Right in Jerusalem
In Jerusalem, you can meet almost anybody.
It was the summer of 1976, and Marty Lebson was in Jerusalem with his rebbe, Arthur Hertzberg (who was to become my rebbe as well, some quarter-century later).
As they walked down the street in the new part of the city, an extremely elderly man teetered toward them, bent over a cane, head down, moving tentatively over the cobblestones. As he inched toward them, Rabbi Hertzberg pointed him out to Marty. “Look, here comes Mordecai Kaplan,” Hertzberg said.
Hertzberg, the editor of The Zionist Idea and a classic public intellectual, was in his mid-50s then and still a congregational rabbi in New Jersey, vigorous, hydrant-shaped, curmudgeonly, combative, throwing off ideas like sparks. He did have a tendency to name-drop. He and Marty Lebson, then a young businessman, watched Rabbi Kaplan, author of Judaism As A Civilization and founder of the Reconstructonist movement and the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, shuffle closer to them. He was 95 years old then, and had another five years to live.
“I read what you wrote in the journal,” Kaplan told Hertzberg. (Which journal it might have been is a detail lost to time, Marty tells me.) “You were right.”
With those words, precious to anyone but mother’s milk to Hertzberg, he tottered off down the street.
In Jerusalem, you never do know.
The author, Joanne Palmer, works for United Synagogue, where she edits CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism.
The “Focus on Israel” column is edited by Robin Fleischner, a Vice President of BJ’s Board of Trustees and Co-Chair of BJ’s Israel Steering Committee.
Originally published in the November 13, 2009 issue of Kol Jeshurun.