not feel you have what it takes to be a good and inspiring rabbi.’”
What did you do?
“What could I do? I left.”
Now, this stunned me. There were many things you could have said about Albert Lewis. But not having what it took to inspire and lead a congregation? Unthinkable. Maybe he was too gentle for the seminary leaders. Or too shy. Whatever the reason, the failure crushed him.
He took a summer job as a camp counselor in Port Jervis, New York. One of the campers was particularly difficult. If the other kids collected in one place, this kid went someplace else. If asked to sit, he would defiantly stand.
The kid’s name was Phineas, and Al spent most of the summer encouraging him, listening to his problems, smiling patiently. Al understood adolescent angst. He’d been a pudgy teen in a cloistered religious environment. He’d had few friends. He’d never really dated.
So Phineas found a kindred soul in his counselor. And by the end of camp, the kid had changed.
A few weeks later, Al got a call from Phineas’s father, inviting him to dinner. It turned out the man was Max Kadushin, a great Jewish scholar and a major force in the Conservative movement. At the table that night, he said, “Al, I can’t thank you enough. You sent back a different kid. You sent me a young man.”
Al smiled.
“You have a way with people-particularly children.”
Al said thank you.
“Have you ever thought about trying for the seminary?”
Al almost spit out his food.
“I did try,” he said. “I didn’t make it.”
Max thought for a moment.
“Try again,” he said.
And with Kadushin’s help, Albert Lewis’s second try went better than the first. He excelled. He was ordained.
Not long after that, he took a bus to New Jersey to interview for his first and only pulpit position, the one he still held more than fifty years later.
No angel? I asked. No burning bush?
“A bus,” the Reb said, grinning.
I scribbled a note. The most inspirational man I knew only reached his potential by helping a child reach his.
As I left his office, I tucked away the yellow pad. From our meetings I now knew he believed in God, he spoke to God, he became a Man of God sort of by accident, and he was good with kids. It was a start.
We walked to the lobby. I looked around at the big building I usually saw once a year.
“It’s good to come home, yes?” the Reb said.
I shrugged. It wasn’t my home anymore.
Is it okay, I asked, to tell these stories, when I…you know…do the eulogy?
He stroked his chin.
“When that time comes,” he said, “I think you’ll know what to say.”
Life of Henry
When Henry was fourteen, his father died after a long illness. Henry wore a suit to the funeral home, because Willie Covington insisted all his sons have suits, even if there was no money for anything else.
The family approached the open coffin. They stared at the body. Willie had been extremely dark-skinned, but the parlor had made him up to be an auburn shade. Henry’s oldest sister began to wail. She started wiping off the makeup, screaming, “My daddy don’t look like that!” Henry’s baby brother tried to crawl into the coffin. His mother wept.
Henry watched quietly. He only wanted his father back.
Before God, Jesus, or any higher power, Henry had worshipped his dad, a former mattress maker from North Carolina who stood six foot five and had a chest full of gunshot scars, the details of which were never explained to his children. He was a tough man who chain-smoked and liked to drink, but when he came home at night, inebriated, he was often tender, and he’d call Henry over and say, “Do you love your daddy?”
“Yeah,” Henry would say.
“Give your daddy a hug now. Give your daddy a kiss.”
Willie was an enigma, a man with no real job who was a stickler for education, a hustler and loan shark who forbade stolen goods in his house. When Henry began smoking in the sixth grade, his father’s only response was: “Don’t never ask
But Willie loved his children, and he challenged them, quizzing them on school subjects, offering a dollar for easy questions, ten dollars for a math problem. Henry loved to hear him sing-especially the old spirituals, like “It’s Cool Down Here by the River Jordan.”
But soon his singing stopped. Willie hacked and coughed. He developed emphysema and tuberculosis of the brain. In the last year of his life, he was virtually bedridden. Henry cooked his meals and carried them to his room, even as his father coughed up blood and barely ate a thing.
One night, after Henry brought him dinner, his father looked at him sadly and rasped, “Listen, son, you ever run out of cigarettes, you can have some of mine.”
A few weeks later, he was dead.
At the funeral, Henry heard a Baptist preacher say something about the soul and Jesus, but not much got through. He kept thinking his father would come back, just show up at the door one day, singing his favorite songs.
Months passed. It didn’t happen.
Finally, having lost his only hero, Henry, the hustler’s son, made a decision: from now on, he would take what he wanted.
MAY
Ritual
Spring was nearly over, summer on its way, and the late morning sun burned hot through the kitchen window. It was our third visit. Before we began, the Reb poured me a glass of water.
“Ice?” he asked.
I’m okay, I said.
“He’s okay,” he sang. “No ice…it would be nice…but no ice…”
As we walked back to his office, we passed a large photo of him as a younger man, standing on a mountain in bright sunlight. His body was tall and strong, his hair black and combed back-the way I remembered him from childhood.
Nice photo, I said.
“That was a proud moment.”
Where was it?
“ Mount Sinai.”
Where the Ten Commandments were given?
“Exactly.”
When was this?
“In the 1960s. I was traveling with a group of scholars. A Christian man and I climbed up. He took that picture.”
How long did it take?
