Have a Little Faith: A True Story

  Why did you get into this business?

  “This business?”

  Religion.

  “Ah.”

  Did you have a calling?

  “I wouldn’t say so, no.”

  There wasn’t a vision? A dream? God didn’t come to you in some shape or form?

  “I think you’ve been reading too many books.”

  Well. The Bible.

  He grinned. “I am not in that one.”

  I meant no disrespect. It’s just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.

  This was easy to believe with the Reb, at least when I was younger. In addition to his imposing presence and his brilliant reputation, there were his sermons. Delivered with passion, humor, roaring indignation or stirring whispers, the sermon, for Albert Lewis, was like the fastball for a star pitcher, like the aria for Pavarotti. It was the reason people came; we knew it—and deep down, I think he knew it. I’m sure there are congregations where they slip out before the sermon begins. Not ours. Wristwatches were glanced at and footsteps hurried when people thought they might be late for the Reb’s message.

  Why? I guess because he didn’t approach the sermon in a traditional way. I would later learn that, while he was trained in a formal, academic style—start at point A, move to point B, provide analysis and supporting references—after two or three tries in front of people, he gave up. They were lost. Bored. He saw it on their faces.

  So he began with the first chapter of Genesis, broke it down to the simplest of ideas and related them to everyday life. He asked questions. He took questions. And a new style was born.

  Over the years, those sermons morphed into gripping performances. He spoke with the cues of a magician, moving from one crescendo to the next, mixing in a Biblical quotation, a Sinatra song, a vaudeville joke, Yiddish expressions, even calling, on occasion, for audience participation (“Can I get a volunteer?”). Anything was fair game. There was a sermon where he pulled up a stool and read Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle. There was a sermon where he sang “Those Were the Days.” There was a sermon where he brought a squash and a piece of wood, then slammed each with a knife to show that things which grow quickly are often more easily destroyed than those which take a long time.

  He might quote Newsweek, Time, the Saturday Evening Post, a Peanuts cartoon, Shakespeare, or the TV series Matlock. He’d sing in English, in Hebrew, in Italian, or in a mock Irish accent; pop songs, folk songs, ancient songs. I learned more about the power of language from the Reb’s sermons than from any book I ever read. You could glance around the room and see how no one looked away; even when he was scolding them, they were riveted. Honestly, you exhaled when he finished, that’s how good he was.

  Which is why, given his profession, I wondered if he’d been divinely inspired. I remembered Moses and the burning bush; Elijah and the still, small voice; Balaam and the donkey; Job and the whirlwind. To preach holy words, I assumed, one must have had some revelation.

  “It doesn’t always work that way,” the Reb said.

  So what drew you in?

  “I wanted to be a teacher.”

  A religious teacher?

  “A history teacher.”

  Like in normal school?

  “Like in normal school.”

  But you went to the seminary.

  “I tried.”

  You tried?

  “The first time, I failed.”

  You’re kidding me.

  “No. The head of the seminary, Louis Finkelstein, pulled me aside and said, ‘Al, while you know much, we do not feel you have what it takes to be a good and inspiring rabbi.’”

  What did you do?

  “What could I do? I left.”

  Now, this stunned me. There were many things you could have said about Albert Lewis. But not having what it took to inspire and lead a congregation? Unthinkable. Maybe he was too gentle for the seminary leaders. Or too shy. Whatever the reason, the failure crushed him.

  He took a summer job as a camp counselor in Port Jervis, New York. One of the campers was particularly difficult. If the other kids collected in one place, this kid went someplace else. If asked to sit, he would defiantly stand.

  The kid’s name was Phineas, and Al spent most of the summer encouraging him, listening to his problems, smiling patiently. Al understood adolescent angst. He’d been a pudgy teen in a cloistered religious environment. He’d had few friends. He’d never really dated.

  So Phineas found a kindred soul in his counselor. And by the end of camp, the kid had changed.

  A few weeks later, Al got a call from Phineas’s father, inviting him to dinner. It turned out the man was Max Kadushin, a great Jewish scholar and a major force in the Conservative movement. At the table that night, he said, “Al, I can’t thank you enough. You sent back a different kid. You sent me a young man.”

  Al smiled.

  “You have a way with people—particularly children.”

  Al said thank you.

  “Have you ever thought about trying for the seminary?”

  Al almost spit out his food.

  “I did try,” he said. “I didn’t make it.”

  Max thought for a moment.

  “Try again,” he said.

  And with Kadushin’s help, Albert Lewis’s second try went better than the first. He excelled. He was ordained.

  Not long after that, he took a bus to New Jersey to interview for his first and only pulpit position, the one he still held more than fifty years later.

  No angel? I asked. No burning bush?

  “A bus,” the Reb said, grinning.

  I scribbled a note. The most inspirational man I knew only reached his potential by helping a child reach his.

  As I left his office, I tucked away the yellow pad. From our meetings I now knew he believed in God, he spoke to God, he became a Man of God sort of by accident, and he was good with kids. It was a start.

  We walked to the lobby. I looked around at the big building I usually saw once a year.

  “It’s good to come home, yes?” the Reb said.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t my home anymore.

  Is it okay, I asked, to tell these stories, when I…you know…do the eulogy?

  He stroked his chin.

  “When that time comes,” he said, “I think you’ll know what to say.”

  Life of Henry

  When Henry was fourteen, his father died after a long illness. Henry wore a suit to the funeral home, because Willie Covington insisted all his sons have suits, even if there was no money for anything else.

  The family approached the open coffin. They stared at the body. Willie had been extremely dark-skinned, but the parlor had made him up to be an auburn shade. Henry’s oldest sister began to wail. She started wiping off the makeup, screaming, “My daddy don’t look like that!” Henry’s baby brother tried to crawl into the coffin. His mother wept.

  Henry watched quietly. He only wanted his father back.

  Before God, Jesus, or any higher power, Henry had worshipped his dad, a former mattress maker from North Carolina who stood six foot five and had a chest full of gunshot scars, the details of which were never explained to his children. He was a tough man who chain-smoked and liked to drink, but when he came home at night, inebriated, he was often tender, and he’d call Henry over and say, “Do you love your daddy?”

  “Yeah,” Henry would say.

  “Give your daddy a hug now. Give your daddy a kiss.”

  Willie was an enigma, a man with no real job who was a stickler for education, a hustler and loan shark who forbade stolen goods in his house. When Henry began smoking in the sixth grade, his father’s only response was: “Don’t never ask me for a cigarette.”

  But Willie loved his children, and he challenged them, quizzing them on school subjects, offering a dollar for easy questions, ten dollars for a math problem. Henry
loved to hear him sing—especially the old spirituals, like “It’s Cool Down Here by the River Jordan.”

  But soon his singing stopped. Willie hacked and coughed. He developed emphysema and tuberculosis of the brain. In the last year of his life, he was virtually bedridden. Henry cooked his meals and carried them to his room, even as his father coughed up blood and barely ate a thing.

  One night, after Henry brought him dinner, his father looked at him sadly and rasped, “Listen, son, you ever run out of cigarettes, you can have some of mine.”

  A few weeks later, he was dead.

  At the funeral, Henry heard a Baptist preacher say something about the soul and Jesus, but not much got through. He kept thinking his father would come back, just show up at the door one day, singing his favorite songs.

  Months passed. It didn’t happen.

  Finally, having lost his only hero, Henry, the hustler’s son, made a decision: from now on, he would take what he wanted.

  MAY

  Ritual

  Spring was nearly over, summer on its way, and the late morning sun burned hot through the kitchen window. It was our third visit. Before we began, the Reb poured me a glass of water.

  “Ice?” he asked.

  I’m okay, I said.

  “He’s okay,” he sang. “No ice…it would be nice…but no ice…”

  As we walked back to his office, we passed a large photo of him as a younger man, standing on a mountain in bright sunlight. His body was tall and strong, his hair black and combed back—the way I remembered him from childhood.

  Nice photo, I said.

  “That was a proud moment.”

  Where was it?

  “Mount Sinai.”

  Where the Ten Commandments were given?

  “Exactly.”

  When was this?

  “In the 1960s. I was traveling with a group of scholars. A Christian man and I climbed up. He took that picture.”

  How long did it take?

  “Hours. We climbed all night and arrived at sunrise.”

  I glanced at his aging body. Such a trip would be impossible now. His narrow shoulders were hunched over, and the skin at his wrists was wrinkled and loose.

  As he walked on to his office, I noticed a small detail in the photo. Along with his white shirt and a prayer shawl, the Reb was wearing the traditional tefillin, small boxes containing Biblical verses, which observant Jews strap around their heads and their arms while reciting morning prayers.

  He said he climbed all night.

  Which meant he had taken them up with him.

  Such ritual was a major part of the Reb’s life. Morning prayers. Evening prayers. Eating certain foods. Denying himself others. On Sabbath, he walked to synagogue, rain or shine, not operating a car, as per Jewish law. On holidays and festivals, he took part in traditional practices, hosting a Seder meal on Passover, or casting bread into a stream on Rosh Hashanah, symbolic of casting away your sins.

  Like Catholicism, with its vespers, sacraments, and communions—or Islam, with its five-times-daily salah, clean clothes, and prayer mats—Judaism had enough rituals to keep you busy all day, all week, and all year.

  I remember, as a kid, the Reb admonishing the congregation—gently, and sometimes not so gently—for letting rituals lapse or disappear, for eschewing traditional acts like lighting candles or saying blessings, even neglecting the Kaddish prayer for loved ones who had died.

  But even as he pleaded for a tighter grip, year after year, his members opened their fingers and let a little more go. They skipped a prayer here. They skipped a holiday there. They intermarried—as I did.

  I wondered, now that his days were dwindling, how important ritual still was.

  “Vital,” he said.

  But why? Deep inside, you know your convictions.

  “Mitch,” he said, “faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.”

  Now, the Reb didn’t merely practice his rituals; he carved his daily life from them. If he wasn’t praying, he was studying—a major part of his faith—or doing charity or visiting the sick. It made for a more predictable life, perhaps even a dull one by American standards. After all, we are conditioned to reject the “same old routine.” We’re supposed to keep things new, fresh. The Reb wasn’t into fresh. He never took up fads. He didn’t do Pilates, he didn’t golf (someone gave him a single club once; it sat in his garage for years).

  But there was something calming about his pious life, the way he puttered from one custom to the next; the way certain hours held certain acts; the way every autumn he built a sukkah hut with its roof open to the stars; the way every week he embraced the Sabbath, breaking the world down to six days and one day, six days and one.

  “My grandparents did these things. My parents, too. If I take the pattern and throw it out, what does that say about their lives? Or mine? From generation to generation, these rituals are how we remain…”

  He rolled his hand, searching for the word.

  Connected? I said.

  “Ah.” He smiled at me. “Connected.”

  The End of Spring

  As we walked to the front door that day, I felt a wave of guilt. I’d once had rituals; I’d ignored them for decades. These days, I didn’t do a single thing that tied me to my faith. Oh, I had an exciting life. Traveled a lot. Met interesting people. But my daily routines—work out, scan the news, check e-mail—were self-serving, not roped to tradition. To what was I connected? A favorite TV show? The morning paper? My work demanded flexibility. Ritual was the opposite.

  Besides, I saw religious customs as sweet but outdated, like typing with carbon paper. To be honest, the closest thing I had to a religious routine was visiting the Reb. I had now seen him at work and at home, in laughter and in repose. I had seen him in Bermuda shorts.

  I had also seen him more this one spring than I normally would in three years. I still didn’t get it. I was one of those disappointing congregants. Why had he chosen me to be part of his death, when I had probably let him down in life?

  We reached the door.

  One more question, I said.

  “One mooore,” he sang, “at the doooor…”

  How do you not get cynical?

  He stopped.

  “There is no room for cynicism in this line of work.”

  But people are so flawed. They ignore ritual, they ignore faith—they even ignore you. Don’t you get tired of trying?

  He studied me sympathetically. Maybe he realized what I was really asking: Why me?

  “Let me answer with a story,” he said. “There’s this salesman, see? And he knocks on a door. The man who answers says, ‘I don’t need anything today.’

  “The next day, the salesman returns.

  “‘Stay away,’ he is told.

  “The next day, the salesman is back.

  “The man yells, ‘You again! I warned you!’ He gets so angry, he spits in the salesman’s face.

  “The salesman smiles, wipes the spit with a handkerchief, then looks to the sky and says, ‘Must be raining.’

  “Mitch, that’s what faith is. If they spit in your face, you say it must be raining. But you still come back tomorrow.”

  He smiled.

  “So, you’ll come back, too? Maybe not tomorrow…”

  He opened his arms as if expecting an incoming package. And for the first time in my life, I did the opposite of running away.

  I gave him a hug.

  It was a fast one. Clumsy. But I felt the sharp bones in his back and his whiskered cheek against mine. And in that brief embrace, it was as if a larger-than-life Man of God was shrinking down to human size.

  I think, looking back, that was the moment the eulogy request turned into something else.

  SUMMER

  IT IS 1971…

  I am thirteen. This is the big day. I lean over the holy scrolls, holding a silver pointer; its tip is the shape of a hand. I follow the ancient text, chanting the words. My teenage voice
squeaks.

  In the front row sit my parents, siblings, and grandparents. Behind them, more family, friends, the kids from school.

  Just look down, I tell myself. Don’t mess up.

  I go on for a while. I do pretty well. When I am finished, the group of men around me shake my wet hand. They mumble, “Yishar co-ach”—congratulations—and then I turn and take the long walk across the pulpit to where the Reb, in his robe, stands waiting.

  He looks down through his glasses. He motions for me to sit. The chair seems huge. I spot his prayer book, which has clippings stuffed in the pages. I feel like I am inside his private lair. He sings loudly and I sing, too—also loudly, so he won’t think I am slacking—but my bones are actually trembling. I am finished with the obligatory part of my Bar Mitzvah, but nothing is as unsettling as what is about to come: the conversation with the rabbi. You cannot study for this. It is free-form. Worst of all, you have to stand right next to him. No running from God.

  When the prayer finishes, I rise. I barely reach above the lectern, and some congregants have to shift to see me.

  “So, how are you feeling, young man?” the Reb says. “Relieved?”

  Yeah, I mumble.

  I hear muffled laughter from the crowd.

  “When we spoke a few weeks ago, I asked you what you thought about your parents. Do you remember?”

  Sort of, I say.

  More laughter.

  “I asked if you felt they were perfect, or if they needed improvement. And do you remember what you said?”

  I freeze.

  “You said they weren’t perfect, but…”

  He nods at me. Go ahead. Speak.

  But they don’t need improvement? I say.

  “But they don’t need improvement,” he says. “This is very insightful. Do you know why?”

  No, I say.

  More laughter.

  “Because it means you are willing to accept people as they are. Nobody is perfect. Not even Mom and Dad. That’s okay.”