He smiles and puts two hands on my head. He recites a blessing. “May the Lord cause his countenance to shine upon you…”
So now I am blessed. The Lord shines on me.
Does that mean I get to do more stuff, or less?
Life of Henry
About the time that, religiously, I was becoming “a man,” Henry was becoming a criminal.
He began with stolen cars. He played lookout while his older brother jimmied the locks. He moved on to purse snatching, then shoplifting, particularly grocery stores; stealing pork chop trays and sausages, hiding them in his oversized pants and shirts.
School was a lost cause. When others his age were going to football games and proms, Henry was committing armed robbery. Young, old, white, black, didn’t matter. He waved a gun and demanded their cash, their wallets, their jewels.
The years passed. Over time, he made enemies on the streets. In the fall of 1976, a neighborhood rival tried to set him up in a murder investigation. The guy told the cops Henry was the killer. Later, he said it was someone else.
Still, when those cops came to question him, Henry, now nineteen years old with a sixth-grade education, figured he could turn the tables on his rival and collect a five-thousand-dollar reward in the process.
So instead of saying “I have no idea” or “I was nowhere near there,” he made up lies about who was where, who did what. He made up one lie after another. He put himself at the scene, but not as a participant. He thought he was being smart.
He couldn’t have been dumber. He wound up lying his way into an arrest—along with another guy—on a manslaughter charge. The other guy went to trial, was convicted, and got sent away for twenty-five years. Henry’s lawyer quickly recommended a plea deal. Seven years. Take it.
Henry was devastated. Seven years? For a crime he didn’t commit?
“What should I do?” he asked his mother.
“Seven is less than twenty-five,” she said.
He fought back tears. He took the deal in a courtroom. He was led away in handcuffs.
On the bus ride to prison, Henry cursed the fact that he was being punished unfairly. He didn’t do the math on the times he could have been jailed and wasn’t. He was angry and bitter. And he swore that life would owe him once he got out.
The Things We Lose…
It was now the summer of 2003, and we were in the kitchen. His wife, Sarah, had cut up a honeydew, and the Reb, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, red socks, and sandals—these combinations no longer startled me—held out a plate.
“Eat some,” he said.
In a bit.
“You’re not hungry?”
In a bit.
“It’s good for you.”
I ate a piece.
“You liiike?”
I rolled my eyes. He was clowning with me. I never thought I’d still be coming, three years after our visits began. When someone asks for a eulogy, you suspect the end is near.
But the Reb, I’d learned, was like a tough old tree; he bent with the storms but he would not snap. Over the years, he had beaten back Hodgkin’s disease, pneumonia, irregular heart rhythms, and a small stroke.
These days, to safeguard his now eighty-five-year-old body, he took a daily gulping of pills, including Dilantin for seizure control, and Vasotec and Toprol for his heart and his blood pressure. He had recently endured a bout with shingles. Not long before this visit, he had tumbled, fractured his rib cage, and spent a few days in the hospital, where his doctor implored him to use a cane everywhere—“For your own safety,” the doctor said. He rarely did, thinking the congregation might see him as weak.
But whenever I showed up, he was raring to go. And I was privately happy he fought his body’s decay. I did not like seeing him frail. He had always been this towering figure, a tall and upright Man of God.
Selfishly, that’s how I wanted him to stay.
Besides, I had witnessed the alternative. Eight years earlier, I’d watched an old and beloved professor of mine, Morrie Schwartz, slowly die of ALS. I visited him on Tuesdays in his home outside Boston. And every week, although his spirit shone, his body decayed.
Less than eight months from our first visit, he was dead.
I wanted Albert Lewis—who was born the same year as Morrie—to last longer. There were so many things I never got to ask my old professor. So many times I told myself, “If I only had a few more minutes…”
I looked forward to my encounters with the Reb—me sitting in the big green chair, him searching hopelessly for a letter on his desk. Some visits, I would fly straight from Detroit to Philadelphia. But mostly I came on Sunday mornings, taking a train from New York City after filming a TV show there. I arrived during church hours, so I guess this was our own little church time, if you can refer to two Jewish men talking religion as church.
My friends reacted with curiosity or disbelief.
“You go to his house like he’s a normal person?”
“Aren’t you intimidated?”
“Does he make you pray while you’re there?”
“You actually talk about his eulogy? Isn’t that morbid?”
I guess, looking back, it wasn’t the most normal thing. And after a while, I could have stopped. I certainly had enough material for an homage.
But I felt a need to keep visiting, to ensure that my words would still reflect who he was. And, okay. There was more. He had stirred up something in me that had been dormant for a long time. He was always celebrating what he called “our beautiful faith.” When others said such things, I felt uneasy, not wanting to be lumped in with any group that closely. But seeing him so—what’s the word?—joyous, I guess, at his age, was appealing. Maybe the faith didn’t mean that much to me, but it did to him, you could see how it put him at peace. I didn’t know many people at peace.
So I kept coming. We talked. We laughed. We read through his old sermons and discussed their relevance. I found I could share almost anything with Reb. He had a way of looking you in the eye and making you feel the world had stopped and you were all that was in it.
Maybe this was his gift to the job.
Or maybe it was the job’s gift to him.
Anyhow, he did a lot more listening these days. With his retirement from the senior rabbi position, the meetings and paperwork had decreased. Unlike when he first arrived, the temple ran quite well on its own now.
The truth is, he could have retired to someplace warm—Florida, Arizona. But that was never for him. He attended a retirees’ convention in Miami once and was perplexed at how many former colleagues he discovered living there.
“Why did you leave your congregations?” he asked.
They said it hurt not to be up on the pulpit or the new clerics didn’t like them hanging around.
The Reb—who often said “ego” was the biggest threat to a clergyman—held no such envy for where he’d once been. Upon retirement, he voluntarily moved out of his large office and into a smaller one. And one Sabbath morning, he left his favorite chair on the dais and took a seat beside his wife in the back row of the sanctuary. The congregation was stunned.
But like John Adams returning to the farm after the presidency, the Reb simply faded back in among the people.
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1958
“A little girl came home from school with a drawing she’d made in class. She danced into the kitchen, where her mother was preparing dinner.
“‘Mom, guess what?’ she squealed, waving the drawing.
“Her mother never looked up.
“‘What? she said, tending to the pots.
“‘Guess what?’ the child repeated, waving the drawing.
“‘What?’ the mother said, tending to the plates.
“‘Mom, you’re not listening.’
“‘Sweetie, yes I am.’
“‘Mom,’ the child said, ‘you’re not listening with your eyes.’”
Life of Henry
His first stop behind bars was Rikers I
sland, in the East River near the runways at LaGuardia Airport. It was painfully close to home, just a few miles, and it only reminded him how his stupidity had put him on the wrong side of these walls.
During his time at Rikers, Henry saw things he wished he’d never seen. He saw inmates assault and abuse other inmates, throwing blankets over the victims’ heads so they couldn’t see their attackers. One day, a guy who’d had an argument with Henry entered the room and punched Henry in the face. Two weeks later, the same man tried to stab Henry with a sharpened fork.
All this time, Henry wanted to scream his innocence, but what good would it do? Everybody screamed innocence. After a month or so, Henry was sent upstate to Elmira Correctional, a maximum security prison. He rarely ate. He barely slept. He smoked endless cigarettes. One hot night he woke up sweating, and rose to get himself a cold drink. Then the sleep faded and he saw the steel door. He dropped onto his bed and wept.
Henry asked God that night why he hadn’t died as a baby. A light flickered and caught his eye and his gaze fell on a Bible. He opened it to a page from the Book of Job, where Job curses the day of his birth.
It was the first time he ever felt the Lord talking to him.
But he didn’t listen.
JUNE
Community
Having finished the honeydew, the Reb and I moved to his office, where the boxes, papers, letters, and files were still in a state of chaos. Had he felt better, we might have gone for a walk, because he liked to walk around his neighborhood, although he admitted not knowing his neighbors so well these days.
“When I was growing up in the Bronx,” the Reb said, “everyone knew everyone. Our apartment building was like family. We watched out for one another.
“I remember once, as a boy, I was so hungry, and there was a fruit and vegetable truck parked by our building. I tried to bump against it, so an apple would fall into my hands. That way it wouldn’t feel like stealing.
“Suddenly, I heard a voice from above yelling at me in Yiddish, ‘Albert, it is forbidden!’ I jumped. I thought it was God.”
Who was it? I asked.
“A lady who lived upstairs.”
I laughed. Not quite God.
“No. But, Mitch, we were part of each other’s lives. If someone was about to slip, someone else could catch him.
“That’s the critical idea behind a congregation. We call it a Kehillah Kedoshah—a sacred community. We’re losing that now. The suburbs have changed things. Everyone has a car. Everyone has a million things scheduled. How can you look out for your neighbor? You’re lucky to get a family to sit down for a meal together.”
He shook his head. The Reb was generally a move-with-the-times guy. But I could tell he didn’t like this form of progress at all.
Still, even in retirement, the Reb had a way of stitching together his own sacred community. Day after day, he would peer through his glasses at a scribbled address book and punch telephone numbers. His home phone, a gift from his grandchildren, had giant black-and-white digits, so he could dial more easily.
“Hellooo,” he’d begin, “this is Albert Lewis calling for…”
He kept track of people’s milestones—an anniversary, a retirement—and called. He kept track of who was sick or ailing—and called. He listened patiently as people went on and on about their joys or worries.
He took particular care to call his oldest congregants, because, he said, “It makes them still feel a part of things.”
I wondered if he wasn’t talking about himself.
By contrast, I spoke to a hundred people a week, but most of the communication was through e-mail or text. I was never without a BlackBerry. My conversations could be a few words. “Call tomorrow.” Or “C U There.” I kept things short.
The Reb didn’t do short. He didn’t do e-mail. “In an e-mail, how can I tell if something is wrong?” he said. “They can write anything. I want to see them. If not, I want to hear them. If I can’t see them or hear them, how can I help them?”
He exhaled.
“Of course, in the old days…,” he said.
Then suddenly, he was singing:
“In the olllld days…I would go door to dooor…”
I remember, as a child, when the Reb came to someone’s house on our street. I remember pulling the curtain and looking out the window, maybe seeing his car parked out front. Of course, it was a different time. Doctors made house calls. Milkmen delivered to your stoop. No one had a security system.
The Reb would come to comfort a grieving family. He’d come if a child ran away or if someone got laid off. How nice would that be today if when a job was lost, a Man of God sat at the dinner table and encouraged you?
Instead, the idea seems almost archaic, if not invasive. No one wants to violate your “space.”
Do you ever make house calls anymore? I asked.
“Only if asked,” the Reb replied.
Do you ever get a call from someone who isn’t a member of your congregation?
“Certainly. In fact, two weeks ago, I got a call from the hospital. The person said, ‘A dying woman has requested a rabbi.’ So I went.
“When I got there, I saw a man sitting in a chair beside a woman who was gasping for breath. “Who are you?” he said. ‘Why are you here?’
“‘ I got a call,’ I said. ‘They told me someone is dying and wants to speak to me.’
“He got angry. ‘Take a look at her,’ he said. ‘Can she talk? I didn’t call you. Who called you?’
“I had no answer. So I let him rant. After a while, when he cooled down, he asked, ‘Are you married?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Do you love your wife?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Would you want to see her die?’ ‘Not so long as there was hope for her to live,’ I said.
“We spoke for about an hour. At the end I said, ‘Do you mind if I recite a prayer for your wife?’ He said he would appreciate that. So I did.”
And then? I asked.
“And then I left.”
I shook my head. He spent an hour talking to a stranger? I tried to remember the last time I’d done that. Or if I’d ever done that.
Did you ever find out who called you? I asked.
“Well, not officially. But, on my way out, I saw a nurse who I remembered from other visits. She was a devout Christian. When I saw her, our eyes met, and even though she didn’t say anything, I knew it was her.”
Wait. A Christian woman called for a Jewish rabbi?
“She saw a man suffering. She didn’t want him to be alone.”
She had a lot of guts.
“Yes,” he said. “And a lot of love.”
A Little More History
Albert Lewis may have reached the point where a Christian nurse would call him for help, but traversing religious prejudices had not always been so smooth. Remember when Moses referred to himself as a “stranger in a strange land”? That phrase could have hung over the door when the Reb arrived in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in 1948.
Back then, the borough was a railroad suburb, with trains running west to Philadelphia and east to the Atlantic Ocean. There were eight churches in town and just one synagogue—if you could call it that—a converted three-story Victorian house, with a Catholic church down one street and an Episcopalian church down another. While the churches had spires and brick facades, the Reb’s “temple” had a porch, a kitchen on the ground floor, bedrooms turned to classrooms, and old movie theater seats that had been installed for sanctuary use. A winding staircase ran up the middle.
The original “congregation” was maybe three dozen families, some of whom drove forty minutes to get there. They had sent a letter to the seminary desperately seeking a rabbi; if none was available, they would have to close down, because it was a struggle to continue operating. Initially, some neighborhood Christians had signed a petition to keep the synagogue from forming. The idea of a Jewish “community” was alien and threatening to them.
Once Al accepted the job, he set out to correct that
. He joined the local ministerium. He reached out to clerics of all faiths. He tried to dispel any bad assumptions or prejudices by visiting schools and churches.
Some visits were easier than others.
One time, he was sitting in a church classroom, explaining his religion to the students. A boy raised his hand with a question.
“Where are your horns?”
The Reb was stunned.
“Where are your horns? Don’t all Jews have horns?”
The Reb sighed and invited the boy to the front of the room. He removed the skullcap (kippah) that he wore on his head and asked the boy to run his hands through his hair.
“Do you feel any horns?”
The boy rubbed.
“Keep looking. Do you?”
The boy finally stopped.
“No,” he said, quietly.
“Ah.”
The boy sat down.
“Now where was I?” the Reb said.
Another time, the Reb invited an Episcopalian priest to address his congregation. The two men had become friendly, and the Reb thought it a good idea if clergymen were welcome in each other’s sanctuaries.
It was a Friday night service. After prayers were sung, the priest was introduced. He stepped to the pulpit. The congregation quieted.
“It’s a pleasure for me to be here,” he said, “and I thank the rabbi for inviting me…”
Suddenly, tears began to well in his eyes. He spoke about how good a man Albert Lewis was. Then he blurted out, in a gush of emotion, “That is why, please, you must help me get your rabbi to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.”
Dead silence.
“He’s a lovely person,” the priest lamented, “and I don’t want him to go to hell…”
More dead silence.