Rebbey what? I said.
“Reb.”
Cass leaned forward, squinting, as if everything to this point had been a prelude.
“Reb come around every day with food on top of that car—on the hood, in the trunk. Vegetables. Milk. Juice. Meats. Anybody who was hungry could have some. Once he stopped that car, there’d be like forty or fifty people in a line.
“He didn’t ask for nothing. Most he’d do was, at the end, he’d say, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you.’ When you homeless, you don’t wanna hear much of that, ’cause it’s like, when you get through talking about Jesus, I gotta go back to living in this empty building, you know?
“After a while, Pastor got deliveries from these food bank organizations and he’d serve them out the side of his house in an empty field. A few of us made this grill next to his place and we’d heat the food up. People would come from blocks away, they’d bring a bowl, maybe a spoon if they got one—I seen people with plastic bags scooping up food and eating with their hands.
“And Pastor would have a little service right there against his house. Say thanks to God.”
Wait. Outside? Against his house?
“That’s what I’m saying. So pretty soon, we’re liking this guy. We see him coming, we say, ‘Here come Rebbey Reb. Hide the dope! Hide the liquor!’ And he’d give us a little money to help him unload the food trucks—turkeys, bread, juice. Me and a guy had our own unloading system: one for the church, two for us. We’d throw ours out in the bushes, then come back later and pick it up.
“Eventually, Pastor come to me and say, ‘You got enough to eat, Cass? Take what you need.’ He knew what I was doing. “I felt ashamed.”
“One night in the projects, I had just gotten high and I hear Pastor call my name. I’m embarrassed to come out. My eyes are big as saucers. He asks if I can do some landscaping around his grass the next day. And I said, sure, yeah. And he gives me ten dollars and says meet me tomorrow. When he left, all I wanted to do was run upstairs and buy more dope and get high again. But I didn’t want to spend this man’s money that way. So I ran across the street and bought lunch meat, crackers—anything so I don’t spend it on drugs.
“That night, this guy who’s staying where I’m staying, while I’m sleeping, he steals the pipes from under the sink—steals ’em for the copper, so he can sell ’em. And he takes off, and all the water starts running in. I wake up on the floor and the place is flooded. I’m washing away.
“My only clothes is all ruined now, and I go to Pastor’s house and I say, ‘Sorry, I ain’t gonna be able to work for you. I’m all soaked.’ And I’m telling him how mad I am at this guy, and he says, ‘Cass, don’t worry. Sometimes people got it worse than you do.’
“And he sends me over to the church, and he says, ‘Go upstairs, we got some bags of clothes, just pick out what you want.’ And I get some clothes—Mitch, it’s the first time I got clean underwear in I don’t know how long. Clean socks. A shirt. I go back to his place and he says, ‘Where are you gonna stay now, Cass?’
“And I say, ‘Don’t know. My place is all flooded.’ And he goes in, talks with his wife, and he comes out and says, ‘Why don’t you stay here with us?’
“Now I’m shocked. I mean, I did a little work for this man. I stole food from him. And now he’s opening his home?
“He said, ‘You wanna think about it?’ And I’m like, ‘What’s there to think about? I’m homeless.’”
Henry never told me any of this, I said.
“That’s why I’m telling you,” Cass said. “I moved in with his family that night. I stayed there almost a year. A year. He let me sleep on the couch in his main room. His family is upstairs, they got little kids, and I’m sayin’ to myself, this man don’t know me, he don’t know what I’m capable of. But he trusts me.”
He shook his head and looked away.
“That kindness saved my life.”
We sat there for a second, quiet and cold. I now knew more than I’d ever figured to know about an elder of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry.
What I still didn’t know was why.
And then Cass told me: “I see the way you watch the Pastor. You here a lot. And maybe he ain’t the way you think a pastor should be.
“But I truly believe the Lord has given me a second chance on account of this man. When I die, Jesus will stand in the gap for me and I will be heard and the Lord will say, ‘I know you.’ And I believe it’s the same for Pastor Covington.”
But Henry’s done some bad things in his life, I said.
“I know it,” Cass said. “I done ’em, too. But it’s not me against the other guy. It’s God measuring you against you.
“Maybe all you get are chances to do good, and what little bad you do ain’t much bad at all. But because God has put you in the position where you can always do good, when you do something bad—it’s like you let God down.
“And maybe people who only get chances to do bad, always around bad things, like us, when they finally make something good out of it, God’s happy.”
He smiled and those stray teeth poked into his lips. And I finally realized why he had so wanted to tell me his story.
It wasn’t about him at all.
You really called Henry “Reb”? I asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
Nothing, I said.
What is there that forgiveness cannot achieve?
VIDURA
Saying Sorry
It was now a few weeks from Christmas, and I dug my hands into my pockets as I approached the Reb’s front door. A pacemaker had been put into his chest a few weeks earlier, and while he’d come through the procedure all right, looking back, I think that was the man’s last chip. His health was like a slow leak from a balloon. He had made his ninetieth birthday—joking with his children that until ninety, he was in charge, and after that, they could do what they wanted.
Maybe reaching that milestone was enough. He barely ate anymore—a piece of toast or fruit was a meal—and if he walked up the driveway once or twice, it was major exercise. He still took rides to the temple with Teela, his Hindu health care friend. People there helped him from the car into a wheelchair, and inside he’d greet the kids in the after-school program. At the ShopRite, he used the cart like a walker, gripping it for balance. He chatted with the other shoppers. True to his Depression roots, he’d buy bread and cakes from the “fifty percent off” section. When Teela rolled her eyes, he’d say, “It’s not that I need it—it’s that I got it!”
He was a joyous man, a marvelous piece of God’s machinery, and it was no fun watching him fall apart.
In his office now, I helped him move boxes. He would try to give me books, saying it broke his heart to leave them behind. I watched him roll from pile to pile, looking and remembering, then putting the stuff down and moving to another pile.
If you could pack for heaven, this was how you’d do it, touching everything, taking nothing.
Is there anyone you need to forgive at this point? I asked him.
“I’ve forgiven them already,” he said.
Everyone?
“Yes.”
Have they forgiven you?
“I hope. I have asked.”
He looked away.
“You know, we have a tradition. When you go to a funeral, you’re supposed to stand by the coffin and ask the deceased to forgive anything you’ve ever done.”
He made a face.
“Personally, I don’t want to wait that long.”
I remember when the Reb made his most public of apologies. It was his last High Holiday sermon as the senior rabbi of the temple.
He could have used the occasion to reflect on his accomplishments. Instead he asked forgiveness from his flock. He apologized for not being able to save more marriages, for not visiting the homebound more frequently, for not easing more pain of parents who had lost a child, for not having money to help widows or families in economic ruin. He apologized to teenagers with whom he
didn’t spend enough teaching time. He apologized for no longer being able to come to workplaces for brown bag lunch discussions. He even apologized for the sin of not studying every day, as illness and commitments had stolen precious hours.
“For all these, God of forgiveness,” he concluded, “forgive me, pardon me…”
Officially, that was his final “big” sermon.
“Grant me atonement” were his last three words.
And now the Reb was urging me not to wait.
“Mitch, it does no good to be angry or carry grudges.”
He made a fist. “It churns you up inside. It does you more harm than the object of your anger.”
So let it go? I asked.
“Or don’t let it get started in the first place,” he said. “You know what I found over the years? When I had a disagreement with someone, and they came to talk to me, I always began by saying, ‘I’ve thought about it. And in some ways maybe you’re right.’
“Now, I didn’t always believe that. But it made things easier. Right from the start, they relaxed. A negotiation could take place. I took a volatile situation and, what’s the word…?”
Defused it?
“Defused it. We need to do that. Especially with family.
“You know, in our tradition, we ask forgiveness from everyone—even casual acquaintances. But with those we are closest with—wives, children, parents—we too often let things linger. Don’t wait, Mitch. It’s such a waste.”
He told me a story. A man buried his wife. At the gravesite he stood by the Reb, tears falling down his face.
“I loved her,” he whispered.
The Reb nodded.
“I mean…I really loved her.”
The man broke down.
“And…I almost told her once.”
The Reb looked at me sadly.
“Nothing haunts like the things we don’t say.”
Later that day, I asked the Reb to forgive me for anything I might have ever said or done that hurt him. He smiled and said that while he couldn’t think of anything, he would “consider all such matters addressed.”
Well, I joked, I’m glad we got that over with.
“You’re in the clear.”
Timing is everything.
“That’s right. Which is why our sages tell us to repent exactly one day before we die.”
But how do you know it’s the day before you die? I asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Exactly.”
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
EZEKIEL 36:26
The Moment of Truth
It was Christmas week in Detroit, but there seemed to be more “For Sale” signs on houses than blinking lights. Folks were not shopping much. Kids were being warned to expect less from Santa. The Depression of our age was unfolding and we sensed it; we wore it on our faces.
Down on Trumbull, Pastor Henry’s church sat cloaked in darkness—they couldn’t afford outside lighting—and unless you pulled open the side door, you might not even know the building was occupied. In all my time there, I never saw the place fully illuminated. “Dim” was pretty much the word for inside, as if the electricity were as old as the walls.
That night with Cass had shown me another way of unraveling Henry—talking to his congregants.
A fellow named Dan, for example, one of the church’s few white members, told me that, years earlier, he had been alcoholic and homeless, sleeping nights on a handball court on Detroit’s Belle Isle. He would drink a fifth of liquor and up to twelve beers a day, pass out, wake up, and start drinking again. One chilly night he came to the church, but it was closed. Henry, sitting in his car, saw Dan walking away and called him over, then asked if he needed a place to stay.
“He didn’t know me from a hill of beans,” Dan told me. “I could have been Jack the Ripper.” Eventually, Dan got sober by staying thirty straight days in the church.
Another congregant, a short, energetic woman named Shirley, recalled twenty or thirty kids sleeping at Henry’s small house on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons. He called the group the “Peace Posse.” He taught them to cook, he played games, but mostly he made them feel safe. Henry so inspired Shirley that she became a church elder.
A man named Freddie showed me the private room with the wooden bed frame that he lived in on the church’s third floor. He said Henry offered it to him when he was out on the streets. A lady named Luanne noted that Henry never charged for a funeral or a wedding. “The Lord will pay us back,” he would say.
And then there was Marlene, a handsome woman with sad, almond eyes, who told me a brutal tale of drug addiction and violence, culminating in a confrontation with the man she was living with: he yanked her and her two-year-old son out of bed, beat her, and pushed them down a flight of stairs. They landed on an old board with nails in it, and her son gashed his forehead. The man refused to let them go to a hospital. He literally held them captive while they bled.
Two days later, he finally left the house, and Marlene grabbed her son and ran—with only the clothes they were wearing. At the police station, an officer called Henry, who spoke to Marlene over the phone. He sounded so concerned and soothing that she asked the police to take her to his church, even though she’d never met him. Henry gave Marlene and her son a hot meal and a place to sleep—and she’d been coming to his ministry ever since.
I thought about how churches and synagogues usually build memberships. Some run schools. Some host social events. Some offer singles nights, lecture series, carnivals, and sign-up drives. Annual dues are part of the equation.
At I Am My Brother’s Keeper, there were no dues, no drives, no singles nights. Membership grew the old-fashioned way: a desperate need for God.
Still, none of this helped Henry with his heating problems or his bills. His Sunday services continued inside a plastic tent. The homeless nights were still noisy with hot air blowers, and the men kept their coats on when they lay down to sleep. Early winter continued its attack, and the snow piled up on the church’s front steps.
Although I tended to stay away from religious themes in my newspaper writing, I felt a need to expose these conditions to the readership of the Detroit Free Press. I did interviews with a few of the homeless, including a man who was once an excellent baseball player, but who’d lost all ten toes to frostbite after spending the night in an abandoned car.
I filed the stories, but something still nagged at me.
And so one night, just before Christmas, I went to Henry’s house. It was down the block from the church. He had mortgaged it for thirty thousand dollars, back when he arrived in Detroit sixteen years ago. It might not be worth that today.
The brick facade was old, a front gate was loose, and the empty lot where he’d once served food to the neighborhood was matted with snow, ice, and mud. The shed where they stored the food was still there, with netting to protect it from birds.
Henry sat on a small couch in his front room—where Cass once spent a year. He was suffering a head cold and he coughed several times. His place was tidy but poor, the paint was peeling, and the ceiling in the kitchen had partially collapsed. He seemed more pensive than usual. Maybe it was the holiday. His walls held photos of his children, but it was clear they weren’t getting a lot of Christmas presents this year.
In his drug dealing days, if Henry wanted a TV, customers would trade him one for dope. Jewelry? Designer clothes? He didn’t even need to leave his house.
I asked if he ever thought, when he entered the ministry, that one day he might be doing better than he was?
“No,” he said. “I think I was meant to work with the poor.”
Yeah, I joked, but you don’t have to imitate them.
He looked around at the crumbling house. He drew a deep breath.
“I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
How do you mean?
He lower
ed his eyes.
Then he said something I will never forget.
“Mitch, I am an awful person. The things I have done in my life, they can never be erased. I have broken every one of the Ten Commandments.”
Come on. Every one?
“When I was younger, in some way, yes, every one.”
Stealing? False witness? Coveting?
“Yes.”
Adultery?
“Umm-hmm.”
Murder?
“I never pulled the trigger, but I was involved enough. I could have stopped things before a life was taken. I didn’t. So I was involved in murder.”
He looked away.
“It was a cutthroat business, dog eat dog, the strong preying on the weak. In the lifestyle I was in, people were killed. It happened every day.
“I hate that person I was. I went to prison for a crime I did not do, but I did things out here that I should have gone back for. I was cowardly. I was hard. That may not be who I am now, but it’s who I was.”
He sighed. “It’s who I was.”
His chin dropped to his chest. I heard his nasal breathing, in and out.
“I deserve hell,” he whispered. “The things I’ve done, God would be justified. God is not mocked. What you sow, you reap.
“That’s why I tell my congregation, don’t put me on a pedestal. I sermonize about wanting cherries when you’re planting lemons, but I’ve planted many lemons in my life…”
His eyes were teary now.
“…and I may not have reaped all that harvest.”
I don’t understand, I said. If you think you’re going to be punished—
“Why still serve God?” He smiled weakly. “What else can I do? It’s like when everyone was turning away, and Jesus asked the apostles, ‘Will you go, too?’ And Peter said, ‘Where can I go, Lord?’