Acts of Faith (37 page)

“So,” he said, “I have to send the best we have.” He looked at her and concluded, “And that, Rabbi Luria, is
you.
”

L
aroche, Vermont, lay so far north that even in late September the leaves were already gold and crimson.

A sharp wind breathed a chilly greeting as Deborah stepped off the bus, her limbs stiff from the long journey, which had passed, it seemed, through all of Europe and the Middle East, as the Greyhound lumbered through such exotic towns as Bristol, Calais, West Lebanon, and Jericho.

Laroche was the last stop, and Deborah was by this time one of only two remaining passengers.

For a moment this caused some confusion, since a pair of middle-aged men bundled in parkas and scarves were waiting for “Rabbi Luria.” Neither the eighty-year-old farmer nor the young woman in camel’s-hair coat and briefcase seemed to fit their preconceived notion of a Jewish man of God.

The senior citizen was greeted by his family in the
joual
dialect of Quebec. By an uncomfortable process of elimination this left Deborah.

“Didn’t they tell you I was a woman?” Deborah asked, as she noted the continuing uneasiness of Dr. Harris and Mr. Newman, the official welcoming party.

“Well, I’m sure they probably did,” the doctor replied. “But I was so busy setting things up—not to mention
setting broken bones—that I guess the whole notion didn’t sink in. To be honest, HUC has usually sent us men.”

“You mean so they could help you chop down trees and build the
sukkah
after Yom Kippur?”

“No, of course not,” Mr. Newman said with an embarrassed smile. He opened the door to his station wagon for her. “I just wonder what the wives will think.”

“I would have thought they’d be pleased to see a woman on the pulpit.”

“Oh, of course,” Newman mumbled. “It’s just that you’re so—”

“Young?” Deborah offered.

“Yes, there’s that,” he conceded, and almost involuntarily added, “And you’re also pretty.”

“Is that a plus or a minus?” Deborah asked.

Newman had painted himself into a conversational corner. The physician stepped in to rescue him. “Please, Miss Luria—I mean Rabbi—don’t take offense. It’s just that we’re so isolated up here. These gatherings are our only connection with what’s happening in the Jewish world.”

“Well,” said Deborah lightheartedly, “I guess you might say
I’m
what’s happening.”

The Unitarian church was filled with people Deborah would never have thought of as Jews. It was as if their appearance had been altered by the strange clime and, compressing years of evolution, they had come to look indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors.

As the church organist struggled through the music Deborah had brought for him, and she rose to the podium in her white robes and square canonical hat, there were murmurs of wonderment from the worshipers and an uneasy tension Deborah could feel.

“Shana tova.”
She smiled. “As you can see, you’re getting something new for the New Year.”

The laughter of relief that filled the church testified to the success of her tactic.

“We’ll begin our service on page one thirty-one of your prayer books.”

The organist struck a chord, and Deborah stunned her congregation with the beauty of her voice, as she sang in Hebrew, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,” and then led them in the reading of the English translation. “Through the greatness of Your Love, I enter Your House. In awe I worship before the Ark of Your Holiness.”

She continued. “In the twilight of the vanishing year, we turn to You as our parents have done before us in their generation. We come into Your Presence together with all other holy congregations of Your people.…”

Her fervor united these scattered enclaves of people, who gathered twice a year to renew their identity and their faith. She, too, was swept up in the feeling of cohesion.

“May the sound of the ram’s horn echo within us and awaken our longing for goodness and new lives in our souls.”

By the time the service had reached the reading of the Torah from Dr. Harris’s single precious scroll, Deborah had touched them all.

At the reception afterward, it seemed as if every congregant wanted to speak to her, not merely to shake her hand, but to take advantage of her presence for a kind of public pastoral consultation.

“You can’t believe how much this means to us, Rabbi,” said Nate Berliner, an orthodontist from a town near the Maine border. “My family drove a hundred miles to these services. And if next year you’re a thousand miles from here, we’ll drive there too.”

“Why doesn’t your seminary send people like you up here more often?” several worshipers asked. But most of the conversations were expressions of loneliness. How hard it was for them—as one man put it—“to keep our religious batteries charged. A jump-start twice a year just isn’t enough.”

“I’ll speak to the dean,” Deborah answered. “Maybe he can arrange for a rabbi to come up on a monthly basis.”

“Then we could have a Sunday School for our kids,” added another congregant.

“Just one thing,” said Mrs. Harris, who had initially been outraged to see a woman on the pulpit. “They’d have to send somebody as wonderful as you.”

When she told Danny about her experiences, he volunteered to return with her for the Day of Atonement.

It was not merely curiosity. Disenfranchised Jew though he was, Danny still trembled at the thought of God’s Judgment. He wanted to observe this most solemn day in the company of the person he loved most in the world.

Deborah put him to good use, persuading him to chant the Torah portion to an admiring audience who could see he knew it practically by heart. At the very end of the long day of fasting and prayer in which the congregation stood in front of God’s open gate, praying to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, Danny sounded the ram’s horn.

He blew it with such vigor that Mr. Newman later remarked that he believed that it could be heard by God Himself.

During the long ride home Danny could barely contain his enthusiasm.

“Now I understand the phrase ‘God Who watches over the remnants of Israel,’ ” he said. “Those people live in the opposite of a ghetto. It takes three hundred and sixty-five days to round them up. If you want a real challenge as a rabbi, Deb, why don’t you apply to be stationed there when you graduate?”

“Sure, then Eli could go to a different school every day. Why don’t
you
take the job?”

“May I remind you that I’m not a rabbi.” He smiled evasively.

“That can easily be remedied, you know,” Deborah countered. “I mean
I
don’t have to tell
you
that it’s not
like becoming a priest. Any rabbi can say the words and ordain another Jew. So next year when I graduate—”

“I’ll think about it,” said Danny, trying to pretend she had not struck a chord. After a pause he asked, “When you said ‘priest’ just then—in fact, whenever you say that word—do you still think of Tim?”

Deborah answered quietly. “Yes. He’s always somewhere in my thoughts. Especially on the Day of Atonement.”

“It wasn’t a sin,” Danny asserted, gently putting his hand on hers.

She was silent for a moment and then said, “I keep wondering when the hell I’m going to tell Eli. I owe him the truth.”

Danny nodded. “Speaking of full disclosure, have you thought how you’re going to tell Papa you’re going to be the next Rabbi Luria?”

“This was a good night to ask me,” Deborah responded. “I made an oath during the closing prayers that I’d stop lying this year.”

“When?”

“When I get the guts.”

A
s an elective course for her senior year, Deborah had chosen Modern Hebrew Poetry, telling herself she should make up for not completing Zev’s course back in Israel.

By happy coincidence she found his name on the cover of the text they would be using:
The New Jerusalem Anthology of Modern Hebrew Verse
, translated and edited by Z. Morgenstern.

“What differentiates this new collection from all the others,” Professor Weiss declared in his opening lecture, “is that Morgenstern not only knows the language, but he’s a poet in his own right.…”

I never knew that, thought Deborah to herself. He never let it slip in class six years ago. Was it ego on his part—expecting all of us would know? Or maybe—as she thought more likely—he was simply shy. So shy, in fact, that he had waited one week too long to invite her for a cup of coffee.

Her attention refocused on the Professor’s words just in time to hear, “Matter of fact, Morgenstern’s reading some of his own verse at the Y next week. It’s sold out already but if any of you care to go, I think I can arrange it—since he’s staying at my house.”

She wondered what to do. Not whether she would go
or not, for that was far beyond the slightest doubt. Her only quandary was whether she should ask for a seat in the first row, if that were possible.

Would he be pleased to catch sight of her, smile, and therefore read with more emotion? Or would she embarrass him and throw him off balance?

Or, worst of all, would he not even remember her?

The night of the reading Deborah came home after her last class, had dinner with her son, and since Danny was out of town, left him under Mrs. Lamont’s supervision before going out, explaining to Eli that she was going “to an important lecture.”

The auditorium of the Ninety-second Street YMHA was filled to capacity as Professor Weiss walked to the podium to introduce the poet. The hall was so crowded she had to squeeze into a seat in the back row.

She scanned Zev’s face from afar as he sat on a chair upstage. He looked the same—almost the same, she thought—although a little tired.

After Professor Weiss’s flattering introduction, Zev stepped shyly to the podium. He reached into the pocket of a well-worn tweed jacket, and pulled out a pair of half-moon glasses.

Ah, thought Deborah, time doesn’t stand still. He never needed those before.

She remembered with what passion he had read the Hebrew verses in their seminar. But there the room had been small, and there had been only twelve students. Now Zev’s audience was in the hundreds, and his performance self-conscious bordering on the timid.

He began by reciting deft renderings of contemporary Hebrew poets and then a series of his own satirical vignettes of academic characters.

Only at the end did he read anything remotely personal, but it was the most courageous poem she had ever heard, a surgical exposure of his inner soul—an elegy to his son, newly
bar mitzvah
, who had died shortly thereafter.

Now it was clear why Zev had left these words for last. For, after reading them, he had no voice to go on.

The muted applause was not for lack of admiration, but a gesture of commiseration.

Professor Weiss had mentioned casually to Zev that one of the female rabbinical students had requested a ticket for tonight’s reading.

“Deborah—what an incredibly nice surprise. How come you just disappeared?”

“It’s a long story,” she replied, elated to be shaking his hand.

“How’s your little boy?”

“He’s not so little anymore. He’s in first grade at the Solomon Shechter School.”

“That’s terrific,” he replied. “Say, the Weisses are having some people over. It’s just a little buffet. I’m sure they won’t mind if I bring along another guest. Are you—uh—here alone?”

“Yes, matter of fact,” she answered. “And I’d love to come.”

Though everybody at the party seemed to want a private session with the guest of honor, Zev managed to find a quiet spot to be with Deborah.

“That was very sad about your son,” she said softly.

He simply nodded.

“I lost more than a child,” he murmured. “My marriage fell apart. I guess we thought that if we split, the guilt would go away. I don’t know about Sandra, but I still feel like a criminal for having normal blood cells and yet somehow causing his leukemia.” He raised a hand to stop her before she could speak.

“Don’t tell me it’s irrational—I’ve spent too much time listening to a shrink tell me that. They don’t seem to understand that nightmares haunt you even if you know they’re not real.”

“I understand,” Deborah said quietly. Then quickly added, “So you were married when we met?”

“I plead guilty, Deborah. I wasn’t the best of husbands. But I’m not that way anymore. Would you believe that in the eight months since our divorce, I haven’t made a single pass at a woman?”

Deborah responded with a candor that astonished herself. “Would you believe that since … my husband died, I’ve never thought of a man … that way?”

Zev trapped her with his eyes. “Isn’t it about time?” he asked gently.

She tried to avoid his gaze. “I suppose so,” she answered, almost inaudibly.

“I wish I could be the one,” he said softly. “But I don’t think I can.”

She was hurt. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not ready for an emotional involvement. And with you I couldn’t be emotionally uninvolved.”

“Would it be any different if the invitation came from me?” Deborah asked, surprised by her own words, “I mean, if I guaranteed you no emotional involvement, would you—?”

“Of course, Deborah,” Zev replied affectionately. “But I don’t think you’re any more capable of casual lovemaking than I am.”

As they discovered later in the evening, he was right.

Before this she had never cut a class. The day after she met Zev she cut all of them so she could be with him, in the hope of finding an answer to the urgent question: If they pooled their limited supply of love, would it be sufficient to sustain an enduring relationship?

After breakfast, they walked in the park and brought each other up to date on the various events that had occurred in their lives since she had been his pupil.

She was curious—and a trifle anxious to know his reaction to her imminent ordination.

“To be brutally frank, I have an instinctive antipathy to rabbis,” Zev remarked. “But, of course, I’ve never kissed one before. Seriously, Deborah, I don’t know if someone with your background can understand how
much I hate the religious aspects of Judaism. To me the ultra-
frum
are rigid, doctrinaire, and arrogant. I’m sorry if this offends you.”