Praying with Moby Dick

I grew up in a pretty New England town with pretty much nothing to see, apart from a small whaling museum founded by a Massachusetts industrialist named Henry P. Kendall. The Kendall Whaling Museum held whale-related art and artifacts, documents and domesticities, and plenty of curiosities (preserved whale blubber!) that magically sustained the attention of a local Jewish boy with no connection to the once-towering American industry. Standing at the end of a woodsy road in a building that was once a tuberculosis sanitorium, the museum always had a hushed quality to it, a tribute to the whalers who never made it back to shore.

As an escape from my required reading, this summer I’ve immersed myself in Melville’s whaling masterwork, Moby Dick. Predictably, the epic battle between man and whale, and between man and his fellow man, has drawn me in again. But this time, I’ve also been moved by some of the book’s quieter moments, like when Ishmael sits down one Sunday morning among “the moody fishermen” at Whaleman’s Chapel.

Whaleman’s Chapel is best known in Moby Dick as the site of a rousing sermon on the Book of Jonah, which Melville uses to build the novel’s biblical undertow. Before the old preacher athletically mounts the ship-like pulpit, Ishmael does the only thing one can do when a “muffled silence reigned” in an austere chapel—he gazes at the memorial plaques, pondering the memory of deceased men he never knew:

Sacred To the memory of JOHN TALBOT . . . November 1st 1836. this tablet Is erected to his Memory by HIS SISTER . . . sacred To the memory of The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY . . . August 3d 1833. this tablet Is erected to his Memory by HIS WIDOW. . . .

Of course, plaque-reading isn’t just a Christian habit. Who hasn’t contemplated the yahrzeit plaques in a quiet moment during Mussaf? At the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, the old shul I sometimes pray in when I’m in New York, I have forged an unlikely connection with some of the souls remembered. Many of them lived what seem to have been quiet lives of dedication. A few made their mark on the neighborhood, like Yonah Schimmel, of the “Yonah Schimmel Knish Shop,” whose memory is invoked on a small rectangle on the back-wall of the sanctuary. Some of the memorialized had more sordid endings, like the pair of siblings who share a yahrzeit on the 19 Heshvan, 5739, or November 18, 1978—the night of the Jonestown massacre.

The plaques in Whaleman’s Chapel have a uniquely tragic air about them, since most of the deceased were lost at sea:

What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.

There’s scarcely a Jew alive who hasn’t contemplated this sort of dark matter when scanning the plaques dedicated to people murdered in the Holocaust. There are many such plaques at Sixth Street. There’s also a sign in the front of the building which recalls the former occupants of the building, members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark, over a thousand of whom perished when their boat, the General Slocum, caught fire in the East River in 1904.

Memorializing can overwhelm sensitive souls with grief. Yet, Ishmael finds that ultimately, it restores his belief in life and his present existence: “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” As it turns out, it is the very starkness of the plaques that restores to Ishmael his lust for the here and now.

“And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will!”

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