Rabbi Gabrielle's Defiance

by Roger Herst

  "Mah nishtana… Why is this night different from all other nights?" the first question began.

  Gabby asked Clementine to read the answer in the Haggadah, and added a personal observation. "For me," she gazed to her left, then right, matching glances from the adults through eyes on the boundary of tears. "This night is special because I have wonderful friends to share it. For years now, I've dreamed about you sitting at my table for Passover. I couldn't do it because I felt obliged to attend other Seders. Couldn't even go home to L.A. to celebrate with my father or to Cleveland, with my sister's family." Soft whispers ceased altogether. "You guys have stuck with me through all the storms and I truly love you for it. And tonight, you've brought people special to you. To the question Mah Nishtanah? I answer, this night is different from all other nights because you are here."

  Kye's hand reached across the table in full view to seize Gabby's. His fingers wrapped around hers and squeezed. This inspired Lydia to do the same with Daisy Seasongood.

  Gabby's eyes remained glassy as she gave the first of four formal answers to the question, "Why is this night different? On all other nights we eat regular bread, but tonight, only matzah…"

  Chuck and Kye appeared to get on well, chatting through the floral arrangement centered on her table. Like a dog sniffing a newcomer to establish rapport, Chuck protectively sniffed out men hovering around Gabby. After dinner, he and Kye formed a dishwashing team to attack the mountain of dirty dishes on the kitchen counter.

  Early the following morning Chuck called to thank Gabby for the seder. Best Pesach he had been to since childhood. She was in a hurry to depart for the synagogue, but he held her back with a lancing question.

  "Will Kye sit next to you at the congregational seder tonight, Rabbi Gabby?"

  "Is there something wrong with that? she sounded testy.

  "Nothing wrong with Kye. I like him. A lot."

  "Good. You're my official food taster when it comes to men."

  Chuck had a habit of being diplomatic and opening a sore subject with a question rather than a declaration. "Do you think this is a good time to introduce him to the congregation?"

  That needed an extra moment to deliberate. "He'll create a stir whenever I present him. I've kept enough secrets about my private life. It's always backfires on me."

  "A Korean Baptist battling to keep a very controversial web site alive while holding his creditors at bay in bankruptcy court is a big pill to swallow. Don't expect universal approval."

  "They'll gossip if I were to bring Moses to the seder. Kye and I are just friends. Don't read too much into that."

  "I'll try not to. But my instinct draws me in another direction. A wise old Turk once said 'Beware impossible relationships. They sneak up and catch you by surprise.'"

  "I'll keep that in mind, friend. By the way, what's your name in Turkish?"

  Anticipating the congregational seder, the synagogue buzzed with extraordinary activity. Sometime Sunday evening a half-dozen heavy production trucks from Disney Productions bivouacked in the parking lot in preparation for the live broadcast the following day. Karla Foo had modified her original plan to air the full reenactment first, followed by the seder at Ohav Shalom. A week before airing, she decided on a more challenging technical format – to run the historical and modern celebrations intermittently, first offering an eight minute selection from the Haggadah at Ohav Shalom followed by a flashback to the historic Sinai reenactment of equal length, then repeating this sequence throughout the evening. This decision meant re-writing the script, as well as coordinating with Gabby the Haggadic portions.

  After a brief maariv, morning worship service, attended by a mere handful of the most devout, Gabby retreated into her study to rehearse for the evening's seder. Mindful that this was supposed to be an annual celebration of an ancient ritual and not a television extravaganza, she plugged into the script readings for Asa Folkman and congregational officers, reminding herself that her role was to conduct this event as if no cameras were present – a tall order since it was necessary to schedule breaks for the historical reenactment from Sinai and, of course, for television commercials.

  She was about to phone Sandra Jacoby's parents to confirm that their nine-year-old son, Joshua, would be called upon to recite the Arbah Shelelot – Four Questions, in Hebrew – when interrupted by a discreet rap on her study door. She rose to admit the visitor and was pleased to find Cantor Reuben Blass, a short, heavy-set man with a shock of silver hair on his temples and pasty eyelids that she felt bore the full weight of Jewish suffering throughout the ages. His taste in music bent toward the operatic rather than the wailing supplications of traditional cantoral hazanut from Eastern Europe. Yet during the Musuf service on Yom Kippur his baritone voice, laced with affliction and misery, competed with the best of the Orthodox cantors. Calculating that Gabby was usually too occupied for matters of liturgy and music, Reuben seldom visited her study, though she had often invited him. The Disney script scheduled him to chant the holiday kiddush, then lead the congregation in three popular Pesach songs, Dayenu, Adir Hu in Hebrew and Haad-Gadya in the original Aramaic. Gabby offered a friendly handshake and ushered him to the couch kitty-corner to her desk.

  Once seated, he lifted a freckled, hirsute hand and shook a CD disc in her direction. "Gabby, have you heard this?"

  The question caught her unprepared. "How would I know? What's on it, Reuben?"

  "Does Asa talk to you about his private life?"

  She thought immediately about his playing in strip bars and conjured a vague reply. "He talks to me about some things. Certainly not everything. What have I missed?"

  "How about his music?"

  She maintained the same degree of vagueness. "Yes. A little."

  "Have you heard his newest composition A Jazzman's Prayer?"

  The title stirred her curiosity. "No, I haven't. He's always composing new scores. The way he improvises I can't keep up with his production. Is A Jazzman's Prayer any good?"

  Reuben waved the CD in a figure eight with bold gestures. "No. It isn't any good, Gabby."

  "The Morgenstern affair has taken a terrible toll on him. It must have an effect on his music, too."

  "No. No, " Reuben became animated. "I didn't mean that. What I meant was it isn't just good. It's positively magnificent. This isn't the music of a hack composer with pretensions to following in Prokofiev's footsteps, but a genius. Lots of us try writing scores and sometimes we turn out a decent product. More often than not, we're just mediocre, or inferior to that. But I'm telling you Asa's in a different league. This CD was made by his friends from the nightclub circuit who sent it around. It's a bit choppy in parts, but the composition is off-the-wall fabulous. I hope I'm not talking out of school, but Asa confided in me that he got a call from the San Francisco Symphony Foundation. They want him to score it for a full orchestra."

  "Is he qualified to score for an orchestra? I didn't know he was familiar with all those instruments," she sounded her amazement.

  Reuben arched his shoulders as if prepared to sing. "If he can compose music like this, he can probably find instruments to play it. Besides, he can hire a professional arranger to help."

  "You've got my attention but I can't listen until sometime tomorrow after the seder. Can you leave the CD with me? By the way, are you prepared for this evening?"

  "Of course, but I'm nervous. This might be the largest audience of my life. But I say to myself, how many times have you sung Adir Hu? It isn't as if I don't know the music. Besides, I intend to get everybody else singing along with me."

  "That's what I prefer; no operatics, please. We don't want our part of this extravaganza to look like a theatrical production. We win if we look exactly like what we are, an urban American congregation celebrating its heritage. Nothing more. We lose if we're discovered by Hollywood."

  "Isn't that what happened when Disney approached the congregation?" Reuben eyed her to reveal a playful insight. "But I understand what you're saying.
Just allow me a few seconds of glory before the cameras. I promise not to ham it up."

  "Do what you think is appropriate, Reuben. Your musical judgment is always superb. You've never disappointed us. I can't wait to hear A Jazzman's Prayer tonight."

  By 4:30 p.m., Ohav Shalom was a madhouse. Troops of Disney cameramen, stage lighting and sound specialists, script readers along with their minions of gofors sortied from temporary synagogue command centers. They clashed immediately with caterers who drew a cordon sanitaire around their kitchen, prohibiting Disney employees even to fill water bottles and wash their hands in the kitchen sinks. In Meyerhoff Hall, tempers reached a boiling point. The caterers bristled when TV people marched among fully-set banquet tables to facilitate lighting for their backup cameras. When Gabby emerged from her study to have a cosmetologist make up her face for better contrast on camera, she heard angry voices and immediately detoured to investigate.

  Manufacturing calmness, she asked the Disney technicians what they wished to achieve and what kept them from their goal, then inquired of the caterers how facilitating the film crew would detract from the food service. The clash centered around nine tables laid out with glassware and dishes, floral centerpieces and silverware.

  Pressed for time, she affected a leisurely demeanor, saying to the Disney representative, "These caterers, who incidentally make food so delicious it's hard for me to make people feel like they're coming out of Egyptian slavery, are short staffed and under immense pressure. If you guys could spare a dozen of your people for fifteen minutes to help move these tables, the job's doable. If not, then you're going to have to live with what's already here. Can you get that kind of help?"

  The Disney representative thought of himself as a can-do personality who knew how to flow with the current rather than oppose it. He assessed what his crew had to lose if an accommodation wasn't made and posed a counter-offer. "Maybe not a dozen, but this effort won't require more than eight. I'll get cracking on it immediately."

  The caterer eyed him skeptically, as if to ask what film people could be expected to know about tables and place settings? To save face, he demanded his own people supervise, a condition the Disney manager reluctantly accepted.

  When Gabby finally dropped into the cosmetologist's chair, she was stricken by a sense of pending disaster. Months before, the idea of having Disney reenact the Passover saga seemed like a splendid idea. To show Gentiles what Jews do on Pesach and combat recurring mythology surrounding this holiday had a definite appeal. But the project had escalated out-of-control and now filled her with forebodings. Her primary job was to conduct an historical celebration for her congregants, not educate the public. Under theatrical lighting, made up like a TV emcee that now seemed unachievable. Despite her best intentions, the decision to cooperate with Disney transformed the festival into a spectacle, devoid of spirituality. "The gorilla," she told herself, "has escaped from its cage."

  The cosmetologist highlighted her eyes with dark mascara and camouflaged normal skin blemishes on her cheeks with flesh-colored powder. To show off her craft, she withdrew a square mirror from a traveling satchel and positioned it before Gabby's eyes. The new Gabby jarred its possessor. No longer ordinary, she looked glamorous beyond her imagination. Hollywood knew how transform average-looking women into stars. Had she succumbed to this vanity?

  Back in her office, Chuck commented on her appearance and joked about his own experience in female drag at a Halloween party. When she failed to inquire how that felt, he handed her a fist-full of phone chits that required attention. "I'm not certain exactly when Kye will arrive, but I may not be able to greet him," she said. "Please see that he's seated next to me at the head table, won't you?"

  "Yep, boss. Right there beside you foursquare before the cameras," he quacked in a voice reserved for sarcasm.

  "Don't read too much into that; he's only my guest at the seder," she corrected.

  "That's not how your congregants will perceive it. You've scrupulously avoided bringing male friends to synagogue functions. Truth be told, I can't remember the last time. This is certain to jump-start the rumor mill."

  Feeling the pressure of time, she made no effort to censor her response. "Good. Let them get used to the idea."

  "That's my old Rabbi Gabby. Never one for subtlety. She carefully keeps her boyfriends shielded from view. But when she goes public it isn't a nice Jewish boy with a promising profession, but a bloody Korean Baptist, the bette noire of Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington, with an army of creditors nipping at his tail. And not in a quiet congregational function, but on national television!"

  "You really think I'm going too far?" she had learned to respect Chuck's wisdom in such matters.

  A coy grimace conveyed his conspiracy in this devilment. "Oh, hell. Go for it!"

  "It's too late to reconsider. Kye will be here soon and I'm not going to un-invite him at the eleventh hour."

  Asa Folkman, a multi-colored Israeli yarmulke on his head, brushed past Chuck into Gabby's study to reconfirm his role in the ceremony. She rose to greet him with a kiss. "Reuben's ecstatic about A Jazzman's Prayer," she said. "I haven't had a chance to listen, but am planning to this evening. Yashar koach, Asa."

  Through the dark clouds that seemed to hover perpetually over him, she heard an uptick of excitement in his voice. "The San Francisco Symphony wants me to orchestrate it for a concert next year, I had no idea anybody would like it."

  She seized his arm, turning him toward the door. "Let's talk about your music tomorrow. For now, we must check that everything is ready for the seder. I'd hate to have you explain the karpas, only to find it isn't where it should be on the seder plate."

  When they arrived in Meyerhoff Hall, both were mortified. No longer a gathering place for a religious ceremony it had been transformed into a television production studio! Powerful lighting bathed the room in dazzling illumination. Electrical lines, secured by gaffing tape, snaked like tree roots in a rain forest over the floor. Oversized TV monitors hung from the ceiling above a platform with four technicians, their ears cuffed with earphones, hovered around a sound-mixing board. Karla Foo, wired like an NFL football coach, was barking orders into a mouthpiece. A section of the reenactment filmed on location in the Egyptian Sinai was scrolling across the monitors. The familiar face of Donald Silvio, anchor of CNN Worldwide News, suddenly appeared simultaneously on several screens, then the camera cut to the colossus of Ramses II at Abu Simbel in the southern Egyptian desert. Karla spoke directly to Silvio through a mike connected to her earphones. A junior production assistant requested Gabby to take her place at the head table to be miked. As she marched forward, the ceiling monitors overhead flickered before going black. Donald Silvio's image disappeared.

  Karla met Gabby at the table. "Must be a technical problem in Egypt where we don't have sophisticated backup equipment. We get crazy uplink phenomenon in remote places. Let's cross our fingers we'll have transmission before we start your seder. Otherwise, I'll have to ask you to improvise. That's not likely, but I'd like to give you a heads-up."

  "Improvise? Easy for you to say," Gabby mumbled under her breath.

  Members of Ohav Shalom's Board of Directors and their spouses assembled near the head table, exchanging holiday greetings and kisses. A production assistant adjusted a lapel microphone on Gabby's jacket and handed her an earpiece through which Karla Foo would issue staging cues. Stan and Dottie Melkin, who took their places beside a vacant seat left for Gabby's escort, exchanged eye signals in speculation about whom their dinner partner might be.

  A din of voices permeated the hall as transmission from Egypt resumed, flashing scenes of the Temple of Karnak with their mammoth granite carvings of Egyptian god-kings, vestiges of a far different era in human history.

  Powerful theatrical stage lights converged on Karla Foo sashaying before the head table. Spots followed her around as if on a stage, with two men in T-shirts trailing behind clearing cable connected to the switching station. Her
voice suddenly penetrated the cacophony of voices, calling for attention. "Ladies and Gentlemen, please! A word of introduction, please."

  After sixty seconds, the audience quieted in anticipation. "We're now a little less than ten minutes before broadcast. You've all been briefed about this presentation. Our satellite link with Egypt is now open and Donald Silvio will soon be seen on the overhead monitors, talking to us from Abu Simbel. Soon after his introduction, we'll begin our broadcast of your seder. Rabbi Lewyn knows when we're planning to cut away from the service to present the Exodus reenactment. Eight minutes later, we'll pop back here, just in time to catch up with your celebration. It's imperative to act as though you are experiencing a normal seder. We'd like you to forget what my production team is doing, though I know that's asking an awful lot. Above all, please don't look at the cameras. My producers in the mix box will automatically delete shots where people are doing that. We'll be shooting several angles at all times, so you might find yourself targeted by more than one camera at the same time. I know you have a custom of lounging around the table on Passover. Do it now. We want authenticity. The reenactment will show what happened in the days of Moses; your seder should show how American Jews celebrate these ancient events today."

  Karla's words concluded with melodic music written for an event no less epic than the exodus of Hebrews from Egypt and the subsequent revelation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

  Gabby reminded herself that she had officiated at many Seders and knew, almost by heart, the Haggadah. She was silently rehearsing her opening statement for the fourth time when a hand squeezed her shoulder and familiar fingers touched her neck. Kye planted a passing kiss upon her cheek just before sliding into his seat. "Sorry, I'm a little late," he whispered. "You wouldn't believe why."

  Overhead lighting suddenly illuminated the room. Dottie Melkin rotated sideways to greet her dinner partner, reaching across to take a hand and introduce herself.