Yesterday was free health fair day at our Temple. Sister
Joanne from the big hospital set it up, mostly for poor folks who don’t have
health care—free blood pressure check, free cholesterol check, free Body Mass
Index.
She invited me for the trifecta, but the Fatso-Meter was all
I really cared about. Oy, what a mistake.
Sister Joanne—herself a gezinte woman, if you can say that
about a Roman Catholic Nun—laughed raucously at my stricken face. It’s an evil chart, she cackled.
Sister Joanne wasn’t always a nun. She had a husband and a
house in New Jersey.
For 6 months, until he died.
Joanne went to church to pray for him while he was sick, and
continued to pray after he passed. As she told me, I was hearing things in the
service that I guess I needed to hear.
One thing led to another and she found herself taking her
vows.
Three vows: Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. My jaw was on
the floor. I could MAYBE do one out of three—yeah, and guess which one.
She now lives in a house with 3 other nuns—one is the Mother
Superior of her order in the US—but they don’t call them Mother Superiors
anymore.
I, of course, tried to look cosmopolitan—the Rabbi’s Wife
who basically got her knowledge of nuns from watching Maria in The Sound of
Music.
So Sister Joanne sold her house and gave the money to her
family. The house she shares now belongs to the church, and her only closet is
a whopping 2 feet by 2 feet.
She doesn’t own the car she drives to work every day, and
her salary is direct deposited to the church. She gets health benefits from the
big hospital.
She gets an allowance—my jaw dropped again when she told me.
$75 dollars. A month. A month. A
month. It’s hard when you want to buy a present for someone, she told me. You
really have to learn to save up.
$75 dollars a month and she’s thinking about presents for
other people. I told her I wasn’t rich myself, but if she EVER needed anything
EVER she should come to me.
She laughed her happy raucous laugh. I don’t need anything,
she said.
That night I told Sruli all about Sister Joanne. I couldn’t
stop. He looked at me and smiled. You can use it for your Mishna discussion this
week.
We study Pirkei Avot here at the Temple, every Friday night during
services. The Ethics of the Fathers. I learned them with my father on Shabbat
mornings when I was a little girl, imagining the ancient Rabbis as I spread my
Challah thickly with Skippy super chunk peanut butter.
This week we are up to my favorite saying: Marbeh Nechasim,
Marbeh Da’agah. The more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to worry
about.
Usually Sruli leads a lively discussion but I had asked him if
I could lead this one.
I thought I knew all about Marbeh Nechasim. I gave up a fancy
job in advertising, a house in Scarsdale, a house in White Plains and a house
in Englewood. I sold all my furniture, gave away most of my clothes, my kitchen
stuff, and now live in the basement of a shul.
But $75 a month.
Someday, Sister Joanne will fly easily and lightly up to
heaven, unencumbered by Nechasim or earthly ties. She will be bathed in the
glow of gratitude from thousands of poor people whose lives she made healthier,
more bearable.
I will be looking up without envy, without
self-consciousness, my jaw open in awe.
I hope I will be able to hear her raucous laugh through the
cacophony as the angels rush to welcome her as one of them.
