They truly were a team. From the pulpit, the Reb might zing her with, “Excuse me, young lady, could you tell us your name?” She would get him back by telling people, “I’ve had thirty wonderful years with my husband, and I’ll never forget the day we were married, November 3, 1944.”
“Wait…,” someone would say, doing the math, “that’s way more than thirty years ago.”
“Right,” she would say. “On Monday you get twenty great minutes, on Tuesday you get a great hour. You put it all together, you get thirty great years.”
Everyone would laugh, and her husband would beam. In a list of suggestions for young clerics, the Reb had once written “find a good partner.”
He had found his.
And just as harvests make you wise to farming, so did years of matrimony enlighten the Reb as to how a marriage works-and doesn’t. He had officiated at nearly a thousand weddings, from the most basic to the embarrassingly garish. Many couples lasted. Many did not.
Can you predict which marriages will survive? I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “If they’re communicating well, they have a good chance. If they have a similar belief system, similar values, they have a good chance.”
What about love?
“Love they should always have. But love changes.”
What do you mean?
“Love-the infatuation kind-‘he’s so handsome, she’s so beautiful’-that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.
“On the other hand, a true love can enrich itself. It gets tested and grows stronger. Like in Fiddler on the Roof. You remember? When Tevye sings ‘Do You Love Me?’?”
I should have seen this coming. I think Fiddler on the Roof was pretty much the Reb’s worldview. Religion. Tradition. Community. And a husband and wife-Tevye and Golde-whose love is proven through action, not words.
“When she says, ‘How can you ask if I love you? Look at all I’ve done with you. What else would you call it?’
“That kind of love-the kind you realize you already have by the life you’ve created together-that’s the kind that lasts.”
The Reb was lucky to have such a love with Sarah. It had endured hardships by relying on cooperation-and selflessness. The Reb was fond of telling young couples, “Remember, the only difference between ‘marital’ and ‘martial’ is where you put the ‘i.’”
He also, on occasion, told the joke about a man who complains to his doctor that his wife, when angry, gets historical.
“You mean hysterical,” the doctor says.
“No, historical,” the man says. “She lists the history of every wrong thing I’ve ever done!”
Still, the Reb knew that marriage was an endangered institution. He’d officiated for couples, seen them split, then officiated when they married someone else.
“I think people expect too much from marriage today,” he said. “They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That’s TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.
“Like Sarah says, twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren’t so great, you don’t junk the whole thing. It’s okay to have an argument. It’s okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It’s part of being close to someone.
“But the joy you get from that same closeness-when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other-that, as our tradition teaches us, is a blessing. People forget that.”
Why do they forget it?
“Because the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning. I’m old enough to remember when it used to be a positive. A committed person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You don’t want to tie yourself down.
“It’s the same with faith, by the way. We don’t want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don’t want to commit to God. We’ll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power-in faith and in marriage.”
And if you don’t commit? I asked.
“Your choice. But you miss what’s on the other side.”
What’s on the other side?
“Ah.” He smiled. “A happiness you cannot find alone.”
Moments later, Sarah entered the room, wearing her coat. Like her husband, she was in her eighties, had thick, whitening hair, wore glasses, and had a disarming smile.
“I’m going shopping, Al,” she said.
“All right. We will miss you.” He crossed his hands over his stomach, and for a moment they just grinned at each other.
I thought about their commitment, sixty-plus years. I thought about how much he relied on her now. I pictured them at night, holding hands on the edge of the bed. A happiness you cannot find alone.
“I was going to ask you a question,” the Reb told his wife.
“Which is?”
“Well…I’ve already forgotten.”
“Okay,” she laughed. “The answer is no.”
“Or maybe no?”
“Or maybe no.”
She walked over and playfully shook his hand.
“So, it was nice to meet you.”
He laughed. “It was a pleasure.”
They kissed.
I don’t know about forty days before you’re born, but at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear two names shouted from the heavens.
As a child, I am certain I will never marry out of my religion.
As an adult, I do it anyhow.
My wife and I are wed on a Caribbean island. The sun is going down, the weather is warm and lovely. Her family reads Bible passages. My siblings sing a funny tribute. I step on a glass. We are married by a local female magistrate, who offers us her own private blessing.
Although we come from different faiths, we forge a loving solution: I support her, she supports me, we attend each other’s religious functions, and while we both stand silent during certain prayers, we always say “Amen.”
Still, there are moments: when she is troubled, she asks Jesus for help, and I hear her pray quietly and I feel locked out. When you intermarry, you mix more than two people-you mix histories, traditions, you mix the Holy Communion stories and the Bar Mitzvah photos. And even though, as she sometimes says, “I believe in the Old Testament; we’re not that different,” we are different.
Are you angry with me about my marriage? I ask the Reb.
“Why would I be angry?” he says. “What would anger do? Your wife is a wonderful person. You love each other. I see that.”
Then how do you square that with your job?
“Well. If one day you came and said, ‘Guess what? She wants to convert to Judaism,’ I wouldn’t be upset. Until then…”
He sang. “Until then, we’ll all get alonnng…”
Life of Henry
I couldn’t help but compare the Reb and Pastor Henry now and then. Both loved to sing. Both delivered a mean sermon. Like the Reb, Henry had been shepherd to just one congregation his whole career and husband to just one wife. And like Albert and Sarah Lewis, Henry and Annette Covington had a son and two daughters, and had also lost a child.
But after that, their stories veered apart.
Henry, for example, didn’t meet his future wife at a job interview. He first saw Annette when she was shooting dice.
“Come on, six!” she yelled, throwing the bones against a stoop with his older brother. “Six dice! Gimme a six!”