Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,18

known as "Jonah and the Wails." It was this announcement that qualified the rabbi for a guest appearance on the Billy & Gilly Show. And the rabbi's public relations man had said Rabbi Turnbull would be delighted to come.

So it was that William Blake – philanderer, cuckold and moderator – looked on naïvely that Monday morning as Gillian hoisted sail. Rabbi Turnbull was difficult from the outset. Not only was he oblivious to Gillian's charm, he even seemed unaware of her presence, and he directed his conversation to the radio audience. He wasn't responding properly to her sallies. He answered them obliquely and continued following a course of his own charting. Gillian added canvas, sailed recklessly after him.

Turnbull, a product of Union Theological Seminary in Cleveland, was a beefy, thick-muscled man in his mid-thirties who sported an ash-blond Vandyke, jaunty salt-and-pepper tweeds and no yarmulke. William noted a resemblance to Skitch Henderson. Rabbi Turnbull sprang from a family of Reform rabbis that had emigrated to the Midwest from Germany before the Civil War. Rabbi Turnbull was considerably more than reformed; he was reconstructed. American to a fault, he was the residual of four generations of reformed Jewry that had refined the stiff-necked, insulated, and anachronistic worship of a desert God into a white precipitate of acceptability and consensus that bordered on the Episcopalian.

Rabbi Turnbull's Sunday School, for example, happened on Sundays. The rabbi had constructed a Temple of steel and glass that was the envy of all the other faiths in King's Neck. (He sometimes took delighted malice in the Greek epigram: "The crucified martyr made light of his loss/ Till he spotted another on a higher cross.") The Temple was built with three prongs jutting skyward, symbolizing the Hebrew letter "shin," a symbol that burst with significance in Jewish lore but was also a symbol that could represent any trinity that one cared to apply. Detractors said it looked like Neptune's trident thrust through the earth, and they claimed it would not be surprising if a huge pagan fist reached up from the waters of Long Island Sound to reclaim it. Vandals from the city had once desecrated the building by painting the words, "By you, this is a shule?" across the front doors.

But the most unpleasant incident connected with the Temple occurred during the dedication ceremonies. Rabbi Turnbull had arranged to liberate a hundred balloons and, as the balloons soared aloft, the string on one of them became entangled on the forked tongue of the Temple's left prong and bobbed there insistently. In effect, the letter "shin" was dotted on the left which, unfortunately, turned it into the letter "sin." And to the rabbi's anguish the balloon remained there for half a day until one of his congregation shot it down with an air rifle.

Despite its beginnings, the Temple prospered. As did Rabbi Turnbull. Gaining some small fame as an ecumenical bridge, the Temple primarily served as the social locus of the Jewish community of King's Neck. The Jews of King's Neck, thoroughly assimilated and distributed, were members of that ultimate ghetto – the dispersed one.

Turnbull always observed that tolerance breeds selectivity. If a community bends over backward to be publicly liberal, it can give itself the bonus of private snobbery. In such a hotbed of tolerance it was perhaps inevitable that the rabbi and his Temple would flourish. Only last year, Turnbull, the father of three, had been named one of the ten most outstanding young rabbis in America. This was followed by a genuine heaven-sent gift – the King's Neck (Reform) Temple Beth Manasseh received a three-page color spread in a Life Magazine series entitled "The New Look in Religion." Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Turnbull received a CORE citation for his Civil Rights efforts. He had marched in Washington and St. Augustine, and his picture had been flashed across the nation when an Associated Press photographer spotted him attempting to reason with an outraged redneck in Selma. Turnbull circulated five hundred of these photographs to leading church, state and community officials at his own expense.

But Rabbi Turnbull's latest venture, hiring Jonah and the Wails for his Friday night service, had caused a stir even among his fellow reformers, most of whom objected on aesthetic rather than ethical grounds. The rabbi dismissed this as so many sour grapes. He had simply stolen a march on them again.

The controversy spread throughout Long Island, with the community about evenly divided. A Newsday poll revealed that the division was among those