For Such a Time as This is a compact little book — “This year’s must-have for your tallis bag!” Rabbi Cosgrove told the folks who came to hear us talk about it at the JCC Association convention in Chicago this week. The title comes from the Megillat Esther: To convince the queen to intervene to thwart Haman’s plot to kill the Jews, Uncle Mordechai suggests that perhaps the whole reason she ended up in the palace in the first place is for such a time as this.
Heady stuff, and the broad implication, in a book being published a year after Oct. 7, is that we, like our forbears, are in a perilous moment and should, like Queen Esther, embrace our Jewishness to save our people.
Maybe. But as I read the book, I found myself thinking also that people throughout history have probably always considered theirs a particularly fraught or auspicious time. How many politicians have told how many crowds that the coming election was the most important of their lives?
So maybe “for such a time as this” is not about a particular moment but about all the moments. Maybe our fundamental obligation is to make what we can of the moments we have. Which brings us back to Elliot’s rabbi-origin story.
It comes practically at the end of the book and plays out over a quick few paragraphs. He was a junior at the University of Michigan, not “terribly involved in Jewish life,” he writes, when his parents called to tell him about the death of Mr. Gendon, “a grandfatherly figure” he’d sat next to in synagogue growing up in LA. “Not really knowing what to do but knowing I had to do something,” Elliot writes, “I decided to go to the Friday night service at Hillel to say kaddish.”
He’d only previously been to Hillel for the High Holidays, and knew no one there. So he sat through the service, said kaddish, and was bolting for the door to meet his friends for Dollar Pitcher Night when “a man blocked my escape route,” as he puts it, to ask if he had plans for Shabbat dinner.
Young Cosgrove lied and said he did. The man — it turned out to be Michael Brooks, who ran Michigan’s Hillel for more than three decades — “then said something that I will never forget,” Elliot writes. “It changed my life forever.”
Well, I bet you don’t have plans for next Friday night.
It worked. “The following week I went back to services and Shabbat dinner,” Rabbi Cosgrove recounts. “I went again and again, became a Hillel board member, led a pro-Israel group to Washington, D.C., edited the Jewish student journal, went to Israel, went to rabbinical school, got a doctorate in Jewish history, and — to make a long story short — became who I am today.”
