Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red

by Harry Kemelman

  “Will that be required reading?” asked a shocked Harvey Shacter.

  “Some of it will be required, and some will be collateral reading. We will start by reading the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, on which our religion is based. I’ll expect you to finish it in the next two or three weeks and then we’ll have an hour exam.”

  “But that’s an awful lot,” Shacter protested.

  “Not really. I don’t expect you to study it intensively at first. Read it as you would a novel.” He held up a copy of the Old Testament that he had brought with him. “Let’s see, in this text it runs about two hundred and fifty pages. It’s good large type. I’d say it’s about the length of a short novel. I shouldn’t think that would be too much for college students.”

  “What text do we use?”

  “Is it on sale in the bookstore?”

  “Any special translation?”

  “Can we use the original?” This last from Mazonson.

  “By all means, if you can,” said the rabbi with a smile. “For the rest of you, any English text will do. If it’s not on sale in the bookstore, you should have no trouble getting a copy. I would appreciate it if you did not leave it until the last few days before the exam. If you begin your reading immediately you can have a better understanding of the material as I deal with it in my lectures—”

  “This is going to be a lecture course?” Henry Luftig seemed aghast.

  “What else did you have in mind?” asked the rabbi dryly.

  “Well, I thought it was going to be a—you know, like a discussion course.”

  “But how can you discuss something you don’t know?”

  “Oh, well, like general principles. I mean everybody knows something about religion.”

  “Are you sure, Mr.—er—?” the rabbi began gently.

  “Luftig. Hank Luftig.”

  “Are you sure, Mr. Luftig? I’ll grant that most people have some general ideas, but often they’re much too general. Religion can be regarded as an overall blueprint for our thinking and our basic attitude toward life. Now the Jewish religion differs widely from the prevailing Christian religion, but at some points the differences involve subtle fine distinctions.”

  “So that’s why we ought to have discussions, Rabbi,” Shacter offered.

  The rabbi considered and then shook his head. “You mean that by combining your ignorance, you’ll be able to achieve knowledge?”

  “Well…”

  “No, no. Let’s proceed in the traditional way. When you have some knowledge, then perhaps we can discuss its interpretation.” Procedural matters over, he launched into his introductory remarks. “Now one immediate difference between Judaism and many other religions is that we’re not bound by an official creed. With us, it’s largely an accident of birth. If you’re born a Jew, you’re a Jew, at least until you officially convert to some other religion. An atheist who was born a Jew is therefore a Jew. And conversely, someone who was not born a Jew but follows all our traditional practices and shares our traditional beliefs would still not be considered a Jew if he had not officially converted to Judaism.”

  He smiled. “And I might add for the benefit of any ardent exponent of Women’s Liberation who may be among us that by rabbinic law, only one born of a Jewish mother—note, mother, not father—is a Jew.”

  “Who you kidding, Rabbi?”

  He was startled by the interruption from an attractive girl in the first row.

  “I don’t understand, Miss—er—”

  “Goldstein. And that’s Ms. Goldstein.”

  “I beg your pardon, Ms. Goldstein,” said the rabbi gravely. “I should have known.”

  “I mean isn’t that just a line Jewish male chauvinists hand women nowadays to hide their second class status?” She went on. “Women are brainwashed into thinking they’re more important because they’re the ones who decide whether the kid belongs to the Jewish race or nation or whatever it is. Terrific! When actually wasn’t it because with Jews a persecuted minority everywhere, there was greater certainty if you traced descent from the mother?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I imagine that could be the rationale,” he admitted.

  A frosty smile flitted across her face. “And isn’t it true that women have no place in the Jewish religion down to the present day? In some synagogues they even hide them behind a curtain up in the balcony.”

  “That’s only in strictly Orthodox congregations.”

  “In our synagogue they sit on one side,” Lillian Dush- kin said.

  “And they’re not allowed to take part in the service,” Ms. Goldstein added.

  “That’s not true,” said the rabbi. “The service is a recitation of a series of prayers. Women who attend the service recite the prayers along with the men.”

  “Big deal,” said Lillian Dushkin. “They’re never called up to read or anything.”

  “They are, in Reform temples,” the rabbi corrected her.

  “I know for a fact that the husband can divorce the wife by just sending her a letter,” said Mark Leventhal, not because he had any great sympathy for the women but because they appeared to have their teacher at a disadvantage. “And she can’t divorce him at all.”

  “And if her husband dies, she has to marry her brother-in-law,” said Mazonson, for the same reason.

  The rabbi held up both hands to bring them to order. “This is a very good example,” he said, “of the danger of discussions based on ignorance and limited knowledge.”

  They quieted down.

  “In the first place,” he went on, “our religion is not ceremonial like the Catholic religion, for example, which requires a consecrated holy place, the church, to conduct its business. The center of our religious practice is more the home than the synagogue. And in the home, the woman certainly shares in whatever ceremonial there is. She prepares the house for the Sabbath, and it is she who blesses the Sabbath candles.”

  Ms. Goldstein whispered something to the girl in the next seat. She laughed.

  “We are not immune to the influences around us,” said the rabbi, raising his voice slightly. “All through recorded history, society has been patriarchal, but the Ten Commandments call for honoring thy father and mother, and father and mother is the way we normally refer to them, rather than by that weak collective—parents. Even in biblical times a Jewish woman could not be forced to marry against her choice. The penalty for adultery was death, but both parties were equally punished. When a woman married she retained title to her property, and when she was divorced, she not only took it with her but also received a large sum which was stipulated in advance in the marriage contract in the event of a divorce.”

  “But a man could divorce his wife anytime he wanted to,” said Leventhal, “and she couldn’t ever.”

  “No. The mechanics of the transaction called for the husband to give the divorce and the wife to receive it. But he has to go to a rabbinical court and convince them before they will give him a get, a bill of divorcement. The wife can do the same. The difference is that the rabbinical court then orders the husband to give the divorce.”

  “What if he don’t want to?”

  “Then the rabbis can apply whatever sanctions they have. In modern Israel, they put him in jail until he agrees. I might add that even by contemporary standards, the grounds for divorce were quite liberal, more so than they are in most Western countries today. There was divorce by mutual consent, for example. The woman could also claim a divorce if her husband was physically repulsive to her or if he failed in his duty toward her which was laid down as the basis for married life. ‘Let a man honor his wife more than himself, and love her as he loves himself.’ No, Ms. Goldstein, I see nothing in the divorce laws that would suggest second class status for women.”

  “How about a widow having to marry her brother-in-law?” demanded Mazonson.

  “Or the other way around?” said the rabbi with a smile. “It’s all in how you look at it.”

  “I don�
�t get it.”

  “You evidently don’t know what the law was or its purpose, for that matter. The law called for the widow and her brother-in-law to marry only if she were childless. But the obligation was on both of them and the purpose, according to the Bible, was that she might have a child who would be named after her dead husband, ‘so that his name should not be lost to Israel.’”

  “Well, I heard—”

  “Why would—”

  “It seems to me—”

  “How about Golda Meir?”

  The rabbi rapped his knuckles against the lectern for quiet.

  “So why do they keep us separated in the synagogue?” asked Miss Dushkin.

  “Certainly not because they regard women as inferior,” he said with a smile. “It goes back to primitive times when in many religions a service that included both sexes ended in an orgy, was arranged for that purpose, in fact, since it had to do with fertility rites. In more recent times, it was felt that the natural attraction of the sexes would interfere with the concentration on prayer.” He spread his hands and added wryly, “How long ago was it that coeducation was disparaged on the grounds that boys and girls sitting in the same classroom would be unable to keep their minds on their studies? But look here,” he went on, “you’re all making the mistake of forming your opinions on isolated bits of information or misinformation instead of on your own experience. Think about your own families and then ask yourself if the women, your mothers and grandmothers, your aunts, are registered as inferiors by their husbands or their families.”

  As they trooped out at the end of the class, Harvey Shacter turned to Henry Luftig. “I thought you were going to set him straight.”

  Luftig shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought we had him on the ropes in the opening rounds, but he came back strong. He might turn out to be one tough baby.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  How did it go?” Miriam asked when he returned Wednesday morning.

  “It was nice,” he said, and then smiled. “I enjoyed it I really enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve been thinking of it all the way home, Miriam, and I’ve concluded there are few quiet pleasures in this life to compare with that of imparting knowledge to a receptive listener. I remember noticing it the last time we had trouble with the heating system. As the plumber explained to me how the system worked and what was wrong, you could see he was enjoying himself.”

  “Why not? He was getting about nine dollars an hour for it,” she remarked.

  But the rabbi refused to be dampened. “I’m sure it wasn’t that. It’s a sense of superiority. You’re bound to get a lift to the ego from dispensing information about anything you know better than others. And when that knowledge can change a person’s way of living, his lifestyle, it’s even more satisfying. It’s quite something this—this ego trip, I think the students call it.”

  “I’m not sure they consider it a particularly nice thing, David. I think they use the term disparagingly.”

  “Really? Well, that just shows how little they know. I suppose it’s part of the Anglo-Saxon ethic. In sports, for example, the champion is taught to attribute his success to his trainer or his teammates or to luck, to anything except his own superiority. It’s so obviously false. No one believes it, but the tradition continues. All I can say is that I frankly enjoyed my first lecture.”

  “So I see,” she said. “And it’s done wonders for your modesty.”

  “I was only trying to answer your question,” he said stiffly, and then they looked at each other and both smiled.

  But Miriam was anxious to pursue it. “But lecturing is nothing new to you. You give a sermon, which is a lecture of sorts, every Friday night and on all the holidays.”

  “No,” he said, “sermons are different. They involve moralizing, which, come to think of it, is just what they said Rabbi Lamden used to deliver when he ran the course. Besides, the people who hear my sermons are the people who pay my salary, and I always have the feeling they’re judging me to see if they’re getting their money’s worth.”

  She was amused. “Oh David, I don’t know where you get that idea.”

  “Besides, their minds are all fixed, their thought patterns crystallized. Nothing I say is apt to influence them. But these young people in school, they’re not frozen, they’re not afraid to express their ideas. Mostly they’re wrong, of course, but they hold them tenaciously and are ready to argue them. There was a girl today, obviously Women’s Lib, who tried to heckle me—”

  “That I would have liked to see,” laughed Miriam.

  The rabbi laughed, too. “She wasn’t bad, at that.”

  He looked forward eagerly to his next lecture on Friday. The street was practically empty when he pulled up in front of the administration building, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps his watch was slow; but as he strode down the corridor he could hear voices from his classroom. As he pushed open the door, he thought he must have made some mistake. Only a scattering of students was present. Then he had the sickening feeling that he had misjudged their reaction to his first lecture. He forced a smile. “The class seems to have shrunk.”

  Several of the students smiled back and one volunteered, “Most of the kids cut on Fridays to get a head start.”

  “A head start? A head start for what?”

  “Oh, you know, for the weekend.”

  “I see.” He understood now why the Dean had been apologetic about scheduling his course for Friday afternoon. He was nonplused, not sure how to proceed. Should he go ahead with the material he had prepared or devote the hour to reviewing his last lecture so that the absentees would not fall behind? He decided to deliver the lecture, but it was not the same. He could not help feel indignant, and he was sure the students were aware of it and took a perverse pleasure in his discomfiture.

  At last the class was over, but his annoyance lasted all the way home. Fortunately, Miriam was busy preparing for the Sabbath, so there was no time to discuss it.

  The following Monday he had full attendance again: twenty-eight. On Wednesday, too; but on Friday there were even less than the previous week: only ten. And so it continued: good attendance on Mondays and Wednesdays, a mere handful on Fridays.

  When after a month they had finished the Pentateuch, he announced a quiz—for Friday. It was a declaration of war on his part.

  “Are we going to be responsible for all the names? You know, so-and-so begat so-and-so?”

  “No, but I will expect you to know certain genealogical material. Certainly, you ought to know the names of Adam’s children, or Abraham’s.”

  “Couldn’t we have the test on Monday?”

  “Do you think you will be luckier then?”

  “No, but we could have the weekend to prepare for it.”

  “Look at it this way. Now you can have the whole weekend to recover.”

  He stopped off at his office on Friday, and Professor Hendryx, seeing the bluebooks, looked up in surprise.

  “You enjoy giving quizzes, Rabbi?”

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “Because anyone quizzing on Friday has to quiz twice,” said Hendryx.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Simply that you have to prepare not only the original, and then read the bluebooks and make all those comments in red in the margin and grade them, but the makeup as well. You can’t expect more than half your class to turn up on a Friday.”

  “Oh, I think they’ll all be there today,” said the rabbi confidently. “I gave them plenty of notice and impressed on them this was an hour exam and important to their grades.”

  But he arrived at the classroom to find only fifteen students. He spent the hour walking about the room as the students wrote. As each finished, he would hand in his paper and hurry out of the room. Long before the bell rang the rabbi found himself alone.

  He graded the papers over the weekend and returned them on Monday. There was an immediate reaction.

  “You said we wouldn�
�t be responsible for the begats.”

  “Benjamin is hardly just one of the begats. Benjamin is an important part of the Joseph story.”

  “How much will this count toward the final grade?”

  “It depends on how many hour exams I decide to give.”

  “Will they all be given on Fridays?”

  “I can’t say. Probably.”

  “Gee, that’s not fair.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—a lot of us—I know I can’t get here Fridays.”

  This was it. He said coolly, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. The Friday session is a regular class hour. If it conflicted with some other course, you shouldn’t have arranged to take this one.”

  “It’s not that it conflicts—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I drive back to New Jersey weekends and I’ve got to get an early start.”

  The rabbi shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  He opened his text to indicate that he considered discussion closed, but the atmosphere was charged. The students, even those who had taken the examination, were sullen. His lecture suffered as a result, and for the first time he dismissed them before the hour.

  When he returned to his office, he found Hendryx stretched out in his usual reclining posture, puffing gently on his pipe.

  “How’s it going, Rabbi?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” In the few weeks that he had been teaching, he had seen Hendryx less than a half dozen times, and then usually for only a few minutes before or after class. “I get about twenty-six in my class. Actually the official class list shows thirty, but twenty-eight is the most that have appeared at any one time.”

  “That’s not bad,” said Hendryx. “In fact, darn good where students are allowed unlimited cuts.”

  “Well, I’m not dissatisfied with the attendance on Mondays and Wednesdays, but on Friday afternoons I’m lucky if I get a dozen.”