Four months have passed since I last set foot in a synagogue, a streak which I would prefer was far longer. Every time I leave a house of worship, I hope that it will be the last time I ever set foot in one, and so far, every time I have thought that, my hopes were dashed sooner or later. There’s always another family bar mitzvah or wedding to attend.
And then, there’s today.
A few days ago, I emailed Rabbi Nesson, leader of the Morristown Jewish Center, the synagogue my family attended when we lived here, about setting up a meeting. He didn’t get back to me until this morning, but he had some time on his schedule early this afternoon, so I agreed to hang around town a little while longer to meet with him.
I have a debt to settle.
When I get to the synagogue, Rabbi Nesson greets me in the administrative lobby, and we go up to his office. He remembers my family, and tells me that he had just joined the congregation when my father was killed. My dad’s funeral, and that of another victim of the bombing, were among Rabbi Nesson’s first duties.
We make small talk for a little while—I tell him about visiting the house last night, and how I’ve laid low and avoided the family friends we have here, whom I’m fairly sure he knows as well. Then, I get to why I wanted to meet with him today.
“My mom has always told me how fantastic the synagogue was after things happened, and how you guys raised money for us, me and my sister, because it was thought that we would need it,” I tell him. “It turns out, though, that the lawsuits that have happened over the years, against Pan Am and against Libya, have left us not so much needing money. We’re doing pretty well. So, I wanted to come by and make a donation.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” the rabbi replies.
“Repay it with some interest,” I say.
“How much it was, I couldn’t possibly tell you,” he says.
“My mom took a guess,” I tell him. “And I’m extrapolating from there. But I also want to attach one small condition to this donation, and that’s this: The money was raised by the community for people in need, so it should either go back to the community or to people in need. It shouldn’t stay here at the synagogue. Help someone out who lost their job. Make a park look nicer. Do something elsewhere with the money.”
He understands what I mean immediately, and explains which groups within the synagoge I could make the check out to in order to have the impact I desire, the best of which seems to be the Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund. After the last year and a half of economic freefall, Rabbi Nesson has gotten more requests for help than he can fulfill with the funds he has available.
I write out a check to the discretionary fund for four times the amount my mom estimated the congregation originally gave me, the best guess I can make as to what that would be worth after 20 years of interest. I feel silly doing so, giving money to a synagogue despite my disdain for religion, but sometimes, religious and secular morality happen to line up.
The rabbi’s eyes pop a little as I hand the check over—I doubt he gets four-figure checks from unemployed 25-year-olds very often. He tells me that, as soon as I leave, he’s going to reach out to a family whose aid request he recently had to deny, and let them know that help is on the way after all. He asks if I want him to create the Saul Rosen Fund within the Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund, but I politely decline. This is not about him or even about me, this is about money meant for people in need going to those who need it, instead of someone who can crash his car thousands of miles away from home, rent another one for a week and a half, and have it barely even qualify as financially notable.
Neither one of us particularly pressed for time in any absolute sense, but I really should hit the road. Before I go, he offers to show me the tallis1 rack that my mom donated to the synagogue many years ago in my dad’s name. I accept, and he calls the maintenance man to unlock the sanctuary. He gives me the grand tour of the building on the way down there, and by the time we arrive at the doors to the sanctuary, the tallis rack has already been rolled out into view.
He tells me that the rack doesn’t feature a plaque or anything else to signify that it was donated in my father’s name, but assures me that they can get one if I so wish. Honestly, I’m happy with it remaining unmarked, but I defer to my mom’s judgment on the matter.
Ironically, the only thing of my father’s which my mom has ever given to me2 was his tallis, which I never actually asked for. I wore it during my bar mitzvah, then immediately returned it to her. I assume she still has it, in the same drawer where it sat all those years before.
Truth be told, I don’t care if I ever see that tallis again, and, while I’m telling the truth, the idea of my father’s name being on a rack full of them offends me more than it should. Intellectually, I know that my father was a religious man, or at least someone who celebrated his Jewish heritage to such an extent that it was indistinguishable. Maurice said that he was fluent in Hebrew, and I know that it was because of him that we belonged to this Conservative Jewish synagogue to begin with, because as soon as we moved to Memphis my family began attending the Reform3 temple where my mom had been raised. I know that it makes sense for a tallis rack to be dedicated to him, because he owned tallis.
And yet, I keep being told how intelligent he was, and I’ve seen plenty of evidence over the years of my mom’s semi-agnosticism4. I get the distinct impression that my mom belongs to her temple more because of the community and culture more than the religion itself. She belongs to the temple for the same reason that I belonged to Jewish youth groups in high school—because that’s where my friends were.
I say none of this to the rabbi. I told him earlier that I no longer practice, and basically left it at that—while I’ve been in his house of worship, I’ve let him take the lead and show me what he wants me to see.
We duck inside the sanctuary and search for my father’s name along the wall where the names of the congregation’s deceased are inscribed, which somehow takes two full sweeps of the wall to locate. After that, he shows me back to the lobby so I can continue onwards. Rabbi Nesson wishes me luck on what’s left of my journey, and we thank each other.
In the car, I plug the address of a hotel I found online outside of Boston into my GPS. The route it gives me leads past the school, Alfred Vail Elementary, where I attended Kindergarten. I’m tempted to stop and see I can have a look around, but when I think of the idea from the perspective of the administrators whom I’d probably have to speak with before I can do so, it occurs that a 25-year-old showing up at a school full of five-to-eight year olds and asking to have a look around probably ranks somewhere around an 8.2 on the Creepy Scale. I pass it by and fill the Pacifica’s gas tank up the road.
Then, like I did so many years ago, I leave Morristown behind, unsure if I will ever return.
There may be no greater postscript to a tale about my views on religion than to note the following: While we spoke, Rabbi Nesson offered me advice on how to get to Boston, and yet I’m putting my faith in my GPS anyway.
I mean this as neither a criticism nor a judgment—I’m sure Rabbi Nesson knows exactly how to get from Morristown to Boston in a swift and efficient manner. If anything, this is my fault—by the time I left the synagogue, I had already forgotten which route he said he preferred. But I still find it amusing in hindsight, here on a stretch of I-95 in Connecticut, that even on matters as simple as geography, I prefer science to faith.
Science, though, cannot cure everything. There’s still no instant repair for my car’s muffler, still no way for me to avoid driving this monster of an SUV along this stretch of road5. The weather alternates between drizzly and rainy, traffic between slow and stopped. My goal for the day was to arrive in the Boston area in time for dinner, but now I merely hope to beat nightfall.
Somewhere here, somewhere in this state, there’s a woman who at first seemed eager to speak with me, but didn’t respond to my emails when I began mapping out my schedule for this trip. While I don’t think it’s fair to tell even the little I do know about her and her story—after all, she essentially opted out—I do think it’s worth noting a larger point here.
These tales are only a few of many.
For every person whose story appears in this book, there are far more whose stories don’t, and their stories are just as important, if not more so, than these. The range of experiences to come from Pan Am 103 are innumerable and immeasurable, and even if I did speak to everyone who was even slightly affected by the attack, there’s still no way to get a true assessment of the bombing’s influence. I can say that Pamela Herbert’s mother was raised out of the projects, Steve Butler’s estranged father was forced to somewhat reconcile with his family, and Dan Tobin wound up heavily medicated, but I can’t say what significance any of these facts hold in the larger picture, or what these people’s lives would have held in store had things gone differently.
As I drive my rental car further east, all I can say for sure is that there will always be more things I don’t know than things I do.
- Tallis are ceremonial shawls worn by men during prayers.
- It is worth noting that, on the few formal occasions in high school when I rented a tuxedo, she allowed me to wear my father’s gold cufflinks.
- Reform Judaism is the least strict of the sects; Conservative is essentially in the middle. For comparison purposes, my Conservative friends had to be fairly fluent in Hebrew for their bar mitzvahs, while I only had to memorize a few prayers and the relevant Torah portion.
- As documented in Chapter 14.
- Aside from renting a different car.