Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home by Harry Kemelman Read Free Book Online Page A

for years. But Irv Kallen never suggested that because he wanted to. I had to.
    “You are talking about some of the seats that have little nameplates on them. I don’t suppose you happened to notice, but on that stand you were talking from and on the reader’s desk behind you and on the very chair you were sitting on, there was a little brass plate telling that it was contributed by the Kallen Family Fund, all the pulpit furniture, including the ark and the public address system you were talking through. Maybe he wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to give it if he had known some young wise guy was going to use it to call him a worshiper of the golden calf.”
    “Money isn’t everything.” said Gorfinkle, “and it doesn’t give you the right –”
    “Sure. I know money isn’t everything. Some people can talk and make speeches instead. I didn’t go to college like you boys. I grew up in the streets, but I learned a couple of things there. One was talk is cheap. And when some wise guy would sound off about something he claimed to know for sure, we would say. ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’”
    “Well, let me tell you –”
    “I just want to ask you one question. Ted. It’s about your sermon. I’m not going to ask you what the purpose of it was. That was pretty clear: The temple is growing; it’s getting too big for the both of us. Maybe you think it would be better for all concerned if you cut it down some in size.”
    “I didn’t –”
    “No. what I want to ask you is, in your sermon, in laying down the law the way you did, did you think of yourself as Moses? Or God?”

Chapter Ten
    There were less than twenty-five present Friday evening in the tiny Hillel House chapel, and Rabbi Small suspected that some of them were Gentiles. One who sat well in back certainly was not Jewish, since he was dressed in black and wore a Roman collar. The rabbi assumed he was the director of the Newman Club at the college, and so it turned out when he approached him at the end of the service and introduced himself. Father Bennett was a youngish-looking man of thirty, slim and boyish, and he laughed easily.
    “Scouting the opposition. Father?” the rabbi teased.
    The priest laughed. “For a while. I thought you might need me to round out your minyan. Is that the word?”
    “That’s the word. The attendance was rather disappointing.”
    “Actually, I’m surprised you got as many as you did. The great majority of students left this afternoon or earlier – right after their last class. Not that Rabbi Dorfman draws crowds, you understand. For that matter, I figure I am getting only about a quarter of the students I should,” he added hastily, as if to avoid any disparagement of Rabbi Dorfman. “In our case, it’s understandable: The church is in a state of flux; we’re trying to modernize. But so many of our young people are holding back, as though waiting to see which road the church will take. They don’t accept blindly; they question and discuss and argue.”
    “And you find this disturbing?”
    “Not at all.” said the priest quickly. “But much that they question we are not in a position to answer. Take the matter of birth control. So many of our Catholic students come from large families. In most cases, they are the first of their families to go to college. Well, you know from hearing them talk that they aren’t planning to have six or seven children; two or three at the most, and that means birth control.”
    “Well?”
    “Of course, upper-income Catholics have been doing it for years. In the higher social levels the large family is the exception, rather than the rule. But these young people are frightfully sincere. If the church establishes a regulation that runs counter to their common sense, they won’t just disregard it, as other generations have done.
    They’re more apt to disassociate themselves from the church completely.”
    “Young people grow wiser or at least more tolerant as they