Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (13 page)

“Of course he did. And he made a eulogy, and he made the blessings. Yet only a few days ago – on the eve of Yom Kippur – with my own ears I heard him threaten my father that if he didn’t take his medicine and died, he would consider him a suicide and bury him in a corner without blessings or eulogy. Then along comes this Isaac Hirsh, who isn’t even a member of the temple – and this is supposed to be a private cemetery for members only – and his wife isn’t even Jewish, and the rabbi buries him with all the trimmings. You say there’s an explanation. I guess there is. The explanation is that you guys wanted to sell a cemetery lot, and for the couple of hundred bucks or whatever it runs, you didn’t care what happened to anybody else who was buried there.”

“I assure you, Ben, it was nothing like that. Marvin Brown, the chairman of our committee, would never do a thing like that. And our rabbi wouldn’t either. There must be some mistake.”

“You think my father doesn’t know what’s kosher and what ain’t?”

“Of course not, but that insurance investigator could be mistaken.”

“How could he be mistaken? He laid it out for me plain as day. This Hirsh goes into his garage and closes the door. Then he sits in his car swigging booze with the motor running. So is it suicide, or isn’t it?”

“Well, it certainly sounds that way, but – Look, if anything can be done –”

“If?”

“Well, tell me, what do you want us to do?”

“You can get him out of there.”

“You mean exhume the body? Ben, we couldn’t do that. You wouldn’t want us to do that. It would create a scandal. We’d need the consent of the widow. The town would –”

“Look, Schwarz” – Goralsky’s tone was cold and dispassionate – “you’ve been sweet-talking my father about building a chapel, and he’s half committed himself to you. Personally, I think the congregation needs a new chapel about as much as they need a pogrom, but if the old man wants it it’s all right by me. But I’m telling you right here and now that if you don’t take care of this cemetery business, any money you get out of us wouldn’t even build a pup tent.”

“Mort, I’m not one of the rabbi’s most ardent admirers any more than you are, but you’ve got to admit he knows his stuff. I mean, if he buried Hirsh then it must be okay.”

“You don’t understand, Marvin. You still don’t get it,” said Schwarz wearily. “The rabbi probably didn’t go into the question of suicide at all. Maybe he suspected and maybe he didn’t. Suppose he did, what would he do? He’d call his friend the police chief who would naturally give him the official finding, death by accident. So he went ahead. In his place I wouldn’t have done any different. And if we ask him, I’m sure he’ll say everything is right and kosher. He’s not going to come right out and say he made a mistake.”

“So what can we do about it now? We can’t take the body out.”

“Well – You know, if the widow wouldn’t object –”

“Forget it, Mort. Even if she were willing, and if I’m any judge of character she wouldn’t be, we’d have to get the approval of the Board of Health of Darbury where our cemetery is, and of the Board of Health of the place where he would be reburied. There’d be so much red tape and so much publicity –”

“Actually, it was Ben Goralsky’s idea, Marve. I told him all that.”

“So have you got any other ideas?”

“Well,” Schwarz began cautiously, “it stands to reason this must happen fairly often, especially where we bury them as soon as we can. Then a couple of days later they find a note, and what they thought was a normal death now is a suicide. So I figure there must be some machinery for taking care of this kind of thing. Some ceremony of purification, say, that the rabbi can perform that would make the cemetery kosher again. The rabbi could dress it up, put on a real show – What’s the matter?” as Marvin shook his head slowly.

“I don’t think the rabbi would do it.”

“Dammit, if the Board orders him to, he’ll have to.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s something the Board can order. It seems to me it would be up to the rabbi to decide. And I’ll tell you something else: I’m not so sure I like the idea myself.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think it would do the cemetery any good.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look, Mort, you’re an architect so maybe you don’t understand the psychology of selling. It’s hard enough to sell someone a cemetery lot – it’s what we call an intangible, like insurance. The people in our congregation are all pretty young. Their minds aren’t running to things like cemetery lots. But a good salesman can convince them. Sometimes, he appeals to their sense of loyalty to the temple; sometimes to their sense of responsibility to their wives and families. Sometimes you just shame them into it. But whatever your approach, you’ve got to make sure your product is perfect, without a flaw. The minute there’s something wrong with your product and your prospect knows it, he grabs onto it and uses it against you. If we let on there is something wrong with the cemetery, that maybe it isn’t a hundred percent kosher, I figure three quarters of those people I’ve got lined up right now I can kiss them goodby.”

“So they’ll buy a little later –”

“Mort, you talk as though you didn’t realize what the cemetery can do for a congregation. Remember, the temple bought the land last year when Becker was president. And whatever you say against Becker, remember he was a businessman. He made me chairman of the committee because he figured that a guy who could sell insurance could sell cemetery lots. Like I say, they’re both intangibles. He used to kid me about it. ‘Marve,’ he used to say, ‘you sell them insurance which is like betting them that they’re going to live, and they’re betting they won’t. So when you sell them a lot, you’re hedging your bets. Son of a gun, you got them coming and going.’ And I’ve used that on some of my prospects – it kind of makes a joke of it.”

“I’ll admit you’re good, Marve. That’s why I kept you on as chairman when I was making up my committees. So what are you getting at?”

“All I’m saying,” said Marvin doggedly, “is you should appreciate what the cemetery can mean to the congregation.”

“But if we don’t do something right now, we stand to lose the Goralskys.”

Marvin was not impressed. “I’ll admit it’s nice to have a first-class tycoon type like Ben Goralsky associated with the temple, but not if we have to kowtow to him every time he –”

“Look Marvin, if I tell you something, can you keep it under your hat? Suppose I said I practically have an ironclad promise from the old man, Ben’s father, that he will ante up the money for a new chapel – not just a big donation, but the whole cost, maybe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Marvin whistled. “A hundred and fifty grand!”

“Maybe more.”

Marvin drew a pencil from his pocket. “Then in that case, I may just have an idea,” he said. He fished around and brought forth from an inside pocket an advertising folder, which he discarded in annoyance.

“What are you looking for? Paper?” Schwarz slid a pad over to him.

“Thanks.” He drew a rough square and in the bottom righthand corner made a small x. “This is the cemetery and here is where Hirsh is buried. All right. According to Goralsky, a suicide is supposed to be buried in a corner off to one side. So we make a corner.” He drew an oval inside the perimeter of the square. It enclosed the entire area except for the four corners. “By building a circular road inside the cemetery, that leaves Hirsh’s grave outside– and in a corner. What do you think?”

Schwarz looked at the drawing in amazement. “Marvin, you’re a genius! You just thought that up?”

“Well, I’ve been playing with the idea in another connection. You remember a couple of Board meetings ago I said we had to have a road through the cemetery. The Board turned it down because they didn’t want to go into that kind of money at the time. But I thought about it a lot, trying to figure out a pattern that would give access to all parts of the cemetery and still eat up the least possible land. This seemed to fill the bill.”

“But isn’t a circular road apt to be more expensive?”

“We don’t have to do the whole road. Even keeping to our present budget – the money already voted that I have in hand – we can lay it out and do just one corner, Hirsh’s corner to start with. We’ll finish the rest when the Board votes more money.”

“By God, Marve, I think that’ll do it. I still say you’re a genius.”

Marvin looked dubious. “How about the rabbi?”

“What about him?”

“Do we tell him?”

Schwarz considered. “I guess we better, if only to make sure this will do the trick.”

“Surely you must be joking,” exclaimed the rabbi. “You’re harking back to the Dark Ages. During the Nazi Terror, there must have been hundreds of suicides. Would you have denied them ritual burial?”

“But you yourself threatened old man Goralsky with just that, according to his son,” said Schwarz.

“Threatened him? I was scaring an adult with the bogeyman. He could tell I wasn’t really serious. I was just trying to get him to take his medicine. I told you all about it at the temple.”

“Yes, but Ben Goralsky evidently took it seriously,” said Schwarz.

“I doubt if he did at the time,” said the rabbi. “But in any case, on what grounds can you assume Hirsh was a suicide? The police verdict was accidental death. And I went to the trouble of discussing it personally with the chief of police, and he feels the evidence overwhelmingly favors that finding. Are we to be more callous in our dealings with the dead and bereaved than the civil authorities?”

“Suppose it finally was decided that he was a suicide?” asked Marvin.

“Decided by whom?”

“Well, by a court of law.”

“Even then, the chances are that he was either temporarily insane or suffering from a compulsion so extreme he was powerless to withstand it. So he wouldn’t be accounted a suicide in the eyes of Jewish Law.”

“Yes, but if he was a suicide, just suppose he was,” Marvin persisted. “Then wouldn’t it be up to us or to you to do something about it?”

“Why would anything have to be done about it? He was buried – that in itself is a cleansing action. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ Burial itself cleanses. When a utensil becomes tref, the way you cleanse it is to bury it in the earth. Are you suggesting that the presence of this man’s body pollutes God’s earth? And if so, where does it stop? At the boundary of our cemetery, which is an artificial line recorded in the Registry of Deeds, or does it go on indefinitely until it reaches the ocean?”

“Well, maybe there’s some prayer –”

“Some bit of hocus-pocus? That I can make a few magician’s passes over the grave? Is that what you had in mind, Mr. Brown?”

“Now look here, Rabbi,” said Schwarz. “We are all practical men, I hope, and we are up against a practical matter. I’m not worried about the cemetery being polluted and Marvin here isn’t either. But this is something that Ben Goralsky, and evidently his father, take seriously. Call it superstition, if you will. Call it ignorance, but it bothers them.

“Now we’re practical men, Rabbi, Marvin and I. As chairman of the Cemetery Committee, Marvin is concerned with the effect on sales of cemetery lots if this story gets around, and I am concerned with keeping the Goralskys in the temple organization. We’ve worked out what I consider a practical solution to a sticky little problem, and what we want from you is just some information. What we have in mind is to build a circular road inside the cemetery. Like this –” And he took out the sketch. “Now here is where Hirsh is buried. If we keep him outside the road and from now on sell lots only on the inside, will that satisfy the regulations? Actually, Hirsh stands to gain. Since we can’t use the corner land naturally we’d want to beautify it – put in some shrubbery, trees. What we want to know is whether that would do it.”

The rabbi rose from his chair. He looked at each of them in turn, as though unable to believe they were serious. “Is a man a dog?” he demanded, his fury all the more intense because he kept it controlled, “that you presume to toss his body from one place to another as suits you? Is the service I conducted at his grave just a bit of mumbo jumbo of no significance and no meaning? Last week I joined with other rabbis in submitting a petition to our State Department asking them to protest the Russian government’s desecration of Jewish graves. And now you would have me party to a plan to desecrate a grave in our own cemetery to satisfy the superstitions of a foolish and ignorant old man and his equally foolish and ignorant son? Are our ceremonies to have a price to be sold to the highest bidder?”

“Just a minute, Rabbi, we’re not desecrating any grave. We have no intention of molesting Hirsh’s grave.”

The rabbi lowered his voice even further. “A woman not of our faith comes to us and asks us to bury her dead husband in our cemetery because he was Jewish. She regards it as her last act of loyalty and love to lay him to rest among his own people, and you propose to differentiate his grave from all the rest? And you don’t consider this desecration? In good faith, she paid her money – three or four times the price of a lot in the public cemetery, mind you – only to have her husband separated, markedly separated from the rest of the cemetery, as – as a thing unclean?”

“I’ll bet I could get her to agree,” said Marvin.

“It’s purely an administrative matter,” said Schwarz.

“You are a salesman, Mr. Brown, and a successful one,” said the rabbi. “It’s quite possible you could persuade a widow in her bereavement to consent to your plan. But you can’t persuade me. And I consider it something more than just an administrative matter, Mr. Schwarz. I will not be a party to it.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel this way, Rabbi,” said Schwarz. “I consider it a practical solution to a practical problem. I am concerned with the living rather than the dead. I am concerned with the effect on our congregation of having the Goralskys as members rather than whether the grave of Isaac Hirsh who was not even a member of our organization is on one side of a road or another.”

“I cannot approve and I will so tell the Board when the matter comes up.”