Suddenly, out in the hall, I heard an infant scream, followed by a quick “shhh!” presumably from its mother. The Reb heard it, too.
“Now, that child,” he said, “reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?”
He made a fist.
“Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’
“But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”
What lesson? I asked.
He stretched open his empty fingers.
“We can take nothing with us.”
For a moment we both stared at his hand. It was trembling.
“Ach, you see this?” he said.
Yeah.
“I can’t make it stop.”
He dropped the hand to his chest. I heard a cart being wheeled down the hall. He spoke so wisely, with such passion, that for a moment I’d forgotten where we were.
“Anyhow,” he said, his voice trailing off.
I hated seeing him in that bed. I wanted him home, with the messy desk and the mismatched clothes. I forced a smile.
So, have we solved the secret of happiness?
“I believe so,” he said.
Are you going to tell me?
“Yes. Ready?”
Ready.
“Be satisfied.”
That’s it?
“Be grateful.”
That’s it?
“For what you have. For the love you receive. And for what God has given you.”
That’s it?
He looked me in the eye. Then he sighed deeply.
“That’s it.”
The End of Summer
When I left the hospital that day, I got a phone call from the Reb’s youngest daughter, Gilah. She was about my age; I had known her during our school years, and we’d kept up loosely. She was funny, warm, opinionated, and deeply loving to her father.
“So, did he tell you?” she said, glumly.
What?
“The tumor.”
What?
“It’s in his lung.”
Cancer?
“He didn’t say anything?”
I looked at the phone.
He’d never said a word.
AUTUMN
Church
In downtown Detroit, there is a church on Trumbull Avenue, across from an empty field. It is a huge, Gothic structure made of red brick and limestone, and it looks as if it blew in from another century. Pointy spires. Arched doorways. Stained glass windows, including one in which the apostle Paul asks, “What must I do to be saved?”
The building itself dates back to 1881, when the neighborhood was full of mansions and wealthy Presbyterians. They built the church to hold twelve hundred members, the largest such congregation in the Midwest. Now the mansions are gone, so are the Presbyterians, and in this poor, barren neighborhood, the church seems forgotten. The walls are decaying. The roof is crumbling. Over the years, some of the stained glass panels were stolen, and some windows have been boarded up.
I used to drive past this church on my way to Tiger Stadium, a famous baseball park a half mile down the street. I never went inside. I never saw anyone go inside.
For all I knew, the place was abandoned.
I was about to find out.
In the months since the Reb had surprised me with those words enemy schmenemy, I had been forced to rethink some of my own prejudices. The truth was, while I tried to be a charitable man, I still drew mental lines between “my” side and the “other” side—whether cultural, ethnic, or religious. I had been taught, as many of us are, that charity begins at home, and helping your own kind should come first.
But who was my “own kind”? I lived far from where I was raised. I married a woman from a different faith. I was a white man in an overwhelmingly African-American city. And while I had been lucky financially, Detroit was going broke around me. The near-depression that would soon hit the nation foretold itself in our streets. Jobs disappeared at an alarming rate. Homes were foreclosed. Buildings were abandoned. Our daily bread, the auto industry, was crumbling, and the swelling numbers of unemployed and homeless were scary.
One night I found myself at a downtown shelter, a Christian rescue mission, where I decided to spend the night and write about the experience. I waited on line for a blanket and soap. I was given a bed. I heard a minister preach about Jesus and was surprised at how many of the weary men, chins in their hands, still listened to how they could be saved.
At one point, in line for food, a man turned and asked if I was who he thought I was.
Yes, I said.
He nodded slowly.
“So…What happened to you?”
That night motivated me to create a charity for the homeless. We raised and distributed money to area shelters. We took pride in no overhead or administrative fees, and if we couldn’t see and touch where the disbursements went, we didn’t proceed. That meant many in-person visits.
And so, on a humid September afternoon, I pulled my car up to the old, decaying church on Trumbull. The pastor, I had been told, ran a small shelter there. I had come to see if it needed assistance.
A traffic signal swayed in the wind. I stepped from the car and clicked the lock button on my key. A man and a woman, both African-American, were sitting by the church wall in fold-up aluminum chairs, the cheap kind we used to take to the beach. They stared at me. The man was missing his left leg.
I’m looking for the pastor, I said.
The woman rose. She pushed through a small red door that was weakly hinged. I waited. The one-legged man, his crutches resting against the chair, smiled at me. He wore glasses and was missing most of his front teeth.
“Kinda warm today,” he said.
Yeah, I said.
I glanced at my watch. I shifted on my feet. Finally, I saw movement in the shadows.
And then.
And then out stepped a large man.
An extremely large man.
He was, I would learn, fifty years old—although his face was still boyish, with a thin, close-cropped beard—and he was tall as a basketball player, but he had to weigh more than four hundred pounds. His body seemed to unroll in layers, a broad slab of a chest cascading into a huge belly that hung like a pillow over the belt of his pants. His arms spread the sleeves of his oversized white T-shirt. His forehead was sweating, and he breathed heavily, as if he’d just climbed stairs.
If this is a Man of God, I thought, I’m the man in the moon.
“Hello,” he rasped, holding out his hand. “I’m Henry.”
From a Sermon by the Reb, 1981
“A military chaplain told me the following story:
“A soldier’s little girl, whose father was being moved to a distant post, was sitting at the airport among her family’s meager belongings.
“The girl was sleepy. She leaned against the packs and duffel bags.
“A lady came by, stopped, and patted her on the head.
“‘Poor child,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got a home.’
“The child looked up in surprise.
“But we do have a home,’ she said. ‘We just don’t have a house to put it in.’”
SEPTEMBER
What Is Rich?
The Reb was using a walker now. I heard it thumping toward me as I stood outside his front door. It was September, three years after the hospital visit. The leaves were starting to change color, and I noticed a strange car in his driveway. His muffled voice sang from inside, “I’m coming…hold on…I’m coming…”
The door opened. He smiled. He was thinner now than when I first began visiting; his arms were bonier and his face more drawn. His hair was white, and his once-tall body was bent at an angle. His fingers gripped the walker tightly.
“Say hello to my new companion,” he said, rattling the handles. “We go everywher
e together.”
He lowered his voice.
“I can’t shake him!”
I laughed.
“So. Come.”
I stepped in behind him, as I always did, and he pushed, lifted and thumped his way to the office with all his books and the file on God.
The car belonged to a home health care worker who now came to the house to aid the Reb. It was an admission that his body could betray him without warning, an admission that things could happen. The tumor in his lung was still there. But at the Reb’s advanced age—now eighty-nine—the doctors felt it was not worth the risk to remove it. Ironically, as the Reb slowed down, so did the aggressiveness of the cancer, like two tired combatants plodding toward a finish line.
Politely put, the doctors said, age would likely claim the Reb before any tumor did.
As we dragged down the hall, I realized another reason that car stood out: there was pretty much nothing new in this house since I started visiting six years earlier. The furniture hadn’t changed. No carpet had been redone. The television had not grown in size.
The Reb had never been big on stuff.
But then, he’d never had much of it.
He was born in 1917, and his parents were poor even by the day’s modest standards. Albert’s mother was a Lithuanian immigrant, and his father, a textile salesman, was always in and out of work. They lived in a cramped apartment building on Topping Avenue in the Bronx. Food was scarce. Young Albert would come home from school each day praying not to see the family’s furniture out in the street.
As the oldest of three—a sister and a brother followed him—he spent from sunrise to sunset in a religious academy called a yeshiva. He had no bicycles or fancy toys. Sometimes his mother would buy bread from the two-day-old bin, spread jam on it, and feed it to him with hot tea. He recalled that as “the most heavenly meal of my childhood.”
As the Great Depression widened, Albert had but two sets of clothes, one for weekdays, one for Sabbath. His shoes were old and cobbled, his socks were washed out nightly. On the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah—the day, in his religion, that he became a man—his father gave him a new suit. He wore it as proudly as any kid could wear anything.
A few weeks later, wearing that same suit, he and his father took a trolley car to a relative’s house, a well-to-do attorney. His father carried a cake that his mother had baked.
At the house, a teenage cousin came running up, took one look at Albert, and burst out laughing. “Al, that’s my old suit!” he squealed. “Hey, guys! Look! Al’s wearing my old suit!”
Albert was mortified. For the rest of the visit, he sat red-faced in humiliation. On the trolley ride home, he fought tears as he glared at his father, who had traded the cake for a suitcase full of clothes, an exchange the son now understood as rich relatives giving to poor ones.
Finally, when they got home, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “I don’t understand,” Albert burst out to his father. “You’re a religious man. Your cousin isn’t. You pray every day. He doesn’t. They have everything they want. And we have nothing!’”
His father nodded, then answered in Yiddish, in a slight singsong voice.
God and the decision he renders is correct.
God doesn’t punish anyone out of the blue.
God knows what he is doing.
That was the last they spoke of it.
And the last time Albert Lewis judged life by what he owned.
Now, seventy-six years later, what he owned meant so little, it was a source of comedy. He dressed like a rummage sale. He mixed plaid shirts and loud socks with pants from Haband, a low-cost clothing line that featured items like polyester jeans and eleven-pocket vests. The Reb loved those things, the more pockets the better. He would stash notes, pens, tiny flashlights, five-dollar bills, clippings, pencils.
He was like a kid when it came to possessions; price tags meant nothing, small enjoyment meant everything. High tech? He liked a clock radio playing classical music. Fancy restaurants? His culinary pleasures were graham crackers and peanut butter cookies. His idea of a great meal was pouring cereal into his oatmeal, adding a cup of raisins, and stirring it all up. He adored food shopping, but only for bargains—a leftover habit from his Depression days—and his supermarket journeys were something of legend. He would push a cart through the aisles for hours, judiciously choosing the correct merchandise. Then, at the cash register, he would dole out coupon after coupon, joking with the cashiers, proudly adding up the savings.
For years, his wife had to pick up his paychecks, or else he’d never bother. His starting salary at the temple was just a few thousand dollars a year, and after five decades of service, his compensation was embarrassing compared to other clerics. He never pushed for more. He thought it unseemly. He didn’t even own a car for the first few years of his service; a neighbor named Eddie Adelman would drive him into Philadelphia and drop him off at a subway so that he could take a class at Dropsie College.
The Reb seemed to embody a magnetic repulsion between faith and wealth. If congregants tried to give him things for free, he suggested they contribute to charity instead. He hated to fund-raise, because he never felt a clergyman should ask people for money. He once said in a sermon that the only time he ever wished he was a millionaire was when he thought about how many families he could save from financial sorrow.
What he liked was old things. Old coins. Old paintings. Even his personal prayer book was old and fraying, stuffed with clippings and held together with rubber bands.
“I have what I need,” he said, surveying his messy shelves. “Why bother chasing more?”
You’re like that Biblical quote, I said. What profits a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
“That’s Jesus.”
Oops, sorry, I said.
“Don’t apologize,” he said, smiling. “It’s still good.”
Church
As the Detroit traffic whizzed by outside, I walked through an oversized sanctuary with Pastor Henry Covington of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry. It was a spectacular old room, with massive high ceilings, a large mahogany pulpit, a towering pipe organ, and an upper balcony of pews.
It was also rotting away.
Paint peeled everywhere. The plaster was cracking. Floorboards had deteriorated, and the carpet had dips that could twist your ankle. I looked up and saw a hole in the ceiling.
A huge hole.
Maybe ten feet long.
“That’s a big problem,” Henry admitted. “Especially when it rains.”
I noticed red buckets in strategic spots to catch the water. The white plaster was stained brown by seepage. I had never seen such a hole in a religious building. It looked like the hull of a ship blown apart by a cannon shot.
We sat down. Henry’s belly hung so large in front of him, he seemed to hook his elbows over the pew for balance.
“I’m not sure why you’re here,” he said politely.
You take care of homeless people, right?
“Yes, a couple of nights a week,” Henry said.
They eat here?
“Yes, in our gym.”
And sleep here?
“Yes.”
Do they have to be Christian?
“No.”
Do you try to convert them?
“No. We offer prayers. We ask if anyone wants to give their life to Jesus, but no one is forced. Anyone can come.”
I nodded. I told him about the charity. How maybe we could help.
“Oh.” His eyebrows lifted. “Well. That would be excellent.”
I looked around.
This is a big church, I said.
“I know it,” he said, chuckling.
You have a New York accent.
“Um-hmm. Brooklyn.”
Was this your first assignment?
“Yes. When I first came, I was a deacon and a caretaker. I swept, mopped, vacuumed, cleaned the toilets.”
I thought of how the Reb, when he
first arrived at our temple, had to help clean up and lock the doors. Maybe that’s how Men of God develop humility.
“Long time ago,” Henry said, “this was a famous church. But a few years back, they sold it to our ministry. Actually, they said if you can pay the upkeep, it’s yours.”
I glanced around.
Were you always going to be a pastor?
He snorted a laugh.
“Noooo.”
What did you plan on doing when you got out of school?
“Actually, I was in prison.”
Really? I said, acting casual. What for?
“Whoo, I did a lot of things. Drugs, stealing cars. I went to prison for manslaughter. Something I wasn’t even involved in.”
And how did you get from that to this?
“Well…one night I thought I was going to be killed by some guys I stole from. So I made God a promise. If I lived to the morning, I would give myself to Him.”
He paused, as if some rusty old pain had just rumbled inside him. “That was twenty years ago,” he said.
He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. “I seen a lot in life. I know what the songwriter meant when he wrote, ‘Glory, Glory, hallelujah, since I laid my burden down.’”
Okay, I said, because I didn’t know what you say to that.
A few minutes later, we walked to the side exit. The floors were caked with grime. A stairway ran down to a small, dimly lit gymnasium, where, he told me, the homeless slept.
I was noncommittal about the charity help that day, saying I’d come back and we could talk more. To be honest, the prison thing was a red flag. I knew people could change. I also knew some people only changed locations.
Covering sports for a living—and living in Detroit—I had seen my share of bad behavior: drugs, assault, guns. I had witnessed “apologies” in crowded press conferences. I interviewed men so adept at convincing you the trouble was behind them, that I would write laudatory stories—only to see the same men back in trouble a few months later.