December 2024
Harvey Starkman
I imagine you still remember where you were at the very cusp of the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.
My wife and I were in southern France, waiting for a Sunday train to take us to Paris and a rushed flight home.
That’s how on a bright Shabbat morning, I found myself in a once grand Orthodox synagogue in Bayonne, the unexpected ninth man in the congregation. My presence had clearly raised the rabbi’s hopes: if one more man appeared, he could lead a full Torah service. The fact that there were at least five women on their side of the sanctuary didn’t count. After half an hour of shivering in the unheated sanctuary, one of the original eight congregants returned with a14-year-old boy in tow, the minyan was made, and the prayers for taking out the Torah began.
I had been in a similar position once before.
Years earlier, on a cold, rainy November evening my wife, two young sons and I were sitting in a steamy Chinese restaurant on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, deciding what to order. Looking up, I noticed a small man wearing a kippah enter the restaurant and nervously scan the dining area, clearly uncomfortable and unsure of whether or not to enter. Our eyes locked. Hesitating a little, he walked to our table, looked at me closely, and asked if I was Jewish. I’ve been asked that before, and sometimes I’m a bit wary, wondering what’s coming next. I felt like telling him that I was Irish, but this felt like a question carrying some genuine and urgent hope, so I told him I was.
I didn’t expect what followed.
He explained that he needed to recite Kaddish for his wife, and they had only nine men at the shul around the corner. He asked if I would go with him to make a minyan. I would be doing a mitzvah he said.
My grandfather, Sam Caplan intuitively understood the meaning of minyans and mitzvot and would not have hesitated. His shul was on Hunter Street (the original Beth Jacob Synagogue), but they knew in the Cannon Street Shul (the original Adas Israel) and the Hess Street Shul (now located in Shalom Village) that he would come there too if they asked.
Unlike my grandfather, I didn’t want to go. I was hungry, I didn’t know the man, I didn’t want to leave my family, I had no connection with that shul nor with any shul. And I did not understand what it really means to do a mitzvah or who one does the mitzvah for.
At that time, I was at a transitional point in my life, and a lot of my thinking was about me. I was a newly appointed high school department head facing a major test: a departmental evaluation that I saw as either a career maker or career breaker. Maybe going would be a good idea. With all that pressure, I reasoned, a little help wouldn’t hurt. Weighing the potential upsides against the possible downs, I smiled weakly at my wife and boys and followed the man out the door and into the rain.
Like the synagogue in Bayonne, the Anshe Minsk had seen better days, its members long since lost to the lure of the northern suburbs and the globalization of the Spadina garment trade. Descending a basement stairwell, we entered a small, dimly lit space where tattered prayerbooks covered a bare table. Following the briefest of introductions, the service continued, and the man was able to recite the Kaddish prayer. Twenty minutes later, I was back in the restaurant with my family.
With time, I’ve come to understand that being part of a minyan is an opportunity to help others, not yourself. Still, when I think about how they found me, I can’t resist laughing at the thought that in a dank synagogue basement, nine orthodox men, needing just one more Jew, suddenly realized that the most likely place to find their minyan maker would be in a Chinese restaurant.
Harvey Starkman has deep family roots in Hamilton.
