Page 330 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
because he had already told Letterman that his predecessor was going to preside—Harry treated the request much as one might treat an invita- tion from the White House. Two points to be made: First, even within the then incredibly male-dominated Conservative movement, and in the context of a ritual meeting that one might have assumed would fol- low antediluvian protocol, I did not rate being given the courtesy of a call from the rabbi. Rather, the call went to the rabbi’s now and future benefactor, the person whom he regarded as the adult in the situation. Second, I wouldn’t call the meeting exactly convenient. Letterman ordained both the time and the place of the meeting: Apparently assum- ing that he would receive the obeisance to which his office entitled him, he told Harry that he could squeeze us in only when he would be able to free himself up from his incredibly taxing and already overbooked schedule, and that he could grant us an audience only in his Mishnah- lined study in Temple Beth El. That this would mean that I would have to come to Manhattan Beach from West 138th Street in the middle of the school year was not of particular importance. Now, it’s true that it had become easy for me to miss classes, but that would be my choice, not someone else’s. Anyway, in the hierarchy of things that mattered, meeting with Phyllis and her rabbi was pretty high up there.
So Harry couldn’t say no to the rabbi, and Phyllis, whom Harry had promptly called, was not one to say no to her father or to a rabbi. I was not one to say no to Phyllis, especially when things were important to her, which would turn out to be any time when her family, religion, or a rabbi was involved. So, of course, I went.
Once again the game face was in order. In the hope that the meeting would be relatively painless, maybe even amusing, I dropped every- thing. So there I was, sitting with Phyllis on my right, on one side of an overly neat desk, about to spend what was, hopefully, very few minutes being enlightened by a man wearing a yarmulke, a vested suit, and a smile that did not seem to me to be all that natural. Rabbi Letterman started by asking me to tell him about myself, something that he had little need for, as he was not going to preside at the wedding, but I did my moot court best of getting through some of the basics without
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