I got out of the car and a freezing wind smacked my cheeks. With the homeless program operating, the side street was populated with men bundled against the cold. A couple of them smoked. I noticed a slight man holding a child, but as I stepped closer I realized that, under the ski cap, it was a woman. I held the door open and she passed in front of me, the child on her shoulder.
Inside, I heard loud grinding hums, like small engines, then a screaming voice. I turned into the catwalk that overlooked the gym. The floor was covered in fold-out tables, and there were maybe eighty homeless men and women sitting around them. They wore old coats and hooded sweatshirts. A few had parkas; one wore a Detroit Lions jacket.
In the middle of the floor, Henry, in a blue sweatshirt and a heavy coat, moved between the tables, shifting his weight from one foot to the next.
“I am somebody!” he yelled.
“I am somebody!” the crowd repeated.
“I am somebody,” he yelled again.
“I am somebody,” they repeated in kind.
“Because God loves me!”
“Because God loves me!”
A few people clapped. Henry exhaled and nodded. One by one, many of the homeless stood up, came into a circle, and held hands. A prayer was recited.
Then, as if on cue, the circle broke and a line formed, leading to the kitchen and something hot to eat.
I tugged on my coat. It felt unusually cold.
“Evenin’, Mister Mitch.”
I looked over and saw Cass, the one-legged church elder, sitting on the catwalk, holding a clipboard. The way he greeted me with that lilt in his voice—“Evenin’, Mister Mitch”—I half-expected him to tip his cap. I had learned that he’d lost the leg a few years ago, to complications from diabetes and heart surgery. Still, he was always so upbeat.
Hi, Cass.
“Pastor’s down there.”
Henry looked up, gave a small wave. Cass watched me wave back.
“When you gonna hear my story, Mister Mitch?”
You’ve got a story, too?
“I got a story you need to hear.”
Sounds like it could take a few days.
He laughed. “Naw, naw. But you oughta hear it. It’s important.”
All right, Cass. We’ll figure something out.
That seemed to appease him and, thankfully, he dropped the subject. I shivered and pulled my coat tighter.
It’s really cold in here, I said.
“They turned off the heat.”
Who?
“Gas company.”
Why?
“Why else? Didn’t pay the bill, I suppose.”
The humming noise was overwhelming. We were shouting just to be heard.
What is that? I asked.
“Blowers.”
He pointed to several machines that looked like yellow windsocks, pushing warmed air toward the homeless, who waited in line for chili and corn bread.
They really turned your heat off? I said.
“Ye-up.”
But winter’s coming.
“That’s true,” Cass said, looking down at the crowd. “Be a lot more people in here soon.”
Thirty minutes later, up in his office, Henry and I sat huddled by a space heater. Someone came in and offered us a paper plate with corn bread.
What happened? I asked.
Henry sighed. “Turns out we owe thirty-seven thousand dollars to the gas company.”
What?
“I knew we were running behind, but it was small amounts. We always managed to pay something. Then it got cold so quick this fall, and we started heating the sanctuary for services and Bible study. We didn’t realize that the hole in the roof—”
Was sucking the heat up?
“Up and out. We just kept heating it more—”
And it kept disappearing out the roof.
“Disappearing.” He nodded. “That’s the word.”
What do you do now?
“Well, we got blowers. At first, they shut off our electricity, too. But I called and begged them to leave us something.”
I couldn’t believe it. A church in the cold, in America, in the twenty-first century.
How do you explain that with your faith? I said.
“I ask Jesus that a lot,” Henry said. “I say, ‘Jesus, is there something going on with us?” Is it like the book of Deuteronomy, the twenty-eighth chapter, “You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country’ for living in disobedience?”
And what does Jesus answer you?
“I’m still praying. I say, ‘God, we need to see you.’”
He sighed.
“That’s why that tarp you helped with was so important, Mitch. Our people needed a glimmer of hope. Last week it rained and water gushed in the sanctuary; this week it rained, and it didn’t. To them, that’s a sign.”
I squirmed. I didn’t want to be part of a sign. Not in a church. It was just a tarp. A sheet of blue plastic.
Can I ask you something? I said.
“Sure.”
When you were selling drugs, how much money did you have?
He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “Man. Do you know, in one stretch, over a year and a half, I brought in about a half a million dollars?”
And now your gas gets shut off?
“Yeah,” he said, softly. “Now the gas gets shut off.”
I didn’t ask if he missed those days. Looking back, it was cruel enough to have asked the first question.
Later, when the plates had been cleared and the tables folded, Cass called names off the clipboard—“Everett!…DeMarcus!”—and one by one, the homeless men stepped up and took a thin vinyl mattress and a single wool blanket. Side by side, a few feet from one another, they set up for the night. Some carried plastic trash bags with their possessions; others had only the clothes they were wearing. It was bone-cold, and Cass’s voice echoed off the gym ceiling. The men were mostly silent, as if this were the moment when it really sank in: no home, no bed, no “good night” from a wife or a child. The blowers roared.
An hour later, Cass, his work finished, lifted himself on his crutches and hobbled to the vestibule. The lights in the gym were dimmed. The men were down for the night.
“Remember, next time, I tell you my story,” Cass said.
Okay, sure, Cass, I said. My hands were dug into my pockets, and my arms and torso were shivering. I couldn’t imagine how these men slept in this cold, except that the alternative was on a rooftop or in an abandoned car.
I was about to go when I realized I had left a notepad up in Henry’s office. I climbed the stairs, but the door was locked. I came back down.
On my way out, I took one last peek into the gym. I heard the steady hum of the blowers and saw the shadowy bumps under blankets, some lying still, some tossing slightly. It’s hard to express what hit me then, except the thought that every one of those bumps was a man, every man once a child, every child once held by his mother, and now this: a cold gym floor at the bottom of the world.
I wondered how—even if we had been disobedient—this wouldn’t break God’s heart.
My eye caught a flicker of movement across the way. A large, lonely figure sat in the darkness. Pastor Henry would remain there for several more hours, watching over the homeless like a sentinel, until the overnight guy arrived. Then he would bundle up, go out the side entrance, and walk home.
I had a sudden urge to get to my own warm bed. I pushed through the door and blinked, because it had started to snow.
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.
ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON
The End of Autumn
“Something happened.”
It
was the Reb’s daughter, Gilah, who had called me on my cell phone, something she was unlikely to do unless there was trouble. The Reb, she said, had suffered a setback, maybe a stroke, maybe a heart attack. His balance was off. He was falling to the right. He couldn’t remember names. His speech was confused.
He had gone to the hospital. He’d been there a few days. They were discussing “options.”
Is he going to be…? I asked.
“We just don’t know,” she said.
I hung up and called the airlines.
It was Sunday morning when I arrived at the house. Sarah greeted me. She pointed to the Reb, released from the hospital and now sitting in a recliner near the back of the den.
“All right, just so you know,” she said, her voice lowered, “he’s not so…”
I nodded.
“Al?” she announced. “You have a visitor.”
She said it loudly and slowly enough that I could tell things had changed. I approached the Reb, and he turned his head. He lifted his chin slightly, pushed up a small smile, and raised one hand, but barely above his chest.
“Ahh,” he expelled.
He was tucked under a blanket. He wore a flannel shirt. A whistle of some sort was around his neck.
I leaned over him. I brushed his cheek with mine.
“Ehh…mmm…Mitch,” he whispered.
How are you doing? It was a stupid question.
“It’s not…,” he began. Then he stopped.
It’s not…?
He grimaced.
It’s not the best day of your life? I said. A lame attempt at humor.
He tried to smile.
“No,” he said. “I mean to…this…”
This?
“Where…see…ah…”
I swallowed hard. I felt my eyes tearing up.
The Reb was sitting in the chair.
But the man I knew was gone.
What do you do when you lose a loved one too quickly? When you have no time to prepare before, suddenly, that soul is gone?
Ironically, the man who could best answer that was sitting in front of me.
Because the worst loss you can suffer had already happened to him.
It was 1953, just a few years into his job at the temple. He and Sarah had a growing family: their son, Shalom, who was now five, and their four-year-old twin girls, Orah and Rinah. The first name means light. The second means joy.
In a single night, joy was lost.
Little Rinah, a buoyant child with curly auburn hair, was having trouble breathing. Lying in her bed, she was gasping and wheezing. Sarah heard the noise from her bedroom, went to check, and came running back. “Al,” she said, hurriedly, “we have to take her to the hospital.”
As they drove in the darkness, their little girl struggled terribly. Her airways swelled and tightened in her chest. Her lips were turning blue. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Reb pressed the accelerator.
They rushed into the emergency room of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The doctors hurried the child into a room. Then came the wait. They stood alone. What could they do? What can anyone do?
In the silent hallway, Albert and Sarah prayed for their child to live.
Hours later, she was dead.
It was a severe asthma attack, the first and last of Rinah’s life. Today, most likely, she would have survived. With an inhaler, with instructions, it might not even have been a major incident.
But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words—We couldn’t save her—told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn’t save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?
The next few days were a blur. There was a funeral, a small coffin. At the grave site, the Reb said Kaddish, a prayer he had led for so many others, a prayer which never mentions death, yet is recited on the anniversary of a death every year thereafter.
“May God’s great name be glorified and sanctified
throughout the world which He has created…”
A small shovel of dirt was tossed on the grave.
Rinah was buried.
The Reb was thirty-six years old.
“I cursed God,” he’d admitted when we’d spoken about it. “I asked Him over and over, ‘Why her? What did this little girl do? She was four years old. She didn’t hurt a soul.’”
Did you get an answer?
“I still have no answer.”
Did that make you angry?
“For a while, furious.”
Did you feel guilty cursing God—you, of all people?
“No,” he said. “Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.”
He paused.
“And that is how I began to heal.”
The night the Reb returned to the pulpit, the temple was packed. Some came out of condolence. Some, no doubt, out of curiosity. But privately, most wondered the same thing: “Now that it’s happened to you, what do you have to say?”
The Reb knew this. It was partly why he came back so quickly, the first Friday after the mandatory thirty days of mourning.
And when he rose to his lectern, and when the congregation quieted, he spoke the only way he knew how—from the heart. He admitted that, yes, he had been angry at the Lord. That he’d howled in anguish, that he’d screamed for an answer. That there was nothing in being a Man of God that insulated him from the tears and misery of never being able to hold his little girl again.
And yet, he noted, the very rituals of mourning that he cursed having to do—the prayers, the torn clothing, not shaving, covering the mirrors—had helped him keep a grip on who he was, when he might have otherwise washed away.
“That which I have had to say to others, I must say now to myself,” he admitted, and in so doing, his faith was being tested with the truest test there is: to drink his own elixir, to heal his own broken heart.
He told them how the words of the Kaddish made him think, “I am part of something here; one day my children will say this very prayer for me just as I am saying it for my daughter.”
His faith soothed him, and while it could not save little Rinah from death, it could make her death more bearable, by reminding him that we are all frail parts of something powerful. His family, he said, had been blessed to have the child on earth, even for a few short years. He would see her again one day. He believed that. And it gave him comfort.
When he finished, nearly everyone was crying.
“Years later,” he told me, “whenever I would go to someone’s home who had lost a family member—a young one, particularly—I would try to be of comfort by remembering what comforted me. Sometimes we would sit quietly. Just sit and maybe hold a hand. Let them talk. Let them cry. And after a while, I could see they felt better.
“And when I’d get outside, I would go like this—”
He touched a finger to his tongue and pointed skyward.
“Chalk one up for you, Rinah,” he said, smiling. Now, in the back of his house, I was holding the Reb’s hand, as he had done for others. I tried to smile. He blinked from behind his glasses.
All right, I said. I’ll come back and see you soon.
He half-nodded.
“You…okay…yeah…,” he whispered.
There was little else to do. He was no longer able to speak a full sentence. And with each of my poor attempts at conversation, I felt I was only frustrating him more. He seemed to sense what was happening, and I feared the look on my face would reveal the crushing loss I felt. How was this fair? This wise and eloquent man, who a few weeks earlier had been discoursing on divinity, was now stripped of his most precious faculty; he could no longer teach, he could no longer string together beautiful sentences from that beautiful mind.
He could no longer sing.
He could only squeeze my fingers
and move his mouth open and closed.
On the plane ride home, I wrote down some sentences. The eulogy, I feared, was finally coming due.
From a Sermon by the Reb
“If you ask me, and you should, why this wonderful, beautiful child—who had so much to give—had to die, I can’t give you a rational answer. I don’t know.
“But in a commentary to the Bible, tradition tells us that Adam, our first man, was supposed to have lived longer than any man, a thousand years. He didn’t. Our sages, in quest of an answer, related the following:
“Adam begged God to let him see into the future. So the Lord said, ‘Come with me.’ He took him through the celestial chambers, where the souls that were to be born awaited their turn. Each soul was a flame. Adam saw some flames burn purely, some barely flicker.
“Then he saw a beautiful flame, clear, strong, golden orange, and healing. Adam said, ‘Oh Lord, that will be a great human being. When shall it be born?’
“The Lord replied, ‘I’m sorry, Adam, but that soul, as beautiful as it is, is destined not to be born. It has been preordained that it will commit sin and tarnish itself. I have chosen to spare it the indignity of being besmirched.’
“Adam pleaded, ‘But Lord, man must have someone to teach and guide him. Please, do not deprive my children.’
“The Lord gently answered, ‘The decision has been made. I have no years left to allocate to him.’
“Then Adam boldly said, ‘Lord, what if I am willing to bestow on that soul some of the years of my life?’
“And God answered Adam, saying, ‘If that is your wish, that I will grant.’
“Adam, we are told, died not at 1,000, but at 930 years. And eons later, there was a child born in the town of Bethlehem. He became a ruler over Israel and a sweet singer of songs. After leading his people and inspiring them, he died. And the Bible concludes: ‘Behold, David the King was buried after having lived for 70 years.’