Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [57]
“We got a bum radiator hose,” my dad shouted back to us. The black man went back to his car and opened the trunk. He brought out a jug of water and gave it to my dad to pour into the radiator.
“This should get you a few blocks to the gas station,” the stranger said. “But I’d go back in the other direction.”
My dad thanked him for his kindness and offered to pay him something, but the man would have none of it.
“Just glad I could help,” the man said. “Hope someone would do that for me if I needed it. You want me to follow you?”
My dad, probably still wondering if we would indeed have stopped for him if he’d been in trouble, said, no, we’ll be fine, we’ll just head back to Michigan Avenue where surely someone would be open.
And someone was. The gas station attendant replaced the radiator hose, filled the radiator up, and we were on our way.
“We were lucky,” my dad said somewhere around Clarkston. “That was a good man we ran into. And that was the last night game we’re going to.”
Eight months later, and just six days before the Opening Day of a new Detroit Tigers season (one in which they would go on to win the World Series), Holy Week was approaching. It was Easter time, and this year the nuns thought it would be a good idea for us to see where the original “Last Supper” on Holy Thursday came from.
“The apostles and Jesus were Jews,” Sister Mary Rene told us. “They were not Christian or Catholic. They were Jews and they observed Jewish traditions. And so during this week, Jesus had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the Jewish feast commemorating the time Jews were told by God to smear lamb’s blood on their doorposts in Egypt. This was done so that when the Angel of Death was making his rounds to kill all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians, he’d know where the Jewish houses were so he could skip them. This was God’s way of sending a message to the Pharaoh: let Moses and the Jewish people go or I’ll fuck you up some more.”4
OK, well, whew, that was some story, and as I was the first (and only) son in my family, I found it mildly interesting if not creepy. God, in the Old Testament, seemed to have some sort of chip on his shoulder. He was constantly whacking whole tribes or tossing guys inside whales’ stomachs. Real attitude problem, I used to think. And why wasn’t his Angel of Death smart enough to know which ones were the Egyptian homes and which were the Jewish homes without having to mess up the Jewish front doors with difficult-to-remove bloodstains? Couldn’t he just tell them apart from the different styles of architecture each group employed—the Egyptians with their split-level colonials, and the Jews with their fixer-upper slave huts? Plus, wouldn’t that blood on the door make the Jews less safe, especially considering the next morning, all the Egyptians are going to wake up to find they’ve got a dead kid in the house and then they’re like, “Let’s go get the Jews!” But then someone says, “How the hell will we find them?” and then someone else runs in and says, “Hey, they’ve all got blood out on their porches! Just burn down the huts with the lamb’s blood!”
Sister Mary Rene, like Sister Raymond and the other nuns, took great pains to let us know that, contrary to what we may have heard, the Jews did not kill our Lord and Savior. The Romans did. Jesus was Jewish, was born Jewish, and died Jewish and he’d be very upset if he thought we blamed his own people for his demise—which was supposed to happen anyway so that he could rise from the dead and start our religion! Yay!
The nuns contacted one of the three synagogues in Flint and asked if they could bring some seventh- and eighth- grade students over for a Passover dinner so we could learn the Jewish tradition of this time of year. The rabbi was more than happy to accommodate and we spent a week learning to sing “Hava Nagila” as a sort of thank-you to them.
I didn’t remember much about this event they called a seder, other than someone asked four questions and we couldn’t put the chocolate cake