17 April 2009 - 12:52Rebbe on the Road Cross Country 2009: The Entertainer
(Initially to the tune of Fiddler on the roof, please try it – yes, I know it’s a stretch.) Transition! Transition. Transition! Transition. Transition!Just now I bite into a perfectly toasted bagel, note the blandness of the cream cheese, slippery fishiness of the lox, and the aromatic of the onion, soothing juiciness of the tomato, come to tell us, challah can’t be far beyond. Transition, transition! (musical interlude) Transition!
In our little village, the 5000 some person Crown Princess - a bagel, what simple happiness,
and on a cruise ship the icon of rescue and freedom, the day after Passover.
Whoever said the hole is greater than the sum of its parts must have been Jewish. (ahem) Coming toward us is Shabbos and the aptly termed Turquoise (Turks and Caicos) islands. (The sea is turquoise, smooth as swimmable silk.)What does Shabbos mean after a week on a cruise ship? This will be my question for the internationally diverse minyan due to materialize towards evening. There’s a campy Yiddish song about a traveling peddler who visits the tiniest of Jewish communities, they call him the minyan man, showing up just in time for them to have the rare joy of a minyan, quorum of ten, needed to hold services wherever he is peripatetically drawn.I met my minyan man last night - he knows it. We’d asked the entertainment assistant director to tip us off to who the best musicians might be on this sailing. He named one “The Entertainer.” I was amused because that’s my private name for God. Well, until now it was private.Why “The Entertainer”? Consider Reb Nachman’s adage: “Mitzvah g’dolah lih’yote b’simchah tamid – a great mitzvah is to always live as though we are in happiness.” Note that it’s not the pursuit of happiness he seems to encourage; my take is that it’s rather to dwell embedded in Creation in a steady state of yirah, pure awe.We find the entertainer in Crooners lounge. Well into his sixties, he looked rather just post-chemotherapy, his voice raspy tinged by some deep disappointment in this life. “What do you want to hear?, he is looking directly at me.. “Jazz, I hear you have a background in it.,” I reply.He protests, “It’s too early, but I’ll do this for you.” He downs half a Mojito, and tah dahm, the grand piano arches its back in stunned pleasure as more keys are used than surely ever in its life. He tells us Sinatra had brought him to meet and Gershwin when the composer was 86. His improvisations of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue were stunning and we sit unaware of body, ship or world, in the River of Yirah, pure Awe, b’simchah tamid. We are four persons, two lone couples in Crooners lounge. He’d been Sinatra’s personal, in-house pianist according to the program. I, a pianist who belongs in a forest when she plays, though it would be unfair to the birds, plants and animals, had fallen into the River and would cheerfully die the death of hessed, in the Flow. “What do you want to hear?” He asks me again like a lover wanting to please. My soul croons back without thought, “Just be yourself.”Just be yourself, a deeply spiritual openly gay, Catholic, personnel director once told me this at a stunningly dysfunctional work site. “Just be yourself, that’s enough. Don’t try to please others or mold yourself to what you think people want, just be yourself. You are enough. Wherever you go from here remember, just be yourself.” We next met up with The Entertainer at Crooner’s bar, this night he was in a Liberace-type costume. (If the Messiah came would you recognize her?) He quickly grasped Barry’s South African accent and noted he’d been deported from
South Africa in 1973. He, his wife and two children had lived in beautiful
Clifton by the beach. “How’d you manage that?” I asked innocently, meaning, getting deported. Then British, if I got his story right, he was on assignment by a record company to record local talent. He’d recorded black musicians for the label. The authorities warned him, “We don’t do that here.”One night the next year, in
Johannesburg, authorities scoop him up, put him on a plane and he would not be allowed to return during Apartheid, and they disallow his wife and toddlers to join him. He tries all possible measure to get them papers, to get them out; no communication is allowed. She files for divorce. Decades and it seems, marriages later, today he co-owns a
California record company that signed Celine Dion among other notables. Barry and I are aware he’s ten minutes late to his curtain call. Barry tells him, “Did you know she’s a rabbi?” He replies, “And, I’m a Yid.”At the piano, he asks like a lover wanting to please, looking directly at me, “What do you want to hear?” “Just be yourself.”He says it like musing a question, “Something original………”He pushes the mike away and Smetena’s The Maldau and derivatives HaTikvah and the Schindlers’ List Theme and then keys are struck in rapid patterns of impossible riffs, with a building heat and speed, into the passion of a full blown hitbodedut, the prayer of your life when alone with a listening God. Inside The Entertainer is all the pain of the world. Hitbodedut is a reflexive verb, and it is as though The Entertainer is alone in the woods and it matters not whether these notes will ever fall on human ears. Our bodies recall us to time as the piano falls silent and a sit ensues. The Entertainer finishes his Mojito. Before he can ask, “What do you want to hear?” I slip in close en route to our cabin, pass him my card, and say, “I sense we’ll need a minyan tomorrow for Shabbos. Hope you come.”
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The Passover Kiddush, a prayer for the holiday that is chanted over dark red grape wine or grape juice symbolizing the vitality of life reads, zman heyruteynu mikrah kodesh, “times we are free holiness happens.” Several things holy happened during free-time on our trip to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands.