"But she lives in Tel Aviv and I want to stay in Jerusalem."
"You don't know my Aunt Gittel."
Chapter Two
Bert Raymond rapped the meeting to order. "I think we can probably dispense with the reading of the minutes of the last meeting. We didn't do much as I recall."
Ben Gorfinkle raised his hand. "I'd like to hear the minutes. Mr. Chairman." he said evenly.
"Oh, well sure. Ben. Will you read the minutes. Barry?"
"Well, Bert. I mean Mr. Chairman. I didn't get around to writing them up. I mean I got my notes, but it's like in rough draft."
"Well, that's all right. Barry. I'm sure Ben will overlook any little mistakes in grammar—"
"What I was going to say is that not having it in final form, and since we didn't decide on anything special last meeting. I didn't think it worthwhile bringing my notes."
The president was a tall, nice-looking young man. a good guy that everyone liked and no one would think of embarrassing needlessly; he was obviously uncomfortable at the secretary's negligence. Gorfinkle shrugged his shoulders. "I guess if nothing happened, it doesn't make any difference." With this new board, there were so many major things to object to. it seemed fruitless to jib at a little matter like not reading the minutes.
"Okay," said the president gratefully, "then let's get on with the important business of this meeting. What's your pleasure on the rabbi's letter?"
Again Gorfinkle raised his hand. "I guess I must have missed something last meeting. I didn't hear about any letter from the rabbi."
The president was contrite. "Gee, that's right, Ben, you don't know about it. I got it during the week, and I talked to some of the boys about it, so I assumed everyone knew. I got this letter from the rabbi asking for a leave of absence for three months starting the first of the year."
"May I see the letter?"
"Actually, I don't have it with me, Ben. But there's nothing in it—just what I said. You know, 'Please regard this as a request for a three-month leave of absence.' That kind of thing, just a straight business letter."
"He gave no reason for his request?" Gorfinkle asked. "No. just what I told you—"
"I tell you it's a ploy," interrupted Stanley Agranat. "He's not interested in a leave of absence. What he's interested in is a contract. He sends us this letter so we got to go to him and say. 'What gives. Rabbi?' Then he says he wants to take off for three months. So we say. 'But. Rabbi, you can't take off three months in the middle of the year like this. You got a job here.' So he plays Mickey the Dunce and says. 'Oh, have I? I don't have no contract.' Then we got to kind of make it up to him and explain how we haven't had a chance to get around to the matter of contract and how we're sorry and all that crap. And that's supposed to put us on the defensive, see? It's just a ploy."
"So what if we say no?" demanded Arnold Bookspan. "When you showed me that letter. Bert. I said right away it was an ultimatum. He's not asking us. he's telling us. Now. if he's a bona fide employee of the temple, he can't take off just like that. And if he can take off just like that, then as I see it. he's not a bona fide employee of the temple."
"Well, look, guys." said the president, "fair is fair. They always work on a contract, and we let his run out."
"We ought to go about this logically/' said Paul Goodman, who. like the president, was a lawyer and had a methodical mind. "First we ought to decide if we need a rabbi at all, then—"
"What do you mean, do we need a rabbi at all? How are we going to get along without a rabbi?"
"Lots of places don't have them," Goodman replied. "I mean not regularly. They get a young punk down from the seminary every Friday evening and pay him maybe fifty or a hundred bucks and expenses."
"Sure, and you know what you get? You get a young punk."
"Not just a young punk." Goodman reproved, "a young rabbi punk."
"Yah. I’ve seen some of those guys from the seminary. A bunch of hippies, if you ask me."
"Look, fellows." Bert Raymond pleaded, "we can't do that. We got people who use the temple for their weddings and Bar Mitzvahs all year round. When they come to make arrangements, what do we tell them? Maybe we'll have a rabbi and maybe we won't? It's an all-year-round business with us, and we've got to have a rabbi full time."
"All right, so we go to the next step." said the methodical Goodman. "Is it this rabbi that we want? Personally, if I’ve got to have some Holy Joe telling me what's right and what's wrong, I'd rather have an older man. It's a matter of sentiment with me."
"Well, to me it's a matter of business. And I don't let sentiment interfere with business." said Marty Drexler, the treasurer. "Now, when Bert told me about this letter, I did some checking around, and I can give you some hard facts to think about. The price of rabbis has been going up every year since World War n. Every class graduating from the seminary has been able to command a higher starting salary than the one before. You go out in the open market to hire a rabbi with five or six years' experience like ours, and you'll pay anywhere from three to five thousand bucks more than we're paying right now because he'll be somebody who's got a pulpit and we'll have to make it worth his while to leave. When you hire a rabbi, you're buying spiritual leadership. Now I say, why raise our spiritual leadership cost three thousand bucks if we don't have to?"
"That makes sense to me."
"Me too."
The president looked around the table. "All right, I think we have a consensus. I think we're all pretty much agreed that right now the best thing for us to do is to continue the services of our present rabbi. So that brings us right back where we started from. What do we do about this letter? My own feeling is that Stan Agranat is right and that what the rabbi is interested in is a contract. How about it? You all in agreement?" Again his glance swept around the table, halting momentarily at each of them for a confirmatory nod.
Only Ben Gorfinkle demurred. "It's my impression that the rabbi usually means what he says."
The president shrugged. "Maybe he did when he wrote it. He may have been a little sore. To tell the truth, I thought he acted kind of sore when I told him that we weren't going to have a community Seder. That may have had something to do with it. But it's my opinion that if we offer him a contract, he'll decide right quick that he doesn't really want a leave of absence. It could be. you know, that what he wants leave for is to go job hunting."
"You got a point, Bert."
"All right, so what kind of contract do we offer him?"
Ben Gorfinkle, who was last year's president, felt constrained to speak once again. He was present at the meeting only because the by-laws made all past presidents life members of the board. The other former presidents. Becker and Wasserman and Schwarz, had stopped attending after the first few meetings. This particular board, all young men. none of them over thirty-five, consisted of close friends. They discussed temple business in the course of casual social get-togethers, so that the board meetings served little purpose beyond voting formally on what had already been decided between them. But Gorfinkle still persisted in attending, even though for the most part he kept his silence. But this was important. Slowly, deliberately, he explained to the board that at the end of the last season the rabbi had rounded out six years with the congregation and that the previous board had planned to offer him a life contract with a year's sabbatical leave for his seventh year. "But we felt that a contract like that should be negotiated by the new board rather than by the retiring board."