Sweet Like Sugar

by Wayne Hoffman

  He stopped when I started to giggle.

  “Frank Sinatra did this song, too,” he said. “But he was no more Sammy Davis Jr. than I am.”

  I was stunned. “What else did you listen to?”

  “Well, I remember putting on an Allan Sherman record once,” he said.

  “He was a comedian, right?”

  The rabbi started to sing again: “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah . . .”

  “Right, right,” I said.

  “Also a very popular record in the early sixties—and of course he was Jewish, too,” the rabbi said. “Sophie never thought he was funny, but I did.”

  “And you used to play these in your store?” I asked. It seemed so out of character, since the store always felt so serious to me.

  “No,” he said. “That wouldn’t have been appropriate. We played them at home. In private. Just the two of us.”

  I pulled into his driveway.

  “Do you still have those old records?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—I haven’t thought about them for ages. I don’t even know if I still have the phonograph,” he said. “Maybe in the basement somewhere. Come inside and you can help me look.”

  As we got to know each other, I got increasingly curious about the rabbi’s life. Fiddling around on my computer one afternoon, I Googled some of the musicians he’d named. He was right: The Barry Sisters had been popular. And Sammy Davis’s version of “What Kind of Fool Am I” was better than Sinatra’s.

  Then I Googled the rabbi’s name.

  Nothing. Like he never existed.

  Not so unusual for someone his age, I figured; even my parents only popped up online a handful of times—a brief mention in a community paper when they won a raffle to benefit the National Zoo, a photo of my father speaking at a county council meeting about a new highway he opposed. So I wasn’t surprised.

  But then I Googled his bookstore, and again found nothing. That, I thought, was simply bad business.

  “You don’t have a web page?” I asked him that evening.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said.

  I explained it to him, but to the rabbi, I was speaking a foreign language.

  “Benji, I don’t know from computers,” he said.

  “Don’t you have one in the store?”

  “Linda Goldfarb does whatever needs to be done with that,” he said. “I never understood it.”

  “You really should have a website for the store,” I said, explaining that it might increase his business and raise his store’s profile.

  “Eh, I don’t have the time to worry about such things,” he said.

  I offered to make a page for him. “Nothing fancy,” I said. “No online sales, no e-mail or anything. Just a simple page with directions to the store, the address and phone number, and maybe a bit about the history of the store and what you sell.”

  He mulled this over. “I can’t afford to be starting up all these new things,” he said.

  “I’ll do it for free,” I offered. “Seriously, it won’t take long, and it won’t even cost you fifty bucks to register the URL.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I trust you. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you say it’s a good thing, I trust you. Some things in this world, I suppose you know more about than I do.”

  It didn’t take more than a few days to set up. There were no bells and whistles, no drop-down menus, no animated menorahs. Just the basics about the store, presented—if I did say so myself—in tasteful fashion: blue and white background, a few photographs I’d taken of the store displays, a picture of the rabbi and Mrs. Goldfarb side-by-side looking almost like they liked each other. There was a map to the store, a list of their most popular items with thumbnail images, and a history of the business told in first person and signed by the rabbi. It was simple, but definitely polished and professional looking.

  I pulled up the page on the bookstore’s computer one day at lunch. Mrs. Goldfarb was impressed. The rabbi seemed pleased, although it was clear he still didn’t quite understand who might ever see this information, or how they could find it on their own computers.

  “Wait, I forgot the best part,” I said.

  At the bottom of the page, a gold Jewish star stood alone without any text.

  “This is a little hidden feature, just for those in the know,” I said. I clicked on the star and music started to play on the computer. The Barry Sisters. I’d downloaded a greatest hits collection.

  “It’s a very nice song,” Mrs. Goldfarb said. “But who will ever know it’s there?”

  The rabbi didn’t answer. He just looked at me, smiled, and winked.

  I burned a CD of the Barry Sisters after that, and every day in the car, I’d play a different song. Sometimes a particular tune became a catalyst for a story from the rabbi’s early days in Maryland—a story he’d continue in my office or in his living room.

  “You really want to hear about this ancient history?” he asked once and only once.

  “I do,” I said. It was true. Besides, the rabbi’s spirits lifted each time he recounted these stories. He’d never had anyone to tell them to.

  The music, to be honest, wasn’t quite my speed. A bit hokey, overly cheerful; a little went a long way. But I loved looking at the Barry Sisters online, seeing their period-perfect album covers and publicity shots where they appeared in matching dresses and matching hairstyles, beneath multicolored block lettering. As a designer, I couldn’t get enough of the visuals, even if the songs themselves quickly wore thin.

  I mentioned this to the rabbi one day, when he remembered a certain song from their LP Shalom.

  “I’ve seen that one online,” I said. “They’re getting off a plane carrying huge bouquets of flowers.”

  “Yes, we sold that one in the store,” he said. “I remember it. That wasn’t just any plane, Benji, it was an El Al plane.”

  “All I remember is what a wonderful image it was. So sixties.”

  “You weren’t alive in the sixties.”

  “When I see pictures like that, I can almost imagine what it was like.”

  Later that week, when the rabbi got in my car at the end of the day, he handed me a rolled-up promotional poster of the Barry Sisters. It was dusty, torn, and discolored from age.

  “I found this in the back of the storage closet,” he said.

  “You just happened to find it? After forty years?”

  He shrugged.

  I unrolled it across the steering wheel, careful not to rip it further. It was beautiful.

  I thanked him.

  “I don’t need it anymore,” he said.

  “I’ll hang it in my office,” I said.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  One Wednesday morning in mid-August, I pulled into the rabbi’s driveway and found the front door still closed. I checked my watch; I wasn’t running early. I waited for a few minutes.

  Nothing.

  This wasn’t like the rabbi. He was usually waiting in the doorway. I tooted the horn, but got no response.

  I got out of the car and walked up his front steps, pulled open the screen door, and knocked.

  No answer.

  I knocked again. Still no answer.

  I rang the doorbell. This time I heard a voice inside, shouting from a distance: “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Rabbi,” I answered, confused.

  “Me who?” the voice replied, closer.

  “Benji. Benji Steiner.”

  The door opened a crack and I could see the rabbi scanning me from head to toe with squinty eyes. I pushed the door open wide and found the rabbi as I’d never seen him: in loose pajamas and a rumpled bathrobe.

  “I’m here to drive you to work,” I said, walking past him into the foyer, letting the screen door swing shut. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Of course, I’m fine,” he said, but it was clear he was not. “Did I ca
ll for a car?”

  “Rabbi, I drive you to work every day,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

  Obviously he did not. But he pretended to understand. “Then I should go get dressed,” he said, turning to go upstairs.

  I followed him upstairs to a part of his house I’d never seen before. There were just two rooms, one on each side of the landing. One was his bedroom, with bookshelves covering every available wall, and an unmade bed beneath a double window. The other was a mirror image, filled with more books, a small desk, and an old couch—his study. Lined with still more bookcases, the hallway between the rooms was lit by a single overhead light, marking the entrance to the bathroom—which was decorated with pink wallpaper and pink fixtures, the only room in the house without any books.

  Outside the bathroom, two framed needlepoint pictures hung on either side of the door: one of an apple tree, the other of flowers, both with Hebrew writing along the bottom in neat red stitching.

  I was trying to make out what the pictures said—my Hebrew, which had never been good, was quite rusty by this point—when the rabbi came up behind me.

  “Excuse me,” he asked, “but what do I wear to work?”

  I called an ambulance.

  Holy Cross Hospital. What kind of a place was that for a rabbi?

  The doctor said it sounded like the rabbi had suffered a ministroke. He would need to stay in the hospital for a couple of days for tests, but he’d probably be fine.

  Most likely, however, he would never recall the events of that morning.

  Sure enough, by the next evening when I visited him after work, he was awake and alert, and he knew exactly who I was when I came in.

  He pushed aside his food tray, which held a kosher hospital dinner, the kind where every item is individually wrapped and sealed and stamped three times: kosher, kosher, kosher.

  “The doctor tells me that you brought me here,” he said. “This I do not remember. I remember going to bed in my house and waking up in this bed instead.”

  I pulled up a chair and recounted the previous morning’s strange scene.

  “Amazing,” he said. “You tell me it happened, and I believe you. But I do not remember.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Well, the food is bad and the bed is uncomfortable and the nurses keep taking blood for some test or other. And then Linda Goldfarb came to visit me.” He rolled his eyes.

  “I told her you were here.”

  “Yes, this I suppose is necessary. But she brought me these awful flowers”—he gestured to a basket of mums on the bedside table—“and they smell just as terrible as her perfume.”

  “I’m sure she was trying to be nice.”

  “Flowers you bring to a dead person,” he said. “Or a wife.”

  I was glad I had opted against flowers on this visit.

  “You’ll come again tomorrow?” he asked.

  I said I would.

  “Would you stop by my house and bring my reading glasses and my prayer book? They are on the desk in my study.”

  “Why do you need them?”

  “Tomorrow is Friday, and tomorrow night is Shabbat. I will need my glasses and my siddur to daven.”

  “The doctor said he wants you to rest.”

  He waved off this notion with the back of his hand. “Benji, there is an authority higher than the doctor.”

  I paused to see if he’d elaborate, but he didn’t; apparently that’s all that needed to be said.

  “You’ve never broken Shabbat, have you?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  I couldn’t begin to understand why the rabbi was so rigid in his observance, keeping every letter of the law even when it was inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unhealthy.

  “Your question is a strange one to me, Benji,” he said. “You ask why I do not break Shabbat. But I wonder why you do not keep it.”

  “Too many rules,” I said.

  Judaism was a religion of a million rules; no matter how hard you tried, you were bound to break most of them. This, I was convinced, was a way of maintaining communal guilt and shame—making sure we all felt that we came up short. It was a trap. I had decided years ago, when I left my parents’ house to go to college, that I wasn’t going to play by those rules anymore.

  “You are looking at it upside down,” he said. “Judaism is not only about refraining from doing bad things. It is also about doing good things. Shabbat is not only a day when you do not work, it is a day when you do rest. Keeping kosher is not only about rejecting treyf, it is about eating the way God has decreed. You see restrictions. I see opportunities. Opportunities to get closer to God, to become the man He wants you to be, to live your life as a good Jew.”

  This sounded like one of my Hebrew school teachers’ speeches. I wasn’t buying it.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on observance.

  He was taken aback, probably unaccustomed to having people reject his spiritual guidance.

  “You’re not interested in being a good Jew?” he asked, incredulous.

  “I’m not interested in all those rules,” I said.

  “Benji, the rules apply to you whether you obey them or not,” he said. “You can’t just pretend you’re not a Jew.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but I’m a grown-up and I’m pretty sure I can do whatever I want.”

  He blinked several times, as if trying to wake from a dream. Then he returned my snideness in kind: “So being a Jew doesn’t mean a thing to you?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, slumping back in the chair. “It means a lot to me.”

  “What does it mean, then?”

  I was silent. I honestly didn’t know the answer, not in any sense that I could put into words.

  “You are lost,” he said.

  “No, not exactly. . . .”

  “Yes, you are lost,” he repeated. “But you can find your way back.”

  “I’m not going to become Orthodox,” I shot back quickly. My mother must have gotten to me, after all.

  A look of confusion spread across his face, but it soon softened into an amused grin.

  “Benji, you do not have to keep kosher or become shomer shabbes,” he said. “But you need to find out what about Judaism has meaning for you—the place where you feel connected to your faith.”

  “I don’t really feel connected anymore,” I said.

  “Then you must reconnect. You must not give up on your faith,” he said, growing serious and shaking his finger at me. “My Sophie lost faith in God. With what she endured, it’s no wonder. Anyone might lose faith. But did she stop lighting candles on Shabbat? No. Did she stop keeping kosher? No. Did she stop going to shul? No. The Nazis tried to take all of that away from her, and after she came to America, she swore that she would continue to practice her religion as long as she was free. She did not find her faith again in an instant. But she maintained her rituals, and the meaning eventually returned. She was a woman of great faith—greater than my own, because her faith had been tested so terribly. She questioned, she doubted, but she did not cast aside her religion like an old coat that has grown too heavy.”

  I was listening quietly, taking it in.

  “And neither will I,” he announced as a sort of grand conclusion. “So please, Benji, the reading glasses.”

  “I’ll bring them tomorrow,” I said, getting up to leave.

  “And tell Linda Goldfarb that she doesn’t need to bring me any more flowers.”

  The third date. There has to be something, at least the spark of something, to get to the third date.

  I hadn’t gotten to the third date for a while. But my first two dates with Christopher, the Hill staffer, had gone well: an evening of Shakespeare at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre downtown (his idea) and an afternoon of duckpin bowling at a shopping center in the suburbs (my idea). Both dates had been followed by moderate
ly priced meals and moderately tasteful kissing in the car.

  Here’s what I had learned about Christopher so far: He grew up outside Omaha. He had double-majored in English and political science at Northwestern. He could bench-press more than I could, but I could kick his butt at duckpin bowling. (Admittedly it wasn’t a fair contest; I’d grown up in an area where duckpins were the norm, while he had never even heard of such a thing.) He had good, progressive politics—better than his moderate, farm-subsidy-loving representative—and he was out at work. I also knew that he was active in his church; I didn’t know the details or even truly understand the differences between all the Protestant denominations, but I did know that he could never stay out late on Saturday night because he had to get up early on Sunday.

  I also knew that he wasn’t the sleep-around type. He was hunting for a husband. And he had me in his sights.

  At least until our third date.

  I met Christopher after work at a romantic restaurant near Union Station. Nouveau comfort food. Mix and match silverware on the table and Billie Holiday on the stereo set the tone: offbeat but homey.

  Christopher had been having a slow week since Congress wasn’t in session, so we spent most of dinner talking about the rabbi. I had mentioned him to Christopher before, but for obvious reasons, there was a lot more to talk about this time.

  “So tomorrow I’ve got to go to his house and pick up a few things for him,” I said.

  “Isn’t there anyone else who can do it? That woman he works with?”

  “He doesn’t exactly like her.”

  “A relative?”

  “All he has are some nieces and nephews and none of them live here.”

  “So you’re like his personal assistant now?”

  “I’m just helping him out.”

  “If that’s what you want to do.”

  Christopher asked about my own Jewish background, and I gave him the whole synopsis. From growing up Conservative—synagogue, bar mitzvah, planting trees in Israel—to giving it all up when I went off to school.

  “I still do a few things, mostly for my parents,” I told him: Passover seders, Hanukkah parties, going to services on the High Holidays. “But mostly I don’t miss it.”

  I didn’t tell him about the rabbi’s suggestion that I start picking up the rituals I’d left behind. He didn’t seem to want to talk about the rabbi.