A Student with a Conscience Who Never Forgot

Meaningful surprises will befall you at unanticipated moments.

In Judaism when a family member dies, males are obligated to say a certain prayer – publicly, in the presence of nine other men — for the first year.

That was the main reason I found myself in the wonderfully empowering, synagogue-rich, old-line Jewish neighborhood of Beverly-Fairfax yesterday.

Depending on the time of year, afternoon and evening prayers carefully are assigned to narrow hours with precise parameters. In mid-December, afternoon prayers are to start at 4:30 — with scant leeway.

Entering my favorite Beverly Boulevard synagogue, I was disheartened to find only four other men. It was suggested we adjourn to a synagogue in the next block where they never are challenged to gather the required 10 men for a minyan.

Prayers, recited at a rapid tempo in Hebrew, already had begun when we stealthily walked into the brightly illumined room.

Glancing about, I saw no one I recognized.

Shortly afterward, a bespectacled young man approached. He was confident he recognized me. “Mr. Noonan, I am —.” We shook hands.

He looked me straight in the eye to begin one of the most unusual, and stunningly rewarding, conversations to grace my life.

Remember that only by the rarest accident did I happen to be in this synagogue for the first time following an impulsive decision. I had been inside just moments.

Unhesitatingly, the young man swung directly into the bosom of his certainly unplanned – but evidently long lingering, long troubling, message.

“I want to apologize for the way I behaved, probably every day, in your English class,” he said with impressive sincerity.

I promptly assured him there was no need to apologize. I said I was proud of his presence at this service, which 99 percent of Jewish men ignore daily.

He said more. But I don’t remember. I was too shocked by the scene. Once he launched into his apology, I instantly recalled the referenced scenarios. Sixteen years ago, just before and just after a brief sojourn in Baltimore, I, a lifelong journalist, had been invited to teach an English class for eighth-grade boys at a nearby yeshiva.

Yesterday’s young man undeniably was my most memory-stained student. Constantly in motion, he also had a tendency to talk out of turn. Without relief. He would leave the room unannounced. He would return at various intervals.

He also would have been a source of historic recall because of his dimensions, a mountain of a boy.

That 16 years later, he would immediately recognize a teacher who waltzed briefly through his life, and that he would be massively moved to issue a heartfelt public apology on the spot, is an indicator of at least three moral values:

•  The true and enduring worthiness of a yeshiva education even if a student seemed to be a problem at the time.
• The powerfully impressive breadth and depth of the young man’s gleaming moral character today.
• How unexpectedly God will randomly reward a pedestrian teacher whose classroom career was even more abbreviated than his first hiccup-length marriage.