Searching for Moses

On a Sunday night in May, Rabbi Ira Silverman returned to his home on Central Park West in New York City to find a message from Sallie Stern on the answering machine. When he called back, she told him that her husband, Rabbi Moses Stern, had disappeared on Saturday afternoon. He reluctantly agreed to begin a search in the morning, a day and a half since the retired cleric had last been seen.

"How are you going to find Moses Stern? It's crazy, Ira," his wife, Rebecca, said the next day at breakfast.

"Look, the police are on the case, but I've got to do what I can. I promised."

"Because Sallie Stern is hysterical? Did she check with Kate to find out if he got on a train to Connecticut to see his grandchildren?" she asked.

"Kate hasn't heard from her father. He's been gone since Saturday after services when he told the Mandelbaums that he was going to walk home. He never got there," said Ira.

Rebecca wasn't listening.

"Kate! Not exactly a Jewish name. First she changes her own name from Sarah to Sallie, then she names the twins Kathryn and John. I heard Moses had to talk her out of Elizabeth and Philip." She tossed back the light brown curls around her ruddy face and turned away from Ira's kiss.

" 'Becca, that's not the point," said Ira.

Still, as he walked crosstown through Central Park, alive with blooming bushes, toward 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, where Moses had last been seen, he wondered if Sallie Stern had made her husband pull a disap-pearing act. Moses had little to do but listen to her complaints about how Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in mid-Manahattan, had tossed him on the trash heap five years ago. That was when the Board of Trustees abruptly replaced the vigorous sixty-seven year-old Rabbi Stern with his assistant, Ira Silverman, a pup half his age.

Mike Braverman, the young president of Shalom, had been itching to replace Moses with his own man. Concerned about declining enrollment, the Board finally agreed to act. Ira's appointment was supposed to be temporary, but, after a fruitless search for a more prestigious leader, the Board gave in, hoping that time and a full beard would bestow on Ira the proper gravitas. For the Temple regulars, it was a defeat. They had tolerated Ira, a clever son of the Midwest, but had never planned to endure him and his small-town wife forever. It was ridiculous, they complained, to replace an out-of-touch guy with a troublesome big-mouth youngster.

The congregation lost interest in Moses, who quickly grew old. His tall frame stooped, and his jaw crum-pled. In contrast, Ira grew sleeker and more polished. But his conscience exacted a price for the luck bought at Moses's expense. Neither Rebecca nor Mike Braverman could convince him that he was not the cause of his mentor's decline.

Moses Stern had watched out for Ira from the beginning. During the young man's first summer Eli Mandelbaum, the Temple administrator, had refused to reimburse Ira's expenses, an indiscriminate collection that listed everything from carfare to dry-cleaning bills. Moses offered tactful corrections. The two kept talking and grew close. Moses's own son had found maddening the combination of his father's absent-mindedness and his mother's social ambitions. He escaped to San Francisco, where he became a chef. Ira had a similar lack of rapport with his father, a self-made businessman with a chain of hardware stores in the Chicago suburbs. While Lewis Silverman could not fathom his son's passionate attachment to biblical scholarship, Moses Stern understood and shared it. He passed along both knowledge and experience, and persuaded Ira to listen. The younger rabbi operated by instinct, and was often hoist by the thoughts that slid so easily off his tongue. But Moses taught Ira not to blame parents when their children married outside the faith; to cease threatening students who declined to be confirmed; and, mostly, to ignore the hyper-materialism that afflicted many of the Temple flock. Ira owed a lot to Moses Stern.

Made hungry by his guilty memories, Ira entered a coffee shop on 70th Street and Lexington Avenue and squeezed into a booth. He ordered a bagel with cream cheese, sweetened his coffee with three sugar packets and settled down to chew, while he pondered the whereabouts of a seventy-two year-old despondent man. He knew Rebecca was right. It was preposterous to take on the role of detective. The task of directing a search party was beyond him. Among his friends, Jack Goldberg would come along only to talk him out of it, Ben Schneidermann would hang up on him, and Mike Braverman would consider involuntary commitment. Anyway, did one collect a posse by telephone? Did two lunatics make one sane man? His thoughts were becoming pseudo-Talmudic.

He could have overcome his superstitious fear of breaking a promise to Sallie, but he, too, was uneasy about Moses's behavior of late. For some time visitors had caught the elder rabbi napping in his office. More recently Ira felt that Moses was not merely tired but lost. One or two conversations had seemed to take place in a time warp. Ira had meant to mention it to Mandelbaum.

Ira stuffed more bagel into his mouth as the acid juices of anxiety welled up and hit his chest. For a rabbi he knew surprisingly little about old age. He had no patience with those who sank almost gratefully into its postures; the old men who bundled themselves in overcoats and mufflers in the spring, the old women in orthopedic shoes and heavy stock-ings. Moses Stern, who wore his Persian lamb hat in April, made Ira turn away.

Occasionally the two would step out for lunch to the corner vegetarian restaurant where Moses could eat lightly to accommodate his multiplying digestive problems. Ira dutifully asked for advice he no longer wanted. Moses gave none, reasoning that if he still had wisdom, his congregation would not have dismissed him. Recently, the elder rabbi made an exception when he signaled his disapproval of Ira's testimony at Jack Goldberg's trial for conspiracy and fraud. It had been a period of great testing for Ira as he tried to balance the claims of his best friend against his duty to the Temple. Moses's public act of criticism dealt a stunning blow to the trust between the two rabbis. Having lost Ira's support, Moses's status plummeted further. The Sterns continued to receive invitations to the best tables of the congregation, but they were for second night of Rosh Hashanah, when the honey cake was stale and the brisket dry, or the second Seder, limp with the wine fermented in the haroseth. Moses finally stood up to his wife on social matters: he would pay only obligatory calls, for shiva, a baby's briss, a bar mitzvah. Otherwise, Sallie would have to make dates in the afternoon. As his short naps in the office lengthened, the switch-board attendant learned not to disturb him after eleven in the morning. Gloria Braverman, Mike's mother, was an old friend of Moses's and had deeply resented her son's arrogant actions. She and Eli Mandelbaum spent hours on the phone trying to work out plans to revive Moses and got nowhere. They assigned him to teach courses no one attended and encouraged him to start an affinity group of retired congregants. Being as American as they were Jewish, they believed sincerely that if they could just find the right activity they could restore his dignity. It was no use. As Ira well knew, purpose in life was not easily found. Take it away, and it was almost too much to ask a man to find another one.

Ira finished his snack and his gloomy meditation, his salt-and-pepper goatee sunk onto his broad chest. He paid the bill and headed back to Madison, trying to make sense of the sketchy facts Sallie Stern had provided. Moses had left for Saturday services in a seemingly normal mood. After a short talk with Cheryl, the young assistant rabbi, about her sermon, and greeting old friends at the Kiddush, he told Eli and Trudy Mandelbaum that he would take a raincheck for lunch. It was a beautiful day, he said, and he would walk a while up Madison Avenue and look at the pretty girls. Mandelbaum was surprised by the reference to "girls," but Moses often said uncharacteristic things these days. He and Trudy accompanied the rabbi to Madison Avenue where they parted.

Since then he had been spotted only by Lenore Schatz, who saw him at the Ralph Lauren window, staring at the mannequins in their classic summer wear. Moses said "hello" warmly, complimenting her on her suit and hairdo. She called Sallie later to say how well he looked, how spry, even. Kate's call to Lenore on Sunday yielded that Moses had been headed east. So Ira Silverman walked in that direction on 72nd Street, over all the long, stately, grey blocks to the river, peering this way and that as if he were a tourist. He sat down on a bench facing the water, as Moses Stern might have done. Where was the wounded old man, lost in New York, waiting for Ira to find him?

Rebecca's advice to leave it alone was wise, no doubt. But how could he when it was his fault, his and the others around Moses. The Bravermans, the Board of Trustees, even Eli Mandelbaum, with whom Moses had run Temple Shalom, all had brushed off the anguish of the man in their midst. They had done what they could: they gave him an apartment, a pension and supplemental Medicare insurance, a place to work and a staff to rely on. Eli stopped by when he could and so did the old timers from Brotherhood. Once a week they would gather on the second floor of the Community House to eat tunafish sandwiches and reminisce about the good old days. This earned them the indulgent smiles of the current crop of clerical and lay leaders.

When Moses had arrived to assist the last in the series of renowned rabbis of Temple Shalom, Reform congregations in New York City had adopted the style, though not the beliefs, of more "American" religions. Building a parallel institution, they stripped away ritual and constructed aesthetically-pleasing, cathedral-like temples with plenty of room for majestic organs and soaring choirs. Women were rescued from the requirement to sit out of sight of their husbands, so as not to arouse them during prayer, and invited to join them in comfortably cushioned pews. The rabbi was expected to preside with decorum and dignity, in English, with a few hints of Hebrew. The congregation was expected to pursue success with a concealed fervency. Private, almost hidden, worship prevailed. The children and grand-children of the immigrants from eastern Europe and later the Holocaust refugees from Europe were first intimidated and later irritated by the hush. In the after-math of World War II, New York Jewry changed profoundly; assimilation gave way to pride of race as the melting pot was stored in the cupboard. The survival of the remnant of the Jewish people in Israel became as important a dream as the flourishing of the diaspora.

By 1970 Jews coming of age wanted an America on their own terms. They joined Temple Shalom for its prestige and convenient location, but had little reverence for the Reform tradition or for aristocratic Jews. To Moses Stern, the unassuming pastor trained for a different time, the new families were like a swarm of noisy, brightly-colored bees, busily poking around, looking for outlets for their new money and liberal consciences. Their energy and verve scared him, and their ability to produce coin of the realm struck him as alchemy. They wanted a rabbi to keep up with them, to inspire and lead them. Moses Stern, they said, did not know how to bring out a crowd; he did not know how to repair the world. As the list of things he did not know lengthened, the end was inevitable. Moses was left to stuggle uncomprhendingly with why they disliked him so much that they took his work away from him.

As he sat by the river, Ira thought about a rabbi's work, to teach and to lead. He had stood by while Moses's pupils and followers dwindled. Ira rose and leaned over the rail to watch the tame and murky East River flow past Manhattan, an island so stolid with concrete that it had lost its affinity for the water. What did this bleak stone landscape offer a man whose world had ended?

He checked in with Rebecca on his cell phone.

"Hi," he said, hesitantly.

"It's the guy from 'Unsolved Mysteries'," she said.

" 'Becca, give me a break. I'm broadcast, not cable."

"In your dreams. You eat too much cream cheese to be network. What have you found?"

"Nothing yet," he said.

"So? What's next?" she asked. The flatness in her voice surprised him.

"What's the matter? It's not that I'm taking the morning off on a hopeless quest, is it?"

"No. Just a feeling. I want you to come home," she said.

"I will, soon," he said, and hung up the phone.

He shrugged off Rebecca's words. Watching the sluggish river, Ira thought that Moses would look for shelter in familiar surroundings. He would not be found stretched out on a bench in Grand Central Station or the Port Authority Bus Terminal, nor on any of the hard sleeping grounds on the city's broad plazas.

Ira found a local convenience shop where he bought a map of Manhattan and a guide for the upper East Side. By now it was past noon and he wanted his lunch. He found another coffee shop on the corner of 86th and York and, amid the blonded ladies spooning up cottage cheese, he read and ate a mountain of Greek Salad. At the end of an hour he had put together a list of the synagogues between 72nd Street and 96th Street, which he proceeded to phone. He got his first lead at an Orthodox shul where Moses had attended morning minyan these last few days. Since Ira's friend Ben Schneiderman was a regular at the service, Ira called him.

"Why didn't you tell anybody you saw Moses Stern?"

"Why should I? Moses Stern has a right to go to morning services anywhere he wants, especially since we don't have one at Shalom," said Ben.

Ira ignored the taunt.

"But he's been missing since Shabbat!"

"No one told me! Listen, Ira, you found him. Isn't that good enough?"

"You're right. It's just that he's gone again," said Ira.

"Look, I wish I could help. I talked with him for a few minutes, passed the time of day."

Ira fell silent and let his friend think.

"He had a yahrzeit this morning," said Ben, sounding triumphant. "When they asked for names to call, Moses called out Hyman Stern."

"His father's name was Jacob."

"And when we were leaving, we talked a few minutes. He asked how Kim and the kids were."

"And you said?"

"That everything was fine, blah, blah, blah. Moses and I were never close. He said not to take these family years for granted, they were very precious, blah, blah, blah."

"Is that it?"

"He said the shul reminded him of his childhood. Said he was glad to see me. Hadn't expected to see anyone from Shalom. Said his old shul downtown on the Lower East Side was a social club for the new people in the neighborhood," Ben said.

"And?"

"Said it was a shame how neighborhoods changed, you know, that kind of thing. I had an appointment at the office, so I said goodbye," said Ben.

"Did he walk out with you?"

"Yes. He walked with me to the subway, at Lex and 76th Street. But I didn't see which way he went."

"At least we know he was healthy and coherent this morning. Nothing else?"

"The yahrzeit. That sticks in my mind. When he called out the name, I turned and saw tears in his eyes. Afterwards, I told him I was sorry. He said thank you, but it had been a long time ago. That was hard to believe, the grief seemed so fresh."

"Who was Hyman Stern? I'd better get over to Sallie's. Thanks, Ben."

"Take care, Ira."

"You, too. Bye."

He walked to Third Avenue and 75th Street, stopping at a deli to buy some blueberry muffins. Some blocks down was a typical 1960's high-rise where Temple Shalom had bought the Sterns an apartment. Ira was announced by the doorman and the elevator took him to the twelfth floor. Sallie was waiting for him at the open door. He put his arms around her plumpness, let her cling to him. He followed her into the living room and headed for the kitchen.

"Have you eaten today?" he asked.

"A little," she said.

"Let me fix you something," he said.

"I couldn't," she said.

"Muffins from the deli if you have some scrambled eggs first," he teased, waving the box.

"Only egg whites," she protested.

He prepared them with the yolks and added toast. He made coffee and brought a tray out to the thick-legged, shiny mahoga-ny table in the dining ell.

"I'll just pick," she said.

"That's fine. I need some coffee," he said.

They ate and drank. Finally Sallie leaned back against the high Spanish-style chair. Her thin blond hair was matted on her neck and her eyes had red rims.

"Who was Hyman Stern?" Ira asked.

She raised an eyebrow. "Moses's younger broth-er. Why do you ask? He died before Moses and I were married. It was a terrible thing, destroyed Baschka Stern completely. There was a fight in the candy store downstairs one night. Some kids came in and threat-ened the old woman who ran the place. Hymie jumped right into it. He was always a hothead. They beat him. By the time the ambulance came, he was gone. The police did nothing. One less Jewish kid. Baschka went off her head and ended her days in a home. Moses's father was traveling most of the time, and Moses was in charge of the other kids. He had to put off going to college, but we never gave up," said Sallie.

"Moses said yahrzeit for Hyman this morning at the old Orthodox shul a few blocks from here. Has he done that before?"

Sallie shook her head and looked quizzical.

"No. I can't even remember the last time he mentioned Hymie's yahrzeit. I only say the prayer for my parents. His secretary kept his yahrzeit calendar for him. The family is all dead now. But I don't remember his ever going somewhere else. Never to an Orthodox shul."

"Sometimes the past looks appealing," said Ira.

"People remember only the good parts. Let me tell you, there wasn't much good. I met Moses in high school. Reagan used to say that his family might have been poor, only he didn't know it. But there were no front porches in our lives. When the settlement house people offered to help Moses with his education, I got a job as a bookkeeper to pay the bills, we got married and never looked back."

"Who took over with the younger kids?"

"His sister Ruthie was old enough by then. We'd done our share," she said. Her round chin managed to take on a look of crisp defiance.

"Where's Hymie buried?" Ira asked.

"In the family plot, where else?"

"Where is that?" he asked, patiently.

"How should I know? Moses takes care of those things. Our plot is in New Jersey. It's beautiful and no one's walking over you all the time," she said.

"There must be a certificate."

"In his desk, I guess. No, you wait here, I'll look," she said.

She came back with a manilla envelope carefully labeled in Moses's writing "Stern Family Plot." The cemetery was located on Staten Island. He took the envelope with him and turned again to Sallie.

"So, now tell me, how's he been feeling?"

"Fine, he's fine. Nothing is wrong," she said.

"There must be something wrong to make him disappear."

"Somebody took him. That's what happened," she said.

"No, Sallie. Ben Schneidermann saw him this morning, at the shul. No one took him," he said.

"Don't start, Ira. Since the Temple threw us out, nothing has mattered to him."

"Rehashing isn't going to find Moses," he said, exasperated.

She began to weep, and he immediately regretted his words. Ira took his leave and headed for the ferry. The ride across the water accompanied by May breezes was quick and cool. At the dock he found a cab driver who knew where the old cemetery was. When he stepped out onto the sidewalk his senses were flooded by the sound of insects humming, by the strong perfume of the lilacs that ringed the tall cast-iron fence. The flowers were in full bloom and luxurious, white, deep purple, the deli-cate lilac color, itself, softening the hardness of the land-scape.

The attendant gave him directions to the plot and asked if he were the rabbi. Ira answered yes and the attendant told him that the mourner was waiting. He walked the weedy paths lined with old stones. Up ahead he spied Moses Stern stand-ing by a grave. He walked on and said,

"Moses, how are you?"

Moses Stern looked up and said nothing.

"Sallie's been worried about you," Ira said.

Moses smiled at the mention of his wife's name.

"Sallie's a good girl," he said. "When Hymie died she cooked so Mama could sit," he said.

"It was only right," Ira answered.

"Sometimes Sallie doesn't understand how people are, but she's a good girl. You know, it's not easy for her. She wants to start her own family. She wants to get away. It's not safe living here. Everybody's afraid," said Moses.

"Of what?" asked Ira.

"Not the Cossacks, thanks God," said Moses.

"Yes, thanks God," said Ira.

"Mama's still afraid of the Cossacks. She dreams about them sometimes. There's nothing I can do."

"You did plenty," said Ira.

"Who knows?" answered Moses.

Moses walked around the plot, plucking a few stray weeds from the grounds. He caressed the headstones and studied the footstones.

"My baby sister Sadie, she laughs at the old ones and their fears. At Passover when they tell the story she laughs. She says she's hungry, that we shouldn't tell the story, that we should eat," said Moses.

"But you tell the story, Moses, don't you?"

"God commands. It would be easier to obey Sadie. She makes more noise. I don't know what God really wants," said Moses.

"It says what He wants in the Torah," said Ira.

"The Torah wasn't given in America. It was given to us in Israel. Hymie says we're in America now, we should be Ameri-cans, forget the Torah," said Moses.

"Do you think so, too?" asked Ira.

"Who knows? Hymie thinks so. He thinks God makes no sense. He doesn't believe in God," said Moses. "It's a shonda. But I don't say anything."

They sat in silence for a long while. Moses was looking up at the fading light in the sky. Ira, on the edge of despair for his old friend, looked down at the ground. The wise men had run out of wisdom.

The graveyard attendant approached them.

"We're closing now. Time to go," he said.

The sun still shone, but the temperature was dropping.

Ira gave Moses his arm. He was docile and let Ira take him home. Sallie cried and fussed and Ira left.

He told Rebecca that he would have no more of the Diaspora. They would make Aliyah to Israel. Temple Shalom could find someone else to lead them into the 21st Century. Over the summer his friend Jack Goldberg's blunt insistence that the stones of Jerusalem held no more answers than the concrete of the World Trade Center failed to change his mind. The Silvermans emigrated. Mike Braverman found a new rabbi. Moses and Sallie Stern lived out their days in the East 70s, with a home health aide to accompany Moses when he wandered.

Nancy Kirk is a free-lance writer and editor who lives in New York City.

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