Patty had been there both times, too. She and Mae and Irv had blown their noses after Hal’s speech, and the sound of their combined honk had brought down the house. Whenever Kathleen walked into Beth Israel’s long, spare sanctuary, she remembered the three of them sitting in the front pew, laughing and crying together.
Mae and Irv had been buried out of that sanctuary, too. And Danny. Had she worn the star for Danny’s funeral? She couldn’t remember.
Buddy didn’t say anything about the reappearance of challah and candles. He stood close to her, his arm pressed against hers, as she bowed her head. She closed her eyes and remembered how Hal and Jack used to fight over who got to blow out the match. “Knock it off, monsters,” she had said every Friday. “Time to kiss and make up.”
She turned to her husband. “Time to kiss and make up, eh, Bud?” He held on to her until the kitchen timer went off.
On their way to the temple, Kathleen played with her necklace, running the star up and down the chain absently. They hadn’t been to services there for well over a year; they’d been visiting Hal in California last High Holidays, which was pretty much the only time they went anymore, and they still hadn’t met the new rabbi.
According to the article in the local paper, she was just a few years out of rabbinical school. Kathleen had meant to attend one of the get-acquainted coffees when she was first hired, but somehow the dates had slipped her mind, as had the new rabbi’s name.
“Rabbi Michelle Hertz.” It was posted on the sign outside the building. “Let’s see if she’s better than Avis,” Buddy said as they walked in. Kathleen didn’t even bother to roll her eyes.
At least forty people were in the sanctuary. “Pretty good crowd,” Buddy whispered. The congregation swelled in July and August, when the summer people showed up, but in May it was still just the locals.
Kathleen and Buddy settled into what had always been Irv’s High Holiday pew, fourth from the front on the left, and waited for the service to start. Kathleen folded her hands, lowered her head, closed her eyes, and prayed, “Thank You.”
Buddy took her hand and kept his eyes on their interlaced fingers, so neither of them noticed the rabbi walk to the lectern. They looked up when she started to sing. Her unaccompanied voice, reedy but pleasant, delivered a tune familiar from the boys’ years in Sunday school. “Shalom Aleichem,” she sang.
After one stanza, the rabbi waved for the congregation to join in. After a second solo verse, she stopped and shook her finger at them. “I’m warning you, I don’t start the service until everyone is singing, and I don’t mind singing all night. There’s a transliteration on page seventy-nine, and we can even do it without words.” She was smiling, but it was clear she meant business.
Rabbi Michelle Hertz was in her late twenties, Kathleen decided; nice looking, with a heart-shaped face, big brown eyes. No discernible makeup. Her yarmulke was a boxy, multicolored third-world cap pinned onto dark curls pulled back into a low ponytail. Her prayer shawl, though, was the kind worn by old men in Orthodox synagogues, black-and-white and very big. How traditional, Kathleen thought, especially compared to the last rabbi’s bare head, black robe, and skinny, little prayer shawl that had always reminded her of a priest’s stole.
After four more stanzas that included a lot of “Yi-dee-di,” everyone was singing. Even Ida Rubelsky, who wore a hat and gloves to services, though much of the crowd was in sweaters and jeans.
Smiling approval, Rabbi Hertz slowed the tempo, ended the song, and asked the congregation to turn to the prayer book and read with her.
The old Union Prayer Book was gone, replaced by a softcover book in which God had changed from He to You. As though God were sitting across the table, close enough to ask to please pass the salt. There seemed to be more Hebrew in this book, a language that would always remain an inaccessible mystery to Kathleen. Her only D in school had been in Spanish, an everlasting shame. But the English translations were graceful, and the singing more than made up for her distance from the Hebrew.
Kathleen smiled at the rabbi’s performance. Or maybe that wasn’t the right word for it. It occurred to her that Michelle Hertz might be a good match for Hal, if Hal were interested in women. She suspected that might be why he lived out in California. Thinking about her son, Kathleen sighed. Buddy cast a concerned eye in her direction; she reassured him with a pat on the arm and turned her attention to the readings.
The service was so unusual that even Buddy was still paying attention when they got to the sermon, if you could call it that.
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sp; Rabbi Hertz hiked the prayer shawl over her shoulders and came down from the altar. “This is one of everybody’s favorite Torah portions,” she said, walking up and down the aisles, handing out copies of the weekly Bible reading, smiling as she made eye contact.
“This is the part where God gives Miriam leprosy for yelling at her little brother, who just happens to be Moses, who is — like it or not — God’s all-time favorite human being.”
The rabbi made her way back to the pulpit and said, “This section has always bothered me. I mean, Aaron does exactly the same thing as his sister, but he gets off without so much as a mosquito bite! So who wants to read the first verse?”
Ida Rubelsky stood, adjusted her hat, and in a pungent North Shore accent rhymed Hazeroth with Reheboth and intoned the name of the “Laud.” She read on and on, ignoring the rabbi’s frequent “Thank yous.”
Buddy whispered, “I haven’t had this much fun at temple since I was seven and my grandmother nodded off and fell out of her seat.”
The rabbi finally got Ida to stop and returned to the top of the page, soliciting comments about Moses’ relationship to God, Miriam’s “raw deal,” and the reason why it took seven days for her to heal. After extracting a few tentative remarks, Rabbi Hertz eased into her own interpretation of the story.
“Let’s assume for a moment that Aaron isn’t a bad guy,” she said. “He doesn’t run off congratulating himself on his good luck while Miriam’s skin turns white and she goes to solitary confinement for a week. Let’s imagine that Aaron is horrified by what happened to his sister, and that he suffers for her.
“What does Aaron think, at that particular moment, about the God they’ve been chasing around in the desert? A God who would do such a terrible thing to his kid sister, the only one in the family who can sing, who composes beautiful songs in praise of Adonai?
“‘What kind of deity am I serving,’ he thinks. ‘What kind of God punishes Miriam and not me?’
“Maybe Aaron wonders if he could have protected his sister. Maybe he’s thinking, ‘Why didn’t I challenge God and ask why she got punished and I didn’t?’ Maybe Aaron suffers over what he perceives is his own cowardice.” Rabbi Hertz took a long breath and scanned the room before going on.
“Now, as biblical characters go, Aaron doesn’t have a lot of charisma. We don’t know a whole lot about him, and besides, we tend not to trust high priests. But I imagine Aaron sitting beside his sister’s hospital bed with his head in his hands. I see him as just a regular Jew, like the rest of us. Guilty. Afraid. Wondering about the meaning of pain. Struggling with his faith and searching for comfort. But also connected by blood and history and love to his brother, Moses, to his sister, Miriam, and to the Jewish people’s unending project of discerning and creating meaning in a seemingly random, sometimes cruel universe.”
Kathleen’s cheeks burned. She felt as if the rabbi were speaking directly to her and almost looked around to make sure no one was staring at her. But everyone seemed intent on the rabbi’s story. Even Ida, notorious for fixing her lipstick during sermons, was listening.