There was something in it. However he tried.
There was something in it … just beyond him; he knew what it was when he did not confront it intellectually.
When he looked away, as it were, there it was. It was a warm and correct feeling of belonging. “That is it,” he thought. “It feels ‘correct.’”
It was a “clean” word, he thought.
But when he confronted it beyond the issue of faith, there was little he could see.
When he confronted it, he saw that they did not want him and despised his efforts to belong. He saw that, to them, he would always be a Jew. And that all his ratiocination regarding assimilation was, to them, pathetic. More, that there was but a short step between their sad bemusement at his antics and their rage. But beyond that, he felt, there was something in it that he—not “as a Jew,” certainly no, but “as a man”—was entitled to. Something that They had.
That something was his right as an American. That was his right as a citizen of a country which guaranteed religious freedom.
What was that freedom, if not the Freedom to Choose?
Oh, but the smallest movement could have meaning. Not only the larger signs, oh, no, the smaller signs too—and, perhaps, more so.
“There is a different religion,” the Rabbi said. “It is no more complex than that.
“Medad and Eldad,” said the Rabbi. “Yes. Nadab and Abihu.
“The question of prophecy. Where were we?”