Since leaving his family’s home on New York’s Lower East Side two weeks earlier, Moishe had been feeling fairly overwhelmed by everything he’d encountered. The night he left had become murky and distant in recollection. He had gone to bed early, only to wake up startled by the one and strikingly clear realization that he was not meant to be a Torah scholar. At least not for a good long while. All of his years of study at the Yeshiva were utterly wasted and his father, the Rebbitsin, would be shamed in shul for having a son like Moishe. It wasn’t that Moishe didn’t want to learn, it wasn’t that he didn’t study hard and pick up the lessons of the sages and the sprawling Hebrew letters quickly, it wasn’t that the ethics and intricacies of thousands of years of moralistic monotheism were boring to Moishe. It was simply that a pang that woke him from a dead sleep at 8:37pm on a Sunday night, July 19th, said—simply—“no.” At first, Moishe thought that maybe there was another way to interpret the strange pang: maybe it wasn’t that he wasn’t cut out for the Rabbinate—maybe he should just be a Kabbalist instead or maybe a Cantor—but as he sat drenched in sweat in the bed he’d slept in since his Bar Mitzvah, his heartbeat dodging and weaving, any other explanations fell away. He was left with only the same clear, sharp, “no.” Moishe stumbled out of bed and dressed as though he were going to Yeshiva, for the last time. Black pants, white shirt, black jacket, black hat, black shoes. He said the blessings and put on his favorite talis (a white one, with Hebrew characters and stripes detailed in black, which he had received for his confirmation) so that it was barely visible under his clothes. He wiped his bifocals on the corner of his jacket before placing them back across the bridge of his nose. Then, he made his bed, packed a small black suitcase with three changes of clothes, his prayer book, his address book, The Insider’s Guide to Trading Baseball Cards, his toiletries and all of his money, just in case, and headed down the hall to his father’s study. It turned out, of course, that Moishe’s “just in case” bag wasn’t just in case: his father was incensed beyond all reason by what Moishe had to tell him and—convinced, despite all Moishe’s pleas to the contrary, that his son was turning his back on the faith with which he was raised— forced him out of the house. By the night’s end, Moishe found himself staying in a small boarding house in a neighborhood only a few blocks away from where his family lived, but where he had never spent any length of time before. Moishe was the only boarder, which made him a little nervous, but he chalked that up to the fact that, since there hadn’t really been any boarding houses since the 1950’s, people probably didn’t know that this one existed. However, Mrs. Wiener who ran the boarding house was a lovely lady, albeit slightly anachronistic and with a strong preference for Donna Reed dresses. Before bed, she had found Moishe a job helping out around her brother-in-law’s Kosher butcher shop.

Moishe liked working in the butcher shop well enough, he was glad to have a place to go and Mrs. Wiener’s brother-in-law gave him money for his help at the end of the day, but he was bored after a few days and beginning to feel like something out of a turn of the century novel about Russian Jewish immigrants coming to “the New World.” Moishe had lived in Manhattan all of his life, though he had always been so closely tied in to his Yeshiva school, his family, his shul, and his small Orthodox community. Without those things, Moishe felt unprepared and overwhelmed by the vastness of his life, but also ready for a larger, faster, life upgrade. It was unfortunate that he didn’t have many life upgrading tools to refer to, as a life spent in deep religious textual study isn’t the best preparation for the job market. So, one day during his lunch break, Moishe bought a classified paper from the newspaper vender on the corner and started expanding his life.

One by one, Moishe called the ads he had meticulously clipped from the classified paper. One by one, they rejected his services. No one seemed to want an Orthodox Yeshiva boy from the Lower East Side whose life experiences and special skills seemed to be limited to davening, debating the Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic, and Yiddish calligraphy. The management staffing agency wanted someone with a college degree. The day camps had started a month ago, and they wanted people who knew how to swim. Moishe didn’t even know what a YMCA was. The catering company wasn’t Kosher. The rejections, in one direction or the other, went on interminably. Then one ad caught Moishe’s eye:

Help Wanted. No Prior Experience Needed. Good Telephone Skills A Must. Please Call.

And then a number and an hourly rate. A very nice hourly rate. Moishe called.

Moishe had been sweating as he’d waited in Mr. Lippenthal’s office to interview. The ad hadn’t been joking when it had stated that no experience was necessary, but the phone interview had been crucial. Mr. Lippenthal had been surprised to hear that Moishe had been hiding in the Wiener’s meat freezer for the majority of the phone interview—it had come up only when Moishe felt the need to apologize for his shaking voice—but he also, oddly enough, seemed all the more impressed by the fact. It was right after Moishe made the admission that Mr. Lippenthal invited him in for an actual hiring interview.
“ Greenbaum,” Mr. Lippenthal had said “I think you might be just the right kind of man for this job.”
Not six hours later, Moishe had found himself ushered into Mr. Lippenthal’s mahogany and leather office by a lazy-eyed secretary with a thick Brooklyn accent, a skirt whose length—or lack thereof— was strictly forbidden in Moishe’s community (and probably should have been in hers, as well), and perfume that reminded Moishe of the odor in the back of the taxi-cab he had just exited. The secretary had shown Moishe to a chair and told him that Mr. Lippenthal would be in shortly, then swooshed back out to her swivel chair. While he had waited, Moishe adjusted his collar. Then he adjusted it again. Then he had straightened it out and adjusted it one more time. When Mr. Lippenthal had come in, he’d looked Moishe up and down slowly. Then he turned around and walked out of the room. He came back in about 15 seconds later, closing the door behind him. He looked Moishe up and down again, and laughed.
“ You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?”
Moishe had shifted in his chair, situating himself uncomfortably on the fringes of his talis, and explained the past two weeks to Mr. Lippenthal as quickly as he possibly could. He had tried to draw connections between his years of intense study within the Orthodox community and the tasks he thought he might be carrying out here, at this company with no apparent name.
“ So, you see, Mr. Lippenthal, ” Moishe had concluded “the Torah has a lot of words in it, so I have excellent communications skills. Hebrew is an extremely complex language, so my speaking is exemplary. I would be a wonderful candidate for your telemarketing position.” Mr. Lippenthal had considered him for a second, laughed, and agreed. He handed Moishe his cell phone and a key to his office.
“ Greenbaum,” he had said “we are in a very special business here. We are giving people something they want, and something that many of our customers feel they need. Always remember three things: 1. Respond to customer requests. 2. Always make your customers happy. And, 3. Take care of that phone.”

Moishe left the office at 11 pm and headed back to the boarding house, gleeful and self-satisfied. The world was his oyster—or it would be, if he ate shellfish. He could hardly wait to get started. He felt like an Orthodox Mary Tyler Moore. He was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The next day, in his new office, Moishe was a little confused by the cell phone. But, then again, he didn’t understand telemarketing in general. He didn’t know what kind of company let their customers dictate the product to the sales representative on the phone. Maybe they were like Amway . . . but, wouldn’t they have catalogues in that case? Suddenly, Moishe was very upset at his upbringing. He felt very small, very insulated and naïve. He stared down at the little black cell phone, at his tsitsit, and at his hands on his new wooden desk (the first one he’d ever sat at without a prayer book on it) and started to flush. Moishe’s emotional catharsis had little chance to come to fruition however, as the little black cellphone started ringing.

He took a deep breath and answered. “ Hello there. What can I do for you?”

It was a woman’s voice on the other end. Moishe’s pulse quickened. He had never even prayed on the same side of the temple as a woman. She said, “ Well, what are you offering, baby?”

Moishe stammered.

She said, “ What are you wearing?”

“Um. Well. My yarmulke, my black sport coat, my tefilin, my talis, a white button down shirt, black pants, black trouser socks, and black dress shoes. I take my professional attire very seriously, you know. Um. I mean. You know . . . ma’am.”

“Can I get you to take off that jacket, cowboy?”

“Um, no thank you ma’am. That’s not looked at very kindly in G-d’s eyes. And I’m not so sure how my boss would feel about it either. And, well, the Ten Commandments . . .”

The woman cut him off, swearing, and he heard the dial tone come on the other end of the line.

Moishe closed his little black cell phone, put his forehead down on the new desk, and prayed.