The Talmudist

Writer’s note: For those who have been reading this blog from its inception, some of the next parts of this serial might bear an uncanny resembelance to a previously removed story.  No, your eyes are not deceiving you.

Yonah walked back to his house, sure of himself for the first time in…in as long as he could really remember.  He wanted this for so long, but now felt confident in himself – he was sure that he was making the ‘right’ choice.  He dialed up a rebbi from one of the yeshivas that he had spent a large chunk of his seminal yeshiva days at.

“Rebbi, uh, this is Yonah Gishering…”, Yonah said.

It had been years since Yonah had last spoken with Rabbi Locobovitz, and a sense of embarrassment and intimidation started to befall him.

“Yonah – it’s so nice to hear your voice, tell me, how’s everything?  You’re married now, right?” Locobovitz asked.

Yonah visibly blushed at that question.  He had never informed Locobovitz about his marriage to Lemkele.  When he left the Yeshiva of Appleton, he pretty consciously lost touch with many of the relationships that he had forged there, rebbeim included.

It all went back to Yonah’s mother.  She had wanted him to go to a top-notch yeshiva straight out of high school and tried everything she could do to square Yonah’s circle.  She had always tried to hide such Sodomite tendencies behind a veneer of religious righteousness, quite the toxic mix.

So Yonah, at least in the beginning, went along with the ride that his mother had set out for him.  ”Like a fish in water,” she said that he would find himself feeling like in the elite Yeshiva of Ivoryville.

Not so much.

The very first thing that had hit Yonah upon his arrival in Ivoryville was the contrast between the physical beauty of the yeshiva and its slum-like surroundings.  He walked into his dorm room, and his physical senses were pleased with the aesthetic of the setup; there was a lot of space in there, as the beds (with built in cubby-spaces underneath them!) were relegated to the outer perimeter of the room.  It wasn’t cramped – it was quite a breath of fresh air compared to the way things had been in his old high school dorm.  Yonah was told that the yeshiva building was relatively new (which, to some degree, explained its beauty), the old premises had gone up in flames a decade before.

There was an irony there that Yonah picked up on.  This less modern (in the theological sense) yeshiva was far more physically attractive and contemporary-looking than his old high-school haunt.  This made Yonah feel envious.  Envious because he knew that he would not last long in Ivoryville, and he knew that when he would leave he would always feel jealous that such a place actually existed, a school that could have its spiritual cake and physically ingest it too.

Ivoryville’s student body was made up of the very serious, driven, and religious sort.  

Next time: Ivoryville, continued.