Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe, Mike McGrady Page A

presence, and he directed his conversation to the radio
audience. He wasn't responding properly to her sallies. He answered
them obliquely and continued following a course of his own charting.
Gillian added canvas, sailed recklessly after him.
    Turnbull, a product of Union Theological Seminary in Cleveland,
was a beefy, thick-muscled man in his mid-thirties who sported an
ash-blond Vandyke, jaunty salt-and-pepper tweeds and no yarmulke.
William noted a resemblance to Skitch Henderson. Rabbi Turnbull
sprang from a family of Reform rabbis that had emigrated to the
Midwest from Germany before the Civil War. Rabbi Turnbull was
considerably more than reformed; he was reconstructed. American to a
fault, he was the residual of four generations of reformed Jewry that
had refined the stiff-necked, insulated, and anachronistic worship of
a desert God into a white precipitate of acceptability and consensus
that bordered on the Episcopalian.
    Rabbi Turnbull's Sunday School, for example, happened on Sundays.
The rabbi had constructed a Temple of steel and glass that was the
envy of all the other faiths in King's Neck. (He sometimes took
delighted malice in the Greek epigram: "The crucified martyr made
light of his loss/ Till he spotted another on a higher cross.") The
Temple was built with three prongs jutting skyward, symbolizing the
Hebrew letter "shin," a symbol that burst with significance in Jewish
lore but was also a symbol that could represent any trinity that one
cared to apply. Detractors said it looked like Neptune's trident
thrust through the earth, and they claimed it would not be surprising
if a huge pagan fist reached up from the waters of Long Island Sound
to reclaim it. Vandals from the city had once desecrated the building
by painting the words, "By you, this is a shule?" across the front
doors.
    But the most unpleasant incident connected with the Temple
occurred during the dedication ceremonies. Rabbi Turnbull had
arranged to liberate a hundred balloons and, as the balloons soared
aloft, the string on one of them became entangled on the forked
tongue of the Temple's left prong and bobbed there insistently. In
effect, the letter "shin" was dotted on the left which,
unfortunately, turned it into the letter "sin." And to the rabbi's
anguish the balloon remained there for half a day until one of his
congregation shot it down with an air rifle.
    Despite its beginnings, the Temple prospered. As did Rabbi
Turnbull. Gaining some small fame as an ecumenical bridge, the Temple
primarily served as the social locus of the Jewish community of
King's Neck. The Jews of King's Neck, thoroughly assimilated and
distributed, were members of that ultimate ghetto – the
dispersed one.
    Turnbull always observed that tolerance breeds selectivity. If a
community bends over backward to be publicly liberal, it can give
itself the bonus of private snobbery. In such a hotbed of tolerance
it was perhaps inevitable that the rabbi and his Temple would
flourish. Only last year, Turnbull, the father of three, had been
named one of the ten most outstanding young rabbis in America. This
was followed by a genuine heaven-sent gift – the King's Neck
(Reform) Temple Beth Manasseh received a three-page color spread in a Life Magazine series entitled "The New Look in Religion."
Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Turnbull received a CORE citation for his
Civil Rights efforts. He had marched in Washington and St. Augustine,
and his picture had been flashed across the nation when an Associated
Press photographer spotted him attempting to reason with an outraged
redneck in Selma. Turnbull circulated five hundred of these
photographs to leading church, state and community officials at his
own expense.
    But Rabbi Turnbull's latest venture, hiring Jonah and the Wails
for his Friday night service, had caused a stir even among his fellow
reformers, most of whom objected on aesthetic rather than ethical
grounds. The rabbi dismissed this as so many sour grapes. He had
simply