Sweet Like Sugar (15 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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“I just haven't met the right person yet.”
I hated it.
My parents arrived and we filed inside. We had assigned seats for the holidays—the expensive seats, not the folding chairs lined up in the back of the room—and it took us a while to find them. My father sat on one end, next to my mother, who sat next to Rachel so the two of them could pass judgment on every other woman's outfit. Richard sat next to my sister, and I sat on the other side of him, because I honestly didn't mind my brother-in-law a bit.
I spotted Mrs. Goldfarb across the room, sitting alone. I nodded at her and she gave me a little wave.
The service was endless, just as I remembered it. Stand up, sit down. Pray silently, sing together. Read responsively in English, sing responsively in Hebrew. For hours and hours. And I was trapped, sitting against the wall. I couldn't sneak out without climbing over my entire family, and if I'd tried, my mother would have shot me a look that would have stopped me in my tracks. So I sat there, noticing how the men—wearing dark suits and conservative ties, traditional prayer shawls and unremarkable shoes—expressed their individuality through their yarmulkes: blue-and-white crocheted with a star of David, shiny crimson satin probably from someone's wedding, chic gray suede, burgundy and gold with a Washington Redskins design. I wondered how many of these designs Mrs. Goldfarb sold in the bookstore. It would surely have been more interesting than selling black yarmulke after black yarmulke to customers from B'nai Tikvah.
The choir, a bunch of old ladies selected more for their spare time than their musical talent, added a note of atonality to the proceedings. And the man blowing the shofar looked like he was about to keel over from the strain; he was red and sweaty and short on breath. It was not what you'd call a lively service.
But the low point was the sermon. It was the only time of the year when Rabbi Adler, who had led the congregation for some thirty years and was making noises about retirement, had pretty much the entire synagogue as a captive audience, upwards of a thousand people. He could have talked about so many things: the war in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, global warming, the following year's presidential race that was already kicking into high gear. He even could have stuck specifically to religion, talking about the crumbling wall separating church and state in America, or interfaith dialogue with Muslims and Christians.
Instead, Rabbi Adler took this rare opportunity to exhort his congregation to come to synagogue more often. A guilt trip, aimed squarely at the people who had skipped services since the previous High Holidays. And Rabbi Adler wasn't the greatest speaker in the first place; my mother could have given a better guilt trip in five minutes and had plenty of time left over to talk about real issues while the sisterhood handed out grape juice and petit fours.
My parents had been talking a great deal about how the Conservative movement was changing. It was about time, as far as I was concerned; my father liked to talk about how the Conservative movement played a key role in the civil rights struggles of the sixties and helped redefine women's role in Judaism in the eighties, but all I saw was a stagnant movement that hadn't kept up with the changing times for as long as I could remember. My father said they finally had some new faces leading the movement and policies around gay issues in particular—marriage, ordaining rabbis—had started to shift.
So the movement was changing. That didn't mean Rabbi Adler was any more enlightened as an individual. I had heard his opinions on gay issues several years earlier.
Everyone preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah at Congregation Beth Shalom was required to attend Saturday morning services regularly, to learn the prayers. So I sat there every week with my parents, wearing my brown loafers and my red tie and my blue blazer, listening to Rabbi Adler.
Before long, I learned the service pretty much by heart, and I took my cues from each page number Rabbi Adler announced.
Page 128: Beginning of the Torah service. Close the prayer book and pick up the
Chumash
, which contains all the Torah portions along with translations and commentary. Flip pages until you find something interesting to read—either a familiar Bible story or an incredibly arcane commandment that has apparently generated centuries of rabbinical philosophizing.
Page 139: The
Amidah.
Stand silently for ten minutes, rocking back and forth, bending occasionally at the knee. Look around the sanctuary to see who else isn't really reading the prayer.
And so on. Very little changed from week to week, other than the sermon.
Oftentimes, Rabbi Adler would pull a lesson out of the Torah portion and spin it into a speech. Other times, he'd focus on a less ancient subject by plucking something from the week's headlines: peace talks in Israel, universal health care, the Redskins' playoff hopes. He tried, given his limited skills as an orator, to keep things interesting.
But one October morning, he gave a sermon I'd never forget—about homosexuality. Here, the Bible and the
Washington Post
were in synch: The Torah portion that week was from Genesis, and included the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And that week in the
Post,
the debate over gays in the military had made headlines on the front page and the editorial page.
Rabbi Adler wasn't some crazed right-winger ranting about sodomites. No, he spoke calmly about “homosexuals” and the ways they were trying to undermine traditional institutions, from the family to the military, the schools to our houses of worship. He spoke of a “homosexual agenda,” and the general decaying of moral standards in America. He said he had compassion for homosexuals' sad plight—he meant AIDS, although this went without saying—but did not believe in giving them “special rights.”
“If you want to see what happens to a society where our codes of morality are turned upside down, where perversion is treated as a reasonable choice, you need look no further than today's Torah portion. The Jewish community does not turn away people struggling with sin, whether they are homosexuals or adulterers, drug abusers or common criminals. But neither can we pretend that their sins are not sins. On this question, when it comes to homosexuality, the Torah says there is but one answer.”
Not yet thirteen years old, I wasn't out of the closet. I wasn't even sure that I was in any closet yet. But I did have an inkling that Rabbi Adler was talking about me.
I knew that I didn't have any interest in girls. I knew that when I was alone in bed at night, I thought about other guys—guys I had seen in the gym locker room, or on television, or at the mall. I knew that this wasn't something I should talk about with anyone, not my parents or my sister or my best friends.
And I knew that in several weeks' time, Rabbi Adler would be on the
bimah
with me, congratulating me on my bar mitzvah, welcoming me as a full member of the community, even as he had already, proactively, unknowingly cast me out.
Rabbi Adler wrapped up his sermon, and then, as if his pronouncements had been utterly casual, he returned to the service.
Page 157:
“Ein Keloheynu.”
Such a pretty song. This means the service is almost over—time to get fidgety.
Am I really a sinner? I haven't even done anything yet.
Page 158: The
Aleynu.
Closer, closer. Stand up, stretch your legs, and don't forget that funny bow in the middle.
So it's like being a drug addict—maybe there's a way to quit. Although I haven't even done anything yet
.
Page 162:
“Adon Olam.”
At last, the end of the service. Cake and coffee to follow in the social hall.
I wonder if there's a way to stop the dreams.
We all filed out of the sanctuary into the social hall, where my parents loaded up their plates with cookies and cake and started chatting with some of their friends. I grabbed a minibagel and walked outside to sit on the steps on the side of the synagogue.
Joanne Gruber was already sitting there. She was in my Hebrew school class, too. And like me, she was a bit of a geek: braces, short frizzy hair, plastic-rimmed glasses. Joanne and I weren't really buddies, but we got along well enough. We'd known each other for years.
“What's going on?” I asked.
“Just waiting for my parents.”
“Are they inside?”
“No, they drop me off and pick me up,” she said. “And they're usually late.”
As bad as it was being dragged to synagogue with my parents every Saturday—I complained to no end that it was unfair that Rachel, a senior in high school, didn't have to go—I knew that it'd be even worse if I had to come without them.
“I can't wait till this bar mitzvah prep is over, so we can stop coming here every week,” I said.
“When's yours?” she asked me, motioning for me to sit down with her on the steps.
“December,” I said, taking a seat. “Invitations went out yesterday.”
She paused. “Am I invited?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool. You're invited to mine, too. It's in January.”
She looked pleased. I offered her half of my minibagel, which she declined.
We talked for a few more minutes, about our eighth-grade teachers, the new Nirvana album, the other kids in our class.
Then Joanne asked me if I had a date for the Homecoming dance at school the next weekend. Of course, I didn't. Joanne asked me if I wanted to go with her.
I looked at her. She was nice enough, and smart enough. The fact that she wasn't one of the “pretty” girls in my class didn't matter much to me, because I didn't like the pretty girls. I didn't even like looking at the pretty girls—eyeliner and hair clips and expensive sweaters didn't draw my eye, and neither did the pretty girls' chests, which had apparently developed with superhuman speed over the summer.
Joanne wasn't the problem. I was. Boys at school already called me “gaywad” and “fag” because I sang in the chorus, ran and threw and jumped “like a girl” whenever we played sports during gym, and made the crucial mistake of hanging an ad for the movie
Benny and Joon
in my locker; I took it down after one day, but the “Benji loves Johnny Depp” taunts had lasted for months. Would showing up at the Homecoming dance with Joanne Gruber make my problems better or worse?
“Forget it,” she said after an awkward moment. “We should just skip the stupid dance. I mean, who cares?”
“No, no, I'll go,” I said.
Now she looked very pleased.
My father opened the door behind us. “There you are, Benji. We were looking for you. You ready to go?”
I looked back and nodded.
He went inside. I scooted off my step and turned to follow him. But before I did, I leaned down and gave Joanne Gruber a kiss.
She was caught by surprise, but didn't pull back.
It was the first time I kissed a girl. Right there on the steps of Congregation Beth Shalom. And I felt nothing but the braces on her teeth.
 
The Monday after Rosh Hashanah, the bookstore reopened, so I stopped by to pick up mail and paperwork for the rabbi when I was done with work, and then headed up the hill. He was in a good mood and invited me in for a slice of an apple cake from the kosher bakery; since the rabbi had been such a loyal customer, the owner had delivered the cake himself.
“It is not as good as Sophie used to make,” he said, offering me a plate. “But it is sweet, and that is the important part.”
He wished me a happy new year in Hebrew—that much I could decipher—and then something else that didn't sound familiar. I nodded my thanks.

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