In downtown Detroit, there is a church on Trumbull Avenue, across from an empty field. It is a huge, Gothic structure made of red brick and limestone, and it looks as if it blew in from another century. Pointy spires. Arched doorways. Stained glass windows, including one in which the apostle Paul asks, “What must I do to be saved?”
The building itself dates back to 1881, when the neighborhood was full of mansions and wealthy Presbyterians. They built the church to hold twelve hundred members, the largest such congregation in the Midwest. Now the mansions are gone, so are the Presbyterians, and in this poor, barren neighborhood, the church seems forgotten. The walls are decaying. The roof is crumbling. Over the years, some of the stained glass panels were stolen, and some windows have been boarded up.
I used to drive past this church on my way to Tiger Stadium, a famous baseball park a half mile down the street. I never went inside. I never saw anyone go inside.
For all I knew, the place was abandoned.
I was about to find out.
In the months since the Reb had surprised me with those words enemy schmenemy, I had been forced to rethink some of my own prejudices. The truth was, while I tried to be a charitable man, I still drew mental lines between “my” side and the “other” side-whether cultural, ethnic, or religious. I had been taught, as many of us are, that charity begins at home, and helping your own kind should come first.
But who was my “own kind”? I lived far from where I was raised. I married a woman from a different faith. I was a white man in an overwhelmingly African-American city. And while I had been lucky financially, Detroit was going broke around me. The near-depression that would soon hit the nation foretold itself in our streets. Jobs disappeared at an alarming rate. Homes were foreclosed. Buildings were abandoned. Our daily bread, the auto industry, was crumbling, and the swelling numbers of unemployed and homeless were scary.
One night I found myself at a downtown shelter, a Christian rescue mission, where I decided to spend the night and write about the experience. I waited on line for a blanket and soap. I was given a bed. I heard a minister preach about Jesus and was surprised at how many of the weary men, chins in their hands, still listened to how they could be saved.
At one point, in line for food, a man turned and asked if I was who he thought I was.
Yes, I said.
He nodded slowly.
“So…What happened to you?”
That night motivated me to create a charity for the homeless. We raised and distributed money to area shelters. We took pride in no overhead or administrative fees, and if we couldn’t see and touch where the disbursements went, we didn’t proceed. That meant many in-person visits.
And so, on a humid September afternoon, I pulled my car up to the old, decaying church on Trumbull. The pastor, I had been told, ran a small shelter there. I had come to see if it needed assistance.
A traffic signal swayed in the wind. I stepped from the car and clicked the lock button on my key. A man and a woman, both African-American, were sitting by the church wall in fold-up aluminum chairs, the cheap kind we used to take to the beach. They stared at me. The man was missing his left leg.
I’m looking for the pastor, I said.
The woman rose. She pushed through a small red door that was weakly hinged. I waited. The one-legged man, his crutches resting against the chair, smiled at me. He wore glasses and was missing most of his front teeth.
“Kinda warm today,” he said.
Yeah, I said.
I glanced at my watch. I shifted on my feet. Finally, I saw movement in the shadows.
And then.
And then out stepped a large man.
An extremely large man.
He was, I would learn, fifty years old-although his face was still boyish, with a thin, close-cropped beard-and he was tall as a basketball player, but he had to weigh more than four hundred pounds. His body seemed to unroll in layers, a broad slab of a chest cascading into a huge belly that hung like a pillow over the belt of his pants. His arms spread the sleeves of his oversized white T-shirt. His forehead was sweating, and he breathed heavily, as if he’d just climbed stairs.
If this is a Man of God, I thought, I’m the man in the moon.
“Hello,” he rasped, holding out his hand. “I’m Henry.”
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1981
“A military chaplain told me the following story:
“A soldier’s little girl, whose father was being moved to a distant post, was sitting at the airport among her family’s meager belongings.
“The girl was sleepy. She leaned against the packs and duffel bags.
“A lady came by, stopped, and patted her on the head.
“‘Poor child,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got a home.’
“The child looked up in surprise.
“But we do have a home,’ she said. ‘We just don’t have a house to put it in.’”
The Reb was using a walker now. I heard it thumping toward me as I stood outside his front door. It was September, three years after the hospital visit. The leaves were starting to change color, and I noticed a strange car in his driveway. His muffled voice sang from inside, “I’m coming…hold on…I’m coming…”
The door opened. He smiled. He was thinner now than when I first began visiting; his arms were bonier and his face more drawn. His hair was white, and his once-tall body was bent at an angle. His fingers gripped the walker tightly.
“Say hello to my new companion,” he said, rattling the handles. “We go everywhere together.”
He lowered his voice.
“I can’t shake him!”
I laughed.
“So. Come.”
I stepped in behind him, as I always did, and he pushed, lifted and thumped his way to the office with all his books and the file on God.
The car belonged to a home health care worker who now came to the house to aid the Reb. It was an admission that his body could betray him without warning, an admission that things could happen. The tumor in his lung was still there. But at the Reb’s advanced age-now eighty-nine-the doctors felt it was not worth the risk to remove it. Ironically, as the Reb slowed down, so did the aggressiveness of the cancer, like two tired combatants plodding toward a finish line.
Politely put, the doctors said, age would likely claim the Reb before any tumor did.
As we dragged down the hall, I realized another reason that car stood out: there was pretty much nothing new in this house since I started visiting six years earlier. The furniture hadn’t changed. No carpet had been redone. The television had not grown in size.
The Reb had never been big on stuff.
But then, he’d never had much of it.
He was born in 1917, and his parents were poor even by the day’s modest standards. Albert’s mother was a Lithuanian immigrant, and his father, a textile salesman, was always in and out of work. They lived in a cramped apartment building on Topping Avenue in the Bronx. Food was scarce. Young Albert would come home from school each day praying not to see the family’s furniture out in the street.
As the oldest of three-a sister and a brother followed him-he spent from sunrise to sunset in a religious academy called a yeshiva. He had no bicycles or fancy toys. Sometimes his mother would buy bread from the two-day-old bin, spread jam on it, and feed it to him with hot tea. He recalled that as “the most heavenly meal of my childhood.”
As the Great Depression widened, Albert had but two sets of clothes, one for weekdays, one for Sabbath. His shoes were old and cobbled, his socks were washed out nightly. On the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah-the day, in his religion, that he became a man-his father gave him a new suit. He wore it as proudly as any kid could wear anything.
A few weeks later, wearing that same suit, he and his father took a trolley car to a relative’s house, a well-to-do attorney. His father carried a cake that his mother had baked.
At the house, a teenage cousin came running up, took one look at Albert, and burst out laughing. “Al, that’s my old suit!” he squealed. “Hey, guys! Look! Al’s wearing my old suit!”
Albert was mortified. For the rest of the visit, he sat red-faced in humiliation. On the trolley ride home, he fought tears as he glared at his father, who had traded the cake for a suitcase full of clothes, an exchange the son now understood as rich relatives giving to poor ones.
Finally, when they got home, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I don’t understand,” Albert burst out to his father. “You’re a religious man. Your cousin isn’t. You pray every day. He doesn’t. They have everything they want. And we have nothing!’”
His father nodded, then answered in Yiddish, in a slight singsong voice.
God and the decision he renders is correct.
God doesn’t punish anyone out of the blue.
God knows what he is doing.
That was the last they spoke of it.
And the last time Albert Lewis judged life by what he owned.
Now, seventy-six years later, what he owned meant so little, it was a source of comedy. He dressed like a rummage sale. He mixed plaid shirts and loud socks with pants from Haband, a low-cost clothing line that featured items like polyester jeans and eleven-pocket vests. The Reb loved those things, the more pockets the better. He would stash notes, pens, tiny flashlights, five-dollar bills, clippings, pencils.
He was like a kid when it came to possessions; price tags meant nothing, small enjoyment meant everything. High tech? He liked a clock radio playing classical music. Fancy restaurants? His culinary pleasures were graham crackers and peanut butter cookies. His idea of a great meal was pouring cereal into his oatmeal, adding a cup of raisins, and stirring it all up. He adored food shopping, but only for bargains-a leftover habit from his Depression days-and his supermarket journeys were something of legend. He would push a cart through the aisles for hours, judiciously choosing the correct merchandise. Then, at the cash register, he would dole out coupon after coupon, joking with the cashiers, proudly adding up the savings.
For years, his wife had to pick up his paychecks, or else he’d never bother. His starting salary at the temple was just a few thousand dollars a year, and after five decades of service, his compensation was embarrassing compared to other clerics. He never pushed for more. He thought it unseemly. He didn’t even own a car for the first few years of his service; a neighbor named Eddie Adelman would drive him into Philadelphia and drop him off at a subway so that he could take a class at Dropsie College.
The Reb seemed to embody a magnetic repulsion between faith and wealth. If congregants tried to give him things for free, he suggested they contribute to charity instead. He hated to fund-raise, because he never felt a clergyman should ask people for money. He once said in a sermon that the only time he ever wished he was a millionaire was when he thought about how many families he could save from financial sorrow.
What he liked was old things. Old coins. Old paintings. Even his personal prayer book was old and fraying, stuffed with clippings and held together with rubber bands.
“I have what I need,” he said, surveying his messy shelves. “Why bother chasing more?”
You’re like that Biblical quote, I said. What profits a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
“That’s Jesus.”
Oops, sorry, I said.
“Don’t apologize,” he said, smiling. “It’s still good.”
Church
As the Detroit traffic whizzed by outside, I walked through an oversized sanctuary with Pastor Henry Covington of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry. It was a spectacular old room, with massive high ceilings, a large mahogany pulpit, a towering pipe organ, and an upper balcony of pews.
It was also rotting away.
Paint peeled everywhere. The plaster was cracking. Floorboards had deteriorated, and the carpet had dips that could twist your ankle. I looked up and saw a hole in the ceiling.
A huge hole.
Maybe ten feet long.
“That’s a big problem,” Henry admitted. “Especially when it rains.”
I noticed red buckets in strategic spots to catch the water. The white plaster was stained brown by seepage. I had never seen such a hole in a religious building. It looked like the hull of a ship blown apart by a cannon shot.
We sat down. Henry’s belly hung so large in front of him, he seemed to hook his elbows over the pew for balance.
“I’m not sure why you’re here,” he said politely.
You take care of homeless people, right?
“Yes, a couple of nights a week,” Henry said.
They eat here?
“Yes, in our gym.”
And sleep here?
“Yes.”
Do they have to be Christian?
“No.”
Do you try to convert them?
“No. We offer prayers. We ask if anyone wants to give their life to Jesus, but no one is forced. Anyone can come.”
I nodded. I told him about the charity. How maybe we could help.
“Oh.” His eyebrows lifted. “Well. That would be excellent.”
I looked around.
This is a big church, I said.
“I know it,” he said, chuckling.
You have a New York accent.
“Um-hmm. Brooklyn.”
Was this your first assignment?
“Yes. When I first came, I was a deacon and a caretaker. I swept, mopped, vacuumed, cleaned the toilets.”
I thought of how the Reb, when he first arrived at our temple, had to help clean up and lock the doors. Maybe that’s how Men of God develop humility.
“Long time ago,” Henry said, “this was a famous church. But a few years back, they sold it to our ministry. Actually, they said if you can pay the upkeep, it’s yours.”
I glanced around.
Were you always going to be a pastor?
He snorted a laugh.
“Noooo.”
What did you plan on doing when you got out of school?
“Actually, I was in prison.”
Really? I said, acting casual. What for?
“Whoo, I did a lot of things. Drugs, stealing cars. I went to prison for manslaughter. Something I wasn’t even involved in.”
And how did you get from that to this?
“Well…one night I thought I was going to be killed by some guys I stole from. So I made God a promise. If I lived to the morning, I would give myself to Him.”
He paused, as if some rusty old pain had just rumbled inside him. “That was twenty years ago,” he said.
He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. “I seen a lot in life. I know what the songwriter meant when he wrote, ‘Glory, Glory, hallelujah, since I laid my burden down.’”
Okay, I said, because I didn’t know what you say to that.
A few minutes later, we walked to the side exit. The floors were caked with grime. A stairway ran down to a small, dimly lit gymnasium, where, he told me, the homeless slept.
I was noncommittal about the charity help that day, saying I’d come back and we could talk more. To be honest, the prison thing was a red flag. I knew people could change. I also knew some people only changed locations.
Covering sports for a living-and living in Detroit -I had seen my share of bad behavior: drugs, assault, guns. I had witnessed “apologies” in crowded press conferences. I interviewed men so adept at convincing you the trouble was behind them, that I would write laudatory stories-only to see the same men back in trouble a few months later.
In sports, it was bad enough. But I had a particular distaste for religious hypocrisy. Televangelists who solicited money, got arrested for lewd behavior, and soon were back soliciting under the guise of repentance-that stuff turned my stomach. I wanted to trust Henry Covington. But I didn’t want to be naïve.
And then, let’s be honest, his world of faith wasn’t one I was used to. So broken down. So makeshift. The church seemed to sag even on the inside. The up staircase, Henry said, led to a floor where five tenants lived in dormlike rooms.
So, wait, people live in your church?
“Yes. A few. They pay a small rent.”
How do you pay your bills?
“Mostly from that.”
What about membership dues?
“There aren’t any.”
Then how do you get paid a salary?
He laughed.
“I don’t.”
We stepped out into the sun. The one-legged man was still there. He smiled. I forced a smile back.
Well, Pastor, I’ll be in touch, I said.
I don’t know if I meant it.
“You’re welcome to come to service on Sunday,” he said.
I’m not Christian.
He shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that meant okay, then you’re not welcome, or okay, you still are.
Have you ever been in a synagogue? I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “when I was a teenager.”
What was the occasion?
He looked down sheepishly.
“We were robbing it.”
The synagogue parking lot was jammed with cars, and the spillover stretched half a mile down the main road. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the day when, it is said, the Lord decides who will be sealed in the Book of Life for another year.
Although solemn by any measure, this was always the Reb’s shining hour, the morning for which his greatest sermons seemed reserved. It was rare when congregants did not go home buzzing about the Reb’s message on life, death, love, forgiveness.
Not today. At eighty-nine, he had stopped giving sermons. He made no appearance on the pulpit. Instead, he sat quietly among the other worshippers, and I sat in the next section over, beside my father and mother, as I had done on this occasion all my life.
It was the one day I looked like I belonged.
At some point during the afternoon service, I walked over to find the Reb. I passed former classmates, vaguely familiar faces but with thinning hair now, or eyeglasses, or jowls that didn’t used to be there. They smiled and whispered hello, recalling me faster than I did them, and I wondered if deep down they thought I felt superior because I’d moved on. They might have been justified; I think I acted that way.
The Reb was sitting a few seats off the aisle, clapping along to an upbeat prayer. He wore a cream-colored robe, as usual, but his walker, which he hated to use in public, rested against the nearby wall. Sarah was next to him, and when she spotted me, she tapped her husband, who looked over from his clapping.
“Ahh,” he said. “All the way from Detroit.”
His family members helped him up.
“Come. Let’s talk.”
He eased out slowly, finding the walker. People in the aisle drew in, hands at the ready, in case he needed help. You could see in their faces the mix of reverence and concern.
He grabbed the handles and steered himself out.
Twenty minutes later, after stopping every few feet to greet somebody, we found seats in his small office, across from the large one he’d once inhabited. I had never before had a private audience with the Reb on the holiest day of the year. It felt strange being in his office when all those other people were outside.
“Your wife is here?” he asked.
With my folks, I said.
“Good.”
He had always been sweet to my wife. And he never chafed me over her faith. That was kind.
How are you feeling? I asked.
“Ach. They want me to eat today.”
Who?
“The doctors.”
It’s okay.
“It isn’t.” He clenched a fist. “Today we fast. That is my tradition. I want to do what I always did.”
He lowered the fist, which shook on its own.
“You see?” he whispered. “This is man’s dilemma. We rail against it.”
Getting old?
“Getting old, we can deal with. Being old is the problem.”
One of the Reb’s most memorable sermons, to me, anyhow, came after his oldest living relative, an aunt, had died. His mother and father were already gone, and his grandparents were long since buried. As he stood near his aunt’s grave, he realized a simple but frightening thought:
I’m next.
What do you do when death’s natural pecking order puts you in the front of the line, when you no longer can hide behind “It’s not my turn”?
Seeing the Reb now, slumped behind his desk, reminded me, sadly, of how long he had been on top of his family’s list.
Why don’t you do sermons anymore? I asked.
“I can’t bear the thought,” he said, sighing. “If I stumbled on a word. If, at a key moment, I should lose my place-”
You don’t need to be embarrassed.
“Not me,” he corrected. “The people. If they see me discombobulated…it reminds them that I’m dying. I don’t want to scare them like that.”
I should have known he was thinking of us.
As a child, I truly believed there was a Book of Life, some huge, dusty thing in a library in the sky, and once a year, on the Day of Atonement, God flipped through the pages with a feathered quill pen and-check, check, X, check-you lived or you died. I was always afraid that I wasn’t praying hard enough, that I needed to shut my eyes tighter to will God’s pen from one side to the other.
What do people fear most about death? I asked the Reb.
“Fear?” He thought for a moment. “Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?”
That’s big.
“Yes. But there’s something else.”
What else?
He leaned forward.
“Being forgotten,” he whispered.
There is a cemetery not far from my house, with graves that date back to the nineteenth century. I have never seen anyone come there to lay a flower. Most people just wander through, read the engravings, and say, “Wow. Look how old.”
That cemetery came to mind in the Reb’s office, after he quoted a poem both beautiful and heartbreaking. Written by Thomas Hardy, it told of a man among tombstones, conversing with the dead below. The recently buried souls lamented the older souls that had already slid from memory:
They count as quite forgot,
They are as men who have existed not,
Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath
It is the second death.
The second death. The unvisited in nursing homes. The homeless found frozen in alleys. Who mourned their passing? Who marked their time on earth?
“Once, on a trip to Russia,” the Reb recalled, “we found an old Orthodox synagogue. Inside, there was an elderly man, standing alone, saying the mourner’s Kaddish. Being polite, we asked for whom he was saying it. He looked up and answered, ‘I am saying it for myself.’”
The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public Web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming, Notice me! Remember me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.
How then, I asked the Reb, can you avoid the second death?
“In the short run,” he said, “the answer is simple. Family. It is through my family that I hope to live on for a few generations. When they remember me, I live on. When they pray for me, I live on. All the memories we have made, the laughs and the tears.
“But that, too, is limited.”
How so?
He sang the next sentence.
“Ifff…I’ve done a good jobbb, then I’ll be re-mem-bered one generation, maybe two…but e-ven-tu-allllly…they’re gonna say, ‘What was his naaame again?’”
At first I protested. Then I stopped. I realized I did not know my great-grandmother’s name. I’d never seen my great-grandfather’s face. How many generations does it take, even in close-knit families, for the fabric to unravel?
“This is why,” the Reb said, “faith is so important. It is a rope for us all to grab, up and down the mountain. I may not be remembered in so many years. But what I believe and have taught-about God, about our tradition-that can go on. It comes from my parents and their parents before them. And if it stretches to my grandchildren and to their grandchildren, then we are all, you know…”
Connected?
“That’s it.”
We should get back to services, I said.
“All right. Yes. Gimme a little shove here.”
I realized it was just me there, and he couldn’t get up from the chair without help. How far was this from the days when he commanded the pulpit with a booming voice and I sat in the crowd, wowed by his performance? I tried not to think about that. I awkwardly moved behind him, counted “one…two…three,” then lifted him by the elbows.
“Ahhhh,” he exhaled. “Old, old, old.”
I bet you could still do a helluva sermon.
He grabbed the walker’s handles. He paused.
“You think so?” he asked, softly.
Yeah, I said. No question.
In the basement of his house there are old film reels of the Reb, Sarah, and their family:
Here they are in the early 1950s, bouncing their first child, Shalom.
Here they are a few years later with their twin girls, Orah and Rinah.
Here they are in 1960, pushing Gilah, their youngest, in her baby carriage.
Although the footage is grainy, the expressions of delight on the Reb’s face-holding, hugging, and kissing his children-are unmistakable. He seems predestined to raise a family. He never hits his kids. He rarely raises his voice. He makes memories in small, loving bites: slow afternoon walks home from temple, nights doing homework with his daughters, long Sabbath dinners of family conversation, summer days throwing a baseball backward over his head to his son.
Once, he drives Shalom and a few of his young friends over the bridge from Philadelphia. As they approach the toll booth, he asks if the boys have their passports.
“Passports?” they say.
“You mean you don’t have your passports-and you expect to get into New Jersey?” he cries. “Quick! Hide under that blanket! Don’t breathe! Don’t make a sound!”
Later, he teases them about the whole thing. But under that blanket, in the back of a car, another family story is forged, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.
His kids are grown now. His son is an established rabbi. His oldest daughter is a library director; his youngest, a teacher. They each have children of their own.
“We have this photograph, all of us together,” the Reb says. “Whenever I feel the spirit of death hovering, I look at that picture, the whole family smiling at the camera. And I say, ‘Al, you done okay.
“This is your immortality.’”
As I entered the church, a thin man with a high forehead nodded and gave me a small white envelope in case I wished to make a donation. He motioned for me to take a seat anywhere. The weather had turned to a blowing rain, and the hole in the ceiling loomed overhead, dark and dripping, the red buckets on plywood planks to catch the incoming water.
The pews were mostly empty. Up front, near the altar, a man sat behind a portable organ and occasionally hit a chord, which was punctuated with a rim shot-pwock!-by a drummer. Their small music echoed in the big room.
Standing to the side was Pastor Henry, in a long blue robe, swaying back and forth. After several of his entreaties, I had come to a service. I’m not sure why. Maybe curiosity. Maybe, to be blunt, to see if I trusted him for the charity contribution. We had spoken several times now. He had spared no detail of his criminal history-the drugs, the guns, the jail time-and while it was nice that he was honest, if you went strictly on his past, there might be no reason to invest in his future.
But there was also something sad and confessional in his face, something weary in his voice, as if he’d had enough of the world, or at least certain parts of it. And while I couldn’t help but think of that old expression “Never trust a fat preacher,” I had little concern that Henry Covington was siphoning profits from his congregation. There were none to be had.
He looked up from his meditation and saw me. Then he continued praying.
Henry Covington was sent to Detroit in 1992 by Bishop Roy Brown of the Pilgrim Assemblies International in New York. Brown had discovered Henry in his church, had heard his testimony, and had taken him to prisons and watched the way inmates reacted to his story. Eventually, after training him, teaching him, and ordaining him a deacon, he asked Henry to go to the Motor City.
Henry would have done anything for Brown. He moved his family into a Ramada Inn in downtown Detroit and was paid three hundred dollars a week to help build a new Pilgrim ministry. His transportation was an old black limousine that Bishop Brown granted him, in part to ferry the man around when he came to town for weekend services.
Over the years, Henry served under three different pastors, and each one noted his devotion to study and his easy connection to people in the neighborhood. They elevated him to elder and finally pastor. But eventually the Pilgrim interest faded, Bishop Brown stopped coming, and so did Henry’s money.
He had to sink or swim on his own.
His house went into foreclosure. The sheriffs put a sign on the door. His water and electricity were turned off. Meanwhile, the ignored church had a busted boiler and cracked pipes. There were local drug dealers who let it be known that if Henry let the place serve as a secret distribution center, his financial woes could go away.
But Henry was done with that life.
So he dug in. He formed the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry, he asked God for guidance, and he did whatever he could to keep his church and his family afloat.
Now, as the organ played, someone hobbled forward on crutches. It was the one-legged man from my first visit. His nickname was Cass, short for Anthony Castelow. It turned out he was a church elder.
“Thank you, thank you, Lord,” he began, his eyes nearly closed, “thank you, thank you, thank you…”
Someone clapped. Someone yelled, “Well…,” which came out more like “Way-elll.” You could hear the traffic noise through the doors when they opened.
“Thank you, Jesus…thank you for our pastor, thank you for the day…”
I counted twenty-six people, all African-American, mostly female. I sat behind an older woman who wore a dress the color of a Caribbean sea, with a wide hat to match. As crowds went, it was a far cry from those megachurches in California, or even a suburban synagogue.
“Thank you for this day, thank you, Jesus…”
When Elder Cass finished, he turned to go, but the cord got caught in his crutch and the microphone hit the floor with an amplified phwock.
A woman quickly put it right.
Then the sanctuary quieted.
And with his cheeks and forehead already shiny with perspiration, Pastor Henry came forward.
The moment a cleric rises for a sermon is, for me, a time for the body to ease in, as if the good listening is about to start. I had always done this with the Reb, and, out of habit, I slid down in the wooden pew as the organist held the last chords of “Amazing Grace.”
Henry leaned forward toward the people. He held there, for a moment, as if pondering one last thought. Then he spoke.
“Amazing grace…,” he said, shaking his head. “…Amaaaa-zing grace.”
Someone repeated, “Amazing grace!” Others clapped. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the quiet, reflective audience I was used to.
“Amaaaazing grace,” Henry bellowed. “I coulda been dead.”
“Mmm-hmm!”
“Shoulda been dead!”
“Mmm-hmm!”
“Woulda been dead!…But his grace!”
“Yes!”
“His grace…saved a wretch. And I was a wretch. You know what a wretch is? I was a crackhead, an alcoholic, I was a heroin addict, a liar, a thief. I was all those things. But then came Jesus-”
“Jesus!”
“I call him the greatest recycler I know!…Jesus…he lifts me up. He rearranges me. He repositions me. By myself, I’m no good-”
“Way-ell-”
“But he makes all the difference!”
“Amen to that!”
“Now, yesterday…yesterday, friends, a portion of the ceiling done fell down. It was leaking in the sanctuary. But you know-”
“Tell it, Rev-”
“You know-you-know-you-know…how that song go…Hallelujah-”
“Hallelujah!”
“Anyhow!”
He began to clap. The organist joined in. The drummer right behind him. And off they went, as if a floodlight had just ignited the altar.
“Haaaa-llelujah anyhow…” Henry sang, “…never gonna let life’s troubles get you down…
“No matter what comes your way,
“Lift your voice and say-
“Hallelujah…anyhow!”
His voice was beautiful, pure and crisp and almost too high-pitched, it seemed, to come from such a large man. The whole congregation was immediately engaged, inspired, clapping, dipping shoulders and singing along-all except me. I felt like the loser who got left out of the choir.
“Hal-le-lujah…anyhow!”
When the song stopped, Henry picked right back up with his preaching. There was no line between prayer, hymn, word, song, preach, beseech, or call and respond. It was apparently all part of the package.
“We were in here last night,” Henry said, “just looking around, looking around, and the plaster was peeling and the paint was chipping everywhere-”
“Sure is!”
“And you could hear the water pouring in. We had buckets all over. And I asked the Lord. I began to pray. I said, ‘Lord, show us your mercy and your kindness. Help us heal your house. Just help us fix this hole-’”
“All right now-”
“And for a few minutes, I despaired. Because I don’t know where the money will come from to fix it. But then I stopped.”
“That’s right!”
“I stopped, because I realized something.”
“Yes, Rev!”
“The Lord, you see, he’s interested in what you do, but the Lord don’t care nothing about no building.”
“Amen!”
“The Lord don’t care nothing about no building!”
“That’s RIGHT!”
“Jesus said, ‘Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.’ God don’t care about no building. He cares about you, and what’s in your heart.”
“Lord of Hosts!”
“And if this is the place where we come to worship-if this is the place where we come to worship…if this is the only place we can come to worship…”
He paused. His voice lowered to a whisper.
“Then it is holy to him.”
“Yes, Rev!…Preach it, Pastor!…Amen!…Way-ell!”
The people rose and clapped enthusiastically, convinced, thanks to Henry, that while their building might be disintegrating, their souls were still in sight, and perhaps the Lord was using that roof hole to peer down and help them.
I looked up and saw the red buckets and the water dripping. I saw Henry stepping back, in his huge blue robe, singing along in prayer. I wasn’t sure what to make of him-charismatic, enigmatic, problematic? But you had to figure his mother was right all along. He was going to be a preacher, no matter how long it took.
I begin to read about faiths beyond my own. I am curious to see if they aren’t more similar than I had believed. I read about Mormons, Catholics, Sufis, Quakers.
I come upon a documentary about the Hindu celebration of Kumbh Mela, a holy pilgrimage from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source in the Himalayas. The legend is that four drops of immortal nectar were dropped when the gods fought with the demons in the sky, and that nectar landed in four places on earth. The pilgrimage is a journey to those places; to bathe in the river waters, to wash away sins, and to seek health and salvation.
Millions attend. Tens of millions. It is an incredible sight. I see bearded men dancing. I see holy men with pierced lips and powdered skin. I see elderly women who have traveled for weeks to seek the majesty of God in the snowcapped mountains.
It is the largest gathering of humanity on earth and has been called “the world’s largest single act of faith.” Yet for most in my country, it is totally alien. The documentary refers to Kumbh Mela as “being part of something big while doing something small.”
I wonder if that applies to visiting an old man in New Jersey?
I haven’t said a lot about the Reb’s wife. I should.
According to Jewish tradition, forty days before a male baby is born, a heavenly voice shouts out whom he will marry. If so, the name “Sarah” was yelled for Albert sometime in 1917. Their union was long, loving, and resilient.
They met through a job interview in Brighton Beach -he was a principal, she was seeking an English teacher’s job-and they disagreed on several issues and she left thinking, “There goes that job”; but he hired her and admired her. And eventually, months later, he asked her into his office.
“Are you seeing anyone romantically?” he inquired.
“No, I’m not,” she replied.
“Good. Please keep it that way. Because I intend to ask you to marry me.”
She hid her amusement.
“Anything else?” she said.
“No,” he answered.
“Okay.” And she left.
It took months for him to follow up, his shyness having taken over, but he did, eventually, and they courted. He took her to a restaurant. He took her to Coney Island. The first time he tried to kiss her, he got hiccups.
Two years later, they were married.
In more than six decades together, Albert and Sarah Lewis raised four children, buried one, danced at their kids’ weddings, attended their parents’ funerals, welcomed seven grandchildren, lived in just three houses, and never stopped supporting, debating, loving, and cherishing each other. They might argue, even give each other the silent treatment, but their children would see them at night, through the door, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding hands.
They truly were a team. From the pulpit, the Reb might zing her with, “Excuse me, young lady, could you tell us your name?” She would get him back by telling people, “I’ve had thirty wonderful years with my husband, and I’ll never forget the day we were married, November 3, 1944.”
“Wait…,” someone would say, doing the math, “that’s way more than thirty years ago.”
“Right,” she would say. “On Monday you get twenty great minutes, on Tuesday you get a great hour. You put it all together, you get thirty great years.”
Everyone would laugh, and her husband would beam. In a list of suggestions for young clerics, the Reb had once written “find a good partner.”
He had found his.
And just as harvests make you wise to farming, so did years of matrimony enlighten the Reb as to how a marriage works-and doesn’t. He had officiated at nearly a thousand weddings, from the most basic to the embarrassingly garish. Many couples lasted. Many did not.
Can you predict which marriages will survive? I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “If they’re communicating well, they have a good chance. If they have a similar belief system, similar values, they have a good chance.”
What about love?
“Love they should always have. But love changes.”
What do you mean?
“Love-the infatuation kind-‘he’s so handsome, she’s so beautiful’-that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.
“On the other hand, a true love can enrich itself. It gets tested and grows stronger. Like in Fiddler on the Roof. You remember? When Tevye sings ‘Do You Love Me?’?”
I should have seen this coming. I think Fiddler on the Roof was pretty much the Reb’s worldview. Religion. Tradition. Community. And a husband and wife-Tevye and Golde-whose love is proven through action, not words.
“When she says, ‘How can you ask if I love you? Look at all I’ve done with you. What else would you call it?’
“That kind of love-the kind you realize you already have by the life you’ve created together-that’s the kind that lasts.”
The Reb was lucky to have such a love with Sarah. It had endured hardships by relying on cooperation-and selflessness. The Reb was fond of telling young couples, “Remember, the only difference between ‘marital’ and ‘martial’ is where you put the ‘i.’”
He also, on occasion, told the joke about a man who complains to his doctor that his wife, when angry, gets historical.
“You mean hysterical,” the doctor says.
“No, historical,” the man says. “She lists the history of every wrong thing I’ve ever done!”
Still, the Reb knew that marriage was an endangered institution. He’d officiated for couples, seen them split, then officiated when they married someone else.
“I think people expect too much from marriage today,” he said. “They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That’s TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.
“Like Sarah says, twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren’t so great, you don’t junk the whole thing. It’s okay to have an argument. It’s okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It’s part of being close to someone.
“But the joy you get from that same closeness-when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other-that, as our tradition teaches us, is a blessing. People forget that.”
Why do they forget it?
“Because the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning. I’m old enough to remember when it used to be a positive. A committed person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You don’t want to tie yourself down.
“It’s the same with faith, by the way. We don’t want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don’t want to commit to God. We’ll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power-in faith and in marriage.”
And if you don’t commit? I asked.
“Your choice. But you miss what’s on the other side.”
What’s on the other side?
“Ah.” He smiled. “A happiness you cannot find alone.”
Moments later, Sarah entered the room, wearing her coat. Like her husband, she was in her eighties, had thick, whitening hair, wore glasses, and had a disarming smile.
“I’m going shopping, Al,” she said.
“All right. We will miss you.” He crossed his hands over his stomach, and for a moment they just grinned at each other.
I thought about their commitment, sixty-plus years. I thought about how much he relied on her now. I pictured them at night, holding hands on the edge of the bed. A happiness you cannot find alone.
“I was going to ask you a question,” the Reb told his wife.
“Which is?”
“Well…I’ve already forgotten.”
“Okay,” she laughed. “The answer is no.”
“Or maybe no?”
“Or maybe no.”
She walked over and playfully shook his hand.
“So, it was nice to meet you.”
He laughed. “It was a pleasure.”
They kissed.
I don’t know about forty days before you’re born, but at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear two names shouted from the heavens.
As a child, I am certain I will never marry out of my religion.
As an adult, I do it anyhow.
My wife and I are wed on a Caribbean island. The sun is going down, the weather is warm and lovely. Her family reads Bible passages. My siblings sing a funny tribute. I step on a glass. We are married by a local female magistrate, who offers us her own private blessing.
Although we come from different faiths, we forge a loving solution: I support her, she supports me, we attend each other’s religious functions, and while we both stand silent during certain prayers, we always say “Amen.”
Still, there are moments: when she is troubled, she asks Jesus for help, and I hear her pray quietly and I feel locked out. When you intermarry, you mix more than two people-you mix histories, traditions, you mix the Holy Communion stories and the Bar Mitzvah photos. And even though, as she sometimes says, “I believe in the Old Testament; we’re not that different,” we are different.
Are you angry with me about my marriage? I ask the Reb.
“Why would I be angry?” he says. “What would anger do? Your wife is a wonderful person. You love each other. I see that.”
Then how do you square that with your job?
“Well. If one day you came and said, ‘Guess what? She wants to convert to Judaism,’ I wouldn’t be upset. Until then…”
He sang. “Until then, we’ll all get alonnng…”
Life of Henry
I couldn’t help but compare the Reb and Pastor Henry now and then. Both loved to sing. Both delivered a mean sermon. Like the Reb, Henry had been shepherd to just one congregation his whole career and husband to just one wife. And like Albert and Sarah Lewis, Henry and Annette Covington had a son and two daughters, and had also lost a child.
But after that, their stories veered apart.
Henry, for example, didn’t meet his future wife at a job interview. He first saw Annette when she was shooting dice.
“Come on, six!” she yelled, throwing the bones against a stoop with his older brother. “Six dice! Gimme a six!”
She was fifteen, Henry was sixteen, and he was smitten, totally gone, like those cartoons where Cupid shoots an arrow with a boinngg! You might not view a dice roll as romantic, and it may not seem a fitting way for a Man of God to find a lasting love, but at nineteen, when Henry went to prison, he told Annette, “I don’t expect you to wait seven years,” and she said, “If it was twenty-five years, I’d still be here.” So who is to say what a lasting love looks like?
Every weekend during Henry’s incarceration, Annette rode a bus that left the city around midnight and took six hours to reach upstate New York. She was there when the sun came up, and when visiting hours began, she and Henry held hands and played cards and talked until those hours were over. She rarely missed a weekend, despite the grueling schedule, and she kept his spirits up by giving him something to look forward to. Henry’s mother sent him a letter while he was locked up, saying if he did not stay with Annette, “you might find another woman, but you will never find your wife.”
They were married when he got out, in a simple ceremony at Mt. Moriah Church. He was slim then, handsome and tall; she wore her hair in bangs, and her high smile gleamed in the wedding photos. There was a reception at a nightclub called Sagittarius. They spent the weekend at a hotel in the garment district. Monday morning, Annette was back at work.
She was twenty-two. Henry was twenty-three. Within a year, they would lose a baby, lose a job, and see the boiler in their apartment burst in winter, leaving them with icicles hanging from their ceiling.
And then the real trouble started.
The Reb said that a good marriage should endure tribulations, and Henry and Annette’s had done that. But early on, those “tribulations” were drug abuse, crime, and avoiding the police. Not exactly Fiddler on the Roof. Both Henry and Annette had been addicts, who cleaned up once Henry came home from prison. But after their baby died and the boiler burst and Annette lost her job-and a broke Henry saw his drug-dealing brother with a fat bankroll of hundred-dollar bills-they fell back into that life, and they fell all the way. Henry sold drugs at parties. He sold them from his house. Soon the customers were so frequent, he made them wait on the corner and come up one at a time. He and Annette became heavy users and drinkers, and they lived in fear of both the police and rival drug lords. One night, Henry was taken for a ride with some Manhattan dealers, a ride he thought might end in his death; Annette was waiting with gun in hand if he didn’t come back.
But when Henry finally hit bottom-that night behind those trash cans-Annette did, too.
“What’s keeping you from going to God?” Henry asked her that Easter morning.
“You are,” she admitted.
The next week, he and Annette got rid of the drugs and the guns. They threw away the paraphernalia. They went back to church and read the Bible nightly. They fought back periodic weaknesses and helped one another get through.
One morning, a few months into this rehabilitation, there was a knock at their door. It was very early. A man’s voice said he wanted to buy some product.
Henry, in bed, shouted for him to go away, he didn’t do that anymore. The man persisted. Henry yelled, “There ain’t nothing in here!” The man kept knocking. Henry got out of bed, pulled a sheet around himself, and went to the door.
“I told you-”
“Don’t move!” a voice barked.
Henry was staring at five police officers, their guns drawn.
“Step away,” one said.
They pushed through his door. They told Annette to freeze. They searched the entire place, top to bottom, warning the couple that if they had anything incriminating, they had better tell them now. Henry knew everything was gone, but his heart was racing. Did I miss anything? He glanced around. Nothing there. Nothing there-
Oh, no.
Suddenly, he couldn’t swallow. It felt like a baseball was in his throat. Sitting on an end table, one atop the other, were two red notebooks. One, Henry knew, contained Bible verses from Proverbs, which he had been writing down every night. The other was older. It contained names, transactions, and dollar amounts of hundreds of drug deals.
He had taken out the old notebook to destroy it. Now it could destroy him. An officer wandered over. He lifted one of the notebooks and opened it. Henry’s knees went weak. His lungs pounded. The man’s eyes moved up and down the page. Then he threw it down and moved on.
Proverbs, apparently, didn’t interest him.
An hour later, when the police left, Henry and Annette grabbed the old notebook, burned it immediately, and spent the rest of the day thanking God.
What would you do if your clergyman told you stories like that? There was part of me that admired Henry’s honesty, and part that felt his laundry list of bad behavior should somehow disqualify him from the pulpit. Still, I had heard him preach several times now, citing the Book of Acts, the Beatitudes, Solomon, Queen Esther, and Jesus telling his disciples that “anyone who loses his life for me shall find it again.” Henry’s gospel singing was inspired and engaged. And he always seemed to be around the church, either up in his second-floor office-a long, narrow room with a conference table left over from the previous tenants-or in the small, dimly lit gymnasium. One afternoon I walked into the sanctuary, unannounced, and he was sitting there, hands crossed, his eyes closed in prayer.
Before the weather turned cold, Henry occasionally cooked on a grill by the side of the church; chicken, shrimp, whatever he could get donated. He gave it out to whoever was hungry. He even preached sometimes on a low crumbling concrete wall across the street.
“I’ve spread as much of God’s word on that wall,” Henry said one day, “as I have inside.”
How is that?
“Because some people aren’t ready to come in. Maybe they feel guilty, on accounta what they’re up to. So I go out there, bring them a sandwich.”
Kind of like a house call?
“Yeah. Except most of ’em don’t have houses.”
Are some of them on drugs?
“Oh, yeah. But so are some folks coming in on Sundays.”
You’re kidding. During your service?
“Whoo, yeah. I’m looking right at them. You see that head whoppin’ and boppin’ and you say, ‘Umm-hmm, they had something powerful.’”
That doesn’t bother you?
“Not at all. You know what I tell them? I don’t care if you’re drunk, or you just left the drug house, I don’t care. When I’m sick, I go to the emergency room. And if the problem continues, I go again. So whatever’s ailing you, let this church be your emergency room. Until you get the healing, don’t stop coming.”
I studied Henry’s wide, soft face.
Can I ask you something? I said.
“Okay.”
What did you rob from that synagogue?
He exhaled and laughed. “Believe it or not-envelopes.”
Envelopes?
“That’s it. I was just a teenager. Some older guys had broken in before me and stolen anything valuable. All I found was a box of envelopes. I took ’em and ran out.”
Do you even remember what you did with them?
“No,” he answered. “I sure don’t.”
I looked at him, looked at his church, and wondered if one man’s life ever truly makes sense to another.
I take home a box of the Reb’s old sermons. I leaf through them. There is one from the 1950s on “The Purpose of a Synagogue” and one from the 1960s called “The Generation Gap.”
I see one entitled “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” It is from the late 1970s. I read it. I do a double take.
It is an appeal to fix the collapsing roof.
“Our roof sheds copious tears after each rain,” the Reb wrote. He mentioned sitting in the sanctuary when a “sodden wet ceiling tile” fell and just missed him, and a wedding celebration in which two days of rain “created unwanted gravy on the chicken.” During a morning service, he had to grab a broom and puncture a buckling tile to allow the rainwater to gush through.
In the sermon, he beseeches members to give more to keep their house of worship from literally caving in.
I think about Pastor Henry and his roof hole. It is the first time I see a connection. An inner-city church. A suburban synagogue.
Then again, our congregation ultimately came up with the money. And Henry couldn’t even ask his.
When I was a teenager, the Reb did a sermon that made me laugh. He read a thank-you letter from another clergyman. At the end, it was signed: “May your god-and our god-bless you.”
I laughed at the idea that two Almightys could be sent the same message. I was too young to realize the more serious shadings of that distinction.
Once I moved to the Midwest -to an area some nicknamed the “Northern Bible Belt”-the issue became weightier. I had strangers tell me “God bless you” in the grocery store. What should I say to that? I interviewed athletes who credited their “Lord and savior, Jesus Christ” for touchdowns or home runs. I worked volunteer projects with Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics. And because metro Detroit boasts the largest Arab population outside of the Middle East, Muslim issues were a regular part of life, including a debate over a local mosque broadcasting Adhan, the daily call to prayer, in a largely Polish neighborhood that already rang with church bells.
In other words, “May your god and our god bless you”-and whose god was blessing whom-had gone from funny to controversial to confrontational. I found myself keeping quiet. Almost hiding. I think many people in minority religions do this. Part of the reason I drifted from my faith was that I didn’t want to feel defensive about it. A pathetic reason, looking back, but true.
One Sunday, not long before Thanksgiving, I took the train from New York, entered the Reb’s house, greeted him with a hug, and trooped behind him to his office, his metal walker leading the way. It now had a small basket in front, which contained a few books and, for some reason, a red maraca gourd.
“I have found that if the walker looks like a shopping cart,” the Reb said, mischievously, “the congregation is more comfortable.”
His eulogy request now sat like a term paper in my mind. On some visits, I felt I had forever to finish it; on others, I felt I had days, not even weeks. Today, the Reb seemed well, his eyes clear, his voice strong, which reassured me. Once we sat, I told him about the homeless charity and even the rescue mission where I’d spent the night.
I wasn’t sure I should mention a Christian mission to a rabbi, and the moment I said it, I felt guilty, like a traitor. I remembered a story the Reb had told me once about taking his old-world grandmother to a baseball game. When everyone jumped and cheered at a home run, she stayed seated. He turned and asked why she wasn’t clapping for the big hit. And she said to him, in Yiddish, “Albert, is it good for the Jews?”
My worry was wasted. The Reb made no such value judgments. “Our faith tells us to do charitable acts and to aid the poor in our community,” he said. “That is being righteous, no matter who you help.”
Soon we had tumbled into a most fundamental debate. How can different religions coexist? If one faith believes one thing, and another believes something else, how can they both be correct? And does one religion have the right-or even the obligation-to try to convert the other?
The Reb had been living with these issues all of his professional life. “In the early 1950s,” he recalled, “our congregation’s kids used to wrap their Jewish books in brown paper before they got on the bus. Remember, to many around here, we were the first Jewish people they had ever seen.”
Did that make for some strange moments?
He chuckled. “Oh, yes. I remember one time a congregant came to me all upset, because her son, the only Jewish boy in his class, had been cast in the school’s Christmas play. And they cast him as Jesus.
“So I went to the teacher. I explained the dilemma. And she said, ‘But that’s why we chose him, Rabbi. Because Jesus was a Jew!’”
I remembered similar incidents. In elementary school, I was left out of the big, colorful Christmas productions of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” or “Jingle Bells.” Instead, I had to join the school’s few other Jewish kids onstage, as we sang the Hanukah song, “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel, I Made It Out of Clay.” We held hands and moved in a circle, imitating a spinning top. No props. No costumes. At the end of the song, we all fell down.
I swear I saw some gentile parents hiding their laughter.
Is there any winning a religious argument? Whose God is better than whose? Who got the Bible right or wrong? I preferred figures like Rajchandra, the Indian poet who influenced Gandhi by teaching that no religion was superior because they all brought people closer to God; or Gandhi himself, who would break a fast with Hindu prayers, Muslim quotations, or a Christian hymn.
Over the years, the Reb had lived his beliefs, but never tried to convert anyone to them. As a general rule, Judaism does not seek converts. In fact, the tradition is to first discourage them, emphasizing the difficulties and suffering the religion has endured.
This is not the case with all religions. Throughout history, countless millions have been slaughtered for failing to convert, to accept another god, or to denounce their own beliefs. Rabbi Akiva, the famous second-century scholar, was tortured to death by the Romans for refusing to give up his religious study. As they raked his flesh with iron combs, he whispered his final words on earth, “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” He died with the word “one” on his lips.
That prayer-and the word “one”-were integral to the Reb’s beliefs. One, as in the singular God. One, as in the Lord’s creation, Adam.
“Ask yourself, ‘Why did God create but one man?’” the Reb said, wagging a finger. “Why, if he meant for there to be faiths bickering with each other, didn’t he create that from the start? He created trees, right? Not one tree, countless trees. Why not the same with man?
“Because we are all from that one man-and all from that one God. That’s the message.”
Then why, I asked, is the world so fractured?
“Well, you can look at it this way. Would you want the world to all look alike? No. The genius of life is its variety.
“Even in our own faith, we have questions and answers, interpretations, debates. In Christianity, in Catholicism, in other faiths, the same thing-debates, interpretations. That is the beauty. It’s like being a musician. If you found the note, and you kept hitting that note all the time, you would go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that makes the music.”
The music of what?
“Of believing in something bigger than yourself.”
But what if someone from another faith won’t recognize yours? Or wants you dead for it?
“That is not faith. That is hate.” He sighed. “And if you ask me, God sits up there and cries when that happens.”
He coughed, then, as if to reassure me, he smiled. He had fulltime help at the house now; his home care workers had included a tall woman from Ghana and a burly Russian man. Now, on weekdays, there was a lovely Hindu woman from Trinidad named Teela. She helped get him dressed and do some light exercises in the morning, fixed his meals, and drove him to the supermarket and synagogue. Sometimes she would play Hindi religious music over her car stereo. The Reb enjoyed it and asked for a translation. When she talked about reincarnation, per her faith, he quizzed her and apologized for not knowing more about Hinduism over the years.
How can you-a cleric-be so open-minded? I asked.
“Look. I know what I believe. It’s in my soul. But I constantly tell our people: you should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don’t know everything. And since we don’t know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.”
He sighed.
“I’m not being original here, Mitch. Most religions teach us to love our neighbor.”
I thought about how much I admired him at that moment. How he never, even in private, even in old age, tried to bully another belief, or bad-mouth someone else’s devotion. And I realized I had been a bit of a coward on this whole faith thing. I should have been more proud, less intimidated. I shouldn’t have bitten my tongue. If the only thing wrong with Moses is that he’s not yours; if the only thing wrong with Jesus is that he’s not yours; if the only thing wrong with mosques, Lent, chanting, Mecca, Buddha, confession, or reincarnation is that they’re not yours-well, maybe the problem is you.
One more question? I asked the Reb.
He nodded.
When someone from another faith says, “God bless you,” what do you say?
“I say, ‘Thank you, and God bless you, too.’”
Really?
“Why shouldn’t I?”
I went to answer and realized I had no answer. No answer at all.
I read up on Buddhist stories and parables.
One concerns a farmer who wakes up to find that his horse has run off.
The neighbors come by and say, “Too bad. Such awful luck.”
The farmer says, “Maybe.”
The next day, the horse returns with a few other horses. The neighbors congratulate the farmer on his reversal of fortune.
“Maybe,” the farmer says.
When his son tries to ride one of the new horses, he breaks his leg, and the neighbors offer condolences.
“Maybe,” the farmer says.
And the next day, when army officials come to draft the son-and don’t take him because of his broken leg-everyone is happy.
“Maybe,” the farmer says.
I have heard stories like this before. They are beautiful in their simplicity and surrender to the universe. I wonder if I could be attached to something so detached. I don’t know. Maybe.
After leaving the Reb’s house, I stopped at the synagogue, seeking information on the original building back in the 1940s.
“That might be in our files,” a woman had told me over the phone.
I didn’t know there were files, I’d said.
“We have files on everything. We have a file on you.”
You’re kidding. Can I see it?
“You can have it if you want.”
Now I walked into the foyer. The religious school was still in session, and there were kids everywhere. The preteen girls loped with awkward self-awareness, and the boys ran the halls and grabbed their heads to keep their yarmulkes from falling off.
Nothing had changed, I thought. Usually, this would make me feel superior. I had soared away while the poor hometown kids were doing the same old thing. But this time, I don’t know why, all I felt was empty distance.
Hi, I said to a woman behind the desk. My name is-
“Come on, we know you. Here’s the file.”
I blinked. I almost forgot that my family had been part of this place for four decades.
Thanks, I said.
“Sure thing.”
I took the file on me and headed home, or to the place I called home now.
On the plane I leaned back and undid a rubber band that held the file’s contents. I reflected on my life since New Jersey. My plans as a young man-my “citizen of the world” dreams-had come true, to a degree. I had friends in different time zones. I’d had books published in foreign languages. I’d had many addresses over the years.
But you can touch everything and be connected to nothing. I knew airports better than I knew local neighborhoods. I knew more names in other area codes than I did on my block. The “community” I had joined was the community of the workplace. Friends were through work. Conversation was about work. Most of my socialization came through work.
And in recent months, those workplace pillars had been falling down. Friends were laid off. Downsized. They took buyouts. Offices closed. People who were always in one place were no longer there when you called. They sent e-mails saying they were exploring “exciting new options.” I never believed the “exciting” part.
And without the work connection, the human ties released, like magnets losing their attraction. We promised to keep up, but the promises were not kept. Some people behaved as if unemployment were contagious. Anyhow, without the commonality of work-the complaints, the gossip-how much was there to talk about?
When I dumped the contents of my personal file onto the tray table, I found report cards, old papers, even a religious school play I wrote in fourth grade on Queen Esther:
MORDECHI: Esther!
ESTHER: Yes, Uncle?
MORDECHI: Go to the castle.
ESTHER: But I have nothing to wear!
There were also copies of congratulatory letters from the Reb-some handwritten-on getting into college, on my engagement. I felt ashamed. He had tried to stay in touch with these notes. And I didn’t even remember receiving them.
I thought about my connections in life. I thought about workplace friends who were fired, or had quit due to illness. Who comforted them? Where did they go? Not to me. Not to their former bosses.
Often, it seemed, they were helped by their churches or temples. Members took up collections. They cooked meals. They gave money to pay bills. They did it with love, empathy, and the knowledge that it was part of the supportive undercarriage of a “sacred community,” like the ones the Reb spoke about, like the one I guess I had once belonged to, even if I didn’t realize it.
The plane landed. I collected the papers, wrapped them back in the rubber band, and felt a small grief, like a person who discovers, upon returning from a trip, that something has been left behind and there is no way now to retrieve it.
Fall surrendered quickly in Detroit, and in what seemed like minutes, the trees were bare and the color siphoned out of the city, leaving it a barren and concrete place, under milky skies and early snowfalls. We rolled up the car windows. We took out the heavy coats. Our jobless rate was soaring. People couldn’t afford their homes. Some just packed up and walked out, left their whole world behind to bankers or scavengers. It was still November. A long winter lay ahead.
On a Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I came by the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry to see firsthand the homeless program it operated. I still wasn’t totally at ease with Pastor Henry. Everything about his church was different-at least to me. But what the Reb had said resonated, that you can embrace your own faith’s authenticity and still accept that others believe in something else.
Besides, that whole thing about a community-well, Detroit was my city. So I put my toe in the water. I helped Henry purchase a blue tarp for his ceiling, which stretched over the leaking section, so at least the sanctuary would not be flooded. Fixing the roof was a much bigger job, maybe eighty thousand dollars, according to a contractor.
“Whoo,” Henry had gushed, when we heard the estimate. Eighty thousand dollars was more than his church had seen in years. I felt badly for him. But that would have to come from some more committed source. A tarp-a toe in the water-was enough from me.
I got out of the car and a freezing wind smacked my cheeks. With the homeless program operating, the side street was populated with men bundled against the cold. A couple of them smoked. I noticed a slight man holding a child, but as I stepped closer I realized that, under the ski cap, it was a woman. I held the door open and she passed in front of me, the child on her shoulder.
Inside, I heard loud grinding hums, like small engines, then a screaming voice. I turned into the catwalk that overlooked the gym. The floor was covered in fold-out tables, and there were maybe eighty homeless men and women sitting around them. They wore old coats and hooded sweatshirts. A few had parkas; one wore a Detroit Lions jacket.
In the middle of the floor, Henry, in a blue sweatshirt and a heavy coat, moved between the tables, shifting his weight from one foot to the next.
“I am somebody!” he yelled.
“I am somebody!” the crowd repeated.
“I am somebody,” he yelled again.
“I am somebody,” they repeated in kind.
“Because God loves me!”
“Because God loves me!”
A few people clapped. Henry exhaled and nodded. One by one, many of the homeless stood up, came into a circle, and held hands. A prayer was recited.
Then, as if on cue, the circle broke and a line formed, leading to the kitchen and something hot to eat.
I tugged on my coat. It felt unusually cold.
“Evenin’, Mister Mitch.”
I looked over and saw Cass, the one-legged church elder, sitting on the catwalk, holding a clipboard. The way he greeted me with that lilt in his voice-“Evenin’, Mister Mitch”-I half-expected him to tip his cap. I had learned that he’d lost the leg a few years ago, to complications from diabetes and heart surgery. Still, he was always so upbeat.
Hi, Cass.
“Pastor’s down there.”
Henry looked up, gave a small wave. Cass watched me wave back.
“When you gonna hear my story, Mister Mitch?”
You’ve got a story, too?
“I got a story you need to hear.”
Sounds like it could take a few days.
He laughed. “Naw, naw. But you oughta hear it. It’s important.”
All right, Cass. We’ll figure something out.
That seemed to appease him and, thankfully, he dropped the subject. I shivered and pulled my coat tighter.
It’s really cold in here, I said.
“They turned off the heat.”
Who?
“Gas company.”
Why?
“Why else? Didn’t pay the bill, I suppose.”
The humming noise was overwhelming. We were shouting just to be heard.
What is that? I asked.
“Blowers.”
He pointed to several machines that looked like yellow windsocks, pushing warmed air toward the homeless, who waited in line for chili and corn bread.
They really turned your heat off? I said.
“Ye-up.”
But winter’s coming.
“That’s true,” Cass said, looking down at the crowd. “Be a lot more people in here soon.”
Thirty minutes later, up in his office, Henry and I sat huddled by a space heater. Someone came in and offered us a paper plate with corn bread.
What happened? I asked.
Henry sighed. “Turns out we owe thirty-seven thousand dollars to the gas company.”
What?
“I knew we were running behind, but it was small amounts. We always managed to pay something. Then it got cold so quick this fall, and we started heating the sanctuary for services and Bible study. We didn’t realize that the hole in the roof-”
Was sucking the heat up?
“Up and out. We just kept heating it more-”
And it kept disappearing out the roof.
“Disappearing.” He nodded. “That’s the word.”
What do you do now?
“Well, we got blowers. At first, they shut off our electricity, too. But I called and begged them to leave us something.”
I couldn’t believe it. A church in the cold, in America, in the twenty-first century.
How do you explain that with your faith? I said.
“I ask Jesus that a lot,” Henry said. “I say, ‘Jesus, is there something going on with us?” Is it like the book of Deuteronomy, the twenty-eighth chapter, “You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country’ for living in disobedience?”
And what does Jesus answer you?
“I’m still praying. I say, ‘God, we need to see you.’”
He sighed.
“That’s why that tarp you helped with was so important, Mitch. Our people needed a glimmer of hope. Last week it rained and water gushed in the sanctuary; this week it rained, and it didn’t. To them, that’s a sign.”
I squirmed. I didn’t want to be part of a sign. Not in a church. It was just a tarp. A sheet of blue plastic.
Can I ask you something? I said.
“Sure.”
When you were selling drugs, how much money did you have?
He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “Man. Do you know, in one stretch, over a year and a half, I brought in about a half a million dollars?”
And now your gas gets shut off?
“Yeah,” he said, softly. “Now the gas gets shut off.”
I didn’t ask if he missed those days. Looking back, it was cruel enough to have asked the first question.
Later, when the plates had been cleared and the tables folded, Cass called names off the clipboard-“ Everett!…DeMarcus!”-and one by one, the homeless men stepped up and took a thin vinyl mattress and a single wool blanket. Side by side, a few feet from one another, they set up for the night. Some carried plastic trash bags with their possessions; others had only the clothes they were wearing. It was bone-cold, and Cass’s voice echoed off the gym ceiling. The men were mostly silent, as if this were the moment when it really sank in: no home, no bed, no “good night” from a wife or a child. The blowers roared.
An hour later, Cass, his work finished, lifted himself on his crutches and hobbled to the vestibule. The lights in the gym were dimmed. The men were down for the night.
“Remember, next time, I tell you my story,” Cass said.
Okay, sure, Cass, I said. My hands were dug into my pockets, and my arms and torso were shivering. I couldn’t imagine how these men slept in this cold, except that the alternative was on a rooftop or in an abandoned car.
I was about to go when I realized I had left a notepad up in Henry’s office. I climbed the stairs, but the door was locked. I came back down.
On my way out, I took one last peek into the gym. I heard the steady hum of the blowers and saw the shadowy bumps under blankets, some lying still, some tossing slightly. It’s hard to express what hit me then, except the thought that every one of those bumps was a man, every man once a child, every child once held by his mother, and now this: a cold gym floor at the bottom of the world.
I wondered how-even if we had been disobedient-this wouldn’t break God’s heart.
My eye caught a flicker of movement across the way. A large, lonely figure sat in the darkness. Pastor Henry would remain there for several more hours, watching over the homeless like a sentinel, until the overnight guy arrived. Then he would bundle up, go out the side entrance, and walk home.
I had a sudden urge to get to my own warm bed. I pushed through the door and blinked, because it had started to snow.
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.
ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON
“Something happened.”
It was the Reb’s daughter, Gilah, who had called me on my cell phone, something she was unlikely to do unless there was trouble. The Reb, she said, had suffered a setback, maybe a stroke, maybe a heart attack. His balance was off. He was falling to the right. He couldn’t remember names. His speech was confused.
He had gone to the hospital. He’d been there a few days. They were discussing “options.”
Is he going to be…? I asked.
“We just don’t know,” she said.
I hung up and called the airlines.
It was Sunday morning when I arrived at the house. Sarah greeted me. She pointed to the Reb, released from the hospital and now sitting in a recliner near the back of the den.
“All right, just so you know,” she said, her voice lowered, “he’s not so…”
I nodded.
“Al?” she announced. “You have a visitor.”
She said it loudly and slowly enough that I could tell things had changed. I approached the Reb, and he turned his head. He lifted his chin slightly, pushed up a small smile, and raised one hand, but barely above his chest.
“Ahh,” he expelled.
He was tucked under a blanket. He wore a flannel shirt. A whistle of some sort was around his neck.
I leaned over him. I brushed his cheek with mine.
“Ehh…mmm…Mitch,” he whispered.
How are you doing? It was a stupid question.
“It’s not…,” he began. Then he stopped.
It’s not…?
He grimaced.
It’s not the best day of your life? I said. A lame attempt at humor.
He tried to smile.
“No,” he said. “I mean to…this…”
This?
“Where…see…ah…”
I swallowed hard. I felt my eyes tearing up.
The Reb was sitting in the chair.
But the man I knew was gone.
What do you do when you lose a loved one too quickly? When you have no time to prepare before, suddenly, that soul is gone?
Ironically, the man who could best answer that was sitting in front of me.
Because the worst loss you can suffer had already happened to him.
It was 1953, just a few years into his job at the temple. He and Sarah had a growing family: their son, Shalom, who was now five, and their four-year-old twin girls, Orah and Rinah. The first name means light. The second means joy.
In a single night, joy was lost.
Little Rinah, a buoyant child with curly auburn hair, was having trouble breathing. Lying in her bed, she was gasping and wheezing. Sarah heard the noise from her bedroom, went to check, and came running back. “Al,” she said, hurriedly, “we have to take her to the hospital.”
As they drove in the darkness, their little girl struggled terribly. Her airways swelled and tightened in her chest. Her lips were turning blue. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Reb pressed the accelerator.
They rushed into the emergency room of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The doctors hurried the child into a room. Then came the wait. They stood alone. What could they do? What can anyone do?
In the silent hallway, Albert and Sarah prayed for their child to live.
Hours later, she was dead.
It was a severe asthma attack, the first and last of Rinah’s life. Today, most likely, she would have survived. With an inhaler, with instructions, it might not even have been a major incident.
But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words-We couldn’t save her-told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn’t save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?
The next few days were a blur. There was a funeral, a small coffin. At the grave site, the Reb said Kaddish, a prayer he had led for so many others, a prayer which never mentions death, yet is recited on the anniversary of a death every year thereafter.
“May God’s great name be glorified and sanctified
throughout the world which He has created…”
A small shovel of dirt was tossed on the grave.
Rinah was buried.
The Reb was thirty-six years old.
“I cursed God,” he’d admitted when we’d spoken about it. “I asked Him over and over, ‘Why her? What did this little girl do? She was four years old. She didn’t hurt a soul.’”
Did you get an answer?
“I still have no answer.”
Did that make you angry?
“For a while, furious.”
Did you feel guilty cursing God-you, of all people?
“No,” he said. “Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.”
He paused.
“And that is how I began to heal.”
The night the Reb returned to the pulpit, the temple was packed. Some came out of condolence. Some, no doubt, out of curiosity. But privately, most wondered the same thing: “Now that it’s happened to you, what do you have to say?”
The Reb knew this. It was partly why he came back so quickly, the first Friday after the mandatory thirty days of mourning.
And when he rose to his lectern, and when the congregation quieted, he spoke the only way he knew how-from the heart. He admitted that, yes, he had been angry at the Lord. That he’d howled in anguish, that he’d screamed for an answer. That there was nothing in being a Man of God that insulated him from the tears and misery of never being able to hold his little girl again.
And yet, he noted, the very rituals of mourning that he cursed having to do-the prayers, the torn clothing, not shaving, covering the mirrors-had helped him keep a grip on who he was, when he might have otherwise washed away.
“That which I have had to say to others, I must say now to myself,” he admitted, and in so doing, his faith was being tested with the truest test there is: to drink his own elixir, to heal his own broken heart.
He told them how the words of the Kaddish made him think, “I am part of something here; one day my children will say this very prayer for me just as I am saying it for my daughter.”
His faith soothed him, and while it could not save little Rinah from death, it could make her death more bearable, by reminding him that we are all frail parts of something powerful. His family, he said, had been blessed to have the child on earth, even for a few short years. He would see her again one day. He believed that. And it gave him comfort.
When he finished, nearly everyone was crying.
“Years later,” he told me, “whenever I would go to someone’s home who had lost a family member-a young one, particularly-I would try to be of comfort by remembering what comforted me. Sometimes we would sit quietly. Just sit and maybe hold a hand. Let them talk. Let them cry. And after a while, I could see they felt better.
“And when I’d get outside, I would go like this-”
He touched a finger to his tongue and pointed skyward.
“Chalk one up for you, Rinah,” he said, smiling. Now, in the back of his house, I was holding the Reb’s hand, as he had done for others. I tried to smile. He blinked from behind his glasses.
All right, I said. I’ll come back and see you soon.
He half-nodded.
“You…okay…yeah…,” he whispered.
There was little else to do. He was no longer able to speak a full sentence. And with each of my poor attempts at conversation, I felt I was only frustrating him more. He seemed to sense what was happening, and I feared the look on my face would reveal the crushing loss I felt. How was this fair? This wise and eloquent man, who a few weeks earlier had been discoursing on divinity, was now stripped of his most precious faculty; he could no longer teach, he could no longer string together beautiful sentences from that beautiful mind.
He could no longer sing.
He could only squeeze my fingers and move his mouth open and closed.
On the plane ride home, I wrote down some sentences. The eulogy, I feared, was finally coming due.
From a Sermon by the Reb
“If you ask me, and you should, why this wonderful, beautiful child-who had so much to give-had to die, I can’t give you a rational answer. I don’t know.
“But in a commentary to the Bible, tradition tells us that Adam, our first man, was supposed to have lived longer than any man, a thousand years. He didn’t. Our sages, in quest of an answer, related the following:
“Adam begged God to let him see into the future. So the Lord said, ‘Come with me.’ He took him through the celestial chambers, where the souls that were to be born awaited their turn. Each soul was a flame. Adam saw some flames burn purely, some barely flicker.
“Then he saw a beautiful flame, clear, strong, golden orange, and healing. Adam said, ‘Oh Lord, that will be a great human being. When shall it be born?’
“The Lord replied, ‘I’m sorry, Adam, but that soul, as beautiful as it is, is destined not to be born. It has been preordained that it will commit sin and tarnish itself. I have chosen to spare it the indignity of being besmirched.’
“Adam pleaded, ‘But Lord, man must have someone to teach and guide him. Please, do not deprive my children.’
“The Lord gently answered, ‘The decision has been made. I have no years left to allocate to him.’
“Then Adam boldly said, ‘Lord, what if I am willing to bestow on that soul some of the years of my life?’
“And God answered Adam, saying, ‘If that is your wish, that I will grant.’
“Adam, we are told, died not at 1,000, but at 930 years. And eons later, there was a child born in the town of Bethlehem. He became a ruler over Israel and a sweet singer of songs. After leading his people and inspiring them, he died. And the Bible concludes: ‘Behold, David the King was buried after having lived for 70 years.’
“My friends, when sometimes we are asked why does someone perish, someone so young in age, I can only fall back on the wisdom of our tradition. It is true that David did not live long for his day. But while he lived, David taught, inspired, and left us a great spiritual legacy, including the Book of Psalms. One of those Psalms, the twenty-third, is read sometimes at funerals.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul…
“Is it not better to have known Rinah, my daughter, for four years, than not to have known her at all?”