This is an excerpt from a chapter for a novel that I was hired to be one of several writers on in 1998 and which never came to fruition. The idea was that a different writer would handle the chapters featuring the different characters, while the originating author would write the chapters that wove everything else all together. The originating author was African-American, as were most of the characters in the book, including “my” character, Eric. But in the course of the story, Eric learns he’s also part Jewish and has to travel to Israel to claim an inheritance in the Gaza Strip. My friend, the originating author, was happy to be able to have one guy be both his “token white guy” and “token Jew” on the project. I was happy to oblige and was disappointed when the book fell through. I would have liked to have written more about Eric.
Eretz Yisroel, or “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”
I was just a kid, seven or eight, I don’t remember exactly, when the old rabbi gave me the lucky dollar one summer afternoon. He was like, I don’t know, the pope of rabbis, at least of this particular sect of Jews. They called him Rebbe. They called themselves the Chabad Lubavitch, which I looked up at the library, eventually. They’re the real deal, old school Orthodox, wear the black hats and suits and long beards, the women wear long skirts and keep their heads covered when they get married with scarves or wigs.
Way I understand it, they’re kind of like missionaries, only instead of trying to convert non-Jews to Judaism, they want to make regular, non-religious Jews more Jewish. Like, most Jews not only don’t wear the get-up, they hardly ever attend synagogue, ignore most of the Jewish holidays except as an excuse to take a few extra days off work every year, and, for good measure, eat pork like it’s going out of style. What the Lubavitch want to do is get these guys to start doing more Jewish stuff, like lighting candles on Friday nights, which is when they start their Sabbath, or say their prayers every day, go to synagogue every now and then, whatever.
The Rebbe lived right there in Crown Heights, at 770 Eastern Parkway, a big three-story brick house, set back from the street by a small patch of front yard on that great big stretch of a street eight lanes wide, a grand boulevard based on the streets of Paris cutting north to south through about three miles of some of Brooklyn’s crappiest neighborhoods with tree and bench-lined islands on either side of the way. The Lubavitch would come to the Rebbe’s house every Sunday, thousands of them, to visit, waiting in line for hours to see him, ask for his advise or receive his blessing. It was a big deal to these guys.
And the Rebbe talked to every single one of them. And he’d would hand out dollar bills. A nice, crisp new dollar for everyone which, I learned, you were supposed to give to charity, what Jews call tzedakah. You can do a lot of good deeds as a Jew, but there ain’t many deeds better than giving to charity.
So there I was, little black kid, finished with church, wandering Eastern Parkway, looking for somebody to hang with, maybe play some stoopball with the old pink rubber Spalding I’d found that still had some bounce left in it. And there they were, what looked like a million Jews with their gray beards, gathered in front of this building, quiet, orderly, talking. Not like black people. You put that many brothers and sisters in one place, you hear it. They’d be shouting and laughing and playing boom boxes. Not the Jews, though. These people knew how to form an orderly line.
I’d seen them there before, on other Sundays, but I guess that was the first time I ever bothered being curious about what was going on. I wandered closer, bouncing my Spalding and weaving through the sea of people, catching snippets of talk in whatever foreign language they spoke, every now and then being smiled at by some old man or woman who were probably wondering what I was doing at their party. But no one complained or seemed to care, so I kept wandering closer, right up to sidewalk in front of the house.
And that was the one and only time I ever saw the Rebbe. He was…well, an old white guy, sitting in a straight back kitchen chair in the doorway, probably to catch the breeze and not be inside a hot house with a thousand people around him. Big white beard, bushy mustache, twinkling eyes. No disrespect, but swap the black hat for a red, fur trimmed cap and you’d have Santa Claus. But that was cool. Santa Claus I could handle. Hell, I liked Santa Claus. And I knew Santa Claus liked me. He left me presents every Christmas, didn’t he?
Don’t know why, but at the very moment I saw him, the Rebbe happened to glance toward the sidewalk where I was standing. He was probably just checking out the crowd to see how many more people were waiting for him, but timing’s everything and we caught each other’s eye. Santa Claus smiled at me, looking delighted to discover this little black kid waiting on line to see him.
And then he raised his hand and waved at me.
So I waved back. Hey, Santa Jew wants to wave hi, I’m gonna be a nice boy and wave back. I didn’t want no coal in my stocking next Christmas.
The crowd looked around to see who the Rebbe was waving at and, when they saw it was me, Tiny LeRoy, they began to laugh and, with pats on the back and encouraging chuckles and “Go, go,” they started to nudge me forward, up the walk, to the small stoop where the old man sat on a kitchen chair. I wasn’t scared, just confused. I mean, I’d seen Santa before, but usually at Macy’s on Flatbush Avenue and usually during the winter, closer to Christmas.
“Hello, young man,” he said when I finally reached him. He had the nicest voice I’d ever heard. Quiet. Calm. Gentle, with a slight accent. And his eyes, up close, were, even to a kid as young as I was, amazing. Superman had X-ray vision, but this guy had Kindness vision.
He was Santa!
“’Lo,” I said, barely above a whisper.
“I see you came to visit me today.”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Do you know who I am?”
Shrug. “Santa?”
The guys around him, young rabbis and students, all laughed at that, but the old man smiled, gently, kindly. “Not quite. I’m a rabbi. You know what a rabbi is?”
Shrug. “Like a priest?”
He nodded and combed his fingers through his beard. “Like a priest,” he agreed. “Only for Jewish people.”
“’Kay.”
He held out his hand. My momma had raised me right, so I took it and gave him a firm hand. “What is your name, young man?”
“Eric.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Eric. Thank you so much for stopping by today.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Here.” One of the young rabbis handed him a dollar bill from a stack in his hand. “This is for you.”
I hesitated. You didn’t take candy or money from strangers. They taught you that starting as soon as you could walk and didn’t stop drilling it into your head until you were old enough to stop listening.
“Take it,” he said. “I make this gift to everyone. It’s all right.”
The men around him all nodded in agreement. So I took it.
“Thank you, rabbi,” I said.
“You are welcome, Eric. Go, be blessed, child.”
So I went, back down the walk to the street, through the chuckling throng, while the Rebbe went on to his next visitor.
“Keep that, sonny,” I heard someone say. “You shouldn’t spend that dollar.”
Another man, his hair and beard as red as Mr. McCann’s, the man who owned the grocery we sometimes shopped in, was waiting his turn, looked sternly down at me.
I shouldn’t?
I was a seven years old. A dollar was a fortune. Visions of candy bars and comic books were dancing in my head. A whole buck? Man, in my mind, that money was spent as soon as it hit my hand.
“From the Rebbe,” not-Mr. McCann said, “that’s a special dollar, a lucky dollar. You buy a piece candy, it’s gone in a few minutes. You keep that dollar, it will bring you luck the rest of your life.”
I looked at the dollar. Looked like any other one I’d ever seen.
Not-Mr. McCann squatted next to me and fixed me with a very serious, very grown-up look.
“To us, he is the masseach. The messiah.”
That got my attention and I remember gasping. “You mean…like Jesus?”
“Well, something like that.”
And I knew it was possible, because even my seven-year old brain could put it together. I’d just been in church that morning, looking right up at Jesus on the cross.
“Jesus…Jesus was a white man, too,” I said in a whisper filled with awe, staring at the dollar bill that I’d just been given by the messiah. The Messiah!
“Oh no,” said not-Mr. McCann. “We’re not white people. We’re Jews.”