Abba didn’t just belong to us, but to everyone

Chapter 1

From a young age, I learned that Abba didn’t just belong to us, but to everyone in the neighborhood who needed a rav. Sometimes it felt like the whole neighborhood had Abba’s number. Rarely did we make it more than a few seconds after Havdalah without his phone beeping with another sh’eilah, another situation, another emergency. When we’d sit with him — to do homework, to learn together, for guidance — he’d flip his phone over and ignore the messages, but I could hear the buzz, the little vibration against the table that signified another question for him.

Today, his phone is clipped to his belt as we crawl through the attic. It’s a low-ceilinged room, tall only at the center where the roof arcs upward, and there are so many boxes stacked throughout that it’s a bit of an obstacle course. I’d offered to sort out the attic myself, but Abba refused. He takes a savage kind of pleasure in throwing out old things, buried in the attic because one of us (Ima, always Ima) couldn’t bear to throw out a useless, forgotten memento.

Now, though, the attic must be emptied. My parents are moving to Eretz Yisrael. I push aside a box of clothing that’s marked “Boys two to three years” — my parents haven’t had a three-year-old boy in three decades — and squint at the next box. It isn’t labeled, and I have to open it to see what’s inside. Manila folders, carefully organized and stacked in the precise way I know must mean they’re Abba’s. “Hey, check this out.”

Abba scoots a little closer. I glimpse his phone for an instant before he tucks it away. Should be fine. Just rinse before adding to the soup, says the last message he types, and I breathe a sigh of relief on behalf of whichever hapless cook just made a kashrus mistake. “Look at this. Are these old lawyer files?”

“I don’t hold on to those. They’ll be at my firm’s office even once I’m working from abroad.” Abba peers at the first folder, opens it, and glances at the first paper. “These are rabbinic.” It’s an official-looking document, written on the letterhead of a medical facility, but there is a scrawl across it, a name and phone number that I recognize immediately. Rabbi Weishaut, and Abba’s phone number.

Abba gazes at it, an absentminded hand moving to stroke his beard, and he says, “I remember this man. Dr. Friedler. He was a cardiologist who lived on the other side of town.”

“I’ve never heard of him. He was part of the shul?” Granted, I’ve been living away from home for many years by now, but I’m back often enough that I think I’d recognize the name of a congregant.

“No.” Abba considers the paper. “He was treating a patient with a very frightening infectious disease one day. Very dicey situation, a lot of doctors present, when an accident happened, and he was pricked by the same needle he’d just used on the patient.”

I can imagine it clearly — the moment of absolute terror, Dr. Friedler’s entire life and future flashing before his eyes. Abba said, “Back then, it would be about ten days of testing before he’d know if he was infected. It was a shattering experience. Another doctor gave him my number, and he called me.

“When I spoke to him, he wasn’t even willing to tell his wife about the possibility. We worked through that first, and then there was more. For days, he’d call me repeatedly. He began to attend my shiurim, and we sat in the shul for hours, discussing topics of emunah and hashkafah. I’ve never seen someone so driven to change and grow, to transform into a better version of himself.” Abba sets the paper back into the folder.

There is a strange sort of symmetry between Abba right now and Dr. Friedler, the two of them standing at a crossroads that would end their lives as they knew it. Whatever had happened next to Dr. Friedler, whatever results would have returned, he’d gone in strong, forever transformed.

Abba tucks away the papers and the box. “I don’t think I’ll need to take this with me,” he says. “Though a lot of these documents are confidential. They’ll have to go into storage.” He moves the box with some effort, putting it close to the ladder entrance that will take us out of the attic.

I stare at him, dissatisfied with his abrupt change of subject. “Wait. What happened to Dr. Friedler?” Abba speaks about him in the past tense. How many levayos had Abba attended over the years, while I’d been oblivious, at school or work? How much grief and loss had he witnessed?

Abba lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “The results came back negative. He was fine.” He drums his fingers against the side of the box. “We never spoke again. I see him at simchahs sometimes, and he walks past me like he doesn’t know me.”

“What?”

“I think I must remind him of a time in his life he’d rather forget. It’s an uncomfortable thing that happens when you see people at their most vulnerable moments,” Abba murmurs. “When they emerge from the darkness, they want little to do with the people who’ve helped them.”

There’s a certain weight to how he says it.

I’ve always thought I’d gotten the helper gene from my parents. When I meet someone in crisis, I feel a compulsion to jump in, to put aside any discomfort and inconvenience, and take immediate action in any way I can. But when the emergency fades, I become less reliable, less involved, and I drift on to the next person who needs it.

Abba can only ever be steady, can only ever remain open to every stranger who might need him again someday. They’re the ones who pull back, who leave the story unfinished, and Abba is only one guide for these travelers along the way. The writer in me sees the poetry in that, but I quail at the incomplete endings.

When I say that to Abba, he just laughs and moves on to the next box. “People are incomplete, Leah. We’re forever changing, forever growing. That’s the beauty of it.”