Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard calls Aaron Lindenbaum on the first of every month from the parking lot of his mother’s facility in Encino, which is the only stretch of the week when nobody can reach him and he has already spent the part of himself he keeps for family.
The call goes the same way it has gone since 2007.
“Aaron. It’s Rabbi Grossbard.”
“Rabbi.”
“How’s the health.”
“The knee’s the knee.”
“You seeing anybody about it?”
“There’s a clinic on Sherman Way.”
“Go to the clinic. You eating?”
“I eat.”
“You in shul?”
“I went for Yizkor.”
He asks four questions and Aaron answers four questions, and then they talk about the Dodgers, who Aaron follows in detail and Grossbard does not follow at all, and Grossbard has learned nine things about a bullpen over nineteen years so the second half of the call has somewhere to go. Aaron never asks him for anything. Aaron asks how the shul is doing, every time, in the tone of a man asking after a business he holds a small position in.
Grossbard timed the call once, in October 2013, out of curiosity, and then timed it four more times, and the average came to eleven minutes. He has never let one run long since.
Then he goes inside and sits with Pearl Grossbard for ninety minutes, which he does every week, and which he has done for six years, and which costs nine thousand one hundred a month against a salary of one hundred and ninety thousand plus housing. That obligation he pays in full. He would tell you the two things are unrelated and he would be lying, and if you pushed him he would stop lying inside of four seconds, because he has no stamina for it.
Hesh Lindenbaum died on November 26, 2007, in a hospital bed set up in his dining room on Alcott, with the good table pushed against the wall and the chairs out in the garage.
He was sixty-two. Pancreas. He had come to the Barn since it had ninety families and he did the High Holiday seating chart by hand for eleven years and took no honors and wanted none. Grossbard was forty. He had been doing the job for nine years and had buried maybe thirty people and still thought of himself as a man who had recently started.
Three days before the end, with the daughter out getting the prescription, Hesh got him by the wrist with a hand that had nothing left in it.
“Aaron.”
“I know.”
“There’s nobody.”
“There’s you.”
“There’s nobody after Tuesday,” Hesh said. “Look after him.”
And Grossbard, forty years old, in a dining room, with a dying man’s hand on his wrist, said, “I’ll look after him.”
Hesh left the Barn forty thousand dollars. It went into the air conditioning, and there is a brass plate in the hallway by the coat room with his name on it that Grossbard walks past nine times a week. Aaron got eighteen thousand and a car. The money was gone by 2011.
The first two years he did it. Lunch at the deli on Ventura every six weeks. A job lead at a printing outfit in Sun Valley that took, and lasted four years, and ended when the outfit closed. Three thousand dollars in March 2009, out of his own account, never mentioned again by either of them. A letter on Barn letterhead for an apartment application in Reseda, which worked. A ride to a colonoscopy in 2010.
Then the Barn went from two hundred and forty families to four hundred, and his mother started falling, and Dina’s father needed the two operations. By 2012 the lunches were twice a year. By 2015 they had stopped.
He put the call on the first of the month because the first of the month is when a man pays things.
He said he would look after him. He has been servicing the interest since 2009 and has never touched the principal.
On July 1, 2026, in minute nine, Aaron mentions the house.
“The Kaplans sold. New guy’s taking the whole property. He was decent about it. Sixty days.”
“Sixty days from when?”
“The fifteenth.”
Aaron has lived in a converted room off a garage behind a house on Hazeltine since 2016. Five hundred and eighty a month, hot plate, mini fridge, a bathroom somebody put in without a permit. He is sixty-eight. He gets one thousand four hundred and sixty a month from Social Security and works two mornings a week at a print shop in Panorama City that keeps him on because the owner’s father knew Hesh.
“What’s the plan.”
“I’m looking.”
“At what.”
“There’s stuff in Sylmar.”
Dina says bring him here before Grossbard finishes the second sentence.
“There’s the room in front.”
“You haven’t met him.”
“You’ve been talking to him since Nechama was in kindergarten. Bring him here.”
And Grossbard finds out, standing in his own kitchen at 9:40 at night, that he does not want to.
He says this to her, because he says everything.
“I don’t want him in the house. I want to be a man who wants him in the house.”
Dina lets it sit a moment.
“Then go to Van Nuys,” she says.
He has never been to Van Nuys.
Two hundred and twenty-six phone calls and he has never once driven over the hill, and he works this out on the 405 north on a Tuesday in July, which is his day.
The room is eleven by fourteen. It is orderly the way a room is orderly when a man has almost nothing to put in it. A bed, a dresser, a folding chair, a hot plate, a shelf with maybe thirty books, a television on a milk crate. On the dresser there is a photograph of Hesh and Aaron at somebody’s bar mitzvah in the eighties, both of them in wide lapels, and next to the photograph, squared to the edge of the dresser, the Barn newsletter.
Aaron has been getting the newsletter since 2007.
“You want coffee? I have the instant.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sit down. Take the chair, the bed’s soft.”
Grossbard sits in the folding chair and Aaron sits on the bed and they talk for forty minutes, the longest they have spoken since 2010, and near the end Aaron says the thing.
“The guys at the shop, when it’s slow, they get to talking about their kids. And I say, my rabbi calls me. First of every month, nineteen years, hasn’t missed. They can’t believe it. There’s a guy there, Ruben, his mother’s dying, and he says he can’t get his priest on the phone.”
He says it with his hands on his knees, pleased, a man producing his one asset.
Grossbard finds him a room in a house on Woodman in Panorama City, seven hundred and forty a month, an older woman named Perla who rents out two rooms and keeps the kitchen for herself and does not allow smoking. He pays first, last, and deposit, two thousand two hundred and twenty, out of his own account and not the discretionary fund, because the fund generates a line item and a line item generates a conversation at the board. He rents the truck and moves the dresser with Zalman Fried, who says four words all afternoon, three of them about the stairs.
He gives it from the bimah on Shabbos Shuva.
He does not name Aaron. He gives the year, the dining room, the hand on the wrist, the sentence he said, and then the accounting: two hundred and twenty-six calls, eleven minutes, the first of the month like a bill, nineteen years without driving over the hill.
“I paid the minimum on time every month for nineteen years and I called that fidelity. It’s the smallest payment that keeps an account out of collections. Now here’s the part I want you to take home. I’m the man in this room who tells you what he costs. I put my number in the newsletter. And I have carried one promise I could never fund since I was forty years old, and I made it in a room where no was not available to me, and every one of you has one. Yours is quieter than mine because you have never had to say it into a microphone.”
It runs eleven minutes and it is the best drasha he gives that year.
Marla Feig cries in the third row. Josh Adelman comes up afterward and says the board should start a fund for cases like this and asks him to write up a proposal. Adina Reiss says nothing to him at all, which is how he knows it landed. Ezra Malik, who is eighteen and has an agent, does it in the parking lot on Sunday and cuts the accounting and keeps the hand on the wrist.
By Wednesday four people have told him it was the truest thing they ever heard in a shul.
Rabbi Yoni Belfer hears about it from a woman in his own shul who has a sister at the Barn.
He drives to Panorama City on a Thursday in October and takes Aaron Lindenbaum to lunch at a place on Roscoe and pays. He does it again in November. He does it again two weeks later, and by January it is Thursdays, and Aaron starts telling the guys at the shop about the tall rabbi from Culver City who comes out.
Grossbard hears about it in January from Marla Feig, who has it from her sister-in-law.
He sits with that a while in the coat room, under the brass plate with Hesh Lindenbaum’s name on it, and what he arrives at is that Belfer is half as smart as he is and got in a car.
He calls on the first of February from the parking lot in Encino.
“Aaron. It’s Rabbi Grossbard.”
“Rabbi.”
“How’s the knee.”
“The knee’s the knee. You hear the bullpen’s a disaster.”
They go fourteen minutes. He notices, and lets it run.
