by Howard Fast
“I’ve had indications.”
“We cling to each other.”
“What are you telling me?” David asked softly. “That you’re miserable and unhappy?”
“Sometimes.”
“What does sometimes mean?”
“It means —” She broke off and rose and went around the table. “The hell with it,” she said. “I love you. I hear the baby crying, and you have a meeting tonight with all the big wheels, and if you want to talk about it, we’ll do it some other time.”
The meeting with the committee was at Mel Klein’s place, about a mile from the old Congregational church that had become David’s synagogue. It was a lovely spring evening, the new leaves making a pale, lacy froth over the trees, the sky reddening behind thin strips of cloud, the air as sweet as honey. Bit by bit, the place had gotten to David, in spite of intervals of irritation and boredom. He had to admit that for sheer, quiet beauty, Leighton Ridge took second place to no other spot he had known. His work still intrigued him. On the other hand, being here in this old Connecticut town constantly raised the question of why he was here. When he saw himself in the third person, he would argue that this was David Hartman passing through, only passing through. But never permanently. To live in this place, to grow old in this place — that was inconceivable. Lucy might not believe it, but he understood quite well what she was saying. But where was her understanding of him? She had no inkling of the meaning of his desire to be in Israel. He envied her certainty. Her validity was deep inside her and unquestioned, and that perhaps was a quality of being a woman; his own validity was vague and disoriented, changing from day to day.
Enough of that! It was too beautiful an evening to cloud with vague and unrewarding thoughts. He tried to clear his mind as he strode down the road. He was the last to arrive at the Kleins’ place, and as Della opened the door and kissed him, she said, “The wolves are here in the den. Now don’t be upset, David.”
“What makes you think I’ll be upset?”
“I know what’s on the agenda. And I know you.”
“Everybody knows me these days. I wish I knew myself.”
“Terrible thing for a rabbi to say. Next I’ll hear you’re being psychoanalyzed.”
“Hardly.”
“But you did have a fight with Lucy.”
“You’re too wise, Della. I prefer the wolves.”
The “wolves” were waiting in what Mel Klein called his den — Jack Osner, president of the congregation, Mel Klein, the treasurer, and Joe Hurtz, the secretary — and as he looked at them and shook hands with them tonight, David toyed with the notion that the governing of the congregation might be helped by the presence of a woman.
They were pleased to see him. After two years, they had the feeling that he belonged to them. They were blessed with this tall, handsome young man who was both firm and amiable; he was theirs; and sometimes they were pressed with the notion that they had created him.
“Sit down, David,” Mel said. He was very proud of his den, with its large leather chairs and its entire wall of books. The books were bought and read by Della. Mel was not much of a reader beyond the daily newspaper, and neither of them had enough pretentiousness to call the room a library. “We’ve been looking forward to tonight.”
“Oh?”
“I thought it might be best to call a meeting of the whole board,” Joe Hurtz said, “but the colonel thought differently.”
Hurtz was the only one who still called Osner “the colonel,” and his use of the term irritated David greatly. He had his own opinion of the virtues and titles war pins on people, but there was no way to explain this to fat, easygoing Joe Hurtz.
“I think there may be some contention,” Jack Osner said. “Might as well keep it among ourselves until we reach a decision.”
“About what? For heaven’s sake, let’s get down to it and end the mystery.”
“No mystery intended, David. But I must review some facts. When you came to us, two years ago, fourteen Jewish families had come together and pledged themselves to the support of a synagogue. When you finished your first sermon, David, twenty-two additional families joined the synagogue.”
Della entered with a large tray of cups, a coffee pot, and cakes. David took the tray and helped her to serve. No one else moved to help, and David thought of the attitude Martin Carter referred to as “parsonitis.” Della flashed him a surreptitious grin and whispered, “Be stout of heart.” She left the room, and Osner took up his narrative while the others munched cake and drank coffee, David thinking, We drink so little alcohol. Marty Carter’s board would get themselves loaded a bit, and everything would flow more easily.
“That was two years ago,” Osner continued. “Since then, we’ve grown to over a hundred families, families from Ridgefield and Wilton and even Weston and Westport and Redding — well, I don’t have to tell you that, David; you’ve watched the process. And though it’s still insufficient, we’ve tripled your salary, and earlier this evening we decided upon another annual raise of a thousand dollars, which we intend to place before the full board at our next meeting, three days from now.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” David said.
“So, you see, things change.”
“They do indeed.”
“And we have the obligation at the right moment to hasten the change, if the change is needed.”
David grinned and said, “I don’t need all this prologue, Jack. Let’s get to the point.”
Osner nodded at Klein. “Mel, the ball’s in your court.”
Klein cleared his throat, coughed, and said, “David, we have come to the conclusion that we need a new synagogue, a real synagogue.”
“So that’s it. You know,” David said slowly, “we have a real synagogue, a very real synagogue.”
“No, sir, Rabbi, if you will permit me,” Osner said. “We do not have a real synagogue. We have an old, converted Congregational church.”
“We have painted that church, repaired it, reroofed it, scraped the floors and the pews, replaced the broken windows, and built a sanctuary for our Torahs. It’s a beautiful building, and except on the High Holy Days, we don’t fill it.”
“David, David,” Mel Klein said, “it’s still a church. We are Jews and we worship in a church. Is that fitting?”
“I don’t know what could be more fitting. We worship the same God, and you could say that church came to us as an act of love, a hand held out from Christian to Jew —”
“For a nice price,” Hurtz put in.
“That’s a low shot.”
“No, it isn’t,” Osner put in. “Marty Carter and his crowd had embarked on their own piece of church building, and they had overspent and used up every dollar they raised and still had not finished their new church when we came in as the buyers. We helped them out of a hole. The old church may be a museum piece, David, but nobody else wanted it.”
“It’s not a museum piece. It’s a signature for a great deal of what is best in America. The people who built this church are the same people who created Harvard and Yale, who laid the basis of a country where Jews could come and be free — for the first time, anywhere.”
“David, David,” Osner said gently, “we are not going to destroy the old church. Do you think that any of us living here on the Ridge are without a sense of what Congregationalism means? We’re not that narrow or that foolish.”
“I didn’t mean to indicate that you were. If I did, I must apologize.”
“Don’t apologize to us, Rabbi,” Klein said, mollifyingly.
“We’re not going to destroy the church, David,” Osner said again. “There’s a group of Unitarians who’ve been meeting at the Elks Club in Danbury, and since most of them come from Brookfield and New Fairfield, they’re delighted at the thought of a church of their own here in Leighton Ridge. They’re crazy about our building, and they’ve offered a very good price, thirty thousand dollars for parsonage and church, which is more than double wh
at we paid.”
“So you’ve sold my home,” David said.
“No. We’ve done nothing, and we won’t without your approval.”
“I’m afraid you’ll never have my approval. On the other hand, I will not stand against any decision of the board. Like the people whose church we are selling, we are congregationalists and we rule ourselves.”
“Now wait a minute,” Osner exclaimed. “If this goes through, David, we’ll build you a good, modern house. Furthermore, I am putting a restrictive covenant into the deed that will prohibit the Unitarians from making any changes in either building without the approval of the Leighton Historical Society.”
“Is that legal?” Hurtz asked.
“Entirely legal. Now what do you say, David?”
“I plead with you to change your minds.”
“We need some things that we don’t have now,” Klein said. “We want to start a nursery school, a sort of crèche. We want a gym. We want a reasonable area to expand into. We want some classrooms and an office for you. These are the functions of a synagogue today, and I see nothing so awful about it.”
“In one of those ugly modern buildings.”
“It need not be ugly.”
“We’ll have the best and most innovative architect we can find,” Osner said. “And you’ve got to admit, David, that Jewish kids growing up in a Congregational church in Connecticut are bound to be a little confused.”
“Such confusion might not be the worst thing in the world. Do we have to go on forever pretending that God changes character every time some sect decides that they own the whole truth?”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Joe Hurtz demanded.
“Come on, come on,” Mel Klein said softly. “I know what David means, but that’s not the kind of a world we live in. The stink of Hitler’s gas ovens is still with us. I spend a day in the showrooms on Seventh Avenue and then come up here to the Ridge, and it’s like the rest of the world disappeared. Only it hasn’t. My father came here from Kiev, in the Ukraine, and he used to tell me what the nature of anti-Semitism was in czarist Russia, and I grew up on One hundred and fifty-ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue, so I know a little something about anti-Semitism myself, but my kids grew up here in Leighton Ridge and they don’t know one damned thing. They feel comfortable in the old church, and I don’t want them to feel comfortable there.”
David remained silent.
“David,” Osner said, “I never asked you. But you come from German-Jewish people, don’t you?”
David nodded.
“Could I ask when they came here?”
“My mother’s family in eighteen forty-eight, my father’s family a bit before that.”
“And Reform since then?”
David nodded. “More or less.”
“So your family has a hundred years of the Reform movement behind it. For me, it’s my first step, and I think three quarters of the congregation are the first generation of Reform Jews. Those who are Reform. Just remember that we have a few Orthodox and Conservative as well.”
“In other words,” David said, “you intend to build the new synagogue, and nothing I say will stop you.”
“Oh, no. Positively not,” Mel Klein said. “You’re putting us in a hell of a position, David. We think this is a proper step — but if you’re going to set yourself in opposition to it, well, we’ll just drop the matter, or postpone it.” He turned to the others. “Am I putting it right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why don’t you think about it, David?” Osner said kindly. “No great hurry. Meanwhile we’re having some drawings made, and you may find it’s not as inappropriate as you fear. If we decide to go ahead, we’ll put it at the other end of the property, about three hundred yards from the present synagogue. And suppose we meet again in a few days and talk about it? Will the drawings be done by, say, Monday?” he asked Hurtz.
“That’s what he promised, Colonel.”
At home, Lucy looked at David and shook her head. “No fun with the boys?”
“That’s nicely put. If I weren’t a rabbi, I might say that those three guiding lights of our religious institution give me a pain in the ass, especially one, our beloved colonel.”
“I can go with that. Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“What is it this time?”
“They want to sell the church and build a new synagogue.”
“Well, you know, Dave, Martin sold it to us, and what’s so terrible if we want to sell it?”
He shook his head and remained silent, but as they were preparing for bed, he told Lucy that he had decided to go into New York the following day and talk to Rabbi Belsen.
“Sure. That might be a good thing, you worry so much, David.” Her voice was like honey, and David knew that meant she wanted to make love. It irritated him, and he stiffened under her touches; and then his guilt rose up, because she was loving and kind and a good mother, ran the house properly, painted and papered rooms by herself, found pieces of antique furniture for ten and fifteen dollars each and put up with the problem of being the wife of an underpaid country rabbi; and out of this rush of guilt, he entered into the lovemaking. But it was not very good. He had to arouse himself with the erotic images of his boyhood encounters, and if that fulfilled something, it spoiled something else.
Driving into New York the following day, David brooded over his relationship with his wife. As a rabbi, he should have been kind, tolerant, understanding. As a rabbi? And why not as a human being? But he had long ago come to the conclusion that men of the cloth, rabbis or otherwise, were less than saintly, and human beings were not very human. His thoughts wandered and he made a wrong turn through a light, and a police car pulled up alongside and waved him over. When the cop saw his license, his face relaxed and he said, “You got to watch yourself, Rabbi. You make an illegal turn like that, you could end up in the hospital or even dead.”
“Then you should give me a ticket,” David said firmly.
The cop’s big, red, Irish face broke into a grin. “That’ll be the day,” he said. “Go on, Rabbi, only be careful.”
Perks. They brought Lucy food, and cops refrained from giving him tickets he deserved. “Shit!” he exclaimed angrily, using the word as a release he desperately needed. “Shit! Shit! Shit! What in hell am I doing here? What in hell am I doing anywhere? Piousness turns my stomach. So I witnessed the Holocaust! Do I bring any Jew back to life by pretending I’m a rabbi? I’m a joke, a clown!”
“I’m pretending to be a rabbi,” he told Belsen, fiercely, challengingly.
“We all are, to some extent,” the old man said. He was warming an electric teapot. “A gift from my daughter,” he explained. “She’s very modern. She couldn’t bear that I made my tea in a little tin pot. You want lemon, David? Milk? I don’t have any here. But I have sugar.”
“Any way.”
“All right, David. Plain. You know, I pretend to be a rabbi too. What is pretending? It’s passing yourself off as something you are not. But not anything you are not. It’s passing yourself off as something that is special in your heart and mind, something you want to be very desperately and you feel it’s beyond you. When my son-in-law says he pretends to be a doctor, what does he mean? That he didn’t go to medical school, that he cheated on his exams? No, absolutely not. He means that with all his learning and degrees, he has not even scratched the surface of the mysteries of the human body. And we who are rabbis, we pretend. We pretend that we know something of the mystery of life and death. We pretend that we heard a whisper of the voice of God. We pretend that we know the nature of worship, the nature of observance, the nature of meditation. Maybe a little. Maybe some of us. Does that make the rest of us liars, cheats, worthless? No. Drink your tea. And about Israel — that is the most glorious miracle of the twentieth century, and to want to be there at this moment is completely understandable. What will you do there, David?”
David hesitated.
&
nbsp; “Take up a gun and fight?”
He shook his head.
“Then you’re still a rabbi. They have enough rabbis there, believe me. You still haven’t mentioned what is underneath all this.”
True. He hadn’t. He hadn’t even spelled it out to himself, and now he wondered whether he could. And what should he say to the old man? The emotion, the passion, the call that I felt in the service is gone, and now I’m a half-baked psychiatrist for a group of middle-class Jews in Fairfield County, and I’m disgusted with it, and I look at my wife and wonder who she is, and even my son brings me no joy. And if he said that, would it be the truth any more than anything else would be the truth?
Instead, lamely, he muttered, “They’re going to sell the old church and build a new synagogue.”
“Oh?”
“I’m against it. I suppose I could stop it. No, I wouldn’t. They want it too much.”
“Maybe they need it, David.”
David shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe in five years. The point is, as far as I am concerned, that we’re giving up a beautiful old building, something that’s intrinsic to the place, for some modern monstrosity.”
“Tearing it down?”
“No, we’re selling it to the Unitarians.”
“So there you are, David. They’ll take good care of it, and you’ll have a new synagogue with all modern improvements. Not too bad. Tell me, David, could it be that there’s comfort in a church, that it makes you feel a little less a Jew?”
David stared at the old man, feeling anger begin to boil in him, yet knowing he could not exercise anger against Belsen, who wore all the images of teacher and father.
“I know.” Belsen nodded. “Over in Israel are heroic figures, a tiny handful of young Jews arrayed against the entire Arab world, and what do you have up there in Leighton Ridge — businessmen, professionals, storekeepers, possibly not even three or four that are noble, heroic, brilliant. What is a Jew, David? Something that wins Nobel Prizes, something chosen for mass murder, something without good manners, something with good manners, something supercultured?” His voice became suddenly harsh, angry. “Come, David. We’ve given you years of study and instruction. Now answer a simple question. What is a Jew?”