His Voice, Part 2

The New Rabbi
by Stephen Fried

(Page 2 of 2)

I ask him how he is. It's a simple enough question, but I can see it's not one he hears very often. Usually, when people come to visit him, it is to unburden themselves. He pauses, removes his glasses and leans back in his desk chair.

Instead of answering right away, he makes a joke about what it's like to be slipping into his "anecdotage," when new research is mostly dusting memories. He is preparing to give a speech in a few days to the synagogue Men's Club, reflections on the end of his rabbinate. This could be a good opportunity to try out some of his material.

An only child of working-class Eastern European immigrant parents in the Roxbury section of Boston, Wolpe was raised by the Jewish community based at the synagogue Mishkan Tefila. It was a lively congregation, where one of his Hebrew school teachers was moonlighting political historian Theodore H. White, and one of the older kids in shul was young Leonard Bernstein, who played piano at the dinner after Wolpe's bar mitzvah.

Benjamin Wolpe, his father, was a vaudeville singer, part of a "song, dance and fancy patter outfit" on the popular Keith Circuit of theaters. His mother, Sally, worked in the family kosher catering business, which was run by her older sister, Bessie, and Bessie's husband, David. "The family was like a sponge," he tells me. "It absorbed anybody who came into its orbit." There was always a lot of food and, on a moment's notice, forty people could show up for dinner. "It was a happy, supportive, riotous kind of place. From my uncles, I learned you can kiss strong men and not be considered a weakling."

Benny Wolpe died suddenly when his son was only eleven. "I still remember my father laughing," he says. "He was a very funny man, always with a cigar." His mother came home one day and found him dead. Probably a heart attack or a stroke.

"That was the pivotal moment in my life," he says. "In a sense, I've been living in that moment ever since."

I interrupt him. How is it that I don't recall hearing this story when I was a kid? It was not part of the Wolpe canon in Harrisburg or, later, the Wolpe mythology. He says I'm remembering correctly: he did not start speaking so publicly about his father's death until several years after he left Harrisburg. When he reached his mid-forties, and was about to pass the age his father was when he died, Wolpe became more open about such things, mostly because he was so fearful that he too would die young. By the time he underwent open-heart surgery at the age of sixty-three, his father's death had become a central metaphor of his sermonizing.

After being widowed, Wolpe's mother began working full-time in the catering business as head waitress. They lived in an apartment above the home of his mother's sister. She and her husband didn't have any children of their own, so they functioned as Jerry's surrogate parents. To some degree, they were parents to his mother as well. Sally Wolpe was never quite the same after the day she took her eleven-year-old son in her arms and told him his father was gone.

He was also taken in by the shammash, the sexton, of his synagogue, an elderly immigrant named Mr. Einstein. Even though he was not technically old enough to say the mourner's prayer for his father - those responsibilities don't kick in until age thirteen - Jerry Wolpe still wanted to do it. Mr. Einstein walked him to shul every day before school, and guided him through the traditional mourning process. He taught Wolpe how to recite the mourner's Kaddish.

"Ritual can be amazingly effective in allowing you to do something, anything, whether it makes sense or not," Wolpe continues. "To be able to say a prayer and be in the company of people sharing the same pain ... well, that was a saving experience. Mr. Einstein taught me how to daven, to pray. He'd sit next to me during the service, and say, "You know, everybody goes very fast. Don't you go fast. Go as slow as you want.' He was a very short man, with a teaching humor. If I mispronounced something, he'd say, " What's the matter, did you have a schnapps this morning?' He made me feel incredibly comfortable in a strange surrounding."

But the Kaddish did not relieve the pain. It simply provided him with words to scream at God. His father's death was the genesis of what Wolpe calls his "theology based on anger." His proof of God's existence, he says, is that in order for him to remain that angry at something, it must exist. It is a view of God that is intellectually provocative and deeply egocentric, just like Wolpe himself. And it is a view of religion driven not primarily by spirituality or joy, but by a time-honored mechanism of coping, a way to process disappointment and loss. As if locked in Jacob's dream, he is forever wrestling with God.

He tells me that the decision to devote his life to professional wrestling was ensured by another incident when he was a teen. One day he returned from school to find his mother banging her head against the kitchen table and wailing. In her hand was a letter from Israel, from a nephew passing on the horrific news that everyone else in her family - forty-two people, including the brother she had begged to leave and come to America with her - had been murdered by the Nazis in Poland. Wolpe had grown accustomed to hearing his widowed mother cry through the night. But never like this.

"Hitler made my mother cry," he recalls. "How else do you fight back? You become a rabbi."

Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Fried.

About the Author

Stephen Fried, an award-winning investigative journalist and essayist, is the author of Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia and Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs. His work has appeared frequently in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post Magazine, Glamour, GQ, and Philadelphia magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.