Called to Controversy Read online

  Moishe would always remember his thirteenth birthday and how it would forever be associated with the passing of a United States president. It was a sad and dreary day; the entire country was in mourning and celebration of any kind would feel strange and unseemly.

  Still, now that he was 13, he was to be bar mitzvah—and so the following Thursday he went to a small neighborhood synagogue to perform the proper rituals.

  “How come I don’t get to do it on Saturday, like the other guys?” Moishe had asked when his father first broached the subject.

  “You do it on Saturday and the whole shul** is there. Everyone expects a big party after.”

  “Yeah,” Moishe nodded. “I know.” He didn’t mention that he’d worked hard at learning the Hebrew and wanted to celebrate his accomplishment, or that a nice reception afterwards would show that his dad was proud of him.

  “You want a big party?” Ben frowned. His son did not usually ask for such things.

  “Sure. Why not? It’s a big deal, a bar mitzvah, right?”

  “You know how much a party like that costs?”

  Moishe looked down. He knew his family didn’t have a lot of extra money to spread around, but he didn’t think they were that poor. Not anymore.

  Then a painful thought occurred to him. Maybe his dad wasn’t proud of him and didn’t want the whole shul to witness his bar mitzvah. Moishe knew that he sang off key. One might think that singing the scriptures to the appropriate minor key melodies would make it easier to remember the Hebrew words, but not for Moishe. Somehow the elusive notes would not stick in his head the way they were supposed to. Singing only seemed to make it harder. Not only that, but he had a bit of a stammer and that was bound to come out if he tried merely speaking the words.

  So he sighed in resignation. Maybe doing it on Thursday wasn’t such a bad thing after all. He certainly would not be the first bar mitzvah to enter into manhood through the downstairs classroom of the synagogue instead of the upstairs sanctuary.

  Every Thursday morning a minyan (quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer) met at the synagogue to listen to the rabbi teach a Talmud class in Yiddish. On the designated day, father and son arrived at the synagogue and went directly downstairs where they joined twelve to fifteen older men sitting around a large table. Moishe knew many Yiddish words, but unlike his parents, he did not speak the language fluently. Consequently, it was difficult to concentrate on the lesson.

  Finally the rabbi finished his remarks, and with no fanfare, the bar mitzvah proceeded. A couple of men placed the Torah scroll on the table, unrolling it to the text for the day. With a yarmulke (skullcap) on his head and tallis (prayer shawl) around his shoulders, Moishe approached the scroll and began the first blessing as best as he could: “Barachu et Adonai Ha-me-vorach.”

  The men around the table sang back to him, as per tradition: “Baruch Adonai ha-me-vorach le-olam va-ed.”

  Taking a breath, Moishe continued: “Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech ha olam asher bacher banu mi kol ha’amim, v’natan lanu et torato, baruch ata adonai notein ha torah. Amen.”

  One man stood beside the boy, holding a yad (literally hand). The long-handled silver pointer was a reminder that the Torah is sacred and not to be touched by human hands. Moishe was glad enough for the traditional helper to hold out the long pointer so that he could keep his place in the ocean of Hebrew words before him.

  Moishe had not completely memorized his portion, but since he had learned how to read Hebrew, he thought he would recognize any words he did not know by heart. Unfortunately, the Hebrew he’d studied had vowel points, and the Torah scroll had none. This slowed him down considerably. As for the melody, Moishe chanted the Scripture portion in a singsong style that he could only hope sounded something like the appropriate chant.

  When he finished, once again he recited the proper blessing. He looked half expectantly at the rabbi, who smiled and nodded, but did not ask him to give a speech. The other men likewise smiled and nodded, but offered no words of encouragement or congratulation. He returned to his seat.

  Ben had brought two bottles of whiskey to make it a festive occasion for the minyan. But for Moishe, the bar mitzvah was a big nonevent.

  Despite the disappointments over his bar mitzvah, Moishe always viewed his Jewish upbringing as a profound influence that afforded many invaluable life lessons. His early days in the synagogue and cheder taught him a sense of awe for God. Through Judaism, he began to learn about holiness and how some places, and some objects, were to be set apart and handled (or not handled) in a special way. That sense of setting things apart for God even affected how one dressed. Before the high holidays in the fall (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) when possible, his family bought new clothes for the special synagogue services. Likewise, in the spring, if they could afford them, they bought new clothes to wear for Passover.

  Although religious objects—the tallis, phylacteries, and holy books—inspired a sense of awe in Moishe, his childhood concept of God was not confined to, or even most often experienced, through religious activities. Usually when he thought of God, it was in the context of a game, in which he regarded God as a companion. As a child, Moishe would jump over tires, trying not to let his foot touch rubber, and think, I’m doing this for you, God.

  Consciously or not, Moishe learned the idea of setting things apart for God from the Jewish religion. Yet he did not develop confidence in the religion—not the way that he saw it practiced in his grandfather’s house or even in his own house while his grandfather was still alive. There were so many rules, and the rules did not seem to provide understanding: they imposed fear and a continual anxiety lest they be broken.

  Contrast this with Moishe dedicating his childish games to God, imagining that the Almighty would actually enjoy them. The desire to dedicate his efforts to God was probably rooted in religion. But the idea that they could be joyful or fun efforts probably came from an inner sense—more intuitive than religious—that God loved him and could relate to him.

  Moishe’s growing understanding of the vastness of the universe expanded his idea of God. He could not regard Judaism as the sole custodian of holy knowledge. Nor did he view the religion of Judaism as the final word on Jewish identity.

  “Being Jewish always gave me a personal context of being,” Moishe explained. “It told me, in part, who I was so far as the rest of the world was concerned. My sense of Jewishness was not derived from religious practice, though I did my share of rituals. My Jewishness was generated from an inner sense of mystery. I felt a sense of awe at our history.”

  Jewish identity was based not only on being part of one community, but also on being separate from another. That separation was often demanded rather forcefully from non-Jewish communities. Moishe recalled the first time he experienced such a demand. He was nine years old and wandered from his neighborhood (they lived at Fifteenth and Federal Boulevard). He said, “I wasn’t particularly aware that the Jewish neighborhood only extended as far north as Eighteenth, and even if I had known, I probably still would have gone well past it. Then I turned down one of the side streets, and saw some boys playing in an empty lot.”

  The boys were digging a big hole, wide enough for all of them to get into it. Moishe recalled,

  Lacking in social graces, I thought if I just stood there they might invite me to join them. And so I came near, and looked at them, and smiled. The boy who was digging with a spade stopped and looked back at me. He said, “You’re new around here. Where do you live?” I said, “Fifteen Ten Federal Boulevard.” And another boy said, “That’s Jew-Town, isn’t it?” Another boy said, “Are you a Jew?” And I answered quite confidently, “Yes,” with the unspoken assumption, “Isn’t everybody?”

  One boy yelled, ‘We don’t want any Jews around here! Go away, you dirty Jew!’ Well, anyone who looked at these boys could see that they’d been digging in the mud. And me? I wasn’t dirty—at least not until one of them threw a spade full of mud at me. I hurried away, so
mewhat hurt and very puzzled.”

  Once home, he and his mother had a talk about what Moishe called “the Jewish facts of life.” His mother said, ’“Don’t go out of the neighborhood. You’ll just get into trouble. They [meaning non-Jews] are not like us, and they don’t like us.” According to Moishe, the rest of the discussion went like this:

  “But, Ma, how come they don’t like us?” With patience, she explained, “Well, it has to do with their religion. They think that we killed their God.”

  I said, “Well, did we?”

  She said, “Do you think that anybody could kill God?”

  As I thought it through, I realized it was a ridiculous idea. So I knew that we were right, and they were wrong, and we were smart, and they were, well, I didn’t know all of them, but those I’d met that day seemed less than smart. After that, if anybody asked me if I were a Jew, I would say in a not especially friendly tone, “Why do you want to know?” And if they didn’t have a good reason for asking, I could give them a good reason not to ask in the future.

  This type of negative experience, which was to be repeated at various stages and with varying severity, galvanized Moishe’s identity as a person who was part of a people who were separate from others. And why would he want to be part of those people who mocked and hated others whom they didn’t even know? Yet somehow he knew that the separation went beyond the prejudices of those who would reject him for being Jewish. And he knew that his religion could not explain the separation. He’d learned that there was a difference between “us” and “them,” but though he knew who “we” were, like many others who grew up Jewish, he did not exactly know what we were or why we were different.

  “I never questioned that God chose the Jewish people, as we’d been taught from the Bible,” he said.

  At the same time, I never imagined that the rabbis—with their laws upon laws and their need to know almost everything about almost nothing—could really understand what an awesome people we Jews were. Somehow with all of their learning, I never felt they adequately explained what it meant to be Jewish.

  Intuitively I knew that if being Jewish was something from God, it should not be so hard to understand. So many rules and procedures, and the not-so-subtle hints that much more study was required all seemed to obscure the issue: What does it mean to be a Jew?

  Like his father, Moishe eventually grew cynical toward religion, but also like his father, he did not allow such feelings to compromise his Jewish identity. Ben Rosen was absolutely loyal to the Jewish community. He knew the prayers and made sure his sons knew them, too, because that was part of what it meant to be a Jew. Once he had the means, he contributed generously to Jewish causes, even to the synagogue that he only occasionally attended. Likewise, Moishe’s assessment of the religion as inadequate in no way lessened his sense of Jewish identity or his loyalty to the community.

  Part of that loyalty meant not trading his religion for another. Moishe had heard how Christians tried to convert Jews to their own religion—the very religion (he supposed) that caused people to hate Jews as Christ killers. He rehearsed over and over for the day when some Christian would try to lure him to “the other side.” He would smile and say, “That’s all right for you, if you want to believe that way,” and then he would add in his best don’t-mess-with-me voice, “But as for me, I’m a Jew.”

  Moishe recalled, “As Jews, we knew that we weren’t regarded as being champions by non-Jews. But our attitude was, if they weren’t going to like us, then we were going to like ourselves.” He quickly learned to accept that part of his identity as a Jew was to be hated for no particular reason. Yet he always felt accepted and secure in his own community, the Jewish community. The fact that he was pretty much finished with the religion by the time he was thirteen was no reflection on his place in that community. In fact, it made him more like than unlike most Jews he knew, including his father, whose influence was considerable.

  * For whatever reason, he never expected to have a very long life.

  *Bar mitzvah, literally “son of the commandment,” refers to the boy who undergoes the rite of passage, but it also refers to the ceremony itself. Traditionally, the bar mitzvah recites the Hebrew prayers and reads from the Torah during the weekly worship service.

  ** Shul is a Yiddish word for synagogue.

  FOUR

  I’m always amazed at how much I accepted my father’s values on one hand and, on the other, how much I reacted against them.

  —MOISHE ROSEN

  The light of the long summer day was finally fading, but the lanky fourteen-year-old had not caught a single fish. He wasn’t disappointed, though; he’d enjoyed the day immensely. He had long since honed habitual daydreaming into a fine art, and fishing was a generous patron of that art.

  He’d heard enough radio shows and read enough to fill the big screen of his imagination with all kinds of stories. Sometimes Moishe starred in his own daydreams, but often he reconstructed famous characters. He knew a lot about superheroes and their powers from comic books, which he bought or borrowed whenever possible. If Captain America wasn’t strong enough to handle a job Moishe dreamed up for him, well, he simply added in a quarter of Superman’s abilities for good measure.

  It made little difference to him that no fish were biting. That saved him a chore, after all. His mother’s maxim was, “I cook fish; I don’t clean them,” and the subsequent warning was, “If you catch anything, it better be cleaned by the time you get it home.” Thinking of fish caught or uncaught reminded Moishe that he was hungry, and he was glad when his father drove up. But before the boy could pack up his gear, his dad had jumped out of the truck and picked up the rod.

  Nodding to his son, he asked, “Catch anything?”

  “Nah,” Moishe answered.

  Ben said, “Let me show you how.”

  Moishe was pretty sure his father realized that he already knew how to fish. So he sighed, and silently wondered, Why don’t you just say you want to try for a while? And he prepared for the inevitable. Sure enough, his dad soon reeled in a fish. Ben continued to fish, speaking slowly, amiably, about things his son already knew. The line jerked, and he pulled another fish off the hook.

  Instructions that imparted no new information were bound to irritate the hungry adolescent. It didn’t occur to him that while his dad liked to fish, he might also want to spend time with his older son. Ben’s way of relating to his boys was to teach them. When he wasn’t teaching, he was teasing.

  The son watched as his father caught another fish and another. He’d spent a whole afternoon without catching anything and had not felt the least bit inadequate. But now he heaved an audible sigh. “Uh, Dad? I’m pretty hungry. Can we go home?”

  His dad shrugged. “Sure. But first I better clean these fish. You know how your mother feels about that.”

  Ben Rosen triumphed over the Great Depression years to become a successful businessman and a good provider. He began with buying and selling goods from a truck and eventually he and a partner, Izzy Weiss, opened R & W, a secondhand store. In the mid- to late-1940s, Ben started his first junkyard, Rosen Brothers, with his brother, Dave, his brother in-law Joe, and his nephew Louie (Annie Singer’s husband and son). Ben poured every drop of sweat and smarts into his trade, eventually shaping it into a large and lucrative business. In 1956, Ben started Atlas Iron and Metal with his younger son, Don, and a couple of Don’s in-laws.

  Busy as he was, Ben set aside an hour or so each evening to teach his sons his philosophy of life. Moishe recalled this as “a combination of the Jewish sense of culture and achievement and his own brand of homey diligence.” He said, “Dad periodically made sure we could recite our Hebrew prayers, and he stressed business principles that, had we written them down, would have made a valuable course in any business school. He taught us how to deal with people, how to determine the value of an item, and how to buy and sell.”

  Regarding the prayers, Ben never hid the fact that he did not think much of re
ligion in general. Moishe knew that if his father believed in God at all, it was not the God of the Jewish religion. At one point he asked, “Dad, why do we say these prayers if you don’t believe God is listening?”

  “Sonny Boy,” his father replied, “we say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag because we are Americans. I don’t think the flag can hear us, do you? We say the prayers because we are Jews. If we don’t do these things, how else will people know we are Jews?”

  And so Moishe learned from his father that the Jewish religion, though not necessarily to be believed in, was to be respected and practiced because it was part of what made people to be Jews.

  These lessons were not relationship-building times, per se. “I never really thought of myself as having a relationship with him,” Moishe explained. “At school I was supposed to learn from the teachers and at home I was supposed to learn from my father.”

  Ben was extremely devoted to his family, but he hadn’t many clues from his own father when it came to drawing out his sons as individuals or providing one-on-one experiences they could enjoy together. Moishe’s fondest memories of his dad were times when the entire family was together, around the supper table or out for a drive. He also remembered taking pride in watching his dad excel or receive acknowledgment in various public arenas. Their private father-son moments were not as satisfying—perhaps because those times afforded more possibilities and therefore greater potential for disappointment.

  “He never took me to do anything that I wanted to do,” Moishe recalled, not by way of complaint or accusation. “He took me along to do what he wanted to do.” Then, correcting himself, he added, “I take that back. He took me to see Snow White when I was five years old. It was a big deal because at the time we were still very poor. . . . He hadn’t chosen the movie for his own pleasure. He expected me to enjoy it, since the film was created for children.”