Religious Instruction

Stuart Waldman

Old men with rheumy eyes and gruesome coughs trudged up the synagogue’s stone steps. In rumpled suits and black fedoras, hands clasped behind their backs, they walked two by two, punctuating the coughs with loud, emphatic guttural Yiddish.

The next generation arrived a bit later, which was understandable. They came as family units. Kids had to be roused from bed. Holiday clothes had to be fished from the backs of closets. Minds had to be steeled for an all-day service, in an ancient language, on a hard bench, in a packed synagogue, on a hot September day. It was Rosh Hashanah, the first of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, ending in Yom Kippur ten days later.

Synagogue was no big deal for the old men. They grew up in Eastern European shtetls where Jews prayed fifty-two Saturdays a year, and on every one of dozens of holidays no matter how obscure. But the second generation was raised in America, where the Almighty had to compete with the dollar, and lost more often than not. Most of these men had to work Saturdays and holidays. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur every Jew without exception took off work and went to the synagogue. In the end, they felt better for it. This was my mother’s pitch to me. My father remained quiet on the subject.

I didn’t mind the synagogue, perhaps because I wasn’t thirteen and didn’t have to actually go in and pray.  But I did have to dress up for the holidays, and that was a problem. For my older sister, Sheila, dressing up was an opportunity, a chance to harass my mother for a new holiday outfit. To me a new holiday outfit was the same as the old holiday outfit: an instrument of torture. The collar on my white shirt was starched to a knife edge. With the top button closed and sealed with a clip-on tie, the collar dug into my neck and left a thin red line, as if I’d tried to hang myself. The pants were worse. My memory of Rosh Hashanah is of legs drenched with sweat and hairy wool tentacles clinging to my thighs and calves.

That aside, I rather liked the holiday. There was something about it that felt cozy. I knew that every year my mother, father, Sheila and I would walk down the stairs and into the street. We’d join a parade of people who we knew, who were dressed up like us and who were going to the same place as us. Rosh Hashanah was dependable, and what kid doesn’t like that?

It was also one of the few times that I could be sure that four of us would be together like a regular, happy family. This was no small thing. Because my father worked nights driving a taxi, he’d be sleeping when I left for school in the morning, barely awake when I came home for lunch and gone by the afternoon. He worked weekends as well, making family outings—the park, the beach, the movies—difficult to organize.  But that was mere logistics. The real problem was that even when we were together, more and more, we weren’t all that happy a family.

I don’t remember arguments in the years before I went to school, which makes sense. Family lore had it that my father made real money during the war selling the extra gas rations given to cab drivers. If he had money, there wouldn’t have been a reason to fight. My parents’ fights were always about money.

I’m not sure when they started, but I remember them as regularly scheduled events, like the Friday night fights on Channel 11, except theirs began around noon, about the time Sheila and I came home for lunch.

My father was hunched over the kitchen table, drinking his coffee, and reading his Daily News. He was in striped boxer shorts and a white tee shirt. His hair was uncombed and he hadn’t shaved.

My mother stood over him, waving bills in his face.
“Two dollars? Two dollars? What the hell do you expect me to do with two dollars?”
My father kept reading, or pretended to keep reading
“Are you deaf?”
“What can I tell you? It was slow,” he said, still not looking up.
“Yeah, you mean the horses were slow.”
“Don’t start. Don’t start.”

“Joey, I have to go to Yankell. What the hell am I going to do at the butcher with two dollars? You want steak? Ask your goddamn bookie.  From me, you’ll get cow shit.”

And, as they said at Belmont, they’re off.  She calls him sonofabitch. He tells her to drop dead. Same to you, she says. I’m trying to eat, he says. Eat? Look at you. All you do is eat.

That did it. He leapt from the chair, all 325 pounds of him, baring his teeth and pounding the table with a meaty fist.
“Shut that mouth of yours. I mean it. Shut that goddamn mouth.”
“What are you going to do? Hit me? Go ahead. Hit me. Hit me.”
He never touched her, not once. But how could I know he wouldn’t?         
           
We arrived at the synagogue. The old men were already inside, and a crowd was slowly working its way up the steps, funneling through the big doors. The men wore dark suits and muted ties, the somber look necessary because they doubled as funeral outfits.  The women wore shades of gray, brown and white and gussied up their outfits with rings, and necklaces.  The men told bad jokes and argued about baseball.  The woman complained about what Yankell was charging for brisket. The kids were in the street playing hide-and-seek and tag.

My parents finally made it into the synagogue. My sister and I remained outside with our friends. At one point I had to go to the bathroom. It was across the hall from the big room where the adults prayed. The door was open. I stood outside and watched. I’d never actually seen grownups praying.

The room seemed huge, even bigger than the auditorium at P.S. 188, although not as big as the Surf Theater, my standard for large buildings. The ceiling was as high though, and like the Surf, and there was a balcony. It was where the women prayed. The main floor only had men.

They prayed from rows of wood benches that were surrounded on three sides by an elevated platform where the Rabbi stood and prayed along with them. Even if I’d known Hebrew, I wouldn’t have understood a word. The congregation didn’t say their prayers as much as mumble them. Their lips barely moved, and the mumbling came out at high speed. It sounded like they were humming and when all the hums joined together, it sounded like a swarm of bees swooping over our heads. 

My father sat in the last row. Like the rest of the congregation, he cradled an open book on his lap, a siddur, from which he read the prayers, or rather acted like he read the prayers. My father didn’t know a word of Hebrew. He gazed intently at the siddur like everyone else, moved his lips like everyone else, but he wasn’t praying like everyone else. My father was actually humming.

While he faked his prayers, he wrestled with the yarmulke perched atop his head. A yarmulke was perfect on an eight-year-old head like mine, or on an adult bald head, especially those with a circle of flesh on top. But for men like my father who had a full head of hair a yarmulke was trouble.

It wasn’t so bad when he sat. Unfortunately, the congregation was required to stand often during the service. There was no “all rise” from the Rabbi. The command was in the siddur, but of course my father couldn’t read it. He had to follow the congregation’s movements and was always a beat behind. He jumped to catch up and his yarmulke teetered. He snatched at it. Most of the time he got it, but once he missed. The yarmulke tobogganed down the back of his head on hair made slick with Wildroot Cream Oil. He turned around and looked behind him. He looked in front of him. Finally he had to get on his hands knees and reach under the bench. The aisle was narrow, and he was a very big man.

My poor father.  Even from the door, I could see the sweat drops on his forehead. It wasn’t only because of the yarmulke. He was clearly uncomfortable in the synagogue. He fidgeted and mopped his brow. Sometimes he just stared into space. I’m guessing he wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to be where he was, but he was the most obvious, at least to me. 

I was back outside playing when he slipped out. He might have been the first to leave. My mother followed a few minutes later, the good Jewish wife, going home to feed her husband. But if you knew her like I knew her, like my father knew her, you knew the expression: fierce eyes, mouth the size of a pea, nostrils flaring like a bull pawing at the dirt.

I assume this wasn’t the first time the Rosh Hashanah truce was violated, but it was the first time I saw it. The roots of the conflict were old, built into the marriage. My mother’s father, Berche Berger, my beloved Zeyde, was old world Orthodox. With a long white beard, black suit, black hat and white shirt, he looked as if he’d hopped out of a Chagall print. My mother was raised in a super kosher household, where the Sabbath and all holidays were strictly observed and The Law was followed down to the final comma of the most obscure sub-clause.

My father’s family was Jewish in everything but the actual religion.  Sabbath was just another Saturday and most holidays came and went without notice. Those they did observe, such as Rosh Hashanah and Passover, were celebrated in more a gustatory than a religious manner. The only thing that approached the divine at the Waldman household was my Grandmother’s kishka.

In 1933, Joel Lewis Waldman and Esther Berger married in a civil service at City Hall. The marriage was kept secret from all but their closest friends. It had all the elements of a Yiddish theater melodrama: The Orthodox immigrant girl, the devout father, the non-observant boyfriend, and the secret marriage. The truth was more prosaic and American.  My father was in the middle of an alimony battle with a litigious ex-wife and was afraid his getting married would drive her back to court.

Actually, Zeyde liked my father and was happy to have him as a son-in-law. Deeply devout himself, my grandfather was from the Pope Francis wing of Orthodox Jewry. “Who am I to Judge,” was a credo he would have fully endorsed. His ten sons and daughters had varying degrees of commitment to their religion. Some kept kosher homes and observed the Sabbath and all the holidays. Others were, like us, a bit more tentative in their Judaism.  No matter. Each could worship in their own way. They were still Jews. They were still his children. He still loved each one of them with every muscle of his great heart.     

Even if she’d married someone less secular, I doubt that my mother would have ever been deeply religious.  It wasn’t whether she believed or didn’t believe in God. It wouldn’t have dawned on her to ask the question. My mother was far too practical and literal a person to concern herself with the metaphysical.  Her Judaism was all about its customs and homey rituals: cleaning out the kitchen for Passover; stuffing her kids’ mouths with hamantaschen at Purim, celebrating Autumn in a thatched roof sukka, boiling chicken every Friday night. Even those strictly religious duties— lighting Sabbath candles, going to the synagogue on the High Holy Days, fasting on Yom Kippur—were more about the warm assurance of tradition than the glories of religious exaltation.

Still, the attitudes you grow up with don’t go away. She and my father had to work out their differences, which they did with a series of mostly unspoken, highly idiosyncratic compromises. We wouldn’t have a kosher home, but we would buy meat only from the kosher butcher. We wouldn’t have any pork products, but shellfish was okay. My mother wouldn’t touch spareribs at the Chinese restaurant, but the rest of us could. None of us could ever drink milk with meat either at home or when we ate out.  We’d go to the synagogue the first day of Rosh Hashanah but not the second. My mother would go Yom Kippur but the rest of the family wouldn’t. And none of us would go on the Sabbath, though my mother would light Sabbath candles on Friday night.  She’d fast on Yom Kippur.  My father wouldn’t but he’d neither work nor drive. We wouldn’t go to the synagogue on Passover, but my mother would make the kitchen kosher for Passover—even though it wouldn’t be kosher the rest of the year. I’d have to take matzo sandwiches to school.

It was our own private Talmud, a series of Laws unique to our family and dizzying in their goofy complexity.  It was also touching in its way, the embodiment of the idea of marriage, an attempt not to deny differences, but to deal with them in a manner that caused a minimum of pain for all involved.

What happened? I don’t think it was one single dramatic event. There was no fuck him/ fuck her moment. Shit just piled up. Why would you want to work things out with a man who gambled, got the family in debt and lied to your face about the gambling and the debt? Why would you want to work things out with a woman who was always going at you, hassling you, accusing you, belittling you, making you feel like dirt in front of your own children?

The Rosh Hashanah I watched my father pray was the last Rosh Hashanah he spent in the synagogue. Soon he was bringing home steaks from a gentile butcher, then ham, then bacon. One Yom Kippur he made bacon and eggs in the kitchen, while my mother fasted in the living room.  He started driving on the High Holy Days and even went to the race track on Yom Kippur, a very large sin committed on the day you were to atone for your sins, a little like masturbating in the confession booth. Judaism became just another fault line in a marriage increasingly filled with tremors and small earthquakes. She called him a goy. He called her a phony. My sister and I watched.

I don’t know if it was because Zeyde had recently died, fraying her main connection to Judaism or because she was picking her battles, but my mother pretty much threw up her hands.  She made new rules for us but it was more to save face than anything else.  I no longer had to go to synagogue on the holidays or wear a tie and wool slacks but I still had to wear pressed chinos and a shirt with a collar, but the shirt didn’t have to be white. I could eat bacon and ham at home, but only in sandwiches, not on a plate. I could eat bread during Passover, but only Italian bread. They rules were clearly wacky, and we all made fun of them. My mother just laughed and shrugged. It was kind of sad.

This all happened around the time, ironically enough, when she enrolled me in Hebrew School, a rite of passage for every young Jewish boy approaching the age of thirteen.  The school was in a damp, dimly lit room across from water pipes and electric panels, in the windowless cellar of our synagogue. The teacher was Rabbi Lippman, a very tiny, very old man in a rumpled suit who wore a telephone-sized hearing aid in his ear, which was irrelevant because of his non-existent English. His assistant, Mrs. Marx, translated for him, but her English was pretty shaky. As pale as Kafka, Mrs. Marx always wore the same long black dress and white collar, circa 1910.  Besides translating, she was the Rabbi’s enforcer. Her specialty was threatening stares, shrill Yiddish oaths and, when all else failed, the ear twist.

The curriculum was Hebrew, written and spoken. The teaching method was rote memorization and class recitation. Theoretically we were there to learn the language of our ancestors so that we could attend service every Saturday as adults, and unlike my father, actually read from the siddur. But most of our parents had a more modest, and realistic goal: that we learn enough Hebrew to perform the required public chanting of a Hebrew text at our Bar Mitzvah, and do it well enough so as not to embarrass our parents.

I had looked forward to the Big Day but because of commercial, not religious, considerations. I wanted the cash. In my neighborhood at least, a Bar Mitzvah was an all cash event.  Whenever I fantasized about it, I saw white envelopes filled with bills or something negotiable like U.S. savings bonds. I didn’t think about what I’d have to do to earn it.

I hated every thing about Hebrew School: Rabbi Lippman, Mrs. Marx, the smelly basement, missing television for two hours every week, the stupid language, the even more stupid alphabet.

“Why do I have to learn Hebrew? Daddy doesn’t know Hebrew,” I whined. 

My mother looked at me as if I were completely crazy.  “How are you going to have a Bar Mitzvah if you don’t learn Hebrew? You want to go up there and sound like a moron?”

I shrugged. “I don’t care.”

But they did, even my father, which was the biggest shock. “Stuie,” he wheedled. “You’re going to have a Bar Mitzvah. You got to learn Hebrew.”

“You had a Bar Mitzvah. You don’t know Hebrew.”
“I knew it then. I went Hebrew School, but it was years ago. I forgot. Stuie, don’t be silly. You got to go.”

I think it was their united front that infuriated me more than anything else. I fought back the only way I knew how. I sulked.  I wouldn’t watch TV. I moped around the house. I even left food on my plate. I’d used these techniques before and they’d always worked. My parents usually had a low tolerance for my pain, but not this time.  My Bar Mitzvah trumped my misery. They ignored me.

I was pissed, so pissed that I did something very much out of character: I got into trouble. I joined forces with my friend Eddie who, unlike me, was fearless and adored trouble. We got an idea from an over-the-top suspense/horror TV show, Lights Out, a precursor to The Twilight Zone but cornier. A story would be introduced each week by a disembodied head floating on a black background and hovering over a candle.  The head spoke in a deep, menacing voice—like Dracula without the accent—about murder,  mayhem and evil. When he finished, the head raised his voice and intoned: LIGHTS OUT. The candle snuffed and the screen went black.           

Eddie and I tiptoed down the cellar stairs, intentionally late to class.  We waited outside the door for the official start: Rabbi Lippman’s alphabet recitation,

“Aleph,” he croaked, tapping his desk with his ruler. “Bet” tap, “Gimmel” tap. “Dalet” tap. The class droned the response. “Aleph. Bet. Gimmel”
Just before “Dalet,” the door flew open and Eddie stepped into the room.
“Who knows what evil there is?”
“Vat are you doink?” Mrs. Marx screamed. “Zeet down. Zeet down.”

Eddie started laughing. Mrs. Marx shook her finger and moved menacingly towards Eddie’s ear. Eddie took off. Mrs. Marx chased him. They ran around the room Tom and Jerry style. The class shrieked and cheered.

“LIGHTS OUT. LIGHTS OUT,” he shouted, laughing and running

I opened the control panel to pull out the fuse. But which one?  I had expected a single fuse like in the hall closet in our apartment. There were at least five.  

“LIGHTS OUT, LIGHTS OUT. LIGHTS OUT.”

I yanked them all out, one by one. Of course the classroom fuse was the last.

The cellar turned black instantly. I heard footsteps upstairs and muffled shouts. I heard Rabbi Lippman sputtering in Yiddish and Mrs. Marx screaming in real fear.   A second later the whole class was screaming with her. I wanted to put the fuses back in but I couldn’t see my hand, much less the panel. Mistake number two. No flashlight.

I don’t know how long it took for the door at the top of the stairs to open and the flashlight beam to find me. When it did, I was cowering against the wall like an escapee from a chain gang, fuses scattered on the floor around me.

The next day Eddie and I were expelled from Hebrew School.

If I thought I’d gotten away with something, I was wrong. My parents soon found another teacher, Rabbi Pell, who specialized in semi-private lessons to Hebrew dunces and troublemakers.  He couldn’t have come cheap.

There were three of us in the class. The curriculum was different from Rabbi Lippman’s. There was no Aleph, Bet, no Hebrew recitation. It was more like an SAT, teaching-to-the-test, crash course.  Rabbi Pell was an old man like Rabbi Lippman and Yiddish was also his first language. That was all the two had in common.

Rabbi Pell was tall. He was lean, and despite his age, strong.  On hot days he took off the jacket of his black suit and rolled up his sleeves. You could see the ropy sinews on his arm. Even his hands were scary, huge, with gnarled fingers like the roots of an old tree.

He walked with a cane, but that didn’t make him seem weak, just the opposite. The cane scared the shit out us. The sound of it hitting the floor—bam-bam-bam-—as he moved toward you made us quake. Rabbi Pell tolerated nothing—no talking, no whispering, no smirking, no laughing. You couldn’t yawn without getting The Stare. We had to pay attention to every word he said and if we didn’t, we paid for it. 

He didn’t yell like Mrs. Marx. If he thought you fucked up in any way, he’d pin with his eyes, and growl through his brown teeth: “Paskudnyak.”  According to the online Yiddish dictionary paskudnyak means scoundrel, a word more suited to Downton Abbey than Coney Island, but like most Yiddish words, the definition is fluid. Rabbi Pell’s definition was: evil little prick whose life won’t be worth shit when I get through with you. To make sure you understood, he would lift his cane over his head like John Henry’s  hammer, and slam it onto the table inches from your fingers. His aim was perfect. He never hit anyone, but you could never be certain. The man knew his stuff. In another life, Rabbi Pell would have been a chaplain for the Mossad.

A small black-and-white photograph in an oval frame hangs on my bathroom wall.  It’s a sixty year old image of me and my family, taken on Saturday, August 7th, 1954, my Bar Mitzvah day. It was obviously shot with a cheap camera. My mother, father, Sheila and me are in various degrees of focus. The background is so bleached out that I can’t be sure where we were. I know it was taken before the ceremony because I’m still wearing my tie.

Sheila, a few months from her sixteenth birthday, looks very pretty in a simple white dress and understated hair style; Grace Kelly was big that year. My mother is on her right. Her face is the most out of focus, but you can see her tight mouth. She does not look happy. I have no idea why. It could have been the heat.  It could have been that my Aunt Beattie, my father’s sister, was behind the camera, a guarantee that my mother wouldn’t smile. It could have been that she wanted to stop wasting time taking stupid pictures and get the show on the road. This sounds the most like her. My father stands a little behind me at a slight angle. He has his left arm around my shoulder while my other shoulder blocks his body. Did he arrange this purposefully? When you weigh 325 pounds posing for a photo is probably not your favorite activity. Or he could have been making sure that I was the focal point of the photo. I’d like to believe that.  I am holding a velvet bag with a Jewish star embroidered in gold. It contains my talis, the prayer shawl that I will wear as I chant the Hebrew that Rabbi Pell had beaten into my brain. I am staring at the camera with a somewhat pained look, not angry like my mother, but not happy either. It may be that the sun is in my eyes, but I don’t think so.

I’ve forgotten almost all of my Bar Mitzvah. I have a hazy memory of standing on the platform looking down at Rabbi Pell’s gnarled finger on the Torah. I think I remember people clapping and shouting Mazel Tov, although that could have been at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah. Then I’m at the party in our apartment where my parents’ friend Henry Leibowitz is so drunk he’s pouring scotch into the telephone receiver.

The day after the Bar Mitzvah, I put my Talis bag in the bottom of my mother’s closet, confident I’d never open it again. A week later, like my father, I’d scrubbed every single word of Hebrew from my memory.  A month later I was wearing jeans and a polo shirt on Yom Kippur. My mother didn’t say a word.

Interestingly, after that the only time I spoke of things Jewish was with my father. He hadn’t become born again, not even close. He still ate the flesh of beasts with cloven hooves and played the ponies on Yom Kippur. His was a different sort of Judaism, free of The Law and God.

We’re watching Sandy Koufax on TV. My father turns to me: “Do you know he won’t pitch on Yom Kippur? Even if they’re in the World Series he won’t pitch.” He beams. “Yeah, I know. You told me,” I say with an adolescent sneer and thinking: when the fuck did you give a shit about Yom Kippur?

And so it went. You should read Isaac Singer. He’s a genius. Who do you think discovered the Polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, another Yiddel. How many of us are they and we keep producing geniuses. And look at Israel. They fought off how many countries without anyone lifting a goddamn finger to help and they made the desert bloom while they were at it. Yes, I voted for Jacob Javits. Why not?  So he’s a Republican. So what?  He’s a Jew.

It took a while, but I finally got it. My father saw himself as a good Jew. He always had, but I hadn’t understood.  This revelation didn’t make me rethink my own feelings or ponder the complexities of being Jewish. The last thing a teenager wants to ponder is complexity. I just put it down as one more item in the bullshit that I was daily discovering in the adult world in general, and in my father in particular.

It is May, 1966. I’m in a synagogue for the first time in the nearly twelve years since my Bar Mitzvah. I stand in front of a wood bench, an open siddur in my hands, my old Bar Mitzvah talis draped around my shoulders.

The synagogue is in Coney Island, where my parents still live or rather where my mother still lives. It’s not our old synagogue. That’s been closed for a few years. Coney Island’s demographics have changed a lot since I moved out of the house. There are ten of us in the congregation including me, just enough to make a minyan, the minimum number of adult males Jewish law requires for a service. I’m the youngest in the minyan by at least fifty years.

I’m here to say Kaddish for my father. The prayer is for him, but I’m doing it for my mother. Before I leave her apartment, she slips me an English transliteration of the Kaddish prayer. She shrugs and smiles, almost shyly. For some reason it makes me want to cry, but I don’t. 

There’s an English version on the facing page of the transliteration. After I finish the Hebrew I try to get into the English words. I am twenty-five. My father had just died of a sudden heart attack. I’m in shock. I need comfort. What can I lose?

The English words speak of God but nothing of loss. If I were a good Jew, I suppose I might have found solace in it.  It only gets me angrier at my religion and the God I don’t believe in. When the Kaddish is over, the regular Sabbath service resumes.  I want to leave, but I can’t. There’s no minyan without me. The entire service for these devout old men depends on, of all people, me. So like my father so many years before, I stare intently at my siddur move my lips and hum.

A fragment of a poem pops into my head. It’s not random. Like a good English major, I’d been looking up passages that would speak to my grief and regret: Lear’s wail over his daughter’s body, Whitman’s When lilacs at your dooryard last bloom’d, an elegy by Tennyson, one by Byron.  But the words that come to mind at that moment were written by a man who died not many months before my Bar Mitzvah. While the old men drone in Hebrew, I stand in front of my bench, cradling my siddur and silently mouth the English words of a Welsh poet.

            And you, my father, there on that sad height,
            Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
            Do not go gentle into that good night,
            Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
           
Finally, and for the first time since my mother called about my father, I cry.

---

Stuart Waldman was born in Coney Island. He attended Brooklyn and Columbia University where he received an MA in English and Comparative Literature. He’s written three children’s books, as well as a history of the Greenwich Village waterfront. He’s owned number of small publishing companies and is presently the publisher and editor of Mikaya Press, which he owns with his wife, Elizabeth Mann. He is writing a memoir about growing up in the 40s and 50s called: A Coney Island of My Mind.