Free What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander Page A

trust.”
    Again they conferred, and finally they consented, and the young rabbi said, “We will judge honestly, or let us be written out of the Book of Life.”
    “Then I need raise only one simple point,” Rena said, “and the case will be resolved.”
    The rabbis nodded, allowing it.
    “If you three pious men will grant me that you are kosher, then you will also grant that the girl is mine.”
    “One,” Kiggel said, “does not follow the other.”
    “But it does,” she said. “You’re going to side against me because my contract with Yehudit, you will say, is symbolic. Because my contract with Yehudit can’t be considered to be a contract at all.”
    “I don’t want to say one way or the other,” Kiggel said, “but there are many facts that lead a logical person this way.”
    “So, I ask you, once again, are the three of you kosher? Have you knowingly broken the rules of what is fit to eat?”
    “We have not knowingly done so,” the young rabbi said.
    “Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah,” Rena said. “Do the three of you observe the Jewish holidays? Are you faithful in carrying out Jewish law?”
    Once again the young rabbi answered, saying, “It is safe to assume.”
    “Then tell me,” Rena said, “if you are willing to state that my deed on this land is sound, and ignore the Arab claims against it, if you are willing to accept biblical contracts as eternally valid, though we have no proof beyond faith that they ever were, I ask you, very simply, every year, on Passover, when you sell your hametz to a Gentile so as not to break the edict of having any trace of it under your roof, when everyone in your congregations comes to you and says, ‘Rabbi, for this week when it’s prohibited for a Jew to have even one crumb of bread in his house, sell all that is forbidden to a Gentile so that we may inhabit our homes,’ is that contract real?”
    “This is the tradition,” the young rabbi said. “And that contract is as legal as any other.”
    “And in all your years, have you ever heard of a single Gentile anywhere in the world stepping into a Jewish home toopen a cabinet and take what is rightfully his? Is there known to you such a case?”
    The rabbis looked at one another, and their answer was no.
    “So tell me, if the selling of the hametz is based on a contract that’s never once been exercised in all the years of your lives in all the world over, can you still say that it is a valid contract in your eyes? Or do you admit that, really, each one of us—each one of you!—is in possession of hametz every Passover, and that no Jew really observes the holiday as commanded?”
    “God forbid!” the rabbis said, all three.
    Then the old rabbi said, “You find yourself on the edge of blasphemy once again. But if there is a point to be made, then, yes, that contract is valid, exercised or no.”
    “If that contract is valid, if you three can still call yourselves kosher, then you have to admit, equally valid is mine. Just because it’s assumed that one party will never exercise her rights doesn’t mean the rights are not hers.”
    And here the rabbis whispered, and all three took out their pens and began passing one another notes, looking terribly concerned. For a judge can know how his heart would decide, but his obligation is always to the law. And they had sworn, these three. Sworn on their lives. A terrible promise to make.
    “And tell me this,” Rena said. “When a little bar mitzvah boy says to a pretty girl as a joke, ‘You are my wife,’ and he gives her a bracelet as a token—”
    “A divorce is arranged,” the young rabbi said. “We have done it before. Yes, if it is uttered and the gift received, they are married, the same as any two people in the world.”
    “Even if neither really meant it?” Rena said. “Even if an innocent joke between two young adults at play?”
    “Even then,” said Rabbi Kiggel.
    “That is all I’m saying,” Rena said. “That a contractdoesn’t