Not Quite Chosen

Mrs. Lipshitz and I sat in the East Parlor under the intense gaze of the Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix. That is to say, his portrait in oil, floor to ceiling, tilted forward at a looming angle. She was a small woman, not terribly old, at least younger than any of the former headmasters whose portraits hung along the wall. She squinted at letters in Hebrew through a small magnifying glass that hung on a gold chain around her neck. We went through the alphabet, aleph, bet, gimel. Then on to sounding out words. And that was how I learned to read my haftarah.

This had all been arranged by my adopted father. As in, he adopted me. It certainly wouldn’t have been the other way around. A few weeks earlier he had taken me into the city. My father was sporting a portable cassette recorder with a cute little microphone. We took a commuter train into Penn Station, then walked up maybe four or five blocks past Times Square and turned west. Down a few blocks Alvin steered us into a skinny brick building flanked by narrow shops. We went in and up a few flights of stairs. The door to a small cluttered office was open. We entered and were greeted by a stocky man with a graying beard and wearing a yarmulke. “Hello Avner, good to see you again,” Alvin said, shaking the man’s hand. “This is my son Marc. Marc, this is Mr. Sobel.” Mr. Sobel motioned us to sit. My father set up his little recorder. Mr. Sobel opened a large hardcover book. Alvin squinted and sighed but finally got the recorder going. Mr. Sobel commenced chanting.

Twenty minutes later we were back on the street walking again. We went to another slender building with a sign on the glass window: Recording — Dubbing. In no time we were heading back down to Penn Station in possession of a thick vinyl disc in a plain brown sleeve.

It was all settled: I was going to be bar mitzvahed. I’d do the ritual reading and henceforth be responsible for my own sins. Then I’d be able to lead prayers, count in a minyan, testify in court, and own property. I’d be a Jew.

Was I a Jew already? I’d been roughed up and called a kike more than once. On the other hand I was in religion class twice a week. And I played my little Bach pieces on the organ in the chapel three times a week. It all seemed more than a little absurd.

When I was not even six I sat on the swing set behind our house with Stacey Small from up the street. We agreed that any god couldn’t be like a person, like some guy with a beard. It would have to be everything, nothing could be outside it. It was sort of like a child’s version of Spinoza. And just a year or so before the bar mitzvah thing came up there was that ride in dad’s Buick station wagon.

It was a visiting day and we were heading off from St. Paul’s to have lunch, Alvin and Joan and the three biological kids in that boat of a car. Somehow, and it wasn’t me, someone brought up the topic of Jesus. I could tell that in this little tribe no one thought he was the son of god. I said “Hey, isn’t Jesus the son of god?”

But Joan spoke up. “No, you don’t believe that, we’re Jews.” And I’m thinking “what else don’t ‘we’ believe. Is the world still round? Does 2 + 2 equal 5 now?” Mind you I was already convinced that there was no god or gods, much less a son of a god. But I thought all the adults were in on the same joke.

It couldn’t have been but a few months earlier that Alvin had taken Michael on that little trip to mid-town Manhattan. I remember him in his room with his portable Panasonic record player, playing that one long track of Hebrew chanting. I’d come in and pretend it was our favorite Beatles record. I’d be swinging my hips and tapping my toe and snapping my fingers like it was the deepest of grooves. When I got my record home and started to learn my track by rote Michael came in and returned the favor.

Of course all those headmasters staring down at old Lipshitz and me couldn’t see the humor. But I did. Still, I behaved myself. I enjoyed learning some Hebrew. The letters were cool. And I got into reading the translation of my haftarah. All this stuff about Jeremiah in some calaboose, buying his cousin’s field with seventeen silver shekels, deeds sealed in clay jars. The city is about to fall and he’s buying real estate.

I’d been working on my drasha, my little speech I’d give to the congregation. I’d read Leon Uris’s Exodus about four times by then. Not sure why I liked it so much. Maybe it appealed to some trace of Jew in me, or I just liked the underdogs winning in the end. I liked the whole kibbutz thing, how it was communal. So I ran with that, something about how this was what real communism was, not that dictator stuff the nasty Cossacks in Russia were up to. Might not have been on the mark, hell I was only 13. Not like I had gotten more than a few pages into Das Kapital.

My precocious diatribe did not pass muster. It was one of the typical phone calls home. Joan answers, does her lukewarm mom thing, asks about school, I say it’s fine and she says “let me put your father on.” There’s a clunk as she sets the phone down. A long pause. Then I hear her call “Alvin, it’s your son.” Another long pause. Then: “Marc. Listen, that speech isn’t going to work.” Something about America, capitalism, how this wasn’t the place to challenge sensibilities. “We’ll help you write something more appropriate.”

Me and religion, never did see eye to eye. Got me in trouble more than once. It was some other day, Alvin dropping me at the front arch and telling me he’d been getting complaints. I was arguing too much with Father Graves. “You gotta respect a man’s religion, it’s like his wife.” I chose not to share my feelings about matrimony at that juncture.

My parents were reconstructionist. So, pretty liberal. And intellectual, though I’d generally reserve that accolade for Joan. They were members of a fairly new congregation and had been holding services at various other venues. So when I mouthed out my haftarah and the drasha that had been rewritten for me, it was at the Friends Meeting House in Manhasset.

Then the party, which was a big to do.

They had a huge tent put up in the backyard. We had to dig deep to come up with “friends” of mine to invite and managed barely a dozen. My friends at the time were two of my teachers, a senior who’d taken me under his wing, and my pal Bob who turned me on to weed and the Grateful Dead. So none of them were invited.

And yet there were a ton of people. Family members of course, but lots of people I didn’t know, friends and business types who knew and worked with Alvin. I got the sense it was a show for them.

But I have to admit it, I had a blast. Joan had taken the trouble to buy me a hell of a suit — dark brown three-piece, wide lapels, pink shirt with French cuffs. So I looked pretty swanky dancing with my borrowed girlfriends. And the gifts of course. Various envelopes of money. I still have some Israeli Savings Bonds. And best of all I got the wetsuit I’d asked for.

That was probably the last day I gave any thought to my Jewish name. I guess we all get one. Mine was Moshe. Moshe. As in Moses. As in the fellow who led his people to the promised land and never got to go in himself. The irony of it never occurred to anyone, even me till now.

If asked these days I say I’m not so much Jewish as Jew-ish. But one thing is certain: I am not now, nor was I ever, one of the chosen.