The Rabbi by Noah Gordon

Author:Noah Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barcelona Digital Editions
Published: 1965-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

23

Max Gross looked at the girl in her stylish clothing and with her sleek legs and bold American eyes and he felt a surge of annoyance. Only four times during his entire rabbinate at Shaarai Shomayim had goyim sought him out and asked him to transform them into Jews. Each time, he reflected, the request had been made as if he were someone who could wave his hands in the air and—pouf!—in a cloud of smoke change the facts of their births. He had never seen fit to undertake a conversion.

“What do you see among the Jews that makes you want to be one of us?” he asked coldly. “Don’t you realize that Jews are persecuted and alone in the universe? Don’t you know that as individuals we are despised by the gentile and that as a people we are cut asunder?”

Leslie stood and collected her gloves and purse. “I didn’t expect you to accept me,” she said. She reached for her coat.

“Why not?”

The old man’s eyes were bright and piercing, like her father’s. The thought of the Reverend John Rawlins triggered relief that this rabbi was sending her away. “Because I don’t think I could feel like a Jew. Not if I lived a million years,” she said. “It’s inconceivable to me that anyone could ever really want to harm me, to kill my future children, to lock me away from the world. I myself have had certain prejudices against the Jews; I must admit this. I feel unworthy to join a people who bear such a burden of mass hatred.”

“You feel unworthy?”

“Yes.”

Rabbi Gross stared. “Who told you to say that?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He stood up heavily and walked to the ark. Pulling aside the blue curtains and pushing open the sliding wooden door, he revealed two velvet-encased Torahs. “In these scrolls are the laws,” he said. “We do not seek recruits to Judaism; we discourage them. It is written in the Talmud that rabbis must say specific things when apostates from other religions seek us out. The Torah says the rabbi must warn the gentile about the Jew’s fate in this world. The Torah also is specific about another detail. If the gentile in effect answers ‘I know all this yet I feel unworthy to be a Jew’ he is to be accepted immediately for conversion.”

Leslie sat down. “You mean you will take me?” she asked faintly.

He nodded. Ah, she thought, what can I do now?

She met with him on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He talked and she listened, more carefully than she had listened in her most difficult lecture course at college, asking no idle questions, interrupting only when it was vital to get his explanation.

He outlined for her the fundamental principles of the religion. “I will not teach the language,” he said. “New York is full of Hebrew teachers. If you wish, go to one of them.” In The Times she saw an advertisement which brought her to the 92nd Street YMHA, and that took care of Wednesday evenings.

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