Shelter Rock Jewish Center

Dear Friends,

Can it really be almost Labor Day? I suppose we’d all best adjust to the idea, but it still seems…wasn’t it just the Fourth of July a couple of weeks ago? Oh well, I suppose feeling this way is just a sign of what a great summer I’ve had! And I hope you all had, and still are having, restful, productive and interesting summers too. At least Rosh Hashanah is in the real fall this year—the one that starts after the autumnal equinox—not in the self-imposed one we Americans have invented for ourselves, the one that starts the day after Labor Day. So at least there’s that!

I wrote to you earlier this summer about Joan’s and my trip to Baxter State Park in Maine and about the marvelous time we had there. Baxter is a truly special place, almost a magical one. Set in the middle of nowhere (don’t quote that to any people from Maine, but you know what I mean), it couldn’t possibly be more worth the effort of finding and exploring. But I wanted to write to you today about the other part of our time away, the part that just concluded a few days ago.

I haven’t really presented myself too openly to the congregation as a writer of fiction, but fiction has been a big part of my creative output for the last two decades. I published my first novel, The Truth about Marvin Kalish, in 1992, then followed it in 1996, 1998 and 2002 with three more, each one with a Jewish theme of some sort and each reflective of my thinking on some different aspect of our Jewish lives and how things were and are for our people at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.

I’ve always wanted to get back to fiction, but once we came back to New York things kept getting in the way—the Psalms volume, the two volumes of Tzur Yisrael, Zot Nechamati for the House of Mourning, this year’s Riding the River of Peace and The Boy on the Door on the Ox, not to mention next year’s The Observant Life, a gargantuan undertaking I’ve been involved with for more than seven years now and which I’ll write to you all about in more detail another time—and holding me back. What can you do? It’s hard enough to find time to study, to keep up my own learning…let alone to write at all, let alone to write fiction. And yet, still, somehow…the fiction bug was not fully dead, just fitfully dormant. And this summer, I’ve let it come back to life.

Joan and I rented a beautiful summer home on a gorgeous, placid, almost totally secluded lake in Swan Lake, New York, between Monticello and White Lake. It was a fabulous setting—really, everything we could have wished for—and, partially because Joan’s (self-imposed) summer project was to master some incredibly complicated film editing program for the Mac and partially because I had been waiting all year to have uninterrupted days to write and read, I devoted myself to working on a new novel, something entirely different from anything I’ve done in the past.

I haven’t written much historical fiction before—just one single short story, really—so this book is a complete departure for me. Set in 189 BCE in Jerusalem, it concerns the murder of a Levite in a Temple and a city fraught with violent factionalism and troubled by urban mayhem…and in a country that barely exists in its own right other than as a backwater province of somebody else’s empire. Of course, all that changed within a few decades once the Maccabees managed to declare Jewish independence from the Syrian Greek empire—that’s the part of the larger story that everybody really does know—but this is set enough years before that for no one to see the Maccabees coming. Instead, Jerusalem in 189 BCE is a kind of provincial capital, but one that no one other than its own inhabitants cares much about. The High Priest, the titular spiritual leader of the people, is a weak figure wholly dominated by his own staff and, particularly, one among them, a malign, volatile fellow with a penchant for solving his problems using violence and intimidation. Our narrator, now an old man recalling his role half a century earlier in solving the murder in question, spends at least part of his time taking his readers on a tour of his city, sharing his intimate knowledge of how things really were in the Temple, and in old Jerusalem itself, and talking about the role he personally, and others of his acquaintance, played in the birth of the Jewish faith as it eventually came to exist at the dawn of the new millennium. It turns out that the murder being investigated is intimately related to a different crime…and that neither murder will be solved until the other one also is. I’ve loved working on it, loved feeling myself drawn into a world of my own making.They say we all invent the worlds in which we live…but that thought is never quite as true as it is when applied to the fictional world a novelist invents and then inhabits. It’s a grand thing, this art of fiction writing…although I still feel a beginner at it, even after all these years.

Is it any good? Who knows? I managed to write 220 pages out of a projected 260, so I’m far closer to the end than the beginning. I’ve been calling the book Jerusalem Ghosts, but just lately I’ve been wondering if I should rethink the title. I’ll let you know what happens. And there’s a long road ahead once the first draft is done: editing the book, getting it ready to show, finding a publisher…each step arduous and uncertain, and none guaranteed actually to happen as planned or wished, or as hopefully imagined in advance. Years ago, one of my editors observed wryly to me that writing fiction is a truly poor choice of a hobby for people who don’t take rejection well. Believe me, I know how true that is: to sell my first novel, I ended up sending out initial query letters to over 600 publishers across North America. From all that effort, I awakened some interest in a couple of dozen houses…and from those initial flickers of interest came eventually one sole offer, which I obviously took. Like my editor said, this is not a good hobby for people who don’t do well with rejection. Still, I have more of a proven track record now…so maybe things will be marginally easier. Or maybe not. I’ll keep you all abreast of new developments!

As the summer winds down, I’m feeling very enthusiastic about all sorts of things that are being planned at Shelter Rock for this year, but most of all I’m excited about reconnecting with those of you I haven’t seen all summer. Enjoy these last days of August! I’ll write to you all at more length about my hopes for the new year just before Rosh Hashanah, so now I’ll just conclude by saying how proud and pleased I am to be beginning my seventh year of service to our great congregation, and how privileged I feel to serve all of you as your rabbi.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen

P.S. I had a wonderful time yesterday that I also want to tell you about. The cantor and I spent the day at Ramah Berkshires attending the USY Encampment and the whole experience was just lovely. Do you want to see a group of beautiful Jewish kids?  How lucky are we all to have such committed, involved, and spirited teenagers in our shul?