by Ragen, Naomi
His parents were satisfied. The last thing they wanted was for him to take over his grandfather’s annoying and penurious congregation of pensioners, who kept pennies in jars and cooked meals on one burner. His mother, who knew a thing or two, was especially appalled by the idea of such an un-American profession for her one and only son, a job that promised bad pay, no advancement, and plenty of aggravation. She wanted him to be a dentist, which in her mind lacked all such drawbacks. His father wanted him to be happy and, if possible, to sell stereo systems.
At some point during his sophomore year in high school, he realized that math—necessary for both computers and accounting—was not his best subject. As for dentistry, he learned from a distant cousin, who had recently set up an office in Queens, that tuition to dental school rivaled that of medical school—that is, if you could get in, not a small question considering his grades. And even if you passed all the hurdles, you were still left with buying all that expensive equipment, unless you wanted to hire yourself out to an established office and work for someone else “forever for nothing,” as his cousin put it to him. The student loans and the bank loans for the machinery would take years to pay off. Besides, people’s breath in your face . . . the sound of the drill . . . the smell of those metals and powders and gummy pastes . . . ?
The summer between his junior and senior year, another cousin found him a job up in the Catskills as a busboy at a strictly kosher hotel. He lied about being eighteen, so they hired him. It was a nice enough place for the guests, but the staff lived in ratty, mosquito-filled bungalows and were fed leftovers by hotel owners who took the epithet “cheap bastards” to a new level. The food first went to the adults. A day later, whatever the adults hadn’t managed to eat was served up in the children’s dining room. Whatever the kids were bright enough to bypass showed up on the staff’s plates.
So of course the waiters and busboys never saved anything, effectively ending the leftover problem. In fact, they felt spilling out the day-old milk before it was foisted on the unsuspecting babies (not to mention themselves) was a mitzva. When the owners somehow got wind of the situation, they started going through the trash. They were experts at eagle-eyed discoveries of unsqueezed lemons, which they insisted be washed off and served again.
The guests, however, were decent people, and the tips made the summer stay worthwhile, providing most of them with a good chunk of their college tuition and living expenses. So, Chaim stayed on. It turned out to be a fateful decision, because that summer, he experienced a revelation that changed his life forever.
One weekend, the hotel hosted its annual convention of the Council of American Orthodox Rabbis. Hundreds of Orthodox rabbis and their wives descended upon the resort from all over the country. Chaim had expected dignified men in dark suits, black hats, big skullcaps, and dark beards, men who were shy and retiring, whose weighty conversations would revolve around serious moral issues.
Instead, they arrived in shorts and flowery, big-printed Hawaiian shirts. Rabbis on vacation, he realized, were more or less like everyone else on vacation, with wives in short summer dresses and bikinis by the pool. The hotel was filled with loud laughter and card-playing. He hardly saw one of them crack open a book, let alone a heavy Talmudic tome. And in between, they would saunter into the auditorium and discuss “The Future of American Judaism.”
It was then Chaim had his revelation: Rabbis were ordinary human beings. Nothing special. I could do this, he thought. But why would I want to?
One of the old-timers, a professional waiter who’d been around, told him that they used to have the National Council of Synagogue Youth conventions the week before the rabbis’ convention, and then treat the most sincere kids to stay over and be inspired. But soon they switched the order, so the rabbis and their bikini-clad wives were gone before the kids got there.
And indeed, a week later, the kids showed up. A few of the rabbis stayed behind to organize seminars on Jewish values and modesty and service to the community. They changed into dark pants and white open-collared shirts. The fresh-faced, wide-eyed kids in their mid-to-upper teens, who had come from all over the country, gathered in small seminars in banqueting halls and on the lawn. The waiters poked one another and made snide remarks about jailbait. But Chaim, who in general didn’t have a sense of humor about such things, said nothing. And then one evening, when he had cleaned off his table and eaten his dinner, he wandered into one of the seminars and sat down quietly in the back.
The rabbi giving the lecture was short and youthful, with immense energy that seemed to lift him off the ground as he spoke. “The most important two things in life are renewal and courage. Turn the page and begin again, as if you are starting from scratch; as if the world had never been created, and you are at that moment creating it. I’m not saying this is easy. I’m not telling you that you won’t fail sometimes, that you’ll never get depressed. Never give in to depression, whatever the reasons! Even if you feel the years have flown by and all your mistakes have just piled up, never despair. This is the greatness of our Creator: His compassion has no end. He will never give up on you, so never give up on yourselves. He knows who we are—He made us, didn’t He?—so even the worst person, the biggest crook, the most evil gossip, is God’s child, and God looks at him and, like a father, always hopes he’ll turn it around. It’s never too late.
“To be a Jew is to remember that we are in charge of makeovers. Not the kind with the hair and the nails. Universe makeovers. We take terrible situations where there is only evil—people who are unkind to one another and full of hatred—and we transform lives. We change things. And we start by changing ourselves.
“You, the youth of tomorrow, the leaders and rabbis and doctors and artists, you are going to make over the world you were born into. You are going to give it new hope, new chances to be the beautiful moral place our Creator envisioned when He separated the water from the dry land, when He set down Adam and his wife Eve. In every generation, you are Adam and Eve in Eden, able to start again.”
Chaim studied the enthralled, uplifted faces of the young people around him. He too felt uplifted. To be a rabbi like that! To stand in front of a group of people and fill their hearts with hope, their minds with good intentions and proper desires. To lead people forward to a new place where they would be happier, kinder, and more just, making the world that much happier, kinder, and more just. It was a noble thing, was it not?
Could I? he wondered. Was it at all possible? What did it take to become a real rabbi? And did he have it in him?
He didn’t know.
But as he looked over college brochures and added up the numbers for tuition and board at places like NYU or Columbia, the realization struck him that Brooklyn or Queens College were in his future, along with some express ticket to nowhere called a BA in education or sociology. So when his grandfather repeated his long-standing offer to underwrite Chaim’s tuition at Bernstein Rabbinical College if he was accepted to their Rabbinic Ordination program, it suddenly seemed like a reprieve.
Bernstein expected its rabbinical students to get a secular degree as well. And having smicha didn’t force one to actually become a practicing rabbi. Many a lawyer, store owner, and insurance salesman on Ocean Parkway had smicha.
In addition, at Bernstein he’d be assured of a steady social life, a stream of willing Orthodox girls who attended Stern College or Bernstein Women’s College, many of them from well-to-do newly religious families, girls who, unlike those in the fancy Hebrew day school he’d grown up with (who wanted handsome Orthodox future doctors), would be only too thrilled to meet a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who came from a rabbinical family. At Bernstein these girls would be thrown in his direction in droves. No senior—however bad his teeth, poor his personality, or ordinary his family—would be permitted to get his diploma without a wife, and preferably a small noisy child, sitting in the audience to applaud him.
And some of these girls, he’d heard, the ones from down South or the M
idwest, were real lookers.
He began his studies with the serious, dogged determination that had seen him through high school. He took classes in Talmud, contemporary Jewish law (halacha), and Introductory Rabbinic Survey. In addition, the school required him to concomitantly earn a master’s degree in either Jewish education and administration, social work, or psychology, which he could opt out of only if he was willing to take six intensive semesters of advanced Talmud study, which was for him not an option, thanks. He opted for social work, which is what he thought being a rabbi was all about anyway.
In his rabbinic studies, he worked diligently, memorizing what he could and avoiding class participation whenever possible. He could repeat what you told him, almost word for word, but when asked to elucidate the law, to leap ahead to original conclusions, he was lost.
His teachers, compassionate men who had seen their share of losers, knew with whom they dealt. Keeping in mind the joys and struggles of their own early scholarship, as well as the apocryphal story of Akiva, the ignorant shepherd who was over forty when by sheer diligence he began a study program that turned him into Rabbi Akiva, one of Judaism’s greatest scholars and leaders, they were not without hope. Rabbi Akiva had said that the image that had inspired him to greatness was that of water dripping on a rock until it finally made a hole. When they looked at Chaim, they saw the rock, imagined their words as water, and hoped for the best.
They gave him passing, if not wonderful, grades that would permit him to continue, so that other rabbis would have to deal with the situation and have it on their conscience each Yom Kippur. In this way, he passed from class to class and rabbi to rabbi until his four years were almost over and, except for one semester on a particularly difficult segment of the Talmudical tractate Yoreh Deah with a young teacher who graded him objectively and without compassion, he managed, miraculously, not to flunk anything.
In his social work courses he did especially well, finding a real affinity for the course material, which had no apparent discipline, scientific basis, or true information that one couldn’t figure out simply by using average common sense. He felt triumphant, and looked ahead to a promising future out in the world, where grades would cease to matter, and no one would be checking his scholarship with a magnifying glass. All they would see was the klaf smicha, the traditional ordination certificate handwritten by a scribe on parchment, with his name carefully spelled out in calligraphic letters to prove his worthiness and competency to head an Orthodox congregation.
As his course work wound down and he began to envision his future, his thoughts turned more and more to the subject of marriage. Few and far between (in fact, he had never in his life heard of such a thing) was the congregation whose rabbi had no rebbitzin. Indeed, the interviews took the wife into consideration with almost equal weight. After all, she would be an integral part of his work. She would create the proper atmosphere in the synagogue, a hominess, openness, and warmth. She’d be up there in the front pew, setting an example with her diligent prayers, her friendly smile, her many well-disciplined children, her compassion, her modest clothing, her great hat, wig, and so on. She would set the style for the women, showing the ideal of wife and mother that each needed to aspire to, just as the rabbi set a shining example to the men with his good nature, good deeds, and scholarship.
Yet he never thought about the woman he would marry in terms of a work partner. He wanted, first and foremost, someone he could love and who would love him. He wanted someone he felt attracted to sexually. There had to be some chemistry, hormonal flows, a little tickle in his stomach. He liked nice legs and a shapely body, the same as any other man. He had been going out nonstop for years, date after date. He’d dated the sisters of fellow rabbinical students, the out-of-town rabbis’ daughters (he hadn’t gotten the lookers), even, desperately, some granddaughters from his grandfather’s congregation. But nothing ever came of it. At most, it fizzled after date three.
Almost always, it was he who put an end to it, with blessings and relief. He tried to analyze why this was so and came to the following conclusion: It was like the plate of roast chicken and mashed potatoes they put in front of you at a decent restaurant—perfectly adequate, probably good for you, but completely disappointing.
Why was it, he bemoaned, that he saw hundreds of beautiful, exciting, luscious girls every, single day—on the subway, in department stores, and on the crowded streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens—and one was never tossed his way? How could it be that the laws of chance should have been so slanted against him?
So when his roommate, Josh, told him about his fiancee’s roommate, a girl sincerely interested in finding a marriage partner, he didn’t exactly leap at the chance.
“I don’t know, Josh. I’m so tired of blind dates.”
All those days comfortably behind him, Josh laughed sympathetically. “Here,” he said generously, whipping out a photograph of his darling Rivkie sitting on the bed of her dorm room with several girls. “It’s one of those.”
Chaim studied the photograph. He recognized the pale sweet face of Rivkie. His heart sank as his eyes ran over two similar girls—both dark-haired and excellent rebbitzin material, he had no doubt—but then he stopped, zeroing in on a blonde who looked into the camera with no smile at all. She seemed to be staring right at him. And there was no doubt about it: She was definitely a looker.
FOUR
He went to Bernstein Women’s College that Saturday night. He shaved closely and, on his roommate’s advice, borrowed a nice blue sweater to wear over slacks, instead of his good Sabbath suit, which had a spill of schnaps on his lapel from that morning’s kiddush. His hair was combed back and neat, but not greasy. His eyes were eager.
“Chaim Levi for Delilah Goldgrab,” he told the housemother, who looked him over with a tentative smile of approval. Obviously, she had seen worse.
He sat on the sofa edge and fidgeted with the gray tweed upholstery beside other fidgeting young men, most of whom looked severe and distinguished in their black suits and homburg hats. Future sages of America, he thought miserably, cursing the little brat who had pushed passed him toward the pretzels and damaged his suit and probably his future.
Graduation and rabbinical ordination were just around the corner. He was eager to try out his skills with a congregation, feeling more and more certain that this was his calling in life. His job applications needed to be filled out; otherwise he’d have no choice but to work in the Bronx for his grandfather. This was not his first choice by any means, but it was something he could fall back on; he felt fortunate to have it. Among his classmates, he knew, there were many eager applicants for the few assistant rabbi and teaching positions available in normal geographical locations around the country, classmates who were smarter, better qualified, and more articulate than he. Leaving the space for Spousal Information blank was a sure way to ruin his chances. Nevertheless, job or no job, he told himself, there were limits to what a man could force himself to do, what he should be expected or required to sacrifice. This certainly included giving up any hope of happiness by marrying a woman for whom he had no passion.
He’d searched diligently through the sacred texts for backup and enlightenment on this score. What he’d come up with was advice that ranged from: Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away. For, lo, the winter is past and the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; and the time of singing is come . . . My beloved is mine and I am his. To: And I found more bitter than death the woman.
It was confusing, Chaim thought, shaking his head, particularly since both sentiments were expressed by the same man, considered moreover to have been the wisest one of all, Solomon himself. Chaim’s teachers had sometimes taken pains to explain away the discrepancies by pointing out that Solomon had written these things at different stages in his life. Still, Chaim wondered about taking marriage advice from a man who’d had a thousand wives and hadn’t been happy with any of them.
He stared through the p
artition at the girls emerging from the elevator, all of them bright-eyed, attractive, and modestly dressed. Perky, he thought, depressed. He had been dating their clones for years. The sincere, “deep” conversations about the duties of Jewish parenthood and the sacredness of the home. And all the while, there was this subtle undercurrent of probing remarks designed to dig out how much money his parents had, where he expected to live, and if he would be learning full-time and expect her to be a Woman of Valor—breadwinner, bread baker, and baby-maker rolled into one obviously saintly package—or if he would be bringing in some money too and, if so, how much and doing what?
Of course, none of these questions was asked openly and none of the answers was given frankly. All these conversations were always held on the highest moral ground, cloaked in the most impressive and saintly verbal packaging. Words like tafkid be chaim (life’s calling), messirat nefesh (dedication of one’s soul), gemilut chasadim (charitable good works) were bandied about like the little hard candies thrown down at a Bar Mitzva boy to celebrate his successful reading of the Torah portion before the congregation, candies that often hit you in the head and accomplished minor concussions.
Then the elevator door opened and there she was. Or at least, he certainly hoped this one was his. He stood up. She was a vision in a slim skirt and green silk blouse, her blond shoulder-length hair tumbling to her shoulders in a mass of golden curls. He swallowed hard, mesmerized, thrilled, and incredulous at his good luck. He couldn’t wait for her to give his name to the housemother. When she did, he took a step toward her. “Delilah?”
She looked up. He was taller than she, but only by a few inches, nothing like Yitzie. Nor did he have that sexy, rock-star slenderness around the hips or that certain way of moving—fluid and a bit dangerous—that never failed to give her those little pinpricks of electric shock. She took a deep breath, accepting that there would be no thumping heart, no flowing juices. Instead of that, there would be a perfectly respectable, good-looking young man, with a conventionally handsome face, fine dark eyes, and a square manly chin. Someone who would look good to her family and friends under the marriage canopy. A genuine Orthodox Jewish catch.
