My Dad Was the Rabbi, So I Got Punished

My father was a Conservative pulpit rabbi for 18 years. For me, it was like being an army brat, moving from base to base every few years, as each congregation would alight on some deficiency and fire the rabbi: “too serious,” “too academic,” “not sufficiently sympathetic.” (“When a congregant would tell me that he ‘wrestled with his conscience,’” my father would say, “I knew immediately that the conscience lost!”) There was no shortage of reasons. By the mid-1960s, my father was the rabbi of B’nai Israel in Pittsburgh. In those days, before it became a Baptist church, B’nai Israel was a large, elegant synagogue with a membership of about 700 families. There were at least two bar mitzvahs every Shabbat, and my father’s typical Sunday included three funerals, two unveilings and six brises—at least that’s the way it seemed to me at the age of nine or ten. I never saw him.

My British-born mother was very concerned with appearances and with “doing the right thing.” She assumed that each of us was under constant scrutiny. She lived in terror, because there was always someone who “didn’t like the rebbetzin’s hat.” She made sure that my sister and I were well dressed and very well behaved. To relieve the pressure of such an existence, I would often escape to explore Pittsburgh on my beloved red Schwinn bicycle. One day, I happened to ride across Mrs. Domb’s lawn, leaving a deep gash in her beautiful sea of green. She was furious, and my mother felt that she had to punish me, publicly. I wasn’t allowed to ride my bicycle for a week. It was the longest week of my young life. It was tough being a rabbi’s kid.

See previous installments in this series here.