New Archive:

March 2000 Issue, Volume 2

Angels in America

By Jennifer Moses

Since October, I've been taking a class at our synagogue, Beth Shalom, on Abraham Joshua Heschel's God in Search of Man. At first, there were about 20 people in the class, but now we are down to a hard core seven--and we are not even halfway through the book. We're moving slowly because Heschel is not exactly beach reading, because certain members of the class, such as our rabbi (who is teaching the class), keep cracking jokes that divert us, and because the questions at stake--Does God exist? How do we know? How can the limited human mind conceive of God to begin with? Why would God care what we do? How can we awaken ourselves to the glory of the universe?--are so complex, and, more to the point, so compelling. This is the kind of stuff I haven't grappled with since the '70s, when, as a depressed and anxious teenager, I read a lot of New Age crap by such notable spiritual figures as Carlos Castenada, spent a lot of time lying in the hammock staring at the sky, and smoked things that my parents still don't know about.

At any rate, I'm not the only student in our Heschel class who, in middle age, is bumping up against the God question. Perhaps it will come as no surprise to Jewish readers that there are many members of our rapidly-diminishing class who simply can't buy the existence of God at all--and yet that these are the same people who come to services regularly, always help out for a bar or bat mitzvah, and eagerly await the next adult education offering. Talk about being stiff-necked! That's actually what I like about Judaism, or at least the liberal, questing, open-minded Judaism as it's practiced at Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: it's okay to question.

But out there, beyond our little "Green Room" where we sit sipping coffee and discussing whether our new millennium world is qualitatively different that of, say, the Second Temple--out where I-10 stretches in one direction to New Orleans and in the other through the swamps and across the Achafalaya Basin, out where row after row of shot-gun shacks sit blistering in the sun and where folks pick up their dinners at the QuickSac or Church's Fried Chicken--is a world of people whose sense of God is immediate, personal, and sure. And I'm not talking about Bible-thumpers, either. I'm talking about people like Joyce.

Joyce works as a health-aid at St. Anthony's home, a residence for people with AIDS in Baton Rouge, where I volunteer once a week. (Mainly I do errands and hang out.). But it's Joyce's job to do just about everything--feed people who can no longer feed themselves, bathe people who can no longer bathe themselves, make sure the residents are taking their medication, clean up every conceivable kind of mess, and keep everyone in line, which, for Joyce, often means telling them what's what, which means, too, that she will not take any nonsense, thank you very much. If your toenails are long and scraggly and nasty, only you can't personally get to them because your hands are shaking too much to hold a scissors, she will cut them. If you whine and back-talk her, she will explain, in no uncertain terms, that respect is a two-way street. And if you're a woman and you need a little perking up, she will do your hair real nice, maybe even paint your fingernails. I have no idea what her background is, or how she got to be so wonderful. I imagine she pulls in a whopping sixteen or eighteen thousand dollars a year.

Last week, when I arrived at St. Anthony's, I was told that Joyce was on vacation, and that Chuck--who has lived at St. Anthony's for more than two years and who the other residents rely on and respect--had landed in hospital with a dangerously high fever. He needed some clean clothes. Could I take him some? So another resident and I shlepped up to Baton Rouge General with a bundle of clean clothes for Chuck, and when we got there, who was already in Chuck's room, visiting, but Joyce who was supposed to be on vacation. Chuck, thank God, was feeling well enough to bitch and moan about the incompetent doctors and nurses and all the dumb things they had done, but Joyce would have none of it.

"You better thank Jesus Christ right now that you had those doctors and nurses," she said, "because here you are, talking and joking and telling stories, but only a few days ago you were on your death bed, so I'd say that God helped you out and maybe you should get down on your knees and thank Him for His courtesy to you." Chuck--his eyes huge behind the thick lenses he has to wear to see anything at all--blinked, flapped his hand, and said, "You're right." Then Joyce got up, flashed her own style of decisively wicked grin, and said, "All right then, see y'all later."

And she was out of the room, leaving us, once again, to marvel at her intense human goodness.

Jennifer Moses is the author of Food and Whine: Confessions of an End of the Millennium Mom (Simon & Schuster). She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with her husband and three children.