I didn’t know why I was being sent to Hebrew school.  My father had not been religious and besides, he was dead.  HE didn’t care.  My mother had only a glancing connection to Judaism, not like her father who davened daily at a little shul in Albany Park.  Nevertheless when I neared thirteen off I went to learn Hebrew at Shaare Tikvah, the big, new synagogue on Kimball Avenue.  It was not a match made in heaven.

Shaare Tikvah Afternoons I had spent riding bicycles or exploring the alleys of Hollywood Park, figuring out my life, were now spent with kids I didn’t know or want to know, learning things I didn’t want to learn from people I didn’t want to learn from.

 Below, my prison of unwanted learning; through those double doors, up to the second floor and into the line of classrooms overlooking the alley.

Shaare Tikvah In those upstairs rooms they taught what me they could.   I grudgingly memorized the Hebrew for my Torah portion and when the day came I recited it standing on the bimah before my mother and my relatives and for the moment everyone was happy.  Then I forgot all the ritual and I left being Jewish behind for forty years.

A few years ago I came back to Chicago to visit and driving by Shaare Tikvah on a Saturday morning I told my wife “There’s the place where I went to Hebrew school”.  We parked and went in and were welcomed to services in a small downstairs chapel, not the big sanctuary where I had stood many years before.  The overwhelming Shaare Tikvah was long gone, both the congregation and my confused feelings about it.  It was dying and a few years later that congregation flickered out.

Shaare Tikvah In December 2015 I came back and saw that it was all changed again.  Not the building but the congregation, the community.  The people I was afraid of and disdainful of, the ones I wanted nothing to do with - all gone.  It might have made me happy but it did not.  I’m not that boy anymore.

But something of him remains from those days, something I feel inside with all the strength of something that happened just yesterday.  I remember this.

Shaare Tikvah

I remember sitting inside those second floor windows looking out.  Not those windows exactly though - in 1955 the windows were different and I could imagine climbing out of them.  What I saw looking out then was that telephone pole.  I knew that if I was willing enough to take the chance I could climb through the window, grab the pole and shinny down to freedom.  I knew it!  All through my pained afternoons looking outside at the world I wanted so much to be in I looked at that pole and imagined the possibilities.   I never took the chance.

It doesn't matter, I didn't jump out the window and my life turned out just fine.  I've had success and good fortune, family and health.  Still...there’s a little piece of me wants to know...could I make it…..can I make it?  If I swing my legs out, duck my head under the glass; reach around to the left and push off can I get a foothold?  Can I get a little way down the pole before the teacher comes running - stay out of reach of his desperate grasping arms? Can I get down the pole without falling and can I run away westward before they all come running out the door after me?  Can I be free?