The Thirty-third Hour

by Mitchell Chefitz

Genres: Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

The Thirty-third Hour opens at midnight Saturday, in the study of Rabbi Arthur Greenberg, the leader of the largest synagogue in Miami. The Rabbi has until 9 a.m. Monday morning, thirty-three hours, to investigate a sex ethics charge brought against one of his colleagues by a member of the congregation, Brenda, an attractive widow and the mother of an autistic son.

That colleague, Moshe Katan, an associate from Arthur's seminary days, has been leading an experimental family education program at the synagogue, bringing together parents and children to explore the stories of the Bible in new and challenging ways. Now, piled on Arthur's desk are the video and audio recordings of these sessions and Brenda's journal, which he has to review in a desperate attempt to avoid a disastrous scandal. The reader becomes judge and jury as Arthur seeks to find out what happened and, in the process, undergoes a spiritual transformation himself.

Release date: January 15, 2003

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Just after midnight, as Saturday became the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Rabbi Arthur Greenberg parked in the space reserved for him alongside Temple Emet, the largest Liberal Jewish congregation in greater Miami. If the broad and elegant facade of the sanctuary did not testify to that, surely the number of reserved spaces under the canopy did. His space first, then those of the two assistant rabbis, the cantor, the cantorial assistant, the executive director, the assistant director, and still more beyond that. He closed the door of his Oldsmobile gently so as not to disturb the neighbor to the south. The plans for the new buildings were before the zoning board. There were enough problems with the neighbors to the north without inviting additional complaints.

Two years it had taken him to coax, cajole, commit the leadership of the temple to the building campaign, and now the whole project was in doubt. Zoning and funding, so necessary if the day school was to expand. Outmoded classrooms and not enough of them. The weekend religious school so large it demanded double sessions Saturday and Sunday. Eight hundred more families since the last structure had been dedicated. Even the sanctuary, sumptuous as it was, stilt not large enough to contain the entire congregation on the High Holidays. The time had come to build. He had everything almost in place. So close, but all so fragile. One scandal and the zoning and funding would come to an end.

Zoning and funding. The words echoed through the numbness. Weddings did this, every time. Alcohol, loud music, and the constant need to smile at banal conversation he couldn't hear from across the table. The Grand Bay or Signature Gardens, it was always the same.
Only midnight, and he was so tired. With a scandal about to ignite, he knew he would not be able to sleep, so he had dropped Charlotte at the house and in his tuxedo proceeded, half awake, into the night.

Arthur entered the sanctuary building through the side door, the one by the kitchen the caterers used. He answered the beeps of the security pad with what he hoped to be the current code. Please, he prayed, eyes braced closed lest the alarm go off. The executive director, paranoid since the desecration, changed the numbers every month. Would he have to explain to the Miami police once again he was the rabbi, not a neoNazi intent on spraying swastikas on the synagogue walls?

Blessed silence.

Another pad gained him direct access to his study. Not much of a secret that, the year of his birth entered backward, 7491.

An extension of the sanctuary roof sloped down through the long room into the exterior wall. Charlotte had done her best to atone for the sins with antiques and oriental carpets, but the ceiling and the cinder block wall, punctuated by stained plastic panes, were too much to overcome.

Was it because of those windows he wanted the new sanctuary? The windows were a crime, atrocious. Long ago he had begged the board for funds to replace them. It was not only a matter of the two that penetrated his study, but the twenty that scarred the southern wall. No, if it were a matter of vanity, he would have moved for the new building years before. There was a greater need now that commanded it, the need for adequate classrooms, for space to assemble for a single service on Rosh Hashanah, for an entire community together on Yom Kippur to stand in unison for Kol Nidre. Repeating the service left a foul taste in his mouth, but the distaste for the congregants was the balagan, the traffic confusion between the sessions as families rushed to leave and arrive. He had a vision: a larger sanctuary, a single service for the entire community, a smooth-flowing traffic pattern. The board was sold.

It was all true, every argument, every justification. But Arthur heard the echo of a deeper argument, the decades-old advice of his mentor, Rabbi Howard Lowenstein, of blessed memory, who had stood in the pulpit in Cleveland unscathed for forty years. "You will have doubts," Howard had advised the young Arthur. "When in doubt, build. The community will gather around a new building. If you perceive a weakness, a vacuum, if there is dissension, discord, build. It doesn't matter what. Just build. Nature abhors a vacuum. Build into it. A structure, an edifice. Attach names to it, and the people will come."

Had Howard really said that, or was Arthur confusing it with something he had heard in a movie? No matter. The classrooms were needed. The larger sanctuary, needed. But at the same time Howard's advice was solid. There was dissension in the ranks, grumbling about the program with little notion of how to make change, a vacuum of leadership. Arthur would create space to fill the vacuum.

With the lights toned down, the study was bearable, stained glass and cinder block notwithstanding, but Arthur needed light to clear the fog in his head. Caffeine was no longer available to him, by doctor's orders. Light was all he had.

With one hand he undid his bow tie and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his tuxedo jacket. The jacket he removed and hung in the closet next to his robes. He had a dozen, eight black for use on the Sabbath, four white for the Holy Days. He had never discarded a robe. He collected them, a history of his rabbinate, most in mothballs, the camphor vaguely odorous through plastic covers. Only the newest two, one black, one white, had the three stripes on each arm that marked the honorary doctorate bestowed upon him the year before by the seminary. The wedding couple had requested he not wear a robe, only the tuxedo. More and more he was hearing such a request. It used to be . . . He suspended the thought. No use considering what used to be.

He removed his ten-commandment cufflinks, put them in his right pocket, and groped for his keys. They weren't there. The keys were always in his right trouser pocket, wallet in his left. The french-cuff sleeves, linkless, sagged limp below his wrists. "Damn," he said aloud, not knowing the target of the epithet, only his need to express it. He rolled the cuffs up to his elbows, tracked back across the floor, found the keys on the carpet, by the closet. He didn't remember dropping them.

A key only he possessed unlocked the private filing cabinet. There was one more file to redeem, one that always remained behind lock and key, but he needed it now. Distasteful as it was, he would read it again. That file joined a stack of tapes, papers, a journal on his desk. He had a lot of work ahead of him and then a decision to make concerning a charge against a colleague. More than a matter of ethics, a criminal charge. With all the resultant publicity, a likely end to the zoning and funding.

The tapes and documents were unsettling, not only because of their nature and threat but by their very essence. Arthur was accustomed to a clean desk at the end of every day. He should have been a lawyer, he thought, as he did every time his work seemed unbearable. He placed his Montblanc pen by a fresh legal pad and considered where in the stack he should begin.

"Brenda," he said aloud. "It begins and ends with Brenda."

Nathan Karman had brought Brenda to Arthur eighteen years before.

Nathan and Arthur had played tennis and golf together at the club. Nathan was the attorney one consulted for zoning, the man of influence one consulted for funding. He knew what could be done and how.

He was divorced from his first wife before Arthur arrived in Miami. Brenda was to be his second. "She is not Jewish," Nathan said, "but she is very spiritual. She wants to convert."

Spiritual maybe, beautiful certainly. Twenty, maybe thirty years Nathan's junior, no secret the motivation for their relationship.

"I want to know something about Judaism," Brenda said, "and then I'll make a decision whether or not I want to convert." The words were empty, her direction already set. Such was the price she was willing to pay for status and security.

"She's what I always dreamed of," Nathan confided in the cart on the course. Blond and blue eyed, she reminded Arthur that he too had once entertained such dreams. He had outgrown them, but his friend had not.

Charlotte asked Arthur about the direction he would take in Brenda's instruction. Brenda was not a candidate for the conversion course. As the intended of a friend, she warranted personal coaching from the senior rabbi. He said he would begin with the story of Avishag, the young beauty obtained to warm the aging King David in his bed. "Don't you dare," Charlotte said, throwing a pillow at him. "Besides, you don't have to be so young or so beautiful to keep a bed warm." There was benefit from being around Nathan and Brenda in the excitement of their romance. Arthur and Charlotte made the most of it.

The wedding was a big affair at the Eden Roc. Charlotte took Brenda under her wing, and the two couples became a foursome for tennis, bridge, and dinner in the Gables.

After five years of trying, Brenda was pregnant and more beautiful than ever. Only her belly grew. It seemed but days after Daniel was born she was back in her bikini by the pool at the club. Daniel seemed fine at first, no hint of any difficulty, but toward the end of the first year they began to make the round of doctors to find a name for what they knew to be wrong.

Nathan died at tennis. He won the set and lost his life, gone before help could arrive. Arthur and Charlotte did what they could for Brenda. She was consolable, left with ample means to provide for herself and her son.

Charlotte was more patient with Brenda than Arthur was. Without Nathan, Arthur had no reason to maintain the relationship, but Charlotte insisted for the sake of the son. A saint, Arthur's wife. He was not worthy of her, the thought no mere formulation. He knew it to be true. Her patience so far exceeded his, she was willing to put up even with him. He told her so every time he slipped beneath what he construed to be her measure. She shook her head, and he laughed, both expressions of love.

Some years after Nathan died, Brenda had come to see the rabbi, not Arthur but the rabbi. She came to his study in the synagogue, not to his home. She settled into the sofa across the coffee table from the rabbi in his wing chair.
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"I need to consult with you about something," she began. Arthur waited for her to become comfortable. "It's about men," she said, "married men. Mostly it's the married men who make the passes. The single men don't it's because of Daniel, I guess. But he doesn't keep the married men away. I must send out some signal that attracts them. Some are members of the temple." She named the names.

Arthur pretended astonishment to be polite. This was no great revelation. Brenda bragged of her men to Charlotte, those who wanted her, those who got her. Arthur heard similar stories from other sources. Once she thought a man might leave his wife. He did, for someone else. Brenda was vicious for weeks following. Stilt Charlotte put up with her. Brenda was like another daughter. To Charlotte, not to Arthur.

"Something in her childhood," Charlotte the social worker explained. She never ventured quite what but said, "It either turns them away from sex or turns them onto sex, rarely anything between. It's probably better this way. But their interest is in unavailable men, so you'd better be careful, darling."

Brenda's list became a litany, a veritable slate of officers for the next Board of Trustees. "I don't know what to do about it," Brenda went on. "If this is what the leadership of a synagogue is like, I don't know that I want to be a part of a synagogue anymore. I don't know that I want to be Jewish anymore, Rabbi. Arthur. I don't know what I want. No, I do know. I want
something spiritual. I want a religion that points toward God. I want to be able to ask God questions. I have a lot of questions. I don't know that I expect answers, but I want to be around people who are asking questions. I don't mean to hurt you, Arthur, but I haven't found that here. I haven't found that in Judaism."

Arthur defended his faith, made his suggestions. There were different expressions of spirituality, he explained. Not all involved prayer and talking to God. Social action and righteous deeds were a form of doing God's work and filled one with a sense of divine purpose. He suggested participation in the temple committee that cared for the homeless or work with Habitat for Humanity, a Christian program that nonetheless had a tie to the temple. That seemed to hold Brenda a while. She remained Jewish and continued her affiliation even after Turin came to town and opened his Institute for Jewish Spiritual Experience.

Rafael Turin had Orthodox ordination, smichah from a yeshivah in Jerusalem. For a decade he had taught Talmud and Zohar at a school in Safed. Some leaders of the Jewish Federation, the secular organization that funneled resources to the Jewish agencies of greater Miami, frustrated that less than twenty percent of the Jewish population of Dade County had any involvement with a synagogue, had invited him to Miami to attract those who might otherwise leave for alien disciplines. With such endorsement it would have been difficult to refuse him entry into the rabbinic association, but Turin made the rounds anyway, to assure colleagues his Institute would in no way compete with the standing synagogues. His intention was only to fill the vacuums that existed in the community.

Turin's Institute was a magnet for Brenda. He spoke of God in the deepest way. Brenda shared what she had learned with Arthur, but the language of the Kabbalah was foreign to him. If he had been more conversant with the vocabulary, would he have recognized the danger?

He drew the confidential file before him, determined to be done with it quickly.