Letters to Israel

“I like Rabbi Herman Fink.”

This is what Eve Lind, forty-seven-year-old pianist, thought to herself as she watched the rabbi on the hot, humid morning of Sunday, September 6, 2014. It was nearly noon, and she’d come to Congregation Sons of Israel to fetch her daughter, Aurora, from her first day of Hebrew school that year. In May, pretty, precocious Aurora, just turned twelve, would be bat mitzvah’ed.

Eve — a dead ringer for the actress Amy Irving, people still gushed — stood at the back of the modest, white-walled sanctuary, under marble plaques memorializing dead Jews who’d belonged to the small Reform synagogue. A second ago, as she walked in, there’d been cacophonous chaos. Fifty kids, ages five to twelve, had packed into the pews, jabbering and fidgeting and giggling after three captive weekend hours in classes — all while the chronically disrespected Cantor Melissa, an acne-ridden recent cantorial school grad, fought to lead them in concluding prayers.

But suddenly the children snapped silent. Rabbi Fink had ascended the bima.

It wasn’t that the old rabbi intimidated. A sturdy, tanned seventy-five, he still boasted the boxy body of the Golden Glove boxer he’d been as a teenager back in the fifties. But out of his neatly trimmed silver beard shone, almost invariably, the grandfatherly grin of a zeyde. He emanated the priestly aura of a man at peace, a man of achievement, a man awash with affection for his Jewish world. Rather than sternness, this benevolent venerability, which the children could sense but not articulate, subdued them in his presence. To misbehave...