This Is Where I Leave You

grew up getting our sneakers and baseball gloves at Foxman’s. On a personal note, I spent a good part of my childhood in the Foxman home, playing ball with Paul and Judd - ”
    “Smoking weed,” I whisper.
    “Jerking off .” Paul.
    “Trying to touch my boobs.” Wendy.
    “...and he leaves behind this legacy, his work ethic and his uncompromising values, for his children and grandchildren to carry on. May the Lord comfort the family among the mourners of Zion.”
    “Amen,” the crowd responds.
    “I’d like to call Hillary and her children up to the bimah now, to say Kaddish for their beloved husband and father, Morton Foxman.”
    Mom stands up first and strides down the aisle in her stiletto heels like it’s a runway, garnering appreciative glances from the older men in the crowd, including Peter Applebaum, who shamelessly watches her ass the entire way down.
    “She couldn’t find a longer skirt for temple?” Wendy mutters. My siblings and I follow her up to the bimah, a raised table at the front of the room, where the cantor hands each of us a laminated sheet with the words of the Kaddish written in Hebrew and then transliterated in English. “Just read it slowly and pause at the dashes for the responses,” he says. “You’ll be fi ne.”
    “Okay, everyone,” Paul says. “On three?”
    “Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba,” we say.
    “Amen,” says the congregation, all rising to their feet.
    “B’alma di v’ra khir’utei v’yam’likh mal’khutei...”
    We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don’t understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning to speak gibberish to each other, and you would think, in these godless times, that the experience would be empty, but somehow it isn’t. The five of us, huddled together shoulder to shoulder over the bimah, read the words aloud slowly, and the congregation, these old friends and acquaintances and strangers, all respond, and for reasons I can’t begin to articulate, it feels like something is actually happening. It’s got nothing to do with God or souls, just the palpable sense of goodwill and support emanating in waves from the pews around us, and I can’t help but be moved by it. When we reach the end of the page, and the last “amen”
    has been said, I’m sorry that it’s over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family’s wet eyes tells me that I’m not the only one who feels that way. I don’t feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that’s more than I expected. 10:12 a.m.
    As the cantor drones on, I stick my hand into the pocket of Dad’s suit and discover what feels like an old, twisted tissue but turns out, upon further inspection, to be a very fat, bona fide, home-rolled joint. I palm the joint, hold it out over Phillip’s lap, and discreetly show it to him. The only thing wider than his eyes is his smile. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he says. He stands up and heads up the aisle. A few minutes later, I follow. The bathroom smells of powdered crotch, so we push open the double fi re doors and head down the darkened hallways of the Temple Israel Hebrew School. Phillip finds an unlocked classroom and we sit down in miniature chairs, still wrapped in our prayer shawls.
    “Where’d you get the doobage?” Phillip says. 198“It was in Dad’s suit.”
    “Dad was a stoner?” Phillip says. “So much about my life makes sense now.”
    “Shut up. It was probably medicinal. They prescribe it for cancer patients.”
    “I prefer to think that every once in a while Dad just liked to toke up and consider the universe.”
    “Think what you want, just light the fucker.”
    A few moments later, we’re sprawled at our tiny attached desks, while the three-dimensional letters of the Hebrew alphabet taped above the blackboard float over us in a smoky haze.
    “Can you still read Hebrew?” Phillip says.
    “I doubt it,” I say. “I know the letters, though.”
    “Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth ...,” Phillip sings.
    “He, vav, zayin, heth, teth, yod,” I chime in. We sing the rest of the Aleph-Bet together solemnly, like a funereal psalm, and when we’re done, our voices echo briefly in the room.
    “I miss Dad,” Phillip says.
    “I do too.”
    “I feel very