As we sat in the room, a commercial for an antidepressant drug flashed across the TV screen. It showed people looking forlorn, alone on a bench or staring out a window.

“I keep feeling something bad is going to happen…,” the TV voice said.

Then, after showing the pill and some graphics, those same people appeared again, looking happier.

The Reb and I watched in silence. After it ended, he asked, “Do you think those pills work?”

Not like that, I said.

“No,” he agreed. “Not like that.”

Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Paxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions more are spent purchasing them. You don’t even need a specific trauma; just “general depression” or “anxiety,” as if sadness were as treatable as the common cold.

I knew depression was real, and in many cases required medical attention. I also knew we overused the word. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures that we weren’t willing to work for. I knew people whose unbearable source of misery was their weight, their baldness, their lack of advancement in a workplace, or their inability to find the perfect mate, even if they themselves did not behave like one. To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken.

But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can’t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren’t satisfied-before working some more.

I knew. I had done all that. There was a stretch where I could not have worked more hours in the day without eliminating sleep altogether. I piled on accomplishments. I made money. I earned accolades. And the longer I went at it, the emptier I began to feel, like pumping air faster and faster into a torn tire.

The time I spent with Morrie, my old professor, had tapped my brakes on much of that. After watching him die, and seeing what mattered to him at the end, I cut back. I limited my schedule.

But I still kept my hands on my own wheel. I didn’t turn things over to fate or faith. I recoiled from people who put their daily affairs in divine hands, saying, “If God wants it, it will happen.” I kept silent when people said all that mattered was their personal relationship with Jesus. Such surrender seemed silly to me. I felt like I knew better. But privately, I couldn’t say I felt any happier than they did.

So I noted how, for all the milligrams of medication he required, the Reb never popped a pill for his peace of mind. He loved to smile. He avoided anger. He was never haunted by “Why am I here?” He knew why he was here, he said: to give to others, to celebrate God, and to enjoy and honor the world he was put in. His morning prayers began with “Thank you, Lord, for returning my soul to me.”

When you start that way, the rest of the day is a bonus.

Can I ask you something?

“Yes,” he said.

What makes a man happy?

“Well…” He rolled his eyes around the hospital room. “This may not be the best setting for that question.”

Yeah, you’re right.

“On the other hand…” He took a deep breath. “On the other hand, here in this building, we must face the real issues. Some people will get better. Some will not. So it may be a good place to define what that word means.”

Happiness?

“That’s right. The things society tells us we must have to be happy-a new this or that, a bigger house, a better job. I know the falsity of it. I have counseled many people who have all these things, and I can tell you they are not happy because of them.

“The number of marriages that have disintegrated when they had all the stuff in the world. The families who fought and argued all the time, when they had money and health. Having more does not keep you from wanting more. And if you always want more-to be richer, more beautiful, more well known-you are missing the bigger picture, and I can tell you from experience, happiness will never come.”

You’re not going to tell me to stop and smell the roses, are you?

He chuckled. “Roses would smell better than this place.”

Suddenly, out in the hall, I heard an infant scream, followed by a quick “shhh!” presumably from its mother. The Reb heard it, too.

“Now, that child,” he said, “reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?”

He made a fist.

“Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’

“But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”

What lesson? I asked.

He stretched open his empty fingers.

“We can take nothing with us.”

For a moment we both stared at his hand. It was trembling.

“Ach, you see this?” he said.

Yeah.

“I can’t make it stop.”

He dropped the hand to his chest. I heard a cart being wheeled down the hall. He spoke so wisely, with such passion, that for a moment I’d forgotten where we were.

“Anyhow,” he said, his voice trailing off.

I hated seeing him in that bed. I wanted him home, with the messy desk and the mismatched clothes. I forced a smile.

So, have we solved the secret of happiness?

“I believe so,” he said.

Are you going to tell me?

“Yes. Ready?”

Ready.

“Be satisfied.”

That’s it?

“Be grateful.”

That’s it?

“For what you have. For the love you receive. And for what God has given you.”

That’s it?

He looked me in the eye. Then he sighed deeply.

“That’s it.”

The End of Summer

When I left the hospital that day, I got a phone call from the Reb’s youngest daughter, Gilah. She was about my age; I had known her during our school years, and we’d kept up loosely. She was funny, warm, opinionated, and deeply loving to her father.

“So, did he tell you?” she said, glumly.

What?

“The tumor.”

What?

“It’s in his lung.”

Cancer?

“He didn’t say anything?”

I looked at the phone.

He’d never said a word.

AUTUMN

Church

In downtown Detroit, there is a church on Trumbull Avenue, across from an empty field. It is a huge, Gothic structure made of red brick and limestone, and it looks as if it blew in from another century. Pointy spires. Arched doorways. Stained glass windows, including one in which the apostle Paul asks, “What must I do to be saved?”

The building itself dates back to 1881, when the neighborhood was full of mansions and wealthy Presbyterians. They built the church to hold twelve hundred members, the largest such congregation in the Midwest. Now the mansions are gone, so are the Presbyterians, and in this poor, barren neighborhood, the church seems forgotten. The walls are decaying. The roof is crumbling. Over the years, some of the stained glass panels were stolen, and some windows have been boarded up.

I used to drive past this church on my way to Tiger Stadium, a famous baseball park a half mile down the street. I never went inside. I never saw anyone go inside.

For all I knew, the place was abandoned.

I was about to find out.

In the months since the Reb had surprised me with those words enemy schmenemy, I had been forced to rethink some of my own prejudices. The truth was, while I tried to be a charitable man, I still drew mental lines between “my” side and the “other” side-whether cultural, ethnic, or religious. I had been taught, as many of us are, that charity begins at home, and helping your own kind should come first.