As we all do, my father struggled with faith, and the idea of it. In some ways, for most of his life he simply stood outside and watched the fray, saying that he needed proofs that God be God. We can ask God, even struggle with the circumstances that flow from being fallen humans, but not demand of Him. The reality is that we have to understand that we are not in command, that we serve, but that doesn't come easily to any of us. When my father converted to Catholicism, I knew that at base he did it for me, but that was a great concession for a man who battled so within, and I am grateful he came to it, however circuitously. This story though reflects my father's life long questions, questions that have been extant since man had consciousness.
It is said that He is aware of that solitary sparrow that glides through the vast forests of eternity. When it falls, wing broken, and thrashing on the ground; when the tree falls in that unkind wilderness, He knows the sounds of despair of his afflicted creations. Yet nothing happens to alter the fate of either the tree or the sparrow.
So it is with some human "Sparrows" who are broken in spirit, from the beginning of their sojourn, assailed at birth by the confluence of natural forces and the imperfections of the human experience.
She came with that great wave of immigrants at the turn of the century. The route was Argentina, first, then the lower East Side of Manhattan. Yitzhak, her father was a weaver. He brought his own loom which he had been guarding with his life since he left that little corner of Galicea, where he was born. Her role became that of the firstborn whose function was to minister to the brothers and sisters, which arrived with little interim between pregnancies, until there were nine. Golda, the mother, grew gray and worn, as she tried to stretch the meagre earnings of Yitshak's solitary loom into enough to stave off the constant threat of starvation.
Rachel, we have waited to give her a name, plodded silently, and dutifully, to the cacophony of needs, the cries of the newborn, the wails of the little brother who scraped his knee, and the thousand ills that befall the poverty stricken, enclosed in a railroad flat, five stories up, if one does not count the stone steps that are a preamble to the first floor.
Still, Rachel was blessed. At seventeen, she was a rare beauty. Her raven hair was uncut since birth, and when allowed to, it fell, glistening and graceful, to her waist. Her eyes were coal black, in a very white face of classical beauty. No lipstick could add anything to lips that were carmine and moist; and precociously impatient.
Such a gem cannot long escape notice. Irving Feldstein was stricken the day they met as she was coming down the stairs. Irving made his collections on insurance premiums, usually, one dollar a week on each of the policies he had sold initially.
The courtship went on for several years, perhaps because of the filial concern of Yitzhak and Golda, more likely, their need for Rachel's services. In time, they met under the canopy. Irving paid, and they moved to a frame house, on Fulton Avenue, in the Bronx, where they had two or three joyful years, sired two children, a boy and a girl, and then Irving made an unceremonious departure from this life. He left nothing but the mortgage and the cash that was found in his pockets.
Rachel had no skills. Her schooling terminated at the third grade. The children were now, ten and eleven. Once again, she was rolling that mythical stone up hill, only to see it roll down again in inexorable repetitions.
There was no help possible from Yitzhak, or any other source. She spent her nights in tearful despair, and prayer.
Hunger was not new to her. The few dollars left after the mortgage payment were gone. She already was straining the benevolence of Mr. Cohen, the grocer at the end of the block, who kept an extensive record of generosity, marked in pencil on a brown paper bag.
It was on one of these errands of need that she passed Mr. Leibowitz' candy store. It was a tiny establishment framed out of an architectural anomaly, and turned into a rental property by an enterprising landlord.
It had the ubiquitous paper stand, a fountain, and a stock of penny candies and cigarettes.
Mr. Leibowitz was very old and tired. Selling penny candies, and two cent newspapers, long, cold winters while practically immobile in his cell-like establishment, were reducing him to desperation.
It was in this context that Rachel made the deal. No money exchanged hands. She would pay him a percentage of the earnings from the proceeds of the candy store of which she was now the proprietor.
So began the next ten years of her existence. Up at five o'clock in the morning to cut the wire on the bundled Daily Mirror and Daily News, to be ready for even the earliest customer. Seven days a week. Days of selling penny cigarettes to the street kids. Three cent sodas; an occasional malted milk. She smoked but only half a cigarette at a time, keeping the "dincher" for later use. And that, she smoked close enough to burn her lips by use of a toothpick inserted to hold the butt between her teeth.
Her hair was shorn, and straggly. She wore the same hat, a kind of inverted cloth pot, perpetually. She wore men's boots, low cut, in the icy days of winter and used old newspapers to line the oversized footwear against the intrusions of cold. Her very black eyes hid in the sunken sockets in her haggard white face. She sat, patiently, in the little cubicle, immobile, in the way that Leibowitz did before her, and she thought well before disposing of a penny without purpose. Yet she paid her mortgage, and her son was now a college senior, and her daughter a jitterbug in the days of approaching war in Europe.
On the day of Pearl Harbor, she screamed loudly, in pain. She was alone in the house on Fulton Avenue that had eaten so much of the substance of her life. Some neighbors came to see. She lay on the bed her eyes wide and blazing in anger. From these once carmine lips there spewed the vilest of epithets. She cursed life, the world and most vehemently the God to whom she had prayed to free her from her life of bondage, and she died.
Does a wounded sparrow have the right to ask for reasons.
"Shall he who contendeth with the Almighty instruct Him?"
Would an answer to Rachel be the one given to Job, in those days of faith?
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou has understanding."
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