A Friend

Alarmed at seeing the chubby new congregant in his pew for the second time, Max Arnold sat instead in the last row on the men’s section of a small Manhattan synagogue. Although it was a freezing cold morning, Max saw that the men near him were dressed as usual in suits and ties, and he felt he might have been wrong to wear a knit vest and thick trousers. The men were of the same medium height as Max, who was sixty-two, yet he saw himself as smaller than they were.

However, after opening the prayer book, Max became absorbed in anticipation. He looked around at the familiar dark-paneled walls and up at the blue ceiling of the sanctuary.

Last Saturday, the chubby man in Max’s pew had sung the Etz Chaim or “Tree of Life” with such emotion, it sounded as if he were imploring God on Yom Kippur. At the end of the song, the chubby man’s deep voice rose in an unexpected harmony on the last four triplets. He  thrilled Max with a final sob. After the song was over, congregants glanced at each other with raised eyebrows.

Yet the man’s singing had moved Max deeply. During the following week, he heard that imploring voice in his mind. In the mornings, as he walked to work from his apartment on 49^th Street to 31^st Street, he kept those harmonies close. “V’nashuva k’kedem”—return us to our days of old. The memory of so much feeling came to him when he looked up from his ledger books at Juno Real Estate Company and it made him happy, as if he were someplace wonderful.

On Wednesday evening, Max was in his living room, about to practice the harmony so that he could sing on Shabbos too, when sirens stopped short front of his building. Frightened,  he looked out his window. An ambulance was double-parked in the street and two emergency technicians were running into his building.

Because he had no rugs on his parquet floors and no curtains, Max could hear the technicians giving orders in the apartment below. He heard his downstairs neighbor shout in despair. A door shut....