Have a Little Faith
A True Story
Mitch Albom
FINALLY, A BOOK FOR MY FATHER, IRA ALBOM,
IN WHOM I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED.
Contents
Author’s Note
In the Beginning…
Spring
The Great Tradition of Running Away
Meet the Reb
A Little History
Life of Henry
The File on God
The House of Peace
The Daily Grind of Faith
Ritual
The End of Spring
Summer
The Things We Lose…
Community
A Little More History
The Greatest Question of All
Why War?
Happiness
The End of Summer
Autumn
Church
What Is Rich?
Church
Old
Church
A Good Marriage
Your Faith, My Faith
The Things We Find…
Thanksgiving
The End of Autumn
Winter
Winter Solstice
Good and Evil
Life of Cass
Saying Sorry
The Moment of Truth
Heaven
Church
Goodbye
The Eulogy
…The Things We Leave Behind
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Mitch Albom
Copyright
Author’s Note
THIS STORY SPANS EIGHT YEARS. It was made possible by the cooperation of two unique men, Albert Lewis and Henry Covington—who shared their histories in great detail—as well as their families, children, and grandchildren, to whom the author expresses his eternal gratitude. All encounters and conversations are true events, although for purposes of the narrative, the time line has, on a few occasions, been squeezed, so that, for example, a discussion held in October of one year may be presented in November of the next.
Also, while this is a book about faith, the author can make no claim to being a religion expert, nor is this a how-to guide for any particular belief. Rather, it is written in hope that all faiths can find something universal in the story.
The cover was inspired by Albert Lewis’s old prayer book, held together by rubber bands.
Per the tradition of tithing, one-tenth of the author’s profits on every book sold will be donated to charity, including the church, synagogue, and homeless shelters in this story.
The author wishes to thank the readers of his previous books, and welcome new readers with much appreciation.
In the Beginning…
In the beginning, there was a question.
“Will you do my eulogy?”
I don’t understand, I said.
“My eulogy?” the old man asked again. “When I’m gone.” His eyes blinked from behind his glasses. His neatly trimmed beard was gray, and he stood slightly stooped.
Are you dying? I asked.
“Not yet,” he said, grinning.
Then why—
“Because I think you would be a good choice. And I think, when the time comes, you will know what to say.”
Picture the most pious man you know. Your priest. Your pastor. Your rabbi. Your imam. Now picture him tapping you on the shoulder and asking you to say good-bye to the world on his behalf.
Picture the man who sends people off to heaven, asking you for his send-off to heaven.
“So?” he said. “Would you be comfortable with that?”
In the beginning, there was another question.
“Will you save me, Jesus?”
This man was holding a shotgun. He hid behind trash cans in front of a Brooklyn row house. It was late at night. His wife and baby daughter were crying. He watched for cars coming down his block, certain the next set of headlights would be his killers.
“Will you save me, Jesus?” he asked, trembling. “If I promise to give myself to you, will you save me tonight?”
Picture the most pious man you know. Your priest. Your pastor. Your rabbi. Your imam. Now picture him in dirty clothes, a shotgun in his hand, begging for salvation from behind a set of trash cans.
Picture the man who sends people off to heaven, begging not to be sent to hell.
“Please, Lord,” he whispered. “If I promise…”
This is a story about believing in something and the two very different men who taught me how. It took a long time to write. It took me to churches and synagogues, to the suburbs and the city, to the “us” versus “them” that divides faith around the world.
And finally, it took me home, to a sanctuary filled with people, to a casket made of pine, to a pulpit that was empty.
In the beginning, there was a question.
It became a last request.
“Will you do my eulogy?”
And, as is often the case with faith, I thought I was being asked a favor, when in fact I was being given one.
SPRING
IT IS 1965…
…and my father drops me off at Saturday morning services.
“You should go,” he tells me.
I am seven, too young to ask the obvious question: why should I go and he shouldn’t? Instead I do as I am told, entering the temple, walking down a long corridor, and turning toward the small sanctuary, where the children’s services are held.
I wear a white short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie. I pull open the wooden door. Toddlers are on the floor. Third-grade boys are yawning. Sixth-grade girls wear black cotton leotards, slouching and whispering.
I grab a prayer book. The seats in back are taken so I choose one up front. Suddenly the door swings open and the room goes silent.
The Man of God steps in.
He stalks like a giant. His hair is thick and dark. He wears a long robe, and when he speaks, his waving arms move the robe around like a sheet flipping in the wind.
He tells a Bible story. He asks us questions. He strides across the stage. He draws close to where I am sitting. I feel a flush of heat. I ask God to make me invisible. Please, God, please.
It is my most fervent prayer of the day.
MARCH
The Great Tradition of Running Away
Adam hid in the Garden of Eden. Moses tried to substitute his brother. Jonah jumped a boat and was swallowed by a whale.
Man likes to run from God. It’s a tradition. So perhaps I was only following tradition when, as soon as I could walk, I started running from Albert Lewis. He was not God, of course, but in my eyes, he was the next closest thing, a holy man, a man of the cloth, the big boss, the head rabbi. My parents joined his congregation when I was an infant. I sat on my mother’s lap as he delivered his sermons.
And yet, once I realized who he was—a Man of God—I ran. If I saw him coming down the hallway, I ran. If I had to pass his study, I ran. Even as a teenager, if I spotted him approaching, I ducked down a corridor. He was tall, six foot one, and I felt tiny in his presence. When he looked down through his black-rimmed glasses, I was certain he could view all my sins and shortcomings.
So I ran.
I ran until he couldn’t see me anymore.
I thought about that as I drove to his house, on a morning after a rainstorm in the spring of 2000. A few weeks earlier, Albert Lewis, then eighty-two years old, had made that strange request of me, in a hallway after a speech I had given.
“Will you do my eulogy?”
It stopped me in my tracks. I had never been asked this before. Not by anyone—let alone a religious leader. There were people mingling al
l around, but he kept smiling as if it were the most normal question in the world, until I blurted out something about needing time to think about it.
After a few days, I called him up.
Okay, I said, I would honor his request. I would speak at his funeral—but only if he let me get to know him as a man, so I could speak of him as such. I figured this would require a few in-person meetings.
“Agreed,” he said.
I turned down his street.
To that point, all I really knew of Albert Lewis was what an audience member knows of a performer: his delivery, his stage presence, the way he held the congregation rapt with his commanding voice and flailing arms. Sure, we had once been closer. He had taught me as a child, and he’d officiated at family functions—my sister’s wedding, my grandmother’s funeral. But I hadn’t really been around him in twenty-five years. Besides, how much do you know about your religious minister? You listen to him. You respect him. But as a man? Mine was as distant as a king. I had never eaten at his home. I had never gone out with him socially. If he had human flaws, I didn’t see them. Personal habits? I knew of none.
Well, that’s not true. I knew of one. I knew he liked to sing. Everyone in our congregation knew this. During sermons, any sentence could become an aria. During conversation, he might belt out the nouns or the verbs. He was like his own little Broadway show.
In his later years, if you asked how he was doing, his eyes would crinkle and he’d raise a conductor’s finger and croon:
“The old gray rabbi,
ain’t what he used to be,
ain’t what he used to be…”
I pushed on the brakes. What was I doing? I was the wrong man for this job. I was no longer religious. I didn’t live in this state. He was the one who spoke at funerals, not me. Who does a eulogy for the man who does eulogies? I wanted to spin the wheel around, make up some excuse.
Man likes to run from God.
But I was headed in the other direction.
Meet the Reb
I walked up the driveway and stepped on the mat, which was rimmed with crumbled leaves and grass. I rang the doorbell. Even that felt strange. I suppose I didn’t think a holy man had a doorbell. Looking back, I don’t know what I expected. It was a house. Where else would he live? A cave?
But if I didn’t expect a doorbell, I surely wasn’t ready for the man who answered it. He wore sandals with socks, long Bermuda shorts, and an untucked, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. I had never seen the Reb in anything but a suit or a long robe. That’s what we called him as teenagers. “The Reb.” Kind of like a superhero. The Rock. The Hulk. The Reb. As I mentioned, back then he was an imposing force, tall, serious, broad cheeks, thick eyebrows, a full head of dark hair.
“Hellooo, young man,” he said cheerily.
Uh, hi, I said, trying not to stare.
He seemed more slender and fragile up close. His upper arms, exposed to me for the first time, were thin and fleshy and dotted with age marks. His thick glasses sat on his nose, and he blinked several times, as if focusing, like an old scholar interrupted while getting dressed.
“Ennnnter,” he sang. “Enn-trez!”
His hair, parted on the side, was between gray and snowy white, and his salt-and-pepper Vandyke beard was closely trimmed, although I noticed a few spots he had missed shaving. He shuffled down the hall, me in tow behind, looking at his bony legs and taking small steps so as not to bump up on him.
How can I describe how I felt that day? I have since discovered, in the book of Isaiah, a passage in which God states:
“My thoughts are not your thoughts
Neither are your ways my ways
For as the heavens are higher than the earth
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
That was how I expected to feel—lower, unworthy. This was one of God’s messengers. I should be looking up, right?
Instead, I baby-stepped behind an old man in socks and sandals. And all I could think of was how goofy he looked.
A Little History
I should tell you why I shunned the eulogy task, where I was, religiously, when this whole story began. Nowhere, to be honest. You know how Christianity speaks of fallen angels? Or how the Koran mentions the spirit Iblis, exiled from heaven for refusing to bow to God’s creation?
Here on earth, falling is less dramatic. You drift. You wander off.
I know. I did it.
Oh, I could have been pious. I had a million chances. They began when I was a boy in a middle-class New Jersey suburb and was enrolled, by my parents, in the Reb’s religious school three days a week. I could have embraced that. Instead, I went like a dragged prisoner. Inside the station wagon (with the few other Jewish kids in our neighborhood) I stared longingly out the window as we drove away, watching my Christian friends play kickball in the street. Why me? I thought. During classes, the teachers gave out pretzel sticks, and I would dreamily suck the salt off until the bell rang, setting me free.
By age thirteen, again at my parents’ urging, I had not only gone through the requisite training to be bar mitzvahed, I had actually learned to chant from the Torah, the holy scrolls that contain the first five books of the Old Testament. I even became a regular reader on Saturday mornings. Wearing my only suit (navy blue, of course), I would stand on a wooden box in order to be tall enough to look over the parchment. The Reb would be a few feet away, watching as I chanted. I could have spoken with him afterward, discussed that week’s Biblical portion. I never did. I just shook his hand after services, then scrambled into my dad’s car and went home.
My high school years—once more, at my parents’ insistence—were spent mostly in a private academy, where half the day was secular learning and the other half was religious. Along with algebra and European history, I studied Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Proverbs, all in their original language. I wrote papers on arks and manna, Kabbalah, the walls of Jericho. I was even taught an ancient form of Aramaic so I could translate Talmudic commentaries, and I analyzed twelfth-century scholars like Rashi and Maimonides.
When college came, I attended Brandeis University, with a largely Jewish student body. To help pay my tuition, I ran youth groups at a temple outside of Boston.
In other words, by the time I graduated and went out into the world, I was as well versed in my religion as any secular man I knew.
And then?
And then I pretty much walked away from it.
It wasn’t revolt. It wasn’t some tragic loss of faith. It was, if I’m being honest, apathy. A lack of need. My career as a sportswriter was blossoming; work dominated my days. Saturday mornings were spent traveling to college football games, Sunday mornings to professional ones. I attended no services. Who had time? I was fine. I was healthy. I was making money. I was climbing the ladder. I didn’t need to ask God for much, and I figured, as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, God wasn’t asking much of me either. We had forged a sort of “you go your way, I’ll go mine” arrangement, at least in my mind. I followed no religious rituals. I dated girls from many faiths. I married a beautiful, dark-haired woman whose family was half-Lebanese. Every December, I bought her Christmas presents. Our friends made jokes. A Jewish kid married a Christian Arab. Good luck.
Over time, I honed a cynical edge toward overt religion. People who seemed too wild-eyed with the Holy Spirit scared me. And the pious hypocrisy I witnessed in politics and sports—congressmen going from mistresses to church services, football coaches breaking the rules, then kneeling for a team prayer—only made things worse. Besides, Jews in America, like devout Christians, Muslims, or sari-wearing Hindus, often bite their tongues, because there’s this nervous sense that somebody out there doesn’t like you.
So I bit mine.
In fact, the only spark I kept aglow from all those years of religious exposure was the connection to my childhood temple in New Jersey. For some reason, I never joined another. I don’t k
now why. It made no sense. I lived in Michigan—six hundred miles away.
I could have found a closer place to pray.
Instead, I clung to my old seat, and every autumn, I flew home and stood next to my father and mother during the High Holiday services. Maybe I was too stubborn to change. Maybe it wasn’t important enough to bother. But as an unexpected consequence, a certain pattern went quietly unbroken:
I had one clergyman—and only one clergyman—from the day I was born.
Albert Lewis.
And he had one congregation.
We were both lifers.
And that, I figured, was all we had in common.
Life of Henry
At the same time I was growing up in the suburbs, a boy about my age was being raised in Brooklyn. One day, he, too, would grapple with his faith. But his path was different.
As a child, he slept with rats.
Henry Covington was the second-youngest of seven kids born to his parents, Willie and Wilma Covington. They had a tiny, cramped apartment on Warren Street. Four brothers slept in one room; three sisters slept in another.