Whenever we had friends visiting from out of town, we’d take them there, and they were consistently struck—moved, even—by the uncommon sweetness of the place, the family feeling, the friendliness and warmth. The size and scale of the bar made it difficult not to be sociable there, elbow to elbow. This was a place where people could grow old together, as domesticated as an East Village bar could be. On Sunday afternoons, Paul’s girlfriend brought in cheese and sausage for all to share, and one of the bartenders frequently showed up with pies he’d baked from scratch. There were regular cookoffs—chili, pasta—to which regulars and staff alike would bring in their best dishes. There were spirited trivia nights, which Frank and I were politely asked to sit out of after we’d brought in a ringer—my know-it-all cousin Phil—a few times too many. We honored the request.
I was getting restless at work. The hours were long, the pay was low, I had no ambitions of advancing in the company, and this nagging feeling that I needed to do something more meaningful was starting to get to me. I’d been taking adult education Hebrew classes at the Jewish seminary across the street from my office and volunteering at the soup kitchen they operated on Monday nights. By the time I got to the cafeteria, meal service was over, and all that remained for me to do was the cleaning up. I was sorry I didn’t get to cook, didn’t get to feed the guests, didn’t get to interact with them and with the other volunteers, most of whom were also gone, or on the way out, when I arrived. But cleanup duty was fine by me. It was useful, it was purposeful. I scrubbed and scoured huge industrial-size pots until they shone, wiped down the crumb-covered tables, swept and mopped the kitchen. One evening, I ran into the young rabbinical student who taught my Hebrew class just as I was leaving. He was pleased that I’d been volunteering at the soup kitchen. “I saw the poster one evening after class,” I told him, “and since it’s right across the street from work, it’s convenient.”
“Is service supposed to be convenient?” he retorted with a sly smile. He wasn’t being antagonistic. He was funny and, especially for a young man, wise. He’d make a great rabbi, I was sure. And he was right. He’d gotten his point across; there’s nothing inherently wrong with volunteering when and where it’s convenient to do so—it’s better than not volunteering at all—but it shouldn’t be anyone’s major criterion for trying to do a little bit of good in the world. I couldn’t get his question out of my head, and it troubled me throughout the next few days at work. I probably needed to inconvenience myself a lot more. And it’s not coincidental that studying Hebrew and volunteering in the soup kitchen happened at the same location. Faith and service—both of which had always been important to me, even if the ways in which I had expressed each had taken many forms, and to which my commitment had fluctuated a lot over the years—were, in my mind and in my heart, of a piece. And both were occupying more and more of my thoughts and my time.
I started taking Hebrew not only because I believe that faith is built into the alphabet, the characters, the words, the syntax, the language itself, but also to fill a gap. I hadn’t had a Bat Mitzvah, but much like I wish I’d been forced to learn piano or violin before my self-consciousness of my lack of musical talent had set in, much like I wish I’d learned how to drive before I’d become an adult and had spent too many years thinking about how fucking dangerous cars are, I wish I’d been sent to Hebrew school. (And of course I realize this is all easy for me to say, not having been made to turn down party invitations to practice my violin, not having been awakened early on Saturday mornings to haul my ass to temple. I know. I know.) Still, I’m grateful that I grew up in a secular home and was given the freedom—more, surely, because of my mother’s lack of interest in such concerns than as a matter of some benevolent and liberal family policy—to explore religion in whatever ways I chose.
I tried to make sense of my religiosity for years, but the thing is, it’s really not so complicated: It’s just how I’m wired. When I was seven or eight and spent summers with my family on Fire Island, I often went to services there by myself, walking barefoot (as most did on the island) to the little reform temple nearby, where I loved the hippie homeyness of it all, the strumming of guitars and singing of folk songs along with the reading of scriptures and reciting of prayers, and where I believed that the little cups of grape juice they served to us kids were wine until somebody set me straight. (I was also wired for wino-hood; family legend maintains that one of my first words was Bordeaux.) I was pretty sure I was getting kind of drunk on something. But even as a kid I doubted that I’d ever be a good and observant Jew; I was too curious about any and every religion I heard about or read about or saw something on TV about, and that was fine by my folks, if a little startling. Did I want to go to Easter mass with a Catholic friend and her family? Sure, go ahead. Quaker meeting? Why not? Buddhist sitting meditation? Fine.
It is possible, however, that the long pagan period that began in high school, peaked when I was living in the Santa Cruz mountains, and ended in college had been too trying for my mother. She was not exactly dazzled to see my byline in publications with titles like Weekly Wiccan World, nor especially enchanted by the chanting she could hear just behind my bedroom door. The many hours during which I commandeered the kitchen to mix up astringent tinctures and gooey poultices with strong-smelling herbs that I procured either at the dusty witchcraft book and supply shops I frequented or by mail from farms and communes across the country caused her to raise her well-groomed eyebrows on not a few occasions. The tarot cards. The runes. The far-flung pen pals whose letters arrived in envelopes emblazoned with ankhs and pentagrams and return addresses bearing names that sounded like Lord of the Rings characters. The tattered, dog-eared, suspect-looking treatises about ancient mystery cults and Druidic wisdom and the healing properties of plants and crystals. The little altar I set up on my bedroom dresser complete with a miniature cauldron and a chalice and a bunch of stones and dried leaves. The solemn invocations of the Old Gods. It was all a bit much for her, and, in time, it no longer satisfied my own spiritual yearnings, if only I could figure out exactly what they were, exactly what it was I wanted from God, or the gods, and what He or She or They in turn expected of me.
In my senior year of college, under the heady influence of William Blake, I started to think that maybe I might be a Christian—but a peculiar and specific kind of Christian, the sort of Christian I imagined Blake himself might have been. I read about and admired many of the old dissenting, rabble-rousing British sects, like the True Levellers, the Muggletonians, the early Methodists, the Shakers. I could get behind their radical and liberating conception of Jesus and, in many cases, their proto-communist practices and the fiery indignation that connected them in one long angry righteous line to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, I was drawn to more recent Christian thinkers who championed social and economic justice, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day.
When I moved back to New York after college, I went to services at many of the grand old do-gooder churches—the Riverside and Saint John the Divine and the Abyssinian Baptist—and some less grand but equally impassioned houses of worship (a Methodist church in my Brooklyn neighborhood, an authentically radical Presbyterian congregation on, of all the unlikely places, the Upper East Side). I was frequently moved by the worship services I took in, roused by the hymns and spirituals, touched by the sense of community, inspired by the faith-in-action that was so palpable in these places, by the collective commitment to social justice. But I fell silent when prayers were directed specifically to Jesus, and I could not take communion. I was not, after all, a Christian. Or was I?
I agonized over this question and prayed for an answer to come. When it didn’t, I started to attend Unitarian Universalist services regularly—for Unitarians make no doctrinal demands, and irrespective of the tradition’s Christian roots, one can now identify as a Jewish Unitarian, a Buddhist Unitarian, even an atheist Unitarian, as one sees fit.
Its tent is wide open. The sermons were always smart and learned, the congregants welcoming to newcomers and visitors like me. But it all felt so fucking polite. Everyone was so educated and rational. The ecstatic experience I sought could not be found there. I think I wanted a Unitarian congregation that behaved like a Pentecostal congregation. Such a thing does not exist. I envied the submissive faith I observed in the Chasidim I saw davening every morning on the subway, that I witnessed among Pentecostals. But my own skepticism was stronger than I’d reckoned. I had too many questions to allow myself to be overtaken completely by the spirit.
Yet the more I immersed myself in the spiritual life of the city, the more, inevitably, it became essential to me. By the time I’d become a regular at the Fish Bar, I was reading the Bible regularly, along with books about faith leaders I found especially compelling and inspired, figures like Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley and Shaker leader Ann Lee. And it frustrated me that here, in New York City, where all things seem possible, this place that so many people move to from everywhere that they might be free to express themselves creatively, sexually, socially, howsoever they wish, it remained an anomaly to make one’s own way in faith. Among my largely liberal circle of friends, the fact that I even believe in God was, and is, regarded as a bit of a novelty—interrogated with courteous curiosity by some, with condescension by others, with outright contempt by a few. That I was, furthermore, a believer who could not identify exactly as a Jew or as a Christian or as a Zen Buddhist or as a Sufi, as something, was even harder for people to grasp.
So when in 2000 I was called—seriously called, like, by God—well, that threw most everybody, not least of all myself. I wish I could report that some magnificent spiritual drama attended this call, but a host of angels did not fly to my side with trumpets, nor was I struck asunder by a brilliant, near-blinding light, and no white salamander was telling me what had to be done. It was something quieter, something internal. My desire to do some good in the world, to be a servant, kept growing stronger, and I knew that this yearning was connected to my faith and believed that somehow this added up to a call to ministry. Besides, if I could not find the kind of worship I wanted—something both socially progressive and spiritually ecstatic—I would have to make it up. Maybe I could even bring a modified Muggletonian-style drinking and dissenting ministry right to the Fish Bar. The Shakers aside, teetotaling sects baffled me. If wine flowed freely in the Hebrew Bible and was good enough for Jesus, surely it was good enough for us. And if Saint Brigid had the power to turn water into whiskey, she must have had good reasons and honorable intentions.
I learned that such a thing as interfaith ministry existed, that it did not object in the least to self-described Marxist Muggletonian Jews who spent much of their time in bars. I enrolled in a part-time two-year ordination program, quit my publishing job, and went to work as a community organizer for an antipoverty nonprofit organization, where I was charged with engaging faith leaders and their congregations all over the city to work harder and advocate more to address the needs and concerns of low-income New Yorkers. This work brought me to fiery worship services at storefront Pentecostal churches in Brownsville where hands were laid upon my head; to progressive Jewish congregations in Park Slope; to fancy high-church Episcopalians on the Upper East Side who fought for the homeless men who set up camp on their steps, to the endless and mean-spirited consternation of their neighbors; to meetings at which socially conservative Evangelists from Staten Island, openly gay rabbis, and Jesuit priests sat at the same table, cooperating in common cause, in service of the greater good, in service of God, in service of the poorest New Yorkers. It didn’t always go smoothly, but we did manage to get some things done. And after these services and meetings and field visits, I had the Fish Bar. Among the bar staff, there were atheists and agnostics and Catholics, but if anybody there found my growing dedication to God and to service strange or foolish, they certainly didn’t let on. If anything, I was sure I had their support.
• • •
On the morning of September 11, 2001, instead of heading straight to my office in the financial district, I went to a diner in my neighborhood to have a meeting with a local rabbi who was active in social justice circles. It was, as anyone who was in New York City that day will tell you, a gorgeous late summer blue-sky morning. I figured the rabbi and I would talk for an hour or so, then I’d amble over to the local middle school to vote in the local elections that were scheduled that day, then hop on the subway and get my ass to the office. Like any ordinary day, but sunnier, and maybe more promising.
The rabbi and I ordered breakfast and I showed her a pamphlet I’d drafted that congregations could use to advocate for easier food stamp applications. We’d only really just started talking when someone in the restaurant turned the radio up louder. A waitress came by to top off our coffee, and we asked her if she wouldn’t mind maybe turning it down a little, since we were trying to have a meeting. She looked dazed. “Something’s going on at the World Trade Center,” she told us. “Like, a plane crash.” It was not yet nine A.M.
We figured that this must have been caused by an inexperienced pilot accidentally flying his plane too low, straying off course, panicking, hitting the north tower. But as everyone in the diner fell silent and listened to the grave voices on the radio, the truth of what was going on sank in, and it was more horrifying than any of us could have imagined. I was grateful at least to be in the rabbi’s company. Her presence was calming and comforting. Of course she’d have to get back to her office immediately. It was possible that some of her congregants, their friends, their loved ones, were in the tower. They would need her. We quickly settled our bill and went our separate ways. My first instinct was to get to work, but when I reached the train station on Seventh Avenue, it was cordoned off. The subways had been shut down.
I walked quickly back home, a little more than ten blocks. My neighborhood, usually busy and chatty even by Brooklyn standards, was silent. But what could we say? There were no words, just this alien speechlessness. Yet we could not stop looking at one another, looking right into each other’s eyes. As I walked, I kept thinking of a passage from the lamentations of Jeremiah: How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!
By the time I got home, the south tower had also been hit. I called my office. No one was there. It was close to the World Trade Center, and any of my colleagues who might have headed to work early, on trains that stopped at Cortlandt Street, in subway stations right below the towers, might have . . . who knew? It was still unclear how many were injured, how many had died. Frank and I watched, stunned. His instinctive response to this terrible event was to cook. It relaxed him and gave him a sense of purpose. In the afternoon, he got to work roasting a chicken, mashing potatoes, cranking out comfort food. E-mails came in from friends in California, Ireland, everywhere. Later on, my boss managed to get in touch and let me know that everyone from work was okay, but we wouldn’t be able to get back into the office for at least a week. Lower Manhattan was no-go, inaccessible to all but police and emergency services and other essential personnel.
I called a college friend who also lived in the neighborhood, and asked if she wanted to come over. Who would want to be alone on such a day? She joined us, we watched the news, we ate, then headed to evening services at a progressive church just blocks away. It felt right and safe and necessary to be in a house of worship, to grieve collectively. But already the discourse of 9/11 started to worry me. The minister came uncomfortably close, to my mind, anyway, to blaming Israel for what had happened, which was not only premature of her, but facile. And besides that, it seemed counterintuitive and potentially dangerous for a pastor to do anything that might widen the gap between people of different faiths at such a time. Once again, mainstream church would not give me what I needed, especially now. But w
e stayed out the disappointing service, then went immediately to the nearest bar—a gay bar two blocks away. We saw familiar neighborhood faces there and had whiskey and greeted one another like survivors. The atmosphere was surreal, even if the sentiment in the room was both sweet and disconcertingly survivalist: The city is burning. But we can drink. We can dance. We can love.
The next day, I signed up with the Red Cross. I’d do whatever needed to be done—but I mentioned that I was preparing for ordination and would most like to volunteer on the spiritual care track, if that was possible. “Can you make a spreadsheet?” the volunteer coordinator asked me. The truth is, I was—and am—terrible at spreadsheets. But sure I could. Fine. If that’s what they needed. “We got all these pastors coming in from all over the place. Somebody better keep track of them.”
I was sent down to the Family Assistance Center, located first at the armory on Lexington and 26th Street. Chrissie, a cheerful college student—a proud member of Campus Crusade for Christ—and a Promise Keeper from Oregon named George and I were given a table and a stack of forms to go through. We made packets for the emergency volunteer chaplain trainings. If those two had any idea what my beliefs were—and I did make a halfhearted attempt to explain, but we had work to do, and it’s not easy to explain—they probably would’ve been pretty sure I was going to hell. But we worked well and efficiently together, got along fine. At home that night I got a start on my visiting emergency chaplain database, and then showed up at the FAC the next morning. My first supervisor was a no-nonsense woman from the Midwest with years of experience ministering to victims of plane crashes and their families. She told me to go to the emergency chaplain training, even if I wasn’t ordained yet. At least that way I’d get to meet a lot of the visiting volunteers, get their names, and start making schedules.
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