Sweet Like Sugar (11 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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“Of course, I'm fine,” he said, but it was clear he was not. “Did I call for a car?”
“Rabbi, I drive you to work every day,” I said. “Don't you remember?”
Obviously he did not. But he pretended to understand. “Then I should go get dressed,” he said, turning to go upstairs.
I followed him upstairs to a part of his house I'd never seen before. There were just two rooms, one on each side of the landing. One was his bedroom, with bookshelves covering every available wall, and an unmade bed beneath a double window. The other was a mirror image, filled with more books, a small desk, and an old couch—his study. Lined with still more bookcases, the hallway between the rooms was lit by a single overhead light, marking the entrance to the bathroom—which was decorated with pink wallpaper and pink fixtures, the only room in the house without any books.
Outside the bathroom, two framed needlepoint pictures hung on either side of the door: one of an apple tree, the other of flowers, both with Hebrew writing along the bottom in neat red stitching.
I was trying to make out what the pictures said—my Hebrew, which had never been good, was quite rusty by this point—when the rabbi came up behind me.
“Excuse me,” he asked, “but what do I wear to work?”
I called an ambulance.
 
Holy Cross Hospital. What kind of a place was that for a rabbi?
The doctor said it sounded like the rabbi had suffered a ministroke. He would need to stay in the hospital for a couple of days for tests, but he'd probably be fine.
Most likely, however, he would never recall the events of that morning.
Sure enough, by the next evening when I visited him after work, he was awake and alert, and he knew exactly who I was when I came in.
He pushed aside his food tray, which held a kosher hospital dinner, the kind where every item is individually wrapped and sealed and stamped three times: kosher, kosher, kosher.
“The doctor tells me that you brought me here,” he said. “This I do not remember. I remember going to bed in my house and waking up in this bed instead.”
I pulled up a chair and recounted the previous morning's strange scene.
“Amazing,” he said. “You tell me it happened, and I believe you. But I do not remember.”
“How do you feel?”
“Well, the food is bad and the bed is uncomfortable and the nurses keep taking blood for some test or other. And then Linda Goldfarb came to visit me.” He rolled his eyes.
“I told her you were here.”
“Yes, this I suppose is necessary. But she brought me these awful flowers”—he gestured to a basket of mums on the bedside table—“and they smell just as terrible as her perfume.”
“I'm sure she was trying to be nice.”
“Flowers you bring to a dead person,” he said. “Or a wife.”
I was glad I had opted against flowers on this visit.
“You'll come again tomorrow?” he asked.
I said I would.
“Would you stop by my house and bring my reading glasses and my prayer book? They are on the desk in my study.”
“Why do you need them?”
“Tomorrow is Friday, and tomorrow night is Shabbat. I will need my glasses and my siddur to daven.”
“The doctor said he wants you to rest.”
He waved off this notion with the back of his hand. “Benji, there is an authority higher than the doctor.”
I paused to see if he'd elaborate, but he didn't; apparently that's all that needed to be said.
“You've never broken Shabbat, have you?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Why not?” I asked.
I couldn't begin to understand why the rabbi was so rigid in his observance, keeping every letter of the law even when it was inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unhealthy.
“Your question is a strange one to me, Benji,” he said. “You ask why I do not break Shabbat. But I wonder why you do not keep it.”
“Too many rules,” I said.
Judaism was a religion of a million rules; no matter how hard you tried, you were bound to break most of them. This, I was convinced, was a way of maintaining communal guilt and shame—making sure we all felt that we came up short. It was a trap. I had decided years ago, when I left my parents' house to go to college, that I wasn't going to play by those rules anymore.
“You are looking at it upside down,” he said. “Judaism is not only about refraining from doing bad things. It is also about doing good things. Shabbat is not only a day when you do not work, it is a day when you
do
rest. Keeping kosher is not only about rejecting
treyf,
it is about eating the way God has decreed. You see restrictions. I see opportunities. Opportunities to get closer to God, to become the man He wants you to be, to live your life as a good Jew.”
This sounded like one of my Hebrew school teachers' speeches. I wasn't buying it.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. I didn't mean to be rude, but I wasn't in the mood for a lecture on observance.
He was taken aback, probably unaccustomed to having people reject his spiritual guidance.
“You're not interested in being a good Jew?” he asked, incredulous.
“I'm not interested in all those rules,” I said.
“Benji, the rules apply to you whether you obey them or not,” he said. “You can't just pretend you're not a Jew.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I'm a grown-up and I'm pretty sure I can do whatever I want.”
He blinked several times, as if trying to wake from a dream. Then he returned my snideness in kind: “So being a Jew doesn't mean a thing to you?”
“I didn't say that,” I said, slumping back in the chair. “It means a lot to me.”
“What does it mean, then?”
I was silent. I honestly didn't know the answer, not in any sense that I could put into words.
“You are lost,” he said.
“No, not exactly. . . .”
“Yes, you are lost,” he repeated. “But you can find your way back.”
“I'm not going to become Orthodox,” I shot back quickly. My mother must have gotten to me, after all.
A look of confusion spread across his face, but it soon softened into an amused grin.
“Benji, you do not have to keep kosher or become
shomer shabbes,
” he said. “But you need to find out what about Judaism has meaning for
you
—the place where you feel connected to your faith.”
“I don't really feel connected anymore,” I said.
“Then you must reconnect. You must not give up on your faith,” he said, growing serious and shaking his finger at me. “My Sophie lost faith in God. With what she endured, it's no wonder. Anyone might lose faith. But did she stop lighting candles on Shabbat? No. Did she stop keeping kosher? No. Did she stop going to shul? No. The Nazis tried to take all of that away from her, and after she came to America, she swore that she would continue to practice her religion as long as she was free. She did not find her faith again in an instant. But she maintained her rituals, and the meaning eventually returned. She was a woman of great faith—greater than my own, because her faith had been tested so terribly. She questioned, she doubted, but she did not cast aside her religion like an old coat that has grown too heavy.”
I was listening quietly, taking it in.
“And neither will I,” he announced as a sort of grand conclusion. “So please, Benji, the reading glasses.”
“I'll bring them tomorrow,” I said, getting up to leave.
“And tell Linda Goldfarb that she doesn't need to bring me any more flowers.”
 
The third date. There has to be something, at least the spark of something, to get to the third date.
I hadn't gotten to the third date for a while. But my first two dates with Christopher, the Hill staffer, had gone well: an evening of Shakespeare at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre downtown (his idea) and an afternoon of duckpin bowling at a shopping center in the suburbs (my idea). Both dates had been followed by moderately priced meals and moderately tasteful kissing in the car.
Here's what I had learned about Christopher so far: He grew up outside Omaha. He had double-majored in English and political science at Northwestern. He could bench-press more than I could, but I could kick his butt at duckpin bowling. (Admittedly it wasn't a fair contest; I'd grown up in an area where duckpins were the norm, while he had never even heard of such a thing.) He had good, progressive politics—better than his moderate, farm-subsidy-loving representative—and he was out at work. I also knew that he was active in his church; I didn't know the details or even truly understand the differences between all the Protestant denominations, but I did know that he could never stay out late on Saturday night because he had to get up early on Sunday.
I also knew that he wasn't the sleep-around type. He was hunting for a husband. And he had me in his sights.
At least until our third date.
I met Christopher after work at a romantic restaurant near Union Station. Nouveau comfort food. Mix and match silverware on the table and Billie Holiday on the stereo set the tone: offbeat but homey.
Christopher had been having a slow week since Congress wasn't in session, so we spent most of dinner talking about the rabbi. I had mentioned him to Christopher before, but for obvious reasons, there was a lot more to talk about this time.
“So tomorrow I've got to go to his house and pick up a few things for him,” I said.
“Isn't there anyone else who can do it? That woman he works with?”
“He doesn't exactly like her.”
“A relative?”
“All he has are some nieces and nephews and none of them live here.”
“So you're like his personal assistant now?”
“I'm just helping him out.”
“If that's what you want to do.”
Christopher asked about my own Jewish background, and I gave him the whole synopsis. From growing up Conservative—synagogue, bar mitzvah, planting trees in Israel—to giving it all up when I went off to school.
“I still do a few things, mostly for my parents,” I told him: Passover seders, Hanukkah parties, going to services on the High Holidays. “But mostly I don't miss it.”
I didn't tell him about the rabbi's suggestion that I start picking up the rituals I'd left behind. He didn't seem to want to talk about the rabbi.
“What will you do if you have kids?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I hadn't really thought about kids. I still felt like a kid myself.
“I mean, would you raise them the way you were raised? Send them to synagogue and Hebrew school? You've rejected all those things, but you had to learn about them first before you could make that decision. What would you do with your kids?”
I stopped to think about it for a moment, chewing my Cornish hen.
“I'd definitely want them to know they were Jewish and understand what that means,” I said.
“How would you do that?”
“Well, I guess we'd observe the holidays. And maybe I'd send them to Hebrew school—I don't know. I had such a rotten time with it, but maybe I could find a better synagogue.”
“You'd send your kids there, but you wouldn't go yourself?”
I hated the idea of pretending to like going to synagogue just so my kids would go, too. But even more, I hated the idea of dropping them off and making them do something I wouldn't do myself.
“I suppose if I sent my kids there, I'd have to go with them,” I said. “At least until they were bar mitzvahed. Then they could make up their own minds.”
“So they'd get bar mitzvahed?”
“Oh yeah, that much I do know.” I said it with certainty, but honestly, until that moment I hadn't even considered the concept. But yes, now that I thought about it, that much I did know.
Christopher was looking down at his goat cheese ravioli.
“Benji, I don't think this is going to work.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You're Jewish.”
“Yeah, but I told you, I'm not religious.”
“You might not be observant, but you're more religious than you think,” he said. “And anyway, it doesn't matter if you're not religious. I am.”
I was accustomed to hearing Jewish people talk about the difficulties of interfaith relationships. I had never bothered to wonder if non-Jews had the same problems. Apparently, they did.

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