PREFACE
Here are some of the stories,
jokes or anecdotes that come back to me to help me understand who and how I
came to be what I am. I put them down in
the order they come to me, on the off chance that such a logic may
unconsciously reveal connections I do not consciously know as I set out on this
enterprise.
In a way these are old,
traditional but perhaps also literary stories, but so far as I know I never
read them anywhere and somehow they entered my mind at a point that is no
longer fixed into a context. There is a
memory occasionally of when I first told the tale, and from then on each time
it has been repeated it has changed a little here, a little there, making it
mine. But not mine in the sense of an
original creative act, the way many of my short stories begin as personal
memories or dreams of memories or memories of dreams, and then develop into
something that seems like a literary process of polishing and conscious
creativity.
The Rabbi and the Priest
A
young Catholic priest called on a rabbi in his small Midwestern town and asked
if he may follow him around for a few days.
Remember, this happened in some modern time and place. The story is not set in Eastern Europe and
imagined to be peopled by my ancestors of a hundred or two hundred years ago.
The priest introduced himself: “My honored colleague, I am a student of
religions, not just a clergyman, and I have always been fascinated by how different
Judaism seems from Christianity, even though we share many things in common—the
Old Testament, prayers constructed out of psalms, and well, some very basic
aspects of morality, what others call the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
The rabbi, an older man, with a long
beard now almost pure white, said: “You want to follow me around? All day? I should understand? But maybe we should have
a glass tea together first?”
“Let me put it more carefully then,
rabbi,” the priest pressed on. “I would
like to see what you do by yourself, with your congregants, with students, with
everybody, not just in your synagogue and specifically pastoral duties.
But...”
The older man nodded his head. “Yes, yes, yes, I think maybe I
understand. Maybe I don’t. You want to come along with me the whole day,
so why not? We will start tomorrow
morning at six for the first minyan
of the day. Later we shall discuss and
you can tell me what you learned.”
“Hold on for a minute,” the young
clergyman said. “What is a minyan?”
The rabbi patiently explained that
Jews can pray together only in a group of ten men, or at least the Orthodox
still observe this law. The priest
nodded his head, as though he understood.
He decided he needed to watch and wait and then ask questions later.
So the next morning—a Tuesday, if
you want to know—the priest arrived bright and early at the rabbi’s house. Already the older man was dressed, and he
invited the priest in for breakfast. And so the day began with the younger man
following the rabbi around the various places, here and there and then back to
the synagogue, and so on everywhere the old Jew went. Shul,
classroom, a sick man’s sick room, back to shul,
some more classes in the afternoon, more prayers and study, a talk with a woman
in the rabbi’s office who is thinking about a divorce, and so on and so forth.
Then, on Sunday morning, after the
morning prayers, back at the rabbi’s home, the priest says: “My dear colleague,
I really appreciate this special favor you have granted me. I have gone with you to your early morning
prayers with your minyan which I now
understand as a gathering of ten men, went to various classes in your school
for the very young and the more mature, visited the homes of sick and lonely
congregants, attended more prayer sessions, classroom lessons, and so on and
on. But, now, please, can I ask you one
important question that has formed itself in my mind after these few days, a
question that never came up in all my years of study in our theological
seminary and in our ecclesiastical follow-up courses?”
The old rabbi, smoothing his white beard,
looked at the young priest and saw trouble in the young man’s eyes.
“Nu, so tell me what it is you want to ask?”
“Well, rabbi,” said the priest a
little hesitantly, “it seems to me that when you say prayers at the dinner table
or in synagogue or in front of the school assembly, you and the others, you all
race through the liturgy so quickly it
sounds just like the humming of bees. It
hardly seems that you listen to your own words.
Maybe it’s because my own Hebrew is purely academic and I can’t follow
very well.”
“No, no,” says the rabbi, “I think
you are right, but please do go on. ”
“Well, when you go to your study
classes—what you call learnin—you and the others start to pick apart
every sentence, you parse the syntax and grammar and argue over every tittle
and jot of the text. In fact, you don’t
get very far in a session. You just
don’t let go and keep asking questions, pulling down other books and searching
for similar usages, following allusions, and, frankly, I don’t see what you are
getting at. I don’t mean to be
disrespectful at all, rabbi, but please tell me what is going on.”
The rabbi laughed.
He slapped the priest on the
shoulders and said: “Oy, this must be confusing to a goy like you, please
excuse the expression. For us it is very
simple. Let me try to explain. When we go through what you call our liturgy,
our prayers and meditations, we just half hum them and half sing the
words. Why? That’s a very good question. You are a very observant young man, and I
hope you will have a blessing on your head for it. When we pray we are talking to God, and He,
Blessed be His Name, He knows what we are saying and also more important, what
we are trying to say, and He has heard these words thousands and thousands of
times before. We are really just
reminding him that we are here and we remember our obligations to him. He makes the distinction between we mean and
what we imperfectly say. But, on the
other hand, my dear young man, when we Jews
sit down to study the holy texts, that is altogether another kettle of fish
altogether. Those sacred books represent
and indeed are God speaking to us. In
them, He is telling us what to do and what not to do and why. How in the world can we figure out what he
means unless we pull apart and recontextualize
everything? We have to look at
the words on the page, the letters that make up the words, the shape of each
letter and the pattern of sentences in each text, compare them to similar
texts, and so on. Then moreover we have
to try to figure out how to apply these meanings we start to extrapolate from
the texts to the specific time-bound situation we find ourselves in and thus
the parameters of what is possible.
Since we probably don’t ever get it just right, nu, so the next
discussion has to start all over from the beginning.“
The young priest stared in
amazement.
“Thank you, so much, rabbi,” he
said, getting up. “I must go back to say
evening mass.”
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