Officially, Deborah had been rabbi at Beth Shalom since the first of September and had already presided over two Sabbath services and a funeral. This had brought her into contact with some of the members of the congregation. But only on the eve of the New Year did she finally realize why the architect had designed the sanctuary to hold nine hundred worshipers.
With the completion of the circle of seasons, Jews all over the world would be gathering for their yearly expiation and atonement. The ritual catharsis available to Catholics at all times was theirs only on the High Holy Days. They shared a collective guilty conscience that drew enormous satisfaction from rising to confess in unison and of course to be further berated by their spiritual leader, garbed in white canonicals.
Traditionally on this occasion, the rabbi’s sermon would be based on the biblical tale of Abraham being called upon to offer up his only son, Isaac, as a sacrifice to God.
But Rabbi Deborah Luria used this text merely as a point of departure. After a fleeting allusion to the piety of Abraham and the unquestioning obedience of Isaac, she continued, “Yet there are other sacrifices told of in the Bible that surpass the magnitude of Abraham’s. For example,” she went on, “in The Book of Judges, we find the story of Jephtha, a great hero who was obliged by a sacred oath to slay his only daughter.”
There was a stirring among the congregants. Few, if any of them, knew the story.
“Look at some of the significant contrasts,” Deborah continued. “For one, Abraham never communicated his intent to Isaac—who we know from the commentators was no mere youngster, but actually thirty-seven years old at the time.”
Her audience whispered to one another (“They never taught us that at Sunday school”) as she went on. “In the story of Abraham and Isaac, there is no meaningful dialogue between parent and child. But Jephtha not only discusses his oath with his daughter, she actually encourages him to fulfill it.
“Unlike the case of Isaac, no angel appears at the last minute to say, ‘Do not touch that child.’ Jephtha must actually kill his own daughter.” She could almost feel the shiver that ran through the silent sanctuary as she continued, “I believe that this is a truer story of religious devotion, one that makes us face the realities of life: That we must be ready to serve a God who sends us no angel, neither to rescue us, nor to tell us that what we are doing is right.
“And so, tomorrow when we read of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, I will be thinking of Jephtha’s daughter, whose name is not even deemed worthy of mention in the Bible. For throughout history, Jewish women have always been Jephtha’s daughters.”
It was indeed a good New Year for Congregation Beth Shalom and its new rabbi.
But it was not only the public Deborah they appreciated. It was also her devotion as a pastoral healer. Sometimes, in the tradition of her biblical namesake, she acted as a kind of judge in marital disputes. At others she counseled the distraught and comforted the bereaved.
Just a week after Yom Kippur, Lawrence Greene, a pediatrician from Essex, had a head-on collision when rushing to an emergency call late at night. Deborah spent nearly forty-eight hours at the hospital with Mrs. Greene until her husband was out of danger, leaving the woman’s side only briefly to deliver and pick up Eli from school.
There was only one problem. And it did not take long for Deborah to realize it. Her personal life was a catastrophe.
Almost by definition, a rabbi’s duties are performed at abnormal hours. This was doubly difficult for a young single mother like herself. Once they were ensconced in their new house and half-acre garden, Deborah was no longer able to provide her son with a Sabbath even remotely like those that had so formed her as a Jew. There had been much more to Rav Luria’s Sabbath dinners than mere blessings and singing of songs. They were a weekly affirmation of the values of the family.
But she, Eli, and Mrs. Lamont made an odd Sabbath trio. After hurriedly dressing to be ready for Temple, she would gather her son and housekeeper to light the candles and help Eli with the blessings on the wine and bread.
They would quickly eat and sing a bit of the Grace After Meals before she had to rush off to Temple, put on her “uniform”—as Eli called it—and conduct Sabbath evening services.
Deborah did her best to compensate for her Friday absences by rehearsing her sermons with him on Thursday evenings and accepting his criticisms—some of which were quite helpful. “You wave your hands too much, Mom,” he would say. “You look like you’re flagging a cab.”
Then there was Saturday morning. Once a month Beth Shalom had a children’s service. She would leave him in the small chapel while she ascended to the sanctuary to lead the grown-ups. How could she have suspected that while she was uplifting their parents’ souls, the children downstairs were teasing her son for being a rabbi’s child?
When, as they drove home, she finally pried out of him the reason for his melancholy, Deborah could not keep from thinking of her brother’s childhood agony as Rav Luria’s son, and the strain it had imposed on him.
Her rabbinical studies had touched on the “PKS” phenomenon, otherwise known as Preachers’ Kids Syndrome—the unusual pressure put on clergymen’s children. Now she had the dubious advantage of knowing about it without being able to deal with it.
On Saturdays when there was a bar mitzvah, Deborah could not depart until the Grace After Meals. This meant that she would arrive home long after Eli had eaten lunch, and he would by then be glumly watching a ball game on television.
That evening she would have to rush out again on a round of sickbed visits that sometimes brought her home at two or three in the morning.
They would drive together to the Temple for Sunday School. They would separate at the doorstep—Eli heading desultorily for his classroom, hoping fervently that his mother, in her capacity as principal, would not pay them a visit this week.
Perhaps the biggest lie that Deborah had told herself was that she could make things right in a single afternoon. The time after Sunday School was to have been sacrosanct for mother and child to spend together. But of course she had not reckoned on certain inexorable facts of life.
For one, Sunday is the time favored by most couples for weddings. Also, because there can be no burials after Friday morning and all day Saturday, there would be a disproportionate number of funerals scheduled for Sunday. So much for the “sacrosanctity” of her parental time.
Deborah was conscientious and compassionate. She was dedicated. And yet while these qualities were also necessary for the exercise of motherhood, she seemed invariably to fulfill the rabbi’s duties, not the parent’s.
Her intuition told her that children like Eli know instinctively when they are being relegated to a back burner, responding with a direct protest to their elders. There would be only one problem. The communication would be in code. She would not receive a letter from her seven-year-old’s attorney stating, “My client objects to your inadequate parenting and reserves the right to sue for any permanent damage that may occur as a result of your negligence.”
Would that things were so simple. Instead, Eli’s resentment might be expressed by various disruptive behavior patterns. And by the time his messages were decoded, perhaps it would be far too late.