Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

  CHAPTER 26

  “What is happening inside that head of yours?” Aurora asks me on the way to Temple Emanuel.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You have not said a single word since you came home from work yesterday. You refused to come down to dinner. You were up at four walking Namu. You wouldn’t go to work today. I had to practically drag you out of that tree house to come with me to see Hesch. I know it’s not the camping trip because you were happy when you returned. Did something happen with your father yesterday at work? Why are you so quiet?”

  “Marcelo is always quiet.”

  “Yes. But it’s a different kind of quiet now. You remind me of…”

  “Joseph. Just before he died.” I finish her thought.

  “How did you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Joseph’s quiet was not a bad quiet, I don’t think.”

  “He was waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “The music.”

  We drive in silence for a few minutes.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Aurora asks me.

  The IM has stopped. It will never come back. It was a temporary product of my brain, just like my special interest. I am lost. I have no way of knowing what to do about Ixtel, about my father, about Jasmine. I cannot tell any of this to Aurora. Instead, I say to her, “Aurora is acting too much like a mother.”

  “You haven’t seen Hesch since I don’t know when. You need to spend a little time around someone on your own wavelength.”

  “Aurora is on the same wavelength,” I say.

  “No. Your religious interests are way beyond me. Besides, you need to talk about them.”

  “Aurora’s religion is like the morning dew. No one knows where it comes from. It is just there.”

  “Nonsense. I am not religious, morning dew or otherwise. The law firm turned you into a poet now?”

  “It’s from the Bible.”

  “What book and verse?”

  “What?”

  “That line about the dew on the flower, whereabouts in the Bible is it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You’re forgetting Bible references now? I knew something was wrong with you. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have insisted that you talk to Hesch. I don’t know why you resisted so much. You always liked going to see her.”

  It is true, I think. Talking to the rabbi was one of my favorite activities. But now I am afraid.

  Aurora drops me off at the rear parking lot of Temple Emanuel. I am climbing up the steps to the back entrance when I hear the rabbi’s voice.

  “I’m back here!”

  She’s at the far end of the parking lot holding a green garbage bag in her hand. I walk toward her, carrying the book by Abraham Joshua Heschel that she lent me.

  “Look at this,” she says when I am close enough to hear her normal voice. She holds up an empty can of Bud Light for me to see. “The cops tell me that kids come back here at night to drink and make out. Can you believe it? A Temple parking lot of all places! Is there nothing sacred anymore?” With her oversized, green-fluorescent sunglasses, she looks like one of the Amazon frogs that Yolanda once kept in her terrarium. She beams me a smile. “How is my young mensch?”

  “I brought back your book.” I hand the book to her. I notice a beer can half-buried in the leaves and bend over to pick it up.

  “Thank you.” She grabs the book first and places it on one of two tattered lawn chairs. Then she takes the can carefully from me with yellow rubber-gloved fingers. “It can’t be any of our kids. No God-fearing Jewish kid would drink this stuff. If I find a bottle of vodka, then I worry.” She tightens the bag and points to the tattered lawn chairs. “Let’s sit outside. It’s beeeautiful out here!”

  It is the middle of August. The leaves on the oak trees are fullsize and dark green. Rabbi Heschel waits for me to sit down and angles the chair so that she is not facing me directly. Then she takes a deep breath and folds her hands in her lap.

  I remember some visits with the rabbi where no more than a hello and a good-bye were spoken. That’s one of the things I enjoyed about her. I didn’t have to think of anything to say when I was with her. Now the silence is uncomfortable.

  I do not know how much time passes before she speaks. “How’s the remembering?”

  This is a question I don’t want to answer. I decide to counter it with another question. “Does Aurora believe in God?”

  “Have you ever asked her?”

  “Once,” I reply. “She answered with a question, like the rabbi likes to do. She said, ‘What difference would it make whether I do or not?’”

  “And what do you think she meant by that?” she asks.

  “You tell me what you think.”

  She sighs. I see her hands tighten around the chair’s armrests. “Aurora believes in God in her own way.” She speaks so quietly I can barely hear her.

  “I know why Aurora does not like to talk about religion.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “There was a little girl at St. Elizabeth’s once who died because her parents refused to consent to a blood transfusion. Their religion prohibited it.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Aurora was very angry.”

  “And sad.”

  “The parents of that little girl believed they were following God’s commands.”

  “Their religion told them that, yes.”

  “Were they wrong? The parents? I know Aurora thinks they were wrong. What does the rabbi think?”

  Rabbi Heschel takes off her sunglasses and dangles them by the side of the chair. “I think we, and I mean all of us, every single one of us who’s in the religion business, have messed things up royally.”

  “It is not possible to know what God wants us to do.”

  “Let’s just say that because we are human, there is an element of uncertainty in interpreting His will.”

  “People kill other people and they think God asked them to do it.”

  “That is correct.”

  We both look up toward the sound of a robin’s double whistle: Pheee-Pheeeu. Pheee-Pheeeu. Pheee-Pheeeu. I can see the robin’s ocher chest puff up with inhaled breath before the sound is made.

  “I don’t remember anymore,” I tell her. It feels good to get the words out.

  Rabbi Heschel is unfazed, as if it were natural to one day suddenly stop praying or remembering. She waits for a while before speaking again. “The day after Lucy died—the little girl whose parents refused her a blood transfusion—Aurora got up in the morning and went to work. She had tried very hard to get the hospital to fight the parents’ decision. A judge ultimately ruled in favor of the hospital, but by then it was too late.”

  “Yes.”

  Rabbi Heschel laughs a short, sad laugh. Then she says, “Do you think that God cares one whit whether Aurora believes in Him? She doesn’t need to believe in God or even remember Him to do His work. Her belief is in her deeds, which is okay.”

  “God is with her like the morning dew.”

  “Thoughts about Him are not what He wants. He wants deeds. But that doesn’t mean she thinks that’s the only way for everyone. I’m her best friend and my head spins with God-talk day and night. I believe that the Holy One, Blessed be He, helps us to know His will through the words of His holy men and women and through the events of history, because He knows we need all the help we can get. And we need to remember the holy words and the events in history as much as we can because it’s in our nature to forget. That’s part of my tradition. And look, Aurora brings you here to talk God stuff with me, although I think she does that just to make sure I stay humble, which is what good friends do.”

  “Do you know where in the Bible it says that God comes to us like morning dew?”

  “There’s nothing that says the Holy One comes to us like morning dew,” she says with absolute certainty. “Somewhere in there, there is something about Hi
s favor coming to us like morning dew.”

  “I am not able to remember where.”

  “It’s a line from a poem of one of your mystics. Good old Metchild. You should know, you’re the one that introduced me to her.”

  “God’s love descends on us like dew on a flower,” I suddenly remember those words. “But Metchild was only repeating an image found in the Hebrew Bible.”

  “Love, favor, God, it’s still a beautiful image no matter what. No wonder one of our people invented it.” She moves her eyebrows up and down rapidly—a gesture meant to imitate Groucho Marx, a favorite comedian of the rabbi.

  “I am not interested in the Bible anymore,” I say.

  “And the other holy books?”

  “Also.”

  “Why?”

  I reflect before answering. “Johnny is a kid at Paterson. He and I entered Paterson at the same time. Johnny’s special interest is baseball. He is obsessed by baseball facts and statistics. ‘In what game did Babe Ruth hit his four hundredth home run and who was the pitcher?’ Johnny will tell you. I always thought it was a silly special interest. What good does it do to know that?” I stop.

  “And you think that reading the Bible and your other books is just like Johnny’s special interest.”

  “It is exactly the same. He can tell you when Babe Ruth hit a home run and I can tell you about Ruth the Moabite.”

  “I have to disagree. It seems to me you read the Bible for a different reason than Johnny studies his baseball books. You’re not simply memorizing, you’re searching, listening, responding even. The story of Ruth the Moabite taught you something about how to live. The Bible is alive for you in a way that baseball statistics are not for Johnny. The Bible and your holy books are reminders of what you want to remember. That’s how you used to pray, yes? You memorized the words from your holy books and then remembered them, and in doing so brought to life the mystery and the reality behind the words.”

  “Johnny remembers also. He is the happiest when he is remembering his baseball. There is no difference.”

  I hear her sigh again. The robin is now in the middle of the parking lot hopping frantically here and there.

  “Something happened at the law firm.”

  “Yes.”

  “You discovered something about the world we live in, some complication that pulls you in different directions.”

  I nod.

  “You are at a loss as to what to do. You lost the bearings you used to rely on.”

  I nod.

  Rabbi Heschel stretches her feet, lifts her face upward and closes her eyes to the sunlight. “Have I ever told you how I ended up as a rabbi?”

  “No.”

  “My Hebrew brain squirmed over the decision.” I turn in time to see her grin. “Was it the Holy One that was calling me, or was it me just wanting to thumb my nose at the males, including those in my closest family, who believed the Lord’s business was not a woman’s business? My father wanted me to be a lawyer, of all things.”

  I try to picture Rabbi Heschel with her neon-green glasses sitting behind Stephen Holmes’s immaculate glass desk. The image causes me to chuckle to myself.

  “What? You don’t think I’d make a good lawyer?”

  “No. The brain of the rabbi is too powerful.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought. I could be a lawyer, but then that wide green pasture in my brain would lie fallow. What a waste that would be, huh? I had to find a job that utilized my overpowering intellectual capabilities.” She lifts the green garbage bag and rattles the empty beer cans inside.

  I smile.

  She continues, “I think your brain is like mine. I never knew for sure that going to seminary was what God wanted me to do. ‘Sure,’ I used to complain, ‘to Moses you appear as a burning bush, but to me you come as a burning hemorrhoid.’ I knew that going to seminary was what the Lord wanted only afterward, when the burning—not stopped—but at least got bearable.”

  “Burning.” I know exactly what she’s talking about.

  “God’s love descends on some like dew on a flower, blessed be He, but sometimes we trudge along our comfortable lives and bam, He descends on us like a splash of gasoline…and then He strikes a match. Why do I think that you have been soaking in gasoline all these years and He just set you on fire?”

  Ixtel was the match, I say to myself.

  She waits for me to respond. Then after a while she says, “How I found out what God wanted me to do is that the urge to do it got too painful to ignore. I ended up going to seminary just so I could finally get some sleep.”

  “The urge. Urge.”

  “Great word, isn’t it? Sounds like when a piece of gefilte fish gets stuck in your throat and you try to dislodge it by coughing and gagging. Uurrrch. Uuurguh.” She imitates a person choking.

  “‘Urgency’ and ‘urgent’ are related to urge,” I say.

  “So is ‘reg-urge-itate,’” she jokes.

  “The urge the rabbi had…has…still has…is a longing, ‘like a hart longs for flowing streams.’”

  Rabbi Heschel’s eyes soften. She turns her face away from me and focuses on the steady working of a woodpecker. “I needed to hear that,” she says, still not looking at me.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She sits up, her back flush against the back of the patio chair. “Only our longing for Him, the big longing, the one with a capital L, sometimes gets confused with a hundred little longings, some of them okay, some of them not. For most of us the big longing lies buried under a mountain of silliness and selfishness.”

  I think of Jasmine, Arturo, Oak Ridge High.

  The rabbi continues, “He’s urging you to do something that may be painful, isn’t He?”

  I shake my head yes.

  “I don’t know what I would do if I thought God was asking me to do something with painful consequences, something that required courage and sacrifice. Not that He doesn’t, it’s just that I’m afraid. Actions that require courage are all He asks these days. I know He needs me to do something with more shock value, like what the prophets used to do, to wake people up from their comfortable stupor. I’d preach to them naked like Hosea, but look at me. You think anyone would even look? ‘Wake up, wake up!’ I’d say, jumping around in my birthday suit. ‘You’re worried about upgrading your Mercedes or about whether so-and-so is sitting closer to the Tabernacle, and all along God is dying for your help. It’s urgent! He’s urging you. The urges that you feel are to do His work—you’re getting the signals all mixed up. You think He’s asking you to be a big success in whatever it is you’re ambitious about, and that’s not what He wants from you at all.’”

  Then she stops talking and makes a concerted effort to calm herself. She resumes, her tone more subdued, more intimate. “If I told you that God speaks to us through our urges so long as these are safe and proper and totally civilized and don’t hurt anyone, what would I be saying? If I told you longing is okay as long as it is within the bounds of what our world considers normal, I would be going counter to my whole tradition. My people discovered divine urges, for goodness’ sake. Not namby-pamby urges either. It was loincloth-tearing, harlot-marrying, sacrificing, succumbing, and surrendering kinds of urges. Not without bickering and haggling, I’ll grant you, but ultimately urges of the worst kind, the kind that demanded everything.”

  Then she opens her eyes wide and I see her pupils darken as she speaks. “Do I think that the people who let children die or who blow themselves up for the sake of God are wrong? Yes, I do. They start out right and turn wrong. They begin holy and end up evil. Is the desire to do justice the same kind of inner fire that makes people deny transfusions to their dying child or blow themselves up or seek revenge? What can I tell you? I have to say that in essence it is. It is the same sap that comes from the ground, travels up the roots, and then clambers up the trunk until it reaches the branches. Then it chooses. If the sap goes up one branch it is good and it bears fruit. Good, beautiful, nouris
hing fruit. And if it goes up another branch it is evil and there is no fruit except maybe a dried-up useless fig. But the sap, the sap is the same, only the fruits are different.”

  I feel her studying me as if she was trying to read my thoughts. “Your fire. The fire you’re in. You have to make sure it goes up the right branch. It’s up to you.”

  “The fire hurts.”

  “It does. There’s no getting around it.”

  “And there is anger and revenge in the fire. The fire wants to hurt those who are deceitful and those who inflict suffering.”

  “Yes. But His urges are always toward life and more life and forgiveness and more forgiveness. And what comes from Him are like these juicy pomegranates I saw in Israel; they are plain on the outside, but inside they are loaded with light-giving rubies that are sweet and precious, and quench and fill. Like those outwardly simple but incredibly rich words of Micah: ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’”

  How is it possible to be kind to Arturo after his deceit, his own lack of kindness? And Jasmine? I tell myself that there is nothing to forgive her for and yet the feeling of being wounded by her exists. It seems to resist forgiveness.

  But I can do justice for Ixtel.

  We see Aurora’s car pull into the parking lot. Rabbi Heschel places her hand on my arm. “Marcelo, before you go, let me play the part of the rabbi for a change and say this: It is a messy business, this trying to figure out what His will is. It is messy and painful and certainly never clear. But deep at the bottom of our conflicting desires and confusions there is the sense of what is right and what is wrong. What else can we do but trust and hope in this sense? What else can we do but trust that He is at the source of what we feel and hope He is at the end of what we want to do? Trust the sense you have that you are traveling the right direction because, when it comes down to it, that and the ability to tell the difference between a dried-up fig and a pomegranate is all you have.”