William Kienzle - Requiem for Moses

“As he’s walking through his town, the widow Moskovitz calls to him and invites him to tea. Reb stays the night with her, figuring that one fornication should make him eligible for hell. When they wake up in the morning, the widow turns to him and says, ‘Oh, Reb, such a mitzvah you did for me.’”

Koesler finished his salad and began looking for the waitress to hot up his coffee. “Reb Yankel and his attempt to even things out reminds me of a story I heard. About a mountain in Ireland. It’s a sacred mountain called Croagh Patrick. Long before they get to the pearly gates, Catholics try to even things out. Which, nine times out of ten, means we do penance for our sins.”

Feldman smiled. He enjoyed hearing about the quaint customs of what he liked to call “Our Daughter Church.”

“The Irish custom at Croagh Patrick is to climb the mountain on one’s knees.”

“You mean crawl up the mountain?”

“Well, it’s not Everest. But, still, it could get rid of a lot of punishment for sin. Anyway, this bunch of pilgrims was about halfway up the mountain when a middle-aged woman, as she was crawling, caught the heel of her shoe in the back hem of her skirt. She was hobbled. So she half turned to the man behind her and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but would you mind lifting my skirt?’ And he replied, ‘I will not. It’s for doin’ the likes of that that I’m doin’ the likes of this.’”

Feldman chuckled. He, too, had finished his salad. He attracted the waitress’s attention, a small miracle in itself, and motioned for more coffee.

The two men, as was their custom, would linger long over a series of coffee refills. They would leave a generous tip. Waiters and waitresses who recognized them did not mind the long visits. Not as long as the big tips kept coming.

“What with this Catholic custom of doing penance for sins, Dr. Moses Green is lucky he’s a Jew,” said Feldman. “If he were a Catholic, he’d never get off that mountain.”

Koesler suddenly became serious. “Dr. Green …” he said meditatively. “That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful you phoned today and we could get together now.”

Feldman’s warm smile encouraged Koesler to continue.

“When I agreed to host the wake service, I had no idea what kind of man Dr. Green was … is. It wasn’t until last night, at the wake, when some people told me what the doctor had done to them that I began to understand. I have the feeling I just scraped the surface. And I was, and am, very embarrassed. Embarrassed for myself.”

“No need for that ….” Feldman leaned forward so they could converse more privately. “You may think the Jewish community considers you to be off your rocker for waking Dr. Green. But he had died-or so it seemed. Someone had to bury him.”

“It wasn’t that so much,” Koesler said. “I was afraid the Jewish community would assume I was aware of Green’s personality. And that I was offering my parish as host for a man who, I suppose, was a disgrace to Jewish people. But until last night’s revelations, I had no idea how venal the man was.”

“Well, we knew. But there was nothing anyone could do about it. It’s the identification that is unfortunate. In no other race of people that I know of is there such a blend of nationality and religion.

“To be Irish is not necessarily to be Catholic. To be German is not necessarily to be Lutheran. To be Scots is not necessarily to be Presbyterian. To be English is not necessarily to be Anglican. But to be Jewish is, at least as the general perception goes, to be Jewish. The religion is the nationality. The religion is the race. They are interchangeable.

“Moses Green is Jewish because his parents were Jewish. Everyone assumes that Green’s religious affiliation is Jewish-even though Green would be utterly lost in a synagogue. Everyone expected him to be buried from a Jewish mortuary. And it’s likely he would have been if the family had not arranged for a Christian ceremony.”

“Now that you mention it, I was surprised at that,” Koesler said. “At St. Joe’s, it was just a wake. The burial would have been a Jewish ceremony.”

“My friend,” Feldman said, “you would have to know us better to understand that.”

They were silent for a moment.

“As we talk,” Koesler said, “what is really bothering me is getting clearer. It was my decision to host Dr. Green’s wake that brought him before the public eye in this affair. The media, as is their habit, are telling all. Now, countless numbers of people will hear how vile a man he was. And their estimate of Jews in general will plummet. All because of one man-and my decision to provide a stage for all this.”

Feldman’s smile did not lighten his serious demeanor. “My friend, we all have our successes and our failures. Off the top of your head, who comes to mind when I say ‘Jewish heroes’?”

“Jewish heroes …” Koesler thought for a moment. “Abraham, Moses, Esther, David-all those wonderful biblical personalities.”

“And since then?”

Well … Maimonides for one. Personal favorites? Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, uh … Hank Greenberg. And so many of the great musicians and composers: Itzhak Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Bruch. And of course”-he smiled-” Beverly Sills.

“How about you?” Koesler asked. “Christian heroes?”

“You might not agree ….”

“It’s not up to me to agree. They’re your heroes.”

“Well, let’s see. Francis of Assisi, John XXIII, Martin Luther King. Bonhoeffer, Schweitzer … and your artistic types: Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo … and so many more.

“But now”-Feldman wagged a finger-” how about some Jewish villains?”

“That’s tough. It has to be a very personal list. Judas.”

They laughed.

“The capos of the Holocaust,” Koesler went on. “Maybe Meir Kahane, maybe Henry Kissinger, maybe Elliott Abrams. I don’t know. How about your list of Christian villains?”

“If you’ll pardon me, that’s too easy. Hitler, Stalin, Petain, Al Capone, Quisling, Oliver Cromwell, Mengele … I could go on and on. Now, if we dipped into Islam,” Feldman continued, “on the plus side might be Muhammad and Saladin. On the minus side, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein.

“The point of course, is that every religion has its angels and its devils.”

“Yes, yes,” Koesler agreed. “And each of the world’s great religions teaches some version of the Golden Rule. Some subjects follow it; others ignore it. Which brings us back to Chesterton, who said that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“So, you see,” Feldman said, “we got stuck with Dr. Green. But, not to worry: You did not introduce us to Green. We have known about him for a long time-a very long time.”

“You do … uh, I mean, you have? But I thought he was a stranger to the synagogue.”

“Oh, but yes. Regardless, we knew all about him and what a bad name he was giving us. A Jewish doctor! How could we not know about him? What’s that story you tell about old John McGraw and the New York Giants?”

“You mean the one about a Giants player getting injured and Muggsie McGraw going out to home plate with a megaphone and asking if there was a priest and a doctor in the stands? And one doctor and twenty-three priests came forward.”

“The very story. Well, if you want to be medically attended as well as possible, go to a synagogue of a Shabbat. If anybody got sick, there would come forward one rabbi and twenty-three doctors. Oh, yes, we know Dr. Green.”

“Then can you tell me, why is he scrambling for the last nickel? I mean, he’s a doctor-a surgeon. Isn’t it safe to assume he’s very comfortably well off?”