Monday the Rabbi Took Off

by Harry Kemelman

  “But she lives in Tel Aviv and I want to stay in Jerusalem.”

  “You don’t know my Aunt Gittel.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Bert Raymond rapped the meeting to order. “I think we can probably dispense with the reading of the minutes of the last meeting. We didn’t do much as I recall.”

  Ben Gorfinkle raised his hand. “I’d like to hear the minutes, Mr. Chairman,” he said evenly.

  “Oh, well sure, Ben. Will you read the minutes, Barry?”

  “Well, Bert, I mean Mr. Chairman, I didn’t get around to writing them up. I mean I got my notes, but it’s like in rough draft.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Barry. I’m sure Ben will overlook any little mistakes in grammar—”

  “What I was going to say is that not having it in final form, and since we didn’t decide on anything special last meeting, I didn’t think it worthwhile bringing my notes.”

  The president was a tall, nice-looking young man, a good guy that everyone liked and no one would think of embarrassing needlessly; he was obviously uncomfortable at the secretary’s negligence. Gorfinkle shrugged his shoulders. “I guess if nothing happened, it doesn’t make any difference.” With this new board, there were so many major things to object to, it seemed fruitless to jib at a little matter like not reading the minutes.

  “Okay,” said the president gratefully, “then let’s get on with the important business of this meeting. What’s your pleasure on the rabbi’s letter?”

  Again Gorfinkle raised his hand. “I guess I must have missed something last meeting. I didn’t hear about any letter from the rabbi.”

  The president was contrite. “Gee, that’s right, Ben, you don’t know about it. I got it during the week, and I talked to some of the boys about it, so I assumed everyone knew. I got this letter from the rabbi asking for a leave of absence for three months starting the first of the year.”

  “May I see the letter?”

  “Actually, I don’t have it with me, Ben. But there’s nothing in it—just what I said. You know, ‘Please regard this as a request for a three-month leave of absence.’ That kind of thing, just a straight business letter.”

  “He gave no reason for his request?” Gorfinkle asked.

  “No, just what I told you—”

  “I tell you it’s a ploy,” interrupted Stanley Agranat. “He’s not interested in a leave of absence. What he’s interested in is a contract. He sends us this letter so we got to go to him and say, ‘What gives, Rabbi?’ Then he says he wants to take off for three months. So we say, ‘But, Rabbi, you can’t take off three months in the middle of the year like this. You got a job here.’ So he plays Mickey the Dunce and says, ‘Oh, have I? I don’t have no contract.’ Then we got to kind of make it up to him and explain how we haven’t had a chance to get around to the matter of contract and how we’re sorry and all that crap. And that’s supposed to put us on the defensive, see? It’s just a ploy.”

  “So what if we say no?” demanded Arnold Bookspan. “When you showed me that letter, Bert, I said right away it was an ultimatum. He’s not asking us, he’s telling us. Now, if he’s a bona fide employee of the temple, he can’t take off just like that. And if he can take off just like that, then as I see it, he’s not a bona fide employee of the temple.”

  “Well, look, guys,” said the president, “fair is fair. They always work on a contract, and we let his run out.”

  “We ought to go about this logically,” said Paul Goodman, who, like the president, was a lawyer and had a methodical mind. “First we ought to decide if we need a rabbi at all, then—”

  “What do you mean, do we need a rabbi at all? How are we going to get along without a rabbi?”

  “Lots of places don’t have them,” Goodman replied. “I mean not regularly. They get a young punk down from the seminary every Friday evening and pay him maybe fifty or a hundred bucks and expenses.”

  “Sure, and you know what you get? You get a young punk.”

  “Not just a young punk,” Goodman reproved, “a young rabbi punk.”

  “Yah, I’ve seen some of those guys from the seminary. A bunch of hippies, if you ask me.”

  “Look, fellows,” Bert Raymond pleaded, “we can’t do that. We got people who use the temple for their weddings and Bar Mitzvahs all year round. When they come to make arrangements, what do we tell them? Maybe we’ll have a rabbi and maybe we won’t? It’s an all-year-round business with us, and we’ve got to have a rabbi full time.”

  “All right, so we go to the next step,” said the methodical Goodman. “Is it this rabbi that we want? Personally, if I’ve got to have some Holy Joe telling me what’s right and what’s wrong, I’d rather have an older man. It’s a matter of sentiment with me.”

  “Well, to me it’s a matter of business. And I don’t let sentiment interfere with business,” said Marty Drexler, the treasurer. “Now, when Bert told me about this letter, I did some checking around, and I can give you some hard facts to think about. The price of rabbis has been going up every year since World War II. Every class graduating from the seminary has been able to command a higher starting salary than the one before. You go out in the open market to hire a rabbi with five or six years’ experience like ours, and you’ll pay anywhere from three to five thousand bucks more than we’re paying right now because he’ll be somebody who’s got a pulpit and we’ll have to make it worth his while to leave. When you hire a rabbi, you’re buying spiritual leadership. Now I say, why raise our spiritual leadership cost three thousand bucks if we don’t have to?”

  “That makes sense to me.”

  “Me too.”

  The president looked around the table. “All right, I think we have a consensus. I think we’re all pretty much agreed that right now the best thing for us to do is to continue the services of our present rabbi. So that brings us right back where we started from. What do we do about this letter? My own feeling is that Stan Agranat is right and that what the rabbi is interested in is a contract. How about it? You all in agreement?” Again his glance swept around the table, halting momentarily at each of them for a confirmatory nod.

  Only Ben Gorfinkle demurred. “It’s my impression that the rabbi usually means what he says.”

  The president shrugged. “Maybe he did when he wrote it. He may have been a little sore. To tell the truth, I thought he acted kind of sore when I told him that we weren’t going to have a community Seder. That may have had something to do with it. But it’s my opinion that if we offer him a contract, he’ll decide right quick that he doesn’t really want a leave of absence. It could be, you know, that what he wants leave for is to go job hunting.”

  “You got a point, Bert.”

  “All right, so what kind of contract do we offer him?”

  Ben Gorfinkle, who was last year’s president, felt constrained to speak once again. He was present at the meeting only because the by-laws made all past presidents life members of the board. The other former presidents, Becker and Wasserman and Schwarz, had stopped attending after the first few meetings. This particular board, all young men, none of them over thirty-five, consisted of close friends. They discussed temple business in the course of casual social get-togethers, so that the board meetings served little purpose beyond voting formally on what had already been decided between them. But Gorfinkle still persisted in attending, even though for the most part he kept his silence. But this was important. Slowly, deliberately, he explained to the board that at the end of the last season the rabbi had rounded out six years with the congregation and that the previous board had planned to offer him a life contract with a year’s sabbatical leave for his seventh year. “But we felt that a contract like that should be negotiated by the new board rather than by the retiring board.”

  “I don’t remember running across it in the minutes of last year’s meetings,” said the secretary.

  “That’s right,” said Raymond. “I don’t recall anything like that.”

/>   “Naturally,” said Gorfinkle. “The rabbi attended board meetings in those days. We couldn’t very well discuss it at the regular meetings.”

  “In that case,” the president interjected, “we have to assume that it was just something that was talked about informally by some of the members. I don’t feel that we’re bound by it.”

  “I was just giving you the background,” said Gorfinkle stiffly.

  “All right, suppose we take that as a starting point,” said the president. “How do you guys feel about Ben’s idea of a lifetime contract and a year’s sabbatical leave?”

  “All I can say is it strikes me as a pretty sweet deal,” said Agranat. “Mind you, I got nothing against the rabbi, but it’s a sweet deal.”

  “On the contrary,” said Gorfinkle, “it’s the usual thing. The rabbi was on trial for a year, and then he was given a five-year contract. The next one is usually a still longer contract, and in most places it’s for life.”

  “How do they work the salary on these contracts?” asked Marty Drexler. “Are there annual increments or—”

  “I suppose,” said Gorfinkle, “or some arrangement for cost of living adjustments. We didn’t go into it at the time.”

  “Seems to me there’s a lot of thinking we got to do about this,” said Drexler. “If we give him a sabbatical, we’re going to have to hire a replacement while he’s gone. Think about that for a while.”

  “What are you getting at, Marty?” asked the president.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m getting at. This is a temple, and he is a rabbi. It’s religion and all that. But a contract is a business deal, I don’t care who it’s between. Everything has to be spelled out, and each side has to make the best deal they can. Take, for instance, what I said before about the cost of rabbis going up from year to year. That’s true, but you take when a rabbi gets to be around fifty, his chances of getting another job are not so good. He’s like over the hill. So there he’s a little weaker and we’re in a little stronger position. He’s what? Thirty-five or so now? So suppose we offer him a fifteen-year contract with the idea of negotiating again when that expires.”

  “Gee, I don’t know ….”

  “That’s kind of dirty.”

  “What’s dirty about it?” demanded Drexler.

  Stanley Agranat waved his hand. “I want to make a motion.”

  “What’s your motion?”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Chairman, there’s a motion on the floor.”

  “What motion?”

  “There’s no motion on the floor. We were just discussing, kind of chewing the fat.”

  Raymond rapped on the table with his gravel. “Just a minute, let’s get organized. Nobody made a motion, so there’s no reason why Stan can’t make one. Go ahead, Stan.”

  “I move, Mr. Chairman, that you appoint a committee to go and see the rabbi and kind of feel him out and get the lay of the land—”

  “You sure it’s the rabbi you got in mind, Stan?”

  The chairman rapped on the table. “C’mon, guys, get serious.”

  “Well, to be serious,” said Goodman, “I’d like to amend Stan’s motion and make it a committee of one, and I’d like to nominate Marty Drexler for the job.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, let’s have just one guy deal with him.”

  “How about it? You all in favor of having one guy do the negotiating?”

  “Right.”

  “The only way.”

  “The only fair way—one against one.”

  “All right,” said Bert Raymond. “All in favor say aye; all opposed, nay. The ayes have it. But I think maybe I ought to talk to him instead of Marty.”

  “No, let Marty.”

  “Why Marty? As the president of the congregation, it seems to me that I ought to talk to him.”

  None of them liked to say that they were afraid he might give away too much, but Paul Goodman offered to explain. “I suggested Marty in the first place because he’s the treasurer and this is definitely a money matter. Besides, Marty is in the finance business and knows all about the angles that got to do with cost of living increases and that kind of thing. But if not Marty, then it seems to me that you’d be the last one we’d want, Bert, just because you are the president. Marty or somebody else can always say he’s got to check with the board for further instructions or for approval of any deal he might arrange, but anything the president proposed, we’d feel we’d have to back him up on it. And if you promised something and then we didn’t back you up, it would put you in a funny spot if you had to go back and say your board wouldn’t go along.”

  “All right,” said Raymond, “you see the rabbi, Marty, and work something out.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Miriam opened the door and ushered Marty Drexler into the living room where the rabbi was sitting. “Since it’s temple business, Mr. Drexler, I’ll leave you two—”

  “Well, maybe you ought to sit in on this, Mrs. Small,” said Marty. “In my own business when it’s family finances like our family plan loan, I always tell the client to come in with his wife. You know what I mean?”

  “Of course, Mr. Drexler, if you prefer.”

  The rabbi had risen, and he now motioned their guest to a chair and then sat down himself. “This has something to do with our family finances, Mr. Drexler?”

  Marty Drexler smiled, a beaming loan company smile. “I’d say it has. We voted in the board to give you a contract, and Bert Raymond appointed me like a committee of one to get all the little details ironed out with you.”

  “That’s very kind of them,” said the rabbi pleasantly. He leaned back in his chair and looked ceilingward. “Of course, I tend to think of a contract as an agreement between two equal parties since each has something that the other wants, rather than as something that one party confers on the other.”

  Drexler was determined not to be put out. He nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right at that. I meant I’m here to negotiate it.”

  “And why at this time?” asked the rabbi.

  Drexler looked at him reproachfully. “Rabbi,” he said, “we’re grown men. We’re not a bunch of kids. We got the message. You send us a letter asking for a leave of absence; it didn’t take us long to realize that you were tickling us on the contract. After all, we’re all businessmen. All right, maybe we been a little remiss. Maybe we been sitting on our fannies—sorry, Mrs. Small—when we should’ve been tending to business. But to tell the truth, we’re kind of new to the game. We figured it was just like a matter of form. All right, I’m sorry; we’re all sorry. Now let’s get down to business. Suppose you tell me what you have in mind, and I’ll tell you what the boys figured was fair. Then if there’s a gap between us, we’ll chin about it. And you feel free to talk up, Mrs. Small, because you’re as much concerned as the rabbi is, I guess. Maybe even more because I always say that it’s the lady of the house that’s the homemaker. She’s the one who knows how much groceries the family needs and how much they’re going to cost. So, you folks lay it right on me, and then I’ll tell you how the board feels. We’ll work out something, and if it’s different from what we had in mind, I’ll discuss it with the board and then come back here and see you about it again until we get it all straightened out. Fair enough?”

  “It’s fair enough, Mr. Drexler,” said the rabbi. He hesitated and tapped the arm of his chair with his fingertips as he marshaled his sentences to explain. “You may find this hard to believe, Mr. Drexler, but when I sent that letter, all I was interested in was a leave of absence. That’s still all I’m interested in. I haven’t given any thought to the matter of a contract, and I don’t think that I’m prepared to think about it right now. A leave of absence I asked for, and it’s a leave of absence that I want.”

  Drexler was still not convinced. He could not help feeling a certain admiration for the rabbi’s gifts at dickering. He tried another tack. “All right, you want to play it that way, I’ll go along. Let’s think about it an
d see where it leads. You say you want a leave of absence. In your letter you said three months. That’s still what you want?”

  The rabbi nodded.

  “So you go away for three months. And you’ll be expecting full pay, I suppose?”

  “As a matter of fact, I hadn’t thought about it.” He considered. “No, I don’t think I’d be entitled to any pay under the circumstances.”

  Drexler was annoyed. How do you dicker with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? He had planned to point out that if the temple paid him three months’ salary, a sizable sum, they would have to have some agreement that he would make it up to them. But if he didn’t expect to be paid….

  “Suppose we refuse the leave of absence, Rabbi?”

  The rabbi smiled faintly. “I’m afraid I’d take it anyway.”

  “You mean you’d resign?”

  “You wouldn’t be giving me any other choice.”

  “Then does that mean if we vote the leave of absence, you’re definitely coming back?”

  The rabbi was honestly troubled. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll feel or what I’ll want three months from now.” He smiled. “Who of us does?”