IT IS 1965…
…and my father drops me off at Saturday morning services.
“You should go,” he tells me.
I am seven, too young to ask the obvious question: why should I go and he shouldn’t? Instead I do as I am told, entering the temple, walking down a long corridor, and turning toward the small sanctuary, where the children’s services are held.
I wear a white short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie. I pull open the wooden door. Toddlers are on the floor. Third-grade boys are yawning. Sixth-grade girls wear black cotton leotards, slouching and whispering.
I grab a prayer book. The seats in back are taken so I choose one up front. Suddenly the door swings open and the room goes silent.
The Man of God steps in.
He stalks like a giant. His hair is thick and dark. He wears a long robe, and when he speaks, his waving arms move the robe around like a sheet flipping in the wind.
He tells a Bible story. He asks us questions. He strides across the stage. He draws close to where I am sitting. I feel a flush of heat. I ask God to make me invisible. Please, God, please.
It is my most fervent prayer of the day.
Adam hid in the Garden of Eden. Moses tried to substitute his brother. Jonah jumped a boat and was swallowed by a whale.
Man likes to run from God. It’s a tradition. So perhaps I was only following tradition when, as soon as I could walk, I started running from Albert Lewis. He was not God, of course, but in my eyes, he was the next closest thing, a holy man, a man of the cloth, the big boss, the head rabbi. My parents joined his congregation when I was an infant. I sat on my mother’s lap as he delivered his sermons.
And yet, once I realized who he was-a Man of God-I ran. If I saw him coming down the hallway, I ran. If I had to pass his study, I ran. Even as a teenager, if I spotted him approaching, I ducked down a corridor. He was tall, six foot one, and I felt tiny in his presence. When he looked down through his black-rimmed glasses, I was certain he could view all my sins and shortcomings.
So I ran.
I ran until he couldn’t see me anymore.
I thought about that as I drove to his house, on a morning after a rainstorm in the spring of 2000. A few weeks earlier, Albert Lewis, then eighty-two years old, had made that strange request of me, in a hallway after a speech I had given.
“Will you do my eulogy?”
It stopped me in my tracks. I had never been asked this before. Not by anyone-let alone a religious leader. There were people mingling all around, but he kept smiling as if it were the most normal question in the world, until I blurted out something about needing time to think about it.
After a few days, I called him up.
Okay, I said, I would honor his request. I would speak at his funeral-but only if he let me get to know him as a man, so I could speak of him as such. I figured this would require a few in-person meetings.
“Agreed,” he said.
I turned down his street.
To that point, all I really knew of Albert Lewis was what an audience member knows of a performer: his delivery, his stage presence, the way he held the congregation rapt with his commanding voice and flailing arms. Sure, we had once been closer. He had taught me as a child, and he’d officiated at family functions-my sister’s wedding, my grandmother’s funeral. But I hadn’t really been around him in twenty-five years. Besides, how much do you know about your religious minister? You listen to him. You respect him. But as a man? Mine was as distant as a king. I had never eaten at his home. I had never gone out with him socially. If he had human flaws, I didn’t see them. Personal habits? I knew of none.
Well, that’s not true. I knew of one. I knew he liked to sing. Everyone in our congregation knew this. During sermons, any sentence could become an aria. During conversation, he might belt out the nouns or the verbs. He was like his own little Broadway show.
In his later years, if you asked how he was doing, his eyes would crinkle and he’d raise a conductor’s finger and croon:
“The old gray rabbi,
ain’t what he used to be,
ain’t what he used to be…”
I pushed on the brakes. What was I doing? I was the wrong man for this job. I was no longer religious. I didn’t live in this state. He was the one who spoke at funerals, not me. Who does a eulogy for the man who does eulogies? I wanted to spin the wheel around, make up some excuse.
Man likes to run from God.
But I was headed in the other direction.
I walked up the driveway and stepped on the mat, which was rimmed with crumbled leaves and grass. I rang the doorbell. Even that felt strange. I suppose I didn’t think a holy man had a doorbell. Looking back, I don’t know what I expected. It was a house. Where else would he live? A cave?
But if I didn’t expect a doorbell, I surely wasn’t ready for the man who answered it. He wore sandals with socks, long Bermuda shorts, and an untucked, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. I had never seen the Reb in anything but a suit or a long robe. That’s what we called him as teenagers. “The Reb.” Kind of like a superhero. The Rock. The Hulk. The Reb. As I mentioned, back then he was an imposing force, tall, serious, broad cheeks, thick eyebrows, a full head of dark hair.
“Hellooo, young man,” he said cheerily.
Uh, hi, I said, trying not to stare.
He seemed more slender and fragile up close. His upper arms, exposed to me for the first time, were thin and fleshy and dotted with age marks. His thick glasses sat on his nose, and he blinked several times, as if focusing, like an old scholar interrupted while getting dressed.
“Ennnnter,” he sang. “Enn-trez!”
His hair, parted on the side, was between gray and snowy white, and his salt-and-pepper Vandyke beard was closely trimmed, although I noticed a few spots he had missed shaving. He shuffled down the hall, me in tow behind, looking at his bony legs and taking small steps so as not to bump up on him.
How can I describe how I felt that day? I have since discovered, in the book of Isaiah, a passage in which God states:
“My thoughts are not your thoughts
Neither are your ways my ways
For as the heavens are higher than the earth
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
That was how I expected to feel-lower, unworthy. This was one of God’s messengers. I should be looking up, right?
Instead, I baby-stepped behind an old man in socks and sandals. And all I could think of was how goofy he looked.
I should tell you why I shunned the eulogy task, where I was, religiously, when this whole story began. Nowhere, to be honest. You know how Christianity speaks of fallen angels? Or how the Koran mentions the spirit Iblis, exiled from heaven for refusing to bow to God’s creation?
Here on earth, falling is less dramatic. You drift. You wander off.
I know. I did it.
Oh, I could have been pious. I had a million chances. They began when I was a boy in a middle-class New Jersey suburb and was enrolled, by my parents, in the Reb’s religious school three days a week. I could have embraced that. Instead, I went like a dragged prisoner. Inside the station wagon (with the few other Jewish kids in our neighborhood) I stared longingly out the window as we drove away, watching my Christian friends play kickball in the street. Why me? I thought. During classes, the teachers gave out pretzel sticks, and I would dreamily suck the salt off until the bell rang, setting me free.
By age thirteen, again at my parents’ urging, I had not only gone through the requisite training to be bar mitzvahed, I had actually learned to chant from the Torah, the holy scrolls that contain the first five books of the Old Testament. I even became a regular reader on Saturday mornings. Wearing my only suit (navy blue, of course), I would stand on a wooden box in order to be tall enough to look over the parchment. The Reb would be a few feet away, watching as I chanted. I could have spoken with him afterward, discussed that week’s Biblical portion. I never did. I just shook his hand after services, then scrambled into my dad’s car and went home.
My high school years-once more, at my parents’ insistence-were spent mostly in a private academy, where half the day was secular learning and the other half was religious. Along with algebra and European history, I studied Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Proverbs, all in their original language. I wrote papers on arks and manna, Kabbalah, the walls of Jericho. I was even taught an ancient form of Aramaic so I could translate Talmudic commentaries, and I analyzed twelfth-century scholars like Rashi and Maimonides.
When college came, I attended Brandeis University, with a largely Jewish student body. To help pay my tuition, I ran youth groups at a temple outside of Boston.
In other words, by the time I graduated and went out into the world, I was as well versed in my religion as any secular man I knew.
And then?
And then I pretty much walked away from it.
It wasn’t revolt. It wasn’t some tragic loss of faith. It was, if I’m being honest, apathy. A lack of need. My career as a sportswriter was blossoming; work dominated my days. Saturday mornings were spent traveling to college football games, Sunday mornings to professional ones. I attended no services. Who had time? I was fine. I was healthy. I was making money. I was climbing the ladder. I didn’t need to ask God for much, and I figured, as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, God wasn’t asking much of me either. We had forged a sort of “you go your way, I’ll go mine” arrangement, at least in my mind. I followed no religious rituals. I dated girls from many faiths. I married a beautiful, dark-haired woman whose family was half-Lebanese. Every December, I bought her Christmas presents. Our friends made jokes. A Jewish kid married a Christian Arab. Good luck.
Over time, I honed a cynical edge toward overt religion. People who seemed too wild-eyed with the Holy Spirit scared me. And the pious hypocrisy I witnessed in politics and sports-congressmen going from mistresses to church services, football coaches breaking the rules, then kneeling for a team prayer-only made things worse. Besides, Jews in America, like devout Christians, Muslims, or sari-wearing Hindus, often bite their tongues, because there’s this nervous sense that somebody out there doesn’t like you.
So I bit mine.
In fact, the only spark I kept aglow from all those years of religious exposure was the connection to my childhood temple in New Jersey. For some reason, I never joined another. I don’t know why. It made no sense. I lived in Michigan -six hundred miles away.
I could have found a closer place to pray.
Instead, I clung to my old seat, and every autumn, I flew home and stood next to my father and mother during the High Holiday services. Maybe I was too stubborn to change. Maybe it wasn’t important enough to bother. But as an unexpected consequence, a certain pattern went quietly unbroken:
I had one clergyman-and only one clergyman-from the day I was born.
Albert Lewis.
And he had one congregation.
We were both lifers.
And that, I figured, was all we had in common.
At the same time I was growing up in the suburbs, a boy about my age was being raised in Brooklyn. One day, he, too, would grapple with his faith. But his path was different.
As a child, he slept with rats.
Henry Covington was the second-youngest of seven kids born to his parents, Willie and Wilma Covington. They had a tiny, cramped apartment on Warren Street. Four brothers slept in one room; three sisters slept in another.
The rats occupied the kitchen.
At night, the family left a pot of rice on the counter, so the rats would jump in and stay out of the bedrooms. During the day, Henry’s oldest brother kept the rodents at bay with a BB gun. Henry grew up terrified of the creatures, his sleep uneasy, fearful of bites.
Henry’s mother was a maid-she mostly worked for Jewish families-and his father was a hustler, a tall, powerful man who liked to sing around the house. He had a sweet voice, like Otis Redding, but on Friday nights he would shave in the mirror and croon “Big Legged Woman,” and his wife would steam because she knew where he was going. Fights would break out. Loud and violent.
When Henry was five years old, one such drunken scuffle drew his parents outside, screaming and cursing. Wilma pulled a.22-caliber rifle and threatened to shoot her husband. Another man jumped in just as she pulled the trigger, yelling, “No, Missus, don’t do that!”
The bullet got him in the arm.
Wilma Covington was sent away to Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison for women. Two years. On weekends, Henry would go with his father to visit her. They would talk through glass.
“Do you miss me?” she would ask.
“Yes, Mama,” Henry would answer.
During those years, he was so skinny they fed him a butterscotch weight gain formula to put meat on his bones. On Sundays he would go to a neighborhood Baptist church where the reverend took the kids home afterward for ice cream. Henry liked that. It was his introduction to Christianity. The reverend spoke of Jesus and the Father, and while Henry saw pictures of what Jesus looked like, he had to form his own vision of God. He pictured a giant, dark cloud with eyes that weren’t human. And a crown on its head.
At night, Henry begged the cloud to keep the rats away.
As the Reb led me into his small home office, the subject of a eulogy seemed too serious, too awkward a pivot, as if a doctor and patient had just met, and now the patient had to remove all his clothes. You don’t begin a conversation with “So, what should I say about you when you die?”
I tried small talk. The weather. The old neighborhood. We moved around the room, taking a tour. The shelves were crammed with books and files. The desk was covered in letters and notes. There were open boxes everywhere, things he was reviewing or reorganizing or something.
“It feels like I’ve forgotten much of my life,” he said.
It could take another life to go through all this.
“Ah,” he laughed. “Clever, clever!”
It felt strange, making the Reb laugh, sort of special and disrespectful at the same time. He was not, up close, the strapping man of my youth, the man who always looked so large from my seat in the crowd.
Here, on level ground, he seemed much smaller. More frail. He had lost a few inches to old age. His broad cheeks sagged now, and while his smile was still confident, and his eyes still narrowed into a wise, thoughtful gaze, he moved with the practiced steps of a person who worried about falling down, mortality now arm in arm with him. I wanted to ask two words: how long?
Instead, I asked about his files.
“Oh, they’re full of stories, ideas for sermons,” he said. “I clip newspapers. I clip magazines.” He grinned. “I’m a Yankee clipper.”
I spotted a file marked “Old Age.” Another huge one was marked “God.”
You have a file on God? I asked.
“Yes. Move that one down closer, if you don’t mind.”
I stood on my toes and reached for it, careful not to jostle the others. I placed it on a lower shelf.
“Nearer, my God, to thee,” he sang.
Finally, we sat down. I flipped open a pad. Years in journalism had ingrained the semaphore of interviewing, and he nodded and blinked, as if understanding that something more formal had begun. His chair was a low-backed model with casters that allowed him to roll to his desk or a cabinet. Mine was a thick green leather armchair. Too cushy. I kept sinking into it like a child.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
Yes, I lied.
“Want to eat something?”
No, thanks.
“Drink?”
I’m good.
“Good.”
Okay.
I hadn’t written down a first question. What would be the right first question? How do you begin to sum up a life? I glanced again at the file marked “God,” which, for some reason, intrigued me (what would be in that file?), then I blurted out the most obvious thing you could ask a man of the cloth.
Do you believe in God?
“Yes, I do.”
I scribbled that on my pad.
Do you ever speak to God?
“On a regular basis.”
What do you say?
“These days?” He sighed, then half-sang his answer. “These days I say, ‘God, I know I’m going to see you soon. And we’ll have some nice conversations. But meanwhile, God, if you’re gonna taaake me, take me already. And if you’re gonna leee-ave me here’”-he opened his hands and looked to the ceiling-“‘maybe give me the strength to do what should be done.’”
He dropped his hands. He shrugged. It was the first time I heard him speak of his mortality. And it suddenly hit me that this wasn’t just some speaking request I had agreed to; that every question I would ask this old man would add up to the one I didn’t have the courage to ask.
What should I say about you when you die?
“Ahh,” he sighed, glancing up again.
What? Did God answer you?
He smiled.
“Still waiting,” he said.
IT IS 1966…
…and my grandmother is visiting. We have finished dinner. Plates are being put away.
“It’s yahrzeit,” she tells my mother.
“In the cabinet,” my mother answers.
My grandmother is a short, stout woman. She goes to the cabinet, but at her height, the upper shelf is out of reach.
“Jump up there,” she tells me.
I jump.
“See that candle?”
On the top shelf is a little glass, filled with wax. A wick sticks up from the middle.
“This?”
“Careful.”
What’s it for?
“Your grandfather.”
I jump down. I never met my grandfather. He died of a heart attack, after fixing a sink at a summer cottage. He was forty-two.
Was that his? I ask.
My mother puts a hand on my shoulder.
“We light it to remember him. Go play.”
I leave the room, but I sneak a look back, and I see my mother and grandmother standing by the candle, mumbling a prayer.
Later-after they have gone upstairs-I return. All the lights are out, but the flame illuminates the countertop, the sink, the side of the refrigerator. I do not yet know that this is religious ritual. I think of it as magic. I wonder if my grandfather is in there, a tiny fire, alone in the kitchen, stuck in a glass.
I never want to die.
Life of Henry
The first time Henry Covington accepted Jesus as his personal savior, he was only ten, at a small Bible camp in Beaverkill, New York. For Henry, camp meant two weeks away from the traffic and chaos of Brooklyn. Here kids played outside, chased frogs, and collected peppermint leaves in jars of water and left them in the sun. At night the counselors added sugar and made tea.
One evening, a pretty, light-skinned counselor asked Henry if he’d like to pray with her. She was seventeen, slim and gentle-mannered; she wore a brown skirt, a white frilly blouse, her hair was in a ponytail, and to Henry she was so beautiful he lost his breath.
Yes, he said. He would pray with her.
They went outside the bunk.
“Your name is Henry and you are a child of God.”
“My name is Henry,” he repeated, “and I am a child of God.”
“Do you want to accept Jesus Christ as your savior?” she said.
“Yes, I do,” he answered.
She took his hand.
“Are you confessing your sins?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you want Jesus to forgive your sins?”
“Yes.”
She leaned her forehead into his. Her voice lowered.
“Are you asking Jesus to come into your life?”
“I am asking him.”
“Do you want me to pray with you?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
It was warm outside. The summer sky was reddening to dusk. Henry felt the girl’s soft forehead, her hand squeezing his, her whispered prayers so close to his ears. This surely was salvation. He accepted it with all his heart.
The next day, a friend of his got a BB gun, and they shot it at the frogs and tried to kill them.
I drove the car slowly under a light spring drizzle. For our second meeting, I had asked to see the Reb at work, because knowing what to say after a man died included knowing how he labored, right?
It was strange driving through the New Jersey suburbs where I’d grown up. They were provincially middle-class back then; fathers worked, mothers cooked, church bells rang-and I couldn’t wait to get out. I left high school after the eleventh grade, went to college up near Boston, moved to Europe, then New York, and never lived here again. It seemed too small for what I wanted to achieve in life, like being stuck wearing your grade school clothes. I had dreams of traveling, making foreign friends in foreign cities. I had heard the phrase “citizen of the world.” I wanted to be one.
But here I was, in my early forties, back in my old hometown. I drove past a grocery store and saw a sign in a window that read “Water Ice.” We used to love that stuff as kids, cherry-or lemon-flavored, ten cents for a small, a quarter for a large. I never really found it anywhere else. I saw a man emerge licking a cup of it, and for a moment I wondered what my life would be like if I’d stayed here, lived here, licked water ice as an adult.
I quickly dismissed the thought. I was here for a purpose. A eulogy. When I was done, I would go home.
The parking lot was mostly empty. I approached the temple, with its tall glass archway, but I felt no nostalgia. This was not the prayer house of my youth. As with many suburban churches and synagogues, our congregation, Temple Beth Sholom (which translates to “House of Peace”), had followed a migratory pattern. It began in one place and moved to another, growing larger as it chased after its members who, over the years, picked more affluent suburbs. I once thought churches and temples were like hills, permanent in location and singular in shape. The truth is, many go where the customers go. They build and rebuild. Ours had grown from a converted Victorian house in a residential neighborhood to a sprawling edifice with a spacious foyer, nineteen classrooms and offices, and a wall honoring the generous benefactors who’d made it possible.
Personally, I preferred the cramped brick building of my youth, where you smelled kitchen aromas when you walked in the back door. I knew every inch of that place. Even the mop closet, where we used to hide as kids.
Where I once hid from the Reb.
But what stays the same in life?
Now the Reb was waiting for me in the foyer, this time wearing a collared shirt and a sports coat. He greeted me with a personalized chorus of “Hello, Dolly”:
“Helllooo, Mitchell,
Well, hellooo, Mitchell,
It’s so nice to have you back
Where you belong…”
I pasted a smile on my face. I wasn’t sure how long I would last with the musical theater thing.
I asked how he’d been doing. He mentioned dizzy spells. I asked if they were serious.
He shrugged.
“Let me put it this way,” he said. “The old gray rabbi-”
Ain’t what he used to be, I said.
“Ah.”
I felt bad that I had interrupted him. Why was I so impatient?
We walked down the hallway toward his office. At this point, in semiretirement, his hours were strictly of his own choosing. He could stay at home if he wanted; no one would object.
But religion is built on ritual, and the Reb loved the ritual of going in to work. He had nurtured this congregation from a few dozen families in 1948 to more than a thousand families today. I got the feeling the place had actually grown too big for his liking. There were too many members he didn’t know personally. There were also other rabbis now-one senior, one assistant-who handled the day-to-day duties. The idea of assistants when the Reb first arrived would have been laughable. He used to carry the keys and lock the place up himself.
“Look.”
He pointed to a stack of wrapped presents inside a doorway.
What’s that? I asked.
“The bride’s room. They come here to get dressed before the wedding.”
He ran his eyes up and down the gifts and smiled.
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
What?
“Life,” he said.
IT IS 1967…
…and the houses are decorated for Christmas. Our neighborhood is mostly Catholic.
One morning, after a snowfall, a friend and I walk to school, wearing hooded jackets and rubber boots. We come upon a small house with a life-sized nativity scene on its front lawn.
We stop. We study the figures. The wise men. The animals.
Is that one Jesus? I ask.
“What one?”
The one standing up. With the crown.
“I think that’s his father.”
Is Jesus the other guy?
“Jesus is the baby.”
Where?
“In the crib, stupid.”
We strain our necks. You can’t see Jesus from the sidewalk.
“I’m gonna look,” my friend says.
You better not.
“Why?”
You can get in trouble.
I don’t know why I say this. Already, at that age, I sense the world as “us” and “them.” If you’re Jewish, you’re not supposed to talk about Jesus or maybe even look at Jesus.
“I’m looking anyhow,” my friend says.
I step in nervously behind him. The snow crunches beneath our feet. Up close, the figures of the three wise men seem phony, hardened plaster with orangey painted flesh.
“That’s him,” my friend says.
I peer over his shoulder. There, inside the crib, is the baby Jesus, lying in painted hay. I shiver. I half expect him to open his eyes and yell, “Gotcha!”
Come on, we’re gonna be late, I say, backpedaling.
My friend sneers.
“Chicken,” he says.
Life of Henry
Having been taught to believe in the Father, and having accepted the Son as his personal savior, Henry took the Holy Ghost to heart, for the first time, when he was twelve years old, on a Friday night at the True Deliverance Church in Harlem.
It was a Pentecostal tarry service-inspired by Jesus’ call to tarry in the city until “endued with a power from on high”-and as part of the tradition, people were called to receive the Holy Spirit. Henry followed others up to the pulpit, and when his turn came, he was swabbed with olive oil, then told to get on his knees and lean over a newspaper.
“Call him,” he heard voices say.
So Henry called. He said “Jesus” and “Jesus” and then “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” over and over, until the words tumbled one into another. He swayed back and forth and spoke the name repeatedly. Minutes passed. His knees began to ache.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”
“Call him!” the church members hollered. “Call on him!”
“Jesus-Jesus-Jesus-Jesus-Jesus-”
“It’s coming! Call him now!”
His head was pounding. His shins cramped in pain.
“JesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesus-”
“Almost! Almost!”
“Call him! Call him!”
He was sweating, choking, fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Finally the words were so tumbled and bumbled that it didn’t sound like “Jesus” anymore, just syllables and gurgling and mumbling and groaning and saliva drooling from his mouth onto the newspaper. His voice and tongue and teeth and lips were melded into a shaking machine, gone wild with frenzy-
“JelesulsjesleuesJesuslelelajJelsusu-”
“You got it! He got it!”
And he had it. Or he thought he had it. He exhaled and he heaved and he almost choked. He took a big breath and tried to calm himself down. He wiped his chin. Someone balled up the wet newspaper and took it away.
“How do you feel now?” the pastor asked him.
“Good,” Henry panted.
“You feel good that He has given you the Holy Ghost?”
And he did. Feel good. Although he wasn’t really sure what he’d done. But the pastor smiled and asked the Lord to protect Henry and that was mostly what he wanted, a prayer of protection. It made him feel safe when he returned to his neighborhood.
Henry ingested the Holy Ghost that night. But soon he ingested other things, too. He started smoking cigarettes. He tried alcohol. He got tossed out of the sixth grade for fighting with a girl, and soon he added marijuana to his list.
One time, as a teenager, he heard his mother talking to relatives about how, of all her children, Henry was the one, he had the heart and the temperament. Her little boy was “gonna be a preacher one day.”
And Henry laughed to himself. “A preacher? Do you know how much of this stuff I’m smoking?”
The Reb’s office at work was not much different than the home version. Messy. Sprawling. Papers. Letters. Souvenirs. And a sense of humor. On the door was a list of blessings, some funny posters, even a mock parking sign that read:
YOU TAKA MY SPACE
I BREAKA YOUR FACE.
Once we sat, I cleared my throat. My question was simple. Something one would certainly need to know to construct a proper eulogy.
Why did you get into this business?
“This business?”
Religion.
“Ah.”
Did you have a calling?
“I wouldn’t say so, no.”
There wasn’t a vision? A dream? God didn’t come to you in some shape or form?
“I think you’ve been reading too many books.”
Well. The Bible.
He grinned. “I am not in that one.”
I meant no disrespect. It’s just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.
This was easy to believe with the Reb, at least when I was younger. In addition to his imposing presence and his brilliant reputation, there were his sermons. Delivered with passion, humor, roaring indignation or stirring whispers, the sermon, for Albert Lewis, was like the fastball for a star pitcher, like the aria for Pavarotti. It was the reason people came; we knew it-and deep down, I think he knew it. I’m sure there are congregations where they slip out before the sermon begins. Not ours. Wristwatches were glanced at and footsteps hurried when people thought they might be late for the Reb’s message.
Why? I guess because he didn’t approach the sermon in a traditional way. I would later learn that, while he was trained in a formal, academic style-start at point A, move to point B, provide analysis and supporting references-after two or three tries in front of people, he gave up. They were lost. Bored. He saw it on their faces.
So he began with the first chapter of Genesis, broke it down to the simplest of ideas and related them to everyday life. He asked questions. He took questions. And a new style was born.
Over the years, those sermons morphed into gripping performances. He spoke with the cues of a magician, moving from one crescendo to the next, mixing in a Biblical quotation, a Sinatra song, a vaudeville joke, Yiddish expressions, even calling, on occasion, for audience participation (“Can I get a volunteer?”). Anything was fair game. There was a sermon where he pulled up a stool and read Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle. There was a sermon where he sang “Those Were the Days.” There was a sermon where he brought a squash and a piece of wood, then slammed each with a knife to show that things which grow quickly are often more easily destroyed than those which take a long time.
He might quote Newsweek, Time, the Saturday Evening Post, a Peanuts cartoon, Shakespeare, or the TV series Matlock. He’d sing in English, in Hebrew, in Italian, or in a mock Irish accent; pop songs, folk songs, ancient songs. I learned more about the power of language from the Reb’s sermons than from any book I ever read. You could glance around the room and see how no one looked away; even when he was scolding them, they were riveted. Honestly, you exhaled when he finished, that’s how good he was.
Which is why, given his profession, I wondered if he’d been divinely inspired. I remembered Moses and the burning bush; Elijah and the still, small voice; Balaam and the donkey; Job and the whirlwind. To preach holy words, I assumed, one must have had some revelation.
“It doesn’t always work that way,” the Reb said.
So what drew you in?
“I wanted to be a teacher.”
A religious teacher?
“A history teacher.”
Like in normal school?
“Like in normal school.”
But you went to the seminary.
“I tried.”
You tried?
“The first time, I failed.”
You’re kidding me.
“No. The head of the seminary, Louis Finkelstein, pulled me aside and said, ‘Al, while you know much, we do not feel you have what it takes to be a good and inspiring rabbi.’”
What did you do?
“What could I do? I left.”
Now, this stunned me. There were many things you could have said about Albert Lewis. But not having what it took to inspire and lead a congregation? Unthinkable. Maybe he was too gentle for the seminary leaders. Or too shy. Whatever the reason, the failure crushed him.
He took a summer job as a camp counselor in Port Jervis, New York. One of the campers was particularly difficult. If the other kids collected in one place, this kid went someplace else. If asked to sit, he would defiantly stand.
The kid’s name was Phineas, and Al spent most of the summer encouraging him, listening to his problems, smiling patiently. Al understood adolescent angst. He’d been a pudgy teen in a cloistered religious environment. He’d had few friends. He’d never really dated.
So Phineas found a kindred soul in his counselor. And by the end of camp, the kid had changed.
A few weeks later, Al got a call from Phineas’s father, inviting him to dinner. It turned out the man was Max Kadushin, a great Jewish scholar and a major force in the Conservative movement. At the table that night, he said, “Al, I can’t thank you enough. You sent back a different kid. You sent me a young man.”
Al smiled.
“You have a way with people-particularly children.”
Al said thank you.
“Have you ever thought about trying for the seminary?”
Al almost spit out his food.
“I did try,” he said. “I didn’t make it.”
Max thought for a moment.
“Try again,” he said.
And with Kadushin’s help, Albert Lewis’s second try went better than the first. He excelled. He was ordained.
Not long after that, he took a bus to New Jersey to interview for his first and only pulpit position, the one he still held more than fifty years later.
No angel? I asked. No burning bush?
“A bus,” the Reb said, grinning.
I scribbled a note. The most inspirational man I knew only reached his potential by helping a child reach his.
As I left his office, I tucked away the yellow pad. From our meetings I now knew he believed in God, he spoke to God, he became a Man of God sort of by accident, and he was good with kids. It was a start.
We walked to the lobby. I looked around at the big building I usually saw once a year.
“It’s good to come home, yes?” the Reb said.
I shrugged. It wasn’t my home anymore.
Is it okay, I asked, to tell these stories, when I…you know…do the eulogy?
He stroked his chin.
“When that time comes,” he said, “I think you’ll know what to say.”
Life of Henry
When Henry was fourteen, his father died after a long illness. Henry wore a suit to the funeral home, because Willie Covington insisted all his sons have suits, even if there was no money for anything else.
The family approached the open coffin. They stared at the body. Willie had been extremely dark-skinned, but the parlor had made him up to be an auburn shade. Henry’s oldest sister began to wail. She started wiping off the makeup, screaming, “My daddy don’t look like that!” Henry’s baby brother tried to crawl into the coffin. His mother wept.
Henry watched quietly. He only wanted his father back.
Before God, Jesus, or any higher power, Henry had worshipped his dad, a former mattress maker from North Carolina who stood six foot five and had a chest full of gunshot scars, the details of which were never explained to his children. He was a tough man who chain-smoked and liked to drink, but when he came home at night, inebriated, he was often tender, and he’d call Henry over and say, “Do you love your daddy?”
“Yeah,” Henry would say.
“Give your daddy a hug now. Give your daddy a kiss.”
Willie was an enigma, a man with no real job who was a stickler for education, a hustler and loan shark who forbade stolen goods in his house. When Henry began smoking in the sixth grade, his father’s only response was: “Don’t never ask me for a cigarette.”
But Willie loved his children, and he challenged them, quizzing them on school subjects, offering a dollar for easy questions, ten dollars for a math problem. Henry loved to hear him sing-especially the old spirituals, like “It’s Cool Down Here by the River Jordan.”
But soon his singing stopped. Willie hacked and coughed. He developed emphysema and tuberculosis of the brain. In the last year of his life, he was virtually bedridden. Henry cooked his meals and carried them to his room, even as his father coughed up blood and barely ate a thing.
One night, after Henry brought him dinner, his father looked at him sadly and rasped, “Listen, son, you ever run out of cigarettes, you can have some of mine.”
A few weeks later, he was dead.
At the funeral, Henry heard a Baptist preacher say something about the soul and Jesus, but not much got through. He kept thinking his father would come back, just show up at the door one day, singing his favorite songs.
Months passed. It didn’t happen.
Finally, having lost his only hero, Henry, the hustler’s son, made a decision: from now on, he would take what he wanted.
Spring was nearly over, summer on its way, and the late morning sun burned hot through the kitchen window. It was our third visit. Before we began, the Reb poured me a glass of water.
“Ice?” he asked.
I’m okay, I said.
“He’s okay,” he sang. “No ice…it would be nice…but no ice…”
As we walked back to his office, we passed a large photo of him as a younger man, standing on a mountain in bright sunlight. His body was tall and strong, his hair black and combed back-the way I remembered him from childhood.
Nice photo, I said.
“That was a proud moment.”
Where was it?
“ Mount Sinai.”
Where the Ten Commandments were given?
“Exactly.”
When was this?
“In the 1960s. I was traveling with a group of scholars. A Christian man and I climbed up. He took that picture.”
How long did it take?
“Hours. We climbed all night and arrived at sunrise.”
I glanced at his aging body. Such a trip would be impossible now. His narrow shoulders were hunched over, and the skin at his wrists was wrinkled and loose.
As he walked on to his office, I noticed a small detail in the photo. Along with his white shirt and a prayer shawl, the Reb was wearing the traditional tefillin, small boxes containing Biblical verses, which observant Jews strap around their heads and their arms while reciting morning prayers.
He said he climbed all night.
Which meant he had taken them up with him.
Such ritual was a major part of the Reb’s life. Morning prayers. Evening prayers. Eating certain foods. Denying himself others. On Sabbath, he walked to synagogue, rain or shine, not operating a car, as per Jewish law. On holidays and festivals, he took part in traditional practices, hosting a Seder meal on Passover, or casting bread into a stream on Rosh Hashanah, symbolic of casting away your sins.
Like Catholicism, with its vespers, sacraments, and communions-or Islam, with its five-times-daily salah, clean clothes, and prayer mats-Judaism had enough rituals to keep you busy all day, all week, and all year.
I remember, as a kid, the Reb admonishing the congregation-gently, and sometimes not so gently-for letting rituals lapse or disappear, for eschewing traditional acts like lighting candles or saying blessings, even neglecting the Kaddish prayer for loved ones who had died.
But even as he pleaded for a tighter grip, year after year, his members opened their fingers and let a little more go. They skipped a prayer here. They skipped a holiday there. They intermarried-as I did.
I wondered, now that his days were dwindling, how important ritual still was.
“Vital,” he said.
But why? Deep inside, you know your convictions.
“Mitch,” he said, “faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.”
Now, the Reb didn’t merely practice his rituals; he carved his daily life from them. If he wasn’t praying, he was studying-a major part of his faith-or doing charity or visiting the sick. It made for a more predictable life, perhaps even a dull one by American standards. After all, we are conditioned to reject the “same old routine.” We’re supposed to keep things new, fresh. The Reb wasn’t into fresh. He never took up fads. He didn’t do Pilates, he didn’t golf (someone gave him a single club once; it sat in his garage for years).
But there was something calming about his pious life, the way he puttered from one custom to the next; the way certain hours held certain acts; the way every autumn he built a sukkah hut with its roof open to the stars; the way every week he embraced the Sabbath, breaking the world down to six days and one day, six days and one.
“My grandparents did these things. My parents, too. If I take the pattern and throw it out, what does that say about their lives? Or mine? From generation to generation, these rituals are how we remain…”
He rolled his hand, searching for the word.
Connected? I said.
“Ah.” He smiled at me. “Connected.”
As we walked to the front door that day, I felt a wave of guilt. I’d once had rituals; I’d ignored them for decades. These days, I didn’t do a single thing that tied me to my faith. Oh, I had an exciting life. Traveled a lot. Met interesting people. But my daily routines-work out, scan the news, check e-mail-were self-serving, not roped to tradition. To what was I connected? A favorite TV show? The morning paper? My work demanded flexibility. Ritual was the opposite.
Besides, I saw religious customs as sweet but outdated, like typing with carbon paper. To be honest, the closest thing I had to a religious routine was visiting the Reb. I had now seen him at work and at home, in laughter and in repose. I had seen him in Bermuda shorts.
I had also seen him more this one spring than I normally would in three years. I still didn’t get it. I was one of those disappointing congregants. Why had he chosen me to be part of his death, when I had probably let him down in life?
We reached the door.
One more question, I said.
“One mooore,” he sang, “at the doooor…”
How do you not get cynical?
He stopped.
“There is no room for cynicism in this line of work.”
But people are so flawed. They ignore ritual, they ignore faith-they even ignore you. Don’t you get tired of trying?
He studied me sympathetically. Maybe he realized what I was really asking: Why me?
“Let me answer with a story,” he said. “There’s this salesman, see? And he knocks on a door. The man who answers says, ‘I don’t need anything today.’
“The next day, the salesman returns.
“‘Stay away,’ he is told.
“The next day, the salesman is back.
“The man yells, ‘You again! I warned you!’ He gets so angry, he spits in the salesman’s face.
“The salesman smiles, wipes the spit with a handkerchief, then looks to the sky and says, ‘Must be raining.’
“Mitch, that’s what faith is. If they spit in your face, you say it must be raining. But you still come back tomorrow.”
He smiled.
“So, you’ll come back, too? Maybe not tomorrow…”
He opened his arms as if expecting an incoming package. And for the first time in my life, I did the opposite of running away.
I gave him a hug.
It was a fast one. Clumsy. But I felt the sharp bones in his back and his whiskered cheek against mine. And in that brief embrace, it was as if a larger-than-life Man of God was shrinking down to human size.
I think, looking back, that was the moment the eulogy request turned into something else.