by Howard Fast
“When morning came, the rabbi was awakened by the sobbing of the old woman, and when he went to comfort her, the two old folks told him that during the night their single cow had died — and how could they live with their cow dead?
“The Prophet Elijah and the rabbi left the little hut and set out to continue their journey, the rabbi muttering petulantly, until the Prophet Elijah said, ‘Rabbi, why do you mutter so? I find it annoying.’
“‘Do you?’ the rabbi said indignantly. ‘I will tell you why I mutter. All my life I have preached God’s goodness and mercy, and what do I see? Two saintly people are punished so terribly while the wicked go free.’
“‘You do not question God’s actions,’ the prophet said severely.
‘“I must.’
“‘No, Rabbi. You must have faith. Ordinarily, I do not explain God’s actions, but this time, Rabbi, I will make an exception. While you slept last night, I was called to the presence of the Almighty, and among other things, he asked me about the peasant and his wife. When I spoke of their goodness, God became deeply disturbed. In the Book of Fate, the peasant’s days were numbered, and even as we spoke, the Angel of Death, the malakh ha mavet, was on his way with the speed of light to end the poor peasant’s days. Not even the Almighty can halt the Angel of Death, but God is not without his own powers, and now he reached out and deflected the thrust of the malakh ha mavet. Death was delivered as destined, not to the peasant but to the cow. Thus, the Angel of Death was frustrated, and the old couple could have each other a few years more.’
“After this explanation, the rabbi was so filled with shame that he walked for hours in silence. The weather turned cold. It began to rain, and the rabbi and the prophet walked on in the cold, pouring rain, but the rabbi could not bring himself to complain or protest.
“Then, just as darkness was beginning to fall, they saw before them a magnificent house. They hurried up to the front door and knocked. The owner opened the door himself. He wore a robe of fine silk, shoes of the softest leather, a belt studded with jewels, and on his hand two diamond rings of great brilliance. He looked at the two soaked, bedraggled travelers with contempt, and when they begged for a place to spend the night, he spat upon them and slammed the door in their faces. Not far from this great house, there was an old, broken-down shed, and there, huddled together, the rain coming through the roof above them, the Prophet Elijah and the rabbi spent the night. You can well imagine that the rabbi did not sleep a wink, and with the very first light of dawn, he saw the prophet rise and slip out of the shed. The rabbi followed the prophet. The rain had stopped. The prophet went into a nearby village and awakened a stonemason. He led the mason back to the house of the rich man. A corner of the house was crumbling, near the foundation, and the prophet instructed the mason to repair it. After the mason had repaired the house, the prophet paid him.
“The rabbi hurried back to the shed, and when the prophet appeared, the rabbi pretended to be asleep. They shared some bread and cheese and started on their way, and finally the prophet said, ‘Again with the muttering, Rabbi?’
“‘I followed you this morning.’
“‘I know you did,’ the prophet said, ‘and once again you doubt God.’
“‘What else can I do? Two saintly poor people, and their single cow is destroyed. And now this rich, selfish, heartless man, and you — you, the Prophet Elijah — you repair his house and pay for the repairs yourself.’
“‘Rabbi, Rabbi,’ the prophet said, ‘you have lost your innocence and you have lost your faith. I will explain once more. Last night I was again called to the Divine Presence, and I spoke of the rich man and his inhospitality. God does not interfere with man’s life on earth, but this time he was in trigued. Do you know, he said to me, the corner of that man’s house is crumbling. In a few days, after the rain, it will crumble enough to reveal a chest that was hidden there a hundred years ago. The chest is filled with jewels, and the rich man will only become richer and more cruel and more selfish. So go to the village and hire a mason and have him repair the corner of the house, that the chest may remain hidden for another hundred years.’
“Once again, the rabbi was so overcome with shame that he covered his face with his hands, and then when he glanced up, the Prophet Elijah had disappeared, and so ends our fable. I tell it to you, not because my own faith is so great, but because it has been stretched so thin. Other people have accepted the calamities that beset mankind, the pain of being human as a natural part of existence, but we Jews are very adroit and we must work them into God’s scheme, and perhaps we are right. Who knows?
“I have always loved this old story, but I am not sure in my own mind that faith is the answer to anything. Doubt is more to my liking. Moses faced God. Who are you? What is your name? Prove yourself to me. There is an old rabbinical belief that the only proof of God is in our own actions, and I most often feel that is sufficient.”
They always finished the Sabbath eve service with coffee and cake in the lounge, and this night David was more than usually beset with questions and arguments. They ranged from Eddie Frome’s plea that he might use the story in The New Yorker to Al Bramer’s demand for David to show where in the Talmud the story existed. Bramer was in the pro-Orthodox division of the congregation. Martin and Millie, visitors only, stayed in the background, Millie whispering to Martin, “He made it up.” “Nonsense. No one makes up a story like that.” “It’s a sort of Jewish joke,” Alan Buckingham said to his wife, Dora, who pointed out that he was the last person in the world to pontificate on Jewish jokes.
“A Jewish joke is a contradiction in terms,” Dora insisted.
“We are a Jewish joke,” Oscar Denton said. He was well past ninety-four, and he walked without a cane and read without glasses. “I have been spared to this unholy age in order to understand that, and I suppose that having understood it, I’ll be gathered to my fathers, as they say. The goyim,” he said, raising a hand of apology to Martin and Millie, “invented us at the point that they realized that they were utterly insane. They had spent the first three thousand years of history slaughtering each other, and when they realized they were faced with extinction, they invented us. But their invention went haywire, because we started slaughtering each other with equal delight. Now they’re stuck with Jews and slaughter.”
Joe Hurtz, who had wandered into the group, said to David, “The old man’s crazy as a hatter. They ought to put him away. I think he’s turned anti-Semitic.”
“I think he’s got something there,” Eddie Frome told David, who had not heard Oscar Denton’s version of history. “It needs cleaning up and a few facts, but he’s got something there.”
“Hurtz!” Oscar Denton said commandingly. “Hurtz, how old are you?”
“Seventy-three, Oscar. You know damned well how old I am.”
“All right — seventy-three. Now listen, motherfucker, I’m going to outlive you!” With that, Denton stamped out, pausing at the door to shout, “It’s past my bedtime, anyway.”
David spread his arms hopelessly.
“When we were kids,” Sophie Frome said, “and one of us raised her voice, Grandma said, ‘Sha, a Shandeh for the goyim.’ Well, that’s what this is. I don’t mind salty talk, but that old man’s an abomination.”
“Oh, come on,” Martin said. “Since Millie and I are the only goyim here tonight, it’s hardly a — what did you say?”
“Shandeh,” David said. “Yiddish for shame.”
“Oh, he’s a marvelous old man,” Millie said.
David grinned at her, and they both remembered the evening long ago when Lucy had invited Denton to dinner with the Carters. Denton’s wife was long dead, and Lucy had seated him next to Millie. “He had tiger knees,” Millie said later.
“What did he say?” David asked now.
“No way that anyone could repeat or make sense of what he said,” Alan Buckingham decided.
“And where did your story come from, Rabbi?” Mrs. Shapiro asked him.
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“I really don’t know. I remember that I heard it as a boy, probably in a synagogue, and again I read it somewhere.”
“A Jewish joke,” Eddie Frome was arguing, “is not necessarily a defiance of logic. I heard one the other day. Mrs. Cohen meets Mrs. Levy on the street. Mrs. Levy is wheeling a large carriage containing twins, Arthur and Arnold. But which is Arnold and which is Arthur, Mrs. Cohen wants to know? Simple, says Mrs. Levy. The lawyer is Arthur and the doctor is Arnold.”
“Awful.”
“Not awful. It’s a typical Jewish joke — or it could be Italian or Greek or whatever, the desperate need of poor people, lately liberated, to improve their status. David’s story is something else. How does one look at God or fate or the universe after the Holocaust?”
“It’s a legend from long before the Holocaust.”
“What Holocaust? Human history is a holocaust. I have a friend who was in the Manhattan Project, and he and his colleagues have calculated that an atomic war would destroy two thirds of the human race.”
“Or all of it.”
Della Klein drew David away. “Let’s have some coffee and cake, Rabbi. It’s too late for clever arguments.”
“Yes, I’d love some coffee and cake.”
The cake was not good. It never was. There were certainly some gifted bakers in the congregation, but they never volunteered for the Friday baking. However, no one complained. The cake was eaten.
“The trouble with your stories,” Della said, “is that they lack a third act.”
“It’s a story, not a play.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. David, have you ever thought of giving up the rabbinate?”
“Yes, I’ve thought about it.”
“But you won’t, will you?”
“Not as long as they tolerate us. You see, they tolerate ministers and rabbis. We are the clowns of God, if there is a God, but everything else is crumbling. People are not very admirable, but they deserve a chance to survive. Perhaps we can help with that.”
“Remember, you agreed to marry me?”
“Any time.”
“You do have a sense of humor,” Della said. “I was never very sure of that. How about the fifth of next month? My kids can make it then, and it will be nice to have your kids, if they can come.”
Mrs. Holtzman wept. “It’s wonderful for you to be married,” she said. “A man like you, he should be married. But what will become of me? I will die if I have to go back and live with my daughter, God bless her, but not to live with.”
David said that he would work that out, but Della saw no reason for Mrs. Holtzman to come with him. After canvassing half his congregation, he found another place for her. He had a letter from his daughter, Sarah, and between the lines there was a plea for financial help. If he wanted his children at his wedding, he would have to send them tickets. And then Lucy telephoned from California to tell him, through her tears, that her mother had passed away. “And David,” Lucy sobbed, “she wanted to be buried next to Pop, and Pop is there at Leighton Ridge, and I just don’t know what to do.”
He could picture it clearly as she spoke to him. This was the woman he had married and lived with so many years, and he could picture her grief and her confusion — and this was apart from him. Everything that happened to her now was apart from him. He took down the name of the funeral parlor where Sally Spendler’s body lay, and he assured Lucy that he would take care of everything else. “I’ll have the body here tomorrow,” he said, “and we can have the funeral a day after that. Why don’t you take the Red Eye tonight, and that will get you in early in the morning. I’ll make arrangements from here. You can stay with Millie. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
“David, I’m married.”
“Yes, of course. There’s no reason why both of you can’t stay with the Carters.”
Later, David drove to the cemetery, the lovely grassy meadow that they had purchased, aided by Alan Buckingham’s machinations, from the Episcopal church. There were twenty-seven graves now, the toll that time had taken, and as David walked through the little cemetery, he recalled Mark Twain’s comment on the Jews, that they were just like everybody else, only more so. The little graveyard had been adorned. It was surrounded by a hedge of taxus, already eight feet tall, and the entrance was defined by an iron gate hung from brick gateposts. Family plots were marked off by low iron rods linked by foot-high granite posts. Flowers and new cedars everywhere. David might have preferred the simple austerity of the Congregational graveyard; but then Jews were not Congregationalists, no matter how much Martin Carter compared the virtues and faults of both groups. Martin Carter was unquestionably a Lamed Vov, one of the thirty-six just men upon whom the existence of the world depended. The notion made David smile. It would be nice to suggest it to Martin, but it would disturb him too much, and Millie would certainly be provoked. “What an outrageous notion!” she would say to David, and of course, she’d be quite right. He came to his own small plot, a burial space large enough for eight graves. He had brought a handful of colored sticks with him to outline the new grave. All too often, they would dig the grave in the wrong spot. “At least, here’s a practical need for someone like myself, a practical purpose of rabbis and ministers,” David decided. “Birth, confirmation, marriage, death — all very basic to any society.” Mel Klein’s family plot was hardly more than a few yards away. “Complications.” David sighed. Well, Della was very bright. He seemed to gravitate toward bright women. She would work things out.
Back at his office, Mrs. Shapiro said to him, “I’ve been on the phone all morning, Rabbi, but I think it’s all in hand. The funeral parlor will ship the body to the airport, and then it goes by air cargo, and they come into Kennedy at five o’clock in the morning. I had to make arrangements for the coffin to be held until the hearse gets there, which won’t be until eight o’clock. The hearse will get here some time before noon, I don’t know exactly when, so you’d better schedule the burial for three o’clock or so. Weather says it will be a very nice day, if you want to have an outside service.” Mrs. Shapiro had become older, stouter, and marvelously competent.
He was about to say that the decision would be up to his wife, but he stopped himself. He praised Mrs. Shapiro and then went outside. His invitation for Lucy and her husband to stay with the Carters had been rather cavalier, and he thought he would drive over to Martin’s place and apologize. As he came out of the synagogue, he heard his name called from the direction of the old Congregational church, which had housed the synagogue and which had been subsequently sold to the Unitarians. The old church and the synagogue were about a quarter of a mile apart, and now David saw a young man striding hurriedly toward the synagogue.
He came up to David with the question “Rabbi Hartman?”
As David turned to the young man, he became aware that Mrs. Shapiro had followed him. “One moment, please,” David said.
“The thing is,” Mrs. Shapiro whispered, “that this is going to cost a fortune, Rabbi. Almost a thousand dollars. Who will pay for it?”
“I will.”
“But you shouldn’t have to.”
“Please,” he begged her. “Not now, please.” He walked over to where the young man was waiting and said, “You must forgive me. My mother-in-law just died in California. We’re trying to make some arrangements.”
“Of course, Rabbi. I don’t want to intrude at a moment like this. I simply wanted to introduce myself. I’m Steven Woodsman, and I’m the new pastor at the Unitarian church. Since we’re such close neighbors, I feel we should know each other. We have many Jews in our membership.”
“Do you indeed!” David said coldly.
“I only meant —”
“I know precisely what you meant,” David said, cutting him off. “I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Woodsman.” With that, he turned around and strode across to where his car was parked. Once in the car, driving toward Martin’s house, he tried to understand what had come over him. How many times Lucy
and Della had berated him for a lack of anger, and here he was seething with anger.
“And I really can’t say why,” he told Martin a while later. “I put down this poor young fellow with the most disgusting behavior.”
“I’m sure it was not that disgusting, David. You haven’t done a quick change into Mr. Hyde.”
“But I’ve always known that half the membership of that Unitarian church were Jews. As a matter of fact, I’ve lured away at least a dozen families through the years, and the Unitarians, Jewish or otherwise, are very nice people.”
“You and I,” Martin said, “we do have the right to resort to anger.”
“Well, when things ease up, I’ll seek him out and apologize. You will forgive me for inviting Lucy and her husband to a night of bed and board at your place.”
When Martin told his wife about the incident, Millie said, “Martin, don’t you see what’s happening? David’s in the process of becoming an angry old Jew.”
“What a thing to say!”
“I don’t mean it as anything derogatory. I adore David. But I think his time of childhood and innocence is over. He’s been brought up and has lived as a damned, bloodless Wasp, no different from you and me. That’s over, I think. He’s converted and turned Jewish, and now he’s in the process of becoming a prophet. You know your Bible. There was nothing nice about the prophets. They thundered and raged and denounced greed and injustice. You wouldn’t want to have one of them in your living room, but they were something.”
Looking at his wife in astonishment, Martin said, “You feel that? It’s very interesting, but I wonder.”
And at that moment, David was saying to Della, “Yes, I finally figured it out. I don’t want any young cub of a Unitarian minister telling me about a congregation full of Jews who haven’t enough brains and guts, not to mention grace, to remain Jews. No, sir! I do not want that!”
Della doubled up with laughter, and David said indignantly, “You’re laughing at me.”
“With you, with you. Oh, David, all those people want is to stop being Jewish without converting. Same as your letter from Salt Lake City, where you can finally be a Gentile and remain Jewish.”
