Thursday The Rabbi Walked Out

13

THE GUESTS HAD ALL ARRIVED BY THE TIME HENRY MALTZman got home. His wife. Laura, could tell by the violent way he shrugged out of his topcoat that something was wrong.

"Did you see the rabbi?" she asked.

"Yeah, I saw him." He strode into the living room. "Hello you folks. Sorry I'm late. I had to see our spiritual leader."

His sarcasm revealed to his wife that he was angry and it worried her. "I think we can eat now,” she announced brightly and led the way into the dining room.

She served the soup from a tureen on a side table and called out. "Don't wait. I always say soup should be piping hot."

"Needs salt." grumbled her husband.

"Delicious, absolutely delicious." said Mrs. Streitfuss. "It has a special taste. Lentils?"

"Lima beans." said Laura. "The big ones. I let them dissolve, and it gives a special flavor." "You must give me the recipe."

"Now, that's what I call soup." said Allen Glick. "Why can't you make soup like that?" he asked his wife.

As Laura cleared the dishes for the next course, her husband, who had been silent up till now, leaned back in his chair and said. "You people hear about the Segal Group taking over the Rohrbough Corporation?"

"Oh, that was reported in the papers last week," said Roger Streitfuss, "at least, that it was in the works."

"Well, it's all set." said Maltzman. "and what's more, Ben Segal, who heads up the Group, is going to run the place personally, he and his missus are in town right now, and—now get this—they're joining our temple."

"Hey, how about that!" exclaimed Herb Mandell.

"Imagine, a big shot financier like that comes to town, and first thing he does is want to join a temple." Allen Glick shook his head in wonder.

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way exactly/' said Maltzman. "I mean, he's not one of those pious Jews who can't live without a synagogue, as a matter of fact, he didn't think of himself as a Jew at all. Oh, born one and all that, and not denying it, but he never had a Bar Mitzvah on account his folks were so poor at the time, so he didn't think of himself as a real Jew. See what I mean?"

"Well, I don't think—"

"In the Hadassah Journal—"

"Seems to me—"

Maltzman held up his hand to still the babble. "I read that article in the Hadassah Journal, too. It's the one about that group of old geezers from California who went to the Wall in Jerusalem to be Bar Mitzvah. Right? Well, I told him about it, and he was willing." He looked around the table to gather their attention. "Then I got an idea. You know, all along I've been saying we ought to do something to bring in new members. I figure there are at least a hundred Jewish families in town, maybe more, that don't belong to the temple, maybe they're not sure they're going to stay on in town, maybe they haven't been approached right."

"Maybe they don't want to join a temple where women are second-class citizens." said Molly Mandell.

Maltzman nodded. "Maybe, anyway, I’ve always thought if we could get the right gimmick, we could sell the temple to these people, and I was sure this time I had it, here's this big shot, and he's going to be running Rohrbough, and some of our people work there. Now, he feels funny about never having been Bar Mitzvah, feels he isn't really a Jew, and yet with a name like Segal, he feels he can't be anything else, unless he changes his name, and he wouldn't do that. So it came to me—the gimmick. I could kill two birds with one stone. Why don't we give him a Bar Mitzvah, the temple, I mean, and we send out invitations to all the Jews in town, whether they're members of the temple or not—'You are cordially invited to join us in worship and the celebration of the Bar Mitzvah of Mr. Ben Segal of Chicago—' Get it?"

He could tell from their faces that they did, that they all thought it as wonderful an idea as he did.

"So I went to see the rabbi about it, that's why I was late getting home."

"And?"

"And nothing, he wouldn't hear of it. Said it was against our religion, that you're Bar Mitzvah when you become thirteen whether you want to or not, and he wouldn't have anything to do with it."

"Well—"

"Seems to me my father said that."

"I don't understand. Wouldn't they know in Jerusalem?"

"And the Hadassah people would know, wouldn't they?"

"I guess our rabbi knows better." said Maltzman bitterly. "He says he's not responsible for what other rabbis do. This isn't the first time—"

"Maybe he feels you're against him." suggested his wife, as she entered to serve the main course. "All the other presidents invited him to sit in on the board of directors' meetings and you never did. If he were at the meeting and something came up—"

Maltzman was exasperated. "I’ve explained to you that it's a different kind of meeting now. Until we reformed the bylaws, practically anybody could come to the meetings.

There were forty-five directors plus all the past presidents, we held the meetings Sunday mornings when people came to bring their kids to the Sunday School, or when they came to the morning minyan. So those who were on the board, some of them would stay for the meeting. It was a crazy system, there'd be only about fifteen or twenty present at most meetings, but if something was proposed and somebody was against it, they'd spend the week calling all the members of the board, and the next meeting, when it was to be voted on, there'd be forty or more, and it would be voted down. You could never transact any business, well, now we have a board of fifteen, and it's like an executive committee, and we meet in the afternoon, and it's every other week, instead of every week. It's a business meeting, not just a place where you come to chew the fat. Everybody who is supposed to comes. If someone stays away two or three meetings, he's dropped, and I'm empowered to appoint someone to take his place the way I appointed Herb Mandell here when Joe Cohen found he couldn't make it regular. So, even if I invited the rabbi to attend the meetings, he would be unable to come every meeting, he has a wedding or a funeral or some other kind of meeting he has to go to on a Sunday afternoon, and if he didn't come every week, we'd have to spend time when he did come explaining what the points at issue were."

"It seems to me." said Molly Mandell placidly, "the big mistake we made was in giving the rabbi a lifetime contract."

"We didn't give him a lifetime contract." said Roger Streitfuss. "We offered him one and he refused it, a couple of years back, I think it was, he's on a yearly basis. It was his own idea."

"That's right." said Maltzman. "It was the year he went to Israel, maybe thought he might want to go back there and didn't want to be bound by a long-term contract."

"So how do you work it?" asked Molly, interested. "Do you meet with him on the terms every year and then draw up a contract?"

"Oh no. His salary is just one item in the budget. When the board votes the budget, the secretary sends him a letter telling him his contract has been renewed for the year, and that's it."

"And what would happen if you wrote him and said it hadn't been renewed?" asked Allen Glick. "I'm just asking, you understand."

"Gosh. I don't know. I suppose he'd—I don't know what he'd do." said Maltzman.

"I bet he'd resign." said Roger Streitfiiss. "I know he's had trouble with other administrations, and he's fought for his job. But he's never actually had an official vote passed against him."

"You got a point there." said Allen Glick. "What else could he do but resign? Either that, or appeal to the board to reconsider, and he's too proud for that."

"With fifteen on the board, it only takes eight to vote the rabbi out." remarked Streitfuss and then added vehemently, "If the matter came up, I'd vote against him."

The others understood his feeling, they all knew about the rabbi's refusal to participate in a joint wedding ceremony with a Methodist minister when the Streitfuss girl had married a Gentile.

"And I would, too." Allen Glick said. "What about you, herb? You're on the board now. You've got a vote."

"Oh, Herb would go along." said Molly before her husband could answer for himself. "The way I see it is if we hopa to get equality for women in the service and make this a modern, up-to-date temple, we've got to get Rabbi Small out and get in a rabbi who'll push for it."

"So you've got three votes already," Streitfuss said. "All you need, Henry, is five more."

Maltzman's eyes gleamed, he rubbed his hands. "Yeah, I think we might be able to bring it off."

Smiles appeared on the faces of his guests.

"But we've got to be awfully careful about this." Maltzman went on. "It's got to be kept secret, because if the opposition gets wind of it—"