The Saturday Wife (17 page)

Delilah chose the quiet private third meal of the day to make her move. Seated across from her hosts at a table filled with coffee and cake and various salads, Delilah said, “We had such a lovely time. This is such a great congregation. So many young people! Chaim is always saying if he had a young congregation, he could do so much. You know that image of writing on blank paper, rather than paper that’s got writing all over it?”

Chaim, who had never expressed—or felt—any such thing, just stared at her.

“Really, Chaim? Would you prefer youth work?” Josh asked him.

“Well, I can’t say I wouldn’t like it. I just don’t have much experi—”

Delilah laid her hand on his arm. “You know Chaim, he makes modesty into a fault. He has so much experience! The NCSY youth groups. Yavneh. Hillel House,” she said, smiling, winking, and waving her arms in all directions.

Chaim, who had never worked with any of those groups, coughed until Rivkie brought him a glass of water.

“He is wonderful with the seniors. But he is wasted in the Bronx. Wasted. You wouldn’t know of another congregation that has an opening, would you, Josh? In some small, pretty place like this? A young congregation?”

“Well, usually you need about four or five years as assistant rabbi before you can even apply for a position as rabbi,” Josh explained.

“Usually, but not always,” she said cryptically, with a secret smile.

“I suppose, theoretically, that’s true.” Josh nodded, wondering how long they would be held captive before the Sabbath was out and they smiled their goodbyes and the Ford disappeared down the road.

“I don’t think an ad in the Rabbi’s Forum of
Bernstein’s Bulletin
is theoretical. It looked pretty practical to me,” she said, pulling out the paper. “Especially if someone with your connections and reputation could pull a few strings—”

“Really, Delilah,” Chaim murmured, mortified.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She looked around, innocent and bewildered. “Did I say something I shouldn’t?”

“What congregation is it?” Josh asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

She smoothed the
Bulletin
down and licked her finger, turning the pages. She jabbed at it, the way one would spear a particularly delicious hors d’oeuvre. “There!”

Josh took the paper and read. “You aren’t talking about the ad for that synagogue by the lake, are you?” His look was incredulous.

“Young, affluent community, interested in open-minded spiritual leader,”
Delilah read. “How can you tell where it is?”

“They’ve been running that ad for months,” Chaim informed her.

“Congregation Ohel Aaron. In Connecticut,” Rivkie said quietly, raising her eyebrows at her husband and quietly taking Delilah’s hand in solidarity. “She couldn’t possibly have known that,” she admonished him.

“Well, maybe not,” Josh conceded. “But Chaim, surely, you’ve heard the story.”

“What story?” Delilah demanded, turning to her husband.

“The story of why Congregation Ohel Aaron of Swallow Lake, Connecticut, will never get a rabbi,” Chaim said quietly. “Isn’t it time we got back to the synagogue for the evening prayers?” Josh nodded gratefully, and the men started the song that ushers in Grace After Meals, putting an abrupt end to the discussion.

Later that evening, when they finally stood at the door to say their goodbyes, Josh put his arm around Chaim’s shoulder. “It’s an honor for you to follow in your grandfather’s footsteps. He has quite a reputation. I envy you.”

“Thank you, Josh. They are enormous shoes to fill,” Chaim said gratefully.

Delilah felt all her dreams slowly stop, the way the bubbles of Coke stop when the bottleneck slows them down and the cap puts an end to their escape.

She kissed Rivkie. “I’ll call you,” she murmured, clutching her a little more tightly than was appropriate.

Rivkie nodded uncomfortably. “I’m sure you will.”

The moment they were in the car on the open road that led inexorably back to the Bronx, Delilah turned to her husband and said stiffly, “Tell me, Chaim. Why is it that Congregation Ohel Aaron in Swallow Lake, Connecticut, will never get a rabbi?”

NINE

I
n the 1950s, the Orthodox Jews of Connecticut joined the national movement out of the inner cities into the suburbs. Jews began showing up in places they were hardly ever seen or wanted. By then, the offspring of Eastern European Jews were already college educated, working in their families’ businesses, or successfully developing their own. They sought an area outside of Hartford or New Haven, where they could build and enjoy their prosperity. And so they found their way to beautiful Swallow Lake. They built a large, imposing synagogue and called it Ohel Aaron, after a major donor. They built large, imposing homes with lake views and private boat docks.

Studies in the 1980s revealing that 52 percent of Jews in America were intermarrying sent shock waves through the American Jewish community. Jews began to rethink their values, the education they were giving their children, and the dilution of religious rituals in their synagogues and in their lives. Many decided to send their children to religious day schools.
When a decade later the dot-com bubble provided new wealth to many, yeshiva high school graduates bought into the Swallow Lake community at an unprecedented rate. One of them was a stock market trader who later wound up serving ten to fifteen in a federal penitentiary. To atone for his sins, he built an elaborate Orthodox Jewish day school on part of his Swallow Lake estate, naming it after his parents, who had both died of heart attacks.

The school was soon attracting the offspring of Orthodox Harvard Law and Business School alumni, Orthodox heart surgeons and cancer specialists, and Orthodox venture capitalists. Joining them were Jewish immigrants from South Africa, Iran, and the former Soviet Union, people who, while not Orthodox themselves, were not put off by the Orthodox way of life and were hopeful the day school would prove a bastion to keep their children from the drugs and sex that were rampant in other schools. They were also attracted to the school’s reputation for getting kids into the Ivy Leagues. And most of all they wished to join other Jews who could afford homes in the high six-to seven-figure category.

When the aging rabbi of Ohel Aaron had a heart attack, they searched high and low for an Orthodox rabbi who would meet all of the community’s needs. The problem, as usual, was that no one could agree on what, exactly, those needs were.

The day school graduates wanted the kind of rabbi they were familiar with from the synagogues of their youth, places with oversized barriers separating men and women; a rushed, rather melancholy, songless service; the words read in Hebrew so fast they sounded like watermelonwatermel-onwatermelon. They wanted a rabbi they could look up to, an eminence grise with an iron will, who would be uncompromising and didactic in anything related to law or ritual. Someone who, when you pointed to a phrase in the Talmud, could complete it by heart and tell you the rest of the page for good measure. Preferably, they wanted the scion of a rabbinic family, or at least someone who had served a prestigious congregation and had earned a reputation for honesty, piety, warmth, and leadership.

The immigrants, however, had quite a different view of the situation. They saw Saturday as their day off. While they were willing to join the synagogue service in order to network, and didn’t mind putting their wives where they could be neither seen nor heard for a few hours, what they absolutely didn’t want—and would not tolerate—was being subjected to weekly exhortations about what they ate, how they lived, or anything else
connected to the Ten Commandments, five of which couldn’t possibly fit into their lifestyles. They wanted a rabbi who would look the part, but would be friendly and understanding. Someone who would kid around and take things easy. Someone who knew not only how to tell a good joke, but how to listen to one (even if it was just a little off-color). In exchange, they were prepared to let him pick their pockets for whatever cause he wanted.

Enter Rabbi Hershel Metzenbaum and his wife, Shira.

Rabbi Metzenbaum was in his mid-forties, a charismatic and distinguished scholar who had made a name for himself as a prominent member of the Council of American Orthodox Rabbis. He was also down-to-earth and friendly, a hands-on person who truly loved being a rabbi. Young people, particularly, were drawn to him, as he had an easy and respectful attitude toward them. He could play basketball and discuss the latest Star Wars movie. As a result, he headed numerous boards of numerous Orthodox Jewish youth groups.

As the rabbi of a small congregation in the Midwest for ten years, Metzenbaum had done wonders in gathering together unaffiliated Jews, reformed Reform Jews, and local Jewish college students from nonreligious backgrounds, not to mention the youth of his synagogue, helping to build a community dynamic that saw his synagogue grow and prosper, as new families bought houses in the vicinity simply to be able to be part of his congregation. He was adored.

The president of Ohel Aaron had heard about him from his brother, a prominent plastic surgeon in Ohio, who had attended one of Rabbi Metzenbaum’s many weekly classes. The Synagogue Search Committee, impressed, put his name at the top of their list.

Rabbi Metzenbaum was used to receiving offers from search committees looking for rabbis. Until now, he had fended them off. But at this particular moment in time, many factors contributed to his reconsidering his commitment to stay put. The salary situation in the Midwest was going nowhere. His house was really too small for his growing family, but a larger mortgage was out of the question. And the kids—all five of them—were attending private Hebrew day schools. The two who were in high school had been forced to board in New Jersey, because there was no local Orthodox high school. Even with a rabbinic discount, the tuition for his five kids was sending him to the poorhouse.

Sensing his vulnerability, the board told him the job in Swallow Lake
came not only with a large beautiful house which would be his—rent and mortgage free—for as long as he was rabbi, but also with free tuition for all his children in the elite local Orthodox day school, which included an excellent high school as well. But what tempted Rabbi Metzenbaum most of all was his perception that here was a rare opportunity, the kind most rabbis look for all their lives: a young, growing community, a place full of affluent, prominent people who would form an important stop on the fund-raising tours of every major Jewish organization. As rabbi, he could easily parlay his local popularity into national prominence, which would ensure him prestigious board memberships and thus an opportunity to influence the direction of Jewish education and community life all over the country. Moreover, it was a place where, when he chose to retire, he would be called Rabbi Emeritus and showered with compliments and a comfortable pension that would leave him the rest of his days to learn Talmud and write popular works of condensed Torah wisdom for busy Jews with short attention spans.

And thus, despite his long and revered position in the community, Rabbi Metzenbaum accepted the invitation of the Swallow Lake board to fly down with his family, all expenses paid, for a long weekend to explore the position. They put him and his wife and children up at the lovely home of the synagogue president, with its private swimming pool and tennis courts. They fed him lavish meals. They introduced the children to their peers and the rebbitzin to the sisterhood.