Reb Moishe and the Beanstalks

Summer, 1995

It wasn’t Catcher in the Rye, or The Foundation Trilogy, or even Henry Miller that caught Moishe’s attention. Unusual reading for a thirteen-year-old, but you didn’t have to be a genius or even supremely precocious to enjoy J. D. Salinger, particularly at this expensive camp filled with the offspring of doctors and lawyers. And certainly reading alone under a birch tree while most of her peers snuck off to dark corners to make out, or rushed to the lake for a quick swim, or just huddled together joking and giggling, boys with boys, girls with girls, waiting for the night, waiting for the changes that would transform them into adults – that wasn’t so strange either. There were always teenagers, always adults for that matter, who preferred to be alone. But when he spotted her lugging around a thick volume called Variety of Religious Experience, and then saw her reading it under a tree, her lips moving slowly, he thought: I should get to know this girl.

Until then, he’d spent his mornings sleeping late. He could sleep through anything, even Jewish tweens and teens howling like feral cats, playing and fighting with such equal fervor that Moishe could barely tell the difference. The rest of the day and into the evening, he stood on the front porch of his cabin strumming his guitar, writing new melodies, performing old songs. Most evenings, an audience of about twenty gathered: Tsipi and her clique of popular older campers, and a few curious counselors. It was Tsipi’s mother, the president of the camp’s board of directors and a longtime fan, who’d gotten him...