The Rabbi Who Prayed with Fire

Prologue

Amid the crowd of bewildered congregants gathering outside the synagogue, Vivian could feel the unsteadiness in the air. The wail of the approaching fire trucks was getting louder. She searched for words: words of closure for the unfinished Shabbat prayers, words that would soothe her congregants, words that could reassure the two unfamiliar millennials in attendance that this was not what Friday night services normally entailed.

But there were no words. Amid the chaos, the screams, the sirens, and now the streams of water unleashed onto the flames, Vivian could only summon tears. She surveyed her flock and noted with relief that none seemed to have sustained serious injuries upon their rushed exodus from the sanctuary. The verse they’d cut short still hung in the air: Come, my beloved, to meet the Sabbath bride.

Tears dripped from her face onto the velvet dressing of the Torah to which she held fast. This Torah must have been through so much, she thought, as it brushed against her ear. What can it tell me?

Oddly, the only congregant’s voice that Vivian was able to decipher from the noise swirling around her did not sound fearful or in need of comfort. As Vivian stared ahead at the advancing blaze, she heard the unmistakable raspy chuckle of elderly Philip Katz.

Now that’s one smokin’ Shabbos bride.

One

Rabbi Joseph Glass scanned the sanctuary. Years of congregational work had made him skilled at counting, sorting. Board members. Those whose homes he considered kosher enough to eat in. Pregnant women. People over sixty-five. People between forty-five and sixty-five. Thirty-five and forty-five. And small children. Never anyone between eighteen and thirty-five, save the kids visiting from college.

On a cool Shabbat day in the middle of Passover, he counted thirty-two between forty-five and sixty-five; forty-four above sixty-five; and a few out-of-towners who did not look younger than forty, though Joseph could not say for sure. No one younger.

Despite the consistent encouragement, the signs, and the greeter’s invitation for people to sit toward the front, those in attendance scattered themselves throughout the faded maroon hall, built a century ago to accommodate six hundred. Whole rows of the wooden chairs, fastened together ten across, remained empty. The morning light angled toward them as if to rub it in.

Joseph approached the bima, his trembling hands imperceptible to the rest of the congregation. Even after thirty-six years as a congregational rabbi, he still grew nervous in the moments right before a sermon.

Shabbat shalom, he began. "This morning, I want to talk about the four children that we encountered at our seders this past week, one child in particular. We spend a lot of time condemning the rasha, the Wicked Son—wagging his pointer finger, he glanced down at his notes—I mean, the Wicked Child, whose question ‘What is this tradition to you?’ is interpreted as an absolution of responsibility and belonging to the Jewish people. We also give ample attention to the chacham, the Wise Son—the Wise Child, that is—who affirms Jewish experience and practice, who follows the rules laid out before him and meets high expectations. Ready to learn, he says, ‘Teach me your ways, teach me our ways.’ We gravitate toward the extremes, toward the children who exist in clear categories, toward the ones we know how to respond to. Those we condemn or extol.

"We pay less attention to those in the middle, those who it’s more difficult to answer. I want to focus on the Child Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask, the one who doesn’t know how to enter the conversation. Because in our current Jewish world, the statistics show that many of our children fall into this middle space. And those numbers are growing.

A lot of ink has been spilled, or should I say keyboards rubbed off, speculating about where the millennials are. Why don’t they come to shul? Why don’t they pay for important services and institutions? Why don’t they respect who and what has come before them and see the meaning of what we have sustained? What will happen to our people if they stay away? Many of you have wondered this aloud to me about your own children, as they chart their paths forward in life.

Joseph locked eyes with Ezra Abrams, who had come into his office the previous week to mourn his daughter’s choice to marry a Hindu man she met while teaching English abroad. For a moment the faces of his own children, Jake and Naomi, flashed in his mind.

He fingered through his notes for his next line. "The explanations about the different children’s questions arise from a predetermined conversation about the exact way things are done on Passover. The tradition, the elders, the parents set the terms of the discussion and expect the children to follow suit. We build structures and expect them to walk right in. Older generations disappear hoping future ones will follow in their footsteps.

But times have changed. The world is messier, more complicated. Kids have more choices of who they can be. We give them mixed messages. Follow this path. Be your true self. But younger generations have so many paths laid out before them, so many possible true selves they could be.

Joseph straightened his kippah. Passover is customarily a time for children to ask questions, presumably with parents answering. Well, perhaps this year, we can ask questions to our children, knowing that, perhaps, they are the ones with the answers. ‘My child, what does this tradition mean to you?’

He glanced at Rabbi Vivian Green, adjusting in the chair to his left. Vivian, the assistant rabbi the community had hired a year earlier with the hope of attracting more young people, often seemed uncomfortable sitting in the plush chairs reserved for leadership—as if she were a child anticipating the end of class.

It was Vivian who had inspired this particular sermon. As they prepared for the congregation-wide seder, she had continued to draw his attention to the two sons ("the two children," she would say), the ones who did not live on the extremes, but perhaps just needed to be asked different questions, better questions. Or perhaps offered some silence that they themselves could be trusted to fill in. Then, maybe, they could set the terms of the conversation.

The exchange stuck with Joseph, and when he sat down to write his sermon, he was too tired to come up with something new. So, he had elaborated upon Vivian’s prompt.

The generation of Israelites that witnessed God’s miracles of liberation, Joseph continued, "was not the same generation that entered the promised land. The latter had fresh eyes and strength, they were not broken down by the indignities and suffering of slavery. They could fight for and build a new world, a better one.

The children who do not know how to ask still have the capacity to be our teachers, if we listen for the conversations that they want to have, if we become familiar with the world they want to build and live in. Perhaps they hold the key to the future they will carry forward far beyond many of us.

Joseph’s voice did not slowly deepen as he stated the last words, as it usually did, in order to indicate the sermon’s end. Rather, they came out higher and abrupt, as if the last sentence were a question.

Casting about for a sense of closure, he said decisively, Now let us turn to page 294 as we continue with our service.

Joseph turned back from the bima, ambling slowly toward his chair perched on the side wall between the ark and Vivian, who nodded with approval. He cupped and combed his gray beard with his fingers, wondering whether he truly believed what he said. After many years of turning and turning and turning over sacred texts, it was harder to think new thoughts and spin them into clear proclamations. When he was not recycling old sermons, which he calculated he could do after seven years of letting them lay fallow in his files, he often grasped onto new ideas that popped into his head without letting them solidify, or that others had stated in his presence that he could enrich with his own commentary. His polished delivery could frequently disguise his doubt.

Joseph viewed himself, and the general role of rabbi, as a scholar first. As a seminary student in the 1970s, he had pored over the Talmud’s puzzles with deep anticipation, as if they were prayers themselves, as if, somehow, speaking them aloud could bring sense to the chaos all around. His dedicated study even spawned a subtle hunch, preventing Joseph from standing fully upright, a malady in which he took a strange pride.

As Joseph grew in his profession in the following decade, however, he found that his congregants were not concerned with situating their religious choices in an age-old tradition. Rather, they came to his synagogue to hear a voice that sounded like their own—though a bit wiser—that confirmed their choices. What mattered was the sermon, not study. So, Joseph trained himself to be a better speaker, to choose shorter, digestible texts to share that his congregants would accept and would contemplate. At least for the duration of a two-hour service.

Sammy Bickel, a fixture at Beth Abraham for decades, took Joseph’s place at the bima to begin leading the congregation in prayer. Since the cantor passed away two years before, and the board decided not to rehire for the role, the few members literate in prayer-leading were called upon more and more to do so. As Sammy, sporting one of his signature bowties, carried the Torah around the sanctuary in order to return it to the ark, Joseph continued to mull over his most recent words.

Is it really true? he wondered. That we need to, or even can, create more space for the younger Jews, the entitled ones who seem to want meaning in every moment, but are not willing to dedicate the necessary effort? The children of my congregants, who still act like needy, misbehaved children from Sunday school? My own children and grandchildren who seem to believe this tradition is an uncomfortable coat they put on a few times a year?

Suddenly, a loud thump jolted Joseph from his thoughts. He looked around the room. Sammy Bickel was on the ground, stuck in an uncomfortable prostration in front of the ark. Underneath him was the fallen scroll. The congregation let out a loud, collective gasp.

Sammy Bickel had dropped the Torah.

It was Vivian who reached him first. As Joseph rose from his seat, he hesitated. Should he first tend to Sammy Bickel, his long-time congregant, a friend, he might even say? Or was his responsibility to the Torah, the most sacred and fragile object of the Jewish tradition?

Frozen in his dilemma, he watched as Vivian put a hand on Sammy’s lower back and knelt down to the floor, to his eye level, her short, brown curls covering her mouth. Even so, Joseph could tell that she was whispering consoling words with no hesitation. Though she was still quite new to the role, he thought, it was as if she were trained for this precise moment.

Joseph strode over to retrieve the Torah, sticking out from underneath Sammy. He noticed that the top of one of the wooden spindles was chipped. He picked up the Torah gently, not wanting to harm it any more, wanting to channel deep love toward its wounds. He hugged it tightly, closing his eyes and wishing it healing. He carefully returned it to the open ark.

As he turned back toward Sammy, who was now surrounded by a crowd of congregants, tears sprung from Joseph’s eyes. He felt a rupture, as though the pain absorbed by the Torah was now his pain. Joseph could see Vivian through the cracks in the crowd of bodies, soliciting the assistance of others to help raise Sammy from the floor.

When Sammy stood, he was weeping. There was a damp circle on the red carpet where his face had been. Sammy repeated over and over, How could this be? How could this be? He took a few inelegant steps toward the ark and kissed the Torah.

The commotion continued as congregants comforted Sammy and wondered aloud what would happen now. Some knew that dropping the Torah was a grievous matter, while others intuited as much.

After letting a few minutes pass, after Sammy had been guided toward one of the plush chairs and everyone else returned to their seats, Joseph lightly shushed the crowd. He racked his mind for the right words. My friends, he began, a Torah is one of our most prized possessions, and so is the welfare of our fellow congregants. Let us continue our service and direct our prayers to the healing of our beloved Torah, and our beloved Sammy. We will later consider how to respond as a congregation. But for now, let us pray.

Joseph stepped in to take Sammy’s place leading the service. But as he stood there, in front of the whole congregation, the words would not come. He could only stare, feeling a deep pain as he pictured the chipped spindle that now rested behind the closed doors of the ark.

In the midst of this daze, Joseph felt a palm on his shoulder and heard a whisper in his ear. Would you prefer if I continued the service? Vivian said. Joseph nodded, walked back to his seat on the bima, and sat down, not blinking, just staring ahead.

Joseph had been present once before when a Torah was dropped. It was decades ago, when he was a teenager in Boston. The drop had come at a vulnerable time. Synagogue membership had been slowly dwindling, with many moving from the city center out to the suburbs. When the Torah fell to the floor, it felt like a divine message that it was time for the congregation to move or close its doors. It would not survive in its original location.

Vivian began to sing a niggun, choosing a slow, minor melody reserved for the service of communal repentance on Yom Kippur. She sang it once through alone as the congregation listened to her soothing voice. When the tune started a second time, a few joined in, and when the third round began, most of the congregants sang together. They continued for a few minutes before returning to the regularly scheduled prayer. When they did, it was time for the Amidah, an opportunity for each congregant’s silent meditation. In her own prayer, Vivian modeled a humble pose, hunching her back and furrowing her eyebrows.

Some congregants mirrored her stance while others fidgeted uncomfortably. Discomfort settled in the space of the silence. Throughout the few minutes of quiet, Sammy Bickel interrupted with echoing grunts. He was still crying.

After the Amidah, Vivian continued the service as usual, though an uneasiness lingered in the sanctuary. Something was off. When the service ended, president Harry Mermelstein, a tall, sturdy man whose full head of brown hair was graying at the roots, who moved through the world with an unquestioned confidence, gave the announcements as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But of course, what had happened was anything but ordinary.

Two

Members of the congregation cleared out of the sanctuary, leaving more quickly than usual, as if to shake off the events of the day. Vivian and Joseph made immediate plans to stay and discuss what had happened. They jogged over to a few key leaders to request their attendance. In addition to Harry Mermelstein, they tapped Vera Cohen, the vice president (and with her husband, Charlie, a significant donor to Beth Abraham), and Tamar Benayoun, the head of the ritual committee.

The group gathered in Joseph’s office. They were seated around a long, mahogany table, surrounded by books and sports jerseys featuring the names of New England teams in Hebrew lettering.

That was quite a service, Joseph began.

It sure was! I’ve only ever heard stories about a Torah falling, from when my dad was a kid in Tunis, Tamar said. It was considered a bad sign for the community.

We aren’t superstitious like that anymore. Are we? Rabbi? Harry said.

Vivian knew that Harry was always referring to Joseph when he asked questions ending in Rabbi.

Joseph took his cue. Well, Harry, dropping a Torah is a serious matter. The rabbis required the man—I mean, he stuttered, the, uh, person—who dropped the Torah to fast for forty days as an act of repentance. But given that this is an unrealistic demand to place on Sammy Bickel, there is an alternative option that all who witnessed the event share the fast. So, we could ask everyone who was at today’s service to sign up for individual days of our communal fast.

That seems like a lot to ask, Tamar said. We don’t really believe that something bad would happen otherwise, do we? I mean…. She stared out the window behind Joseph. I know that antisemitism is on the rise…but that couldn’t be…. She left her thought unresolved.

We all felt it, Vera spoke up, when the Torah dropped. The, the, the off-ness. And Tamar’s right. It is a scary time. I think people want to feel safe and empowered in our community. Perhaps this fast can do the job.

"The rabbis also consider tzedakah to be an appropriate response