On Sunday morning I was at the Los Angeles airport on my way to Taipei via Tokyo. It was to be the start of a very long day. I love it in Taiwan but getting there is hell. I was walking away from the gate agent after unsuccessfully trying to change my seat assignment and not in the best of moods when a stranger approached me.
“Excuse me. Are you Jewish?” he asked.
I’m asked that from time to time. I am Jewish and I do look Jewish so people looking for Jews will approach me. Every time this happens, it’s an evangelist of some kind. In the U.S. it’s a Christian or a “Jew for Jesus.” When I was in Israel, it was Orthodox Jews trying to convince me to become more religious. I am fiercely proud of my Jewish heritage but I am also a non-practicing atheist. I haven’t been to synagogue in maybe seven years.
This time though, I was being asked the question for a very different reason.
“Yes,” I replied to the question.
“If you have time, I need your help,” the mad said, “I need to get a minyon together to say kaddish for my Mother.”
A minyon is a group of ten adult male Jews necessary to hold an official service (in the Reform branch it can be men or women.) The kaddish is a memorial prayer for the dead. The man’s mother had recently passed away and he was going to New Jersey to the funeral. I was number nine and about ten minutes later he found the tenth and final member of the group.
The man realized that he didn’t have enough yarmulkes to go around so we had to improvise. One guy had a hooded sweatshirt and pulled up his hood. I had a ball cap in my luggage and wore that. One guy just held a magazine over his head.
One of the members of our group was about seventeen years old and an Orthodox Jew. He attended a yeshiva (Jewish) high school and was on the same flight back to New Jersey to continue his studies. The man looked to him, the youngest in the group of strangers other than the man’s two adolescent sons to lead the service. He came through like a champ.
“There’s a mishna (teaching) that says that the wise man learns something from every person that he meets,” he said, “maybe you can tell us something about your mother so we can all learn from her.”
“My mother loved to help people in need,” the man began, “but she was never taken advantage of. She always tried to help unless she got a feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the person and her intuition was rarely wrong. All of you trusted me today when a total stranger approached you and asked for you help. Maybe all of us can learn from this experience.”
The man then chanted the kaddish and we said our amens as a group. After he finished he thanked all of us profusely for our help and told us how much it meant to him. He said that his mother would have thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of him trying to find ten Jews in LAX so he could memorialize her.
I am by nature very cynical and not much into religion. That being said, it was a moving experience. We were a group of strangers just coming from or going to places all over the globe joined together briefly to take part in a ritual that is thousands of years old. I think I did learn something from the experience.
Haj