“Do you think that’s why he was crying?” Jack asked.
“Oh, no. That wasn’t the reason. He was crying because we were in the presence of God.”
Jack made a noise in his throat that came through the radio as a kind of gulp. I was surprised that he sounded surprised; I assumed he knew what his guests were going to talk about, so he should have been familiar with the story the rabbi was telling. But maybe he hadn’t heard all these details. Maybe he had been thrown off guard.
He soon recovered enough to ask another question. “Is that what you thought, too?”
“No. But I guess I had started praying so fervently that the other radioman believed I was in touch with some sense of God that he wasn’t. That he couldn’t find.”
“You knew he was some kind of radioman.”
“Oh yes. That was his job. He was setting up some kind of radio network. I know how odd it sounds, but that’s what he was doing. His . . . people, I guess you’d call them—well, his people are broadcasting prayers. All through the universe. They’re hoping that someday, in some way, God will reply. You know, find a way to let them know He hears them. That He’s . . . somewhere. And He’s listening. That’s what all religious people want, in one way or another. At least, in my very humble opinion, that’s what I think people want, people who are devout. Or perhaps even people who aren’t.”
“How did you know what he was doing?’ Jack asked. “Your . . . visitor.”
“I think he told me,” the rabbi said. “When he was holding my hand. Somehow, he told me. There were no words but . . . I knew. I understood.”
I was riveted by this conversation. So much so that I found I had wandered far beyond the bounds of the usual route I followed when I was walking the dog. I was near a deserted canal that ran behind the auto repair shops, a polluted scar that remained from the time when small barges were part of the commercial traffic in this area. The struts of a broken crane leaned over the water, looking like a monster getting ready to dip a long, rusted finger into a poison well. This was probably not the greatest place to linger, but I didn’t care. I sat down on an empty oil drum and listened as the rabbi continued to describe what had happened to him that long-ago night. Digitaria seemed to simply accept that we were stopping in this unexpected place for a while and made himself comfortable on the ground, keeping close enough to me so that I could feel the weight of his body against my leg.
Jack seemed to have recovered from his surprise about the turn the story had taken and he zeroed in on the narrative, the step-by-step details that the rabbi was recounting. “And then?” Jack coaxed. “What happened after you realized that the radioman was crying?”
“That’s really it, all of it, to tell you the truth. Except that, after a while, I felt this sense of pressure on my hand—almost like the person was squeezing it.”
“He was hurting you,” Jack interjected.
“No, no, not at all,” the rabbi replied. “It was just like when you’re holding someone’s hand and you squeeze it, just before you say good-bye. It’s just an extra gesture of contact, of touch between two . . . well, persons. People. So when he did that—my visitor—I just instinctively looked down and saw that what I thought was a hand wasn’t really that at all. What I mean is, I felt like my hand was intertwined with another but no—laying across my palm was a band of light. Moveable, incandescent light. Whitish, bluish, sort of.” The rabbi chuckled softly. “I guess I’m having a hard time explaining myself.”
“You’re doing fine,” Jack assured him, but he sounded a little confused himself.
“He let me see him,” the rabbi continued. “At least part of him; the part I was touching. That was what he really looked like, I think. Light. Not filmy or diffuse but . . . well, flexible. Flexible light.” The rabbi chuckled again. “That’s as close as I can get to a description.”
“You never saw his face?”
“No,” the rabbi said. “Nothing more than what I’ve told you. He let me see just that part of him. Another gesture, I guess.”
The rabbi continued. “A couple of nights after this, Howard and I were down in the crew’s quarters. His bunk was across from mine and for once, all the other bunks around us were empty, which was unusual. On a ship like that, you’re almost never alone. So maybe it was just that it was quiet and that we weren’t on alert or anything that started us talking. And I just blurted it out . . . about the radioman. About how I’d felt him next to me in the chapel, and he was crying. Howard started questioning me then. He wanted to know exactly what the radioman looked like. I did the best I could to describe him—you know, my impression of a flat, gray shape sitting beside me—and then Howard said he had something to tell me. He said he thought he’d seen the same figure up on the radars maybe a month or so prior. His radioman, though, had acted very differently than mine. He had made some sort of awful noise—it sounded threatening, Howard said—and made it very clear that Howard was not to come near him.”
“Did you ever tell Howard what else you saw? That you actually got a glimpse of what the radioman really looked like?”
“But I didn’t—not for sure. I just saw that band of light.”
“Even that? You didn’t tell Howard?”
“What would have been the point? Howard’s experience was so much different than mine; his was angry, confrontational. I didn’t want to make it seem like I had been given a gift that had been withheld from him.”
The rabbi sounded philosophical, which didn’t suit Jack’s style of questioning, so he tried to find a way to elicit a more definitive answer. “Given your different experiences, do you think that you and Howard actually met the same, uh, person?”
“I don’t know,” the rabbi responded. “And I don’t know that it matters, really.”
“But they—or he, if it was the same radioman—acted so differently.”
“Well, we all act differently, don’t we, at different times? I mean, even the most confident, aggressive person can have a moment of vulnerability. Especially if you’re around someone who you think will be sympathetic.”
“And you were.”
“I guess you could say that. But you could also say that what happened to me was a turning point, so if I gave the radioman a moment of comfort, what he gave me was . . . well, a purpose to my life. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what happened. After the war, I tried different things, different jobs, but I was very unhappy. Eventually, I realized that what I wanted was to feel what the radioman thought I felt that night, in the chapel. I wanted to feel the presence of God. And so . . . well, eventually, I enrolled in a Jewish theological seminary and became a rabbi.”
“Who has stood in the presence of God?”
The rabbi’s gentle laugh seemed to soften the bluntness of Jack’s question. “We all do that, whether we know it or not. Let’s just say I have been trying to be deserving of that awareness.”
“To coin a phrase?”
The rabbi laughed again. “No, no, it certainly wasn’t me who had anything to do with Howard coming up with that name. The Blue Awareness.” I could almost picture Rabbi Friedman shaking his head in amusement. “Well, I suppose it’s what we’re trying to become aware of that matters in the end.”
Jack went on questioning him. “Did you and Howard Gilmartin keep in touch after the war?”
“No,” the rabbi replied. “As a matter of fact, after the night we talked about the radioman, he barely spoke to me again. The fact that we’d had such different experiences seemed to drive a wedge between us—at least from his point of view. I think he was already trying to, well, let’s say process what had happened to him.” Another chuckle punctuated that last part of the story and the rabbi said, “You can tell I’ve had some psychology training, right? Well, the point is that I imagine he was already thinking quite differently than I was about what had happened to us both.”