Before I ever learned that politicians parse the truth or just outright lie a good deal of the time and all of us parse the truth or lie some of the time, I had an eye opening life primer in what's true and what’s not courtesy of a man named Lester Fisher.
My family belonged to a reform synagogue and I attended weekly religious school that we called “Sunday school.” Classes were held on Sundays because our synagogue was actually closed on Saturdays— the Jewish Sabbath —and pretty much only open on a Saturday for the occasional bar mitzvah. But that’s another story.
I was in sixth grade when our textbook was titled When the Jewish People Was Young. Some of us couldn't accept that as grammatically correct but it was— “a people" can be singular although I don't recall to this day reading or hearing anybody ever say the American people is. There could have been a fix. When the Jewish Nation Was Young may have worked as well as the title but then what would we have had to discuss? Most, if not all of us didn’t read the book.
And for a book about a people who God made wander in the desert for forty years When the Jewish People Was Young was as parched as the Israelites must have been themselves during their time in the Sinai. It was published originally in the early 1930s and when we were given our copies in the late 1950s, it was so stylistically outdated it could have been printed on stone tablets.
Lester Fisher was our religious school teacher that year and challenged with trying to resuscitate this moribund account of Jewish biblical history. I don't recall that he succeeded. I only remember THE TEST. Now, up to this point in my education a true or false exam was preferable to multiple choice questions or being asked to provide an actual name or date for anything. Having only two options for an answer was easily a more welcome alternative to any question that required a choice among more or, God forbid, a written sentence or a paragraph.
But Mr. Fisher was about to change the entire calculus of what I considered my testing comfort zone. He was my father's age and I now realize that he likely didn't want to be teaching our class about as much as we didn't want to be attending it.
We weren’t a rowdy group but I remember one of us (not me) being caught with a transistor radio inside of her purse which years later I saw reprised in another synagogue classroom but this one was on the big screen in my favorite Coen brothers movie A Serious Man. Fisher confiscated the radio and it was maybe the only moment of levity in our somber year.
Mr. Fisher was generally undemonstrative but sometimes enjoyed being theatrical and on the morning of THE TEST our teacher was in total performance mode.
"Children, close your books and get out a pencil and paper. This will be a True-False test!”
He was as pumped up as we weren’t.
I hadn’t done much of the reading and my goal was to achieve a passing grade and consider it mission accomplished. However, with a single sentence Fisher seemed to ominously up the ante.
"Get ready for Fisher's Horrible Hundred!”
The questions began and they were tough— really tough —but after the first half dozen I realized I had marked them all as true. I was fairly confident that they were but after a few more that I marked true as well I began to feel uneasy. How could there be this many true answers in a row?
I opened my mouth. "These are all true," I said and probably sounded more like I was asking a question than making a declaration of certainty. Mr. Fisher did not look at me and did not pause. His face gave no hint of whether or not I was on to something. The questions kept coming and they all still continued to seem to be true even if I wasn't sure anymore.
An impulse was telling telling me they were. Logic was telling me that it wasn't possible. I had to make a choice, go with my gut feeling or what seemed like common sense. "Fisher's Horrible Hundred" could turn out to be the easiest hardest exam I'd ever taken if I were to simply mark all one hundred questions true. But who would ever give such a test?
In a split second I lost my nerve and began to write as many Fs as Ts the rest of the way. As I think about it now, I realize it was an indication that I wasn't a fearless gambler and looking back on my life I guess I haven't been. But as I recall I still got the highest mark in our class on THE TEST that day. It was a pyrrhic achievement. "Fisher's Horrible Hundred" were indeed all true and our entire class failed!
Several years ago I found a copy of When the Jewish People Was Young for sale on eBay and bought it from a public library. Inside the cover I discovered it had been used by a congregation in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A boy's name was inscribed in it and for no good reason I tracked down his family in Las Cruces and learned he had grown up to become an insurance agent in Southern California. I called him. He did not want the book back.
Our neighbor, Eric, who lives on the ground floor of our building building, and is five years older than I am, said he used the same book in "Sunday school"
Another great one Peter. Are you in Berlin?