Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home

Chapter Eleven

You whipsawed me.” said Irving Kallen ruefully. “You and the Doc between you.”

Meyer Paff grinned. “Nothing to it, Irving,” he said. “It was the last hand, so we were just trying to make a pot.”

“Don’t you believe him. Irving.” said Dr. Edelstein. He was a round man with a perpetual smile (“A natural bedside manner.” his patients would say). “Normal tactics—drive out the buttonhole makers.”

“You ended up ahead, didn’t you?” demanded Paff.

Kallen evened off the little columns of chips in front of him. “Nope. Let’s see. I’m down thirty-two, no, thirty-seven cents. You’re the big winner tonight—as usual.”

Paff gathered in the chips to put away in the box. “Luck,” said Kallen.

“Don’t you believe it, Irv. You’ve got to know how to play,” said Paff.

“Maybe you’re right. Meyer. My game is bridge.”

“If you got card sense.” Kermit Arons offered, “you can play any card game.”

“Well, last night, I was playing bridge over at Nelson Shaffer’s house—”

“That explains it.” said Paff with finality. “You go playing cards on the Sabbath instead of going to the temple, and the next time you play, you’re going to lose.”

“Well, for thirty-two, no, thirty-seven cents, I figure I wasn’t punished too bad. Taking the two nights together. I’m still wa-ay ahead of the game. And from what I heard,” he added maliciously, “I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t gone last night.”

Paff shrugged his shoulders.

“What Brennerman pulled on Meyer was pretty raw,” said Arons, “but actually it was directed against all of us here.”

“You mean the business of the seating?” asked Dr. Edelstein. “As far as I’m concerned. I’d just as soon sit in the back row. With the public address system, you can hear just as good, and to tell the truth I kind of like the idea of being near the door so I can go out for a breather every now and then without everybody noticing.”

“How about if you find yourself downstairs in the vestry?”

“What do you mean?”

“Last year we had to have two services, one in the vestry. Right?”

“Yes, but the new members were assigned seats downstairs; the old members—”

“Sure, but the whole idea now is to make the seating democratic. If there are no reserved seats, it means that if you come in a little late, you go down to the vestry because all the seats in the sanctuary are full.”

“I don’t think I’d care for that.”

“Well” said Kallen, “I don’t like to sit in the back. What’s more, my old man considers our seats in the first row a kind of honor.”

“And how about the money we paid for those seats?” demanded Arons. “I plunked down a thousand bucks to the Building Fund—not a pledge, but hard cash—back when Becker was president. And it was supposed to reserve my seat for me each year, the same seat, mind you, until the last day of the ticket selling. Well now, I regard that as a contract that I entered into with the temple, and if anybody should live up to their contract, it seems to me it should be an organization like a temple.”

“You’re one hundred percent right, Kerm,” said Kallen. “That’s how I feel. If you can’t trust the word of a temple, who can you trust?”

“All right, what can you do about it?”

“I’ll tell you what I can do about it, Meyer,” said Kallen, his tone determined. “I’m still a member of the board of directors. I could place it before the board and demand that they take action.”

“So what would that get you? They’d take action, all right. They’d put it to a vote, and they’d vote Gorfinkle’s way. Remember, they’ve got a clear majority.”

“Well, if the board should repudiate their solemn promises, I’d pick up my marbles and get out.”

“And where would you go. Irv? To Lynn? To Salem? Where nobody knows you?”

“I’ll tell you what I would do.” Edelstein asserted. “I’d stay, but they’d whistle before they got a dime out of me.”

Paff shook his head. “It wouldn’t work, Doc. It might work in a church, but not in a temple. Our people don’t ask for it; they demand it. It’s part of the tradition. You know the old joke: The only thing two Jews can agree on is what a third should contribute to the support of the temple. No. if you were to give less than you gave last year, at the best everybody would think you had a bad year, that your practice was off. As for not giving at all—forget it. They just wouldn’t let you get away with it; they’d bother you and pester you until you came across.”

“Meyer’s right.” said Arons. “And you know what it means? It means that from here on in, we’ll be putting up the big money, we and our friends, and Gorfinkle and his gang will be spending it. They won’t even do us the courtesy of consulting us about it.”

“That’s right.” said Paff. “You don’t think this new seating plan was brought up before the board, do you?”

“You mean it was just Ted Brennerman’s idea? Dammit, they can’t do that. A change like that has to be brought up before the board.” said Kallen.

Paff shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, they’ll bring it up at the meeting, just to make it legal, and they’ll let us talk on it for a while, and then one of them will move the previous question and—zip—it’ll go through like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And that’s how it’s going to be from here on in. Make up your mind to it.”

“And that’s how they’ll work this Social Action Fund. They’ll appropriate all kinds of money, and they’ll disburse it any way they want to. We’ll give it, and they’ll spend it.”

“Aw, come on.” said Kallen. “How much of a fund will they set up? Five hundred? A grand? So what? I remember my old man told me that years ago, in all the shuts, they had a fund that the president used to control and to disburse when, say, some poor guy would come to town and didn’t have a place to sleep or needed a meal—”

“But that was charity.” said Paff. “This money is to be used for politics. And it isn’t the amount; it’s the principle of the thing.”

“All right, they won this election, and they’re in power. So next year we work a little harder, and we take it away from them.”

“Don’t kid yourself.” said Paff. “They’re in, and they’re in to stay. They got a different attitude toward this whole business than we have. They look at the temple organization as a corporation—which it is, of course, legally. When Wasserman was president and Becker and even Mort Schwarz, they put men on the board because they were either doing a lot of work for the temple or they hoped they would. The idea was to get the best men. But Gorfinkle’s crowd—most of them work for large corporations, administrators, executives—and they look at it like a business corporation where if you get the majority of the stock, you take over all the top jobs and you fill the board of directors with your own men. So from here on in. their nominating committee won’t nominate anyone unless they’re sure he’ll see things their way.”

“Well. I think the least we could do is make the most God-awful stink tomorrow at the board meeting.” said Arons, “and hope that we’ll rouse enough people to rally to our support—”

“We can’t.” said Paff in his deep bass rumble. “Why not?”

“Because we don’t have anything for people to rally to. What are we going to do? Ask them to support our right to retain our front seats? Be practical.”

“Well—”

“Then maybe what’ll happen tomorrow will give us a better reason.” said Kallen.

“And what’s going to happen tomorrow?” asked Paff.

“Well, like I said. I was over at Nel Shaffer’s last night. Nel and I are good friends, but mostly he hangs around with guys that are close to Gorfinkle, like Bill Jacobs and Hymie Stern. I got the impression from things Nel let drop that Gorfinkle was planning to announce the new committees tomorrow, and some of his appointments might be pretty raw from our point of view and from the point of view of a lot of members of the congregation.”

“Like what?” demanded Edelstein.

“Like making Roger Epstein chairman of the Ritual Committee for openers.” said Kallen.

“He wouldn’t dare!” said Edelstein.

“Why wouldn’t he dare? He’s his best friend. The two families are so close they’re—”

“But the Ritual Committee.” insisted Edelstein. “The man doesn’t know a word of Hebrew. If the rabbi didn’t announce the page, he wouldn’t know what prayer to say next. He’d never been in a temple before he came here. His folks were radicals, free thinkers. And his wife—she’s Gentile.”

“When she was converted, she became Jewish.” Paff reminded him. “That’s the law. But that’s a can of worms we don’t have to open. If Gorfinkle appoints Epstein, it’s still a raw deal against the congregation. And I’m not saying that because it’s me he’s going to replace.”

“All right.” said Arons, “so as soon as he announces it, we make a stink.”

“No.” Paff was emphatic. “I got an idea. When Gorfinkle announces his committees at the meeting tomorrow, we don’t say a damn word. We sit tight.”

Everyone looked at him. “And what does that get us?”

“Just trust me. I tell you I got an idea. Sorry, boys, but I can’t give it to you now. Let’s just see what happens tomorrow and follow my lead. If I don’t say anything, don’t you say anything.” He looked around the table. “Have I ever let you down?”