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From the Rabbi's Desk A Sketch From My Childhood Money was always in short supply when we were growing up during the Depression of the 1930s. My father, alav hashalom, was a hazan paid hardly enough to subsist on. The bank closures of 1933 wiped out everything we had saved. In those days of balloon mortgages one paid only the interest every month. In our case we couldn’t come up with the payments, resulting in foreclosure by the bank, which then became our landlord. To make ends meet my mother took in boarders. Of course, they were pensioners who could afford only a few dollars in rent, but this extra income was enough to sustain us from month to month—provided that my mother took the trolley to the other side of town and shopped in the cheap stores on Fourth Street, in Philadelphia’s Little Italy. When the High Holy Days rolled around each year I recall that the rabbi, the shamash, and the hazan put out plates on a table in the shul foyer. Each plate had a label on it designating the recipient of any munificent gift. I felt keenly my father’s loss of dignity to have to depend on the “kindness of strangers,” in the words of Tennessee Williams, for a charity handout to supplement his meager wages. It didn’t fully compensate for the outpourings of his soul during the Days of Awe and the other holy days of the year. He would assemble his choir and rehearse them for days at a time. Good voices who would sing for low pay were hard to come by. (Eddie Fisher was a boy alto in my father’s choir in the ’40s.) The point of this vignette is that one of our boarders was a retired shoe salesman named Mr. Buchman, who occupied the choicest bedroom in the house. He drove around in an ancient Buick coupe with a huge salesman’s trunk. He often spoke about the women he consorted with, and he often came in very late at night. I never saw him attend the synagogue, but he told us that he had paid for a bronze plaque to be affixed to the wall of the vestibule of the shul in a conspicuous place befitting a generous donation, and sure enough I never failed to notice it when I came into the synagogue. What struck me about him was that just before Rosh Hashanah I would hear strange sounds coming from his room. Through the door, which was left ajar, probably for effect, I could see Mr. Buchman pacing back and forth, the straps of his tefillin and the fringes of his tallis trailing behind him. He truly believed, it seems, that his murmured penitential prayers, uttered for a few hours a year, would cleanse him of his sins. I was sent off to yeshivah soon afterwards. I learned that Mr. Buchman decided to move to cheaper quarters. I truly hope all of his sins were forgiven. ~ Rabbi Harold Spivack Excerpted from the September 2004 bulletin (PDF)
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