JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 10

           Continuing With the Saga of the Rabi Family in the Ghetto
       Community of Brownsville in Brooklyn 


   In Brownsville, the Rabis lived as before, amid a mass of humanity living with equal frugality. "I didn't know we were poor," Rabi said later ---as did his sister Gertrude, but more revealingly : "There was poverty all around us, but I was very rich. My life was a joy." Rabi remembers being "a close family. We were completely open and we trusted one another. In the grocery store, the money drawer was open, and I could take what I wanted. That's something which I didn't abuse. When there were discussions of the family business, I was part of the discussions , maybe too much a part." 
   As for education, Rabi was not inspired by school :"I did well in school but I was no prodigy. Neither did I do any work. I went to class and listened." Inspiration came elsewhere.  One day he noticed one of his classmates carrying a strange book that did not come from the school. Rabi had read all the Yiddish books at home; he knew the Bible stories by heart. A strange book whetted his desire to know its contents. When he asked where the book came from, his classmate replied, "the library," and thus Rabi was introduced to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Carnegie Library." 
   Here there were more books in one place than Rabi had ever seen. Starting with the A's, with Alcott, he took two books from the shelf and checked them out. But the librarian, suspicious of this small boy, stopped him before he got out of th building and made his read aloud  from one of the books before she would permit him to leave with them. Rabi read for her and then went home with his books. The year was 1908. [Rabi was 10]. 
   The children's books in the Carnegie Library were fun to read, and Rabi read them all. The next bank of shelves held books of science, which were organized by subject rather than by author. Again, he started with A for astronomy. Decades later, he could say : "That was what determined my later life more than anything else ---reading a little book on astronomy." 
   The young Rabi was captivated by astronomy --- but not by the usual things that might attract a ten-year-old, such as stars, interstellar distances, galactic sizes, intergalactic distances, or the constellations, or Jupiter's spot and Saturn's rings, or even the craters on the moon. The pages in the little astronomy book that so fixed Rabi's attention described the Copernican solar system. 
    Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, stirred the world when, in 1543,  he published his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.  Up to that time, an earth-centered universe had been consistent with the wisdom of the past, with the teachings of biblical scholars, and, most of all, with everyone's common sense. It seemed obvious that the sun rose in the east, circled the earth, and set in the west : nothing indicated that the earth was spinning about a terrestrial axis. A few astronomers, however, like Kepler, like Galileo, saw beyond authorities of the past and were able to ignore the "certainties" of common sense. 
   Rabi was neither Kepler nor Galileo, but he saw what the Copernican system offered and his mind was receptive to it. His fascination with the biblical creation story, his reading and rereading of it, had raised questions in his mind. The answers he had been given invoked God at every turn : God raised the sun every morning ; God darkened the sky each night ; God brought the moon to the sky at different times in different shapes. 
   In the seventeenth century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler had seen the Copernican system as "an inexhaustible treasure of truly divine insight into the wonderful order of the world and all the bodies therein"---- a "wonderful order" also apparent to the child Rabi. "It was so beautiful, so marvelous," said Rabi years later,"so simple. Instead of the idea that there is some special intervention every day for the sun to come up. I came home with this great revelation." 
   One night after reading the astronomy book in the library, Rabi went home "full of delight," walked in, and announced to his parents, "It's all very simple, who needs God ?" 
   Who needs God ? Such a question for immigrant parents whose life was simple devotion to God and to their children : "I didn't appreciate what a  blow this this was. Gave them a lot of pain. I was sorry about it, perhaps baffled that they didn't share my enthusiasm. I have guilt feelings about their feelings. For my family it was rather tragic : I was the first born, the only son. And I could outtalk them." 
   Who needs God ? The immediate stimulus for the question was Rabi's delight and enthusiasm at the Copernican view of the heavens : this question, however, had been in the making during months of open-eyed observations --- and testing Jewish law held that one was not to ride a streetcar on the Sabbath. What if he did ? One Sabbath he tried it. He rode the streetcar, half expecting God to wreak havoc on both himself and the streetcar. He waited. No catastrophe occurred. Later he conducted another test :"I remember being in the synagogue and the priests, the Kohens would stand up with their hands outstretched and covered with tallis, they would bless the congregation. You were not supposed to look at their hands, you might go blind if you did. Well, I tried .. . with one eye." Since he was not struck blind by his defiant act, his doubts grew about the validity of things he had been taught. 
   Life conducted according to Jewish law brings dilemmas, moral dilemmas. One such arose in Brownsville : 

     Of course, you couldn't carry money on the Sabbath. I did once. I bought some candy. It was spectacular. I found I HAD some money in my pocket. I didn't put it there. I don't know how it got there, but there it was. And what to do ? I consulted with the other kids, what to do ? Well, apparently, you get rid of it. So I spent it and bought some candy. Later the storekeeper told my father and there was hell to pay. Here was a real moral question which I felt I was never resolved. They didn't understand the problem I was confronted with. I had the money in my pocket, what am I to do ? Go around with it ? Whether the sin was having the money in your pocket and walking around with it, or utilizing it ----- it was all kind of subtle. 
   
    There was nothing subtle about the Copernican sun. When Rabi discovered Copernicus in Brooklyn, his life outsde the home became increasingly secular as he slowly abandoned the religious practices and rituals of his parents. And they were no match for him : 

     You have no idea how tough I was. My father was a nice gentle man from another culture, another language . . . I was very hard on him. They [my parents] never spoke English well, not well enough to communicate any subtleties, so there was an enormous gap --- a generation gap and, in addition, a cultural gap. They were simple people. My mother was a woman of great intelligence, but very little education. That's true of my father as well. So I was left to myself because of the difficulty of bridging that gap. I would say now that I was rather insensitive to them. . . I was the first born, the only son.