Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

I USED TO BE A RABBI

by Bert Stratton

 
I wasn’t always this religious. I used to be more religious. I first started going to shul regularly right after college. I was a paralegal at the time. I thought I was going to go to law school. I worked at this firm called O’Connor, Joseph and Welch. I got my birthday off (St. Patrick’s Day) because of O’Connor, and Mr. Joseph didn’t mind I wanted two days off for Passover. One night, in the office after-hours, I decided to answer an incoming call, trying to be helpful. I said, “O’Connor, Joseph.”

The phone caller said, “Do you know who I am? I’m Welch and I hate it when people answer the phone ‘O’Connor, Joseph’!”

I said, “Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“Good.” I hung up and quit. Screw lawyers and their big egos. I enrolled in a non-denominational rabbinical school in Boston. I learned Hebrew; I studied Talmud; I spent a year in Israel; and all that time I was playing clarinet and saxophone. People started calling me “the jazz rabbi.” Fact: there’s an actual “jazz rabbi,” Greg Wall, who lives in Connecticut and is 10-times better than me on horns. Make that 100-times.

I eventually got a job at a Jewish nursing-home complex in Cleveland. I led services, played some jazz standards and “Hava Nagila,” and did some grief counseling. But the job wasn’t that satisfying. I wanted to engage in deeper “shrink”-style counseling. I wanted to meet up with Jews-on-the-go behind closed doors and hear all their secrets. I wanted to discuss high-stress moments: birth, life, marriage, divorce, death, tennis. (I play tennis with a rabbi. The guy kicks my ass.)

I never did become a pulpit rabbi. I applied for six synagogue jobs and got one half-baked offer — not a real pulpit. The Hillel in Norman, Oklahoma. I didn’t want to hang out with kids.

I got no decent job offers because I had too much hate in me, and that, no doubt, came across in my job interviews. For one thing, I was obsessed with Nazis at the time and wanted to stomp them. (I was about 35 years too late.) My hero was Abba Kovner, the Vilna ghetto fighter. I even attended — almost daily — the Demjanjuk trial in Cleveland, and that guy wasn’t even a Nazi, just an adjunct.

I went into real estate. That, as it turned out, was a perfect fit.

—

fiction

The “O’Connor, Joseph” anecdote comes from an actual rabbi, Joshua Skoff.

[illustration by Ralph Solonitz]

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2 comments

1 Mark Schilling { 04.16.25 at 9:22 am }

Welch should have lobbied harder to be Number One or at least Number Two. Also, ” I thought I was going to go law school” appears twice in the same graf. Once is enough, no? Great seeing you in Chi, BTW.

2 David Korn { 04.16.25 at 10:27 am }

Bert, best post in recent memory. But my memory isn’t what it used to be, so that might mean it’s better than last week’s post. In keeping with the goal of improvement of all functions, like memory skills, I think the repetition within the paragraph is good reinforcement. Good post, Bert.

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