On the first day of Rosh Hashanah in September, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, Oklahoma, gave his last official sermon. He had announced his retirement months, even years ago — a retirement in slow motion, as all retirements should be — so I assumed this choreography had been in the works for some time.
I wasn’t planning to attend services. I rarely do. I am one of those Jews more comfortable with my Jewishness than my Judaism, even if, as bad a Jew as I am — I once wished someone a “happy Yom Kippur” — I am an official dues-paying member.
Marlon Brando once said that guilt was a useless emotion — and he’s probably right — but if guilt helps pay for the new carpet in the preschool, so be it.
Anyway, I didn’t know the rabbi would be on the bimah. Many in the congregation call him Marc, but I can’t.
I want to call my rabbi “rabbi.”
During his sermon, the rabbi talked of what the congregation meant to him over the past 37 years, what Tulsa has meant to him. He talked of his passions, outrages, successes, peculiarities, and failures. He talked of finding the silver lining in a pandemic. He talked about how his wife, Alice, is both troublesome and profane and how he wouldn’t want her any other way.
He predicted he would cry before he finished his remarks.
He did.
We gave him a standing ovation.
He wasn’t the only one crying at that point.
He was my second rabbi in Tulsa to retire — Charles P. Sherman was the first.
Sherman was at Temple Israel, the reformed congregation; Fitzerman was at Congregation B’nai Emunah, the conservative one.
There are only about 2,500 Jews in Tulsa, so there’s no real need for two places of worship. There’s an old joke about a rich Jew who builds himself two places of worship, side by side, but visits only one. When his friends mention how beautiful the sanctuary to which he doesn’t go is, he responds, “You couldn’t pay me to walk into that place.”
Jews need someone to be mad at.
When a committee was formed to find Sherman’s replacement, one of the members said, “I don’t want a rabbi who’s going to tell me what to do.”
American Jewry ain’t beanbag these days.
More than two decades ago, Rabbi Fitzerman did a sermon about a Huffy bike he had as a kid.
“I so wanted a Schwinn, though,” he said of his Huffy. He was disappointed and jealous of those who had the better bike.
The sermon ultimately was about seeing the love in the gift and the recognition, power, and, at times, limitations of what those who love you can provide. The bike was from his parents — there was the love.
I have kidded him about the sermon for more than 20 years. He’s never admitted it, but he never liked his Huffy.
He is wickedly smart and defiantly sweet. For the past few years, after Sherman retired, he has been the face of Judaism in Tulsa.
Having said all that, I in fact don’t know him that well, certainly not compared to those who regularly attend services, work on committees with him, and actually lay the carpet in the preschool.
Your better rabbis never take attendance, though.
When my son died 14 years ago — Fitzerman wasn’t even my rabbi at the time — he came to the memorial service.
I thanked him for coming.
And I kept thanking him.
“I noticed,” he said after the service, “that every time I looked in your direction, you were standing tall, your shoulders were thrown back.”
“I actually decided to do that this morning,” I said. “I decided I wanted to be the kind of father of a dead son who does that.”
“It’s a good person to be,” he said.
He knew it’s what I wanted, needed to hear.
Years before that, he told me and my fiancé, my future ex-second wife, a musician and converted Jew (your joke here), that he wanted to dance at our wedding. But days later, the two of them had an argument over some money she thought the synagogue owed her. When he respectfully disagreed, she said to him, “But I converted, for Chrissakes!”
“Oh, that’s good,” he said, howling with laughter.
He didn’t dance at our wedding, though, because we didn’t invite him.
Yet there he was, sitting in the back row in a sanctuary not his own — and only because my son had died.
“We hurt you and you came anyway,” I said to him. “I can’t tell you what that means.”
“Stop it,” he said. “There was no place else to be. There was no place else I wanted to be.”
It’s how I felt today, even though I didn’t know that until I arrive at the synagogue Rosh Hashana morning.
When rabbis retire, their congregations often endow scholarships in their name and/or send them and their families on trips around the world.
I’m sure Congregation B’nai Emunah is doing that — or will soon.
But would someone get the man a Schwinn, for Chrissakes!
Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February 2022. See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2022
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