“When I was born…I was highly factual. When I die…I hope to be highly personal.” —Franz Rosenzweig

 

The rabbi in my childhood synagogue was fierce, impressive, and unapproachable. On High Holidays, he wept from a crow’s nest of a bimah. On ordinary days, he walked the halls with a faraway look. His inaccessibility seemed to be proportional to his holiness. No one saw the inside of his office. Actually, he didn’t have an office. He had chambers.

Rim has no chambers. He has an office; a scholarly, sunny, humble mess with a fat sofa he seats others on when not napping on it himself. There is a photo of himself and Elie Wiesel, a marriage portrait from 16 years ago, piles of unhung art, a ukelele, a boombox, and the plump and self-satisfied Mr. Godfrey Waddle Duck. There are texts on Zohar and Talmud, poetry by Marge Piercy and Mary Oliver, science fiction, psychology (“Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life — revised edition”), and a handful of topical books any well-rounded reader should be familiar with: Catholic Girls, What Is Life Worth?, How to Yodel the Cowboy Way. There is also a sign taped to the back of the door: “Asleep. Will awake by 3:30.”

This is certainly an office. But its physical size is an illusion, because really, his office travels with him. You can reach him by cell phone — the ring tone is loud, with horns Marching The Saints In — by email, by voice mail. Once, in the human traffic rotary that is also our Sunday School entrance, he sat in a chair facing an empty chair, with a cardboard sign hung between them: “The rabbi is in. 5 cents.”

He seems endlessly accessible. And, unlike the rabbi of my particular childhood, we know things about him: two marriages, a complicated relationship with Jenny Craig, children he adores who have struggled just like his congregants’ children struggle, anxieties he sometimes jokes about and sometimes does not. “I don’t have a lot of personal sorrows I haven’t shared,” he says. “I’m not separate from this community.”

Still, we idealize our leaders. We want to believe that there is no end to the attention they can pay us, or the problems of ours that they can tolerate. We prefer them bottomless. The rabbi is scholar, teacher, and specialist in our joys and sorrows. But who is a specialist in his?

Sometimes, announcing shivas or illnesses at the end of services, Rim looks tired, or sad, or distant, or private. Where does he bring his problems and sorrows, when he is the person others bring theirs to, and his Saints are always having to March In?

Sitting in his physical office, Rim says that last week he did four funerals. “Sometimes,” he says, “grief goes around and around. I’m like a pond into which people toss their sadnesses. I hold it. It can effect my equilibrium. But when it’s good, I’m enriched by it, and I bring it back, and share it.” Sometimes, newly diagnosed illnesses in congregants overlap, and there are multiple difficult, concentrated conversations over a few days. Afterwards, sometimes, he finds himself snippy at organizational meetings.

He has three friends he talks to every week, “friends of the self.” He talks to Beth. He talks to his family, and, on different levels, to some of us. He takes Thursdays off, and this June, he hopes to take Sundays off, too. “I like being quiet,” he says, “quiet with my wife, quiet with my kids. I love days when I walk around and don’t put my hearing aids in.” He reads science fiction. He wanders the house and thinks about what he wants to write. He watches CSI, holding hands with his wife. “And then, of course,” he says, “I have these moments of prayer.”

He is starting to elaborate on this — after all, this is a rabbi — when the Saints begin to ring. He pulls a phone out of a striped shirt pocket. It’s Ben, from New York. Rim often thinks about the fact that he had no way, absolutely no way, to converse with his own father after he died. When his son calls, as he does almost every day, Rim is delighted. “Sometimes he calls just to see what he should eat for lunch,” he says — like a man who can’t believe his own good luck.