“What with this Catholic custom of doing penance for sins, Dr. Moses Green is lucky he’s a Jew,” said Feldman. “If he were a Catholic, he’d never get off that mountain.”
Koesler suddenly became serious. “Dr. Green …” he said meditatively. “That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful you phoned today and we could get together now.”
Feldman’s warm smile encouraged Koesler to continue.
“When I agreed to host the wake service, I had no idea what kind of man Dr. Green was … is. It wasn’t until last night, at the wake, when some people told me what the doctor had done to them that I began to understand. I have the feeling I just scraped the surface. And I was, and am, very embarrassed. Embarrassed for myself.”
“No need for that ….” Feldman leaned forward so they could converse more privately. “You may think the Jewish community considers you to be off your rocker for waking Dr. Green. But he had died-or so it seemed. Someone had to bury him.”
“It wasn’t that so much,” Koesler said. “I was afraid the Jewish community would assume I was aware of Green’s personality. And that I was offering my parish as host for a man who, I suppose, was a disgrace to Jewish people. But until last night’s revelations, I had no idea how venal the man was.”
“Well, we knew. But there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s the identification that is unfortunate. In no other race of people that I know of is there such a blend of nationality and religion.
“To be Irish is not necessarily to be Catholic. To be German is not necessarily to be Lutheran. To be Scots is not necessarily to be Presbyterian. To be English is not necessarily to be Anglican. But to be Jewish is, at least as the general perception goes, to be Jewish. The religion is the nationality. The religion is the race. They are interchangeable.
“Moses Green is Jewish because his parents were Jewish. Everyone assumes that Green’s religious affiliation is Jewish-even though Green would be utterly lost in a synagogue. Everyone expected him to be buried from a Jewish mortuary. And it’s likely he would have been if the family had not arranged for a Christian ceremony.”
“Now that you mention it, I was surprised at that,” Koesler said. “At St. Joe’s, it was just a wake. The burial would have been a Jewish ceremony.”
“My friend,” Feldman said, “you would have to know us better to understand that.”
They were silent for a moment.
“As we talk,” Koesler said, “what is really bothering me is getting clearer. It was my decision to host Dr. Green’s wake that brought him before the public eye in this affair. The media, as is their habit, are telling all. Now, countless numbers of people will hear how vile a man he was. And their estimate of Jews in general will plummet. All because of one man-and my decision to provide a stage for all this.”
Feldman’s smile did not lighten his serious demeanor. “My friend, we all have our successes and our failures. Off the top of your head, who comes to mind when I say ‘Jewish heroes’?”
“Jewish heroes …” Koesler thought for a moment. “Abraham, Moses, Esther, David-all those wonderful biblical personalities.”
“And since then?”
Well … Maimonides for one. Personal favorites? Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, uh … Hank Greenberg. And so many of the great musicians and composers: Itzhak Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Bruch. And of course”-he smiled-” Beverly Sills.
“How about you?” Koesler asked. “Christian heroes?”
“You might not agree ….”
“It’s not up to me to agree. They’re
“Well, let’s see. Francis of Assisi, John XXIII, Martin Luther King. Bonhoeffer, Schweitzer … and your artistic types: Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo … and so many more.
“But now”-Feldman wagged a finger-” how about some Jewish villains?”
“That’s tough. It has to be a very personal list. Judas.”
They laughed.
“The capos of the Holocaust,” Koesler went on. “Maybe Meir Kahane, maybe Henry Kissinger, maybe Elliott Abrams. I don’t know. How about
“If you’ll pardon me, that’s too easy. Hitler, Stalin, Petain, Al Capone, Quisling, Oliver Cromwell, Mengele … I could go on and on. Now, if we dipped into Islam,” Feldman continued, “on the plus side might be Muhammad and Saladin. On the minus side, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein.
“The point of course, is that every religion has its angels and its devils.”
“Yes, yes,” Koesler agreed. “And each of the world’s great religions teaches some version of the Golden Rule. Some subjects follow it; others ignore it. Which brings us back to Chesterton, who said that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
“So, you see,” Feldman said, “we got stuck with Dr. Green. But, not to worry: You did not introduce us to Green. We have known about him for a long time-a very long time.”
“You do … uh, I mean, you have? But I thought he was a stranger to the synagogue.”
“Oh, but yes. Regardless, we knew all about him and what a bad name he was giving us. A Jewish doctor! How could we not know about him? What’s that story you tell about old John McGraw and the New York Giants?”
“You mean the one about a Giants player getting injured and Muggsie McGraw going out to home plate with a megaphone and asking if there was a priest and a doctor in the stands? And one doctor and twenty-three priests came forward.”
“The very story. Well, if you want to be medically attended as well as possible, go to a synagogue of a Shabbat. If anybody got sick, there would come forward one rabbi and twenty-three doctors. Oh, yes, we know Dr. Green.”
“Then can you tell me, why is he scrambling for the last nickel? I mean, he’s a doctor-a surgeon. Isn’t it safe to assume he’s very comfortably well off?”
Feldman turned his cup upside down in the saucer, an indication to their waitress and a reminder that this meeting was drawing to a close.
“Your question has two … no, three considerations.
“First: We will not soon see many benefits held for physicians. With rare exception, they make a respectable income.
“Second: There are physicians who lose their position, especially specialists. Salaries are being cut. This is new, brand new. Doctors today are being brought down from their God-like thrones. They used to be masters of all they surveyed. Now, hospital administrators are cutting back on salaries. Or, in order to hold down costs, the administrators forbid some medical procedures.
“This is all foreign to the doctors. They used to order whatever medical procedures they wanted. They decided how long patients would convalesce in the hospital. They called in specialists-and to hell with all the added costs.
Third: Dr. Green is nearly on a plane by himself-thank God. From all I’ve heard about him, from contacts I’ve had with the man, I’d say he has no moral philosophy at all.”
“Take abortion, for instance,” Feldman said. “Now there’s a procedure that is rife with moral, philosophical, theological questions. My guess is that Green doesn’t give a damn for any such consideration. I don’t know that he’s ever performed an abortion. But if he did-or if he refused to-his decision would have nothing to do with good or evil: It would be measured by whether it was profitable, in any sense of that term, for him.”
Koesler immediately called to mind Claire McNern and her involuntary abortion at the hands of Dr. Green. And she hadn’t even known she was pregnant. The sole reason for that operation was that it served Green’s purposes.
Koesler guessed that Green was not a sociopath, incapable of telling bad from good. But it was not a major step away from that to measuring actions not by good and evil but solely by personal gain-the What’s-in-it-for-me? philosophy.
“In any case,” Feldman said, “I think these three things go together in the understanding of Moses Green and his obsession with wealth. Physicians tend to be well off. They are beginning to see the widening cracks in their position of eminence. All that, plus Dr. Green individually has no one to please but himself.
