As we walked to the front door that day, I felt a wave of guilt. I’d once had rituals; I’d ignored them for decades. These days, I didn’t do a single thing that tied me to my faith. Oh, I had an exciting life. Traveled a lot. Met interesting people. But my daily routines—work out, scan the news, check e-mail—were self-serving, not roped to tradition. To what was I connected? A favorite TV show? The morning paper? My work demanded flexibility. Ritual was the opposite.
Besides, I saw religious customs as sweet but outdated, like typing with carbon paper. To be honest, the closest thing I had to a religious routine was visiting the Reb. I had now seen him at work and at home, in laughter and in repose. I had seen him in Bermuda shorts.
I had also seen him more this one spring than I normally would in three years. I still didn’t get it. I was one of those disappointing congregants. Why had he chosen me to be part of his death, when I had probably let him down in life?
We reached the door.
One more question, I said.
“One mooore,” he sang, “at the doooor…”
How do you not get cynical?
He stopped.
“There is no room for cynicism in this line of work.”
But people are so flawed. They ignore ritual, they ignore faith—they even ignore you. Don’t you get tired of trying?
He studied me sympathetically. Maybe he realized what I was really asking: Why me?
“Let me answer with a story,” he said. “There’s this salesman, see? And he knocks on a door. The man who answers says, ‘I don’t need anything today.’
“The next day, the salesman returns.
“‘Stay away,’ he is told.
“The next day, the salesman is back.
“The man yells, ‘You again! I warned you!’ He gets so angry, he spits in the salesman’s face.
“The salesman smiles, wipes the spit with a handkerchief, then looks to the sky and says, ‘Must be raining.’
“Mitch, that’s what faith is. If they spit in your face, you say it must be raining. But you still come back tomorrow.”
He smiled.
“So, you’ll come back, too? Maybe not tomorrow…”
He opened his arms as if expecting an incoming package. And for the first time in my life, I did the opposite of running away.
I gave him a hug.
It was a fast one. Clumsy. But I felt the sharp bones in his back and his whiskered cheek against mine. And in that brief embrace, it was as if a larger-than-life Man of God was shrinking down to human size.
I think, looking back, that was the moment the eulogy request turned into something else.