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Volume 6   Issue 3	Spring 1999

Becoming a Blessing: A Story from Sherman, Texas
By Steven Z. Leder

The following excerpt is reprinted from Rabbi Steven Leder's new book, The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things, which was published by Behrman House in April.

Sherman, Texas, was a long way from the yeshiva. But that's where they told me my student pulpit was, so that's where I was going. Student pulpit duty is a rabbinical school requirement intended to help you learn the ropes by serving a weekend a month in a small community that can't support a full-time rabbi but still has enough left in it to keep the synagogue doors open.

Rabbi Steven Leder

Congregation Beth Emet, with its twenty-five Jewish families hunkered down just south of the Oklahoma border, was my rabbinical boot camp. Other than the occasional High Holy Day when a retired rabbi from Dallas conducted services in the one-room synagogue, I was the first rabbi or student rabbi to visit Sherman on a regular basis since Jews arrived there in the early twentieth century. The notion of a rabbi was so new to the community that I was often referred to by non-Jews in town as "Rabbi Steven Leder, the pastor from the Hebrew church."

On my first visit, I pressed on doing all of the things an energetic, idealistic student rabbi was supposed to do: services, tutoring the few children, teaching adult education, visiting the Jewish businesses on Main Street, drinking iced tea with the temple president at the diner next to the pawnshop and the VFW post. Whenever I had some extra time on Saturday afternoon, I would visit the few elderly Jews in town who were too frail or sick to come to services on Friday night. Bill was one of those Jews.

Bill had a bad heart--so bad the doctors in Dallas told him he was best off at home, close to his oxygen and the telephone. His wife, Betti, was a practicing Baptist who had driven him to synagogue and had sat with him every High Holy Day for forty-five years. But now her eyes were bad, and even if Bill could go to synagogue, she couldn't drive him and be by his side.

It was my first visit to Bill and Betti's house. I imagined that I would chat a little about their lives, when they came to Sherman and why, maybe tell them a bit about myself, then wish them well and be on my way. At least, that's what I had planned as I stepped up on to the porch past the rusted chairs and knocked on the screen door.

The house looked as though it hadn't changed much inside for a long time, with its faded pictures, black-and-white TV, an ashtray from a cruise to Mexico in 1973. Bill was in the kitchen fixing us some iced tea and cutting the sponge cake Betti had made the night before. The three of us sat around the speckled Formica table, ate our white cake on orange plastic dishes, and chatted about this and that, just as I'd imagined it. Life seemed hard for them, yet neither seemed to mind too terribly much.

After an hour or so, my rabbinical duty done, I glanced at my watch, mentioned my next appointment, and stood up to leave. Just as I was thanking them and promising to visit again next month, Betti clutched my hand, quick and hard. "Perhaps you'd like to bless us, Rabbi," she said.

Bill, weak and awkward, nodded and whispered "Yes. Bless us, Rabbi," as he held Betti's hand and reached for my own.

There we stood, grasping hands in that little Texas kitchen, in that little Texas town--the blind Baptist woman, the weak old Jew, and the bewildered rabbinical student who had only come for conversation. "A blessing?" I thought to myself, convinced that this was neither the time nor the place. "What am I supposed to say?"

But there they stood, eyes closed, hands held tight, fervent, expecting. And to my lips came the words of a three thousand year-old blessing spoken originally by the High Priest and used today by rabbis in sanctuaries of marble and glass: "May the Lord bless you and keep you." There in that Texas kitchen: "May the Lord illumine your life and be gracious unto you." Behind the tattered screen door: "May the Lord's spirit be upon you and grant you peace."

"Amen" said Bill and Betti as they opened their eyes, visibly moved. "Amen."

I've never forgotten that afternoon or that kitchen, because I learned an important lesson there. We can all bring blessings to people who need them. Blessings require no great sanctuary, no marble, no golden ark, no microphone. All a blessing takes--all seeing God takes--is a little time; a few words with two people locked in the silent struggles of life, seeking meaning and recognition amid their faded pictures. That's all it took, just a little time and a few kind words to say I wished them well and "God bless."

We could all manage that for the Bills and Bettis in our own lives; for everyone we meet and know caught up in the search for understanding and insight, craving notice and love. Such a simple thing, these blessings spoken or transmitted in a touch, a smile, a call; making of us blessings ourselves.

"Amen," said Bill and Betti as they opened their eyes. "Amen."

Rabbi Steven Z. Leder has served Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles since 1986.

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