Read The Beautiful Possible for Free Online Page A

of Talmud, wondering where oddball Walter had vanished. He hears Rosalie’s voice whispering in his good ear, Opportunities, Rabbi Kerem. You have to start behaving like a holy man.
    After class, Sol finds Walter in the hallway. “Has anyone claimed you yet?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Everyone needs a study partner. A chavrusa. You’d be good for me.”
    “I’m only visiting here.”
    “I want to learn with you,” says Sol. “The others are ambitious and smart but you have the gall of someone who doesn’t care.” He thinks of what Rosalie said in the park. “Maybe you can teach me something.”
    “Your school is a temporary shelter for me,” says Walter. “I am not one of you.”
    “That’s exactly why I’m asking,” says Sol.
    Rosalie spreads a blanket over a snow-laced boulder in Central Park. She has brought plates from her mother’s house and places a pastrami sandwich on each one.
    “Leave it to you to propose a winter picnic,” says Sol.
    “It’s not officially winter and a sandwich is not quite a picnic. Did you bring the wine?”
    “It’s not the Sabbath,” says Sol. “I prefer to save my blessings.”
    “You are the master of saving everything for another time. Picnics for spring, wine for the Sabbath, sex for marriage.” Rosalie sighs. “Does it ever stop?”
    Sol wraps his arms around her. “Be patient with me.”
    She rests her head on his shoulder and spies a man and woman kissing on a nearby bench. The man’s hand reaches inside the woman’s skirt.
    “I just wish,” says Rosalie.
    “Wish what?”
    “Oh, don’t pretend to be naïve. The other students don’t follow these rules. It’s the Seminary, Sol. The Conservative movement, not some crazy Orthodox yeshiva where men and women are forbidden to touch before marriage—”
    “I’m not like other men.”
    “Clearly.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you think this is easy for me? I touch myself at night and think of you.”
    “Really?”
    “I’m counting the days.”
    “Look at those two. We could be enjoying ourselves right now. No leap of time, no waiting. We decide the course of our lives, free of prescriptives.”
    “But—”
    “The law doesn’t have to be a fence,” says Rosalie. “It wasn’t for my father.”
    “I’m not like your father.”
    Be free of him; be devoted to him. Rosalie closes her eyes. Give yourself over to your rabbi, see where it goes, she thinks. Rosalie Wachs soon to be Rosalie Kerem. Kerem means vineyard. Rosalie Vineyard. Where grapes are saturated with light and grow into their fullness in time. Rosalie rests her hand in Sol’s palm.
    “We have this,” he says. “What is suggested is more arousing than its fulfillment.”
    “Sometimes I feel it’s all too challenging and lofty and—”
    “And?”
    Rosalie closes her eyes. The woman on the bench knows the man she kisses; she studies him through his touch. Necessary information. But Rosalie knows so little about Sol; he is filled with words that Rosalie cannot translate. And yet he is her bashert; she knows this . Intended, perfect, inevitable as rain.
    She’elah: What can the body teach the mind?
    Teshuvah : The body delivers its truth without words.
    Sol and Walter sit side by side at a table in the beit midrash, a tower of books stacked before them. Walter reaches into his pocket, pulls out a bag of yellow spice and inhales.
    “Want some?”
    “Don’t get your powder on the books! If they get ruined, we’ll have to bury them.”
    Walter laughs. “These books were written under the influence of all kinds of spices, Sol. Just imagine your beloved ancient rabbis picking at the roots of plants and sniffing with abandon. They craved all kinds of knowledge, just like you do.”
    Sol opens tractate Berakhot and scans the pages. He begins to sway.
    “Oh, look,” he says, his voice falling into the cadence of Talmudic singsong. “Rabbi Meir says that to love God with all of your soul means that you