Truth - Al Franken [55]
I told the rabbi I’d check with my Dad and went down the hall to his bedroom. By now, Dad was down to about seventy-five pounds and extremely weak. But he was still totally on the ball. I said to him, “Dad, Rabbi Black is here and he was wondering if he could talk to you.”
It took Dad a moment to gather his breath and say, “Well, I don’t really know him.” Rabbi Black was new to the temple. Then with a shrug in his frail voice, Dad said, “But if he feels it will do him some good . . .”
I laughed really hard. And Dad smiled. A happy, satisfied smile, because his son had given him the best gift you could receive in our house. I had laughed at his joke.
I went back to the living room and told Rabbi Black that Dad would see him. The rabbi spent about a half hour with Dad, who died five days later. Rabbi Black presided over Dad’s memorial, where I told the “if he feels it will do him some good” story. Everyone laughed, especially Rabbi Black.
It wasn’t until a few months ago that I heard the rest of the story. I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Rabbi Black now has a congregation. Our radio show was touring the Southwest, and I invited the rabbi to be part of the audience. Before the show, we sat in a small office at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and I asked Rabbi Black how his talk with my Dad had gone. The rabbi smiled. “Oh, he tried to make me feel comfortable.”
That was my Dad.
Joe Franken was born in 1908 in New York City to immigrant parents. His dad, my grandfather, Otto Franken, died of tuberculosis when Dad was sixteen. So Dad went to work and didn’t finish high school. He never had much of a career—Dad was a printing salesman for the last thirty years of his working life—but everyone liked Joe Franken. He and Mom were married fifty-three years. They bickered sometimes—maybe more than sometimes—but were completely devoted to each other. Mom pretty much fell apart after he died.
Neither of my folks was particularly observant, but my Dad liked going to temple. Mainly, for him, it was a social thing. He was an usher, and he loved the music and the sermons. Rabbi Shapiro, the rabbi he knew, spoke from the bema about Jewish religious philosophy and the requirement that Jews not only be just but that we do justice.
Unlike Mom, Dad was comfortable talking with me about religion and God. He believed in God, but not as an old man with a long white beard sitting in Heaven. In many ways, Dad’s view of God was like our Founding Fathers’. Not Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, who were not really Christians so much as Deists.
To Dad, the Bible—meaning the Old Testament—was not to be taken literally. Woman evolved along with man through natural selection. Not from Adam’s rib. The work of God could be found, as our Founders believed, in Nature.
Dad told me that he believed Nature, which to him included humankind, to be so beautiful, so magnificent, that there had to be something behind it all. That was it. That was Dad’s idea of God: something behind it all. It was no more or less complicated than that.
For Dad the rest of religion lay in the ethical teachings of Judaism and, to the extent he had absorbed them, of any other faith, Western, Eastern, or whatever. Again, not so different from our Founders. In their famous correspondence at the end of their lives, Adams and Jefferson wrote a lot about religion. When Adams concluded that his personal creed was “contained in four short words, ‘Be just and good,’ ” Jefferson replied, “The result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the four words, ‘Be just and good,’ is that in which all our inquiries must end.”
So if your definition of traditional American religious values starts with the Founders, you could say my Jewish father’s values were as traditional as they get. Jefferson, of course, had sex with a slave, which Dad would have disapproved of. Mainly on the slavery front.
My conception