The Things We Lose…
It was now the summer of 2003, and we were in the kitchen. His wife, Sarah, had cut up a honeydew, and the Reb, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, red socks, and sandals-these combinations no longer startled me-held out a plate.
“Eat some,” he said.
In a bit.
“You’re not hungry?”
In a bit.
“It’s good for you.”
I ate a piece.
“You liiike?”
I rolled my eyes. He was clowning with me. I never thought I’d still be coming, three years after our visits began. When someone asks for a eulogy, you suspect the end is near.
But the Reb, I’d learned, was like a tough old tree; he bent with the storms but he would not snap. Over the years, he had beaten back Hodgkin’s disease, pneumonia, irregular heart rhythms, and a small stroke.
These days, to safeguard his now eighty-five-year-old body, he took a daily gulping of pills, including Dilantin for seizure control, and Vasotec and Toprol for his heart and his blood pressure. He had recently endured a bout with shingles. Not long before this visit, he had tumbled, fractured his rib cage, and spent a few days in the hospital, where his doctor implored him to use a cane everywhere-“For your own safety,” the doctor said. He rarely did, thinking the congregation might see him as weak.
But whenever I showed up, he was raring to go. And I was privately happy he fought his body’s decay. I did not like seeing him frail. He had always been this towering figure, a tall and upright Man of God.
Selfishly, that’s how I wanted him to stay.
Besides, I had witnessed the alternative. Eight years earlier, I’d watched an old and beloved professor of mine, Morrie Schwartz, slowly die of ALS. I visited him on Tuesdays in his home outside Boston. And every week, although his spirit shone, his body decayed.
Less than eight months from our first visit, he was dead.
I wanted Albert Lewis-who was born the same year as Morrie-to last longer. There were so many things I never got to ask my old professor. So many times I told myself, “If I only had a few more minutes…”
I looked forward to my encounters with the Reb-me sitting in the big green chair, him searching hopelessly for a letter on his desk. Some visits, I would fly straight from Detroit to Philadelphia. But mostly I came on Sunday mornings, taking a train from New York City after filming a TV show there. I arrived during church hours, so I guess this was our own little church time, if you can refer to two Jewish men talking religion as church.
My friends reacted with curiosity or disbelief.
“You go to his house like he’s a normal person?”
“Aren’t you intimidated?”
“Does he make you pray while you’re there?”
“You actually talk about his eulogy? Isn’t that morbid?”
I guess, looking back, it wasn’t the most normal thing. And after a while, I could have stopped. I certainly had enough material for an homage.
But I felt a need to keep visiting, to ensure that my words would still reflect who he was. And, okay. There was more. He had stirred up something in me that had been dormant for a long time. He was always celebrating what he called “our beautiful faith.” When others said such things, I felt uneasy, not wanting to be lumped in with any group that closely. But seeing him so-what’s the word?-joyous, I guess, at his age, was appealing. Maybe the faith didn’t mean that much to me, but it did to him, you could see how it put him at peace. I didn’t know many people at peace.
So I kept coming. We talked. We laughed. We read through his old sermons and discussed their relevance. I found I could share almost anything with Reb. He had a way of looking you in the eye and making you feel the world had stopped and you were all that was in it.
Maybe this was his gift to the job.
Or maybe it was the job’s gift to him.
Anyhow, he did a lot more listening these days. With his retirement from the senior rabbi position, the meetings and paperwork had decreased. Unlike when he first arrived, the temple ran quite well on its own now.
The truth is, he could have retired to someplace warm- Florida, Arizona. But that was never for him. He attended a retirees’ convention in Miami once and was perplexed at how many former colleagues he discovered living there.
“Why did you leave your congregations?” he asked.
They said it hurt not to be up on the pulpit or the new clerics didn’t like them hanging around.
The Reb-who often said “ego” was the biggest threat to a clergyman-held no such envy for where he’d once been. Upon retirement, he voluntarily moved out of his large office and into a smaller one. And one Sabbath morning, he left his favorite chair on the dais and took a seat beside his wife in the back row of the sanctuary. The congregation was stunned.
But like John Adams returning to the farm after the presidency, the Reb simply faded back in among the people.
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1958
“A little girl came home from school with a drawing she’d made in class. She danced into the kitchen, where her mother was preparing dinner.
“‘Mom, guess what?’ she squealed, waving the drawing.
“Her mother never looked up.
“‘What? she said, tending to the pots.
“‘Guess what?’ the child repeated, waving the drawing.
“‘What?’ the mother said, tending to the plates.
“‘Mom, you’re not listening.’
“‘Sweetie, yes I am.’
“‘Mom,’ the child said, ‘you’re not listening with your eyes.’”
Life of Henry
His first stop behind bars was Rikers Island, in the East River near the runways at LaGuardia Airport. It was painfully close to home, just a few miles, and it only reminded him how his stupidity had put him on the wrong side of these walls.
During his time at Rikers, Henry saw things he wished he’d never seen. He saw inmates assault and abuse other inmates, throwing blankets over the victims’ heads so they couldn’t see their attackers. One day, a guy who’d had an argument with Henry entered the room and punched Henry in the face. Two weeks later, the same man tried to stab Henry with a sharpened fork.
All this time, Henry wanted to scream his innocence, but what good would it do? Everybody screamed innocence. After a month or so, Henry was sent upstate to Elmira Correctional, a maximum security prison. He rarely ate. He barely slept. He smoked endless cigarettes. One hot night he woke up sweating, and rose to get himself a cold drink. Then the sleep faded and he saw the steel door. He dropped onto his bed and wept.
Henry asked God that night why he hadn’t died as a baby. A light flickered and caught his eye and his gaze fell on a Bible. He opened it to a page from the Book of Job, where Job curses the day of his birth.
It was the first time he ever felt the Lord talking to him.
But he didn’t listen.