The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

In the taxi going downtown she retained her grasp on his fingers. “Whom will you ask next? To perform the ceremony.”

  “One of my classmates at the Institute, I suppose.” He thought for a moment and then decided. “Milt Greenfield has a congregation in Bethpage.”

  He called that afternoon, from a telephone booth in a Lexington Avenue drugstore. Rabbi Greenfield was warm and congratulatory and then silent and wary, in that order.

  “You’re sure it’s what you want, Michael?”

  “Don’t be an ass. If I weren’t sure I wouldn’t be calling you.”

  “Well, then, I’m flattered you called me, you son of a gun,” Greenfield said finally.

  That night when Michael’s parents were asleep he sat in his old room and searched through the Modern Reader’s Bible for the English translation of the passage Max Gross had hurled at him to drive him from the synagogue. He found it after a while. Proverbs 5 : 3.

  . . . The lips of a Strange Woman drop honey,

  And her mouth is smoother than oil:

  But her latter end is bitter as wormwood,

  Sharp as a two-edged sword.

  Her feet go down to death;

  Her steps take hold on Sheol;

  So that she findeth not the level path of life:

  Her ways are unstable and she knoweth it not.

  He thought that he would have trouble falling asleep. But he dropped off while praying. If he had dreams, he retained no memory of them when he awoke next morning.

  At breakfast, he watched his mother uneasily. Leslie had telephoned her father and then had wept very quietly and for a long time. When Michael had suggested that they visit the Reverend John Rawlins and talk things over she had shaken her head. Feeling relief, he had not urged her to change her mind.

  He did not want to tell his parents immediately, knowing that there would be a scene and preferring to postpone it.

  As he was starting his second cup of coffee the telephone rang. It was Rabbi Sher.

  “How did you know I was in New York?” Michael asked after the pleasantries had been exchanged.

  “I happened to be talking to Milt Greenfield,” Rabbi Sher said.

  Good old Milt, Michael thought.

  “Can you drop by the Union office for a chat?”

  “I’ll be there this afternoon,” he said.

  “I am certain that you’ve wrestled with this thing from every aspect,” Rabbi Sher said with great gentleness. “I just want to be sure that you realize the probable consequences of such a marriage.”

  “I am marrying a Jewess.”

  “You are ruining what would certainly be a brilliant pastoral career. So long as you realize that, your decision is valid, if perhaps . . . unwise. I merely want to make sure that you have not overlooked the consequences in a state of—” He struggled for the words.

  “Unthinking passion.”

  Rabbi Sher nodded. “Something like that.”

  “All our lives we insist, in the face of vicious filth spread in every society in the world, that Jews are as good as the next group, that as individuals all of us are equal in the eyes of God. In answer to the fairy tale about the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion we carefully explain to our kids that we’re Chosen only to carry the great burden of the Covenant between God and man. But deep down, fear has made us the most prejudiced people on the face of the earth. Why is that, Rabbi?”

  From outside and far below the sound of horns drifted up to them. Rabbi Sher walked to the window and gazed down at the snarled traffic on Fifth Avenue. Taxicabs. Too many taxicabs. Except when you need one in the rain, he thought. He turned. “How do you think we’ve survived for more than five thousand years?”

  “The girl I’m going to marry is a Jew. Her father is not. But is Judaism a blood line? Or an ethic and a theology and a way of life?”

  Rabbi Sher closed his eyes. “Michael, no debates, if you please. Your situation isn’t unique, you know. We’ve met it before this. It has always presented great difficulties.” He turned away from the window. “You’ve made up your mind?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Then good luck to you.” He held out his hand and Michael shook it.

  “One more thing, Rabbi,” Michael said. “You’d better find somebody else for the Ozarks.”

  Sher nodded. “With a new wife you won’t want to be traveling every day.” He made a pyramid of his fingers. “It raises the question of future employment. It might be interesting for you to try something academic. A Hillel chaplaincy, or a job with one of the cultural foundations. We have many requests for recommendations in these areas.” He paused. “The campus mind is less apt to be a narrow one.”

  “I want a congregation.” Michael met his gaze steadily.

  Rabbi Sher sighed. “Temple boards are made up of parents. They are almost certain to see your marriage—however you see it yourself—as a bad example for their children.”

  “I want a congregation.”

  The older rabbi shrugged. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Michael. Drop in with your wife when you can. I’d like to meet her.” They shook hands once more.

  When Michael had gone, Rabbi Sher lowered himself into his chair and sat for several minutes without moving, absentmindedly humming the Toreador Song from Carmen. Then he pressed the buzzer on his desk.

  “Lillian,” he told his secretary when she appeared, “Rabbi Kind is going off the Ozarks circuit.”

  “You want me to put that card in the Positions Open file?” she asked. She was fading and middle-aged and he never stopped feeling sorry for her.

  “Please,” he said. When she left his office he sat and hummed all that he could remember of the Bizet music and then he punched the buzzer again.

  “Hold that Ozarks card out for a while,” he said when she came back. “We may not fill it at all unless we can find a married man to take the circuit.”

  She shot him a make-up-your-mind-boss look. “That isn’t likely,” she said.

  “No,” he agreed, “it isn’t.”

  He walked to the window and leaned with his hands on the sill, looking down. The traffic on Fifth Avenue was a battlefield, with the horns sounding like the shrieks of wounded. Taxicabs, he thought, they’re messing up the whole city.

  25

  There was a time not so long ago when there was no Jewish congregation in Cypress, Georgia. Before the war—the second world war, that is, not the War Between the States—there were only a few dozen families of Jews in the whole town. Their leader was Dave Schoenfeld, the editor and publisher of the weekly Cypress News, and he was the great-great-grandson of Captain Judah Schoenfeld who took a Minié ball in the throat while commanding a troop under Hood at Peachtree Creek, so Dave was more Southerner than Jew, almost like any hardshell Baptist in Cypress except perhaps a little more influential around election time.

  Dave Schoenfeld was a lieutenant colonel in Intelligence at Sondrestrom in Greenland when the first Friday-night service was held back in his home town. A rabbi named Jacobs who was chaplain at Camp Gordon brought in a busload of Jewish infantrymen and officiated at a Yom Kippur observance in the First Baptist Church by special permission of the deacons. The service was attended by virtually all of the town’s Jews and proved to be so popular that it was repeated the following year. On the Yom Kippur after that there was no rabbi to direct the service, Chaplain Jacobs having been shipped overseas before the arrival of his replacement. The High Holidays came and went without a service in Cypress, and the lack was noted locally and commented upon.

  “Why don’t we hold our own Sabbath service?” suggested young Dick Kramer, who had cancer and who did a lot of thinking about God.

  Others were amenable, so on the following Friday fourteen of them got together in the rumpus room of Ronnie Levitt’s house. They pieced together the service out of memory; Ronnie, who had studied voice in New York after World War I before he came home to go into his father’s turpentine business, served as cantor. They sang remembe
red fragments of the service with enthusiasm and volume if not with harmony. In the kitchen upstairs, Rosella Barker, Sally Levitt’s maid, lifted her eyebrows and grinned at her fourteen-year-old brother Mervin, who sat at the table drinking coffee and waiting to walk his sister home.

  “Those people are born with rhythm, honey,” she said. “Those white folks got music bustin’ out all over ’em, even the way they walk.” And she whooped silently at the expression on the boy’s face.

  Dave Schoenfeld was upped one grade on paper and was separated as a bird colonel in 1945. The Army had stolen his vintage years. His muscles had lost their tone, his step some of its spring. His hair had thinned and grayed and his prostate had gone bad, necessitating periodic attentions which, characteristically, he had obtained by having an affair with the most desirable nurse on the base. Two weeks after his return to civilian life he had received a note from a former fellow officer, informing him that the girl had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, had had her stomach pumped, and had been flown to Walter Reed Hospital for psychiatric observation. Schoenfeld had dropped the note into his wastebasket along with a large sheaf of unusable press releases and invitiations to social events he did not wish to attend.

  He had come back to Georgia to find Cypress almost a thousand people bigger, with a lumber mill, a small electronics subcontracting plant, and the promise that a medium-size textile corporation was going to move out lock, stock, and looms from Fall River, Massachusetts. He was a rich, good-looking bachelor of forty-eight, and the many women he had known over the years and the many men who had benefited from his political influence at one time or another all flocked to greet him warmly. They made him feel glad to be home. He spent $119,000 to convert the News and its commercial printing shop from letterpress to offset, a process he had come to admire greatly in the military. He changed the paper from weekly to semiweekly to take advantage of the rise in potential circulation and hired an energetic young fellow fresh out of the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism to do the bulk of the new work, then he relaxed and resumed his twice-a-week poker games with Judge Boswell, Nance Grant, Sunshine Janes, and Sheriff Nate White.

  For twenty years the five men had shared more than a love for poker. Together they controlled cotton, peanuts, law, power, and public opinion in Cypress. Their steadily growing syndicate holdings had long ago made each a wealthy man.

  They welcomed Dave back into their midst.

  “Well, how d’ya like it up in Green Land?” asked the Sheriff, pronouncing it as if it were two words.

  “Like to froze my ass off,” Dave said, shuffling the cards.

  Sunshine cut. “Get your fill of that Eskimo nooky? Must be kind of fish-oily.”

  “Who, me?”

  Sunshine guffawed and the other men smiled.

  “Let’s see if it changed my luck,” Dave said as he started to deal.

  He had taken a great many photographs and seven weeks after his return he was invited to give a talk before the men’s club of the Methodist church. The color slides of the ice cap and the snow cliffs proved to be a great success, as did his anecdotes and funny stories about the lives of the Eskimos and the service men. On the following day Ronnie Levitt called him on the telephone and asked if he would repeat the talk after the oneg shabbat Friday night in the Levitt home.

  The rumpus room was crowded with Jewish worshipers, not all of whom he recognized, he noted with surprise on Friday evening. Despite Ronnie’s ragged leadership, the service was chanted enthusiastically. There was no sermon. His own talk afterward drew polite applause.

  “How long has this been goin’ on?” he asked.

  “A long time,” Dick Kramer said eagerly. “We just ordered prayer books. But you can see what we need. We should have a more suitable place to congregate, and a regular rabbi.”

  “I didn’t think I’d been invited here because of a sudden burst of interest in polar bears,” Dave said drily.

  “We’ve got about fifty Jewish families in town now,” Ronnie said. “What we need is a small frame house we can buy cheap and fix up to make a decent temple. A rabbi wouldn’t cost a great deal. We can all pay dues.”

  “Can you raise enough from the membership to cover the entire program?” he asked, knowing that they couldn’t or they wouldn’t have been courting him.

  “We need a few principal donors, people who can give substantial contributions for the first couple of years,” Ronnie said. “I can help out in that respect. If you will assume a similar responsibility, we can get rolling.”

  “How much?”

  Levitt shrugged. “Five-ten thousand.”

  Dave appeared to think carefully for a few moments. “I don’t think so,” he said finally. “I think services like these are fine and I’d like to join you again some time. But it doesn’t pay to try to develop too fast. I think we should wait until there are more members, so everyone can feel he has an equal stake in the purchase of the buildin’ and the hirin’ of the rabbi.”

  They stood clustered around him, reluctant to turn away, with carbon-copy expressions of blank disappointment on their faces.

  Saturday night Schoenfeld won one hundred thirty-one dollars playing poker. “What’s this new industry doin’ to our labor pool?” he asked.

  “Nothin’,” said the Judge.

  “You let a few more factories into this town and labor’s goin’ to start grabbin’ us by the short hair,” Dave said.

  Nance Grant bit the tip from a thick black cigar and spat the tatter to the floor. “Nobody else is comin’ in. We let in just enough to help us a little with some of the chores.”

  Schoenfeld was puzzled. “Since when do we need help? And with what?”

  The Judge rested a manicured hand lightly on his arm. “You’ve been away a while, Davey boy. Damn government’s goin’ to be givin’ us more trouble than the five-year itch. Won’t hurt us any to have some friends around to fight off the socialists.”

  “Our expenses goin’ up all the time, too,” Nance said. “Be kinda nice to share some of ’em.”

  “What kind of expenses?”

  “Well, Billy Joe Raye, for one. He’s a preacher. Fire an’ brimstone an’ the layin’ on of hands.”

  “A faith healer?” Schoenfeld asked. “Why should we pay his way?”

  The Sheriff cleared his throat. “Damned if he don’t keep ’em in line for us better’n cheap whiskey.”

  Schoenfeld refused one of Nance’s stogies with thanks and took a Havana from his inside pocket. “Well,” he said, puffing on the match as he built the ash, “it can’t cost us a hell of a lot for one preacher.”

  The Judge looked at him calmly. “Hundred grand.”

  They all grinned at the expression on his face.

  “He’s got an air-conditioned tent costs nearly that much alone,” Sunshine said. “An’ a radio program. An’ tee-vee.”

  “What we gave him is just a grubstake. His collections are already big enough to keep him just fine,” Nance said. “And the more this town builds a reputation as a religious, God-fearing community, the better off we are.”

  “Goddam it, it don’t have to build a reputation,” the Judge said. “This is that kind of community. Hell, now even the Jews are holding prayer meetin’s.” There was a small silence. “I beg your pardon,” he said to Dave with courtly grace.

  “No apology needed,” Schoenfeld said easily.

  That night he telephoned Ronnie Levitt. “I haven’t been able to get the temple out of my mind,” he said. “What do you say we get together again and talk it over?”

  They found a small cottage in good repair and bought it, Dave and Ronnie putting up five thousand dollars apiece for the purchase of the building and the two-acre lot of land. It was understood that the rest of the congregation would contribute a sum sufficient to pay for renovations and the salary of the rabbi.

  Ronnie Levitt hesitantly suggested that the temple be named Sinai. Dave shrugged and nodded. There were no voices of dissent. />
  “I’m goin’ to New York next month to have a talk with the paper’s national reps,” Schoenfeld said. “I’ll see what I can do about findin’ us a rabbi.”

  He had exchanged correspondence with a man named Sher, and when he got to New York he called the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and invited the rabbi to lunch the next day. Only after he said good-by did it occur to him that the clergyman might be restricted to kosher food.

  But when they met in the office of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Sher made no mention of where they should eat. Downstairs, in the taxi, Dave leaned toward the driver and said, “Voisin.” He glanced quickly at Rabbi Sher but saw nothing in his face but repose.

  At the restaurant he ordered crêpes stuffed with lobster. The rabbi ordered chicken sauté echalote, and Dave grinned and told him that he had worried about not selecting a Jewish restaurant. “I eat everything but shellfish,” Sher said.

  “Is there a rule?”

  “No, no. Just the way I was raised. Every Reform rabbi makes up his own mind.”

  During the meal they spoke of the new temple.

  “What will it cost us to hire a new rabbi?” Schoenfeld asked.

  Rabbi Sher smiled. He spoke a name familiar to two-thirds of the Jews in the United States. “For him, fifty thousand dollars a year. Perhaps more. For a young fellow just out of rabbinical school, six thousand. For an older rabbi who has had many congregations without being kept on, six thousand. For a good man with a couple of years of experience under his belt, perhaps ten thousand.”

  “We can forget about the great man. Can you recommend a name or two from the other categories?”

  The rabbi carefully broke his crusty roll. “I know somebody who is very good. He served briefly as an assistant in a large congregation in Florida and then he had his own circuit congregation in Arkansas. He’s young and energetic and personable and extremely bright.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Here in New York. He is teaching Hebrew to children.”

  Schoenfeld shot him a keen look. “Full-time?”

  “Yes.”