Read Online Intentions by Deborah Heiligman - Free Book Online Page A

had texted:
    Can’t come. Sorry. Violin lesson ran over .
    Gotta go home .
    A sharp pain shot through my knee.
    “Shit!” I yelled. “Shit, shit, fu—”
    At that exact moment the rabbi walked into the social hall.
    I was beyond mortified to have cursed in front of him. He ignored it, though. “Pretty tough doing this on your own, huh, Rachel?”
    I nodded and started crying. I couldn’t help it. I was frustrated, my knee was killing me, and I cried easily back then.
    “You hurt yourself?”
    “My knee,” I sobbed.
    He went to the kitchen and got me an ice pack, told meto hold it on for ten minutes and then he’d help me put up the streamers.
    “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “A rabbi shouldn’t have to put up streamers!”
    “ Nu? You think a rabbi can’t put up streamers?” he said in a fake Yiddish accent. “I’ve been putting up streamers since before they were even invented, Rachelleh . I was putting up streamers for Moses. You know, when he came down with the Ten Commandments? Streamers.”
    It was a stupid joke—it didn’t even make sense—but it was the way he said it, with that Yiddish accent and a half smile. Cheered me up right away. He could do that. I tell myself now that I was not naive. Everyone felt—still feels—that way about him.
    Could I be wrong about him now? Or was I naive then?
    As I sat there icing my knee, the rabbi in a chair next to me, we talked about this and that.
    “How is your grandmother doing?” he asked me after a while. I knew he visited her every week. So he was totally aware of how badly she was doing. He was actually asking me how I was doing.
    “It’s horrible, Rabbi,” I said. “She’s nothing like she used to be. It’s like we’re all in a really bad dream and we can’t wake up.” Grandma had turned from a happy, energetic eighty-year-old who went to the gym and did yoga into a decrepit old lady, just like that. My parents’ fighting began then, too. It’s like Grandpa’s death started an avalanche of sorrow.
    He nodded, didn’t say anything.
    “Why would God do this, Rabbi? To Grandpa? To Grandma?
    To us?” I immediately felt bad about saying that—it was blasphemous. The rabbi shook his head, stroked his beard, frowned.
    “I’m sorry, Rabbi, I shouldn’t have said that.”
    “No, you shouldn’t be sorry,” he said. “I don’t blame you for asking. It’s exactly what I would ask. The thing is, I think you’re going to be surprised by my answer. And I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
    “Hang on! I’ll help you!” the bus driver yells out, breaking into my memories. He puts the bus in park, closes the front door, and walks to the back. I turn around. There’s a guy in a wheelchair coming up the ramp. The driver has to strap the wheelchair in place in the back. I watch how carefully he does it, joking quietly with the man, who doesn’t look embarrassed, but I can’t imagine why not.
    I should not be staring. I turn around.
    “Say whatever you want, Rabbi,” I had told him. “I can take it.”
    The rabbi furrowed his brow, stroked his beard again. “So some rabbis might say in a situation like this that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. Others might say that God has a plan that we can’t know—we see only the back of the tapestry, the different threads woven together; it’s only at the end of our lives that the beautiful picture on the other side is revealed.”
    Wait a minute, I thought. If that’s so, that God is weaving the tapestry and only God can see the picture, then do we have no part in creating the design?
    “Rachel, I don’t think God had anything to do with your grandfather’s death.”
    “Really? Then who did?”
    He got up, walked around for a minute, taped up the end of the streamer I had been working on when I fell off the ladder, and then came back and sat down. He put his hand on my head, lightly.
    “Rachel, your grandfather died because he had an undiagnosed heart