I continued to shake my head like a pendulum back and forth as Assi poured out a string of objections mostly pertaining to the reasons for the prohibitions against the mutilation of the body, dead or alive, from tattoos to autopsies to cremation—sacred vessel, God’s image, on loan from God, the whole predictable banal drill. When finally it sank in that I was battening down the hatches and not budging, he drew out his last and best card. “Very soon now, very quickly in our time, the holy Rebbe Himself, our Master, our Teacher, our Rabbi, will rise up from concealment in His true form as the Messiah the King to rescue the living and to raise the dead. If you go ahead with this atrocity, your holy mother, peace be upon her, will have no body to resurrect. On that great day she will be forced to come back to life in a different body and no one will recognize her and no one will greet her.” “That’s okay, Assi,” I said, for some reason oddly serene maybe in reaction to his foaming agitation, “Ma never liked her own body very much anyhow. Next time around, I think she’d prefer thin.” “Vantz!” the rabbi spat out. He turned furiously, sparing himself the indignity of a total public meltdown, and darted out of the room. Frankly, I was stunned that Assi knew some Yiddish, even if it was limited to a few common curse words. He was dark skinned, I had taken him for an Oriental Jew stemming from the Levant or North Africa, Sephardi, though of course some Yiddish must have been part of his purebred Ashkenazi Chabad curriculum. And I wasn’t sure if by vantz, which translates as bedbug and is not exactly meant as a compliment, he was referring to me or with his pidgin Yiddish to the swarm of insects hovering over my mother’s double in that bed, like the gray cloud over the Israelites in the wilderness. Tomorrow, it would be replaced by the pillar of fire. Now I was even more unshakable.

It was not the last I would see of the rabbi, of that I was sure the second he stomped out in such a rage. I needed to remain exceedingly vigilant and alert. And just as I had predicted, he was back within the hour, this time accompanied by four of his toughest Hasidim, elite ex-paratroopers by the looks of them, lugging a heavy-duty stretcher. It was obvious that they intended to seize the body by force, to kidnap it in order to save it from the abomination of being consigned to the cremation pit. From the rabbi’s perspective, there are times when it is permissible, in the name of heaven, to commit even an act explicitly forbidden in the written law, such as kidnapping, an act, moreover, for which the death penalty is mandated (though some might argue that this same severity does not apply if the kidnapping involves a corpse, especially one slated for the fires). It was entirely correct in this emergency, according to the rabbi, during the small window of opportunity still open to them, to use any means necessary to rescue the dead from an impending sacrilege, including brute force and violence. Clearly my mother had been in a deluded state when she had made her final request. Assi was acting in her interest, for the sake of her salvation in the world to come.