Timebends by Arthur Miller

individually, softly, all kinds of different melodies, and then I heard muffled thumps, and then more, deeper thumps and the voices rising louder, some of them seeming to be calling out above an undertone of baritone worrisomeness, and then a sudden tenorflight taking air like a pigeon and the thumping getting faster. My rising fear separated two fingers over one eye, and I peeked through the fuzz of eyelashes and saw the most astonishing thing—about fifteen old men, bent over and covered completely by their prayer shawls, all of them in white socks,
dancing!
I gasped in fright. One of them must be Great-grandfather, and I was seeing the forbidden. But exactly what was the forbidden part? That they had their shoes off? Or maybe that they were so undignified! Or maybe that in some hidden and mysterious way they were being happy even though they were old. For I had never heard a music like this, so wild and crazy, and each man dancing without any relation to another but only toward the outer darkness that enveloped the spaces beyond family and men, the spaces you might say listened to prayers.
    Now the heads began to uncover and I quickly hid my eyes, a faker who would have to sit there and wait for Great-grandfather to return and permit me to see again. Especially wounding, this particular fraudulence, when I had undoubtedly sensed even so early—as the vividness of memory about him attests—that he loved me much, and that in some osmotic way it was he I would strive to imitate as a writer though he died before I even started to go to school.
    The man’s reputation for telling stories was very big, and while I understood no Yiddish I would sit beside my mother after dinner, with a dozen or more family listening to him there at the end of the table going on and on through his great beard, pausing only to spit or drag on a cigarette, no doubt enjoying the center of the stage he had so securely won, and when I asked my mother to interpret something he had said, she would wave down at me and yell, “Shhh,” so I was left to concentrate on the pure spell he wrought and the music of his expressive voice. I can only recall a fragment of one story that my mother did take the time to translate for me as the old man spoke. A man in the old country was taking a shortcut home one night through a cemetery when out from behind a gravestone stepped a … “Wait, wait!” she said, breaking off to hear what my great-grandfather had to say next, her eyes as wide as a child’s, her lips open. One minute passed as the old man spoke, two minutes. Unable to wait anymore, I pulled her sleeve for the translation. “Shhh!!” she shot down at me. It was hopeless, and I could only stare down the length of the table at that spellbinder and those grownups he held so helpless in the palm of his hand.
    Through the decades I have watched these dancing men cross my memory, each time resolving to find out what their ceremony was all about and forgetting to follow through, until recently, in writing this, I finally had to decide whether it was real at all or a dream. A rabbi friend, hearing the scene described, laughingly apologized, explaining that he was a Reform rabbi and that this sounded like a real old-time Orthodox service. But what time of the year was it? he asked. I searched for clues in the clothes I was wearing but could not recall. Then I remembered the open door to the fire escape through which the tobacco juice had streamed, which meant that it had to have been either spring or fall, because in summer we’d have been away in Far Rockaway. My friend now decided it had been fall and the occasion Simchat Torah, one of the three great festivals—the last day of Succoth, “The Rejoicing in the Law,” that is, in the Lord’s gift of the Torah to the people. On Succoth the congregation dances with joy, and indeed it is the only occasion when all the Torah scrolls are removed from the Ark