Chapter Fifteen
Tiredly and listlessly, Father Koesler fingered through the mail. A couple of requests for records, one baptismal, the other marital. Nothing personal or even first-class. Mostly junk.
Next the telephone messages. None of an emergency category. Thank God.
Then he smiled. And the smile broadened. The message read: If you tell me about your half funeral, I’ll tell you about some of mine. The caller was Rabbi Richard Feldman.
Just what and when he needed: a friend at the end of a most trying day.
Many years before, Rabbi Feldman and Father Koesler had found themselves at the Round Table of Christians and Jews. After some humorous exchange, the two clergymen had commenced a tentative friendship. Feldman was Reform, Koesler liberal—a pretty good match. Once they discovered they were not going to offend each other no matter how frank and honest they were, they were able to relax in each other’s company.
Koesler had been a guest in the Feldman home several times. The priest found the rabbi’s wife, Sara, even more sociable than her husband. Without a wife himself, it was somewhat more problematical for Koesler to invite the pair for a meal. But he managed it a couple of times.
Feldman had to be aware of what was going on at Old St. Joe’s. Everyone who was not in a cloister—and possibly even some of those—was following the continuing mystery play. How typically kind of the rabbi to call his beleaguered old friend.
Koesler dialed him immediately. They agreed to meet at Seros, a popular restaurant in the suburb of Southfield. Koesler was eager for the company. At this time, Rabbi Feldman was more welcome even than a fellow priest. The rabbi was certain to inject just the right measure of humor and lightheartedness. Feldman, on his part, was glad to be of help. On occasion, Koesler had served him in a like situation.
Both clergymen arrived at Seros at nearly the same time. Koesler watched as his friend rather laboriously got out of his car. The rabbi had heart problems and was forced to moderate his activity accordingly. He was tall—an inch or so shorter than Koesler—but somewhat more husky. His thinning hair topped a round face. Wire-rimmed glasses framed eyes that enjoyed fun. All in all, the rabbi’s appearance was reminiscent of the late balladeer Burl Ives—a resemblance that on occasion startled onlookers who were certain that the folksinger had already departed this earth.
They greeted each other with enthusiasm. Once inside the restaurant, they sat on benches against a back wall and made small talk while waiting for a table.
Once at table, they ordered after glancing perfunctorily at the menu. Each asked for a salad—a specialty of this restaurant—and coffee.
Their conversations, more often than not, leaned toward an interdisciplinary ecumenism. Each respected the other’s religious affiliation. But on occasions such as this, they tried to keep it light.
“What’s this about having half funerals?” Koesler asked. “You never mentioned this before. You could have prepared me for my combination baptism circumcision.”
“As it turns out”—Feldman’s eyes danced—” I never even heard of one until you came up with this one. I thought I could cheer you up if I made you realize you weren’t the only leper in town.”
“You mean to tell me,” Koesler chided, “that you’ve lived a troublefree life as far as funerals are concerned?”
“Who has such luck? Let’s see.… I didn’t think you’d get specific,” he added, parenthetically. “I have to rattle through my memory bank. Ah … ah, yes. We have a custom called the unveiling, that happens about a year after death. It sort of dedicates the tombstone. During the ceremony, a veil—or, God save us, a piece of plastic—is taken off the stone. One time I finished the ceremony and a little boy whipped out a book and did the ceremony all over again. Imagine, a self-appointed expert!”
“At least he showed up with a book,” Koesler said. “Early on, I had a wedding, and as I walked up to the altar, I realized I’d left the ritual in the sacristy. By then, I’d done so many weddings, I probably could’ve done it from memory. But, in my heart I knew that once you try something like that, you set yourself up for botching the whole thing.
“So, I turned to this little altar boy and said, ‘Do you know that little black book I use for weddings and funerals?’ And he said, ‘Yes, Father,’ because little altar boys never learn to say, ‘No, Father.’
“So I told him to go back to the sacristy and get the book and bring it to me. And, do you know, I never saw that kid again!”
The waiter served their salad and coffee.
“I’ll bet,” Feldman said, “you never had a fistfight at the grave site!”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“It was another unveiling ceremony. And when the stone was unveiled, it read, ‘Beloved Father and Husband’ instead of ‘Beloved Son and Brother.’ I don’t know why the fight broke out. It had to be over the marker. But pretty soon everybody but me was throwing punches.”
Koesler tasted the coffee. It was excellent—even better than he could make. “The closest I ever came to violence, that I can recall, was when I was a little altar boy. It was my first time at a military funeral. I had served at graveside before, but this military style was a first for me. Everything went smoothly until the end when, completely unexpectedly for me, the honor guard fired their rifles in salute. At the first salvo the widow fainted. And all I could think was, My God, they shot her!”
Feldman paused with a forkful of salad. “That’s it for me, I’m afraid—at least for real-life experiences. After this, we get into apocrypha.
“Like the one about the rabbi who is graveside. There’s a man at the next grave, screaming, ‘Why did you have to die? Why did you have to die?’ So the rabbi walks over to the man. ‘Was this your wife?’ he asks. And the man sobs, ‘No; it was my wife’s former husband.’”
Koesler laughed. “That’s one I hadn’t heard, oddly enough. But it sort of reminds me of the foursome holing out on the sixth green when a funeral procession passes by. One of the golfers stops just as he is about to putt. He waits, hat over heart, until the procession is completely out of sight. The second golfer says, ‘I have seldom seen such respect for the dead.’ ‘Yes,’ says the first golfer, ‘next Saturday we would’ve been married thirty-two years.’”
“Sticking with golf,” Feldman said, chuckling at the story he was going to tell, “here’s one where the rabbi wakes up on an absolutely perfect Saturday morning. The temperature is in the low seventies; there isn’t a cloud in the sky, just a slight breeze. A golf day made in heaven. Only one problem. It’s Shabbat—the Sabbath. Nothing like golf permitted on the Sabbath. But the temptation is too great. Quietly, the rabbi gets into his golf togs and slips out of the house.
“In heaven, an angel and Yahweh are watching all this. ‘Adonai,’ the angel says, ‘you can’t let him get away with this!’ ‘Wait,’ Yahweh says.
“The rabbi, all alone, steps up to the first tee, a short par four. He addresses the ball and hits it perfectly, the longest drive of his golfing career. The ball takes three bounces to the green, rolls up to the hole, and drops in. An ace—the first in his life!
“The angel turns to Yahweh and says, ‘You call that punishment?’ And Yahweh says, ‘Who can he tell?’”
“That’s pretty good,” Koesler noted. “Would the entire rabbinical school agree that that was punishment enough?”
“You know the old saying,” Feldman said, “the only thing you can get two Jews to agree upon is how much a third Jew should give to charity.”
Feldman was on a roll and Koesler was delighted; this light material was just what he needed.
Feldman put his salad aside for the moment. “Bob, you know what a mitzvah is?”
“A good deed?”
“Yeah. A meritorious, charitable act. Well, this Reb Yankel leads a righteous life. So he dies and goes before the pearly gates, or whatever. The angel who’s guarding the entrance to heaven says, ‘Reb, you have lived so good a life, you c
an choose to go to heaven or hell.
“Reb wants to know what’s the difference. The angel tells him in heaven he will be able to read the holy books. In hell there’s just wine, women, and song. Reb figures he’s read just about all the good books there are. So he chooses hell.
“But the angel, checking the record more carefully, sees that Reb hasn’t done even one evil thing. And you’ve got to have at least one black mark before you can get to hell. So the angel sends him back to do one rotten thing.
“As he’s walking through his town, the widow Moskovitz calls to him and invites him to tea. Reb stays the night with her, figuring that one fornication should make him eligible for hell. When they wake up in the morning, the widow turns to him and says, ‘Oh, Reb, such a mitzvah you did for me.’”
Koesler finished his salad and began looking for the waitress to hot up his coffee. “Reb Yankel and his attempt to even things out reminds me of a story I heard. About a mountain in Ireland. It’s a sacred mountain called Croagh Patrick. Long before they get to the pearly gates, Catholics try to even things out. Which, nine times out of ten, means we do penance for our sins.”
Feldman smiled. He enjoyed hearing about the quaint customs of what he liked to call “Our Daughter Church.”
“The Irish custom at Croagh Patrick is to climb the mountain on one’s knees.”
“You mean crawl up the mountain?”
“Well, it’s not Everest. But, still, it could get rid of a lot of punishment for sin. Anyway, this bunch of pilgrims was about halfway up the mountain when a middle-aged woman, as she was crawling, caught the heel of her shoe in the back hem of her skirt. She was hobbled. So she half turned to the man behind her and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but would you mind lifting my skirt?’ And he replied, ‘I will not. It’s for doin’ the likes of that that I’m doin’ the likes of this.’”
Feldman chuckled. He, too, had finished his salad. He attracted the waitress’s attention, a small miracle in itself, and motioned for more coffee.
The two men, as was their custom, would linger long over a series of coffee refills. They would leave a generous tip. Waiters and waitresses who recognized them did not mind the long visits. Not as long as the big tips kept coming.
“What with this Catholic custom of doing penance for sins, Dr. Moses Green is lucky he’s a Jew,” said Feldman. “If he were a Catholic, he’d never get off that mountain.”
Koesler suddenly became serious. “Dr. Green …” he said meditatively. “That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful you phoned today and we could get together now.”
Feldman’s warm smile encouraged Koesler to continue.
“When I agreed to host the wake service, I had no idea what kind of man Dr. Green was … is. It wasn’t until last night, at the wake, when some people told me what the doctor had done to them that I began to understand. I have the feeling I just scraped the surface. And I was, and am, very embarrassed. Embarrassed for myself.”
“No need for that ….” Feldman leaned forward so they could converse more privately. “You may think the Jewish community considers you to be off your rocker for waking Dr. Green. But he had died—or so it seemed. Someone had to bury him.”
“It wasn’t that so much,” Koesler said. “I was afraid the Jewish community would assume I was aware of Green’s personality. And that I was offering my parish as host for a man who, I suppose, was a disgrace to Jewish people. But until last night’s revelations, I had no idea how venal the man was.”
“Well, we knew. But there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s the identification that is unfortunate. In no other race of people that I know of is there such a blend of nationality and religion.
“To be Irish is not necessarily to be Catholic. To be German is not necessarily to be Lutheran. To be Scots is not necessarily to be Presbyterian. To be English is not necessarily to be Anglican. But to be Jewish is, at least as the general perception goes, to be Jewish. The religion is the nationality. The religion is the race. They are interchangeable.
“Moses Green is Jewish because his parents were Jewish. Everyone assumes that Green’s religious affiliation is Jewish—even though Green would be utterly lost in a synagogue. Everyone expected him to be buried from a Jewish mortuary. And it’s likely he would have been if the family had not arranged for a Christian ceremony.”
“Now that you mention it, I was surprised at that,” Koesler said. “At St. Joe’s, it was just a wake. The burial would have been a Jewish ceremony.”
“My friend,” Feldman said, “you would have to know us better to understand that.”
They were silent for a moment.
“As we talk,” Koesler said, “what is really bothering me is getting clearer. It was my decision to host Dr. Green’s wake that brought him before the public eye in this affair. The media, as is their habit, are telling all. Now, countless numbers of people will hear how vile a man he was. And their estimate of Jews in general will plummet. All because of one man—and my decision to provide a stage for all this.”
Feldman’s smile did not lighten his serious demeanor. “My friend, we all have our successes and our failures. Off the top of your head, who comes to mind when I say ‘Jewish heroes’?”
“Jewish heroes …” Koesler thought for a moment. “Abraham, Moses, Esther, David—all those wonderful biblical personalities.”
“And since then?”
Well … Maimonides for one. Personal favorites? Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, uh … Hank Greenberg. And so many of the great musicians and composers: Itzhak Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Bruch. And of course”—he smiled—” Beverly Sills.
“How about you?” Koesler asked. “Christian heroes?”
“You might not agree ….”
“It’s not up to me to agree. They’re your heroes.”
“Well, let’s see. Francis of Assisi, John XXIII, Martin Luther King. Bonhoeffer, Schweitzer … and your artistic types: Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo … and so many more.
“But now”—Feldman wagged a finger—” how about some Jewish villains?”
“That’s tough. It has to be a very personal list. Judas.”
They laughed.
“The capos of the Holocaust,” Koesler went on. “Maybe Meir Kahane, maybe Henry Kissinger, maybe Elliott Abrams. I don’t know. How about your list of Christian villains?”
“If you’ll pardon me, that’s too easy. Hitler, Stalin, Pétain, Al Capone, Quisling, Oliver Cromwell, Mengele … I could go on and on. Now, if we dipped into Islam,” Feldman continued, “on the plus side might be Muhammad and Saladin. On the minus side, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein.
“The point of course, is that every religion has its angels and its devils.”
“Yes, yes,” Koesler agreed. “And each of the world’s great religions teaches some version of the Golden Rule. Some subjects follow it; others ignore it. Which brings us back to Chesterton, who said that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
“So, you see,” Feldman said, “we got stuck with Dr. Green. But, not to worry: You did not introduce us to Green. We have known about him for a long time—a very long time.”
“You do … uh, I mean, you have? But I thought he was a stranger to the synagogue.”
“Oh, but yes. Regardless, we knew all about him and what a bad name he was giving us. A Jewish doctor! How could we not know about him? What’s that story you tell about old John McGraw and the New York Giants?”
“You mean the one about a Giants player getting injured and Muggsie McGraw going out to home plate with a megaphone and asking if there was a priest and a doctor in the stands? And one doctor and twenty-three priests came forward.”
“The very story. Well, if you want to be medically attended as well as possible, go to a synagogue of a Shabbat. If anybody got sick, there would come forward one rabbi and twenty-three doctors. Oh, yes, we know Dr. Green.�
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“Then can you tell me, why is he scrambling for the last nickel? I mean, he’s a doctor—a surgeon. Isn’t it safe to assume he’s very comfortably well off?”
Feldman turned his cup upside down in the saucer, an indication to their waitress and a reminder that this meeting was drawing to a close.
“Your question has two … no, three considerations.
“First: We will not soon see many benefits held for physicians. With rare exception, they make a respectable income.
“Second: There are physicians who lose their position, especially specialists. Salaries are being cut. This is new, brand new. Doctors today are being brought down from their God-like thrones. They used to be masters of all they surveyed. Now, hospital administrators are cutting back on salaries. Or, in order to hold down costs, the administrators forbid some medical procedures.
“This is all foreign to the doctors. They used to order whatever medical procedures they wanted. They decided how long patients would convalesce in the hospital. They called in specialists—and to hell with all the added costs.
Third: Dr. Green is nearly on a plane by himself—thank God. From all I’ve heard about him, from contacts I’ve had with the man, I’d say he has no moral philosophy at all.”
There it was again, thought Koesler. The same evaluation as that of the nurse who had worked with Green: that he was amoral.
“Take abortion, for instance,” Feldman said. “Now there’s a procedure that is rife with moral, philosophical, theological questions. My guess is that Green doesn’t give a damn for any such consideration. I don’t know that he’s ever performed an abortion. But if he did—or if he refused to—his decision would have nothing to do with good or evil: It would be measured by whether it was profitable, in any sense of that term, for him.”
Koesler immediately called to mind Claire McNern and her involuntary abortion at the hands of Dr. Green. And she hadn’t even known she was pregnant. The sole reason for that operation was that it served Green’s purposes.
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