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.