I got the highest grade on the bible studies test, so I was selected (chosen!) to pick up the very special guest coming to speak at Friday night Shabbat services.  This was back when they could assign you a chore and call it a privilege.  (Pick me! Pick me to remain in the classroom and erase the blackboards while the rest of the kids go outside for recess.  Let me absorb the choke-inducing, possibly cancerous chalk dust into my lungs while the others play dodge ball or tag.)

The Talmud Torah bible studies class consisted of 8 high school juniors and seniors.  Not a big pool of competitors, I know –most kids stopped attending Hebrew School right after they had their bar or bat mitzvah – but the kids who remained were mostly smart nerds, so I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t do a kick-ass job.  I aced the multiple choice questions, and on the essay question, I explained in depth how God (in the old testament; we don’t acknowledge the new) demands absolute compliance from his leaders.  See, e.g., Abraham, Job, Lot, Noah.  God brooks no dissension.  In human form, we would call Him a tyrant or despot, but I didn’t say that.  I didn’t want to get marked down for calling out God.  I wrote and wrote until the teacher called “time.”  My labor and insights earned me the right to drive to the airport on Friday afternoon, stand at baggage claim holding a placard with the speaker’s name, and escort him to my car:  my parent’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser with the fake wood paneling.  (“Wood veneer,” my mother would have corrected me.)  When we reached the car, the speaker put his small suitcase in the way-back.  I opened the rear passenger side door, but the speaker shook his head.  “I’d rather have a companion than a chauffeur,” he said.  I closed the rear door and he opened the front passenger door and slid in.

The speaker was a well-known holocaust survivor – not the survivor, the most famous one, but well-known throughout the Midwest.   He had published a memoir and a book of poems, and gave speeches to Jewish congregations and civil rights groups around Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas.  The so-called “frozen chosen.”  The speaker had been a teenager when he was sent to the concentration camps, the only one in his family to survive the war.  Now he was an old man, to my 17 year-old eyes, although upon reflection, he could not have been past his early 50s at that time.  He was thin, slightly stooped.  He had only a faint European accent, perhaps because he was still young when he arrived in Canada through its resettlement program.  (In preparation for my driving duty, I had read the biographical blurb on the back cover of the speaker’s memoir, though not the memoir itself.)

The speaker was staying at Judy and Warren Lipschitz’s house.  They lived two blocks from the synagogue.  The speaker didn’t drive on Shabbat, so he needed to stay close enough to walk to Friday night services.  Michael Lipschitz was away at college so his bedroom was available.  The speaker would sleep in Michael’s twin bed, surrounded by posters of corvettes, the Minnesota Vikings, and the ubiquitous poster of Farrah Fawcett in a red tank suit with protruding nipples.  Or maybe Farrah had been replaced with a newer model.  Maybe there were still bar mitzvah invitations tacked to a cork board.  I hadn’t been in Michael’s room in a long time.

On the drive to the Lipschitz’s, the speaker asked me how I had come to be the one to pick him up that day.  When I described my essay, he seemed impressed.  We spoke then about the nature of God.  Should we honor and revere a God who so often seemed petulant and domineering?  Should we love a God who let millions of his supposedly chosen people be murdered?  It was deep, for sure.  When I responded one way, the speaker nodded politely but then offered the counter position.  He was soft-spoken but persuasive.  He didn’t ask the typical, idiotic questions that adults usually ask:  where do you go to school; what are your hobbies, your future plans?  He said, “It’s important not just to think about these questions, but to ask them out loud.  If you are silent, you start to question whether it ever even happened.”  By the end of the short drive, I felt our spiritual connection, and I suspected that he did too.  

When we pulled up, Judy Lipschitz was waiting on the front walk, wearing a nicer dress than I would have expected for the middle of the afternoon.   I remained in the car as the speaker took his luggage out of the station wagon, and introduced himself to Judy.  Judy waved to me, said to say hi to my mom and dad, and we’d see them tonight at services.

Ordinarily, I would have sat in the back of the sanctuary, with friends, and we’d wait out most of the service in the Ladies Lounge.  But tonight I sat with my parents, in the middle of the synagogue.  The speaker read one of his poems that described golden light from the setting sun, melding with smoke from the crematorium; he thought he glimpsed spirits rising to heaven.  Then the speaker talked about human nature and the need for hope, even in what appears to be a hopeless situation.  Yes, people are more bad than good, when they believe no one is watching, but is anyone purely evil?  He told of a female guard in his prison camp; the speaker would watch for her and follow her closely, because she “accidentally” dropped small cubes of bread as she walked through the dirt yard.  “We can judge her from afar, and say that she was part of an evil enterprise, or we can admire her for risking her own safety, or at least her employment, with every dropped morsel.  But can’t we see her as both good and bad?”  

 Then the speaker talked about his relationship to God.  “For many years after the war, many, many years, I was so angry with God.  I shaved my beard.  I ate cheeseburgers.  I stopped praying.  But then I had a conversation with someone, a gentile, who asked, ‘What is it with the Jews?  They all seem so obsessed with the holocaust.  Is there anything else to Judaism? Would Judaism still exist if the holocaust hadn’t happened?’  Of course this infuriated me.  But I ruminated, and saw there could be some truth to this person’s comments, no matter how insensitive they seemed.  The holocaust forced Jews to acknowledge and reckon with their identity, because they couldn’t simply fade into the goyishe wallpaper any longer, no matter how much they wanted to.  The holocaust was the single greatest contributor to creating the state of Israel. The holocaust gave modern Jews a renewed identity that will keep us going.”

The speaker was starting to lose his audience.  The congregants were rustling, shifting in their seats, uncomfortable with this new line of thought.  Was the speaker saying that the holocaust was good for the Jews?  

But the speaker brought us back to his side, saying, “But, even so, 6 million?  That seems a bit far, even for the God of the Old Testament.  Overkill, if you will.”

The congregation relaxed, settled back into their red velveteen seats, and chuckled.

“My point is this:  we cannot look at God, any more than we can look at individuals, and see him, or her – you are a Reform congregation, after all (the speaker paused for more chuckles) – as only good or only bad.  There is an expression:  God works in mysterious ways.  I believe that.  Sometimes God does things that at the time seem contrary to what you want and expect, but maybe there is a reason.  Maybe there is a reason beyond your individual happiness or well-being.  As a new teenaged friend of mine said, ‘God is kind of like your best teacher.  Not your favorite teacher; the one you dislike but you know is actually pushing you to be better.  And that teacher, you know, can be a real prick.’  I couldn’t put it more eloquently than that.”

The congregation gasped and then laughed.  The speaker looked over at me and winked.  Me!  He was quoting me.  His new friend.  My face felt warm and I stared at my lap, flushed with embarrassment and pride. 

The Oneg Shabbat followed the service:  tea, juice, and home-baked treats.  We would never serve store bought to such an illustrious guest!   The congregants swarmed the speaker, and I didn’t want to fight the crowd, so I grabbed a couple of brownies and left with my parents.  I did not see the speaker again until Saturday after Shabbat, when I picked him up from the synagogue to drive him to the airport for his late-night flight to Winnipeg. I wasn’t obligated to drive him; it wasn’t part of the “reward,” but I offered and the rabbi said that would be wonderful.

When we reached the curbside drop off, I got out of the car to get the speaker’s suitcase from the way-back.  As he took the bag, he wrapped his arms around me.  He held me tightly and kissed me on the lips.  I realized that his tongue was poking out, probing my lips.  I gasped in surprise, which allowed his tongue full admission.  The speaker pressed against me and I felt his hard-on.  Then he slid his fingers up my leg, all the way up.  I pushed myself away.  The speaker gave a quick wave, as if nothing had happened.  “Thank you for the ride,” he said and entered the terminal. I returned to the car and sat, shaking, but not for long – a police officer told me I needed to move along, and I did.

That evening, while my mother was washing dishes and I was drying, I told her what had happened.  

“The speaker kissed me.”

“Oh.  That’s nice.”

“No, Mom, he kissed me.  He forced his tongue into my mouth.  And he touched me.  He molested me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? Mom, that isn’t something to be unsure about.  Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I do.  It’s just, you have such a vivid imagination and you read those romance novels…”

“Mom!”

“I believe you. I do.”

“So what do we do?  Do we tell anyone?” I asked.

“I’m not sure.  Do you think we need to tell anyone?  Who would we tell?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.  

“I mean, he probably would deny it.  And he’s so well-respected.  People might not believe you.  Or they would blame you for trying to shame him.  Let’s, you know, think about it.”

I nodded.

“Did he hurt you?  Are you okay?”

“No. I mean, I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me,” I said. 

I never told anyone.  Of course I never told anyone else, and my mother never mentioned it again.  This was 1979, decades before the “me too” movement, but that wasn’t the reason.  I didn’t want to hurt the speaker.  I liked him.  I admired him.  As he had said, no one is all good or all bad, maybe not even God.  And it seemed wrong, somehow, to topple a hero, a survivor.  He had already endured so much.  What was one unwanted kiss?  Michael Lipschitz had done worse.  And if putting his fingers between my legs, over my leggings, gave him pleasure, was that so bad? To topple a Jewish icon, to announce to the world that he was a pervert, would bring shame on all of us, all Jews, don’t you think?

Ten years later, maybe more, a young girl publicly accused the speaker of fondling her, saying that he had intentionally touched her breasts but acted as if he hadn’t.  

“Can you believe it?” my mother asked.  Could I believe what?  That the speaker was a pervert?  Or that this nothing of a girl had destroyed a hero’s legacy, all for the mere slip of a hand?  I never asked my mother what she meant; I didn’t want to know the answer.

After that, I never heard about the speaker.  He didn’t publish anything else, but maybe his writing had dried up anyway.  Little more was said.  He wasn’t publicly condemned, but he wasn’t invited to speak, as far as I could see.  He vanished, like a beautiful spirit rising above the furnace ashes.

When he died, the local paper published the speaker’s obituary.  There was a single, oblique reference to the allegations against him.  “He faced some controversy late in his career, and led a mostly private life for the last decades of his life.”  By then, my mother was old and in poor health; she would die, too, within the year.  When I came to visit her, she asked if I had seen that the speaker had died. I said yes.

“I always wondered, did I do the right thing?  He didn’t really hurt you, did he?”

“Just my faith in humanity,” I said.  

I looked at my mother.  Until that moment, I had never understood what it meant to look stricken, but I did now.  Her mouth was opened into an “O” and her features were frozen, unable to speak or cry.

“I’m kidding Mom, I’m kidding.”

Her face relaxed.  “You always had such a funny sense of humor,” she said.