The Day the Rabbi Resigned

by Harry Kemelman

  “But that didn’t cut down on student applications, did it?” asked Levine.

  “Quite the contrary,” said Macomber. “XYZ couldn’t accept all the qualified students, so they took only the cream—and then only the cream of the cream. And secondary schools gained prestige from the number or percentage of their graduates who were admitted to XYZ.”

  Cotton said, “In general, students come to XYZ because they want to know more—about themselves, about society, about the world, about the universe. But in truth such colleges have become a professionals’ camp where rookies come to compete for the few available positions on the team. The result is a rat race. We produce a bunch of superbly trained young people with second-rate minds.”

  “Why would they have second-rate minds?” Levine demanded.

  “Because they compete with grades. And when you’re intent on grades, you quickly learn that the way to get them is to suppress original thought and give the professor’s thoughts back to him. You spend learning years doing that, and you’ll go on doing it for the rest of your life.”

  “Where did you get your Ph.D., Professor?” asked Levine.

  “I don’t have one,” Cotton said simply. And then, arrogantly, “Who could grant me one?”

  Macomber laughed while Levine blushed in embarrassment.

  The waiter removed dishes and served coffee. Levine lit a cigar and asked, “Are you going to be here for a few days, Professor?”

  And Macomber said, “If you are, I’d like to talk to you about some of the changes I’m planning.”

  “I was planning to,” said Cotton, “but my wife called me earlier this evening and asked me to come home. Nothing wrong—she was taking care of the grandchildren while their mother was in the hospital, and they did a job on her; she’s a soft touch—but I told her I’d take the morning plane out.”

  “I’m flying, too,” said Levine. “What time is your flight? The reason I ask is that the company I’m doing business with here has put a limousine and chauffeur at my disposal.”

  “My flight is at eight o’clock.”

  “Mine is a little later, but if you like, I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  As they drove along next morning, Professor Cotton explained, “My wife is a nervous sort. I warned her that taking care of a couple of kids at her age was silly. And it isn’t as though my son-in-law couldn’t afford to get someone in for the two weeks. But no, it was a grandmother’s duty.” He shook his head in annoyance at her obduracy. “On the other hand,” he went on, “I’ve been away almost two weeks, and I’m tired of eating in restaurants. I was planning on spending a few days with my cousin in Barnard’s Crossing—oh, good Lord!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I told them I’d be out today. They’ll be expecting me there.”

  “Well, you can call him when we get to the airport,” said Levine.

  “No … he’s at the temple for the morning service at that time.”

  “Oh, observant, is he?”

  “He’s the rabbi of the congregation,”

  “Of Barnard’s Crossing? Rabbi Small is your cousin?”

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “He gave a course at Windermere one year, a few years back. And he’s your cousin?”

  “That’s right. Second or third cousin. Let’s see, my grandfather and his great-grandfather were brothers.”

  “Then how do you happen to have different names, Cotton and Small?”

  The professor smiled broadly. “Do you know any Hebrew?”

  “Well, I went to a Hebrew school when I was a youngster.”

  “Pronounce my name, but accent the last syllable.”

  Levine looked at him doubtfully and then said, “Cot-ton.” Enlightenment came. “It means little, small.”

  “That’s right. His grandfather translated the name; mine transliterated it. I think the original was Cottonchik, either because he was short or perhaps because he was very tall, in the same way that we might call a fat boy Slim.”

  “You can call him when you get to Chicago, or if it’s important, you can even call him from the plane.”

  “Yes, I could do that, couldn’t I? Actually, it isn’t terribly urgent. He’s leaving the rabbinate, at least the job in Barnard’s Crossing, and thought he might like to try teaching for a while. I met somebody from Iowa who thought there might be an opening at his school.” They had reached Levine’s airline and the chauffeur was handing his bags to a porter.

  He shook hands with Cotton and said, “Well, it was nice seeing you again, Professor.”

  “Yes, and thank you for the dinner and the ride.”

  Levine had his baggage checked in and then made his way to a phone booth. He called President Macomber. “Don? That Rabbi Small you thought so much of, the one from Barnard’s Crossing. He’s a cousin of Professor Cotton. And you know what? He’s leaving his job and is planning to go into teaching for a while.”

  “Hm, he’s just the man I think we want. I’ll write to him.”

  “Don’t write to him, Don. Call him.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  The call from Simcha came while the rabbi was having his breakfast after his return from the minyan. “That was Simcha,” he said. “He’s not coming today. He’s not coming at all. He’s on his way back to Chicago. In fact, he was calling from the airplane. Imagine that. He thinks he might have something that would interest me, in Iowa. He said he’d write me.”

  It was while he was having a second cup of coffee that the call from Macomber came. “Well, well, well,” he said in response to Miriam’s inquiring glance, “that was President Macomber of Windermere. It’s not entirely clear, but somehow he heard through one of his trustees, who got it from Simcha, that I might be interested in a teaching job. He wants to see me.”

  42

  As the rabbi drove into Boston he thought about the call he had received from President Macomber. Rabbi Small did not think that it concerned a teaching position, unless it was to take over the three-hour course he had taught some years before when Rabbi Lamden, who normally gave it, had asked him to substitute for him. He had enjoyed teaching it, to be sure, but if that was what Macomber had in mind, he would not accept since it would preclude his taking a full-time job if one came along. Certainly, if it was anything more than that, Simcha would have mentioned it when he had called earlier.

  Macomber greeted him cordially, almost effusively. “I had no idea that you were related to Professor Cotton,” he said when they were seated, he behind his desk, and the rabbi in the visitor’s chair. “I was one of a coterie devoted to Professor Cotton.” He chuckled. “In fact, we were called Cottontails. Naturally, when I heard he was going to be in town, I got in touch with him. We had dinner together Tuesday night, he, I, and Mark Levine, who is a trustee of the college and one of my closest friends. We sat and talked until it was quite late, about education in general and Windermere in particular.”

  Macomber recounted the gist of the conversation, and then said, “Well, that’s what I want to do here, make Windermere a real college. I want to educate rather than train. I want to develop a faculty that will be devoted to teaching students rather than to writing papers for publication in learned journals. Learning for learning’s sake.” He broke off as the rabbi nodded vigorously. “You agree? You approve?”

  “It is our traditional view of learning. We have a saying: Do not use your knowledge of the Torah as a spade to dig with.”

  “I don’t—yes, I think I do. It means one should not use his knowledge of the, er, Torah for practical purposes, to make a living. Yes, I see, it’s learning for learning’s sake. But—but don’t you—I mean, don’t rabbis in general go contrary to that principle? Don’t they make their living from their knowledge of the Torah?”

  The rabbi smiled. “Yes, they do, but the rationalization is that they are being paid for the time they are taken away from productive work. There is another tenet in our doctrine of education. It is
to the effect that the father who fails to teach his son a trade is teaching him to be a thief. That is, we distinguish between study that one does for oneself and study that is to be used in the service of society and by which we make a living. You might say it is like the distinction between undergraduate, liberal arts study and graduate study.”

  “I’m afraid that distinction with us has become rather blurred of late,” said Macomber sadly. “All study nowadays seems to be directed to getting ahead: from the high school to a good college: from college to a good graduate or professional school; from the professional school to a good job, and from a good job to a better one.” He had been leaning back in his swivel chair. Now he straightened up and, hitching the chair closer to his desk, said in a businesslike voice, “Rabbi Lamden, for whom you substituted a few years ago, is retiring next year—”

  “And you think I might be interested in taking his place?”

  “No. I don’t intend to continue the course he gave.” He smiled. “To be perfectly frank, Rabbi, that was instituted for public relations reasons. Since the name of our school was Windermere Christian College, it was intended to reassure the parents of the Jewish students we had attracted. It was a snap course that all the Jewish students took because it meant an almost certain A.” As the rabbi started to protest, Macomber held up a placating hand and added, “Oh, I know it wasn’t that way when you gave it, Rabbi, but that was the way it was under Rabbi Lamden.

  “Well, we are no longer Windermere Christian; we are Windermere College of Liberal Arts—as of Tuesday, when our Board of Trustees voted on it,” he added in response to the rabbi’s look of surprise. “And I would like to make it a real liberal arts college; not just a fall-back school for those who have been refused admission elsewhere, but a college of first choice, for those who want an education rather than training for a job. That entails an understanding of the society of which they are a part, of its origins and history. We’ve always acknowledged the Greek and Roman influences, but the Judaic only as it filtered through Christian doctrine. Well, I’d like courses in Judaic thought and philosophy, either as part of an enlarged Classics Department, or even as a separate department. Would you be interested in taking charge?”

  43

  The rabbi did not attend the board meeting on Sunday. When his letter of resignation was read by the secretary, the immediate reaction was that the committee had somehow been at fault.

  “What did you guys say to him?”

  “We didn’t say anything to him,” declared Ben Clayman. “Levitt said he was surprised the rabbi didn’t have a life contract—”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t push it,” said Levitt. “When he said he preferred it that way, I dropped it.” With a touch of malice, he added, “And I didn’t make fun of his car by calling it a jalopy.”

  “You think he’d resign because I called his car a jalopy?”

  “Look, fellows,” said Al Bergson. “I know why the rabbi resigned.”

  “So tell already.”

  “If you’ll all pipe down. I stayed on after Clayman and Levitt left, and the rabbi told me he wouldn’t accept any of the expensive gifts that were suggested because he was going to resign. Why? Because he’s fifty-three, so he can still try something else. He’s been here twenty-five years, so he’s eligible for his pension—”

  “Yeah, but it means a big cut in his salary.”

  “Twenty-five percent, but as he explained, his daughter is getting married and his son will be getting a good job. So with the kids off his hands, he figures he’ll be able to manage.”

  “What kind of job is he looking for?”

  “Why doesn’t he just stay on until he gets the job he’s looking for?”

  “I suggested,” said Bergson, “that he take a leave of absence, even for as much as a year, that we could hire a substitute for the year and then—”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. What happens if the guy we hire turns out to be a real hotshot? Do we tell him he’s got to go at the end of the year?”

  “Yeah, and if we say it’s only for a year, what kind of guy are we likely to get?”

  “You know, the guy is right. Twenty-five years! Enough is enough.”

  In the end they agreed to accept the rabbi’s resignation and to write him a letter to that effect.

  “Make sure you say ‘with regret.’ You know, ‘We accept with regret—’”

  “Make it ‘with deep regret.’”

  “Then in the fall we can throw him a big party and give him a nice gift like a silver kiddush cup or—”

  “How about an illuminated address? You know, on parchment, in this old-fashioned kind of print and with fancy lettering at the beginning of each sentence. Something he can frame.”

  “I think we ought to do the framing.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. We’d do the framing.”

  After the meeting, Bergson stopped off at the rabbi’s house on his way home. He described the meeting and ended with, “They didn’t appear terribly upset, David,” much to Miriam’s chagrin. The rabbi was mildly amused.

  “I wasn’t even able to sell them on my idea of a leave of absence for a year, although one of them suggested that maybe you could stay on until you got another job and then resign. What’s the story on a job, David? Got any leads?”

  The rabbi smiled. “Oh, I shall be Professor of Judaic Philosophy at Windermere next year.”

  44

  It was a hot, steamy day in July when Lanigan went to see Tomasello, the Assistant District Attorney, on quite a different matter. As he was leaving, he thought to ask about the Merton case.

  “We’re dropping it,” said Tomasello shortly.

  Lanigan sat down again. “How come? New evidence?”

  “The boss decided we didn’t have a case, not one we could win.” It was evident that Tomasello was not happy.

  “But why not? The guy came down Pine Grove Road, and he must have seen the wrecked car.”

  “So what?”

  “And he didn’t report it to the police.”

  “There’s no law that says he has to.”

  “So how about the watch? It was in his car, so he must have taken it off Joyce’s wrist—”

  “It wasn’t in his car; you put it there.”

  “Yeah, but when he saw it in his glove compartment, he didn’t doubt that it had been there all along, and he even tried to bamboozle me into thinking Joyce had given it to him as security for the money he’d lent him.”

  “We’d have a hard time introducing that in evidence. He hadn’t been charged at the time, his rights hadn’t been read to him.”

  “So what? There was the watch. It was Joyce’s and he had taken it from him.”

  Tomasello’s attitude softened. “You’d have a tough time, Hugh, convincing a jury that it constituted theft. It had been his brother’s watch, then his niece’s. But most of all, it had a saint’s relic, and any jury would accept the idea that a good Catholic—one who attended Mass every day, mind you—would be apt to take it to prevent it being stolen. The main trouble with our case is that it depended on this doctor—”

  “Dr. Gorfinkle? What’s wrong with Dr. Gorfinkle?”

  “What’s wrong with him is that he’s an eye doctor. He probably hasn’t felt a patient’s pulse in twenty years, maybe not since he completed his general internship. All we have is his word that Joyce was alive when he saw him. And this Gorfinkle—do you know him?”

  “Sure, I know him.”

  “Well, can you imagine him on the witness stand, trying to ward off the bludgeoning he’d take from a tough cross-examiner?”

  “Yeah … So Merton gets off scot-free. It’s going to be kind of awkward when I bump into him in church or on the street.”

  “Maybe if you should see him in the next week or two, but after that, no problem. I understand he’s selling out, or had already sold out to a big Boston realty firm, and he and his sister are retiring to Florida.”

  “And th
e girl, the widow?”

  “I hear she’s planning to go back to that Sisters’ school in Ohio where she spent most of her life.”

  “Did you see him, Luigi? Did you get to talk to him?”

  “No, but his lawyer, the big shot, Elliot Bender, spoke to my boss, the D.A. They’re kind of friendly. They were in the same law firm for a couple of years when they got out of law school—”

  “You mean that’s why—”

  “The D.A. dropped the case? Oh no, but being friends, it was easier for Bender to get to see him. According to him, Merton was going to report it to the police, but he thought that they’d then call his niece, maybe wake her up if she were already asleep, and have her come to the hospital to identify the body. And that would be pretty traumatic for her. So he went to her house, planning to break the news to her and then call the police from there.”

  “But she wasn’t home.”

  “Right, so he went to the Donut Shop to have a cup of coffee and then try her again later.”

  “Why didn’t he report it when he called the police to tell them his car had been stolen?”

  “He figured they already knew,” said Tomasello.

  It was an unhappy, troubled Lanigan who drove back to Barnard’s Crossing. Had he been too precipitate in following Tomasello’s suggestion of procedure when he knew the reason for his wanting to arrest Merton? Should he have questioned Merton further before going ahead?

  As he approached the rabbi’s street, on the spur of the moment he made the turn and stopped in front of the rabbi’s house. He found him in the breezeway between the garage and the kitchen, sipping at a tall iced drink as he leafed idly through a magazine.

  “I could use one of those, David, I’ve had a hard day.”

  “It’s a gin and tonic. Hold on and I’ll get you one.”

  He was back in a minute or two with a tall, frosty glass. They held up their glasses in a silent toast, and then the rabbi said, “Crime increasing, or is it administrative detail that’s getting you down?”

  “Neither,” and he proceeded to recount his conversation with Tomasello.