Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red

CHAPTER SEVEN

"How did it go?" Miriam asked when he returned Wednesday morning.

"It was nice,” he said, and then smiled. "I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve been thinking of it all the way home, Miriam, and I’ve concluded there are few quiet pleasures in this life to compare with that of imparting knowledge to a receptive listener. I remember noticing it the last time we had trouble with the heating system, as the plumber explained to me how the system worked and what was wrong, you could see he was enjoying himself."

"Why not? He was getting about nine dollars an hour for it," she remarked.

But the rabbi refused to be dampened. "I'm sure it wasn't that. It's a sense of superiority. You're bound to get a lift to the ego from dispensing information about anything you know better than others, and when that knowledge can change a person's way of living, his lifestyle, it's even more satisfying. It's quite something this— this ego trip, I think the students call it."

"I'm not sure they consider it a particularly nice thing, David. I think they use the term disparagingly."

"Really? Well, that just shows how little they know. I suppose it's part of the Anglo-Saxon ethic. In sports, for example, the champion is taught to attribute his success to his trainer or his teammates or to luck, to anything except his own superiority. It's so obviously false. No one believes it, but the tradition continues, all I can say is that I frankly enjoyed my first lecture."

"So I see,” she said. "And it's done wonders for your modesty."

"I was only trying to answer your question,” he said stiffly, and then they looked at each other and both smiled.

But Miriam was anxious to pursue it. "But lecturing is nothing new to you. You give a sermon, which is a lecture of sorts, every Friday night and on all the holidays."

"No," he said, "sermons are different, they involve moralizing, which, come to think of it, is just what they said Rabbi Lamden used to deliver when he ran the course. Besides, the people who hear my sermons are the people who pay my salary, and I always have the feeling they're judging me to see if they're getting their money's worth."

She was amused. "Oh David. I don't know where you get that idea."

"Besides, their minds are all fixed, their thought patterns crystallized. Nothing I say is apt to influence them. But these young people in school, they're not frozen, they're not afraid to express their ideas. Mostly they're wrong, of course, but they hold them tenaciously and are ready to argue them, there was a girl today, obviously Women's Lib, who tried to heckle me—"

"That I would have liked to see." laughed Miriam.

The rabbi laughed, too. "She wasn't bad, at that."

He looked forward eagerly to his next lecture on Friday, the street was practically empty when he pulled up in front of the administration building, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps his watch was slow; but as he strode down the corridor he could hear voices from his classroom, as he pushed open the door, he thought he must have made some mistake. Only a scattering of students was present, then he had the sickening feeling that he had misjudged their reaction to his first lecture, he forced a smile. "The class seems to have shrunk."

Several of the students smiled back and one volunteered. "Most of the kids cut on Fridays to get a head start."

"A head start? A head start for what?"

"Oh, you know, for the weekend."

"I see." He understood now why the Dean had been apologetic about scheduling his course for Friday afternoon, he was nonplused, not sure how to proceed. Should he go ahead with the material he had prepared or devote the hour to reviewing his last lecture so that the absentees would not fall behind? He decided to deliver the lecture, but it was not the same, he could not help feel indignant, and he was sure the students were aware of it and took a perverse pleasure in his discomfiture.

At last the class was over, but his annoyance lasted all the way home. Fortunately, Miriam was busy preparing for the Sabbath, so there was no time to discuss it.

The following Monday he had full attendance again: twenty-eight. On Wednesday, too; but on Friday there were even less than the previous week: only ten, and so it continued: good attendance on Mondays and Wednesdays, a mere handful on Fridays.

When after a month they had finished the Pentateuch, he announced a quiz— for Friday. It was a declaration of war on his part.

"Are we going to be responsible for all the names? You know, so-and-so begat so-and-so?"

"No, but I will expect you to know certain genealogical material. Certainly, you ought to know the names of Adam's children, or Abraham's."

"Couldn't we have the test on Monday?"

"Do you think you will be luckier then?"

"No, but we could have the weekend to prepare for it."

"Look at it this way. Now you can have the whole weekend to recover."

He stopped off at his office on Friday, and Professor Hendryx, seeing the bluebooks, looked up in surprise.

"You enjoy giving quizzes. Rabbi?"

"Not particularly. Why?"

"Because anyone quizzing on Friday has to quiz twice." said Hendryx. "I don't understand."

"Simply that you have to prepare not only the original, and then read the bluebooks and make all those comments in red in the margin and grade them, but the makeup as well. You can't expect more than half your class to turn up on at Friday."

"Oh, I think they'll all be there today." said the rabbi confidently. "I gave them plenty of notice and impressed on them this was an hour exam and important to their grades."

But he arrived at the classroom to find only fifteen students, he spent the hour walking about the room as the students wrote, as each finished, he would hand in his paper and hurry out of the room. Long before the bell rang the rabbi found himself alone.

He graded the papers over the weekend and returned them on Monday, there was an immediate reaction.

"You said we wouldn't be responsible for the begats."

"Benjamin is hardly just one of the begats. Benjamin is an important part of the Joseph story."

"How much will this count toward the final grade?"

"It depends on how many hour exams I decide to give."

"Will they all be given on Fridays?"

"I can't say. Probably."

"Gee, that's not fair."

"Why not?"

"Well— a lot of us— I know I can't get here Fridays."

”This was it, he said coolly, "I'm afraid I don't understand. The Friday session is a regular class hour. If it conflicted with some other course, you shouldn't have arranged to take this one."

"It's not that it conflicts—"

"Yes?"

"Well, I drive back to New Jersey weekends and I've got to get an early start."

The rabbi shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know the answer to that."

He opened his text to indicate that he considered discussion closed, but the atmosphere was charged, the students, even those who had taken the examination, were sullen. His lecture suffered as a result, and for the first time he dismissed them before the hour.

When he returned to his office, he found Hendryx stretched out in his usual reclining posture, puffing gently on his pipe.

"How's it going, Rabbi?"

"Well, I'm not sure." In the few weeks that he had been teaching, he had seen Hendryx less than a half dozen times, and then usually for only a few minutes before or after class. "I get about twenty-six in my class, actually the official class list shows thirty, but twenty-eight is the most that have appeared at any one time."

"That's not bad." said Hendryx. "In fact, darn good where students are allowed unlimited cuts."

"Well, I'm not dissatisfied with the attendance on Mondays and Wednesdays, but on Friday afternoons I'm lucky if I get a dozen."

"At one o'clock? On Friday? I'm surprised you're getting that many."

"But why?" the rabbi insisted. "I can understand that one or two might have a trip planned for the weekend and want to make an early start—"

"They've all got plans for the weekend. Rabbi. If it's a girl, she's been invited to another college for the football game on Saturday. If she attends your class, she finishes at two and can't start much before three, so she'll get wherever she's going too late for all the fun on Friday.

And young people nowadays can't afford to miss any fun. It's a kind of commitment, even a kind of religion, you might say."

"You mean that all those absent have weekend dates?"

"No, not all." said Hendryx. "Some stay away so that their friends will think they've got a date. Some figure they might as well make it a long weekend. Some— although personally I doubt it— use the time to study for other courses, supposedly the rationale behind unlimited cuts: they're supposed to be mature enough to organize their own time."

"And what am I supposed to do on Fridays when less than half my class shows up?"

"Well." said Hendryx, drawing on his pipe, "that's a good question, there aren't too many courses given Friday afternoon. Joe Browder has a geology class at one over in the Blythe Building. Off-hand I don't know any other. By noon the place is deserted. Even the cafeteria is closed. Haven't you noticed?"

"But what am I supposed to do?" the rabbi persisted. "Not give the lecture?"

"I’ve known instructors to do just that. Not that they openly cancel out, but every other week or so they announce they'll be unable to meet with the class." He looked at the rabbi, a faint derisive smile on his face. "But I guess you wouldn't do that, would you?"

"No, I don't feel as though I could," he said. "So what have you been doing?"

"So far, I’ve treated it as just another hour and given my regular lecture. Last week, as you know, I gave a quiz."

"I meant to ask you about that," said Hendryx. "How many showed up?"

"Only fifteen."

Hendryx chuckled. "Well, well, well. Only fifteen, eh? And for an hour exam? You handed back the books today? Tell me, how did your class react?"

"That's what bothers me," confessed the rabbi. "Many of them seemed resentful and some appeared actually indignant, as though I had been unfair."

Hendryx nodded. "You know why they acted indignant. Rabbi? Because they were indignant, and they were indignant because you were unfair, at least according to their lights. You see, yours is traditionally a snap course, that's why so many elected it. So why get yourself in a sweat. Rabbi, trying to change it? Why not do as the rest of us do and go along with things as they are?"

"Because I'm a rabbi,” he said, and then added with obvious disparagement, "not a teacher."

Hendryx laughed uproariously in acknowledgment of the thrust. "But Rabbi. I thought that's what a rabbi was. Isn't that what the word means— teacher?"

"Not that kind, a rabbi is one who is learned in the law by which we are expected to order our lives. His major traditional function is to judge, but he also expounds the law on occasion for the benefit of his congregation and community, the kind of teacher you have in mind, the kind that coaxes the young and immature to learn, a teacher of children— that's something else. Him, we call a melamed, and the term has a derogatory connotation."

"Derogatory?"

"That's right. You see, since Jews have had practically one hundred percent literacy for centuries." the rabbi said, enjoying this, "anyone can teach. Naturally., the social prestige or the financial reward for doing what everyone else can do is not great. So the melamed was usually someone who had failed at everything else and finally had to fall back on teaching children to make a living."

"And you feel that by going easy with your class, you will be a melamed! Hendryx asked, interested in spite of himself. "Is that it?"

"Oh, I'm not so much concerned about my status as I am about their attitude, we Jews expect to tease and coax children to learn, that's why when a child starts school we give him cake and honey so he will associate learning with something sweet and desirable. But I don't feel I should have to continue the treatment with adults. Of course, not all adults want to become scholars, but those who do and come to college should have an adult attitude toward instruction. I shouldn't have to tease and coax them to learn."

"You don't," said Hendryx. "And neither do the rest of us, we give our lectures. Those who want to come, come; and those who don't, stay away."

"And those who decide to stay away— do they pass?"

"Well, of course—"

"But that's cheating!" he exclaimed. "I'm afraid I don't follow you. Rabbi."

"Let me put it this way." said David Small, searching for an analogy. "Traditionally, the way you become a rabbi is to present yourself to a rabbi for examination. If you pass his examination, he gives you what we call smicha, a seal of approval, ordination. Of course some rabbis were harder, more exacting, in their examination than others because they were themselves more subtle in their thinking and even more knowledgeable. But I expect they were all honest in their decisions, because in designating the candidate a rabbi they were certifying him capable of sitting in judgment throughout the Jewish world.

"Now the degree granted here also has value and meaning throughout the world and the authority to grant it was conferred by the state, as I understand it, the college system calls for the candidate to accumulate credits toward the degree by sitting under a number of instructors and then satisfying them that he has properly completed their courses of instruction. I am being paid to pass on some small part of the total. So if I don't do my work thoroughly, I'm acting dishonestly. I'm cheating."

"Cheating whom?"

"Cheating everyone who assumes the degree indicates a body of knowledge has been successfully assimilated."

"You mean you are planning to flunk students who cut their Friday classes?"

"Those who don't take the exams, or fail in them."

"Very interesting. Ve— ry interesting." said Hendryx. "In a little while we're supposed to submit to the dean's office the names of all students who are failing at mid-semester. Do you intend to submit such a list?"

"If that's the system, of course I shall comply. Don't you?"

"Well, the last few years. I haven't bothered with it much, as a matter of fact, last year I didn't flunk anyone in any of my classes. But I expect you're planning to."

"If they do not pass the examinations. I will give a failure mark of course."

"Well, all I can say, Rabbi, is that you're going to have a very interesting year."