Seven men from a small Jewish community in New Jersey go across the Hudson to New York on a mission, and learn—as have hundreds before them—that “returning to Judaism” in our times is no simple matter. S. T. HECHT, who here relates this episode, teaches English and economics in the East Side High School in Newark, New Jersey.
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As Chairman of the Rabbinical Committee, an honor no one else had wanted, I rose to report on my reconnoiterings in New Jersey for a rabbi (we were without one). I had been here, I had been there, I said, I had made inquiries, and I believed, I said humbly, that I had found a man for our small synagogue. I described him as a refugee, young, talented, and he seemed, I was about to say, to have enough learning for our needs. Suddenly Mr. Greenspan’s hand shot up, and with it Mr. Greenspan himself.
Now, to look at Greenspan was experience enough, but to hear him in the full flower of his eloquence was memorable. His abilities had impressed themselves on me from the first time I had encountered them at our Men’s Club meetings.
“Mr. Waxman!” he addressed me.
I appealed to the chairman, indicating that I still had the floor.
“Just one word,” Mr. Greenspan insisted. “Bluster?”
As coldly as I could I replied that I would like to conclude my remarks.
But Greenspan was subject to control neither by heat nor cold.
With his glasses off now he called back to me once more, “Bluster?”
“Who is blustering?” I demanded. “I’m giving a report.”
“Bluster tsu bluster nit?”
Suddenly I understood. Mr. Greenspan wanted to know, in his best Litvak Yiddish, if the young refugee could “blow”—on the shofar.
“He plays the piano,” I said.
“Nu! Short gut!” and he sat down with a feeling of triumph.
Triumph it was! With his marvelous eyes and that last thrust of his, “Short gut!“ he had persuaded his cronies that we young fellows were quite prepared to throw out the true, the tried, and the kosher, and drag in the golden calf of Reform Judaism. Who knows! The way things were going in our little town, with young American Jews, veterans, moving into the garden apartment house development, next we&39;d be using the saxophone instead of the shofar on Yom Kippur.
Mr. Epstein, the president of our Men’s Club (the best little bunch of pinochle players between the Hackensack and the Hudson rivers), announced the result of the vote. My young refugee was not to be invited, not even to be looked over. On the spot I offered my resignation. But to my surprise Greenspan arose. He did not think I should resign.
“You done a good job,” says he. “Only we don’t like the man. But a good job, Mr. Waxman, you certainly done.”
I failed to hear what other encomiums he was laying at my feet because my admiration for his capacity for nice distinctions led my mind off to a recent altercation I had had with my wife. It was an excellent soup I told her she had cooked; only I didn’t like it. I thought it had been wrong of her to get angry with me, and so I saw how wrong it would be of me to get angry with Greenspan.
“Try again,” he says. “Maybe next time you find something better.”
They left the chairmanship still in my hands, but I noted they enlarged the Rabbinical Committee, loading it heavily with old-timers.
So now we were seven, and it was decided that all of us drive into New York and let ourselves loose, so to speak, over the city, in search of a rabbi. We agreed to meet on Sunday at nine in the morning in front of our little synagogue. I warned them to be prompt. “Not at eleven!”
“Don’t worry,” I was assured, and as I left I saw them scraping chairs together while a hunt went up for a deck of cards.
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At Nine promptly I was there, and of. course no one else had arrived. I sat in the car keeping the radio and the heater on while I restively waited. At nine-thirty I was more than huffish, at which point David Deutch pulled up in his car, looking dapper and smiling. But I could not afford to alienate the only man on the committee, “young” (under fifty) like myself, who stood for a change from the old set-up. Together we bemoaned the backwardness of our elderly Jews who were in control of the synagogue. We wanted to renovate the place, on which not a penny had been expended in years. We wanted a young rabbi whose services we could understand, who would understand our growing children, and who would understand our own problems-second-generation Jews, most of us back from the war, and eager to embrace our religion, which before the war we had been separately fleeing in our own ways. The war and Hitler had indeed made a change.
At nine forty-five Mr. Itzkowitz and Mr. Klein drove up. They at least excused themselves for being late, in a fashion.
“Sunday morning,” said Abe Klein, with a cigar in his mouth, “is nice to sleep.”
Itzkowitz sold paper bags, boxes, twine, and other supplies to retailers. He was a tall man with a haggard look, as if someone were pursuing him. Klein, short and full-blooded to his florid cheeks, had one of those bright, beady-eyed looks and a sense of humor of a kind I found hard to relish. He owned a prosperous liquor store and called me “professor.”
“Compared to me you are a professor. Me? I’m igomus. Never went to no college like you. You wanna hear something funny? One time my teacher in school holds up a ball and drops it, and then she says to me, ‘Abie, what was that?’ I says it was a ball. ‘No, Abie. That’s gravity.’ ‘Teacher, what I seen was a ball,’ I says, and she hollers, ‘Sit down, stupid!’ So tell me, professor, was it a ball I seen or was it gravity? Gravity you don’t see. You feel it (he pronounced it ‘fill’) like fish. Get it? Gefilte fish!”
By ten-thirty Blumberg, Klepper, and Greenspan arrived. David Deutch, in the car with me, whispered, “Keep your shirt on, Waxy.”
“Is everybody here now?” Greenspan asked, sailing up toward us.
“Is this what you call nine o&39;clock?” I asked bitterly.
“So is no use for getting mad, Mr. Wax-man.”
“I’ve been here since nine!”
“So have a cigar,” he says, looking at me through his glasses. “Is an honor to serve with you on the same committee.”
Who could be angry with such a man? I knew that he held me in respect because I had once run into Mrs. Greenspan on Main Street. The broad hello she gave me and her smile set me wondering what she could be wanting.
“Mine husband has a cross on you,” she began.
“A cross?” I asked bewildered, wondering what new sort of hex she had in mind.
“Yes. A cross. He likes you.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “A crush!” and once again I felt helpless among the Litvaks.
Our four cars were lined up before the synagogue.
“Is no use going mit four cars,” Greenspan suggested.
“Why not?” said Abe Klein. “It would make a better impression.”
“If we’ll make an impression they’ll ask for more money for the rabbi,” Itzkowitz said, laughing.
So we decided to use only two cars although Abe said that if we used four we could spread over the city easier. But just then Miss Brandt, our volunteer Sunday school teacher (poor thing, nehhich, thirty-one already and no feller in sight-and so-o educated!) appeared in her short fur coat looking very cold. She tried the door of the synagogue and it was locked.
“The children will be here soon,” she said. “Where’s Gittleson?”
Gittleson was our sexton and he had the key.
So instead of starting out for New York we first had to find out why Mr. Gittleson wasn’t on the job. None of us quite knew where he lived. I volunteered to find him, and with Deutch in my car we went looking for the shammes and found him, after much wandering and inquiry, living in a decrepit house, on the second floor. Mrs. Gittleson answered to our knock, an old woman, who when she heard who we were exclaimed, “Hot zich ubergeshlofen!“ (“he overslept”), and pushed the key at us through the partly opened door.
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On Our way back to the shul I said, “Do you think, David, that we’ll ever clean this mess up?”
But David was more hopeful than I.
“Wait till all the boys come back,” he said. “We’ll take the place right over from &39;em.”
But all I could think of was my father’s kleisel on Ridge Street in New York’s Lower East Side. It was on the upper floor of a rear house, the lower occupied by a tinsmith. I recall that on the Sabbath, while we prayed we had the harmonious tinsmith’s hammering coming up from below, and while I recited the Shmone Esra silently, as did everyone else, clang, clang, clang, pounded the man below us. So here, in East Reedville, New Jersey, after all my wanderings and my flight from the shul, I had come back to the same thing again, even to the clanging and honking from the gas station, the trucks, the cars. What a dunce I had been in my haste to get settled again after the war, to grab up a house in Reedville without inquiring about the synagogue. It was only after I had been in for a few months, my house bought, that I discovered that across the tracks, in East Reedville, there was a shul after all. As I drove back to it now, the key in my pocket, I kept recalling how shocked I felt seeing it the first time, jammed in between a gas station and a cleaning store. You’ve traveled the long way home, I had said to myself, looking at it, but not altogether in despair because the memories of my father’s kleisel were not unhappy ones. I would go in, I said, and introduce myself. Perhaps it was destined to be so; that thought of destiny being something newly acquired since the war. Before the war, like the rest of us, I was “the master of my fate.” I was returning to my own people, my father’s learned Jews, who knew Torah and could conduct a service. But what had I found in this wilderness, this midhar, between the Hackensack and the Hudson?
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I Delivered the key to Miss Brandt, and we got into two cars and at last were off. But we were not long on our way when Greenspan asked if Deutch and I would mind going first of all to the Yeshiva.
"What kind have they got there?” Deutch asked innocently. I saw Greenspan suppressing a smile.
“You talking like it was merchandise, Mr. Deutch.”
“He means-” I began.
“That’s right, professor. You explain.”
Klein got under my skin, but I didn’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing it. So I asked him what sort of rabbi he would like.
“Professor,” he said, taking the cigar out, “I got no use for any of &39;em.”
Greenspan, at heart very religious, asked Klein to justify himself, and I was glad to be taken out of the conversation. Greenspan was the scholar, and he, to give him credit, had once confided to me that in our neck of the woods one didn’t need much learning to pass for a Talmud chochem.
“If you’re asking, I’ll tell you,” and that round, usually cherubic face of Abe Klein’s turned a shade serious, if not angry.
“When I was a boy,” he began, “my father died. We were very poor and my mother wanted me to say kaddish for my father, but I didn&39;t know how. So she asked some guy if he would teach me and he said he would, if she paid him. I remember how she looked when he said it and I knew she could not help herself because she had no money. We were living somewhere God knows in three rooms in New York and my father had left her three kids, me the oldest. I was ten. So I told my mother I would learn by myself if she got me a book with the words in English. But I wouldn’t go near the synagogue again because of what that louse told my mother. If that’s religion, I says to myself, then I want none of it. But every night, so help me, I remember standing right in the street by a drug store with them colored globes in a window where the light was good, and with that little book my mother got for me I read the words in English, saying the kaddish for my father and then coming home to my mother and saying to her that I come from the shul and that I said it. So now, Mr. Greenspan, maybe you know why I got no use for the whole tribe of &39;em.”
“So why you coming along to find a rabbi when you got no use for one?” Greenspan asked very mildly, for we all had been moved momentarily by Abe’s story, even I, who disliked the pride he took in his ignorance.
“Strictly for the ride, Greenspan, and the professor’s company,” Klein replied, laughing at his own humor.
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But the basic question, what kind of rabbi we would get, was not settled in the car, no more than it had been at our meetings. We had received from our chairman a sort of roving commission. We were to look over the field, and like the spies Moses sent out from the wilderness of Paran to inspect the land of Canaan, so were we to bring back a report. Now I ask you. For a major project such as Moses had in view twelve men were deemed enough. But we, from the wilderness of East Reedville, only sent out seven men. Seven men charged with one directive: go to New York and look over the rabbinical situation. Don’t hire nobody. But Greenspan wanted to beguile us into first going to the Yeshiva, where they trained the Orthodox. I knew that the younger men whom Deutch and I represented on the committee would feel betrayed if we brought back recommendations for an Orthodox rabbi. At the Yeshiva none other was available.
“There’s a place in Brooklyn,” said Greenspan, and he mentioned the word “Yavneh.” Deutch and I had never heard of it.
“Is it Orthodox?” Deutch asked.
Deutch was a tall, thin fellow, with glasses, and very well dressed. He was from the garden apartment house crowd, and he warned us that if we got an Orthodox rabbi none of the young Jewish residents would join the synagogue.
“So what you want?” cried Itzkowitz. “Reform maybe? Maybe you want throw out our Prayer Book and put in Kaplan’s?”
“Who is Kaplan?” Deutch asked, more willing than I to expose his ignorance.
“Ai, ai,” groaned Greenspan, and he scratched his neck.
“Would be better maybe,” he said pensively, “I should give you young people a lesson as what goes on in the world among Jews. Never heard of Mordecai Kaplan!”
“Is better they shouldn’t hear,” cried Itzkowitz, getting very red.
“Don’t be getting excited, Benny,” Greenspan warned him.
“Why not getting excited, Meyer? Them young people don’t know from nothing and is telling us what kind of rabbi to get! You seen Kaplan’s Siddur. You seen his Haggadah. Left out the Shvoch Hamoshiml”
“Look, Benny. You got blood pressure, Minnie says. So what is the excitement? Them young people wanna learn. They don’t know.”
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When had crossed the George Washington Bridge, and we had turned into Riverside Drive when David, whose car we were in, cried, “Oy! A flat!”
He signaled our other car to stop and we all got out to examine our misfortune.
“This means,” said Abe Klein, “that God didn’t want us to come at all.”
“Since when you are God?” Greenspan asked laughing.
Deutch had stripped off his overcoat, and I, to make him feel better, followed suit.
It was a beautiful day, a snowless winter, and the river carried the sun and the sky in magnificent reflection. For a brief moment I forgot I was the chairman of the Rabbinical Committee, and I became a boy in New York again. I retraced the thirty-five years of my life, my college wanderings among the radicals, my graduation into the depression, the years in Nebraska working as an asphalt chemist for the state highway department, then back East again, glad to leave those arid, unintellectual regions, vowing never to go back there; marriage; a good job at last, then the war, and the return of my lost Jewish feelings, and here now, with this bunch—doing what? Looking for a rabbi. Was I looking for a rabbi really, or was I looking for my Jewish self once more? And what was Deutch there, with his coat off and the jack lifting up his car? What was he looking for? Klein, I knew, was looking for nothing. But Greenspan and Itzkowitz, and those others in the second car, were they looking for something or did they have it? Why wouldn’t the same thing do for us, for me? I felt drawn toward them—they were Jews—and I felt repelled by their ideas of Judaism—and yet I myself, if you had pressed me, didn’t quite know, wasn’t prepared to say what I was looking for. All I could say and feel at the moment was that Deutch and I were young American Jews and that we had lived through something Greenspan couldn’t understand. Perhaps he could. Why not talk it out with him? Talk it out among ourselves?
“Hey Waxy,” David called, and he tossed me a lug wrench.
Between the two of us we had finished in fifteen minutes, and were ready to go. “Where are we going?” I asked.
But Greenspan called attention to David’s and my own untidiness, and we saw that our hands needed washing. Abe Klein at this point suggested we drive down to Second Avenue for a good meal.
“You boys can spruce up while we eat.” Greenspan would have none of it. We had come for business, he said.
We found a restaurant on Upper Broadway.
Greenspan, the true Litvak, ordered “a gless tea mit lemon,” and I saw how things stood when the orders were in: five teas and two coffees.
“Nothing else?” asked the proprietor, indignant that we should take up so many seats, silver and napkins and glasses of water, and order so little. So we ordered something else. But to me, the five teas with lemon and two coffees were the handwriting on the wall. Those five would turn thumbs down on any proposal David and I might make.
“The Yeshiva isn’t far from here,” Greenspan hinted.
David declared emphatically that if it was for an Orthodox rabbi we were going he would not go along.
“So don’t go!” Itzkowitz, that harried-looking soul, cried rather loudly and got red in the face once more. Again he demanded to know if David and I only wanted a Reform rabbi.
“I don’t want an Orthodox rabbi,” David said, raising his voice and setting down his coffee, which was spilling.
“Why not?” Itzkowitz answered just as loud and perhaps louder.
“He don’t know what he wants,” Abe Klein threw in. “Ask the professor.”
“Please, gentlemen!” cried Greenspan, who saw that the proprietor was approaching.
We were informed that we were in a restaurant, not a meeting hall.
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Out on the sidewalk the power of democracy triumphed. They voted, teas against coffees, to set out for the Yeshiva. David said he would not go inside, but I persuaded him to come along anyway.
“We’re just looking,” I said.
“Sure. That’s right,” said Greenspan, and he led us up the few steps inside.
“Say!” exclaimed Abe Klein once he was inside, and when he saw the solid mass of people, surely over a thousand, gathered in the huge auditorium for some occasion or other, everyone in rapt attention to what the speaker had to say—when Abe saw the dignity, the order, the small-town yokel in him subsided, went into hiding. Greenspan was expansive with pride. But there was nobody there to greet us. We waited and nobody paid any attention to us. By degrees we all must have been getting smaller and smaller.
But not for long. Greenspan to the rescue!
“From what kind business is this?” he asked, collaring someone who happened to pass through. “is a Rabbinical Committee come from out of town looking for a rabbi and is nobody to talk to.”
They flung themselves into the Yiddish language and presently Greenspan came up smiling as the man went away.
“Is coming a Mr. Stein to talk to us,” he said proudly, and presently a stocky, barrel-chested man appeared wearing a skullcap.
“Mr. Waxman,” said Greenspan to me. “You speak. You the chairman.”
I introduced myself, saying that we were a committee in search of a rabbi.
“All seven of you?” he asked, a trace of amusement escaping his well-guarded manner.
He showed us into a conference room, where we all found seats at a long table with himself at the head, after which he informed us that this was not his regular work, but that he was merely taking Rabbi Beder’s place because we had come from out of town. What sort of man were we looking for? he asked. I was sure he had put the question to me, but Greenspan grabbed the torch.
“Mr. Stein,” he began.
“Rabbi Stein,” he was softly corrected with a round smile.
“Allright. Let be Rabbi Stein. Is in our community a very tough problem, so leave me explain how is. In East Reedville is a small Jewish population which is mostly merchants, also in Reedville, from across the tracks, which comes to us to shul because in Reedville, which is very goyish, is no synagogue at all. Is more than twenty-five years we built our little shul in East Reedville, and everybody work hard to do it. Mr. Itzkowitz over there, and Mr. Klepper and Mr. Blumberg, and me, we was the organizers and believe me we work hard. But not everybody is lucky enough to have such work. Is a mitzvah to build a shut. So everything goes allright, thank God, and we pay off the mortgage, we burn it and make a big party, and is even a little money in the bank when comes the war and we don’t have no rabbi and is no need for one. But now, after the war, is these young men, Mr. Waxman, the chairman from the Rabbinical Committee, and Mr. Deutch, they coming back from the war and is suddenly wanting to be Jews. Is moving in more young people which never lived before in East Reedville in a big apartment house from two hundred families, many Jewish, and now they wanting a modern up-to-date shul with a rabbi which speaks English and English-speaking services. We old-timers, Rabbi, you understand how we feel. We like our shul. True, is better shuls in existence, but ours we built is what we like. Is ours. So is a problem, Rabbi, mit these young fellows coming in and asking to be members but making trouble all the time with this and with that. Everything is no good. So is a problem how we should get a rabbi which will please everybody, which is impossible when is
young and old together in one little place.”
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Greenspan must have said many other things which I have left out, and which must have been familiar enough to Rabbi Stein, who listened with patience and apparent interest. When Greenspan finally stopped, Rabbi Stein, in a very gentle voice that surprised everyone because he looked like a man able to quarterback any varsity team, begged to be excused if he would appear to be coming to the point too bluntly. In a most perfect English he informed us how deeply he felt our troubles. We were not the only ones these days.
“But, gentlemen, I am obliged to ask you a very material question. How much is your community willing to pay for a rabbi?”
Perhaps he saw the consternation on my face. The question had not even been considered.
Now no one was ready to speak, and as chairman I felt called on to reply to Rabbi Stein. I confessed that we had not fixed on any sum. We were making an effort to find out so as to inform our membership.
Rabbi Stein asked how many members we were and I said that we had about fifty. He then asked what dues we paid, and when I told him twenty-five dollars, he looked embarrassed.
“Not much money there for a rabbi,” he said.
It required, he told us, a minimum of five to six thousand dollars a year to hire a rabbi. If he had applied a mallet to each of our skulls he could not have silenced us more efficaciously. But as though that weren’t enough, he added, “Have you a home suitable for a rabbi to live in?”
I answered we had none, feeling very small and humbled.
“That makes it even more difficult. You’ll want a married man, no doubt. A commuting rabbi is as good as no rabbi at all. It takes a rabbi in residence to—build up a community like yours, to knit the different elements together.”
“But if we haven’t six thousand?” Abe Klein suddenly exploded.
“Then you haven’t got it,” Rabbi Stein calmly replied.
“You mean we don’t get a rabbi,” Abe shot back. “We can go hang ourselves, isn’t that right?” He turned to me. “You see, professor, it’s like I told you about my saying kaddish.”
Fortunately Rabbi Stein did not understand his allusion. He inquired further into the nature of our population, its potential growth, and wound up by saying that it was next to impossible to find a good man for less money.
“What a racket!” Abe murmured as we filed out, Rabbi Stein himself seeing us to the door, speaking to us as we moved along and saying that there were many communities waiting for rabbis. “They’re asking for rabbis, regardless of cost.”
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Outdoors again Abe let go now real loud. “Six thousand dollars! What a racket!” “Rabbis is no racket,” Greenspan answered warmly, and then, “But is a lot of money. I remember we could get a rabbi for two thousand before the war, no, Meyer?”
Itzkowitz concurred and they all agreed that at these prices there was no sense in going elsewhere. We began moving toward our cars when Greenspan announced that he would go visit a cousin in the Bronx. So Itzkowitz rode home with the others and David and I went alone. I kept thinking of my father’s kleisel where they had no headaches about getting a rabbi. Every Jew there was a learned Jew, and more than one could deliver a drosh at a moment’s notice. They kept a rebbe for the children, who, I remember, was a tempestuous soul who bit his pencil to pieces while he taught us Chumesh. Each family paid him a pittance and he lived on free enterprise. (If you must know, he nearly starved to death. I once told my mother what a madman he was eating pencils, and she said, “What do you want, he’s hungry.”)
I reminisced to David about my father’s kleisel and then our conversation became serious. David was enthusiastic about the young couples in the garden apartments. “Give &39;em a young rabbi and they’ll come flocking in, but if Greenspan and Itzkowitz have their way, you won’t see one of them.”
Again he repeated his credo: They&39;d move in and take &39;em over. But when I was alone in my own car driving home I set to thinking about our problem. Greenspan had the virtue of knowing at least what he wanted. What did we, young American Jews, want in our synagogue?
My wife greeted me at the door. “What did you find?” she asked.
So maybe you can tell her.
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