrift.

  I was saved by the bell. Miriam again rushed to answer it.

  “Who have we here?” Jude bowed to her from the threshold. He took her hand and kissed it as if she were a queen. She laughed and curtsied.

  He came in with young Benjamin.

  “So, are we celebrating or what?” Jude asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs where I can tell you the whole story.”

  “Hello, Rabbi, Mrs. Cohen,” Jude said. “Good to see you again.”

  My parents nodded at their son’s childhood role model.

  “Come on,” I said. I didn’t want these two worlds mixing any more than necessary. As we went up the stairs, Miriam grabbed the plate of rugelach from under Mrs. Epstein’s nose.

  “Bring this with you, Jude!” she shouted, running with the plate and losing a substantial portion of its contents in the process. “For you to eat!”

  “Funeral food! Cool,” Jude joked of the pastries. Then, to Samuel, “I didn’t mean, you know . . .”

  “It’s quite all right,” Samuel said from the table. “Enjoy.”

  As I went up the stairs, I felt like I was leaving him behind.

  With every opportunity in the world to do otherwise, I pitched my heart out to Jude. I made no mention of Entertainink’s intention to bury TeslaNet forever. I focused instead on how the first six million dollars would be split, and how revenue would be assessed after that. Jude didn’t seem at all surprised or even impressed that we were talking about millions of dollars. He nodded along as if he already expected it. Not even Benjamin batted an eye. In fact, he looked positively morose about the whole deal. Did he sense my ambivalence?

  Finally, when I was done, Jude asked just one question.

  “So you think this is the right way to go?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had been basically honest with Jude, if not absolutely forthcoming. He didn’t deserve any better, really. This was the guy who had fucked me—the fact that it ended up serving my goals notwithstanding. Besides, I was on a new team now, and that team was depending on me. A whole industry was depending on me. But I couldn’t give my unconditional recommendation and live with myself. Not after all that Bible stuff downstairs.

  “I think it’s a good deal,” I said. “A really good deal.”

  “You’re saying we should take the money?” Jude pressed. Why was he letting me make the decision for him? My Greek chorus began rustling their sheet music.

  “If you don’t mind losing control of the project,” I edged toward disclosure, “yes, I do.”

  Tell him! Tell him! The chorus chanted.

  “Well, TeslaNet is beyond anyone’s control once it’s released, right?” Jude asked rhetorically.

  “That would be true,” I said, wording my sentences as carefully as a president giving grand jury testimony. 85

  “And they’ll release it, right?” Jude asked.

  We’d finally reached the juncture I was hoping to avoid. Jude had an incredible knack of digging down to the weakest line of code.

  “Well,” I managed, “they’re paying an awful lot of money if they have no intention of actually releasing the program.” There. I mentioned the possibility. It was a throwaway line, but it would serve to alleviate me of responsibility later on.