Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
Jewish or not, you’ve probably heard of Susan Talve, the rabbi at Central Reform Congregation. Her low voice and gentle manner grant her passage into all sorts of worlds—and when she senses injustice, she burns her convictions into the public debate. The archbishop sputters; other rabbis tsk; politicians prick up their ears and step nervously, like horses before a storm. But many, many people follow ... because it’s Susan, and she is their shortcut to integrity.
And the other rabbi? Talve’s husband, Rabbi James Stone Goodman, has enough integrity for 10 selves. But he is a musician, poet and storyteller; he loathes politics, and he is painfully (or is it deliberately?) shy. The 100 or so families in his congregation, Neve Shalom, are a hodgepodge of smart, artistic, neurotic, unconventional people. They like Talve a lot, but they crave the intimacy of her husband’s quieter work—his emphasis on story and ritual in place of organized structures, healing and silence in place of sociable fuss, kindness in place of rules.
Goodman does not mind his lower profile, his smaller congregation and its rented space in the middle of Creve Coeur’s Rainbow Village, surrounded by people with developmental disabilities. I doubt he’ll even mind that his profile opens with his better-known wife. They are, as their son, Jacob Talve-Goodman, puts it, “night and day”: “She’s very good at working with people. He’s good, too, but he gets really down to the soul of people; he’ll help in any way possible. She’s like the popular girl in school, nice to everyone; everyone loves her. My dad’s the mysterious guy. He thinks he’s the easiest person to understand, and he tries to tell you that all the time, and he’s not.
“He’s very unpredictable,” Jacob continues. “He always does his own thing. You have to meet him on his grounds, which is tough because his grounds are so different than anyone else’s. For a long time I tried to—I studied philosophy, even, so I’d have something to talk about with him. But I wasn’t happy, and I finally realized, you can’t worry about pleasing him. You’ve got to please yourself to please him.”
I confess that I’ve been reading up on Kabbalah—the set of ancient mystical beliefs rooted in the Jewish tradition, not last year’s celebrity version—to prepare for my next interview with his father.
“It won’t do any good,” Jacob tells me. “It won’t do any good at all.”
When Goodman tells his life story, it really is a collection of stories—funny, dreamy, poignant tales in which he romanticizes everybody but himself. About three stories in, you realize this is as deeply honest a man as you’ll ever meet—he’s answering every question you’ve asked—but he’s telling you very little. He’s not being coy; it’s just that his inner world is as impenetrable as a medieval walled city, its labyrinth of streets unmapped and ringing with sound: rock ’n’ roll, high squeaky puppet voices, wise old rabbis, vaudeville shtick, penguin jokes, Greek tragedy, north African drumming and the tambourine shimmy of Motown’s call-and-response. Deliberately, regularly, he chooses to let a few notes escape—maybe a story, maybe a bit of music. But mainly, he listens.
Right now, even as he answers the stock questions—grew up in Detroit, father owned a children’s clothing store—he’s hearing an old vaudeville song, and he can feel big warm hands at his waist and a whoosh of air as he’s lifted up high and plumped down on top of the piano. His musical family would “play Jewish”—klezmer music—and its patriarch, his grandfather Arthur Stone, would play the trumpet or Irish music, do a little shtick, make everybody laugh. What did Stone look like? “Me,” Goodman says, sounding dazed. “He looked like me.”
Goodman’s closest childhood friend was Steve Reifman. “Stevie!” Goodman says warmly. “I’ve known him since I was born.” And so I call Reifman, now a lawyer in Detroit, and his first words are “Jimmy! I’ve known him since I was born!
“I lived on the east side of Detroit, near my father’s store,” Reifman continues, “and Jimmy lived on the west side near his father’s store. When they put the freeways in, now my mother could live with the Jews—’cause Jews are very clannish people, you know—so she moved us 22 miles to Oak Park, and Jimmy’s family moved there, too.”
Goodman paints a picture of the neighborhood: “Working-class Jewish, colorful, wacky, eccentric, a lot of Holocaust survivors, a great tumble of life. My next-door neighbor was a professional hypnotist; the guy across the street was a world-class piano player who became a physicist. It was like this little European village, an urban shtetl.”
Life there was loud with music. Goodman learned to play guitar, and then he started sneaking across town to hang out at White’s Music. “I couldn’t tell my parents,” he says. “White guys in the suburbs didn’t really do that. But all the musicians came there from the Motown studios, which were right around the corner. It was open really late; it was a magical place. People at the store would put on records for me: ‘Listen to this.’ ‘Listen to this.’ James Brown, the Spinners, the Contours ...”
The rhythms stuck in his head, but he sought quiet. “I dressed in black for years—had this French Symbolist thing going—and hung out in libraries. The librarians would bring me brownies and sit me down in a room and make sure I ate.”
Nerd, yeah, but he was also the lead singer in a rock ’n’ roll band, and according to Reifman, girls thronged. “He was extremely handsome, looked a bit like Elvis Presley. The women loved Jimmy. He had this mystique—he’d be sort of quiet, and they’d like him even more.”
Goodman snorts. “He thought I had girlfriends all the time because of the band. Believe me, it wasn’t true. I was so shy!”
“Jimmy’s different,” Reifman says later. “That’s the key.”
Goodman shrugs. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t know how to talk about that. Just different. At the University of Michigan, they wanted me to join a frat because I had a 4.0. I think they call it rush. They all rushed me. And I was just opposed to the idea; it just seemed so stupid to me. I didn’t like the way they acted. My best friend went, and I was crushed, I couldn’t believe it.”
He retreated into his books, but after college, life got loud again. A master of voices, Goodman toured the country voicing Russian folk tales with a puppet theater. He wound up living near the Arizona desert, where he counseled kids in trouble with the police and worked as an apprentice to a lion tamer in an exotic animal show. “It’s all done by intimidation,” he says (meaning the lions, not the kids). “They would watch you like this.” He tilts his head down, eyes turned upward, staring. “And they would not move, and I had to feed them, very carefully.” He brightens at a memory. “It was so much fun to bathe the elephant. The elephant just loved it.”
Next he worked for a year and a half as a private detective, carrying a gun he says he couldn’t have fired to save his life. “We got in the middle of a drug run to Nogales, Mexico: Somebody had hired us to find out who was following him. Every possible law enforcement agency was involved, and we’re the ones getting shot at, and they’re saying, ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’”
Amid the lion roars and gunshots, he sought quiet again by studying classical Greek. “It led me back to my roots,” he says, “and I started studying Hebrew really seriously, and something started to awaken in me.”
Goodman applied to rabbinical school and, at age 27, spent his first seminary year in Jerusalem. “I came from vaudevillians and rabbis,” Goodman says, “but it took me years to integrate the two. I didn’t like show business. I did it for a while in Israel. I wasn’t good, I was popular.” Is this humility? “Oh no,” he says with a wince. “I have tapes.” He’d gotten gigs by playing guitar on the seminary steps—the same place he met, and fell instantly in love with, fellow rabbinical student Susan Talve.
Had he been in love before? “Oh yeah,” he says, then waves away the question. “I was older, and Susan was older, too. It made our beginning complicated.”
In rabbinical school, Goodman chose his toughest professor, Dr. Eugene Mihaly, as a mentor, because Mihaly saw religion as an art form. “He terrorized most students, but I walked into his office and said, ‘Teach me.’” Years later, when the faculty refused to give Goodman the best sermon award at graduation because he’d written it in the form of a detective story, Mihaly endowed a new award for the most creative sermon. “A cash award,” Goodman exults. “And I had no money.”
After seminary, he started his own congregation. “I didn’t want to inherit anybody else’s commitments,” he says. “I was not a good match for things as they were. At Neve Shalom, we are not Orthodox or Reform or Conservative. We live in the whole house, draw upon all the forms of Judaism. We are traditional but very informal and loose and innovative, and that combination is something people are not accustomed to.” The atmosphere at Neve Shalom is that old ’60s mix: intense, idealistic, imaginative, free-spirited, soulful, wide-open tolerant.
“He’s definitely a hippie, but without going wild, without the drugs and the not-showering,” his son says. “He’s ... a prissy hippie.”
The turning point for Goodman wasn’t entering the seminary, it was finding a teacher there—a second mentor—who understood where he was going musically. Goodman had been listening to Middle Eastern and North African rhythms and to the music of the oud, an Arabic lute. “You will have to play classical style, with your fingers,” his teacher told him, “and learn to sing deeper.” Goodman promptly gave up the folksy American steel-guitar technique he’d been practicing for 20 years and went back to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” “It took another 10 years to know he’d been right,” he says, “but I trusted him.”
Still haunted by the sounds he’d heard in Jerusalem, he wrote to a music archivist there, got a list of people who could teach him Sephardic and Oriental Jewish music and contacted each one. “It’s all about having obsessions,” he says with a shrug. “When you recognize other people who have the same obsession, something always happens.”
Like the evening he heard Taiseer Elias, on tour from Israel, play the oud and begged to study with him. Elias said yes—but what did Susan say about six months in Israel, now that they had three kids? “She said, ‘Let’s go!’ She’s a real adventurer.”
Goodman decided to carry his oud on board the plane. “In line, somebody nudges me [he gives it the Yiddish “noodges” pronunciation] and pushes the oud up against the wall of the J.F.K. terminal. I was holding my beautiful oud in my hands like a duck about to be prepared for a Chinese feast, dead in my arms, limp neck, the headstock snapped. I woulda cried, but what use?” Instead he found a Russian repair guy in Israel who reminded him of the Kabbalist principle: When a broken place is repaired, it will be stronger than if it were never broken.
And was the oud better than ever? “I’m not sure about that,” Goodman admits. “I would like to say it is, to fit the story. But ...”
But the encounter almost redeemed the tragedy. And that six-month sabbatical has sustained Goodman ever since. Every week he left his family in Jerusalem and drove three hours to Shfaram, an Arab town in the Galilee. “I was his only student,” Goodman says. “To me it was like the music of Abraham before the separation of Isaac and Ishmael. I had to learn a whole new way of listening; at first I couldn’t even hear the intervals, because they are closer together than in western music. He would start each lesson by saying, ‘Close your eyes and listen.’ He knew nothing about me, only my name. We met only in the music.”
Goodman came home with an entirely new repertoire, far removed from the pop music he used to play. “If he wanted to shift his music a little bit, it could be on the radio, and everybody would enjoy it,” Reifman complains, “but it’s so esoteric and particular. I’ve often wished he would get a manager, somebody who’d beat him up a bit. But I don’t think he cares about that.”
He does care about his monthly coffeehouse series—named Jacob’s Pillow, for his son and for an Old Testament reference to the stone that helped conjure a dreaming state. An opening into visions, that’s what he’s after. In what’s more a ceremony than a performance, he and other musicians improvise on traditional North African and Middle Eastern forms, he tells stories and reads poetry to a rhythmic groove, “and it swings,” he says. “It’s not meditational; at times it really cooks!”
Onstage, he’ll often play for an hour before he feels ready to speak. He says audiences have trouble believing he’s shy.
“He is shy, but if he’s on his own, he’ll talk to anybody,” his son comments. In Jamaica, Goodman tried to walk back to the hotel from a meeting, got lost, found himself in a big open space being followed by a massive Jamaican in dreadlocks carrying a machete. Goodman cheerfully asked for directions and wound up a guest in the man’s home, politely refusing his marijuana. “You don’t like it?” the man asked, hurt. “It’s a purity thing with me,” explained Goodman, who leads Shalvah, an outreach program for recovery from alcoholism and other addictions. “Oh, purity!” the man exclaimed in recognition, and they talked for hours about religion.
In Hebrew, “Shalvah” means “serenity.” The St. Louis Jewish community greeted the program with anything but. “They didn’t think we had the problem,” he says wryly. The work, he adds, is “really hard. People come in and go out, it’s messy and it’s difficult, and there’s often a lot of drama. But it’s also life-saving.”
Goodman teaches Kabbalah, meditation, breathing, “a lot of spiritual practices that lower the threshold on anxiety and help people live with challenges in a much more measured, reasonable way. It anchors them, makes them less vulnerable so they are not thrown off course.”
“He’s the most empathetic person I’ve ever met,” says Pat Denlow, a friend. “He sees what most of us would see as weaknesses as something to celebrate, as a blessing in disguise because something good is meant to come out of them. And he brings out the good in that person.”
Knowing her rabbi’s insatiable pursuit of information on the Internet, Jeri Changar once asked if he went to chat rooms. “I have trouble chatting in person!” he retorted. Yet with the congregation, his shyness comes through not as inadequacy but as meaningful, comfortable silence. “He doesn’t do a sermon just because he has to,” Changar remarks. “If he has something to say, it comes from the heart. To him, religion is how you relate to others and to God, and there’s no one way. Kindness is always the most important thing. It’s more important than the rules, more important than the order.”
Changar has been ill for more than a year. “He always made me feel so good, so calm, when he called me,” she says. “And when he can’t find me, he calls my friends to see if everything is OK. To me, that’s what a rabbi is: He touches you. He treats you like a human being. And it’s not about page 42.”
Neve Shalom “draws all kinds of people,” she adds: “converts, mixed marriages, people with psychological problems, addiction problems, artists, librarians, one day three Japanese people—I don’t know how they got there.”
The constant is Goodman: “If you ask him for something, you’ve got it,” says a man who comes to the weekly 12-step meeting. “He’s always there. Nobody knows how he does it. It’s a mystery. We talk about it sometimes. He’s never said no, not even to strangers. It’s his job in life, and he takes it seriously.”
When I read him that quote, Goodman shrugs. “I show up.”
Small talk’s torture for him; parties are terrorist coups. “He’s a lot of fun,” Jacob says, “but it’s very second-grader. He loves penguin jokes.” He loves animals, period. When he was little, he dressed up like a vet and took care of all the neighborhood animals. He once adopted an inordinately ugly bulldog because a store was keeping her caged and no one would buy her.
He loves grocery stores, too. “In the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep, he goes to Schnucks,” his wife confides. “I actually asked Craig Schnuck not to close the store at Clayton and Hanley because it was my husband’s best therapy. He thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.”
Talve says Goodman writes constantly. “I remember when I was in labor with our middle child, and the contractions were particularly painful, I looked up and saw Jim writing and said, ‘It better be good!’”
The most powerful event in Goodman’s life defies words: One of his daughters had a life-threatening illness that filled his mind and heart for years, but out of respect for her, he won’t speak of it.
His wife’s all over town, urging social justice, celebrating ritual, teaching, speaking with passion to ecumenical groups. She shines; he’s in the corner glowing. And people in trouble come to him.
“I’m always amazed by what people bring to their life when they need to,” he says. “I think people just have to stay out of their own way. Sometimes a person needs a little bit of help, not a lot. You can do too much for people. Sometimes you just need somebody around to let you know that you have what you need. You don’t have to do this; you don’t have to do that. You can be quiet.”
