Mitch Albom - Have a Little Faith - A True Story

In his later years, if you asked how he was doing, his eyes would crinkle and he’d raise a conductor’s finger and croon:

“The old gray rabbi,

ain’t what he used to be,

ain’t what he used to be…”

I pushed on the brakes. What was I doing? I was the wrong man for this job. I was no longer religious. I didn’t live in this state. He was the one who spoke at funerals, not me. Who does a eulogy for the man who does eulogies? I wanted to spin the wheel around, make up some excuse.

Man likes to run from God.

But I was headed in the other direction.

I walked up the driveway and stepped on the mat, which was rimmed with crumbled leaves and grass. I rang the doorbell. Even that felt strange. I suppose I didn’t think a holy man had a doorbell. Looking back, I don’t know what I expected. It was a house. Where else would he live? A cave?

But if I didn’t expect a doorbell, I surely wasn’t ready for the man who answered it. He wore sandals with socks, long Bermuda shorts, and an untucked, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. I had never seen the Reb in anything but a suit or a long robe. That’s what we called him as teenagers. “The Reb.” Kind of like a superhero. The Rock. The Hulk. The Reb. As I mentioned, back then he was an imposing force, tall, serious, broad cheeks, thick eyebrows, a full head of dark hair.

“Hellooo, young man,” he said cheerily.

Uh, hi, I said, trying not to stare.

He seemed more slender and fragile up close. His upper arms, exposed to me for the first time, were thin and fleshy and dotted with age marks. His thick glasses sat on his nose, and he blinked several times, as if focusing, like an old scholar interrupted while getting dressed.

“Ennnnter,” he sang. “Enn-trez!”

His hair, parted on the side, was between gray and snowy white, and his salt-and-pepper Vandyke beard was closely trimmed, although I noticed a few spots he had missed shaving. He shuffled down the hall, me in tow behind, looking at his bony legs and taking small steps so as not to bump up on him.

How can I describe how I felt that day? I have since discovered, in the book of Isaiah, a passage in which God states:

“My thoughts are not your thoughts

Neither are your ways my ways

For as the heavens are higher than the earth

So are my ways higher than your ways

And my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

That was how I expected to feel-lower, unworthy. This was one of God’s messengers. I should be looking up, right?

Instead, I baby-stepped behind an old man in socks and sandals. And all I could think of was how goofy he looked.

I should tell you why I shunned the eulogy task, where I was, religiously, when this whole story began. Nowhere, to be honest. You know how Christianity speaks of fallen angels? Or how the Koran mentions the spirit Iblis, exiled from heaven for refusing to bow to God’s creation?

Here on earth, falling is less dramatic. You drift. You wander off.

I know. I did it.

Oh, I could have been pious. I had a million chances. They began when I was a boy in a middle-class New Jersey suburb and was enrolled, by my parents, in the Reb’s religious school three days a week. I could have embraced that. Instead, I went like a dragged prisoner. Inside the station wagon (with the few other Jewish kids in our neighborhood) I stared longingly out the window as we drove away, watching my Christian friends play kickball in the street. Why me? I thought. During classes, the teachers gave out pretzel sticks, and I would dreamily suck the salt off until the bell rang, setting me free.

By age thirteen, again at my parents’ urging, I had not only gone through the requisite training to be bar mitzvahed, I had actually learned to chant from the Torah, the holy scrolls that contain the first five books of the Old Testament. I even became a regular reader on Saturday mornings. Wearing my only suit (navy blue, of course), I would stand on a wooden box in order to be tall enough to look over the parchment. The Reb would be a few feet away, watching as I chanted. I could have spoken with him afterward, discussed that week’s Biblical portion. I never did. I just shook his hand after services, then scrambled into my dad’s car and went home.

My high school years-once more, at my parents’ insistence-were spent mostly in a private academy, where half the day was secular learning and the other half was religious. Along with algebra and European history, I studied Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Proverbs, all in their original language. I wrote papers on arks and manna, Kabbalah, the walls of Jericho. I was even taught an ancient form of Aramaic so I could translate Talmudic commentaries, and I analyzed twelfth-century scholars like Rashi and Maimonides.

When college came, I attended Brandeis University, with a largely Jewish student body. To help pay my tuition, I ran youth groups at a temple outside of Boston.

In other words, by the time I graduated and went out into the world, I was as well versed in my religion as any secular man I knew.

And then?

And then I pretty much walked away from it.

It wasn’t revolt. It wasn’t some tragic loss of faith. It was, if I’m being honest, apathy. A lack of need. My career as a sportswriter was blossoming; work dominated my days. Saturday mornings were spent traveling to college football games, Sunday mornings to professional ones. I attended no services. Who had time? I was fine. I was healthy. I was making money. I was climbing the ladder. I didn’t need to ask God for much, and I figured, as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, God wasn’t asking much of me either. We had forged a sort of “you go your way, I’ll go mine” arrangement, at least in my mind. I followed no religious rituals. I dated girls from many faiths. I married a beautiful, dark-haired woman whose family was half-Lebanese. Every December, I bought her Christmas presents. Our friends made jokes. A Jewish kid married a Christian Arab. Good luck.

Over time, I honed a cynical edge toward overt religion. People who seemed too wild-eyed with the Holy Spirit scared me. And the pious hypocrisy I witnessed in politics and sports-congressmen going from mistresses to church services, football coaches breaking the rules, then kneeling for a team prayer-only made things worse. Besides, Jews in America, like devout Christians, Muslims, or sari-wearing Hindus, often bite their tongues, because there’s this nervous sense that somebody out there doesn’t like you.

So I bit mine.

In fact, the only spark I kept aglow from all those years of religious exposure was the connection to my childhood temple in New Jersey. For some reason, I never joined another. I don’t know why. It made no sense. I lived in Michigan -six hundred miles away.

I could have found a closer place to pray.

Instead, I clung to my old seat, and every autumn, I flew home and stood next to my father and mother during the High Holiday services. Maybe I was too stubborn to change. Maybe it wasn’t important enough to bother. But as an unexpected consequence, a certain pattern went quietly unbroken:

I had one clergyman-and only one clergyman-from the day I was born.

Albert Lewis.

And he had one congregation.

We were both lifers.

And that, I figured, was all we had in common.

At the same time I was growing up in the suburbs, a boy about my age was being raised in Brooklyn. One day, he, too, would grapple with his faith. But his path was different.

As a child, he slept with rats.

Henry Covington was the second-youngest of seven kids born to his parents, Willie and Wilma Covington. They had a tiny, cramped apartment on Warren Street. Four brothers slept in one room; three sisters slept in another.