Acts of Faith (38 page)

“Offense has nothing to do with it. It’s more like astonishment. Feeling the way you do, how on earth did you end up in Israel living on a starvation wage just to teach Hebrew literature?”

“Ah,” he answered, raising his index finger demonstratively, “therein lies the difference. I may have misgivings about my religion, but I’m totally devoted to my cultural heritage. I love the Bible for the beauty of its poetry, its richness of sentiment. But I absolutely loathe the self-appointed interpreters who think they’re all going to travel first-class on the chariot of fire when Elijah comes.”

He tempered his outburst for a moment and asked, only half-joking, “Have I made you hate me yet?”

“You certainly seem to be trying,” she said with a playful smile. “But I’ll hear you out.”

“I believe passionately that man’s existence is territorial. And that goes for the Jew as well as his neighbor.
Every
people has to have a homeland.”

“But what does this have to do with my becoming a rabbi?”

“I guess it was my way of saying it depends on what you stand for. I mean, if you’re going to preach the dogma that we’re ‘God’s chosen people,’ then I can’t honestly say I believe in what you’re doing.”

“What do
you
think I should be doing?”

He grew passionate again as he answered. “Reaching out to every complacent Jew, grabbing him by the collar, and telling him to love his neighbor—starting with his fellow Jew. I don’t have to tell you Hillel said
that’s
the basis of our whole religion, and the rest is commentary.”

She smiled at him and said softly, “I think Hillel said it all.”

Suddenly Zev turned and grabbed her shoulders. “Then I think you’re gonna be one hell of a rabbi.”

He took her into his arms. “And, Deborah, I want to be in the front row for all of your sermons.”

As they walked through the park, Zev told her of the only palliative he had found from what was otherwise a life of constant anguish—work. He wrote and studied to exhaustion. Since his son had died, he had submerged his emotions like a swimmer under water and only surfaced for a breath of life when he was on the point of fainting.

“Sometimes I feel like a walking rain cloud,” he said. “I seem to cast shadows over everyone I meet. I know I’m doing it to you right now. Don’t you find my melancholia unbearable?”

She squeezed his hand. “No, I find it very familiar,” she answered gently.

Zev stopped and looked at her intensely. “Then that gives us something in common—we each have half a heart. If we put the pieces together …”

She touched his lips gently to stop him.

“No, Zev, I didn’t say that. I spent most of the night just watching you sleep, and even then I could see the sadness and loneliness on your face. I wanted to make it better.”

“Well, you can,” he insisted, “we can both—”

“No,” she interrupted, “I also realized that I’m still part of a ‘both.’ I didn’t give just half of myself to … Eli’s father, I gave everything. I can feel how desperately you want to love and be loved. You deserve someone who can fill that need. I’m sorry, Zev. I only wish I could.”

Zev’s eyes grew sad again. “Deborah, are you telling me you intend to go through the rest of your life alone?”

“I’m not alone. I have my work.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” he retorted. “And you have your son. We’ve gone through all that. But what about a husband? Don’t you feel the need for a man in your life?”

She lowered her head and said quietly, “I know what you’re saying, Zev, but I also know I’ll never be capable of loving anyone else.”

“What about last night? Were you just using me as some kind of test case?”

She shrugged. She couldn’t confess how painfully close to the truth he had come. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t even know myself.”

Zev’s yearning caught fire. “Dammit, Deborah, life is short enough. You’re going to wake up some day to discover that you’ve waited until it’s too late.”

She looked at him mournfully and replied, “It’s too late already, Zev. I’m sure of that.”

He gripped her arms, fighting the urge to shake her. “Deborah, can’t you understand—he’s dead. Your husband’s dead! When the hell will you come to terms with that?”

She looked at his contorted face and answered in a whisper.

“Never.”

She turned and started to walk off. Even when she heard him calling she did not turn back.

“You’re crazy, Deborah,” he shouted. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I do, she murmured to herself. I only hope some day you’ll forgive me.

A
paradox: Why is it that even the happiest moments of life inevitably fade with time, but try as you may, you never forget the minutest detail of a catastrophe?

At precisely 5:16
A.M.
on the last Wednesday in May, 1978, I had been blissfully sleeping in the Ritz Hotel Chicago when Deborah’s phone call woke me. There was panic in her voice.

“Is something wrong with Eli?” I asked.

“No, no, Danny. It’s Papa—”

“Is he sick?”

“Not yet, but I think this scandal may kill him,” she replied. “He’s been meeting with the elders all night.”

“Hey, it’s dawn,” I protested, growing ever more afraid. “Has the synagogue been vandalized?”

“In a way. Papa’s been betrayed by one of his rabbis. And I’ll give you one guess who the bastard is.”

“Schiffman in Jerusalem?” I ventured.

“Let his name be erased forever!” Deborah spat out the supreme curse of our faith.

“What’s he done? Calm down or I won’t be able to understand.”

“You’ll understand, all right,” she said bitterly.

And then she told me everything.

It seems the outwardly ascetic Rebbe Schiffman had
been “borrowing” from our funds for years. That’s a fancy way of saying he had embezzled money that pious people gave to help poor boys go to study in Jerusalem. Of course we have a genuine yeshiva promoting Torah studies, but some of the contributions were naively sent to what turned out to be Schiffman’s own post office box.

Deborah told me of an incident that had occurred during her indentured servitude at the good rabbi’s hovel.

There was a generous, kindhearted Philadelphia couple—Irv and Doris Greenbaum, self-made millionaires who had no children. Schiffman had somehow wangled five hundred thousand dollars out of them over lunch at the King David. Their contribution was intended to be for a much-needed dormitory. Somehow, the money found its way to an account in Zurich.

Recently, several months after Mr. Greenbaum’s untimely passing, his widow, accompanied by her niece Helene, had set out on a journey to visit all the places she and Irv had endowed with the fruits of their mutual labor.

First they visited a youth training center in the port city of Ashkelon, where she was heartened to learn about the many poor immigrants from the Arab countries who had benefited from the technical skills they had received there.

In Jerusalem the following morning they had taken a taxi to Mea Shearim and asked to be dropped at the
B’nai Simcha
yeshiva.

When they arrived, all they saw was a narrow two-story building which was obviously a dwelling that had been converted into classrooms. The school seemed to have no dormitory.

“There must be some mistake,” Doris murmured to her niece, then asked their driver, “Are you sure this is the address the doorman gave you?”

“Of course, of course,” the man responded, waving the paper in one hand and pointing to the sign above the building with the other. “Can’t you see it says
‘Yeshivat B’nai Simcha’
?”

“I’m sorry,” said Helene, “but we can’t read Hebrew. Maybe I can stop someone and ask.”

“No, no,” the driver quickly cautioned. “None of the men will speak to women, and most of the women won’t speak to strangers. Let me try.”

The two visitors waited in the taxi, which was gradually becoming an oven, as the driver tried to find some passerby liberal enough to converse with a man who wore no skullcap.

He came storming back, poked his head into the open window, and said, “That man insists this is all there is. They don’t have a dormitory. Their students live as boarders with different families.”

Mrs. Greenbaum began to grow hysterical. “That’s impossible,” she cried. “Irv and I gave that money nearly ten years ago. We must contact Rabbi Schiffman immediately.”

Once again their driver went to reconnoiter—even daring to penetrate the portals of the school. He emerged five minutes later and walked slowly back to his passengers.

“I’m afraid he’s not here anymore,” he reported.

“What do you mean?” demanded Mrs. Greenbaum.

“His assistant is now running the school. They say the Rebbe and his family left the country about a month ago.”

“But I don’t understand.” Doris was growing increasingly distraught. “I wrote and told him precisely what days we would be here.”

By now her niece had caught on to the situation. “That’s probably exactly why he left.”

Returning to the hotel, Helene called Mort, her lawyer husband in the States. It was he who had originally arranged for the transfer of the cash.

Though it was barely dawn in Philadelphia, Mort promised he would get to the office and call them back.

A few hours later, he had the law firm’s bank confirm that in early 1969 they had duly wired the money to the bank account named in the instructions given them.

Mort called the Jerusalem bank in question under the pretext that the Greenbaum Foundation once again wished to contribute to the
B’nai Simcha
and asked them to verify that their bank number had not changed.

His worst fears were confirmed. The account had been closed for nearly three years.

Not wasting any time, he shouted enough to get the branch manager on the phone and demanded to know the fate of the money his foundation had already donated.

The records showed that, within a day of its arrival, the five hundred thousand dollars had been transferred to an account in Zurich. This was all the banker’s fiduciary ethics would permit him to disclose. The American lawyer would have to go through the normal protocol for any further information.

Two days later, the three Greenbaums were in Mort’s Philadelphia office conversing on the speaker phone with the international leader of the
B’nai Simcha
, Rav Moses Luria.

In the interim Mort had investigated and discovered that over the years the good Rebbe Schiffman had appropriated nearly two million dollars for himself and was currently somewhere in Switzerland—obviously within visiting distance of the money.

The way Deborah told it, Papa had been almost berserk with shock and grief, especially when the lawyer informed him that a wire service reporter had already sniffed the story and could not be kept at bay forever.

Mort had promised to help as much as he could in trying to set things right before the scandal reached the press.

If he could be given a list of the contributors over the past ten years, Mort would then contact the parties concerned, swear them to silence, and explain that all the misdirected money would be repaid.

“But where am I going to get that kind of money?” Father had moaned.

“I’m sorry, Rav Luria,” the attorney replied. “Miracles are your department, not mine.”

I asked Deborah what emergency measures Papa was going to take, though I knew even a second mortgage on the school property would be pathetically inadequate.

Deborah, too, realized that there was no way our people could raise so vast a sum of money. But Father would not admit defeat, she said. In fact he had called a meeting of the entire community to take place at seven o’clock that evening in the
shul.

“Danny,” she pleaded, “do you think there’s anything you could do?”

I was so thunderstruck that I could barely think. To be sure I was rich, but nobody keeps that kind of money on twenty-four-hour call. Though my heart sank, I nonetheless tried to reassure her.

“Hey, Deb, calm down and do everything you can to reassure Papa. I’ll call you back in exactly three hours.”

“Thank God, Danny,” she responded. “You’re our only hope.”

I hung up, relieved that at least I had comforted her.

The only problem was that
I
didn’t know what the hell to do.

B
y 6:45, the synagogue was so packed that there were not enough seats for all the younger men, some of whom had returned from their university studies to be at this extraordinary gathering. In the balcony above, the younger women were seated even on the steps.

Promptly at seven
P.M.
, Rav Luria rose, gray and trembling, went to the podium, and recited from Psalm Forty-six: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change, and though the mountains be moved into the heart of the seas.…”

He cast his sorrowful eyes on the sea of perplexed faces looking up at him.

“Friends—this is an hour of great danger. It is so grave that what we do tonight will determine whether we can remain together or will disintegrate into a thousand pieces, scattering into the void. I do not exaggerate. Nor do I fear that any of the words spoken here will go beyond these walls, since in our community brother does not betray brother.”

He sighed deeply. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have put it that way. Because one of our number has played Cain to the Abel of us all. The guilty party deserves no anonymity, so let me simply say that Rebbe Lazar Schiffman, the
chief of our Jerusalem yeshiva, has absconded with money given over the years in good faith to foster the teaching of righteousness.”

There were murmurs among the huge crowd, and the Rav let them crescendo. He was counting on their feelings of communal desperation to intensify their will to act.

“Now I could give this matter to the secular authorities and have them deal with it as the theft that it is. But that would rob us of our good name also, which the Torah teaches us is our most valued possession. Instead,” he continued, “I have called you together this evening to make an extraordinary appeal. Our congregation is nearly one thousand in number. Some are teachers, shopkeepers, men of modest means. There are also businessmen whose wealth is considerable. We can clear ourselves of shame by raising the sum of …” He paused to take a breath and could barely pronounce a sum of such magnitude. Finally, he said, “Nearly two million dollars.”