Chanukah Guilt, page 1
Chanukah Guilt
Rabbi Ilene Schneider
Dedication
To my family: husband Rabbi Gary M. Gans for never nagging me about surfing the ’net or watching TV instead of writing; and to our sons Natan and Ari Schneider-Gans for … well, just for being.
Chapter 1
Saturday, November 23
I hate funerals.
No one really likes funerals, except maybe Harold and Maude, and they’re fictional. I guess I should say that no one I know in real, rather than reel, life likes them, but I really, really hate them. That’s because I have a tendency to cry.
I realize that it’s acceptable, even healthy, to cry at funerals, but I overdo it. It doesn’t matter if the funeral is for a friend, an acquaintance, a relative, a stranger, a child dying too soon or an older person who’s lived a full life. As soon as the eulogy starts, I take one look at the bereaved in the front row, and, bingo, the water works begin. I cried so hard during the funeral scene in Steel Magnolias that I was worried I would be asked to leave the movie theater. Even life insurance ads leave me weepy.
Generally, excessive crying at funerals is permissible. But not when the person crying is the officiating rabbi.
Over the twenty-five or so years I’ve been conducting funerals, I’ve trained myself to disconnect or dissociate or compartmentalize my feelings or whatever this year’s pop psychology buzzword is. Usually, I take a deep breath, look somewhere just over the mourners’ heads, and get through the service with barely a catch in my voice.
This funeral, though, wouldn’t present any problems of the lachrymose variety. In fact, it would be hard for me to show any sympathy at all as I tried to find something nice (or not too nasty) to say about William Phillips, self-made millionaire, real estate developer, and land rapist. To complicate matters, I would have to remember that his name was William Phillips, not Phillip Williams. Interchangeable names always confuse me.
I had never met Phillips, but that didn’t stop me from disliking him. Nobody had liked him, not even his several wives, past, current, and future. Not even his kids, from what I had heard. In fact, I would guess that no one, not even his mother, had ever given Phillips unconditional love except for his granddaughter. And she was still a toddler.
Fortunately, the family had decided to have a graveside funeral. Fortunately for me, that is, since there’s no eulogy at a graveside service. I would have to say something—the family wants something for their money—but not the twenty-minute praise-filled speech they expect when the service is held at the funeral home.
Phillips was such a prominent person in the community—not popular, but famous for his infamy—that I was surprised when I came home from services late Saturday morning to find a message from the funeral home asking me to preside at the funeral the next day. Generally, when someone dies on Shabbat—Friday sundown through Saturday sundown—the funeral would be on Monday, or even Tuesday, to allow the family to notify friends and to give non-local relatives time to arrive.
“How come they decided to have a graveside, and so quickly?” I asked Caryn Rozen, the newest member of the Ruben family to join the family funeral home business.
Caryn and I had gone to rabbinical school together for a year before she had gotten married and decided to go into early childhood education instead. We had been good friends and movie-going buddies then and had kept in touch off-and-on through the years. After her recent divorce, she had decided to accept her grandfather’s offer to pay for mortuary college if she joined the family firm. Now that we lived in the same area, we had reconnected. Caryn and I are friends in part because we share the same warped sense of humor, tinged with a streak of cattiness, so her professional sense of honor wasn’t offended when I asked, “Are they afraid that no one would come?”
“The ‘official’ reason is they want to bury him as soon as possible, ‘in accordance with Jewish tradition,’” she answered. We both laughed, although mine came out as a snort. According to Janet Brauner, one of the few congregants who had shown up for services that morning and my source for everything gossipy, when Phillips had keeled over the previous night, it had been into his lobster special at one of the new upscale seafood restaurants in the area. So much for his devotion to Jewish tradition.
“Remember the scene at the beginning of Charade when the bad guys come to the funeral to check that Audrey Hepburn’s husband is really dead? Phillips’ family didn’t want anyone opening the casket and poking him. Or maybe they’re afraid that everyone will applaud. He left more enemies than friends, and no one’s particularly mourning him.”
She hesitated. “Actually, that’s not true. Madison, the middle child, is upset.” So much for my suspicion that only the two-year-old loved him.
Caryn continued, “And Tyler’s pretty torn up, but I think it’s because Phillips died before he and Jennifer were even formally separated. Chances are that he hadn’t changed his will, so Jennifer will get the bulk of his estate, while Tyler gets nothing. I bet even her condo’s not in her name.”
“Wait a minute.” I said. “Back up. I know Jennifer is the trophy wife, but who is Tyler?”
“Tyler’s the trophy-wife-in-waiting. When you’re as rich as Phillips was, you get to change wives every couple of years, along with your luxury car. I think she’s about twenty—an aerobics instructor, of course. What a stereotype.”
I sighed. “I’m not sure I want to do it. I was planning to go to Brig tomorrow afternoon.” I’m an avid birder, and the Edwin Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, Brigantine Division, about fifty miles from my house and ten miles northwest of Atlantic City, is one of my favorite birding places. “I don’t know him or his family. Why choose me?”
Caryn chuckled, “He left instructions for his funeral, including a list of the rabbis he didn’t want. You’re the only one not on the list, but that’s probably because you’d never met.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Don’t take it personally. He managed to alienate everyone.”
Caryn suddenly switched gears. “Hey, did you know he donated the land for your synagogue?”
“You mean that worthless piece of shit?” Mishkan Or, where I worked, was the result of a merger of two small, isolated, rural congregations. Our building, which was tiny compared to the mega-complexes in nearby Cherry Hill, had been built about twenty years before on several acres, most of which were under water when it rained. We couldn’t expand the building or the parking lot even if we had the money to do so.
“I bet he gave it to us because he couldn’t develop it. That way he got rid of a tract that was losing him money, and deducted it as a donation.”
“Don’t be such a cynic. Although you’re probably right.” Caryn got back to business. “Listen, the family wants to have the funeral in the early afternoon, but I’ll tell them they have to move it to the morning. Then you can still go birding in the afternoon. And don’t tell me you can’t use some extra cash.” She had me there. Even though I work full-time as Mishkan Or’s rabbi, it’s a small place, with only about one hundred twenty-five members. The pay is about half of what I could earn in a larger place, and two-thirds of what I had been earning thirteen years earlier when I had turned forty and had a mid-life crisis, shedding both my job and spouse in the process. I had traded in my plum position as assistant rabbi/gofer in a large, urban, urbane, and affluent Philadelphia synagogue and moved fifteen miles away to Walford, New Jersey, a former farming community that was now the epitome of suburban sprawl. It was mostly known as the home of Walford University, dubbed Triple-U (as in “Double-u U.”).
The job isn’t prestigious, and it isn’t going to make me rich. I’ll probably be eighty before I save enough to retire. But, for the first time in my life, I’m doing what I want and not what society expects. I’m no longer the hippie alternative educator I was in the Seventies or the made-in-the-male-image religious leader of the Eighties. I can wear comfortable clothes to work. I can hold discussions instead of delivering sermons. I can get to know my congregants on a personal level. I can write and read and make my own hours, within some limits. Even though my entire townhouse could fit into the living room of some of the newer houses in Walford, I’m driving a thirteen-year-old car, and my vacations are mostly visits to family members with sofa beds, I’m more content with my life than I’ve ever been.
But it looked like I wasn’t going to do what I wanted on this Sunday. Caryn was getting desperate. “I’ve got to make this funeral go smoothly,” she begged. “It’s the first time my family is letting me solo, and it’s a biggie.”
I sighed and gave in to the tone of pleading in Caryn’s voice. “I’ve got to be at an adult ed. breakfast tomorrow morning at the synagogue until at least eleven-thirty, so tell the family I can only make it after one.” There went any hopes of going to Brig. tomorrow.
“Done. No problem. I owe you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll collect. You’d better fill me in before I call the family. Whom should I talk to? Whom should I avoid mentioning?”
I could picture Caryn in her office—a small, windowless one, in accordance with her position as junior member of the firm, even though she was older than her co-worker brothers. She would be settling back in her chair, kicking off her plain, black pumps, pushing her stylish but understated suit skirt up her legs, and putting her black pantyhose-clad feet on the desk. She was probably running her hands through her short, gray-streaked, brown curls. “Here goes.” I’m sure I heard her cackle. “You’d
“Ready? Here are the names: Phillips’ mother, Henrietta—I think it was originally Yetta—is at least eighty-five years old and looks not a day over eighty-four, despite frequent trips to Switzerland for injections of sheep placentas. The ex-wives are Sylvia and Marilyn. Jennifer is his current wife. Rumor has it that she was slated to be replaced by Tyler, but you’d better not mention her in public. His sons with Sylvia are Kenneth, who’s married to Kayla, and Brian, who’s divorced. Their half-sisters, via Marilyn, are Madison and Ashley. Samantha, who’s still an infant, is his daughter with Jennifer. His only grandchild, Ken and Kayla’s daughter, is Sophie. So far as I know, Tyler’s not pregnant.”
I had to laugh again. “Are those really the names, or are we preparing a list for a sociological survey on the changing American taste in children’s names?”
“Yup, the names are real, and wait till you meet them.” She hesitated again. “Um, I forgot to tell you.” Uh, oh, I thought, here it comes. “It’s at Hills of Eternity.”
Terrific, not only had Caryn suckered me into giving up a birding day to do a funeral for a man I had never met and instinctively didn’t like, but she was sending me an hour away to do it.
“Okay,” I grumbled. “I need to restock the freezer anyway.” The cemetery is on the far reaches of the northeast corner of Philadelphia, almost to Bucks County. On my way back, I would stop at one of Northeast Philadelphia’s kosher supermarkets and pick up some chicken. I may like to watch birds, but I also eat them. “Better make it two o’clock instead. And tell the probably very merry widow that I’ll call after Shabbat.”
Caryn tried to make amends. “Let’s get together for lunch soon—my treat—and compare notes. And make sure you go to the shiva—I want a full report on the house. It’s supposed to be spectacular.” We made plans to get together on Monday for lunch at the Mexican Food Factory in Marlton, halfway between Mishkan Or and the Ruben Funeral Home. But it was a lunch that would be postponed, several times.
Chapter 2
I took a quick glance at the clock and realized that I could still get to Brig to go birding today, now that tomorrow was out. Despite my long conversation with Caryn, it was only noon; once again, we hadn’t gotten a minyan, the requisite ten adults for a prayer service, that morning, so I had gotten home earlier than usual from the synagogue. I still had time to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, grab a quick yogurt for lunch, pack a snack, load up the car with my spotting scope, binoculars, and every birding guide in publication, and be on the road by twelve thirty. I could be at Brig by one forty-five and be finished with the eight-mile driving circuit before sundown.
There was only one problem. I hadn’t filled up the gas tank before Shabbat, and there was no way my trusty, rusty Toyota with one hundred forty-five thousand miles on it was going to make the one hundred-plus-mile round trip on less than a quarter tank of gas.
I’m not Orthodox, obviously, or I wouldn’t be a rabbi, but I do keep Shabbat after a fashion. I use electricity, watch TV, cook, drive, but I don’t use any money. Ergo, no gas stations on Shabbat.
Brig is part of the National Wildlife Refuge system and charges admission. To get around the problem, I buy an annual Duck Stamp, which gives me free access to the National Wildlife Refuge system. It also qualifies me to get a hunting license, but I would rather eat birds that someone else has killed.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help me fill my gas tank.
I put the yogurt back into the fridge and was looking for something more substantial but equally easy to prepare when the phone rang. When I picked it up, I was sorry that I hadn’t taken the chance with the car. I would rather run out of gas in the middle of nowhere than deal with my sister Jean.
Jean and I have always had a troubled relationship, to put it mildly. She’s fifteen years older than I am and was born when our parents were first married and in their early twenties. I showed up unexpectedly when my mother was thirty-nine; she had assumed she was menopausal and hadn’t even gone to the doctor until she was in her sixth month and had gained forty-five pounds.
I was an acute embarrassment to Jean, visible proof that her parents were still “doing it.” Not that she had a clear idea of what “doing it” meant, only that her better-informed friends found the whole idea to be a combination of ludicrous and hysterically funny. Teens in the late Forties had been more naive and ignorant than they would be even ten years later.
It wasn’t until I took my first graduate-level counseling course and had to write a psychosocial history of my family that I realized something else. I wasn’t just proof that our “elderly” parents were sexually active. Worse, people thought that Jean was my real mother and that our parents had pretended I was theirs as a ruse. Jean had been a large, chunky teenager, and she tended to wear baggy, ill-fitting clothes in a misbegotten attempt to hide her weight. Shortly after I was born, she went on a crash diet. She did lose weight—and kept it off until her first child was born—so all of a sudden there was a slender Jean and a new baby in the house. Add to this the fact that I look absolutely nothing like either of our parents or like Jean, so my looks must have come from someone else.
Actually, I’m a throwback to some great-great whatever. I met a second cousin at my father’s funeral fifteen years ago, and we could have been twins.
“Spring, you have to do something about Mother.” Jean never called me by my Hebrew name, Aviva, which I now use exclusively.
I took the portable phone into the living room and sank into the couch with a sigh of resignation. It was going to be one of those calls.
“What’s Mom done now?”
“It’s not what she’s done; it’s what she hasn’t done. It’s almost winter, and she’s insisting on staying in Boston. I don’t understand why she won’t move to Florida.”
Because you live there. I thought it, but didn’t say it. This time.
“You know she hates Florida and the humidity. She has her friends and her doctors and her activities. Everything she’s familiar with is in Boston.”
“But still, at her age! What if she slips on the ice and breaks a hip?”
“And what if she moves to Florida and gets eaten by an alligator? Listen. We can’t live our lives with ‘what ifs.’ Mom’s healthy enough for a ninety-two-year-old, her mind’s still sharp, she gets around just fine, and it’s not as though she lives alone. The assisted living facility she’s in is fantastic, and Larry and his kids visit her all the time. Just leave her alone and let her be happy.”
I could tell that Jean was about to make some rejoinder about it’s not being her fault if Mom’s not happy, but she thought better of it and changed tack.
“And you’d better talk some sense into Trudy.”
I knew what she was referring to, but played innocent. “What’s Trudy planning to do now?”
“As if you didn’t know!”
I did know. My forty-eight-year-old niece, who was more of a sister than a niece, was thinking about adopting. It would be her second child, actually, since her life partner, Sherry, had been artificially inseminated seven years earlier. But Jean had never accepted that Trudy was a lesbian or that Sherry and their son Josh were anything more than roommates.
“If you’re talking about their adopting a second child, I think it’s terrific. You’re the one who needs some sense talked into her.”
“It’s not terrific. She’s too old. And she’s single.”
I took a deep breath. “First of all, a lot of older women are having children or adopting. Don’t you read the papers? There’s no such thing as ‘too old.’ And, second, she’s not single. She and Sherry have been together for—what is it now?—sixteen or seventeen years? I know they were together before Dad died. Don’t you think it’s time you acknowledged their relationship?”
I was treading where Jean didn’t want to go, so she changed subjects again. “Where are you going for Thanksgiving?”
“To Trudy and Sherry’s.”
“I don’t understand why Trudy won’t come to Florida to visit me for Thanksgiving.”
