Well, You Never Know...

In the early 90s, I lived in Manhattan for a couple of years. During part of that time, I had a position chanting the Torah in a Synagogue in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. The Synagogue was just a couple of minutes from Madison Square Garden, as well as the Fashion Institute of Technology, whose students seemed to be primarily young models. Indeed, one of the many pleasant aspects of attending that Synagogue was gazing upon the student body (pun wholeheartedly intended).

The Synagogue was known as the Fur Center Synagogue, after the neighborhood in which it was situated. Built in an earlier decade, it seated hundreds, even though, by the time of my tenure, typical attendance was  just about three dozen.

One of the reasons I always enjoyed praying at that Synagogue was that the congregants were such interesting, colorful, and diverse people. True individuals! One was a man in his seventies, who had fought with the partisans during World War II, while another was a man in his 40s, who was a Vietnam veteran. One was a pianist, and a group of us once went to hear him play at a piano bar. Another man, who came only a couple of times, was a "performance artist", and when a few of us went to see him perform, he burst onto the stage wearing nothing but underwear and a gas mask. Then there was the thirty-something couple who had been married in Central Park, which to me seemed so incredibly romantic -- in all senses of the word.

One of the many very fond memories I have of that Synagogue was the time we celebrated the holiday of Sukkoth there. A small Sukkah had been constructed in the alley outside the Synagogue, and several of us remained after services to eat there. Since this was not your typical Mister Rogers neighborhood, the local police on patrol would occasionally stop by to make sure all was okay. A warm, mutual friendship grew between us and one of the men in blue, a handsome, mustachioed Italian man in his thirties, to the extent that, a week later, he joined us as we danced during our celebration of the Simchat Torah festival.

One of the people with whom I became quite friendly was a woman in her 50s. I can still picture the two of us standing on a busy intersection in lower Manhattan one evening, after we had had dinner together at the Second Avenue Deli, passionately debating the existence of God. She was a very pleasant woman, always smiling, and always cheerful.

Her home was in the Village, comme on dit, a relatively short walk from the Synagogue. I was there only once, but the memory of that one visit is not likely to leave me anytime soon. For when I entered her apartment, I was alarmed by the vision that confronted me.

Dozens (hundreds?) of stacks of paper, approximately chest level, covered the entire space of her living room. She left a narrow empty path, in order to allow one to navigate from room to room. But by and large, her entire apartment was covered with these chest-high stacks of paper.

I understand that this is a not-unheard of phenomenon, but at the age of 26, I had certainly never seen anything remotely like this. I am actually reminded of the boiling lobster. For I've heard tell that a lobster is boiled alive thus: it is placed in a pot of tepid water, and the temperature is very gradually increased -- eventually, right up to the boiling point. But since the change is gradual, the lobster does not perceive the change in its environment, and stays put, right up to the bitter end (or tasty end, if one happens to be the one who has ordered said lobster). (Full disclosure: as someone who keeps Kosher, I have never sampled lobster, or other forms of sea food.)

So did the transformation of my friend's abode from a pleasant dwelling (which I must assume was its original state) to a pulp and paper warehouse proceed along the same lines? One wonders at what point my friend looked at her accumulating sheafs of paper and thought: "This won't do". And what thought process led her to the decision to continue adding stack to stack, until the apartment resembled one of those children's puzzles, where one has to trace a path in a maze from point A to point B.

I randomly picked up a sheet or two of paper from the top of one of the piles. I was truly curious as to what sort of papers my friend considered so terribly important that she would allow them to so completely disrupt her life. I cannot recall the precise contents of the sheets I looked at, but it seemed fairly clear that these papers (a) were several years old and (b) would not likely have any relevance at any point in the future.

When I asked my friend whether she really needed to keep these particular papers, her response was a nonchalant: "Well, you never know."

I later thought about this reaction. Given that my friend was obviously intensely attached to this motley collection of papers, one actually might have expected a far fiercer response, along the lines of:

Of course I need these papers! How dare you question my judgment! I did not ask for you to intrude into my personal, private affairs! I'll thank you to mind your own beeswax!

But no. Rather, a decidedly blasé: "Well, you never know". The more I reflect upon it, the more I find the complete and utter lack of conviction in her response très amusant. It seems to me analogous to a general being asked in battle whether his company should attempt to take a hill, and replying: "Uh, sure." Or a woman responding to a proposal of marriage with a: "Hmmm, all right."

A parting thought. I wonder if, on occasion, my friend would realize that she actually did need one of the papers lurking somewhere in those myriads. The ensuing scene would prove most interesting.