The Scattering of Israel

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

In the months before the ward’s planned trip to the temple in Kyiv, Menachem Menasche started to follow a story online. He was always doing things like that—to be honest, it drove Zalman the Learned a little crazy. Vanity, vanity, the preacher says, all is vanity. And why did he say that? Because he saw our day, Zalman argued, and all the tiny things that would slip out of cell phone screens to trouble our minds.

Never mind that, Menachem countered. This story was important, because it involved a disease that people had contracted by eating bats. According to the Torah, bats are trayf, so the story was—in a way—religious. It could remind the members of the Chelm ward that there was value to keeping the Word of Wisdom and otherwise eating kosher. Even if God wasn’t so strict about certain points in this last dispensation—every parent gives up on enforcing the rules by the time the youngest children are coming of age—it would still never be a good idea to eat bats or pangolins or pigs. This obvious moral was the proof that one could still find little nuggets of wisdom on the internet.

But when have the children of this world ever listened to sense? They ate bats, and they got sick. Fortunately, most of them survived. Ever since God put the breath of life into Adam, people have been quite stubborn about holding onto that original gift. Unfortunately, they also tend to leave it lying out in public. Breath quickly became one of several key suspects (along with restroom doors and polluted handshakes) for how the disease spread.

Menachem kept the ward updated as the virus came closer. It hit South Korea. Japan. It hit the United States, and he got worried: that country was not capable of keeping anything to itself. When the first cases were confirmed in France, he knew there wasn’t much time left. France had taken Frederic Chopin and Marie Curie from Poland—not to mention Dobra Peretz’s cousin Ronia—and it would be just like them to send a virus back in return. He told his fellow ward members that any day now, they should expect the disease to come knocking.

Sara Levy laughed the warning off. The virus wasn’t Jesus. It had better ring the bell as well as stand at the door knocking if it wanted to be let in. Zalman also remained skeptical about this whole viral story. He agreed that eating bats was unwise but thought a backwater like Chelm might be safe from whatever disease happened to be fashionable in Paris.

At the beginning of March, however, doctors in Poland confirmed medically that the country was, in fact, part of the larger world. By then, who knew how many people in Chelm had secretly become agents of infection? Ward members who had spent the first part of the year studiously ignoring Menachem suddenly wanted to know what they should stock up on in case society collapsed. Would they need an emergency supply of board games? Or to quadruple their collections of pajama bottoms?

Not necessarily, Menachem reported. After some quick research, he was able to inform them that the market had settled on toilet paper as the preferred pandemic craze. He predicted that skyrocketing demand for toilet seat covers, toilet plungers, and toiletries in general would soon follow. Isaac Peretz responded to this news by rushing to install a bidet. Several other ward members made a feverish run on various bathroom-related companies’ stock.

In the midst of this panic, Oskar the Miser was calm as a summer’s day. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear, the scripture says—and for once, a verse was worth the thin paper it was printed on! He had already stockpiled bathroom supplies eight years earlier when a small drugstore went out of business. At his current rate of use (which involved a pair of scissors for precise portioning), he’d have toilet paper enough to last for decades. And toothpaste? If you watered it down enough, a single tube could outlast a measly pandemic. He didn’t need any external vindication or praise, of course, for his exceptional foresight. He was, in fact, rather looking forward to not having to listen to other people at all. But still, it didn’t hurt to know he was far ahead of the curve. If more people took advantage of life’s little opportunities, he thought, no misfortune would be a crisis. Just another opportunity to eliminate waste.

Because not everyone was so prepared (temporally or temperamentally) for an intermission in the world as they’d known it, Fruma Selig and President Gronam set to work measuring the ward’s needs. Surely, everyone would have some. Lazar the Blind Beggar would probably have to break his tradition of meeting the bishop to collect the first fast offering. Henya would need to be protected from visits. Even Oskar might require some help if he got sick, Fruma thought. Hard as it may be for him to grasp, there was more to life than keeping a closet full of floss.

Yossel the Fisherman and Mirele Schwartz also had their organizations move into action. Gimpel and Dudel went from door to door to collect offerings from a special fast. Golda and Chava took responsibility for health communication, making a video message for ward members about the importance of not touching your face. Theirs, Mirele thought, was truly a chosen generation. 

Still, some people somewhere must have kept touching their faces, because a few days later, everything shut down.

It wasn’t so bad at first. For example, doing school from home allowed Golda an opportunity for some career exploration. While helping her younger sister, Breyndl, manage her online homework, she was able to rule out careers in technical support, elementary education, and prison administration. By keeping an eye on the news, Golda was also able to rule out nursing, retail, and basically anything that involved interaction with the general public. She was learning a great deal about the world and herself.

At the Peretz home, Dinah took advantage of the close quarters to drive her brothers crazy. After all, God expected people to be nice once they were old enough to get baptized and she only had another two years.

But as the mandated lockdown dragged on, such silver linings lost their luster. Tzipa watched video after video of mimes, desperately studying their craft, as she tried to keep up with the demands of running a bakery mostly via gestures through her shop’s front window. Mirele Schwartz wiped down groceries—jars, cans, loaves of fresh bread—to keep her family safe. As usual, she was sure that she wasn’t doing enough. This time, however, trustworthy experts seemed to agree. The news felt like a long list of ways you could accidentally make somebody die. Having her fears taken so seriously was far less pleasant in practice than she’d always expected.

Sundays were especially bad for some people. Israel Lewensztajn missed the meetinghouse; he never slept as well at home. Zelda Gottstein disliked the stale quiet of her living room. It might’ve been more bearable, she thought, if there were a few cranky babies passing through. No such luck: people could bless the sacrament at home, give little talks at home, study the scriptures at home, but nothing at home could replace a meetinghouse foyer.

Everyone felt the loss in their own way. The truth is that all kinds of people need a little time in a foyer. Even when it’s not under mandated lock and key, the modern world is sorely lacking in shared but barely-governed spaces. People need chances to run into each other by accident, especially when they would never do it on purpose. Take that one small inconvenience away and they go a little crazy. Even by the high standards set in Chelm.

The longer Aaron Cohen stayed at home, the more paranoid he got. Not about the virus. He didn’t really believe all that propaganda about how sickness comes from germs. No. As anyone who reads the scriptures knows, the leading cause of disease is wickedness. (Direct trials from God take a distant second, unless the disease in question is a skin condition like boils or leprosy.) The best medicine, therefore, is repentance. And maybe a nice offering to God to go with it. Preferably something shiny. Returning the ark of the covenant with an offering of little golden mice, for instance, or setting up a bronze serpent. Maybe this time a bronze bat? Aaron wasn’t an expert on the details, but the big ideas were all laid out somewhere between Numbers and Judges if a person only had eyes to see.

But did the doctors today read the scriptures? No. They were too busy stuffing their heads with all the body parts and smut in their anatomy textbooks. In their arrogance, they genuinely believed they could stop a plague by sending people home. But idle hands do the devil’s work. So the consequence—the totally predictable consequence—of all the lockdown measures was that people grew sicker. You could see it in the case counts as they rose and rose and rose. Aaron Cohen could see the daily proof and had to bear the constant agony of having a solution the experts weren’t smart enough to look for. If only he could make them understand! “Of course, no one ever listens to me,” he complained bitterly to Feige. “Not even my wife!”

Feige was in fact hearing her husband’s rants. But because she had grown as a person, she decided not to respond in any verbal sort of way. They were happier like that. It was better for everyone if they didn’t argue over the fine and potentially hurtful distinctions between hearing and listening. Years ago, she’d learned that no one really wants to be told which one you’re willing to do. In her own way, though, she did think about the words that kept dribbling out of Aaron’s mouth. That was something. For instance, his comment about idle hands and the devil helped motivate her to get out her lace work. While Aaron railed against the entire medical profession, Feige fended off Satan by knitting face masks.

She wasn’t the only one thriving amidst the adversity. Heshel was having an excellent pandemic. He’d often found himself remote from work in one way or another, and now he had plenty of company. Meanwhile, Clever Gretele was enjoying the administration of their temporary home branch. She kept the talk assignments short and sweet. In an echo of her favorite calling, she assigned herself to focus on the Young Women. And, since there was no one around to stop them, she asked Heshel to serve as her assistant. During midweek activities with Chava, the three of them were able to build up a thriving business inventing things like digital receipts for physical cookies, which they were able to sell quite profitably online to speculators and bored futurists.

Across the ward, life’s ordinary trials also continued. Hirsh’s roof still leaked. Out on the lake for Yossel, fish refused to bite. Bananas that were green in the evening still became perfectly ripe at 3 am yet mushy by morning. People committed sins in most of the same old ways plus some mildly inventive new ones. Beynish’s weight continued to fluctuate.

During the pandemic, however, many routine problems got worse in a subtle, soul-sapping sort of way. With a glut of toilet paper came a corresponding rise in toilet clogs. Routers groaned under the weight of people’s need for connection. Before long, they seemed to have unionized and would randomly go on strike. Pet dogs got indigestion from licking too many scraps off the floor; pet cats got depression from being cooped up with the humans always at home and dropping those crumbs. People said stupid things by text message, then never got a chance to be less offensive in person. Selfishness and despair prowled for victims and had quite a feast. 

Even outside of Chelm, of course, the human mind has a limited capacity. Add a few extra troubles and the nerves strain like an overstuffed plastic grocery bag preparing to rip open at the least convenient time. Bishop Levy tried and failed to keep up with the few ups and many downs in people’s lives. He could feel them scattering not only to their own homes, but into neglected corners of their own hearts. He wanted to reach out to his people, to do something to keep the Lord’s little flock together, but in the early days of the pandemic, most of his energy went to canceling old plans instead of coming up with new ones.

He closed down the meetinghouse. He let everyone know that he didn’t know when they’d next have any meetings. One grey morning, he called the charter bus company to postpone their trip to Kyiv and its temple until such a time as the world got better. “Don’t worry,” he told himself and the other ward members. “The moment this pandemic lets up, we’ll reschedule. Right now, the spirits of the dead are probably busy ministering to people anyway. Soon enough, they’ll have more time on their hands for ordinances and we’ll make it to Ukraine.”

In the meantime, to keep up ordinances for the living, Bishop Levy contacted each priesthood holder in the ward to tell them they could bless the sacrament at home. After checking the Doctrine and Covenants, he said it didn’t matter who passed it—so long as it was done with an eye single to God’s glory. In a pinch, he admitted, an eye flitting between God’s glory and the carpet would also do.

Houses without a priest or an elder presented a problem. On a call, Bishop Levy asked the stake president if some members could lay out bread to be blessed through a window, but apparently Church leaders were opposed to performing ordinances through screens. Maybe it struck them as too Catholic. Instead, Bishop Levy suggested that members who couldn’t get the sacrament break a little bread and take a moment for the memory of how, in the Bible, Jesus and his friends really liked to eat. Over the centuries, there would surely be times when memory was all anyone had. It wasn’t so bad to get a little practice now quietly keeping God’s stories alive.

Still, one theological problem troubled him. The scriptures say that wherever two or three gather in his name, Jesus is there with them. Suddenly, of course, that had become a higher bar. It seemed like such a tragedy to leave ward members who lived on their own without the Master—for who knew how long—just because of immune conditions.

Bishop Levy thought and thought, until at last, a solution came to him. To those who were alone, he recommended setting out a cup for Elijah. If his spirit came, that would turn one into two, and then Jesus would turn two into three—and three . . . well, three was company! It was pure inspiration. His clearest revelation. And proof, above all, that even in the darkest, the most isolating of times, if you’d only look for it with a little prayer and a desperate degree of faith . . . there is always some way of gaming the system.

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

Artwork by David Habben.

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Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction