Wednesday the Rabbi got wet

CHAPTER FIVE

Say, Miriam, do we know anyone named Rokeach?" the rabbi asked his wife when he got home. "Akiva Rokeach? Do you recall my ever mentioning the name?"

She was small, with the trim figure of a young girl, she had wide blue eyes and an open frank face that would have appeared naive were it not for the firm determined chin, the mass of blond hair piled on top of her head threatened to come tumbling down about her neck and shoulders as she shook her head in vigorous denial. "A name like that I'd be sure to remember. It sounds like an Israeli name."

"He's certainly not Israeli. His Hebrew is bad and his English has no trace of accent." He told her about the incident at the temple.

"He doesn't have to be a sabra." Miriam pointed out. "He could have emigrated, you know, and come back for a short visit, a lot of them take Israeli names. Or they translate their names into Hebrew. Does Rokeach mean anything in Hebrew?"

"Why yes. It means druggist, an apothecary."

"An apothecary? How about Aptaker? That means apothecary too, doesn't it?"

"In Russian, I believe. I wonder—"

"The proprietor of Town-Line Drugs is a Mr. aptaker. Could it be his son?"

"You know, Miriam, I think you're right. Remember a few years back—"

"Of course. Jonathan got that terrible attack in the middle of the night and you called the doctor—"

"And he called Mr. aptaker at his home, and his son opened the store and got the medicine and delivered it." He screwed his eyes shut in an effort to recall young Aptaker's appearance. "He had no beard, of course, and his hair was cut short. It could be."

"I didn't see him." Miriam smiled ruefully. "I was with Jonathan, he wouldn't let me out of his sight."

"And I never saw him again either," the rabbi said. "I went there a couple of days later to pay for the medicine, and he was gone. I seem to recall that I spoke to his father, and he was rather stiff and formal with me. I got the feeling that perhaps he resented having been put to the trouble since I didn't normally trade there."

"Well, if it's Aptaker's son, you can thank him properly now that he's back."

"I gather he's not. Just visiting, he said, maybe he'll be at the evening service and I'll get a chance to talk to him then. I would have this morning— I sensed that he wanted to talk to me, but with his usual officiousness Kaplan came over and dragged me off."

"You don't like him much, do you, David?"

"Who, Kaplan? Oh, I like him well enough." His face twisted into a sour smile. "Though I liked him better before he became president of the congregation." He laughed shortly. "Since his election, we appear to be in competition, the president is supposed to be the executive director of the congregation while the rabbi guides its religious life. Usually we're on opposite sides of the fence, they want to shorten the service or update it by substituting modern poetry for some of the prayers, or they want to get the temple to take sides on national politics."

"But you’ve always been able to set them right," she interposed.

"True. But then we were in opposition. I represented the religious side, while they represented the secular. But with Kaplan—"

"He's trying to be both the president and the rabbi of the congregation. Is that it?"

He nodded grimly. "Just about, he holds weekly At Homes for religious discussions and lectures. Every few weeks he leads a group up-country to some camp and holds a retreat of prayer and meditation and religious discussion."

"And you object to that? What was it my Aunt Gittel used to say—'Is it a flaw that the bride is pretty?'"

"You can err on the right just as much as on the left," her husband retorted. "And you can be so meticulous in your observance of the regulations that you lose sight of the reason for them in the first place. But where the error is in the direction of excess, criticism becomes almost impossible. It's like those airline people who instead of calling a regular strike tied up the airports by adhering rigidly to the regulations. What could you say to them? Don't follow the regulations? Can I say to Kaplan and his group, don't be so religious? At the last meeting he proposed that the temple buy this property in New Hampshire to establish a permanent retreat. This new idea of retreats, and of the special group, or the commune, or the chavurah— whatever they call it— withdrawing from the world and society to expand their precious souls, it's contrary to traditional Judaism."

"It's attracting the young people, though," Miriam observed. "I was reading—"

"What's the point in trying to attract young people to traditional Judaism by changing it? So if they do get interested— hooked, is the expression I’ve heard— it's not Judaism. It's something else that has only a superficial resemblance to it. I’ve read about them, too, there is a group that celebrates Rosh Hashonah by baking a birthday cake with candles for the world, if you please, another, down in Florida, tried to rent a lion from some outfit that supplies them to the movies to see if they could make him lie down with a lamb. What's the sense of attracting young people, if they turn out to be nuts? Some are in the neo-Chasidic movement. This Akiva may be one of those, judging from the way he was gyrating and rocking back and forth while davening, they're terribly concerned about such things as having the mezzuzah affixed to the doorframe exactly right and that it be handwritten by a scribe on real parchment. Otherwise, presumably, it won't work, and all of them are so self-righteous and so condescending to what they call 'establishment Judaism' as though for the last couple of thousand years we've just been going through the motions and haven't really understood what it's all about. It's the same attitude that led to the recent 'improvement' in our colleges."

"Whew! I had no idea you felt so strongly."

He shrugged. "Maybe I got carried away. It was just that it occurred to me that when this Akiva, if it is he, brought that medicine in the middle of the night, he was doing a real mitzvah. It certainly was more of a religious act than his coming this morning to pray."