Saturday afternoon was sunny and cold. I walked from 29th Street down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village.
At the crosswalk, I waited for the light to turn green beside a balding man with snow-white hair and a beard, hunched over a shopping bag and leaning on a cane, like me. He wore no hat, scarf, or gloves, and his sweatpants were rolled up on his swollen left leg to fit a podiatrist’s boot. He looked at me and smiled. “It’s not easy being 70.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I just turned 73.”
I offered him my arm, and we shuffled step by step to the other side. He needed to rest and used his right hand to grip 2 Fifth Avenue’s wrought-iron fence. Michael introduced himself and said he had taken the bus from the East Village to the senior center for supper.
“Our meals were supposed to be delivered, but they never came by today.” Then, out of nowhere, Michael said, “I wonder what the weather is like in Israel.”
“I was in Jerusalem this time last year for four months, in an Airbnb off Hillel,” I said. “It can get cold.”
He asked if I’d made aliyah. I said I wasn’t Jewish, and that I loved Israel and had been there 10 times since 2002.
“I’ve been to Israel 10 times, too!”
Michael said his two brothers were rabbis living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He grew up in Far Rockaway and was fluent in Hebrew. He said he was disabled after being beaten up during COVID.
As we inched up the block—stopping often so he could rest—Michael told me his stories. He’d been a Jewish history lecturer at summer camps in the Catskills and an activities director at a senior living home in California. His biggest achievement, he said, was the year he spent in Europe and Israel writing and publishing his Holocaust research grant paper in 1975.
It took us half an hour to get around the corner and down the block to the Greenwich House Older Adult Center, which was closed on weekends.
I said, “We’re getting a cab back to your neighborhood.”
Michael and I squeezed into a booth at B&H Dairy on Second Avenue. We had the kosher vegetable lasagna and ordered a slice of chocolate cake to go.
“You’re a mitzvah magnet,” I said.
My wife, Franny, had called me a mitzvah magnet in 2003, when I was in Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv recovering from the Mike’s Place suicide bombing. Rabbis and support groups for terrorism victims visited us daily, bringing cake, cookies, and small gifts.
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The writer, at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, May 2, 2003
(Photo: Courtesy Jack Baxter)
“Mitzvah—mitzvot isn’t doing just one good deed, but it is the keeping of all of the 613 commandments in the Torah,” he said. “Leviticus has a commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus didn’t come up with that. He was teaching Torah.”
Another half-hour later, we reached his place off First Avenue. He signed a piece of paper with his contact information: “Mike Mitzvah Magnet.”
It was dark and cold on my walk back home.