Chaptzem Blog!      

A rabbi-turned-notary reveals woman's past lives by examining her signature



It's hard to find a notary public these days, as anyone who's gotten divorced, applied for public housing, sold a house, or executed a complicated financial agreement with their dad can tell you. I feel like I've spent a lot of time during this past legally exciting year tracking down notaries. I've also spent some time pondering what an odd job a notary has: authenticate that you are who you are, and that you've signed a document in front of them. The document could state that you promise to eat more fiber or that you will love clowns for ever and ever. The notary does not care what it says.

I was glad to find a notary within walking distance of my new home. At the rear of a vast, old-fashioned stationery store on Court Street in Brooklyn, past ledger books and hole-punches, two portly Orthodox men work behind a glass counter. The younger one, clean-shaven with bright red payes, answers the phone and does Xeroxing. The older one has short hair and a gray beard; he wears a yarmulke and a handsome, rumpled suit. That is Yitz Ring. He takes the authenticating-who-you-are thing to a new, unfamiliar level: on my first visit, he examined my signatureâ�"a series of concentric loopsâ�"and pronounced, "Nelly, your head is too much in the spiritual realm." Then he looked at the phone numbers and addresses on my documents and muttered something about "so many 8s" and "chaos."

The next time I went in he told me that in a past life I had helped a lot of Jews during the Holocaust and that I was a reincarnation of Eve. With most people, I would not have found such unsolicited psychic pronouncements charmingâ�"I would have found them intrusive and possibly creepy. But Yitz is charismatic and funny; he radiates good will and I got curious: Where did his pronouncements come from? Were they religious? Was he totally nuts or a savant?

I'm not sure I got an answer during the conversations that followed, but I did learn that Yitz truly embraces his own cosmology. Most of the people I talk to acknowledge, maybe without even being conscious of it, that there is an element of subjectivity in their theologies. Yitz believes that his beliefs are truth for all of us.

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=602