I don’t usually walk through the streets of Boston with a Torah.
But sometimes I do.
It’s not exactly normal. And it does make me a little anxious; after all, I’m walking through the world holding something that does not quite belong to the world I’m walking through. And someone is going to notice.
Is it risky? In this day and age, it feels that way.
About a year ago, I was carrying a Torah down Lansdowne Street before a bat mitzvah, which meant navigating one of the most well-known streets in Boston, right behind Fenway, crammed with bars and restaurants and, on this particular day, thousands of people there to see the Savannah Bananas. Face paint. Elaborate foam fingers. People in banana costumes. The full thing.
What was I supposed to do? I was headed to the House of Blues and there was one front door.
What I expected was the crowd to part in mild confusion, to get a few second glances, maybe someone to ask a question I’d have to talk my way through. What did I get instead? Not much. A few people nodded. A man in a banana suit gave me a little bow. Nobody said a word, but a few eyebrows may have been raised. Much ado about nothing? Who knows; I made it to the House of Blues, and the bat mitzvah was beautiful.
Last weekend, I did it again. This time it was a bar mitzvah in the Seaport, on a hot and humid Saturday evening. I parked the car and started walking toward the venue with the Torah again. I was making my way down the street, Torah in arms, when I heard it before I saw it—the unmistakable sound of a good time. A trolley, open-top, packed with people who were clearly having a few beverages. Was it a bachelorette party in full sail? I’d like to think so.
Someone spotted me. It wasn’t hard; they were turning right and I was crossing the street.
“Hey! What’s that?”
I looked up at maybe 20 faces looking down at me, plastic cups aloft. I weighed my options in about half a second and leaned in with the truth.
“A Torah!”
There was a pause. In that moment, there was so much potential for not-awesomeness.
But then, cheering. Actual cheering. And then, from somewhere near the back, a voice cut through all of it:
“Let’s go!”
And then they were gone, rolling down the street, leaving me and my wife standing on the sidewalk in the warm evening air, laughing.
I’ve thought about these two moments a lot since Saturday.
Jewish life spent in public often comes with a background hum of self-consciousness. You wonder whether it’s welcome, you prepare to explain yourself, and, increasingly, you steel yourself to justify Jewish existence writ large.
But here is what the Seaport and Lansdowne Street taught me: Most people, when they encounter something visibly sacred, something that is clearly for real (even if they don’t know exactly what kind of real), tend to do the right thing. Not always. Not everywhere. But more often than we’re afraid of.
Perhaps more often than I’m afraid of.
Did the drunken bachelorette party know what a Torah was? It’s unclear, but I’d like to think they do now. Did some of the Savannah Bananas fans know what I was carrying? For sure. After all, this is Boston, outside Fenway; some of those 37,000 folks inside and a few hundred I saw outside were Jewish. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter either way; it all turned out to be just fine.
May it forever stay that way.
Let’s go.
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