I’ve never been too keen on golf, so when Cerise mentioned back in December that she was taking it up, the prospect filled me with a no uncertain amount of trepidation. Would I, also, have to develop an interest in, and pay huge amounts of money for the privilege of chasing a little white ball around over-fertilized and pesticide-ridden greensward? Or, if I did not, would I become whatever the unmarried, male equivalent of a golf widow is?
Well, Friday the 21st was a glorious day, and a quite fitting one to begin the season of spring – on its first day this year, spring had just woken the first jonquils and splashed the pale greens of new grass shoots and tiny leaves with bright yellow forsythias. It was a bit cool, but very sunny, and the wind was soft and kind. The perfect weather, in my dear girlfriend’s estimation, in fact, for her very first game of golf. So, as I later determined, she arranged to leave work at noon, grab a quick, light lunch and convene with three of her gal-pals for a 1:15 tee time.
It was just after three o’clock that one of those dames called me at the office and advised that Cerise had been taken to the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital. Her maiden golf game had progressed to the third hole rough, were her ball had landed after taking a wicked slice. After locating the ball and lining up a shot to chip it back over the fairway onto the third hole green, she was just raising her club and assuming stance when another golf ball, hit by a similarly inept player on the adjacent sixteenth hole tee attempting a drive down that fairway took a similarly wicked hook, sailed over the sixteenth hole sand trap adjacent to the third hole rough and bonked my sweetie right on the noggin.
I arrived at the ER just in time to see a woman who looked a lot like Cerise being escorted beyond a pair of double doors to a place were the only ordinary mortals allowed are the hospital’s patients. Cursing my rotten luck, I proceeded to schmooze with the folks at the desk, presenting the suitably plausible lie that I was the half-brother of a certain woman whom I was told may have been recently admitted. This ruse, combined with about forty minutes of waiting around, gained me admission to Cerise’s semi-private room, where I spent another hour or so consoling her. She had what physicians call an acute cranial subdural hematoma, and the rest of us call a nasty bump on the head. She would have to stay overnight for various scans, one of which, I was informed, involved antimatter.
“Ah, yes,” I sagely responded, “that would be positron emission tomography.”
“Something like that,” Cerise confirmed, shortly after which a large Jamaican nurse informed me that the first of that battery of tests awaited, and I would have to leave.
Having thus assured myself that Cerise was in good hands, that nothing terribly serious seemed to be wrong with her, and that there was an outstanding chance that she’d never, ever pick up a golf club again, I made my way back out, taking the same path I had taken coming in – through the ER.
There, to my utter surprise, sporting a world-class shiner and an acute cranial subdural hematoma to rival my girlfriend’s, was none other than Rabbi Slivovitz.
“Rabbi Slivovitz,” I exclaimed, “you look like you rear-ended Mike Tyson’s SUV or something! What on earth happened to you?”
Slivovitz raised his head slowly, turning his battered face toward the sound. “Who’s that? Some wiseacre, nu?”
“It’s me, rabbi,” I gently insisted, “Tom Collins. You and I were on ‘The Power of Speech’ – that cable program, remember? They taped us back in late 2006.”
“Oh, yeah, that meshuggah pilpul,” Slivovitz recalled, and clearly with no great pleasure. “I had a heart attack.”
“Why yes, so you did,” I affirmed, taking a seat next to him. “I certainly hope you haven’t been to the ER again until now.”
“No, Mr. Collins,” Slivovitz stated in a matter-of-fact tone, “I have not.”
“So,” I pressed on, “what in Heaven’s name happened to you this time?”
Slivovitz stared down at the floor. “Purim parade, that’s what. The annual Congregation Adonai Shaygetz Purim parade.”
Purim, I thought to myself – the yearly Jewish celebration of the events related in the Book of Esther; a day traditionally set aside as an irreverent romp, where everything turns topsy-turvy. Then it hit me – because the Jews use a lunar calendar, where Purim is celebrated every year on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Adar, and the Christians use a solar calendar, wherein the date of Easter is determined as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, Purim, like Passover, sometimes coincides with Holy Week and sometimes does not. And this spring, in the year 2008 or 5768, depending which calendar you use, Purim and Good Friday both fell on the same day – today.
“Rabbi Slivovitz,” I carefully enquired, “you held a Purim parade, with clowns, jugglers,…”
“… tummlers, a band, a sound truck,” Slivovitz interrupted, “yeah, and graggers and horns and confetti and balloons and a float – just like every year…”
“… on Good Friday?”
Slivovitz shrugged. “Purim is Purim. You saying we had no right to make a parade?”
“Oh, no,” I assured him, “absolutely not. You have the Constitutional right to hold a public parade displaying the Jewish equivalent of a cross between Mardi Gras and Halloween whenever your calendar specifies it, but that didn’t make it a good idea.”
“What?” It was obvious my comments were doing little to alleviate the rabbi’s headache.
“I’m just saying,” I continued, “that Good Friday, well, that’s the day that, ah, you know… it’s the day when all those horrible things that happened to Jesus in Mel Gibson’s movie occurred. Good Friday is the darkest, most despairing nadir of the Christian experience – a pitch blackness of the soul’s deepest night before the blinding dawn light of the Resurrection and its promise of everlasting life…”
“Feh,” Slivovitz snorted, “that’s not my God you’re talking about. We’re Jews, okay? We don’t give a [expletive] about that Yeshua Ben Joseph, your Jesus Christ guy. To us, he’s a nobody – the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, you get it?”
“Of course, rabbi,” I agreed, “there’s absolutely no reason you should give a [expletive] about Jesus. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give a [expletive] about offending Christians by having a big, silly hoopla costume parade on their second most important day of holy observance, does it? I mean, think about it – what if, say, there was some sort of Moslem holy day, and one particular year, it fell on September 11th? Okay, say they celebrate it in their mosques? Nobody would even notice, I bet. But what if, instead, they had a big parade past Ground Zero?”
“If the Moslems want to parade past Ground Zero on September 11th,” Slivovitz said, spreading his hands in a gesture of impartial indifference, “they have the Constitutional right to do it.”
“Sure they do,” I admitted, “and the Nazis had a Constitutional right to march through Skokie, Illinois; and the ACLU made damn sure they did. But no reasonable person could describe that as an example of good taste, now could they?”
“You saying celebrating Purim isn’t in good taste?”
“Of course not,” I clarified, “what I’m saying is, most Christians haven’t got the vaguest notion that Purim even exists, much less what it’s about, or how a political upheaval in the Persian empire twenty-five hundred years ago relates to dressing up like Batman or a teenage mutant ninja turtle and walking behind some guy on a white horse with a bunch of other people wearing similarly silly get-up. When the average Christian sees that going by on Good Friday, they’re probably going to think the Shriners have gone bonkers looney and decided to protest Easter.”
“So why,” Slivovitz gamely parried, “would that be my problem?”
“Very well, then,” I thrust back, “So how did you end up here, talking to me?”
Slivovitz frowned deeply as he composed his reply. “I’d say it was a simple misunderstanding about parade routes.”
“Parade routes?”
“Yeah, parade routes,” Slivovitz assured me, “you heard that right. Parade routes. You see, everything was going fine. We kicked things off around one o’clock, and we marched all through downtown DC without a hitch. Sure, people were staring at us, and the ones who were driving didn’t much appreciate having to sit in a traffic jam while we went by, but what can you expect, anyway? It was a parade, after all. Then we turned a corner – and there they were.”
“They?”
“The other damned parade! All these guys dressed up like Roman centurions, whipping this guy dressed up like Jesus, who was dragging this big wooden cross…”
“… A Procession of the Via Dolorosa,” I interjected.
“Huh?”
“The particpants were re-enacting the agonies of Jesus as he was driven from Pontius Pilate’s dungeon to Golgotha. The Catholics even have a ritual derived from it, called the Stations of the Cross. You see, they believe that during that journey, and his subsequent crucifixion, Jesus suffered for everyone so that they would have the promise of forgiveness. He died for our sins, you see.”
“Is that so? I see nothing but a trouble maker who got what the law said he should get,” Slivovitz sniffed. “We Jews take care of our own sins every year on Yom Kippur, and we don’t need any help from some nutcase who thought he was the Messiah.”
“Of course not,” I conceded, “but anyway, that’s what the folks in the other parade were up to. So how did your Purim parade and the Good Friday parade get all tangled up?”
“Oh that,” Slivovitz muttered, “it was our parade marshal. He was dressed up like King Ahasuerus, and he was out front, directing Haman, who was leading the white horse with Mordechi on it. He’s a Sabra. Grew up reading and writing Hebrew. You know what that does?”
“Oh, yeah,” I affirmed, “sure do. Since reading from right to left only requires the left hemisphere of the brain to process the reading material and to coordinate the eyes, and reading from left to right requires both hemispheres, a person who grew up reading English will say “Turn right” while gesturing with their right hand, but a person who grew up reading Hebrew will say “Turn right” while gesturing with their left hand.”
“And that’s what he did,” Slivovitz sighed, “when it came time for us to make our first turn.”
“But everybody else in your congregation, they’re Americans, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Slivovitz whispered ruefully, “and so the Purim parade zigged when it should have zagged, and we ran smack dab into Jesus and his pals.”
“Mixed it up pretty good, then?”
“I guess you do have a point, Collins,” Slivovitz relented, “not one of those goyim had the slightest idea what we were really doing. They just started pointing at the acrobats and the clowns and the noisemakers and so forth and got really, really upset.”
“Then?”
“Then Jesus punched me in the eye and bopped me on the head with his cross.”
“I see. So, once you get patched up, what are you going to do?”
“What do you mean, ‘what are you going to do?’ I’m going to sue!”
“Oh, now why didn’t I guess that? Going to go for whiplash on top of the rest of it, maybe score some extra bucks?”
Slivovitz suddenly smiled. “You know, Collins, I was so damned upset, up until now, I hadn’t even thought of that, but now that you mention it,” he winced, placing his hand to the back of his neck, “one of my congregation is a doctor who does whiplash x-rays for shvuggims that get in auto wrecks for a living. So why not for me? Yeah, thanks, Collins. Pretty good thinking.”
“That’s my specialty,” I modestly proclaimed.