IT IS 1971…
I am thirteen. This is the big day. I lean over the holy scrolls, holding a silver pointer; its tip is the shape of a hand. I follow the ancient text, chanting the words. My teenage voice squeaks.
In the front row sit my parents, siblings, and grandparents. Behind them, more family, friends, the kids from school.
Just look down, I tell myself. Don’t mess up.
I go on for a while. I do pretty well. When I am finished, the group of men around me shake my wet hand. They mumble, “Yishar co-ach”-congratulations-and then I turn and take the long walk across the pulpit to where the Reb, in his robe, stands waiting.
He looks down through his glasses. He motions for me to sit. The chair seems huge. I spot his prayer book, which has clippings stuffed in the pages. I feel like I am inside his private lair. He sings loudly and I sing, too-also loudly, so he won’t think I am slacking-but my bones are actually trembling. I am finished with the obligatory part of my Bar Mitzvah, but nothing is as unsettling as what is about to come: the conversation with the rabbi. You cannot study for this. It is free-form. Worst of all, you have to stand right next to him. No running from God.
When the prayer finishes, I rise. I barely reach above the lectern, and some congregants have to shift to see me.
“So, how are you feeling, young man?” the Reb says. “Relieved?”
Yeah, I mumble.
I hear muffled laughter from the crowd.
“When we spoke a few weeks ago, I asked you what you thought about your parents. Do you remember?”
Sort of, I say.
More laughter.
“I asked if you felt they were perfect, or if they needed improvement. And do you remember what you said?”
I freeze.
“You said they weren’t perfect, but…”
He nods at me. Go ahead. Speak.
But they don’t need improvement? I say.
“But they don’t need improvement,” he says. “This is very insightful. Do you know why?”
No, I say.
More laughter.
“Because it means you are willing to accept people as they are. Nobody is perfect. Not even Mom and Dad. That’s okay.”
He smiles and puts two hands on my head. He recites a blessing. “May the Lord cause his countenance to shine upon you…”
So now I am blessed. The Lord shines on me.
Does that mean I get to do more stuff, or less?
About the time that, religiously, I was becoming “a man,” Henry was becoming a criminal.
He began with stolen cars. He played lookout while his older brother jimmied the locks. He moved on to purse snatching, then shoplifting, particularly grocery stores; stealing pork chop trays and sausages, hiding them in his oversized pants and shirts.
School was a lost cause. When others his age were going to football games and proms, Henry was committing armed robbery. Young, old, white, black, didn’t matter. He waved a gun and demanded their cash, their wallets, their jewels.
The years passed. Over time, he made enemies on the streets. In the fall of 1976, a neighborhood rival tried to set him up in a murder investigation. The guy told the cops Henry was the killer. Later, he said it was someone else.
Still, when those cops came to question him, Henry, now nineteen years old with a sixth-grade education, figured he could turn the tables on his rival and collect a five-thousand-dollar reward in the process.
So instead of saying “I have no idea” or “I was nowhere near there,” he made up lies about who was where, who did what. He made up one lie after another. He put himself at the scene, but not as a participant. He thought he was being smart.
He couldn’t have been dumber. He wound up lying his way into an arrest-along with another guy-on a manslaughter charge. The other guy went to trial, was convicted, and got sent away for twenty-five years. Henry’s lawyer quickly recommended a plea deal. Seven years. Take it.
Henry was devastated. Seven years? For a crime he didn’t commit?
“What should I do?” he asked his mother.
“Seven is less than twenty-five,” she said.
He fought back tears. He took the deal in a courtroom. He was led away in handcuffs.
On the bus ride to prison, Henry cursed the fact that he was being punished unfairly. He didn’t do the math on the times he could have been jailed and wasn’t. He was angry and bitter. And he swore that life would owe him once he got out.
It was now the summer of 2003, and we were in the kitchen. His wife, Sarah, had cut up a honeydew, and the Reb, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, red socks, and sandals-these combinations no longer startled me-held out a plate.
“Eat some,” he said.
In a bit.
“You’re not hungry?”
In a bit.
“It’s good for you.”
I ate a piece.
“You liiike?”
I rolled my eyes. He was clowning with me. I never thought I’d still be coming, three years after our visits began. When someone asks for a eulogy, you suspect the end is near.
But the Reb, I’d learned, was like a tough old tree; he bent with the storms but he would not snap. Over the years, he had beaten back Hodgkin’s disease, pneumonia, irregular heart rhythms, and a small stroke.
These days, to safeguard his now eighty-five-year-old body, he took a daily gulping of pills, including Dilantin for seizure control, and Vasotec and Toprol for his heart and his blood pressure. He had recently endured a bout with shingles. Not long before this visit, he had tumbled, fractured his rib cage, and spent a few days in the hospital, where his doctor implored him to use a cane everywhere-“For your own safety,” the doctor said. He rarely did, thinking the congregation might see him as weak.
But whenever I showed up, he was raring to go. And I was privately happy he fought his body’s decay. I did not like seeing him frail. He had always been this towering figure, a tall and upright Man of God.
Selfishly, that’s how I wanted him to stay.
Besides, I had witnessed the alternative. Eight years earlier, I’d watched an old and beloved professor of mine, Morrie Schwartz, slowly die of ALS. I visited him on Tuesdays in his home outside Boston. And every week, although his spirit shone, his body decayed.
Less than eight months from our first visit, he was dead.
I wanted Albert Lewis-who was born the same year as Morrie-to last longer. There were so many things I never got to ask my old professor. So many times I told myself, “If I only had a few more minutes…”
I looked forward to my encounters with the Reb-me sitting in the big green chair, him searching hopelessly for a letter on his desk. Some visits, I would fly straight from Detroit to Philadelphia. But mostly I came on Sunday mornings, taking a train from New York City after filming a TV show there. I arrived during church hours, so I guess this was our own little church time, if you can refer to two Jewish men talking religion as church.
My friends reacted with curiosity or disbelief.
“You go to his house like he’s a normal person?”
“Aren’t you intimidated?”
“Does he make you pray while you’re there?”
“You actually talk about his eulogy? Isn’t that morbid?”
I guess, looking back, it wasn’t the most normal thing. And after a while, I could have stopped. I certainly had enough material for an homage.
But I felt a need to keep visiting, to ensure that my words would still reflect who he was. And, okay. There was more. He had stirred up something in me that had been dormant for a long time. He was always celebrating what he called “our beautiful faith.” When others said such things, I felt uneasy, not wanting to be lumped in with any group that closely. But seeing him so-what’s the word?-joyous, I guess, at his age, was appealing. Maybe the faith didn’t mean that much to me, but it did to him, you could see how it put him at peace. I didn’t know many people at peace.
So I kept coming. We talked. We laughed. We read through his old sermons and discussed their relevance. I found I could share almost anything with Reb. He had a way of looking you in the eye and making you feel the world had stopped and you were all that was in it.
Maybe this was his gift to the job.
Or maybe it was the job’s gift to him.
Anyhow, he did a lot more listening these days. With his retirement from the senior rabbi position, the meetings and paperwork had decreased. Unlike when he first arrived, the temple ran quite well on its own now.
The truth is, he could have retired to someplace warm- Florida, Arizona. But that was never for him. He attended a retirees’ convention in Miami once and was perplexed at how many former colleagues he discovered living there.
“Why did you leave your congregations?” he asked.
They said it hurt not to be up on the pulpit or the new clerics didn’t like them hanging around.
The Reb-who often said “ego” was the biggest threat to a clergyman-held no such envy for where he’d once been. Upon retirement, he voluntarily moved out of his large office and into a smaller one. And one Sabbath morning, he left his favorite chair on the dais and took a seat beside his wife in the back row of the sanctuary. The congregation was stunned.
But like John Adams returning to the farm after the presidency, the Reb simply faded back in among the people.
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1958
“A little girl came home from school with a drawing she’d made in class. She danced into the kitchen, where her mother was preparing dinner.
“‘Mom, guess what?’ she squealed, waving the drawing.
“Her mother never looked up.
“‘What? she said, tending to the pots.
“‘Guess what?’ the child repeated, waving the drawing.
“‘What?’ the mother said, tending to the plates.
“‘Mom, you’re not listening.’
“‘Sweetie, yes I am.’
“‘Mom,’ the child said, ‘you’re not listening with your eyes.’”
Life of Henry
His first stop behind bars was Rikers Island, in the East River near the runways at LaGuardia Airport. It was painfully close to home, just a few miles, and it only reminded him how his stupidity had put him on the wrong side of these walls.
During his time at Rikers, Henry saw things he wished he’d never seen. He saw inmates assault and abuse other inmates, throwing blankets over the victims’ heads so they couldn’t see their attackers. One day, a guy who’d had an argument with Henry entered the room and punched Henry in the face. Two weeks later, the same man tried to stab Henry with a sharpened fork.
All this time, Henry wanted to scream his innocence, but what good would it do? Everybody screamed innocence. After a month or so, Henry was sent upstate to Elmira Correctional, a maximum security prison. He rarely ate. He barely slept. He smoked endless cigarettes. One hot night he woke up sweating, and rose to get himself a cold drink. Then the sleep faded and he saw the steel door. He dropped onto his bed and wept.
Henry asked God that night why he hadn’t died as a baby. A light flickered and caught his eye and his gaze fell on a Bible. He opened it to a page from the Book of Job, where Job curses the day of his birth.
It was the first time he ever felt the Lord talking to him.
But he didn’t listen.
Having finished the honeydew, the Reb and I moved to his office, where the boxes, papers, letters, and files were still in a state of chaos. Had he felt better, we might have gone for a walk, because he liked to walk around his neighborhood, although he admitted not knowing his neighbors so well these days.
“When I was growing up in the Bronx,” the Reb said, “everyone knew everyone. Our apartment building was like family. We watched out for one another.
“I remember once, as a boy, I was so hungry, and there was a fruit and vegetable truck parked by our building. I tried to bump against it, so an apple would fall into my hands. That way it wouldn’t feel like stealing.
“Suddenly, I heard a voice from above yelling at me in Yiddish, ‘Albert, it is forbidden!’ I jumped. I thought it was God.”
Who was it? I asked.
“A lady who lived upstairs.”
I laughed. Not quite God.
“No. But, Mitch, we were part of each other’s lives. If someone was about to slip, someone else could catch him.
“That’s the critical idea behind a congregation. We call it a Kehillah Kedoshah-a sacred community. We’re losing that now. The suburbs have changed things. Everyone has a car. Everyone has a million things scheduled. How can you look out for your neighbor? You’re lucky to get a family to sit down for a meal together.”
He shook his head. The Reb was generally a move-with-the-times guy. But I could tell he didn’t like this form of progress at all.
Still, even in retirement, the Reb had a way of stitching together his own sacred community. Day after day, he would peer through his glasses at a scribbled address book and punch telephone numbers. His home phone, a gift from his grandchildren, had giant black-and-white digits, so he could dial more easily.
“Hellooo,” he’d begin, “this is Albert Lewis calling for…”
He kept track of people’s milestones-an anniversary, a retirement-and called. He kept track of who was sick or ailing-and called. He listened patiently as people went on and on about their joys or worries.
He took particular care to call his oldest congregants, because, he said, “It makes them still feel a part of things.”
I wondered if he wasn’t talking about himself.
By contrast, I spoke to a hundred people a week, but most of the communication was through e-mail or text. I was never without a BlackBerry. My conversations could be a few words. “Call tomorrow.” Or “C U There.” I kept things short.
The Reb didn’t do short. He didn’t do e-mail. “In an e-mail, how can I tell if something is wrong?” he said. “They can write anything. I want to see them. If not, I want to hear them. If I can’t see them or hear them, how can I help them?”
He exhaled.
“Of course, in the old days…,” he said.
Then suddenly, he was singing:
“In the olllld days…I would go door to dooor…”
I remember, as a child, when the Reb came to someone’s house on our street. I remember pulling the curtain and looking out the window, maybe seeing his car parked out front. Of course, it was a different time. Doctors made house calls. Milkmen delivered to your stoop. No one had a security system.
The Reb would come to comfort a grieving family. He’d come if a child ran away or if someone got laid off. How nice would that be today if when a job was lost, a Man of God sat at the dinner table and encouraged you?
Instead, the idea seems almost archaic, if not invasive. No one wants to violate your “space.”
Do you ever make house calls anymore? I asked.
“Only if asked,” the Reb replied.
Do you ever get a call from someone who isn’t a member of your congregation?
“Certainly. In fact, two weeks ago, I got a call from the hospital. The person said, ‘A dying woman has requested a rabbi.’ So I went.
“When I got there, I saw a man sitting in a chair beside a woman who was gasping for breath. “Who are you?” he said. ‘Why are you here?’
“‘ I got a call,’ I said. ‘They told me someone is dying and wants to speak to me.’
“He got angry. ‘Take a look at her,’ he said. ‘Can she talk? I didn’t call you. Who called you?’
“I had no answer. So I let him rant. After a while, when he cooled down, he asked, ‘Are you married?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Do you love your wife?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Would you want to see her die?’ ‘Not so long as there was hope for her to live,’ I said.
“We spoke for about an hour. At the end I said, ‘Do you mind if I recite a prayer for your wife?’ He said he would appreciate that. So I did.”
And then? I asked.
“And then I left.”
I shook my head. He spent an hour talking to a stranger? I tried to remember the last time I’d done that. Or if I’d ever done that.
Did you ever find out who called you? I asked.
“Well, not officially. But, on my way out, I saw a nurse who I remembered from other visits. She was a devout Christian. When I saw her, our eyes met, and even though she didn’t say anything, I knew it was her.”
Wait. A Christian woman called for a Jewish rabbi?
“She saw a man suffering. She didn’t want him to be alone.”
She had a lot of guts.
“Yes,” he said. “And a lot of love.”
Albert Lewis may have reached the point where a Christian nurse would call him for help, but traversing religious prejudices had not always been so smooth. Remember when Moses referred to himself as a “stranger in a strange land”? That phrase could have hung over the door when the Reb arrived in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in 1948.
Back then, the borough was a railroad suburb, with trains running west to Philadelphia and east to the Atlantic Ocean. There were eight churches in town and just one synagogue-if you could call it that-a converted three-story Victorian house, with a Catholic church down one street and an Episcopalian church down another. While the churches had spires and brick facades, the Reb’s “temple” had a porch, a kitchen on the ground floor, bedrooms turned to classrooms, and old movie theater seats that had been installed for sanctuary use. A winding staircase ran up the middle.
The original “congregation” was maybe three dozen families, some of whom drove forty minutes to get there. They had sent a letter to the seminary desperately seeking a rabbi; if none was available, they would have to close down, because it was a struggle to continue operating. Initially, some neighborhood Christians had signed a petition to keep the synagogue from forming. The idea of a Jewish “community” was alien and threatening to them.
Once Al accepted the job, he set out to correct that. He joined the local ministerium. He reached out to clerics of all faiths. He tried to dispel any bad assumptions or prejudices by visiting schools and churches.
Some visits were easier than others.
One time, he was sitting in a church classroom, explaining his religion to the students. A boy raised his hand with a question.
“Where are your horns?”
The Reb was stunned.
“Where are your horns? Don’t all Jews have horns?”
The Reb sighed and invited the boy to the front of the room. He removed the skullcap (kippah) that he wore on his head and asked the boy to run his hands through his hair.
“Do you feel any horns?”
The boy rubbed.
“Keep looking. Do you?”
The boy finally stopped.
“No,” he said, quietly.
“Ah.”
The boy sat down.
“Now where was I?” the Reb said.
Another time, the Reb invited an Episcopalian priest to address his congregation. The two men had become friendly, and the Reb thought it a good idea if clergymen were welcome in each other’s sanctuaries.
It was a Friday night service. After prayers were sung, the priest was introduced. He stepped to the pulpit. The congregation quieted.
“It’s a pleasure for me to be here,” he said, “and I thank the rabbi for inviting me…”
Suddenly, tears began to well in his eyes. He spoke about how good a man Albert Lewis was. Then he blurted out, in a gush of emotion, “That is why, please, you must help me get your rabbi to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.”
Dead silence.
“He’s a lovely person,” the priest lamented, “and I don’t want him to go to hell…”
More dead silence.
“Please, have him accept Jesus. Please…”
Few attendees ever forgot that service.
And then there was the time when a member of the Reb’s congregation, a German immigrant named Gunther Dreyfus, came racing in during a High Holiday service and pulled the Reb aside.
Gunther’s face was ashen. His voice was shaking.
“What’s wrong?” the Reb asked.
Apparently, minutes earlier, Gunther had been outside, overseeing the parking, when the Catholic priest came stomping out and began to yell about all the cars parking by his church, because it was a Sunday and he wanted the spaces for his members.
“Get them out of here,” he hollered, according to Gunther. “You Jews move your cars now!”
“But it’s the High Holiday,” Gunther said.
“Why must you have it on a Sunday?” the priest yelled.
“The date was set three thousand years ago,” Gunther replied. Being an immigrant, he still spoke with a German accent. The priest glared at him, then uttered something almost beyond belief.
“They didn’t exterminate enough of you.”
Gunther was enraged. His wife had spent three and a half years in a concentration camp. He wanted to slug the priest. Someone intervened, thankfully, and a shaken Gunther returned to the sanctuary.
The next day, the Reb phoned the Catholic archbishop who oversaw the area’s churches and told him what had happened. The following day, the phone rang. It was the priest, asking if he could come over and talk.
The Reb met him at the office door. They sat down.
“I want to apologize,” he said.
“Yes,” the Reb said.
“I should not have said what I did.”
“No, you should not have,” the Reb said.
“My archbishop had a suggestion,” the priest said.
“What is that?”
“Well, as you know, our Catholic school is in session now. And they will have their recess soon…”
The Reb listened.
Then he nodded and stood up.
And when the school doors opened and the kids burst out for recess, they saw the priest of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church and the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom walking arm in arm, around the schoolyard.
Some kids blinked.
Some kids stared.
But all of them took notice.
You might think that an uneasy truce; two men forced to walk around a schoolyard, arm in arm. You might think a certain bitterness would haunt the relationship. But somehow, in time, they became friends. And years later, the Reb would be inside that Catholic church.
At the priest’s funeral.
“I was asked to help officiate,” the Reb recalled. “I recited a prayer for him. And I think, by that time, he might have thought it wasn’t so bad.”
Life of Henry
Henry was often told “Jesus loves you,” and it must have been true. Because he kept getting second chances.
While he was in prison, Henry boxed well enough to win a heavyweight competition, and he studied well enough to earn an associate’s degree, even though he had never finished junior high.
When he got out of prison, he found a job in the exterminating business. He married his longtime girlfriend, Annette, and for a short while they lived a straight, normal life. Annette got pregnant. Henry hoped for a son.
Then one night, he came home and she was doubled over. They rushed to the hospital. The baby was born, three months premature, a tiny boy who barely weighed a pound. They named him Jerell. The doctors warned that his chances of survival were bleak, but Henry held the child in the palm of his big hand and he kissed the tiny feet.
“My son,” he whispered. Then he turned to God and asked for his help. “Let him live. Please, let him live.”
Five days later, the baby died.
Henry and Annette buried their child in a cemetery on Long Island. For a while, Henry wondered if the Lord had punished him for the things he had done.
But soon he turned bitter. His business soured, his house went into foreclosure, and when he saw that his drug-dealing brother had more hundred-dollar bills than he had singles, Henry turned his back on God and second chances and returned to the business of breaking the law.
He began by dealing a small supply of drugs, then a larger amount, then a larger amount. The money came in fast. Soon, he was acting like a kingpin, glorifying himself, giving orders. He bought fancy clothes. He styled his hair. He actually made people kneel down when they wanted something. Only when mothers came with babies did he soften up. They would offer him anything in exchange for drugs: groceries they’d just purchased, sometimes even a baby girl’s tiny earring.
“Keep it,” he would say, giving them a small bag. “But that earring belongs to me now. I want to see it on that baby every time you come in here.”
At one point, in the mid-1980s, Henry was making tens of thousands of dollars per month. He sold drugs at fancy parties, often to “respectable” types like judges, lawyers, even an off-duty cop. Henry smirked at their weakness and his momentary power. But one night, he made a common and fatal error: he decided to try some of his own product.
That was the cliff. And off it he flew.
Soon Henry was addicted to his own poison, and he wanted only to lose himself in a cloud of crack cocaine. Often he used the very product he was supposed to sell, and then, to cover up, he’d invent outlandish excuses.
Like the time he took a cigarette and burned holes into his arm, so he could tell his dealers he’d been tortured and the drugs stolen.
Or the time he had a friend shoot him in the leg with a.25 automatic, so he could tell his dealers he’d been robbed. They still came to the hospital, demanding to see the wound.
One bad night, already high and needing more money, he and a few others, including a nephew and a brother-in-law, drove a Coupe DeVille out to Canarsie, Brooklyn. Their method of assault was to pull the car alongside an unsuspecting target, jump out, demand the money, and ride off.
This time, it was an elderly couple. Henry sprang from the car and waved a gun in their faces.
“You know what this is!” he yelled.
The old woman screamed.
“Shut up or I’ll blow your head off,” he screamed back.
The couple surrendered their money, jewelry, and watches. Henry was unsettled by their older faces. A pang of conscience hit him. But it didn’t stop him. Soon the Coupe DeVille was racing away down Flatland Avenue.
And then a siren sounded. Lights flashed. Henry shouted at his nephew to keep driving. He rolled down the windows and out it all went. The jewelry. The money. Even their guns.
Moments later, the police overtook them.
At the station, Henry was put in a lineup. He waited. Then the officers brought in the elderly man.
And Henry knew he was sunk.
Once the man identified him, Henry would be charged, convicted, and face fifteen years in prison. Life as he knew it would be over. Why had he risked it all? He had literally thrown everything out the window.
“Is that him?” the officer asked.
Henry swallowed.
“I can’t be sure,” the old man mumbled.
What?
“Look again,” the officer said.
“I can’t be sure,” the old man said.
Henry could not believe his ears. How could the man not finger him? He had waved a gun right in his face.
But because the ID was not certain, Henry was let go. He went home. He lay down. He told himself the Lord had done that. The Lord was being merciful. The Lord was giving him another chance. And the Lord did not want him stealing anymore, using drugs anymore, or terrorizing people anymore.
And perhaps it was true.
But he still did not listen.
IT IS 1974…
…and I am in my religious high school. The subject is the parting of the Red Sea. I yawn. What is left to learn about this? I’ve heard it a million times. I look across the room to a girl I like and contemplate how hard it would be to get her attention.
“There is a Talmudic commentary here,” the teacher says.
Oh, great, I figure. This means translation, which is slow and painful. But as the story unfolds, I begin to pay attention.
After the Israelites safely crossed the Red Sea, the Egyptians chased after them and were drowned. God’s angels wanted to celebrate the enemy’s demise.
According to the commentary, God saw this and grew angry. He said, in essence: “Stop celebrating. For those were my children, too.”
Those were my children, too.
“What do you think of that?” the teacher asks us.
Someone else answers. But I know what I think. I think it is the first time I’ve heard that God might love the “enemy” as well as us.
Years later, I will forget the class, forget the teacher’s name, forget the girl across the room. But I will remember that story.
In any conversation, I was taught, there are at least three parties: you, the other person, and the Lord.
I recalled that lesson on a summer day in the small office when both the Reb and I wore shorts. My bare leg stuck with perspiration to the green leather chair, and I raised it with a small thwock.
The Reb was looking for a letter. He lifted a pad, then an envelope, then a newspaper. I knew he’d never find it. I think the mess in his office was almost a way of life now, a game that kept the world interesting. As I waited, I glanced at the file on the lower shelf, the one marked “God.” We still hadn’t opened it.
“Ach,” he said, giving up.
Can I ask you something?
“Ask away, young scholar,” he crowed.
How do you know God exists?
He stopped. A smile crept across his face.
“An excellent question.”
He pressed his fingers into his chin.
And the answer? I said.
“First, make the case against Him.”
Okay, I said, taking his challenge. How about this? We live in a world where your genes can be mapped, where your cells can be copied, where your face can be altered. Heck, with surgery, you can go from being a man to being a woman. We have science to tell us of the earth’s creation; rocket probes explore the universe. The sun is no longer a mystery. And the moon-which people used to worship? We brought some of it home in a pouch, right?
“Go on,” he said.
So why, in such a place, where the once-great mysteries have been solved, does anyone still believe in God or Jesus or Allah or a Supreme Being of any kind? Haven’t we outgrown it? Isn’t it like Pinocchio, the puppet? When he found he could move without his strings, did he still look the same way at Geppetto?
The Reb tapped his fingers together.
“That’s some speech.”
You said make a case.
“Ah.”
He leaned in. “Now. My turn. Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all at the end of the search.
“And no matter how far they try to go the other way-to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty-at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When life comes to an end?”
I shrugged.
“You see?”
He leaned back. He smiled.
“When you come to the end, that’s where God begins.”
Many great minds have set out to disprove God’s existence. Sometimes, they retreat to the opposite view. C. S. Lewis, who wrote so eloquently of faith, initially wrestled with the very concept of God and called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.” Louis Pasteur, the great scientist, tried to disprove a divine existence through facts and research; in the end, the grand design of man convinced him otherwise.
A spate of recent books had declared God a fool’s notion, hocus-pocus, a panacea for weak minds. I thought the Reb would find these offensive, but he never did. He understood that the journey to belief was not straight, easy, or even always logical. He respected an educated argument, even if he didn’t agree with it.
Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?
The Reb was a believer from the start, that was clear, but I also knew that he was not crazy about some things God allowed on this earth. He had lost a daughter, many years ago. That had shaken his world. And he regularly cried after visiting once-robust members of the congregation who now lay helpless in hospital beds.
“Why so much pain?” he would say, looking to the heavens. “Take them already. What is the point?”
I once asked the Reb that most common of faith questions: why do bad things happen to good people? It had been answered countless times in countless ways; in books, in sermons, on Web sites, in tear-filled hugs. The Lord wanted her with him…He died doing what he loved…She was a gift…This is a test…
I remember a family friend whose son was struck with a terrible medical affliction. After that, at any religious ceremony-even a wedding-I would see the man out in the hallway, refusing to enter the service. “I just can’t listen to it anymore,” he would say. His faith had been lost.
When I asked the Reb, Why do bad things happen to good people?, he gave none of the standard answers. He quietly said, “No one knows.” I admired that. But when I asked if that ever shook his belief in God, he was firm.
“I cannot waver,” he said.
Well, you could, if you didn’t believe in something all-powerful.
“An atheist,” he said.
Yes.
“And then I could explain why my prayers were not answered.”
Right.
He studied me carefully. He drew in his breath.
“I had a doctor once who was an atheist. Did I ever tell you about him?”
No.
“This doctor, he liked to jab me and my beliefs. He used to schedule my appointments deliberately on Saturdays, so I would have to call the receptionist and explain why, because of my religion, that wouldn’t work.”
Nice guy, I said.
“Anyhow, one day, I read in the paper that his brother had died. So I made a condolence call.”
After the way he treated you?
“In this job,” the Reb said, “you don’t retaliate.”
I laughed.
“So I go to his house, and he sees me. I can tell he is upset. I tell him I am sorry for his loss. And he says, with an angry face, ‘I envy you.’
“‘Why do you envy me?’ I said.
“‘Because when you lose someone you love, you can curse God. You can yell. You can blame him. You can demand to know why. But I don’t believe in God. I’m a doctor! And I couldn’t help my brother!’
“He was near tears. ‘Who do I blame?’ he kept asking me. ‘There is no God. I can only blame myself.’”
The Reb’s face tightened, as if in pain.
“That,” he said, softly, “is a terrible self-indictment.”
Worse than an unanswered prayer?
“Oh yes. It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there.”
Life of Henry
He was now approaching his thirtieth birthday, a criminal, an addict, and a liar to the Lord. He had a wife. It didn’t stop him. He had a daughter. It didn’t stop him. His money was gone, his fancy clothes were gone, his hair was unstyled and coarse. It didn’t stop him.
One Saturday night, he wanted so desperately to get high that he drove with two men to Jamaica, Queens, to the only people he could think of with both money and product-drug dealers he used to work for.
He knocked on their door. They answered.
He pulled a gun.
“What are you doing?” they said, incredulous.
“You know what this is,” he said.
The gun didn’t even have a firing pin in it. Luckily, the dealers didn’t know that. Henry waved it and barked, “Let’s go,” and they gave him their money and their jewelry and their drugs.
He drove off with his friends, even gave them the valuables, but he kept the poison for himself. It was all his body wanted. It was all he could think about.
Later that night, after he’d smoked and sniffed and guzzled alcohol as well, paranoia set in, and Henry realized the dumb mistake he had made. His victims knew who he was and where he lived. And they would want revenge.
Which is when Henry grabbed that shotgun, went out front, and hid behind a row of trash cans. His wife was confused and scared.
“What’s happening?” she said, crying.
“Shut the lights!” he yelled.
He saw his daughter, watching from the doorway.
“Stay inside!”
He waited. He trembled. Something told him that for all the trouble he had escaped, this would be the night it caught up with him. A car would come down his block, and he would die from a spray of bullets.
And so, one last time, he turned to God.
“Will you save me, Jesus?” he whispered. “If I promise to give myself to you, will you save me tonight?” He was weeping. He was breathing heavily. If, with all the wrong he’d done, he was still allowed to pray, then this was as close as he came to true prayer. “Hear me, Jesus, please…”
He had been a troubled child.
A delinquent teen.
A bad man.
Could he still be a saved soul?
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
MOHANDAS GANDHI
The summer moved quickly. The war in Iraq dominated the headlines, as did a battle to put the Ten Commandments in front of an Alabama courthouse. I found myself phoning the Reb in between visits. His voice was always upbeat.
“Is this Detroit calling?” he might begin.
Or: “Rabbi hotline, how can I help you?”
It made me ashamed of the way I sometimes answered the phone (a rushed “Hello?” as if it was a question I didn’t want to ask). In all the time I knew the Reb, I don’t think I ever heard him say, “Lemme call you back.” I marveled at how a man who was supposed to be available for so many people could somehow be available for each one of them.
On a late August visit, the Reb’s wife, Sarah, a kind and eloquent woman who’d been with him for sixty years, answered the door and led me to his office. The Reb was already seated, wearing a long-sleeved shirt despite the summer heat. His downy white hair was neatly combed, but I noticed that he didn’t get up. He just stretched out his arms for a hug.
Are you okay? I said.
He flung his palms in opposite directions.
“Lemme put it this way. I’m not as good as I was yesterday, buuuut…I’m better than I’m gonna be tom-orrrrr-ow…”
You and singing, I said.
“Ah,” he laughed. “I sing a song, you hum along…”
I sat down.
A newspaper was open on his desk. The Reb kept up with the news, as much as he could. When I asked how long he thought the Iraq war would last, he shrugged.
You’ve lived through a lot of wars, I said.
“Yes.”
Do they ever make more sense?
“No.”
This one, we agreed, was particularly troubling. Suicide bombings. Hidden explosives. It’s not like the old wars, I said, with tanks coming one way, tanks coming the other.
“But, Mitch, even in this new age of horror,” the Reb noted, “you can find small acts of human kindness. Something I saw a few years ago, on a trip to Israel to visit my daughter, stays with me to this day.
“I was sitting on a balcony. I heard a blast. I turned around and saw smoke coming from a shopping area. It was one of these terrible…uh…whachacalls…”
Bombs? Car bombs?
“That’s it,” he said. “I went from the apartment, as fast as I could, and as I arrived, a car pulled up in front of me. And a young fellow jumps out. He is wearing a yellow vest, so I follow him.
“When I get to the scene, I see the car that has been blown up. A woman was apparently doing laundry; she was one of the people killed.
“And there, in the street…” He swallowed. “There…in the street…were people picking up her body pieces. Carefully. Collecting anything. A hand. A finger.”
He looked down.
“They were wearing gloves, and moving very deliberately, a piece of a leg here, skin there, even the blood. You know why? They were following religious law, which says all pieces of the body must be buried together. They were putting life over death, even in the face of this…atrocity… because life is what God gives us, and how can you just let a piece of God’s gift lie there in the street?”
I had heard of this group, called ZAKA-yellow-vested volunteers who want to ensure that the deceased are treated with dignity. They arrive at these scenes sometimes faster than the paramedics.
“I cried when I saw that,” the Reb said. “I just cried. The kindness that takes. The belief. Picking up pieces of your dead. This is who we are. This beautiful faith.”
We sat quietly for a minute.
Why does man kill man? I finally asked.
He touched his forefingers to his lips. Then he pushed in his chair and rolled slowly to a stack of books.
“Let me find something here…”
Albert Lewis was born during World War I. He was a seminary student during World War II. His congregation was peppered with veterans and Holocaust survivors, some who still bore tattooed numbers on their wrists.
Over the years, he watched young congregants depart for the Korean War and the Vietnam War. His son-in-law and grandchildren served in the Israeli Army. So war was never far from his mind. Nor were its consequences.
Once, on a trip to Israel after the war in 1967, he went with a group to an area on the northern border and found himself wandering through some abandoned buildings. There, in the ruins of one destroyed house, he discovered an Arabic schoolbook lying in the dirt. It was facedown, missing a cover.
He brought it home.
Now he held it on his lap. This was what he’d gone looking for. A schoolbook nearly forty years old.
“Here.” He handed it over. “Look through it.”
It was fraying. Its binding had shriveled. The back page, torn and curled, had a cartoon image of a schoolgirl, a cat, and a rabbit, which had been colored in with crayon. The book was obviously for young kids and the whole thing was in Arabic, so I couldn’t understand a word.
Why did you keep this? I asked.
“Because I wanted to be reminded of what had happened there. The buildings were empty. The people were gone.
“I felt I had to save something.”
Most religions warn against war, yet more wars have been fought over religion than perhaps anything else. Christians have killed Jews, Jews have killed Muslims, Muslims have killed Hindus, Hindus have killed Buddhists, Catholics have killed Protestants, Orthodox have killed pagans, and you could run that list backward and sideways and it would still be true. War never stops; it only pauses.
I asked the Reb if, over the years, he had changed his view about war and violence.
“Do you remember Sodom and Gomorrah?” he asked.
Yes. That one I remember.
“So you know Abraham realized those people were bad. He knew they were miserable, vicious. But what does he do? He argues with God against destroying the cities. He says, Can you at least spare them if there are fifty good people there? God says okay. Then he goes down to forty, then thirty. He knows there aren’t that many. He bargains all the way down to ten before he closes the deal.”
And they still fell short, I said.
“And they still fell short,” the Reb confirmed. “But you see? Abraham’s instinct was correct. You must first argue against warfare, against violence and destruction, because these are not normal ways of living.”
But so many people wage wars in God’s name.
“Mitch,” the Reb said, “God does not want such killing to go on.”
Then why hasn’t it stopped?
He lifted his eyebrows.
“Because man does.”
He was right, of course. You can sense man’s drumbeat to war. Vengeance rises. Tolerance is mocked. Over the years, I was taught why our side was right. And in another country someone my age was taught the opposite.
“There’s a reason I gave that book to you,” the Reb said.
What’s the reason?
“Open it.”
I opened it.
“More.”
I flipped through the pages and out fell three small black-and-white photos, faded and smudged with dirt.
One was of an older dark-haired woman, Arabic and matronly looking. One was of a mustached younger Arabic man in a suit and tie. The last photo was of two children, side by side, presumably a brother and sister.
Who are they? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, softly.
He held out his hand and I gave him the photo of the children.
“Over the years, I kept seeing these kids, the mother, her son. That’s why I never threw the book away. I felt I had to keep them alive somehow.
“I thought maybe someday someone would look at the pictures, say they knew the family, and return them to the survivors. But I’m running out of time.”
He handed me the photo back.
Wait, I said. I don’t understand. From your religious viewpoint, these people were the enemy.
His voice grew angry.
“Enemy schmenemy,” he said. “This was a family.”
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1975
“A man seeks employment on a farm. He hands his letter of recommendation to his new employer. It reads simply, ‘He sleeps in a storm.’
“The owner is desperate for help, so he hires the man.
“Several weeks pass, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, a powerful storm rips through the valley.
“Awakened by the swirling rain and howling wind, the owner leaps out of bed. He calls for his new hired hand, but the man is sleeping soundly.
“So he dashes off to the barn. He sees, to his amazement, that the animals are secure with plenty of feed.
“He runs out to the field. He sees the bales of wheat have been bound and are wrapped in tarpaulins.
“He races to the silo. The doors are latched, and the grain is dry.
“And then he understands. ‘He sleeps in a storm.’
“My friends, if we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of ‘I could have, I should have.’ We can sleep in a storm.
“And when it’s time, our good-byes will be complete.”
Life of Henry
Henry Covington did not sleep that night.
But he did not die, either.
The drug dealers from whom he’d stolen somehow never found him; the cars that came down his street did not fire a bullet. He hid behind those trash cans, gripping his shotgun and reciting his question over and over.
“Will you save me, Jesus?”
He was following man’s sad tradition of running to God when all else fails. He had done it before, turned his face to the heavens, only to return to new trouble when the current trouble passed.
But this time, when the sun rose, Henry Covington slid the shotgun under his bed and lay down next to his wife and child.
It was Easter Sunday.
Henry thought about his life. He had stolen and lied and waved guns in people’s faces. He had blown all his money on drugs, and he had been so low at one point he had a small pebble of crack cocaine but nothing to smoke it in, so he scoured the streets until he found a cigarette butt. Anyone could have stepped on that cigarette butt. A dog could have urinated on it. It didn’t matter. He put it in his mouth. He had to have what he had to have.
Now, on Easter morning, he suddenly had to have something else. It was hard to explain. Even his wife didn’t understand it. An acquaintance came by with heroin. Henry’s eyes desired it. His body craved it. But if he took it, it would kill him. He knew it. He was certain. He had promised his life to God in the darkness behind those trash cans, and here, hours later, was his first test.
He told the man to go away.
Then Henry went into the bathroom, got on his knees, and began to pray. After he finished, he guzzled a bottle of NyQuil.
The next day, he guzzled another.
And the next day, he guzzled another-all in an attempt to numb himself through a self-imposed detox. It was three days before he could put a morsel of food in his mouth. Three days before he could even lift up out of bed.
Three days.
And then he opened his eyes.
The Reb opened his eyes.
He was in the hospital.
It was not the first time. Although he often hid his ailments from me, I learned that in recent months, staying upright had become a problem. He had slipped on the pavement and cut open his forehead. He had slipped in the house and banged his neck and cheek. Now he had fallen getting up from his chair and slammed his rib cage against a desk. It was either syncope, a temporary loss of consciousness, or small strokes, transient attacks that left him dizzy and disoriented.
Either way, it was not good.
Now I expected the worst. A hospital. The portal to the end. I had called and asked if it was all right to visit, and Sarah kindly said I could come.
I braced myself at the front entrance. I am haunted by hospital visits and their familiar, depressing cues. The antiseptic smell. The low drone of TV sets. The drawn curtains. The occasional moaning from another bed. I had been to too many hospitals for too many people.
For the first time in a while, I thought about our agreement.
Will you do my eulogy?
I entered the Reb’s room.
“Ah,” he smiled, looking up from the bed, “a visitor from afar…”
I stopped thinking about it.
We hugged-or, I should say, I hugged his shoulders and he touched my head-and we both agreed that this was a first, a hospital conversation. His robe fell open slightly and I caught a glance at his bare chest, soft, loose flesh with a few silver hairs. I felt a rush of shame and looked away.
A nurse breezed in.
“How are you doing today?” she asked.
“I’m dooooing,” the Reb lilted. “I’m dooooing…”
She laughed. “He sings all the time, this one.”
Yes, he does, I said.
It amazed me how consistently the Reb could summon his good nature. To sing to the nurses. To kid around with the physicians. The previous day, while waiting in a wheelchair in the hallway, he was asked by a hospital worker for a blessing. So the Reb put his hands on the man’s head and gave him one.
He refused to wallow in self-pity. In fact, the worse things got for him, the more intent he seemed on making sure no one around him was saddened by it.
As we sat in the room, a commercial for an antidepressant drug flashed across the TV screen. It showed people looking forlorn, alone on a bench or staring out a window.
“I keep feeling something bad is going to happen…,” the TV voice said.
Then, after showing the pill and some graphics, those same people appeared again, looking happier.
The Reb and I watched in silence. After it ended, he asked, “Do you think those pills work?”
Not like that, I said.
“No,” he agreed. “Not like that.”
Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Paxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions more are spent purchasing them. You don’t even need a specific trauma; just “general depression” or “anxiety,” as if sadness were as treatable as the common cold.
I knew depression was real, and in many cases required medical attention. I also knew we overused the word. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures that we weren’t willing to work for. I knew people whose unbearable source of misery was their weight, their baldness, their lack of advancement in a workplace, or their inability to find the perfect mate, even if they themselves did not behave like one. To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken.
But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can’t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren’t satisfied-before working some more.
I knew. I had done all that. There was a stretch where I could not have worked more hours in the day without eliminating sleep altogether. I piled on accomplishments. I made money. I earned accolades. And the longer I went at it, the emptier I began to feel, like pumping air faster and faster into a torn tire.
The time I spent with Morrie, my old professor, had tapped my brakes on much of that. After watching him die, and seeing what mattered to him at the end, I cut back. I limited my schedule.
But I still kept my hands on my own wheel. I didn’t turn things over to fate or faith. I recoiled from people who put their daily affairs in divine hands, saying, “If God wants it, it will happen.” I kept silent when people said all that mattered was their personal relationship with Jesus. Such surrender seemed silly to me. I felt like I knew better. But privately, I couldn’t say I felt any happier than they did.
So I noted how, for all the milligrams of medication he required, the Reb never popped a pill for his peace of mind. He loved to smile. He avoided anger. He was never haunted by “Why am I here?” He knew why he was here, he said: to give to others, to celebrate God, and to enjoy and honor the world he was put in. His morning prayers began with “Thank you, Lord, for returning my soul to me.”
When you start that way, the rest of the day is a bonus.
Can I ask you something?
“Yes,” he said.
What makes a man happy?
“Well…” He rolled his eyes around the hospital room. “This may not be the best setting for that question.”
Yeah, you’re right.
“On the other hand…” He took a deep breath. “On the other hand, here in this building, we must face the real issues. Some people will get better. Some will not. So it may be a good place to define what that word means.”
Happiness?
“That’s right. The things society tells us we must have to be happy-a new this or that, a bigger house, a better job. I know the falsity of it. I have counseled many people who have all these things, and I can tell you they are not happy because of them.
“The number of marriages that have disintegrated when they had all the stuff in the world. The families who fought and argued all the time, when they had money and health. Having more does not keep you from wanting more. And if you always want more-to be richer, more beautiful, more well known-you are missing the bigger picture, and I can tell you from experience, happiness will never come.”
You’re not going to tell me to stop and smell the roses, are you?
He chuckled. “Roses would smell better than this place.”
Suddenly, out in the hall, I heard an infant scream, followed by a quick “shhh!” presumably from its mother. The Reb heard it, too.
“Now, that child,” he said, “reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?”
He made a fist.
“Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’
“But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”
What lesson? I asked.
He stretched open his empty fingers.
“We can take nothing with us.”
For a moment we both stared at his hand. It was trembling.
“Ach, you see this?” he said.
Yeah.
“I can’t make it stop.”
He dropped the hand to his chest. I heard a cart being wheeled down the hall. He spoke so wisely, with such passion, that for a moment I’d forgotten where we were.
“Anyhow,” he said, his voice trailing off.
I hated seeing him in that bed. I wanted him home, with the messy desk and the mismatched clothes. I forced a smile.
So, have we solved the secret of happiness?
“I believe so,” he said.
Are you going to tell me?
“Yes. Ready?”
Ready.
“Be satisfied.”
That’s it?
“Be grateful.”
That’s it?
“For what you have. For the love you receive. And for what God has given you.”
That’s it?
He looked me in the eye. Then he sighed deeply.
“That’s it.”
When I left the hospital that day, I got a phone call from the Reb’s youngest daughter, Gilah. She was about my age; I had known her during our school years, and we’d kept up loosely. She was funny, warm, opinionated, and deeply loving to her father.
“So, did he tell you?” she said, glumly.
What?
“The tumor.”
What?
“It’s in his lung.”
Cancer?
“He didn’t say anything?”
I looked at the phone.
He’d never said a word.