There was, in the construction of the universe, us down here, God up there, and you in between. When God seemed too intimidating to face, we could first come to you. It was like befriending the secretary outside the boss’s office.
But where do we look for you now?
Eight years ago, you came to me after a speech I gave, and you said you had a favor to ask. The favor was this: would I speak at your funeral? I was stunned. To this day, I don’t know why me.
But once you asked, I knew two things: I could never say no. And I needed to get to know you better, not as a cleric, but as a human being. So we began to visit. In your office, in your home, an hour here, two hours there.
One week turned to a month. One month turned to a year. Eight years later, I sometimes wonder if the whole thing wasn’t some clever rabbi trick to lure me into an adult education course. You laughed and cried in our meetings; we debated and postulated big ideas and small ones. I learned that, in addition to robes, you sometimes wore sandals with black socks—not a great look—and Bermuda shorts, and plaid shirts and down vests. I learned that you were a pack rat of letters, articles, crayon drawings, and old “Temple Talk” newsletters. Some people collect cars or clothes. You never met a good idea that couldn’t be filed.
I once told you I was not like you, that I was not a man of God. You interrupted and said, “You are a man of God.” You told me I would find something to say when this day came.
But it is here, and you are gone.
And this pulpit seems as empty as a desert.
But all right, here are your basics, for any good eulogy should contain the basics. You were born in New York during the First World War, your family endured terrible poverty, and your father once rode the rails to Alaska—and never broke the laws of keeping kosher. Your grandfather and father-in-law were rabbis—you had rabbis all over your family tree—and yet you wanted to be a history teacher. You loved to teach. In time, you tried the rabbinate. And you failed. But a great Jewish scholar said two words you would later invoke many times with many of us: “try again.”
And you did. Thank God you did.
When you were ordained, the popular thing was to go west, to California. There were rich and growing synagogues there. Instead, you went two hours down the New Jersey Turnpike, to a congregation on its last legs, operating out of a converted house. You did it because, like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, you felt an obligation to stay near your family. And like Stewart’s character, you never did get away from this place. Instead, you built this temple. Some would say you carried it on your back.
Under your loving care, it grew from that converted house to a blossoming synagogue pitched between two churches—not exactly the easiest geography. But you always made the best peace. When a Catholic priest from across the street insulted one of our members, you demanded he apologize. When he did, you accepted, as his penance, a gesture. You waited until the Catholic schoolkids were in recess, playing in the schoolyard, then you and the priest strolled around the perimeter, arm in arm, showing that different faiths can indeed walk side by side, in harmony.
You stood up for us that way, you stood tall for us, you built our membership, you built our school, you built a sacred community, you built until we burst at the seams. You led marches and excursions. You made house calls. Endless house calls.
You were a clergyman of the people, never above the people, and people clamored to hear you, stuffing in for your sermons as if to miss them would be a sin in itself. I know you always hated how there was a noisy rush to the exits after you finished. But Reb, think of how many synagogues in which that happens before the sermon starts!
After rabbi-ing through six different decades, you finally stepped down from the pulpit, and instead of moving to Florida, as many do, you simply took a seat in the back row of this sanctuary. It was a humble act, but you could no more move to the back row than the soul could move to the back of the body.
This is your house, Reb. You are in the rafters, the floorboards, the walls, the lights. You are in every echo through every hallway. We hear you now. I hear you still.
How can I—how can any of us—let you go? You are woven through us, from birth to death. You educated us, married us, comforted us. You stood at our mileposts, our weddings, our funerals. You gave us courage when tragedy struck, and when we howled at God, you stirred the embers of our faith and reminded us, as a respected man once said, that the only whole heart is a broken heart.
Look at all the broken hearts here today. Look at all the faces in this sanctuary. My whole life, I had one rabbi. Your whole life, you had one congregation. How do we say good-bye to you without saying good-bye to apiece of ourselves?
Where do we look for you now?
Remember, Reb, when you told me about your childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, such a crowded, tight-knit community that when you nudged a cart, hoping an apple would fall off, a neighbor five floors up yelled out the window, “Albert, that’s forbidden.” You lived with the wagging finger of God on every fire escape.
Well, you were our finger, wagging out the window. How much good have you done simply by the bad we have not? Many of us here have moved away, taken new addresses, new jobs, new climates, but in our minds, we kept the same old rabbi. We could look out our windows and still see your face, still hear your voice on the wind.
But where do we look for you now?
In our last visits, you spoke often about dying, about what comes next. You would cock your head and sing, “Nu, Lord above, if you want to take me, maybe take me without too much paaaain.”
By the way, Reb, about the singing. What gives? Walt Whitman sang the body electric. Billie Holiday sang the blues. You sang…everything. You could sing the phone book. I would call and say how are you feeling, and you’d answer, “The old gray rabbi, ain’t what he used to be…”
I teased you about it, but I loved it, I think we all loved it, and it comes as no surprise that you were singing to a nurse last week, preparing for a bath, when the final blow took you from us. I like to think the Lord so enjoyed hearing one of his children joyous—joyous enough to sing in a hospital—that he chose that moment, you in mid-hum, to bring you to him.
So now you are with God. That I believe. You told me your biggest wish, after you died, would be that somehow you could speak to us here, inform us that you had landed, safe and sound. Even in your demise, you were looking for one more sermon.
But you knew there is a maddening yet majestic reason you cannot speak to us today, because if you could, we might not need faith. And faith is what you were all about. You were the salesman that you cited so often in a Yiddish proverb, coming back each day, knocking on the door, offering your wares with a smile, until one day, the customer gets so fed up with your persistence, he spits in your face. And you take out a handkerchief, you wipe the spit away, and you smile again and say, “It must be raining.”
There are handkerchiefs here today, Reb, but it is not because of rain. It’s because some of us can’t bear to let you go. Some of us want to apologize for all the times we said, through our actions, “Go away,” for all the times we spit in the face of our faith.
I didn’t want to eulogize you. I was afraid. I felt a congregant could never eulogize his leader. But I realize now that thousands of congregants will eulogize you today, in their car rides home, over the dinner table. A eulogy is no more than a summation of memories, and we will never forget you, because we cannot forget you, because we will miss you every day. To imagine a world without you in it is to imagine a world with a little less God in it, and yet, because God is not a diminishing resource, I cannot believe that.
Instead, I have to believe that you have melted back into His glory, your soul is like a returned favor, you are a star in his sky and a warm feeling in our hearts. We believe that you are with your forefathers, with your daughter, with your past, and at peace.
May God keep you; may he sing to you, and you to him.
&n
bsp; Where do we look for you now, Reb?
We look where you have been trying—good, sweet Man of God—to get us to look all along.
We look up.
…The Things We Leave Behind
Emptiness is not tangible, but after the Reb died, I swear I could touch it, especially on Sundays when I used to make that train trip from New York. Over time, I filled that slot closer to home, with visits to Pastor Henry and the church on Trumbull. I got to know members of his congregation. I enjoyed his sermons. And although I was comfortable, more than ever, with my own faith, Henry laughingly dubbed me “the first official Jewish member of the congregation.” I came to the homeless nights and wrote more stories about them. People were moved. Some sent money—five dollars, ten dollars. One man drove an hour down a Michigan highway, walked in, looked around, seemed to choke up, then handed over a check for a thousand dollars and left.
Henry opened a bank account for repairs. Volunteers came down to serve food. One Sunday, a large suburban church, the Northville Christian Assembly, invited Henry out to the suburbs to speak. I went to watch him. He wore a long black robe and a wireless microphone. The scripture he chose was flashed up on two giant video screens as he read along. The lighting was perfect, the ceiling solid and dry, the sound was concert quality—there was even a huge grand piano on the stage—and the audience was almost entirely white and middle-class. But Henry was Henry, and before long, he was moving around, exhorting the crowd to earn interest on their talents, as Jesus had once urged in a parable. He told them not to be afraid of coming to his church in Detroit, to use their talents there. “If you’re looking for the miracles God can do with a life,” he said, “you’re looking at one.”
When he finished, everyone stood and clapped. Henry stepped back and humbly lowered his head.
I thought about his dilapidated church downtown. And I realized that, in some ways, we all have a hole in our roof, a gap through which tears fall and bad events blow like harsh wind. We feel vulnerable; we worry about what storm will strike next.
But seeing Henry that day, being cheered by all those new faces, I believe, as the Reb once told me, that, with a little faith, people can fix things, and they truly can change, because at that moment, you could not believe otherwise.
And so, although it is cold as I write this, with snow packed atop the blue tarp on the church roof, when the weather thaws—and it always thaws—we are going to fix that hole. One day, I tell Henry. We will fix that hole. We will shake the generosity tree and raise the funds and replace the roof. We will do it because it needs to be done. We will do it because it’s the right thing to do.
And we will do it because of a little girl from the congregation who was born prematurely, weighing only a few pounds—the doctors said she probably wouldn’t make it—but her parents prayed and she pulled through and she is now a ball of energy with a grin that could lure the cookies out of the jar. She is at the church almost every night. She skips between the tables for the homeless and lets them rub her head playfully. She doesn’t have a lot of toys and she isn’t scheduled for countless after-school activities, but she most certainly has a community, a loving home—and a family.
Her father is a one-legged man named Cass, and her mother is a former addict named Marlene. They were married in the I Am My Brother’s Keeper church; Pastor Henry Covington did the service.
And a year later, along came their precious little girl, who now runs around as if in God’s private playground.
Her name, fittingly, is “Miracle.”
The human spirit is a thing to behold.
I often wonder why the Reb asked me for a eulogy. I wonder if it was more for me than for him. The fact is, he trumped it moments later.
Just before the cantor began the final prayer, the Reb’s grandson, Ron, popped a cassette tape into a player on the pulpit. And over the same speakers where Albert Lewis’s voice used to ring out in wisdom, it rang out once more.
“Dear friends, this is the voice of your past rabbi speaking…”
He had recorded a message to be played upon his death. He had told no one—except Teela, his shopping companion and health care worker, who delivered the tape to his family. It was brief. But in it, the Reb answered the two questions he had most been asked in his life of faith.
One was whether he believed in God. He said he did.
The other was whether there is life after death. On this he said, “My answer here, too, is yes, there is something. But friends, I’m sorry. Now that I know, I can’t even tell you.”
The whole place broke up laughing.
I didn’t forget about the file on God. I went and retrieved it months later, on my own. I took it off the shelf. When I held it, I actually trembled, because for eight years I’d seen the word “God” written on the label, and after a while you imagine some holy wind is going to swoosh out.
I looked around the empty office. My stomach ached. I wished the Reb was with me. I yanked it open.
And he was.
Because there, inside the file, were hundreds of articles, clippings, and notes for sermons, all about God, with arrows and questions and scribbling in the Reb’s handwriting. And it hit me, finally, that this was the whole point of my time with the Reb and Henry: not the conclusion, but the search, the study, the journey to belief. You can’t fit the Lord in a box. But you can gather stories, tradition, wisdom, and in time, you needn’t lower the shelf; God is already nearer to thee.
Have you ever known a man of faith? Did you run the other way? If so, stop running. Maybe sit for a minute. For a glass of ice water. For a plate of corn bread. You may find there is something beautiful to learn, and it doesn’t bite you and it doesn’t weaken you, it only proves a divine spark lies inside each of us, and that spark may one day save the world.
Back in the sanctuary, the Reb concluded his taped message by saying, “Please love one another, talk to one another, don’t let trivialities dissolve friendships…”
Then he sang a simple tune, which translated to:
“Good-bye friends, good-bye friends,
good-bye, good-bye,
see you again, see you again, good-bye.”
The congregation, one last time, joined in.
You could say it was the loudest prayer of his career.
But I always knew he’d go out with a song.
Epilogue
One last memory.
This was not long before the Reb passed away.
He was talking about heaven and suddenly, for some reason, I had a notion.
What if you only get five minutes with God?
“Five minutes?” he said.
Five minutes, I said. God is a busy God. Here’s your slice of heaven. Five minutes alone with the Lord and then, poof, on you go to whatever happens next.
“And in those five minutes?” he asked, intrigued.
In those five minutes, you can ask anything you want.
“Ah. Okay.”
He pushed back into the chair, as if consulting the air around him.
“First I would say, ‘Do me a favor, God in heaven, if you can, members of my family who need help, please show them the way on earth. Guide them a little.’”
Okay, that’s a minute.
“The next three minutes, I’d say, ‘Lord, give these to someone who is suffering and requires your love and counsel.’”
You’d give up three minutes?
“If someone truly needs it, yes.”
Okay, I said. That still leaves you a minute.
“All right. In that final minute, I would say, ‘Look, Lord, I’ve done X amount of good stuff on earth. I have tried to follow your teachings and to pass them on. I have loved my family. I’ve been part of a community. And I have been, I think, fairly good to people.
“‘So, Heavenly Father, for all this, what is my reward?”’
And what do you think God will say?
He smiled.
“He’ll say, ‘Reward? What reward? T
hat’s what you were supposed to do!’”
I laughed and he laughed, and he bounced his palms on his thighs and our noise filled the house. And I think, at that moment, we could have been anywhere, anybody, any culture, any faith—a teacher and a student exploring what life is all about and delighting in the discovery.
In the beginning, there was a question. In the end, the question gets answered. God sings, we hum along, and there are many melodies, but it’s all one song—one same, wonderful, human song.
I am in love with hope.
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK the families of Henry Covington and Albert Lewis: the wives, Sarah Lewis and Annette Covington; the Reb’s children—Shalom, Orah, and Gilah; and Pastor Henry’s children—Lakema, Kendrick, Keyshia, and Tiffany. It is never easy to read about one’s husband or father in a book, and their grace toward these pages is deeply appreciated. Additional thanks to spouses—Cindy Lewis, Shimon Lipsky, Brian Seitz—and the Reb’s many grandkids.
Others who helped make this book possible include Anthony “Cass” Castelow, Dr. Chad Audi of the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, Rabbi Steven Lindemann, Teela Singh, Eddie Adelman, Norm Trask, the staff at Temple Beth Sholom, members of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Church (some of whose names were changed), Matty and Lisa Goldberg for their dusty shelf research, and Ron Lipsky, who adored his grandfather and proved it through the tender footage he captured.
At Hyperion, my deep thanks to my always supportive editor, Leslie Wells, Ellen Archer, Will Balliett, Phil Rose, David Lott, Vincent Stanley, Kristin Kiser, Mindy Stockfield, Jessica Wiener, Marie Coolman, Maha Khalil, Sarah Rucker, SallyAnne McCartin, and Michael Rotondo.
And, as always, the wonderful team at Black Inc—David, Susan, Antonella, Annik, Joy, Leigh Ann, and Dave. Thanks also to those who gave an early read to these pages, to my family and extended family, to Rosey—and to Janine, where my thanks always begin and end.