I wanted a Walk-In rabbi. I was on West 24^th Street in New York City. My mother was dying in Cleveland (“I can’t believe she’ll be alive in two weeks,” the hospice nurse had told me in a frank telephone conversation). My plane to Israel was to leave Newark Airport at 10:30 PM. I needed consolation, support and prayer. So I walked over to a synagogue on West 23^rd  , hoping I’d find a rabbi sitting at his desk in his book-lined office, waiting for walk-ins. 

The door to Emunat Yisrael was locked.  An advertisement in the display window invited the public to a Purim Party, despite the July 12^th heat. I needed a rabbinic source to assure me it was alright to return to Israel, rather than cancel my flight and fly to Cleveland. After a two week visit in the States, I wanted to go home – to Israel, not to a vigil for my mother. I thought of a woman I knew in Jerusalem who had sat with her dying mother for six months in Chicago and tried not to feel guilty. Hopefully, a rabbi would reiterate what the hospice nurse had told me: Whatever decision you make, Judy, will be the right one.

On the way to the synagogue I had passed a store front advertising walk-ins for a Psychic Adviser, a reader of palms, stars and Tarot cards. I resisted the temptation to walk in, but after the closed synagogue, I walked back and rang the bell, not as opposed to idolatry as the Hebrew prophets. Nobody answered.

My last option for solace was the public library on the other side of  West 23^rd. I assumed I could use a computer there to email my Jerusalem rabbi, give him a heads-up about my impending need for organized mourning. On the way to the library I noticed a sign on the side of the street I had just left: The Chelsea Hotel. “I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel,” I sang to myself . Other lines from that beautiful Leonard Cohen song – “I need you, I don’t need you, I need you, I don’t need you …” – filled me with yet more sadness and conflict.

The computer at the public library was only for NYC library card holders, so I left and crossed over to The Chelsea Hotel. A Jew with a knitted kippa walked by. I wanted to share with him my pre-mourning dilemma, but restrained myself. Rather, I asked if he was involved in the building operation—scaffold, workmen, noise. “Yes,” he said, “I’m the developer.” We chatted under the scaffold. His name was Michael.  Just to show him I was not some sad drunk roaming the streets of New York with my silly Kodak, I asked if he knew Bruce Ratner. He whipped out an iphone from his pants pocket and showed me a picture of Ratner’s latest building, Beekman Tower, a 76-story skyscraper opposite City Hall Plaza in Lower Manhattan, designed, no less, by Frank Gehry. It lorded over the surrounding buildings, one of which was Michael’s.

I told Michael I went to Shaker Heights High School with Bruce. I probably did this in an effort to raise my status in his eyes, though at the same time assuming this Michael didn’t give a shit who I was or where I went to high school. To him I was just a melancholy lady interrupting his work.  I asked for his last name and a card, but he declined. “Some of the current tenants are not so happy with the new management,” he said. Turns out Michael was not only the developer, but also the owner of The Chelsea Hotel. This information made me feel better than I had felt all day and slightly closer to Leonard Cohen and the ‘60’s, when my mother and I were young.    

Michael was busy, said Shalom and I walked on, past Chelsea Guitars, where a man wearing a black and white bandana on his head told me I could see a larger version of the bowdlerized “Creation of Adam” on the corner of 8^th Avenue.

Next door at Emunat Yisrael  a 20-something Jew with a white shirt and black kippa was hanging around the door. I asked if he was the rabbi. He smiled and said no. He had been hired a few weeks ago as a community outreach worker to revive the old place. “If I lived in New York,” I told him, “I’d come to his congregation. But alas, I live in the land of the Jews and am in search of a walk-in rabbi.”  He smiled as if I might be one of those deranged women you see on the streets of New York. I walked on. When I passed the storefront of the Psychic Adviser, I noticed an obese woman in a lime tea shirt sitting on a stool in the little room, no bigger than the window at sidewalk level. She was bent over, like a green gorilla playing with her toenails. Was this the reader or the cleaning lady? Though she could have told me in detail what the future held by reading the stars, my palms or her cards, I didn’t want to find out. It would have been an insult to my dying mother, a woman, once beautiful, with elegant taste and fine clothes, before her descent into the final stages of Alzheimer’s.

I walked back to West 24^th, thinking of Bruce Ratner and his skyscraper. How could it be that we went to the same high school, danced at the same parties on the shores of Lake Erie, sometimes even with each other, and that he thought big and high, while I thought small and deep. Granted, he was born into a family of developers, but still. Why didn’t more of Shaker Heights rub off on me?

I knew my mother would be happy if she knew I was doing what I do best- walking, observing, asking questions, talking to strangers, standing in wonder and amazement at the colorful world, musing on the past like a cow chewing its cud, writing. She would probably think I was on an assignment for The New Yorker, just as she had thought in 2004 that I was a speaker at the Florida Suncoast Writers’ Conference, rather than a mere participant. She thought big for me, especially as her disease progressed. Yes, surely I was a skyscraper on assignment for Harper’s or Vanity Fair,  rather than a small woman documenting the randomness of the world on a short walk between 2 and 3 PM on July 12, 2012,  unsuccessful in my mission, yet feeling, somehow, better at the end of the journey than at its beginning. All in an attempt to live with myself.

I sought Life, pursued it, not viciously, but quietly on a city street. For the first time, I sensed a glimpse of the rightness of the Kaddish, a prayer I would be saying soon, the psychological accuracy of its glorification of the Everlasting Living God, repeated as a mantra against oblivion at the time of Death.