CHAPTER 1

Just before sunrise on a cold December weekday, the morning gabbai unlocks the front door of Anshe Emes. He steps inside the small foyer and turns on the light. Squinting in the sudden brightness, he unbuttons his overcoat. The gabbai is a tall, handsome man in his late fifties with strong features, salt-and-pepper hair, and somber blue eyes.

He pauses in the main sanctuary to adjust the thermostat and continues along the back corridor to the small shul, the place of worship used for weekday services. He opens the door, turns on the light, and waits as the fluorescent tubes flicker overhead, making the contents of the room seem to jiggle. There are three rows of benches on either side of a narrow center aisle. Seating for eighteen, maybe twenty. He checks to make sure that there is a prayer book and a chumash in each of the slots along the backs of the seats and extras in the first row. A wide podium up front is draped with a blue felt cloth. It faces forward, or east, toward the small ark against the front wall. Mounted along the side walls are several heavy brass memorial plaques, each with two columns of names and a small commemorative lightbulb next to each name, some turned on.

Along the north wall is a window facing the parking lot that the small synagogue shares with a 7-Eleven, a dry cleaner, and a Little Caesar's Pizza. The sky has begun to lighten. Through the window he watches a large Dodge pickup pull into a spot in front of the 7-Eleven. Two construction workers step down from the pickup cab, each carrying a big plastic coffee mug, their breath vaporing in the cold air. Down in the synagogue basement, the furnace rumbles to life. He moves over to the window and closes the shades.

Back in the foyer, he hangs his coat on the rack and places his gray fedora on the shelf above it. Reflexively, his right hand moves to his head to check that his kippah is in place. In his left hand he holds a small blue velvet bag embroidered with gold Hebrew letters. He unzips the bag and removes his tallit. Unfurling the silk prayer shawl, he inspects the ends to make sure that none of the fringes is tangled. As he does this, he quietly recites the Hebrew prayer thanking God for commanding him to wrap himself in the garment. Holding the tallit by the collar, he kisses each end and places it over his shoulders.

Just then the front door opens. He turns as Hyman Kantor enters, his walking cane hooked over his forearm. Kantor is in his late seventies—strong nose, hawk eyes, bald head splotched with brown age spots, posture slightly hunched by age.

"Good morning, Mr. Kantor."

"And a good morning to you, Gabbai."

He waits for the question as he watches the old man hang up his coat and arrange his belongings.

Mr. Kantor turns to him. "Will we have a minyan today?"

"There should be twelve."

Mr. Kantor nods, pleased. "Well done."

The gabbai smiles to himself. Mr. Kantor is the first to arrive each weekday morning, and each morning he asks the same question about the minyan, which is the quorum of ten Jewish men required to pray as a community and recite the mourner's Kaddish.

Mr. Kantor thrusts his cane forward and starts toward the shul. "I shall see you inside, sir."

The other men are arriving now, many in their sixties and seventies. They welcome one another as they take off their gloves and unbutton their overcoats and stamp their feet and rub their hands together for warmth. The men greet him warmly—several giving his first name the Yiddish pronunciation, Doovid. A few call him Gabbai.

The lofty title embarrasses him. Unlike the evening gabbai and the Shabbas gabbai of Anshe Emes—and their counterparts in Conservative and Orthodox synagogues around the world—he is not fluent in Hebrew, is not well versed in the Torah, does not call men up to the bima to read from the Torah, does not stand next to them to correct pronunciation and chanting errors, and never himself reads from the Torah. Nor is he a member of long standing or in any way deserving of the great honor normally associated with the title Gabbai. The men gave it to him out of appreciation for the tasks he's performed since joining the small congregation two years ago. Winter, summer, rain or shine, he opens the building at sunrise each weekday morning and makes sure there is a minyan for the morning service. On snowy days, he shovels the front walk. These duties place him somewhere closer to custodian than gabbai. He'd prefer no title, but if forced to take one, he'd choose the humbler designation of sexton.

Inside the shul, Mr. Kantor is in his customary preservice position up at the podium facing the front wall. Bent over, forehead resting on his palms, tallit covering his head, he is softly reciting the preliminary prayers. The other men are scattered among the three rows, each in his usual seat. Some are going through the prayer shawl ritual. Others have progressed to the donning of the tefillin.

The tefillin had intrigued the gabbai at first. Raised a Reform Jew, he'd never heard of the leather contraptions, which, on first impression, seemed almost kinky. Now, though, he couldn't imagine the morning prayers without them.

He rolls his left shirtsleeve above the elbow, unwraps the leather strap of the arm tefillin, places the black leather box on his left bicep, and silently recites the first prayer. He tightens the tefillin and winds the leather strap seven times around his forearm, ending near his wrist. Next he places the leather box of the head tefillin in the middle of his forehead at his hairline. He recites the second prayer and tightens the straps behind his neck. Each of the leather boxes—the one on his left arm and the one on his forehead—contains a tiny scroll with the four scriptural passages that command Jews to put on the tefillin. As he does every morning, he quietly recites in English one of those passages—today the one from Exodus where God explains to Moses the observance of Passover.

"And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, 'It is because of this that Hashem acted on my behalf when I left Egypt.' And it shall serve you as a sign on your arm and as a reminder between your eyes—so that Hashem's Torah may be in your mouth; for with a strong hand Hashem removed you from Egypt."

He moves to his seat in the second row against the north wall near the window. Mr. Kantor has finished his preliminary prayers and moves to his aisle seat in the front row. Rabbi Zev Saltzman, a slender man in his early forties with a neatly trimmed beard and a wry smile, stands to the side of the podium, his left sleeve rolled up, softly reciting the prayers as he dons his tefillin. Most of the regulars are here this morning, all in their usual spots. In the second and third rows on the far side of the aisle is the group of elderly men who call themselves the Alter Kocker Brigade: Saul Birnbaum, Morris Cohen, Benny Abrams, Sid Shalowitz, Heshie Lipsitz, and Mendel Klein—all retired, all in their seventies, all mumbling the preliminary prayers as they rock back and forth, prayer books open on their laps, tallit covering their heads like shawls on elderly widows. In the front row on the left are the two minyan volunteers for today: a podiatrist in his forties named Bob Finkel and a CPA in his thirties named Gerald Brown. Both are yawning. He had called them last night to confirm that they would be here this morning. Seated behind the gabbai in the back row on his side of the aisle are the two mourners: Sam Gutman, whose seventy-three-year-old wife, Sadie, died two months ago, and Kenny Rosenberg, whose mother, Shirley, died of lung cancer seven months ago. They are here today—as they were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that—to say Kaddish, the special prayer recited every morning during the first eleven months following the death of a loved one and thereafter on every anniversary of the death, known as the yahrzeit.

Copyright © 2005 by Michael Baron