Chaim complained to his parents, who secretly raised eyebrows and exchanged worried glances but nevertheless publicly backed the teachers. He began to wet the bed. He broke out in hives. He bit his nails to the quick, then let the ragged edges bleed.
He tried to learn, practicing the Hebrew words. He tried to sit still. To pay attention. But when the rebbe
[wham!)
wished—for Chaim’s own good, of course—to (
WHAM!
) help free him of the unaesthetic and distasteful habit of nail-biting (
wham! Wham! WHAM!
), he felt a little volcano suddenly erupt in his brain. He ran to the window of the classroom and jumped down to the adjoining fire escape. Looking over his shoulder, he quickly ran down two flights to the street. Once there, he carefully spread-eagled himself on the pavement.
Carefully, he opened one eye, just in time to see the rebbe swoon, his ruler clattering to the ground. The boys, hanging out the window, cheered.
With his parents’ and the yeshiva’s full agreement, another school was
found for Chaim, an Orthodox Hebrew day school, where smooth-cheeked American rabbis cracked jokes, and public school teachers in high heels and red lipstick came in the afternoons to teach them about the Statue of Liberty and the
Mayflower
. A place with a gym and a basketball court and vending machines.
His grandfather was heartbroken.
But when the boy was actually able to recite Talmudic passages in Aramaic and knew the difference between a Rashi and a
tosefot,
he relented. Little Chaim had taken a detour but was nevertheless on an upward path toward taking over his grandfather’s congregation. An
illuy,
a Talmudic genius, he wasn’t. But when he put his mind to it—or was coerced or bullied into putting his mind to it—he managed to keep up with the class, although he never rose to more than a middling student.
He had little imagination, but he was good at memorizing. He memorized whole passages from the Talmud, which sometimes convinced a certain kind of dreamy and unduly optimistic teacher that he had a special aptitude for it. Truthfully, most of the time, he had no idea what the passage was about that he rattled off with such ease. He couldn’t decipher it and wasn’t interested in it. The give and take of Talmudic discussions he viewed with trepidation, fearing they would reveal his intellectual deficiencies. Still, he always managed to get As in Talmud, which thrilled his grandfather.
When Chaim entered high school, his grandfather offered to pay his entire college tuition if he would consider getting
smicha,
rabbinical ordination. It was the old man’s fervent hope that, when his time came, his grandson would step into his shoes, shepherding and nurturing the beloved congregation he would leave behind.
It was a generous offer, but Chaim wasn’t so sure. To put it mildly, his grandfather’s modest synagogue did not reek of enticing possibilities. His mental image of the place conjured up dusty, mostly empty pews and creaky tables laden with anemic sponge cake and plastic cups of cloyingly sweet wine, all set out to fete a congregation transferring with alarming rapidity from rent-controlled Bronx apartments to paid-up plots in Forest Lawn. The demographics of the neighborhood had changed. The building had future Baptist Temple written all over it.
All his friends were interested in careers in computers or accounting, neither of which thrilled him either. Basically, all he wanted was something respectable, where he wouldn’t have to work too hard and which would
provide him with a reasonable and steady income, enough to afford a two-family house in a better section of New Jersey, a Chevy station wagon, a JC-Penney charge card, and tuition at Hebrew day schools for his children.
What else did he need, really?
When it came to religion, he was not a cynic, like so many of his classmates, who were only in the lifestyle until they could escape their parents’ clutches. He was simple in his faith, a sincere, Torah-observant Jew, a person who prayed and practiced, studied and struggled. A person who sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed, repented and tried again. And all through his growing years he eventually developed a trust that his faith would see him through every joy and sorrow. It didn’t always make sense to him, the myriad laws, the intricate web of custom and lore that ruled every minute of his life, but it felt comfortable, like an old house that has its creaks and leaks but nevertheless embraces one with its sheltering arms. As for God, He was a comfortable, familiar presence, someone who sat next to him on the couch when he watched television, and who jogged alongside him in the park.
He never understood Maimonides’ God, that cold, far-off, unknowable Being, more an intellectual exercise than a Father, who had nothing to do with the heart. He believed in a God Who listened to phone calls, heard prayers and whispers, and was not above lending a helping hand when the occasion required it.
Chaim was comfortable in his own skin, happy with his place in the world, the little niche he’d been born into. A poor imagination is sometimes a blessing. In Chaim’s case, it helped him to ward off frightening visions of a future full of fierce ambitions to accomplish outlandish scenarios in which he would be the main character.
The idea of taking over from his venerated grandfather, someone he truly loved and respected and in whom he felt great pride, seemed preposterous. A rabbi? Someone who stood at the front and had all eyes glued to him? Someone others looked to for guidance and wisdom? He didn’t see himself as a do-gooder or a leader or even a politician, all of which he understood were invaluable qualities in a pulpit rabbi. He much preferred—and planned for—the simple life of the follower and had no doubt he would eventually discover a leader whose devoutness, charisma, and brilliance would shine out like a lighthouse, leading him in the right direction.
His parents were satisfied. The last thing they wanted was for him to take over his grandfather’s annoying and penurious congregation of pensioners,
who kept pennies in jars and cooked meals on one burner. His mother, who knew a thing or two, was especially appalled by the idea of such an un-American profession for her one and only son, a job that promised bad pay, no advancement, and plenty of aggravation. She wanted him to be a dentist, which in her mind lacked all such drawbacks. His father wanted him to be happy and, if possible, to sell stereo systems.
At some point during his sophomore year in high school, he realized that math—necessary for both computers and accounting—was not his best subject. As for dentistry, he learned from a distant cousin, who had recently set up an office in Queens, that tuition to dental school rivaled that of medical school—that is, if you could get in, not a small question considering his grades. And even if you passed all the hurdles, you were still left with buying all that expensive equipment, unless you wanted to hire yourself out to an established office and work for someone else “forever for nothing,” as his cousin put it to him. The student loans and the bank loans for the machinery would take years to pay off. Besides, people’s breath in your face… the sound of the drill… the smell of those metals and powders and gummy pastes… ?
The summer between his junior and senior year, another cousin found him a job up in the Catskills as a busboy at a strictly kosher hotel. He lied about being eighteen, so they hired him. It was a nice enough place for the guests, but the staff lived in ratty, mosquito-filled bungalows and were fed leftovers by hotel owners who took the epithet “cheap bastards” to a new level. The food first went to the adults. A day later, whatever the adults hadn’t managed to eat was served up in the children’s dining room. Whatever the kids were bright enough to bypass showed up on the staff’s plates.
So of course the waiters and busboys never saved anything, effectively ending the leftover problem. In fact, they felt spilling out the day-old milk before it was foisted on the unsuspecting babies (not to mention themselves) was a mitzva. When the owners somehow got wind of the situation, they started going through the trash. They were experts at eagle-eyed discoveries of unsqueezed lemons, which they insisted be washed off and served again.
The guests, however, were decent people, and the tips made the summer stay worthwhile, providing most of them with a good chunk of their college tuition and living expenses. So, Chaim stayed on. It turned out to be a fateful decision, because that summer, he experienced a revelation that changed his life forever.
One weekend, the hotel hosted its annual convention of the Council of American Orthodox Rabbis. Hundreds of Orthodox rabbis and their wives descended upon the resort from all over the country. Chaim had expected dignified men in dark suits, black hats, big skullcaps, and dark beards, men who were shy and retiring, whose weighty conversations would revolve around serious moral issues.
Instead, they arrived in shorts and flowery, big-printed Hawaiian shirts. Rabbis on vacation, he realized, were more or less like everyone else on vacation, with wives in short summer dresses and bikinis by the pool. The hotel was filled with loud laughter and card-playing. He hardly saw one of them crack open a book, let alone a heavy Talmudic tome. And in between, they would saunter into the auditorium and discuss “The Future of American Judaism.”
It was then Chaim had his revelation: Rabbis were ordinary human beings. Nothing special. I could do this, he thought. But why would I want to?
One of the old-timers, a professional waiter who’d been around, told him that they used to have the National Council of Synagogue Youth conventions the week before the rabbis’ convention, and then treat the most sincere kids to stay over and be inspired. But soon they switched the order, so the rabbis and their bikini-clad wives were gone before the kids got there.
And indeed, a week later, the kids showed up. A few of the rabbis stayed behind to organize seminars on Jewish values and modesty and service to the community. They changed into dark pants and white open-collared shirts. The fresh-faced, wide-eyed kids in their mid-to-upper teens, who had come from all over the country, gathered in small seminars in banqueting halls and on the lawn. The waiters poked one another and made snide remarks about jailbait. But Chaim, who in general didn’t have a sense of humor about such things, said nothing. And then one evening, when he had cleaned off his table and eaten his dinner, he wandered into one of the seminars and sat down quietly in the back.
The rabbi giving the lecture was short and youthful, with immense energy that seemed to lift him off the ground as he spoke. “The most important two things in life are renewal and courage. Turn the page and begin again, as if you are starting from scratch; as if the world had never been created, and you are at that moment creating it. I’m not saying this is easy. I’m not telling you that you won’t fail sometimes, that you’ll never
get depressed. Never give in to depression, whatever the reasons! Even if you feel the years have flown by and all your mistakes have just piled up, never despair. This is the greatness of our Creator: His compassion has no end. He will never give up on you, so never give up on yourselves. He knows who we are—He made us, didn’t He?—so even the worst person, the biggest crook, the most evil gossip, is God’s child, and God looks at him and, like a father, always hopes he’ll turn it around. It’s never too late.
“To be a Jew is to remember that we are in charge of makeovers. Not the kind with the hair and the nails. Universe makeovers. We take terrible situations where there is only evil—people who are unkind to one another and full of hatred—and we transform lives. We change things. And we start by changing ourselves.
“You, the youth of tomorrow, the leaders and rabbis and doctors and artists, you are going to make over the world you were born into. You are going to give it new hope, new chances to be the beautiful moral place our Creator envisioned when He separated the water from the dry land, when He set down Adam and his wife Eve. In every generation, you are Adam and Eve in Eden, able to start again.”
Chaim studied the enthralled, uplifted faces of the young people around him. He too felt uplifted. To be a rabbi like that! To stand in front of a group of people and fill their hearts with hope, their minds with good intentions and proper desires. To lead people forward to a new place where they would be happier, kinder, and more just, making the world that much happier, kinder, and more just. It was a noble thing, was it not?
Could I? he wondered. Was it at all possible? What did it take to become a real rabbi? And did he have it in him?
He didn’t know.
But as he looked over college brochures and added up the numbers for tuition and board at places like NYU or Columbia, the realization struck him that Brooklyn or Queens College were in his future, along with some express ticket to nowhere called a BA in education or sociology. So when his grandfather repeated his long-standing offer to underwrite Chaim’s tuition at Bernstein Rabbinical College if he was accepted to their Rabbinic Ordination program, it suddenly seemed like a reprieve.
Bernstein expected its rabbinical students to get a secular degree as well. And having
smicha
didn’t force one to actually become a practicing rabbi. Many a lawyer, store owner, and insurance salesman on Ocean Parkway had
smicha.
In addition, at Bernstein he’d be assured of a steady social life, a stream of willing Orthodox girls who attended Stern College or Bernstein Women’s College, many of them from well-to-do newly religious families, girls who, unlike those in the fancy Hebrew day school he’d grown up with (who wanted handsome Orthodox future doctors), would be only too thrilled to meet a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who came from a rabbinical family. At Bernstein these girls would be thrown in his direction in droves. No senior—however bad his teeth, poor his personality, or ordinary his family—would be permitted to get his diploma without a wife, and preferably a small noisy child, sitting in the audience to applaud him.
And some of these girls, he’d heard, the ones from down South or the Midwest, were real lookers.