Three Rabbis

Written By Daniel Imrem

Prologue

When I was very young my family switched from an orthodox temple to a reform one, owing largely to an incident in which one of my teachers tried to convince both my sister and I that reincarnation was not only a legitimate phenomenon, but that it could result in a person being reborn as an inanimate object.

This, to my six year old brain, was roughly the equivalent of being told that god was in fact a being known as 'Xenu' and my body composed of a million tiny 'thetans.' I more or less believed her though, as I was still in that vulnerable age where I implicitly believed everything adults told me, yet even so the idea proved too much to wrap my head around immediately; I needed to test it out somewhat. I began by tapping the plastic fold-out table in front of me.

“So this table… used to be a person?” I inquired.

She nodded.

I retracted my hands from the surface as if I’d touched a hot stove. I stood up from my chair, pointed to it, and asked:

“This chair too? A person?”

She smiled and nodded, knowingly.

I leapt back from my seat. Then, in horror, I realized what I’d just done.

“And the carpet too? The floor?”

She nodded again. Yes, yes.

I pulled off my kippah; held it in front of my face; scrutinized it. I tugged on my clothes– I was surrounded by the souls of the karmically unfortunate. Every moment I existed I was walking upon their tortured persons. I began apologizing to my chair. My teacher thought I was mocking her. I was inconsolable.

When Sunday school ended, with tears in my eyes, I explained to my mother that I couldn’t morally enter her car. Or wear shoes. Or clothes of any kind.

Within a month we were attending a new temple.

The First Rabbi

We began attending congregation B-D; a reform temple hosted out of several trailers that had been converted into buildings in the style of portable classrooms. It was strange starting over again; all the songs had the same words, but the melodies and rhythms were different. I didn’t fit in very well with the other kids and was on my way to resenting the move entirely… when I met the congregation’s rabbi.

Imagine Santa Claus. Now imagine him, but Jewish.

You have just pictured my first rabbi.

He was a rotund, jolly, unflappable man. In between services he would wander from classroom to classroom, disrupting lessons in his own jovial way. Instead of presents, he brought us stories; he’d fall weightily into a chair and regale us with tales of clever jews and resourceful rabbis. It was from these stories that I began to form my ideas of ‘Jewish masculinity.’

Now, that term– Jewish masculinity– is almost certainly too narrow a descriptor for what I truly mean, as the phenomenon I’m referring to isn’t exclusive to male Jews. I use it only so far as it serves to illustrate the difference between it and the ‘Christian masculinity’ that I’d been exposed to through western media up to that point.

Christian masculinity– the kind which expressed itself in the action movies and Saturday-morning cartoons I loved to watch– was all about bravery and strength. It was about picking yourself up when you got knocked down– especially when your adversary ordered you to “stay down.” If that happened, well, goddamnit you just had to pick yourself back up and get knocked down again. Never give the bastards an inch, it commanded; put your faith in god and, if what you’re fighting for is just and righteous, trust that god will give you strength.

The kind of lessons my rabbi related to us were all in opposition to this idea. It was better, he said, to lie down and wait for an opportunity; to save yourself a few brain cells and use them against the bastard. Be smart when you couldn’t be strong. Be clever. Do as your ancestors had done; survive. All of his stories taught us the same lesson:

Pray to god for assistance… but then act as if he does not exist. After all, he’s already given you a brain with which to figure things out for yourself; what more could you ask?

I know this way of thinking isn’t exclusive to Jews, or even universal among them (I would go so far as to say it actually contradicts more than a few stories from the Torah), but it’s central to my conception of myself as a Jew.

I loved my rabbi, I adored his wisdom, and I was greedy for his stories.

I was heartbroken when he left us for a congregation several states away.

The Second Rabbi

The rabbi who replaced him was a thin little man with a bald spot on the back of his head that he kept covered with a kippah. He looked and talked like a professor; I would watch the spittle collect in the corners of his mouth as he spoke.

I did not like him.

Not at first.

It took me a while before I began to respect his more intellectual style of teaching; he was not one to tell stories with warmth, but he spoke to me and the other children like equals. He was thoroughly ‘reform,’ to a degree that might have seemed blasphemous in comparison with his predecessor. He introduced us to the paradox of god and the immovable boulder. He went so far as to tell us the true name of god– not Adonai or Jehovah– but the YH word that I, agnostic though I am, still find myself uncomfortable speaking aloud, writing down, or even thinking.

No knowledge was forbidden; he was a rebel in rabbinical robes. He was a cultivator of minds as well as souls.

I don’t think I ever truly appreciated him until I began preparing for my bar mitzvah. He sat me down in our temple’s small library and explained to me:

“I’m sorry kid, but you’ve drawn the short straw.”

My birthday, and therefore my bar mitzvah, correlated with one of the driest and most boring passages of the old testament: the building of the holy tabernacle in the desert. Nevertheless, he pledged to help me until I found enough to comprise the compulsory sermon I was to write and perform.

He was as good as his word. I proposed that we interpret the literal building instructions as metaphorical, and make the lecture about preparing an internal space within one’s own heart for worship. It was just vague and sanctimonious enough to work. One small section, regarding the innermost chamber of the temple– the place where god supposedly dwelled– demanded special consideration, and I wrote up a digression that spoke to its significance. Taking a line from Sam Raimi’s then-new Spiderman trilogy, I based the section around the concept that “With great power comes great responsibility.”

(In a spiritual sense, of course)

The Sunday prior to my bar mitzvah, my family and I attended his service. When he arose and finally started his sermon for the night, he began to talk about some of the very same things we’d discussed, only this time in the context of a spiritual leader’s responsibilities to their congregation. I thought to myself, “My god, this guy’s stealing all my material.”

Then, our Rabbi unbuttoned the top of his suit shirt and revealed beneath it:

A paper gemstone in the shape of Superman’s symbol, emblazoned on it the letters SR.

Super Rabbi.

The crowd erupted in choruses of mirth; my rabbi beamed, pleased his joke had gone over so well. He pointed to me in the audience and credited me with inspiring his stunt.

People turned in their seats to look at me. Hundreds of eyes fell upon me at once. I was… embarrassed. I turned red. I hid my face in my hands. I had felt comfortable winking at pop-culture in my writing, but this was a full-on embrasure of it. My rabbi was comfortable playing the enlightened jester; the wise old foole; and why not? To the truly enlightened, silliness is not folly, and prankishness conceals within itself the greatest wisdom. But I was not so learned. I was mortified.

A voice rose out of my belly. It said, quietly at first, then louder: “No.”

I told those around me, those staring at me with eyes I feared to be mocking: “No. I did not say that. I did not tell him to say that. No, no, no, no, no!”

I looked up and met my rabbi’s eyes. He had heard me. His expression I still remember, though I struggle to discern it. Was he hurt? Or surprised? Or confused?

He finished his speech, and I, despite being a Jew, suddenly felt a strange kinship with Peter the apostle; I had just denied my own rabbi.

A few years later, he was driving home from work when he began to have a brain aneurysm. He understood, on some level, what was happening, and drove off the road; parking his car along the shoulder. It was there that they found his body the following day.

I know that in some ways this was a fitting end for him. He was a kind man, and his last act was one of beneficence and love for his fellow man. He drove off and parked rather than risk getting into an accident and injuring another person.

But I can’t help but imagine myself in his place. I Imagine how alone I would feel. How cold I would feel. How dark the night would seem outside my window.

I hope that he wasn’t scared.

I wish I hadn’t denied him. Not even once. He was one of the best men I’ve ever known. I owe him much.

The Third Rabbi

After my bar mitzvah, I mostly stopped going to temple, seeing as my fellow classmates largely took the ceremony as a kind of ‘graduation.’ This, cumulatively, likely played a role in our temple’s financial ruin.

I know I’m playing into certain stereotypes pertaining to my community, but there was an added shame that came with our congregation’s poor money management; we had recently moved into a temple too large for our means. Sure, it could accompany all members on high holy days, but it sat at about one-fifth capacity all other nights. In a short time, the administration was reduced to all but begging for funds from the families.

A new rabbi was brought in; a woman this time (gasp!), who was so reformed she even opted to wear a kippah of her own (a truly unorthodox decision, in every sense of the word). By then our cantor had moved on as well, and, best as she could, our new rabbi attempted to fill both roles.

Perhaps it was my age, but this time the gaps in my heart refused to be filled despite her good nature and dedication to a lost cause. I sat in on only a handful of services and left unsatisfied.

I caught wind of a program being held in the temple one Sunday; a free-meal program called ‘Get on the Bus!’ which would drive mothers and children out to the local men’s penitentiary so they could see their incarcerated loved ones. Afterwards, we would shuttle them over to the temple for ice cream before dropping them off back at home. For some reason I signed up to be a scooper; probably trying to secure some free dessert for myself, more likely than not.

At first, things went off without a hitch. Maybe fifty or so families had shown up and the other volunteers and I had our work cut out for us. But something happened once everyone had taken their seats.

Our new rabbi announced that she wanted to lead everyone in a prayer before they dug in.

She was going to bless the ice cream.

Immediately, I felt infuriated. If there’s one thing that I like about Jews, it’s that we don’t try to recruit. We don’t push our beliefs or traditions in other people’s faces. We don’t proselytize.

And here she was– shoving our words down their throats when the only thing they’d come to consume was ice cream. I felt like a Christian.

I never went back after that. It wasn’t that I thought she was a bad person– even now, I think her heart was likely in the right place– it’s just that her conception of Judaism was fundamentally in opposition to my own. She had broken the one rule, the one Jewish tradition that was sacred to me. I was angry at myself for having been party to it.

Epilogue

I still consider myself a Jew, even though I struggle with believing in god. I still consider myself a Jew even though I don’t practice, and haven’t been to temple in years. I still consider myself a Jew because I was raised to believe that it wasn’t something you can opt-into or out-of; If the woman who birthed you was Jewish, then– and I’m sorry to break this to you– in my eyes you’re a Jew. Unfortunate I know, but everyone’s got their own cross to bear (metaphorically speaking, of course).

In college, I attended a single solitary class on Jewish studies; the only one offered by the school. Our teacher made a whole show out of her refusal to tell us whether she was Jew or Gentile, which still rubs me the wrong way. Even more infuriating was that I could clearly tell just from her face she was among the ‘chosen people.’ Did she really think we were incapable of recognizing our own?

I bring this up, in an attempt to find some satisfactory conclusion to this essay, because of a discussion we had as a class which I still occasionally think about. It was about what defined a ‘Jewish author.’ Was it subject matter which made a work Jewish– Jewish topics or themes– or simply the author’s ethnicity?

Is Isaac Asimov a Jewish author despite never writing about Jews? What about Franz Kafka? Or Randy Newman, for that matter?

Is there something deeper than subject matter? Something in each of their styles– their approaches– something which lends itself to the concept of a Jewish lens through which all Jewish artists see the world through?

I might be wrong, but I feel there is– some kind of deeper connection between all of their expressions– and yet I can’t describe what it is. It’s something more elusive than the occasionally suggested ‘perspective of the eternal outsider,' but I don’t know what that something is.

What is the ‘Jewish style?’ What connects Larry David and Groucho Marx and Nathan Fielder?

I wonder sometimes if my writing– if my work– if it too carries with it some kind of stamp which makes it all immutably ‘Jewish.’

I don’t know.

But I hope it does.

In that spirit, I would like to leave you with my favorite Jewish joke. A word of warning– it’s a dark one.

An old Jewish man dies and goes up to heaven. He sees the creator, walks over to him, and immediately begins telling the almighty the worst, most offensive holocaust joke you’ve ever heard. When he’s finished, the good lord looks down at him, not at all amused.

“That’s a horrible joke” says god.

The old Jewish man shrugs his shoulders, waves him away, and says:

“I guess you just had to be there.”