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Friday March 30, 2007

Breakfast with Jerry: Jewish values come home in the kitchen

by janet silver ghent

Around 8 a.m. every Sunday, I am awakened by stirrings at the side door. It’s Jerry, with a bagful of bagels to feed our bodies and wisdom to enrich our souls.

Mitch Albom spent Tuesdays with Morrie. We spend Sunday mornings with Jerry, my husband’s older brother, a retired synagogue director and therapist who now manages a Mountain View apartment complex. Jerry, 79, offers the insights of a generation of immigrants, even though he was born in Brooklyn.

A century ago, his maternal grandmother left Romania for the Holy Land, only to lose her husband and all but one son to typhoid on Cyprus. Desperate, she wound up in New York, where she was married off, had more children and was widowed again. “You make the best of it,” she always said.

Those are the words Jerry lives by. He grew up poor — “but we didn’t know we were poor because nobody had anything.” He remembers walking 12 blocks to Fulton Street for day-old bread. Later he was sent to an orphanage, even though his parents were still alive.

Some habits stay with him. After breakfast, Jerry asks if we have any leftovers he can take home for lunch. Then he beams when my husband gives him a barely worn sweater.

Jerry is neither cheap nor poor. But he doesn’t care about material things, least of all new things, and least of all for himself. At Oliver Twist’s orphanage, he would have starved to death rather than ask for more.

I ask Jerry why he left organized Judaism. Although he attended rabbinical college, he never got ordained. Instead, he served as executive director of a large Chicago synagogue. Later he left the Jewish community and ran therapy workshops, often working with the gurus of the human potential movement.

He says he wasn’t impressed by the wisdom of rabbis, the politics of the Jewish community or the mores of lay leaders. If there’s anything that disgusts him, it’s people who give big bucks and expect to be honored with plaques and testimonial dinners.

“Giving money publicly is the opposite of what the essence of being Jewish is for me,” says Jerry. True giving is “like Rebecca at the well. She gives water not for fame or glory. It’s because she’s a caring person. That’s the essence of it for me.”

He knows we belong to a synagogue with no plaques. Maybe someday he’ll return, and we’ll be the richer for it. Meanwhile, Jerry brings his take on Jewish values into my kitchen.

The “Rebecca” in his own life was Nellie Brann, the cottage mother in the Pleasantville, N.Y., Jewish orphanage that was later home to music impresario Bill Graham after he escaped Nazi Europe. “Warmth, kindness,” Jerry says of Brann..

Warmth wasn’t always there. When Jerry was a toddler, his parents separated. The grandmothers put pressure on Jerry’s mother to grant custody to the father so she could work and remarry. But Jerry was farmed out to relatives. When they died, there was the orphanage. Meanwhile, Jerry’s mother moved out of state, remarried and had another son.

There are many unanswerables. Yet Jerry’s stories are not that unusual. After my grandfather’s father died, he was sent to a Hebrew orphanage so his mother could earn a living. Meanwhile, my own father, whose mother died when he was 5, was shipped to a boarding school in Connecticut, running away to his aunt’s house in Jersey City. Later, a stepmother made his life miserable.

But like Jerry, they learned to make the best of it. Is this the lesson for us? That, and enjoying simple, sweet pleasures, with no bitterness about the past.

Monday afternoons, Jerry comes over for tea and cookies. He inhales the aroma of the chicken stock on the burner. Then he praises my black walnut cookies.

“Why do you bake?” my husband asks.

“It’s my way of giving love to people I care about,” I reply.

“Happiness is getting pleasure from bringing others pleasure,” my husband adds.

Jerry nods as he munches. This is the kind of pleasure he allows himself. “It’s not about the black walnuts or the ginger,” he says. “You made this with love.”

Janet Silver Ghent, former senior editor of j., is a freelance writer/editor living in Palo Alto. She can be reached at ghentwriter@gmail.com.

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