The Geniza

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

God works in mysterious ways. People? Not so much. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man,” the scripture says. God laughs when his wandering children are ignorant enough to think themselves original. 

For Bishop Levy, issuing a calling might involve a little spark of divine mystery, but mostly regular human plodding. But what could he do? Some callings come by revelation, others by desperation. If he studied a calling out in his mind and could only really see one solution, the best he could do afterward is pray God would stop him if there was a disaster ahead.

He clung to this idea despite the plain knowledge he had gleaned through a study of the scripture: God did not have a strong track record of stopping people just because there might be a disaster. 

But some disasters were not so bad! Bishop Levy had called Heshel as executive secretary, for example, despite Heshel’s total lack of organizational skills, because Heshel happened to attend church regularly, hold the priesthood, and have a pleasant enough personality to work with others bloodlessly. More significantly, Heshel happened to be available at the time the need arose. Bishop Levy had learned to place a particular trust in God’s timing, because there frankly didn’t seem to be many other options. 

He had also prayed about the calling, yes, but shy of shuffling the entire ward, what was he to do if the good Lord said no? The headache of the very possibility loomed large in Bishop Levy’s thoughts as he went on his knees: his prayer for confirmation was also, truth be told, a plea for mercy. And didn’t the scriptures say God wanted mercy more than sacrifice? What greater witness could he have than from God? And so it was that Bishop Levy got an executive secretary with the guile of a Nathaniel, the punctuality of a Jonah, and the record-keeping abilities of an Omni.

Not all callings went like that. Bishop Levy had considered all the adult, active women in the ward to serve as Relief Society president and felt strongly that the right leader for the time was Fruma Selig. Leah Kantor’s name had popped immediately into his mind when they needed a ward chorister. Whether that was because of the whisperings of the Spirit or some preconceived notions of his own, he couldn’t say, but Kantor the chorister certainly sounded right. And, aside from some difficult cleaning after a choir practice involving livestock, that calling had turned out just fine. 

One way or another, when faced with a calling that needed filling, ward leaders and Bishop Levy had always been able to find a person who was filled, as the scriptures say, with the breath of life. After all, if that was all the qualification it took to name every living creature and tend the garden of Eden, it was certainly good enough for the Chelm ward. And yet . . . in all that work of matching jobs to bodies and bodies to jobs, Bishop Levy had not once pondered how to fill a calling and had the name of Oskar Wiener come to mind. 

Well? Some callings come by revelation, others by elimination. One week, Bishop Levy made up a very long list of every possible responsibility in the ward and began crossing out the ones it simply wouldn’t do to have Oskar the Miser fill. 

The Bishop worked rapidly at first. Any calling involving compassionate service was obviously out. Brother Wiener seemed almost equally unsuited for any callings reserved for women, which went next. Teaching callings were out, since Oskar the Miser had so many objections to some gospel basics, like love and mercy, which every class covered. Financial clerk was out if the ward was going to keep functioning, as well as anything that involved spending a budget. 

Bishop Levy briefly considered the possibility of calling Oskar the Miser to coordinate meetinghouse cleaning. After all, he’d seen Oskar bending to pick up discarded items at church and on the street when he thought they might have any value. But then Bishop Levy remembered  that Oskar considered cleaning products frivolous. He crossed the calling off his list. Next, Bishop Levy studied out in his mind the counterintuitive possibility of calling Oskar as a counselor in the bishopric, on the logic that you should keep your friends close and Oskar the Miser closer, but as soon as he remembered that counselors needed to give interviews to human beings, he lost heart. And so it went, crossing out calling after calling, until all that remained was ward librarian. 

That Oskar the Miser refused to throw anything away was hardly an objection. Keeping every scrap of paper with God’s name inscribed upon it had a long and venerable tradition. And his insistence on locking doors the moment he stepped away was practically a qualification. Bishop Levy extended the call and, to his great relief, Oskar the Miser accepted—with a minimum (though no less) of his usual grumbling about the Bishop’s general sins of mismanagement. 

There were raised eyebrows among ward members, to be sure, when Oskar the Miser issued library cards. And it was something of a shock the first time he revoked one for wasteful behavior. There were not a few rolled eyes about the large metal canister the Miser used to collect late fees. And teachers struggled to write after he broke all the chalk into tiny pieces, which he doled out as reluctantly as a nursery-aged child who has solved the dilemma of weekly abandonment by clinging to a favorite toy. 

And yet, Oskar the Miser’s innovations were not without their positive effects. Late fees did motivate people to turn things back in rather than carrying them home, and the hall near the library filled with laughter each Sunday as ward members mingled there in the long inspection line. It wasn’t the only incidental effect of his service: Oskar was so strict about the numbers of copies he would make that teachers began calling their students in advance to see who planned to attend. Within a few months, attendance had increased. For the ward’s youth, a phone call during the week showed that their teachers truly cared about them. For teachers, the bits of life they heard while making phone calls increased their ability to personalize lessons. If that also meant the ward saved a few zlotys on paper, what was the harm? 

The new librarian also did wonders for everyone’s scriptural literacy. The very week he was sustained, Oskar the Miser had stripped the binding off each Bible and Book of Mormon and bound the individual books within each volume separately to reduce the cost of loss should a person fail to return their borrowed goods. Soon, even primary children knew the difference between Ecclesiastes and Lamentations, between Habakkuk and Haggai. And parents always knew it was time to have a coming-of-age talk with a child when they saw her check out the Song of Solomon. 

All told, the miser was the most marvelous librarian the ward had ever seen. It just went to show, Bishop Levy reasoned, that there was a season for every personality, and a time for every tic under heaven. 

“Geniza” defined: You wouldn’t want to just throw something with God’s name on it into the garbage, would you? A geniza is a place to stash things that might be holy but are also past their prime (sort of like a meetinghouse library). Some genizas have remained in continuous use for hundreds of years (not unlike the average junk drawer).

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Artwork by David Habben.

Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction

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