Rabbi Redux: An Unorthodox Tale : GOD’S EAR <i> by Rhoda Lerman</i> (Henry Holt: $19.95; 309 pp.)

When Yussel Fetner, son of a millennial line of saintly, dancing rabbis, throws it all up to become a Long Island insurance agent with a beach house and a fax machine, there is heartburn in the celestial orders.

The heartburn burns hottest, of course, in the breast of his father. Rabbi Fetner is a Hasid so holy that still wine bubbles in his wine glass, and people weep to be near him. When he dances to the refrain of “Yom Diddle Yom Diddle Ai Diddle Dai Dai,” we hear the refrain at least a dozen times in Rhoda Lerman’s novel; we memorize it--his feet do not touch the ground. He is so transfigured by riddles and divine anarchy that alongside him, a Chagall painting is pure minimalism.

Too much divine anarchy can freeze an American boy’s soul. Yussel’s froze at 13 when he made his Bar Mitzvah. He loved his father deeply, but from then on, actuarial order replaced heavenly disorder as his ruling passion.

Yussel prospers extraordinarily, of course. His Orthodox Jewish clients figure that a man whose prophecying lineage goes back to the Baal Shem Tov has to have an inside track. “Believe me, Yussel, if a Fetner comes to my door selling life insurance, I’m buying,” one of them tells him.

Yussel’s prosperity helps keep the old rabbi dancing. He mortgages his beach house 14 times to finance his father’s largesse, buying the mortgages back each time. “His father was a world class victim for every living thing except his wife, his daughter, his son,” Lerman writes.

Even after the rabbi’s wife leaves him, fed up with having her house invaded by his charity cases, and with his refusal to install a separate door for privacy, Yussel remains loyal. Even when his father proceeds to marry a hippie named Flower Child. Even when the rabbi, inspired by revelation, persuades him to sell everything he has to buy 50,000 acres of Colorado desert for a new community of the faithful.

The land scheme, of course, is a God trap. The community will consist of the rabbi’s transplanted disciples, the rabbi himself will immediately die, and Yussel, after a titanic struggle, will have no choice but to take his place.

Lerman has written a latter-day “Hound of Heaven,” though of a most particular kind. The spiritual harrying of Yussel, led by his father--who comes back as the busiest and most interfering ghost in current fiction--is as wild and chaotic as the caucus race in “Alice in Wonderland.”

It is a high-temperature conversion, a dramatic juxtaposition of comedy and pain, joy and fury, snippets of the supernatural, a sweetness that often cloys, a manic and utterly disorganized single-mindedness, and other contradictions; all borne along on a torrent of mystical infiltration of modern secular life. As if this were not enough to chew on, Lerman essays, as a kind of subplot, a feminist infiltration of Hasidic mysticism.

The book is a long reach and only partly successful. Yussel’s resistance, his attempt to hold on to his adolescent rebellion and the life he has made for himself since, is appealing and sometimes moving. When he agrees to stay as rabbi for a year, and conducts his first Sabbath service, he is shaken to feel how the hereditary fire seems to kindle inside him. This was no marriage with God, he protests, half-panicked. “This was a one-night stand.”

In fact, it is not a spontaneous kindling. Rabbi Fetner, a ghost by now, is hard at work. Yussel, torn in all directions and with his wife back East, has fallen passionately in love with a neighboring property owner known as Lillywhite. His father, knowing that Yussel’s heart must crack open if he is to join the saintly ranks, advises him that lust, like everything else, comes from God; and that he can use it to give fire to the service.

Lillywhite, a larger-than-life woman of beauty, independence, and great strength, turns out to be a kind of counterpart to Yussel. She is Jewish, and the daughter of a wealthy man who died of a stroke after she defied him as a young girl. She is haunted by her inability, as an Orthodox Jew, to properly mourn him. As Yussel moves into his mystical inheritance, she moves with him at an angle. Toward the end, he teaches her the Kaddish--which in the Orthodox tradition, only men can say--and stands with her as she defiantly recites it over her father’s grave. It is a kind of spontaneous marriage of differing currents: Yussel taking on the tradition of his forebears while Lillywhite looks forward to changing them.

Lerman seems to force things. These last pages have more lyricism than strength. There is a sentimentality at work; a kind of wishfulness. It is a quality that weakens much of the book; and particularly the pivotal character of old Rabbi Fetner.

Certainly, the rabbi is the most spectacular thing in “God’s Eye.” He has found himself unexpectedly excluded from heaven because of one moment of hard-heartedness; namely, his refusal to build his wife her door. Accordingly, as a ghost, he has to wear a set of doors, along with a constantly shifting array of the fancy pajamas that were his special weakness.

His son must get him into heaven, and free of those doors. Yussel, in other words, must achieve sanctity. It is, as has been said, a God-trap; it is also a father-trap.

Funny, wise, loving and paradoxical as the rabbi is, there is also something oppressive about him. Ghosts inhibit the freedom of the living. Hamlet’s father did his work in the first act; after that, except for one cameo appearance, he got out of the way. Old Rabbi Fetner is always on hand, always pursuing the same quarry.

Yussel does grow in his struggle with himself, and there are moments when this struggle takes on a real beauty. Yet he is bound, and this puts lead weights on his mystical sorties, as if they all had to be home by 5.

“An angel stands behind every blade of grass singing ‘Grow, darling, grow’ ”; this is old Fetner’s vision of the universe and the vision that Yussel moves into. It is lovely in a way, but constricting. Perhaps God made man, and man’s freedom, precisely because He found the angels lovely but boring.