Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [16]
One time, he was sitting in a church classroom, explaining his religion to the students. A boy raised his hand with a question.
“Where are your horns?”
The Reb was stunned.
“Where are your horns? Don’t all Jews have horns?”
The Reb sighed and invited the boy to the front of the room. He removed the skullcap (kippah) that he wore on his head and asked the boy to run his hands through his hair.
“Do you feel any horns?”
The boy rubbed.
“Keep looking. Do you?”
The boy finally stopped.
“No,” he said, quietly.
“Ah.”
The boy sat down.
“Now where was I?” the Reb said.
Another time, the Reb invited an Episcopalian priest to address his congregation. The two men had become friendly, and the Reb thought it a good idea if clergymen were welcome in each other’s sanctuaries.
It was a Friday night service. After prayers were sung, the priest was introduced. He stepped to the pulpit. The congregation quieted.
“It’s a pleasure for me to be here,” he said, “and I thank the rabbi for inviting me…”
Suddenly, tears began to well in his eyes. He spoke about how good a man Albert Lewis was. Then he blurted out, in a gush of emotion, “That is why, please, you must help me get your rabbi to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.”
Dead silence.
“He’s a lovely person,” the priest lamented, “and I don’t want him to go to hell…”
More dead silence.
“Please, have him accept Jesus. Please…”
Few attendees ever forgot that service.
And then there was the time when a member of the Reb’s congregation, a German immigrant named Gunther Dreyfus, came racing in during a High Holiday service and pulled the Reb aside.
Gunther’s face was ashen. His voice was shaking.
“What’s wrong?” the Reb asked.
Apparently, minutes earlier, Gunther had been outside, overseeing the parking, when the Catholic priest came stomping out and began to yell about all the cars parking by his church, because it was a Sunday and he wanted the spaces for his members.
“Get them out of here,” he hollered, according to Gunther. “You Jews move your cars now!”
“But it’s the High Holiday,” Gunther said.
“Why must you have it on a Sunday?” the priest yelled.
“The date was set three thousand years ago,” Gunther replied. Being an immigrant, he still spoke with a German accent. The priest glared at him, then uttered something almost beyond belief.
“They didn’t exterminate enough of you.”
Gunther was enraged. His wife had spent three and a half years in a concentration camp. He wanted to slug the priest. Someone intervened, thankfully, and a shaken Gunther returned to the sanctuary.
The next day, the Reb phoned the Catholic archbishop who oversaw the area’s churches and told him what had happened. The following day, the phone rang. It was the priest, asking if he could come over and talk.
The Reb met him at the office door. They sat down.
“I want to apologize,” he said.
“Yes,” the Reb said.
“I should not have said what I did.”
“No, you should not have,” the Reb said.
“My archbishop had a suggestion,” the priest said.
“What is that?”
“Well, as you know, our Catholic school is in session now. And they will have their recess soon…”
The Reb listened.
Then he nodded and stood up.
And when the school doors opened and the kids burst out for recess, they saw the priest of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church and the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom walking arm in arm, around the schoolyard.
Some kids blinked.
Some kids stared.
But all of them took notice.
You might think that an uneasy truce; two men forced to walk around a schoolyard, arm in arm. You might think a certain bitterness would haunt the relationship. But somehow, in time, they became friends. And years later, the Reb would be inside that Catholic church.
At the priest’s funeral.
“I was asked to help officiate,” the Reb recalled. “I recited a prayer for him. And I think, by that time, he might have thought it wasn’t so bad.”
Life of Henry
Henry was often told “Jesus loves you,” and it must have been true. Because he kept getting second chances.
While he was in prison, Henry