The Rabbi (49 page)

The high holidays came and the temple overflowed with people who remembered suddenly that they were Jews and that it was time to fill up with enough repentance to last another year. The sight of the crowded sanctuary excited him and filled him with new hope and firm resolve that he would not fail to win them over in the end.

He determined to make another try while the Yom Kippur sermon was still fresh in their minds. One of his former professors, Dr. Hugo Nachmann, was spending some time at the Los Angeles branch of the rabbinical institute. Dr. Nachmann was an expert on the period of the Dead Sea scrolls. Michael invited him to San Francisco to lecture at the temple.

Eighteen people attended the lecture. Michael recognized fewer than half of them as temple members. Two of them turned out to be science reporters there to interview Dr. Nachmann on archeological aspects of the discovery of the scrolls.

Dr. Nachmann made things easy for the Kinds. “This isn't at all unusual, as you know,” he said. “People simply are not interested in lecturers on certain nights. Now, if you had offered them a dinner dance. . . !”

The next morning, leaning on the fence overlooking the half-completed church, Michael found himself telling Father Campanelli about it. “I keep failing,” he said. “Nothing I do will get them inside the temple.”

The priest fingered the mark on his face. “On many a morning I give thanks for the Days of Obligation,” he said quietly.

One morning several weeks later Michael sprawled in bed feeling mildly dejected at the thought of another day. He knew enough about the psychology of personal loss to realize that the mood was a lingering remainder of his mother's funeral, but this awareness did nothing to bolster his spirits as he lay absent-mindedly seeking comfort in his wife's warm thigh and staring at a crack in their bedroom ceiling.

There was little at Temple Isaiah to draw him out of bed; not even a clean floor, he told himself.

Just before the holidays the temple janitor, a gap-toothed Mormon who had kept the premises tabernacle-clean for three years, had announced his retirement to his married daughter's home in Utah to lull his sciatica and reawaken his spirit. The house committee, which met infrequently, had been lethargic about replacing him. While Phil Golden fumed and scolded, the silver and brasswork went unpolished and the wax yellowed on the floors. Michael could have hired a janitor, secure in the knowledge that his salary checks would have been issued at the rabbi's command. But it was the house committee's job to hire a new man. At least they would be held to that much commitment to the temple, he thought grimly.

“Get up,” Leslie said, twitching her hip.

“Why?”

But seventy minutes later he was parking his car outside the temple. To his surprise the door was unlocked. Inside, he heard the rasp-rasp of scrub brush against linoleum, and following the sound downstairs he saw the man in paint-spattered white coveralls scrubbing the hallway floor on his hands and knees.

“Phil,” Michael said.

Golden wiped a wet forehead with the back of his hand. “I forgot to bring newspapers,” he said. “When you were a kid did your mother wash all the floors on Thursday afternoons and spread newspapers?”

“Fridays,” Michael said. “Friday mornings.”

“Nah, on Friday mornings she baked
chaleh.
”

“What are you
doing?
A decrepit old
momser
like you, scrubbing floors? You want a heart attack?”

“I got a heart like a bull,” Golden said. “A temple's got to be clean. You can't have a dirty temple.”

“So let them hire a janitor. Hire one yourself.”

“They'll
krahtz
around to it after a while. Start doing things for them, they'll never bother to think about the temple. In the meantime, the floors will be clean.”

Michael shook his head. “Phil, Phil.” He turned on his heel and went back upstairs. In his office he took off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves. Then he searched through several closets until he found another pail and brush.

“Not
you
,” Golden protested. “Who needs help? You're the rabbi!”

But he was already on his hands and knees, rotating the brush over the soapy water. Sighing, Golden returned to his own pail. Together, they scrubbed. The sound of the two brushes was friendly. Golden began to sing, in a breathless, grunting voice, snatches of opera.

“I'll race you to the end of the hall,” Michael said. “Loser goes for coffee.”

“No races,” Phil said. “No kids games. Just work, a good job.”

Golden reached the end of the corridor first and went out for the coffee anyhow. A few minutes later, sitting together in an empty Hebrew-school classroom, they drank it slowly and regarded one another.

“Those pants,” Phil said. “Don't let the
rebbitzen
see them.”

“She'll see I'm finally working for my money.”

“You're working for your money every day.”

“No. Come on, Phil.” He sloshed his coffee round and round in its container. “I'm almost a full-time Talmudist. I spend every day with books, looking for God.”

“So who knocks that?”

“If I find Him, my congregation won't come to hear about it until next Yom Kippur.”

Golden chuckled and then sighed. “Ah, I tried to tell you,” he said. “It's that kind of a congregation.” He put his hand on Michael's arm. “They like you. You probably won't believe it, but they like you very much. They're going to offer you a long-term contract. With a good yearly increase.”

“For what?”

“For being here. For being their rabbi. On their terms, sure, but still their rabbi. Is it a bad thing for a rabbi to be financially secure and still to be able to devote most of his time to study?”

He took the coffee container from Michael's hand and dropped it into the wastebasket along with his own. “Let me talk to you as if you were one of my sons,” he said. “This is a good set-up. Relax. Be comfortable. Grow prosperous. Let your kid grow up with the rest of the lotus-eaters and go to Stanford and only hope that he ends up with this good a deal.”

Michael said nothing.

“Another couple of years, we'll buy you your car. Later on, your house.”

“My God.”

“You want to work?” Golden said. “Come on, let's wash some more floors.” His laughter was like blows on a drum. “I guarantee you, when I tell that lousy house committee who their acting janitor was, they'll have a permanent man hired by tomorrow!”

On the following day his muscles complained about the unnaccustomed exercise. He stopped at St. Margaret's and leaned on the fence watching the steel-helmeted workers swarming over the new building, the knotted sinews in the backs of his thighs causing him to feel a new kinship with the workers of the world. Father Campanelli was not there. The priest now rarely came out to watch the work, remaining inside the red-brick walls of the old church, soon to feel the clout of the swinging iron ball.

Michael couldn't blame him. The new church had a roof like a poured cement derby. Its walls were of tinted glass block that sloped sharply inward, causing that portion of the building to resemble a huge ice-cream cone with the bottom tip broken
off. A corridor of aluminum and glass led to a circular building that had all the spiritual appearance of an industrial powerhouse. On the roof of the round structure workmen were raising a gleaming aluminum cross.

“How's that?” one of the men on the roof shouted.

A man standing near Michael tipped back his tin hat and peered upward. “Fine,” he yelled.

Fine, Michael thought.

Now anybody could tell it from a hot-dog stand.

He turned away, knowing he wouldn't be back for the same reason the priest no longer watched. It was a tastelessly conceived house of worship.

At any rate, there was nothing else to watch; it was finished.

So was his own research into temple architecture. He had worked out what seemed to him a reasonable verbal blueprint for a modern place of prayer. Since the former St. Jeremiah's Church could meet with ease the undemanding requirements of Temple Isaiah, there seemed nothing to do with the accumulated data but publish it. He wrote a paper which he submitted to the journal of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and subsequently it was published there. He mailed copies of the journal to his father in Atlantic City and to Ruthie and Saul in Israel, then he packed all his notes into a cardboard carton and took them home and stored them in the tiny attic, inside the lowboy from his parents' apartment which he and Leslie had not been able to bring themselves to sell.

The completed project left him with more time on his hands than ever. One afternoon he came home at two-thirty to find Leslie making out the marketing list.

“There's mail,” she said.

The new contract had arrived as Phil Golden had promised. He examined it and saw that it was very generous, covering a five-year span with a substantial increase in income at the beginning of each year. At the end of the five years, Michael knew, there would be a contract with life tenure.

Leslie read it without comment when he dropped it on the table.

“It's as good as an annuity,” he said. “I've been thinking about starting a book. I have plenty of time.”

She nodded and busied herself with the marketing list.

He didn't sign the contract. Instead he placed it in the top drawer of his bedroom bureau, under his tray of cuff links.

He went back into the kitchen and sat with Leslie at the table, smoking and watching her.

“I'll do the shopping for you,” he said.

“I can go. You must have things to do.”

“I have nothing to do.”

She glanced at him and opened her mouth as if to say something, then she changed her mind.

“All right,” she said.

The letter came a few days later.

23
Park Lane
Wyndham, Pennsylvania
October 3, 1953

Rabbi Michael Kind
Temple Isaiah
2103 Hathaway Street
San Francisco, California

Dear Rabbi Kind:

The Executive Board of Temple Emeth of Wyndham has read with no small interest your provocative article in the newly established and excellent
CCAR Journal.

Temple Emeth is a sixty-one-year-old, medium-sized Reform congregation in the university community of Wyndham, twenty-three miles south of Philadelphia. Over the past several years we have hopelessly outgrown our twenty-five-year-old building. Faced with the necessity of determining what a new temple should be like, we found your article to be particularly fascinating. It has been the subject of many discussions here since its appearance
.

On April 15, 1954, Rabbi Philip Kirschner, our religious leader for the past sixteen years, begins what we expect will be a happy and full retirement in his native St. Louis, Mo. We are seeking as his replacement somebody who will be both an inspiring religious leader and a man who has given thought
to what kind of place a Jewish temple should be in modern America.

We would appreciate greatly an opportunity to discuss this with you. I will be in Los Angeles October
15-19,
attending the 1953 meeting of the Modern Language Association at UCLA. If you could fly to Los Angeles at Temple Emeth's expense during this period, we would be grateful. If this is impossible, perhaps I can come to San Francisco
.

I have notified the Placement Committee of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations of our intention of discussing our rabbinical need with you. I shall eagerly await your reply
.

Sincerely yours,
(signed)
Felix Sommers,
Ph.D.
President
Temple Emeth

“You're going?” Leslie asked when he showed it to her.

“I suppose it wouldn't hurt to fly down and meet him,” Michael said.

On the night he returned from Los Angeles he came in quietly, expecting her to be asleep, and found her lying on the sofa watching the late late show. She made room for him and he lay down beside her and then kissed her.

“Well?” she said.

“It would be a thousand dollars less than I'm making now. And it would mean a one-year contract.”

“But you can have it if you want it.”

“There'd be the usual preliminary guest sermon. But I can have it if I want it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do
you
want me to do?” he asked.

“You have to decide yourself,” she said.

“You know what happens to rabbis who go through a string of short-term contracts? They become footballs. Only the problem congregations will consider them, at minimum wages. Like the one in Cypress, Georgia.”

She said nothing.

“I've already told him we'd go.”

She turned her face away suddenly, so that all he could see
was the back of her head. He reached out his hand and touched her hair. “What is it?” he asked. “The thought of facing a new batch of women? The
yentehs?
”

“Damn the
yentehs
,” she said. “There'll always be people to whom you and I are freaks. They're not important.” She turned swiftly and put her arms around him. “What's important is that you'll be doing more than collecting a fat annuity for serving as a rabbi in name only, because you're so much better than that, don't you understand?”

He could feel her wet cheek on his neck and he was filled with wonder. “You're the finest part of me,” he said. “The very best of me.” His arms were around her anyhow, to keep her from falling off the narrow couch, and now they tightened.

She placed her fingertips over his mouth. “What's important is that this is something you really want to do.”

“It is,” he said, touching her.

“I'm talking about Pennsylvania,” she said in a little while, but she turned in his arms and lifted her face greedily.