“In the Ten Commandments, did Moses write like this?”
“Nobody know,” the rabbi said.
“Knows,” Michael said. “With an s at the end. Present tense.”
“Nobody knows,” the rabbi said, scooping three sugars into his tea, then handing the spoon to Michael, who did the same. “The original tablets, they have not survive. They might be just, how do you say? A legend. Like the lost tribe…. Some say Moses spoke Egyptian. He definitely didn’t speak Aramaic. That is the language Jesus spoke. We know that for sure. Aramaic…”
So it went until they had finished the tea. Then the rabbi glanced at the letter and said he had to go into the sanctuary to recover a book. Michael followed him. The room was much smaller than the downstairs church at Sacred Heart, but to Michael it had an even more powerful sense of the sacred. A few weeks earlier in this basement sanctuary, Rabbi Hirsch had shown him the Ark, which contained the Torah scroll. That, he explained, was the symbol of the Tradition, a word he often used to describe the kind of Jew he was: a follower of the Tradition. When he said the word, Michael always heard it with a capital letter.
“All the centuries of the Jews?” the rabbi said. “Thousands and thousands of years? To this place, they are connected. That’s what we Jews mean by the Tradition. That is what we have in a synagogue. Everything that ever happened.”
“Is the word synagogue Hebrew or Yiddish?”
“Neither,” the rabbi said, moving slowly through the pews, lifting prayer books, opening them to scan names, closing them. “It’s Greek. This fact even most Jews don’t know. Synagogue is Greek! Amazing! It means, uh, uh, place of assembly in English. I looked up it.”
“Looked it up,” Michael said.
“Yes: looked it up.”
Michael loved these moments. The rabbi was a grown man, but he was always learning something new and becoming as excited as a ten-year-old when he passed the new thing on to Michael. One afternoon, he spoke in an amazed way about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Another time he discussed the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s and how it changed New York, linking Manhattan to Brooklyn forever. Knowledge made his eyes twinkle, his face seem younger. He paced about the tiny room, he motioned with his hands, waving his fingers gracefully to describe music, making fists to express anger or passion. About some things, of course, Michael was the teacher. American things. Baseball. Movies. Comic books. But most of the time, the rabbi led the class.
On an afternoon like this one, Michael wished he could tell his father about the things he was learning. His mother always listened patiently to his reports, but his father might have been even more excited. If Tommy Devlin had come home, he could have gone to college on the GI Bill, which Michael heard about from the rabbi.
“Imagine,” the rabbi said, “the son of a carpenter, a farmer, a policeman, he can go to the university! Like any rich guy! Is a great country, boychik.”
Michael imagined his father sitting in the kitchen, studying his college books at the same table where Michael was doing his homework. They could talk about how Judaism was the father of Christianity. He could tell his father about the synagogue and its three purposes. It was a house of worship, just like Sacred Heart. It was a house of the people, where Jews could spend time together. And it was a house of study. He wished he could explain all this to his father and let him know how sad Rabbi Hirsch looked when he talked about it.
“Almost nobody to this synagogue comes anymore,” the rabbi said, waving a hand. “The Jews from around here? Dead. Moved away.” That was why the upper sanctuary was kept closed, its doors locked and sealed. Michael had never seen it. “We have services there? Everybody is lonely. And another thing: we don’t have the money to heat it up.” Most of the congregation now was composed of older people, he said, who could not come easily to synagogue through the snow. “About Florida they are thinking more than about God,” the rabbi said, “and who blames them?” He worried, he told the boy, that some Shabbos he would not have a minyan. The Tradition insisted on a minyan — a minimum of ten males — before worship could begin. “Nine men and one woman? Not enough. Not even one beautiful, intelligent woman. An old man with no teeth and a very little brain is okay, but not a woman. Sometimes…”
He sighed in the face of God’s mysterious ways. Years ago, before Rabbi Hirsch came to Brooklyn, the upstairs sanctuary had been filled. “The old people telled me this.” There were services on Wednesdays too, and the synagogue was packed all day on Saturdays. “How wonderful it must have be. Like Prague when I’m a boy. Now? Not so wonderful. Not in Prague. Not here. I pray and pray but this does not become a house of the people. Not full of singing. Of praying. Of laughing. And you and me, we are the only ones who study.” He shook his head. “The rabbi and his Shabbos goy.”
Now Michael wandered to the back of the sanctuary, where double doors opened under the stoop on MacArthur Avenue. There were three locks and a plank wedged into two angle irons to keep the doors from being forced open from the other side. Hebrew tablets were cemented into the walls. And in the right-hand corner there was a narrow oak door.
“Where does this door go, Rabbi?”
“Upstairs.”
“Can I see it?”
“No, is closed,” the rabbi said. “Well, someday maybe.” Then he stopped, a book in his hand. “Ah, here is the book. Greenberg, Yossel.” He smiled. “Just like the Golem.”
Michael came over, his stomach suddenly queasy.
“What’s his name?”
“Greenberg.”
“That’s Mister G.”
“You know him?”
“I was there when he was beaten up.”
“You were there?”
“Yes,” Michael said, and then realized he might have said too much. He turned away.
“Is very sad story,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “His son writes to me a letter. He says his father is in — the word is coma? Yes. But maybe also he is given up on the life. He says Greenberg just lies in the hospital in the dark. The hospital, it don’t help. His head is broke and hurts all the time. Tubes are in his arms. They give him medicine. They feed him. But Greenberg never says nothing. The son, to me he writes a letter that says maybe his father’s old prayer book will help. The son, he says maybe the book will make Greenberg open his eyes.”
Michael remembered the old man holding his head, the blood slippery on his fingers, the cash register held in the air, the breaking sound when it landed, and the shards of broken glass and ruined Captain Marvels on the floor. He remembered Mister G lying in his own blood. He remembered Frankie McCarthy’s sneer. The rabbi stared at him.
“Did you tell the police who done it, this beating to Greenberg?”
“No.”
“Why?” the rabbi said softly.
“Ich vais nisht.”
“You don’t know why?”
Michael tried to face the rabbi, but gazed instead at the walls and the low ceiling.
“I can’t tell the cops,” Michael said. “Around here, you don’t tell the cops anything. They’re like, I don’t know, the enemy. And I’m Irish, Rabbi. I talk to the cops, I’m an informer, and my mother says they were the worst people in Ireland.” He struggled for control, pushing the image of Mister G’s bloody face from his mind. “Around here, they call an informer a rat, or a squealer. I talk to the cops, and I get found out, they give me the mark of the squealer. They cut your cheek all the way to your ear, they—”