Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

A Story from the Road 

by Irwin Kula

A SHAGGY, GRAY HAIRED, TOUGH LOOKING, CAB DRIVER NAMED GEORGE, WHO looked to be in his fifties, picked me up after a recent talk I gave in Queens, New York. It was a Tuesday night, rainy and dreary, and all I wanted to do was sit back and close my eyes for the thirty-five minute ride home. "You look familiar," he bellowed from the front seat staring at me from the rear view mirror, "weren't you on television, weren't you that rabbi on the Today Show a few days ago talking about the sacred messiness of love." "Yeah," I said quietly, hoping that I wouldn't have to engage in conversation when all I wanted was to get home. "Hey, is there any 'love' going on between you and that minister who was on with you," he snickered, referring to the Reverend Sherri Hausser, with whom I have jointly appeared on the Today Show a number of times over the past few months. I didn't really respond to his teenage humor and after a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence he said in a solemn tone, "Sorry, I was just joking. Can I tell you a story how I know what you said on the show is really true?" And then George proceeded to tell me, in a non-stop rapid-fire delivery, the most amazing story about the mystery and unpredictability and redemptive quality of love.

George was raised Greek Orthodox by traditional parents in a very strict but loving home. A product of the Sixties, he became a member of a rock and roll band that actually played in clubs all around the country, did quite a bit of studio work with some important artists and made a very decent living. When he was in his mid thirties his parents moved to their ancestral home in Greece and in that same period, after years of only "normal" dabbling and partying with drugs he began to snort heroin. Soon after he was hooked and wound up having a $100 dollar-a-day habit that he paid for by small time dealing, though he stressed only enough to pay for his own habit. For about a decade he lived like this—a "functioning addict," in his words, "playing music and staying alive." When his mother died he could not attend her funeral in Greece because leaving the country with a heroin habit was impossible. He felt terribly guilty. One day, about a year after his mother died, he returned home from making a drug deal and he smelled this overwhelming aroma of perfume at the entrance to his apartment building, which he recognized but could not place. He frantically searched everywhere, even climbing into the garbage bins from where the smell seemed to be emanating, but he could not find the source of the smell. And to make things worse his wife and neighbors did not smell it at all. After more than an hour of crazed search he gave up, went into his apartment and plopped down on the couch. Within five minutes the police were banging on his door. Someone had ratted on him and he was arrested for dealing heroin. At the sentencing the judge said to him, "This is your lucky day; because you have no previous record and no history of violence, I am giving you two year probation on the condition that you enter detox, and if you remain clean for two years your record will be wiped clean."

So George got clean. A few months later he was speaking on the phone with his father, who still lived in Greece. At some point they began talking about his mother's funeral at which he had not been present and his father happened to confess something strange that he did at the funeral. Before the casket was closed he had poured an entire bottle of her favorite perfume on her. As his father said this, George remembered the unaccounted-for aroma of perfume that he had smelled the day he was arrested and realized it was his mother's perfume, and that his mother had "reached out to save my life that day."

"My mother never gave up on me," he said, "she really embraced the messiness of love, right." Precisely as he finished his story with these words, we pulled up in front of my apartment building and he turned around and said, "When I heard you say that love isn't just a feeling, but is serious work that takes practice every single day, I wanted to yell out I have been practicing at it ever since that day I realized how much my mother loved me when I was such a mess. I even practice love with customers in this cab in this crazy city. So, thanks rabbi, you guys were really cool on TV."

I put double the fare into George's hand, and as I stood there watching the cab drive away I realized I had been given a gift. I thought I was going to get a nap on the way home after a long day. Instead, I was offered a teaching by a most surprising teacher—a ba'al agalah (a harbinger of the Messiah who conceals himself as a wagon driver) in a most surprising place (a beat-up taxi taking me from here to there) about what it means to really be at home.

We all yearn for love. Embracing the messiness of love—its disappointments and difficulties—is the necessary path to greater intimacy, to gaining the wisdom and compassion to allow ourselves to be loved and to love others more deeply.

Thanks George.

Rabbi Irwin Kula is the author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (Hyperion, 2006) and the President of CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

Kula, Irwin. 2008. A story from the road. Tikkun 23(1):57-58.