The Tenth Word

by Franz Rosenzweig, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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At a quarter past seven on a Tuesday in January there were nine of them in the prayer room, and Arkadi Zilberman went round with his finger.

He did not say one, two, three. He pointed at each man and said a word, and moved on to the next. Ludwig Seligmann had been coming for ten weeks. In the second week he had worked out that the words made a sentence, and in the third that the sentence had ten words, because on the mornings when they began, Arkadi's finger came to rest on the tenth man exactly as the sentence closed. On the other mornings it stopped one short. The sentence went on in the air without anybody to land on.

This morning it stopped on Ludwig. Ludwig was the ninth.

"Ad," said Arkadi, and lowered his hand.

Nobody spoke. Boris Lerner, who was a dentist and came in his white trainers, looked at his phone. The two Kogan brothers, who had arrived from Dnipro in 1996 and still sat as they must have sat on the train, shoulder against shoulder, looked at the door. Old Mr. Rabinovich unwrapped a cough sweet. The radiator under the window knocked twice, as it did every morning at this time, when the caretaker downstairs turned the heating up for the kindergarten.

Ludwig knew the arithmetic. He had known it before he walked in. On weekday mornings in winter this room drew, on average, nine point four men; he had kept the tally in the back of his diary since the first week of November, without meaning anything by it, the way some men keep their petrol receipts. Nine point four meant that on rather more than half of all mornings there would be no Kaddish. It meant that his father, who had died at the end of October at the age of eighty-six, would go unmentioned in this room on about three days out of five.

Except that the Kaddish does not mention him. Ludwig had learned that too.

At twenty-five past, Arkadi looked at the clock and then at Ludwig, and lifted his shoulders. They prayed without the ten. The parts that need ten were left out, the way a bus leaves out a stop that has been closed for roadworks: it goes straight past, and nobody on board remarks on it. At ten to eight Ludwig put his coat on, walked to the tram, and was at his desk by twenty-five past eight.

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He worked for a reinsurer. The company did not insure people. It insured the companies that insured people, against the possibility that too many of their people would do the thing they had been insured against all at once. Ludwig's part of it was mortality. He had been doing it for thirty-one years. For thirty-one years he had spent his days on death, and he had never once been to a funeral that was not a colleague's.

That morning he had the new period life table open on one screen, the federal statistical office's, and his own working file on the other. He was meant to be checking the smoothing at the high ages, where the data thin out and the curves begin to misbehave. Instead he scrolled down the male column until he came to eighty-six.

0.118434.

Of a hundred thousand German men alive on their eighty-sixth birthday, a little under twelve thousand would not see their eighty-seventh. His father had been one of them. His father had made no difference to the figure. The figure would have been 0.118434 if Heinz Seligmann had lived to a hundred, and it would have been 0.118434 if he had died at forty. Ludwig had explained this to graduate trainees perhaps two hundred times. It was the first thing they had to understand, and the hardest. The table is not about anybody. It is about everybody, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole of the trade.

He printed the page. He took a pencil from the jar and wrote in the margin, next to the row for eighty-six, H. S., very small.

Jasmin Ortlepp put her head round the partition to ask whether he had the Q3 claims extract. He said yes, and sent it to her. When she had gone he took the eraser on the end of the pencil and rubbed the initials out, and rubbed so hard that the paper pilled, and the 0.118434 beside it went grey at one edge.

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His father had not been a religious man. He had been a heating engineer. He was born in Haifa in 1939, to parents who had left Kassel in 1936, and in 1964 he had come to Germany for a job with a boiler manufacturer and stayed for sixty-one years, for reasons he never gave in Ludwig's hearing. He did not keep a kosher kitchen or fast on Yom Kippur. He took his son to a synagogue exactly once, in 1979, to a bar mitzvah of somebody's grandson, where both of them stood at the back. He spoke Hebrew on the telephone to a cousin in Netanya twice a year and German at all other times.

In the drawer of the hall table, under the guarantee for the dishwasher, Ludwig had found an envelope with his own name on it in his father's draughtsman's capitals. Inside was a single sheet from a squared notepad.

SAG KADDISCH. ELF MONATE. PAPA.

Say Kaddish. Eleven months. Papa.

Nothing else: no reason, no instructions, no address of a synagogue, no hint of what the thing was or how it was done. An engineer's note, which assumed the person reading it would find out the rest. Ludwig had stood in the hall in his coat, holding the squared paper, and for some time he did not take his coat off.

He looked it up that night, as he would have looked up anything. The mourner's prayer. Said by a son for a parent, every day, at the services, for eleven months, not twelve, because the full year is reserved for the wicked and no son assumes his father needs it. Said only in the presence of ten adult men. Mostly in Aramaic, which surprised him; he had supposed it would at least be Hebrew. He found a transliteration and a translation and read the translation through twice, and then a third time, looking for the place where it got to the point.

It praises God. It asks that his great name be magnified and sanctified in the world he created according to his will. It asks for his kingdom in our lifetimes and in our days. It praises him again, with eight different verbs one after another, as though one were not enough. It asks for peace. That was all. There was no death in it, nor any father. Nobody who had died was named, or comforted, or so much as remembered.

The next morning he rang the community office and asked what time the morning service was.

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"It does not say anything about the dead," he told Arkadi in the second week, in the corridor, while the others were folding their prayer shawls. He said it the way he would have told a client that their reserving basis was out of date.

Arkadi was seventy-three. He had been an electrical engineer in Kharkiv, which had made Ludwig like him before either of them had said a word, and he was the gabbai because nobody else would do it. He was putting the prayer books back on the shelf in a particular order that Ludwig had not yet worked out.

"No," said Arkadi.

"Then why does the son say it?"

Arkadi put the last book on the shelf. "Because he is the son," he said, and went to switch off the lights.

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In February Ludwig learned the sounds. He did not learn Hebrew. He learned the shapes the words made in his mouth, the way he had once, at fourteen, learned the first page of a Chopin nocturne without being able to read music, by watching his teacher's hands. Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba. He said it in the car. He said it standing at the printer. He discovered that it had a rhythm, and that the rhythm was broken in two places by the congregation's answers, Amen and the long Y'hei sh'mei raba, so that the mourner could not get through it alone even if he wanted to. Somebody else had to speak into the middle of it.

He kept the tally. In February the average went up to nine point eight, because Boris Lerner's father-in-law came to stay from Cologne and came every day, and on fourteen mornings out of twenty Ludwig said the Kaddish. When the father-in-law went home it fell to nine point three.

In March he learned the counting verse, because he had been listening to Arkadi's finger for four months and it had become intolerable not to know. He wrote it out from a website in the transliteration and the German, on the back of a claims summary.

Hoshia et amecha, u'varech et nachalatecha, u'r'em v'nas'em ad ha'olam.

Save your people, and bless your inheritance; tend them, and carry them, for ever.

He counted the words, out of habit, with the tip of the pencil. Ten. He counted the ones Arkadi said on the mornings when they failed. Nine. The ninth was ad, and ad is not for, it is until, and ha'olam is the world, or for ever, or the age. On the mornings when they were nine, then, the sentence came as far as carry them until and stopped there. He sat with the claims summary for a while. Then he put it in the folder with his father's note.

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In April Mr. Rabinovich went into hospital with his lungs, and for three weeks they were mostly eight. Ludwig took the tram to the hospital on a Sunday with a box of the cough sweets, and found Mr. Rabinovich sitting up and furious about the food. He did not say anything about the minyan. When Mr. Rabinovich came back he was thinner, and had a portable oxygen cylinder on a little trolley that he parked in the aisle, and Boris Lerner moved his seat so that no one would trip on the tube.

In May the younger Kogan's mother died, in a care home out at Langenhagen. Ludwig had not known she was ill. The next Monday the younger Kogan stood up where Ludwig stood up and said the words alongside him, in a heavy Ukrainian Aramaic, half a beat behind, so that for those minutes each morning there were two of them and the room answered both. Ludwig found that he waited for him at the end of each phrase. On the mornings when they were nine, he found that he minded more on Kogan's account than on his own. He did not examine that. He went on keeping the tally.

In June Arkadi asked him to bring the wine for the Sabbath kiddush, because the man who usually brought it had gone to his daughter in Ashdod for the summer. Ludwig brought it. Then in July Arkadi asked him to check the electrics in the women's gallery, where a light flickered, and Ludwig said he was an actuary, not an electrician, and Arkadi said, "Your father was a heating engineer," as if that settled it. Ludwig stood on a chair with a torch for forty minutes and found a loose neutral in the ceiling rose, and did not tell Arkadi that he had watched three videos first.

He was being counted now, he realised in August, on mornings that had nothing to do with him. A man came from Braunschweig for his mother's yahrzeit, and they were nine without Ludwig and ten with him, and Arkadi's finger came to rest on Ludwig's chest with ha'olam. The stranger said Kaddish for a woman Ludwig had never heard of, and Ludwig said Amen into the middle of it, and Y'hei sh'mei raba, in the place where somebody else has to speak.

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The eleven months ended on the last Thursday in September. He had worked it out on a spreadsheet in November and checked it against two calendars, the community's and a website's, because the website counted from the burial and the community from the death, and he had wanted to be sure which convention his father would have meant. He decided his father would have meant whichever was longer.

That Thursday it was raining. He came in at five past seven and shook out his umbrella in the corridor, and there were Arkadi, Boris Lerner, both Kogans, Mr. Rabinovich and his trolley, a quiet accountant called Sacharow, and two men from the Russian-speaking old people's home round the corner who came when their knees allowed. With Ludwig that made nine.

At a quarter past, Arkadi went round with his finger.

Hoshia. Et. Amecha. U'varech. Et. Nachalatecha. U'r'em. V'nas'em.

"Ad," said Arkadi, at Ludwig, and lowered his hand.

The radiator knocked twice. The younger Kogan, who still had seven months of his own to go, looked at Ludwig and then at the floor. Boris Lerner began to type a message, perhaps to someone who might come; he had done that before, and nobody had ever come.

Ludwig looked at the clock. He knew what the clock would say. Nine point four on an average Thursday in autumn: on rather more than half of mornings, nothing. The table was not about anybody. That was the first thing the trainees had to understand.

He put his prayer book down on the chair and went out into the corridor and down the stairs and out through the security door into the street.

It was still raining. The street was the ordinary street: the kindergarten with its paper leaves stuck in the windows, the bakery on the corner, the stop for the No. 3 tram, where a young man in a cycling jacket with a delivery company's box on his back was standing under the shelter with his bicycle, talking on the phone.

He was talking in Hebrew.

In January Ludwig would not have known it. In January it would have been a foreign language among the dozen foreign languages of the tram stop, and he would have walked past it to the bakery. He did not know it now, either, not in the sense of knowing what the young man was saying. But he heard b'seder and achshav and ima, and a rhythm he had had in his mouth since February, and he stopped in the rain on the pavement.

He waited until the young man had finished. Then he said, in German, because he had no Hebrew in which to say it, "Excuse me. Are you Jewish?"

The young man looked at him the way young men at tram stops look at older men in good coats who ask them questions. "Why?"

"We are nine," said Ludwig. He pointed up at the window, where the light was on. "Upstairs. We need ten. It is the last day I can say it for my father." He heard himself, and it sounded like a man explaining a reserving basis to a client who had not asked. He stopped. "It takes twenty minutes."

The young man looked at the window and at his phone and at the box on his back. "I'm not religious," he said. "At all. I don't even know the—"

"Nor do I," said Ludwig.

The young man was called Itai. He was from Be'er Sheva and studying mechanical engineering, and he delivered food in the mornings because the money was better before the lectures. He told Ludwig all this on the stairs, very fast, in English, as if to make it quite clear what he was and was not. He chained his bicycle to the railing of the kindergarten. He took the box off his back and left it in the corridor beside Ludwig's umbrella. When they came into the prayer room the two men from the old people's home stood up, and Mr. Rabinovich said something in Russian that made Arkadi laugh, and Boris Lerner put his phone away.

Arkadi did not ask the young man anything. He took a skullcap from the box by the door and held it out, and Itai put it on, crooked, over his wet hair. Then Arkadi went round the room again from the beginning, slowly, as though the first count had never happened, his finger moving from man to man.

Hoshia. Et. Amecha. U'varech. Et. Nachalatecha. U'r'em. V'nas'em. Ad.

The finger came to Itai, who stood by the door with his hands in the pockets of the cycling jacket, dripping on the linoleum.

"Ha'olam," said Arkadi.

At twenty to eight Ludwig stood up where he had stood up, on the mornings that had counted, since November. The younger Kogan stood up beside him. Ludwig opened his mouth and found the first word already there, and he began.

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Franz Rosenzweig, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Francīscō Rosenzweigiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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