Don’t Try to Tell a Jew What His Job Is on Holy Day

Two days before Yom Kippur, 1984, the telephone rang at my desk in a suburban bureau of a metropolitan daily in the Northeast. On the line was one of the top editors from downtown. It was getting toward evening, and he was hot for me to jump on a story the next day: A pleasure boat was missing off the New England coast and the owner, someone wealthy and prominent, was presumed dead. I would drive 2 1/2 hours to the shore town, report the story and file it by evening.

More than anyone else on the paper, this guy was a maker or breaker of careers; if he asked you to do something, you would be well advised to do it or expect consequences. I can still see myself holding that telephone and making an instant calculation. Could I pull off the story in time for deadline? Not a deadline dictated by an editor’s news judgment, but a deadline imposed by who I am and the yearnings of my soul.

I am a Jew. On erev Yom Kippur, the eve of the Day of Atonement, I have an appointment with myself, my people and my ancestors. It is not a night to report and to write, but to go to the synagogue, to hear once more the Kol Nidre. That 500-year-old chant of repentance is the keynote to the 24 hours of fasting, stock-taking, reflection and spiritual self-cleansing that is commanded in our Torah. The holy day--no mere holiday, as most Americans know holidays--instills even in casual Jews a primal need, for at least one day a year, to be Jews first.

I was too rattled to say this to the editor. I stammered something about how I had planned to drive to my parents’ house the next day to join them for Yom Kippur services, and, no, I was honored he would call on me, but I really could not take the assignment because of the Jewish holiday.

I can still hear the long silence on the telephone line, and I still seethe at what he said next.

“Are you sure?”

I muttered something meek and bland. No, I really couldn’t take the assignment. And that was the end of it, except for the anger inside.

Yes, you coercer. I was sure, I am sure and I will always be sure. I defy and repudiate you and what you tried to do to me that day, preying on my insecurity, manipulating my professionalism and, probably without even realizing you were doing it, trying to tie a knot around my soul.

I curse you still, and now I bless Shawn Green.

The Dodger star won’t be in the outfield on Yom Kippur, even though the season-long pennant race will be at a climax, the stakes are likely to be extreme, and his home-run swing will be sorely missed. Green isn’t highly observant, he wasn’t brought up religious, but he knows what he is and he knows that on Yom Kippur Jews are not ballplayers or reporters or anything else but people of a particular faith and tradition that has its nonnegotiable demands, people who need a day’s commanded stillness to consider what it means to be human and in what ways they might be falling short.

“There are those who will insist that a six-year, $84-million contract should buy a man’s soul, as well as all that comes with it,” Times baseball writer Ross Newhan wrote Thursday, the day after Green announced that he would have that stillness on Yom Kippur and leave it to his teammates to get along for a day without him. “But should he be asked to sacrifice beliefs . . . that nothing is bigger than his religion and his roots . . . ?”

No, he should not be asked. Nobody should ever be asked. And maybe, thanks to Shawn Green, that hard-driving Northeastern editor and others like him will think a little before they ask. And when they do, we Jews will have greater confidence to answer the question as it needs to be answered.

“Are you sure?”

Yes, we are. And you need never ask again.