Paradise Park (25 page)

“Don’t stop what?”

“Don’t stop teaching. Even if your students know nothing. Especially then. Even if they don’t know the first thing. Then teach them that. You may be their only source,” he said. “Then be that source. Be an oasis in the desert. Be like Augustine in Hippo. Even here,” he said, “even on this piece of rock in the Pacific Ocean, there can be learning if you have the heart to teach.”

I looked at him sitting there at the desk and a startling thought occurred to me. Rabbi Siegel was talking about himself! That was a profound moment for me. Not just because of what Siegel said—but because for a second I’d really heard him say it, and unlike talking, meditating, questioning, seeking, and screwing up, listening to other people was something I hardly ever did. Back at the monastery Michael was always harping about learning to listen, but I’d never really done it. I’d never listened to someone else before. Now it almost knocked me down, suddenly hearing the rabbi speak out like that. Suddenly feeling the strength of somebody else’s heart. I looked at the rabbi, and that was when I realized: This man is reaching out to me, but not just because I’m a sinner, or a loser, or a returning student. This person is seeking me out because we are related. Because somehow, somewhere, we come from the same Jewish place—which is why Grandpa Irving was trying to warn me! This rabbi knows the code. He knows the Hebrew at the bottom of the Bible. He knows the text and the letters and the sound and the voice, and deep down he knows me, because I am his relative! He knew me
first.

“Ah,” I said.

Rabbi Siegel put his hands together and rested his chin ecclesiastically on his fingertips. He said, “You teach the dance. And I’ll teach you the words.”

Minotaur

C
OUNTING
me, there were three of us who came to Rabbi Siegel’s office each week for instruction, and we were a diverse group. There was a guy named Fred, and a girl named Alyssa. Now, Fred was about forty and quite tall but unbelievably skinny, and his face was always raw with sunburn. He did odd jobs, mainly fixing things in people’s houses, which was how he had originally met the rabbi. For about ten years Fred had been addicted to drugs and blown a few gaskets, and lost some dear friends who had wound up dead of overdoses. Finding himself alive in Honolulu, he had decided to rededicate himself spiritually, but feeling that the Catholic religion he was brought up in was not the most comfortable for him, he had for several years been searching for a new religion he could relate to. So having worked for the temple on its retaining walls, and attended some services, he’d decided to start learning about Judaism. Alyssa, on the other hand, was this smart but somewhat disturbed thirteen-year-old who actually was from a Jewish family. Her dad was treasurer of the temple. She was in the awkward position of being on the verge of her bat mitzvah but at the same time having been expelled from Sunday school for inciting an insurrection in her class against its instructor, who was found
later locked in the art supply room. She was a fat freckled kid with straight, shoulder-length brown hair and braces, sparkling brown eyes, a foul mouth, and pockets full of candy and bubblegum, which she was always offering to sell you. The rabbi was teaching her, as a favor to her parents—as an alternative to Sunday school.

So we would sit in the rabbi’s office, and we would be at all different levels and at odds with each other. Alyssa would be sucking a jawbreaker and sometimes practicing the Hebrew chanting for her bat mitzvah, and Fred would be studying some book like
To Be a Jew
, and in between them I would be going over the Aleph Bet with the rabbi. “Aleph,” the rabbi would say, and he’d show me the large-print aleph in the book, and he would say, “Aleph has horns like an ox.” And actually it was true, you could see the head of the ox and the two pointy horns up top. “Bet. It looks like a
bayit
, or house.” And bet did have a nice sheltering form, and even a dot in the middle, like a doorknob. “Dalet is like a
delet
, or door.” Okay, you could kind of see it, with that big long hinge on the right, and the top of the door swinging out to the left. “Ayin is like an eye.” That one was fairly mystical to me, with its shape open on top, but then cupped on the bottom and with a little tail. It could have been an eye, or a well, or a fish standing with her tail up in the air. That letter could have been the source of many things.

“Ayin. Ayin,” I’d be trying to get it down.

And Alyssa would mutter under her breath, “It’s only
been
a month.”

And I’d say, “Look, kid, I happen to work. I happen to work and go to school part time, and—I have three hundred pages a night of reading to—”

“So. I go to school full time.” Alyssa thought that was very witty.

And she sniggered, which was her specialty. When Alyssa giggled, she would giggle
at
you, and that is pretty much the dictionary definition of what sniggering means.

“Ladies. Ladies,” Fred would say, and raise his rail-thin arms, and wave his raw-boned hands. He was really a very sweet and gentle guy, but the slightly spooky thing about him was his sweetness and all the rest of his attributes had this residual feeling about them, like they were what was left over after he’d had his big systemic cataclysm. He was sweet and brittle like banana chips. He would say all the time, “Let’s not lose our concentration, now.”

After a while, when it came to Alyssa, I really had to hold it in. I had to delve deep inside of myself and try to breathe. One time I came to class and I was almost the happiest I’d ever been. I’d written a letter to John Denver, just about his music and his vision of the environment, and what it meant to me to hear him express it so well. And I’d mailed the letter several months before, and then that week I got a large envelope in the mail, and it was, I swear, an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photo of John playing his guitar. “It was as big as that one.” I pointed to the rabbi’s large photo of himself and John F. Kennedy. “And he wrote on it,” I told Fred and Alyssa and the rabbi.

“No!” Fred said, all impressed.

“He did. He wrote,
For Sharon. Peace, John.”

“My goodness,” said Fred.

“He didn’t really write that, you know,” Alyssa informed me. “He probably has a hundred people working for him to do stuff like that.”

“Well,” I began, “well … what do you know about
anything?”
I wished propriety in the rabbi’s study hadn’t forbidden me from adding,
you little shit.
I’d just never imagined it could be like that, with a hundred people in an office stuffing envelopes with photos. But when she put it that way—it sounded so mean, it must have been true. I blinked. I ducked my head down. My hair fell around my face.

After a minute Rabbi Siegel said, “I had a light lunch today. Would anyone care to join me for a bite to eat?” He got up and opened the door from his office to the vestry, which was this little passageway between the office and the sanctuary where his black robes hung. He went in there and he got his briefcase, and with great dignity in his three-piece suit he took his car keys and he drove the three of us out of the temple lot in his gray Cadillac, which had a license plate that said:
SHALOHA
. Fred and I were in the back, and Alyssa sat in front. He drove up to this little old local store just off Old Pali Road and he parked directly in front of the door, which he could do because he had his Clergy placard in the window, and because he was a regular customer. And Fred got a pack of pistachio nuts, and Alyssa got gummy bears and Sweet-Tarts, and the rabbi and I got those large homemade almond cookies that they always had in those local stores on the counter in a jar. And the rabbi paid for everything. It was his treat. He was actually a very compassionate man, Rabbi Siegel, and also, he told us that his wife,
Grete, had him on pretty much grapefruits and vegetables at home, because she’d put him on a diet. And he tended to get headaches in the afternoons.

We ended up going to the store a lot, and during those trips the rabbi told us something of his life, and how he’d been raised in an Orthodox home, very strict and scholarly, and how he had at one time wanted to be a concert violinist, but the winding road of life had changed him and his original ideals. He had found his calling in Reform Judaism, and not in the dogmatism of Orthodoxy. When he drove us all in that Caddy, it was just like sailing in a silvery gray ocean liner. He showed us the scenic places out near the reservoir where he’d married people. He talked about how this couple and that one wrote their own contracts and ceremonies. We had some lovely times. We all relaxed to the point that we students started getting along pretty well. The only thing was, we weren’t really learning all that much, or, if we were, it was at a snail’s pace.

After around six weeks I had finally mastered the Hebrew alphabet, and I was moving on to simple words in a primer about this little Israeli kid named Uri. And then, guess what happened? A newly engaged guy, Matthew, entered the class, and the rabbi had to turn his attention to teaching the alphabet to him, leaving me to struggle mostly by myself. So, of course, I didn’t get very far—actually none of us did, because the only serious learning happening there was the rabbi’s descriptions of the alphabet and his discussions of Judaism in general. I started getting frustrated, because I’d come in there with a very certain goal, which was to learn the Hebrew words that went with the dances I was teaching. I was still teaching the ladies every week, and a couple of them were actually picking up some steps. But it seemed like the rabbi wasn’t teaching me any Hebrew words at all.

Finally, after class one Sunday I hung back until the others had gone, and I brought my chair in close to the rabbi’s desk, and I said, “Rabbi, I hate to say this, but I feel like we’re all wasting time in here.”

Siegel looked at me over his suit and silk tie with its silver tiepin. “Sharon,” he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I thought I was supposed to be learning some Hebrew. Isn’t that what we’re here for?”

“Sharon,” he said, “I think you realize, that in the end, the words are the least important aspect of what I’m trying to teach.”

“Not to me!” I protested.

“Come in here,” he said.

We walked through the vestry and into the sanctuary. He flicked on the lights, floodlighting the temple’s vaulted ceiling and modernistic stained glass. We were standing on the dais looking down onto the rows of empty seats below us. And I saw the organ on the left with the seats for the choir all fenced off with a paneled wood fence, and I saw the marble altar, where there were two candlesticks with electric candles in them. The rabbi pushed a button and a pair of doors in the front wall opened, and you could see this open spotlit closet with four Torah scrolls inside, and they were covered with crimson velvet, and the covers embroidered in gold thread.

“Sharon,” Rabbi Siegel said, “Judaism is more than a few simple phrases. It’s a culture. One of music and art, poetry and light. It is the intimate and the sublime; it is the exalted and the humble. Think of the lyric music of the Psalms.” He stood up there in the empty theater, and he gestured with his hands. You could see him turning all sermonic. “While the Egyptians were building tombs, we were singing of life and love. While the monuments of the ancients were crumbling to dust, we were treading over the ruins in a tradition that arched back over the millennia, and forward to the future. Our friends in class may never remember a word of Hebrew, but if they can sense something of the grandeur of our tradition—if they can only glimpse one part of the history of our chosen people….”

“Excuse me?” I said. There he was, right back where he’d started with the chosen people. “I’m not talking about joining a people!” I told him. “Definitely not any people that thinks it’s any better than any other people!”

So naturally Siegel heaved a big sigh. He folded his arms over his orotund bod. “Each people is dear to God in its own way,” he told me. “I often make the analogy to the different states of the Union. …”

And I felt like it was my turn to sigh. He was actually a good human, Siegel, but when you asked him a question, it was like throwing a bottle in the ocean and watching it drift away over all his metaphors and comparisons, plus the incidents it reminded him of. And as far as where I was coming from with my folk background, he hadn’t a clue, because he was into “high” art. He used to say, “When I say the Bor’chu—’Bless ye
the Lord’—I think how fitting a trumpet fanfare would be right there.” And I’d be thinking, trumpet fanfares? That was spiritual music for him? If it turned him on—but to me God’s music was this whole-world ethnic fusion that belonged to everyone! Bluegrass, bongos, recorder, ukulele. Nose flute. Just a joyful noise, just folk. All the voices of the planet raised in song and humming like one enormous family!

T
HAT
night after my encounter with the rabbi I sat up late in the living room writing to Gary. I was feeling so overwhelmed; I was so full of indignation. I scribbled page after page, just pouring out my heart. I felt like he was the only one I could confide in. I was consumed with this thirst, this huge desire to learn and to know, and to somehow draw near the Creator! And the reality was I was teaching a bunch of senior citizens to dance, and taking an adult ed course in Hebrew that had gone way off track—not to mention my academic trouble. Yup, I was having trouble at the university, but it wasn’t what you might think. In Professor Flanagan’s course I’d received a solid A. I was rock solid in that class. My problem was the course had ended. Now it was spring semester, and I had Professor Raymond Friedell.