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 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.