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 the gig. They were paying him to hang out – mingle with the campers, mentor the staff – but they’d given him nothing to do. No camp-wide performances, no classes, no lectures. Moishe understood. The camp director was a lifelong Conservative Jew, into Israeli politics, history, the satisfying logic of Jewish law, and remembering the Holocaust. Moishe’s mystical music, his Jewish reincarnation workshops, his lectures on Jewish paganism, on Torah and Tantra, his God-intoxicated calisthenics, his beard, his accent, his Yiddish pronunciations – these all struck this otherwise kind and competent fellow as not only nonsensical, but dangerous and subversive. And Moishe couldn’t disagree; they were all those things, that was the point. Moishe flaunted the subversive nature of his teachings, yet he couldn’t deny that much of it was nonsense....
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