I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment
millions of human beings are standing at crossroads
and intersections, in jungles and deserts,
showing each other where to turn, what the right way is,
which direction.
—Yehuda Amichai
1
Rabbi Nate stood on the bimah Rosh Hashanah morning waiting for his flock to come to order for his d’var torah. A sea of faces swam before him. Some gazed back at him with expectation, some with disparagement, others with boredom. In the front row to his right sat Reisa with their son and daughter and with Nate’s parents. In the central bank of seats, in the middle of the front row, old Moish Stipelman’s bald pate caught a ray of sunshine. Behind Moish and Sylvia and Frances and Mark Tannenbaum, Melly Darwin and Bubbles wore an air of complacent self-righteousness—
What was Melly doing here?
The younger generation of Darwins must be cozying up to Rabbi Alter at his headquarters in Snowdon (Solomon’s Temple would take some months to complete), and Nate had assumed that Melly and Bubbles would defect as well. What did their presence signify?
Abigail Rosen, a garish turban wound about her head and her eyes burning with a feverish light, sat in her customary place a few aisles back, and Marty was seated behind her, a doting smile on his face, as he dandled a tot on his knee. Nate reflexively scanned the room for Erica and found her in one of the back rows of the section to the left, sitting between Raichie and Tamara, near the Kaplanskys and their sons. He searched in vain for Al Rabinovitch. No trace of him, not even in the rafters.
Nate had struggled hard with his sermon this year. He was in the habit of bouncing his ideas for this most supercharged address of the year off Reisa and any half-way intelligent soul he could corner for a few minutes of agonized discussion. Faith had always been a great sounding board and had helped him fine-tune many a half-baked notion into insight.
Faith was constantly on his mind. He didn’t want to base his most important sermon of the year exclusively on her, yet her tragedy underlined the need for heshbon ha-nefesh, taking stock of the soul, the core theme of these Days of Awe. And so of late the ghostly melody and dread litany of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer had become the default setting for his mind, as he found himself waking to its haunting strains from troubled sleep and humming it under his breath as his thoughts strayed this way and that, but never far away from what he would be saying today.
Finally he had decided to give in and allow himself to say what was really on his mind. “Hayom harat olam, our prayers tell us, ‘Today the world was born.’ Rosh Hashanah, our New Year, celebrates the birth of the world and the birth of humanity. However, our celebration is accompanied not by the partying fanfare of the secular New Year but by solemn soul searching. It is a holy day. Later we will chant the Unetaneh Tokef prayer which begins with the words “Let us recount how utterly holy this day is.”
“Unetaneh Tokef has a tragic origin. It’s attributed to Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, a great scholar who lived in the eleventh century and who was martyred for his faith.
“The metaphor of a Book in which God judges us and records our deeds and seals our fates comes to us from the remembered words of Rabbi Amnon. In this, one of our most solemn prayers, we are reminded of the fragility of our lives as we are assessed and brought to account.
“On Rosh Hashanah humanity’s destiny is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: how many shall pass away and how many shall be brought into existence; who shall live and who shall die; who shall come to a timely end, and who not; who shall perish by fire and who by water; who shall be at peace and who tormented.
“Against this grim pronouncement, Unetaneh Tokef also speaks of God’s throne being founded on loving kindness and truth. In the face of uncertainty, the prayer offers a ray of hope. Its refrain teaches that repentance, reflection, and good deeds can mitigate a dire judgment.
“We don’t need Unetaneh Tokef to tell us we are going to die: we know it in the marrow of our bones. But we don’t know how and when. This prayer with its litany of possible deaths brings us face to face with our mortality, and confronts us with a challenge. Since we will not live forever, we must try to turn towards the kind of life we want to lead. Unetaneh Tokef prods us in the direction of making the best of our lives.
“But how are we to do this? There are so many claims on us, so many ways for our good intentions to be dissipated. In a poem called “A Man in His Life,” the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who died just a few days ago leaving a gorgeous body of work, framed this dilemma in a litany of arresting paradoxes:
A man doesn’t have time
to have time for everything….
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
to make love in war and war in love….
“Somehow we must find a way to live in fullness, nourishing our inner lives by committing ourselves anew to our faith, our families, our community. We must create! Those of us with books or symphonies inside us must get them onto the page. And we must build. As a congregation, we have dreamt of building a new home. We need but take it one step further now to make this communal aspiration a reality. Working individually and together, we must bring all our worthy strivings to fruition. And if we live intensely and fully, to paraphrase the poet, we will
…die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of ourselves and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
2
It was a couple of weeks later, a Monday morning. Erica was pulling on her sneakers, just about to leave the house for a yoga class, when the phone rang.
“Ms. Molnar, Dr. de Costa is on the line.”
Erica’s heart stopped. This was the call she had been dreading and anticipating for a month. Her legs began to shake. Her throat tightened.
“Erica, are you there?”
“Yes,” Erica whispered.
“You’re okay! These new readings are completely normal!” She had never heard him so jubilant.
“The TSH? The Thyroglobulin?”
“Perfectly normal. Everything. Relax. Get on with your life. Don’t give it another thought.”
Don’t give it another thought.
She replaced the phone in its cradle and leaned for a moment against the wall in the hallway, as tears trickled out the corners of her eyes. Then she kicked off her sneakers. There was a yoga class at seven in the evening that she could take instead.
There were people who would be thrilled with this piece of news. First she called Raichie’s school in Toronto and left a message with the secretary that Raichie should be told, in these words, “Mom is fine. Yes, that’s right, ‘Mom’s fine.’” Then she dialled Christine’s pager and got her sister on surgical rounds at St. Joseph’s.
“Fabulous! Excellent! I’ll call you back in an hour.”
Erica hung up. She was dying to talk to somebody, but the rest of the world was gainfully employed.
She went into her office and shot off a rapid-fire emails to Tammie at school, and Rhoda at work.
And then, she took a big gulp of air and decided to tackle a task that was the equivalent of a dive from a high cliff. She pulled open her desk drawer and began to rummage in the cubby where she kept an assortment of business cards in disarray.
The one she was searching for was near the top of the pile. Martin Riess Realties. There was a plethora of numbers on it—office, home, cell. She opted for the cell.
He answered on the first ring.
“It’s Erica.”
There was a brief silence.
“Yes, Erica…. How are you?”
“I—I’m fine…. Is this a terrible time for you? I mean, are you in the middle of something?”
“I’m in the office. It’s not a terrible time.”
“I wanted to tell you—my doctor just called. I’m okay.”
“Baruch hashem! That’s wonderful. I really appreciate hearing it from you like this.”
Erica was quiet and then spoke in a rush.
“Do you have another minute? Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?”
“I have another minute.”
“This isn’t the easiest thing to say to you. I’ve been thinking a great deal over the course of the past few weeks. I simply can’t put out of my mind that letter of yours …. You know, the information that came to me inadvertently? You know what I’m talking about?”
There was an exceedingly long silence. Then Marty spoke in a strangled voice.
“Yes,” he said.
“But really, I realize now that I wasn’t supposed to get that letter until after the fifth date. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” Marty whispered.
“I wondered,” Erica continued haltingly, “I wondered—that is if you’re still keeping an open mind about me—I wondered if perhaps you’d like to consider date number two?”
There was a sound like a pent up sigh being released. She wasn’t sure if it was coming from him or from her.
“Did you have something in mind, Erica?”
She allowed herself a tiny giggle. “Perhaps coffee at the Brûlerie St-Denis?”
“Should we try the one on St-Denis this time?” he asked. “If I recall, you thought it less likely that we’d meet Reconstructionists there. Not, of course, that you dislike Reconstructionists. Just that you prefer to avoid—what was that word again?”
“Scuttlebutt.”