Page 332 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
yet another trip to a synagogue, this time one during which I, the groom, would be called to the Torah, there to sing the same blessings that I had last sung on November 9, 1957). No explanation was forthcoming. After all, everyone knows what an Aufruf is. (To this day, I can’t hear the term without thinking of the joke in which a dog, having been thrown out of a bar with his master after having plausibly answered “ruff ” to every question posed to him (for example, “What’s the top of a house called?”) in response to a bet that revolved around his ability to speak, including the one that asked for the name of the greatest Yankee of them all, turns to the frustrated owner, stands on his hind legs with forepaws out- stretched, shrugs, and asks, “DiMaggio?”)
As it turns out, Rabbi Letterman was deprived of the pleasure of see- ing me on March 8, as the Auf-Ruf was somehow arranged to take place at the East Midwood Jewish Center (take that, Rabbi Halpern)—so that my mother could more easily host the meal that followed it, I assumed.
Rabbi Letterman then capped it all off by saying that he assumed that we would send our children (children!) to Solomon Schechter (a Conservative day school that purported to deliver not just a proper Jew- ish education but a wonderful secular one as well). I nodded again, shook his hand, and, relieved that I had kept my game face on, left hand in hand with Phyllis, in search of air. (The second, closely competing, encounter with Rabbi Letterman occurred when he showed up in 1972, without any invitation of which I was aware, said a prayer, and without any request that I heard, honored us by nailing a mezuzah to the portals of our new home in Scarsdale, all the while wearing a yarmulke and a campaign button that said “Nixon,” spelled out in Hebrew letters. Rabbi Letterman was nothing if not consistent.)
Closing Lines
I clearly had a lot to learn, but I went with the flow, being, as they put it in the World Book Encyclopedia, “borne along on an iceberg,” and was delighted to be getting married and becoming a part of this dynamic
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