I was a candyman. Nobody appointed me. The position was open, so I took it.
One Shabbat morning, I came to shul with a bag of Dum-Dums and intent to distribute. “Here you go,” I imagined saying to any child I saw, then checked myself. Too creepy? Yes, too creepy. I huddled with my own children. “See that kid over there?” I motioned to an unsuspecting child with a tilt of the chin. “Tell him he can get a lollipop if his dad says it’s OK.” Dad assented; a lollipop exchanged hands. The whisper network worked quickly. By the next week, everyone knew.
Wait a minute, you say. Why are you giving out candy? To children. Who you do not know. On a regular basis. During prayers. And why are you so proud of this that you bought a tallis bag embroidered with sweets and the word “candyman” in Yiddish lettering?
Because that’s what candymen do. That’s what a candyman is. He’s a stranger who gives candy to your children. Wait, that came out wrong. I mean, he gets kids to like him through sugar. Wait, let me rephrase…
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It’s no use. Fear of the sweets-bearing stranger is ancient. In America, its origins lie in the true story of a Philadelphia child who was kidnapped and ransomed by two men offering sweets and fireworks from a horse-drawn carriage. In the age of the after-school special, the carriage evolved into a white-paneled van, the preferred vehicle for every man standing in a school parking lot claiming to have jellybeans, an image at once terrifying and implausible, like tales of Halloween candy stuffed with razor blades. As a literary trope, the malevolent candy-giver is everywhere: The Witch’s Turkish delight in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mrs. Coulter’s chocolate in The Golden Compass, Snow White’s poisoned apple. In Hansel and Gretel, the siblings were lured by a cannibalistic witch living in a gingerbread house; the story was first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 — and it was old even then.
The panic is popular because candy works. Gifts of candy, the universal symbol for “I like you,” can facilitate unlikely ties. Under the best circumstances, such exchanges can signify powerfully that this is a community. By contrast, when that action is used to manipulate, it can turn indifference towards one’s neighbors and coreligionists into a default of “stranger danger.” Candy is just that powerful.
But enough Critical Candyman Theory; let’s talk practice. The candyman exists because Shabbat morning services are too long, and everybody knows it. Two hours is “efficient,” three hours is to be expected, and Lord help you if you can’t follow along. Imagine attending a graduate seminar in a field you don’t know. Now imagine that you’re 7. That’s Shabbat morning for little kids.
Services are long because they weren’t designed for families; they’re for unencumbered men, a few women, and kids who don’t act like kids. Menachem Lonzano, the 16th-century rabbi and scholar, recommended leaving them at home. “A child coming to synagogue,” Lonzano wrote, “brings punishment on those who brought him, for he comes to profane the holiness of the House of Our Lord.”
But the children came anyway, so synagogues adapted. They built playrooms and hired babysitters. They ran children’s services. They let them sing “Adon Olam.” They adapted. This is how the candyman, a uniquely Jewish institution, was born.
But who is that institution? I wondered as I distributed confections. I sought out other candymen and those who remembered them. I looked for patterns in the people who held this role. What I found moved me deeply.
Unlike rabbis and cantors, nobody appoints candymen (or, rarely, candywomen). There’s no candyman search committee, no bitter contract-renewal fights. Instead, the candyman is an emergent property of the synagogue itself, and so every candyman has a unique path. Once, I asked a local candyman for his origin story. “I like candy,” he replied, a little sheepishly. The candy was for him. He only assumed the role when kids caught him sneaking snacks.
My Platonic ideal of a candyman is the candyman of my youth: an elderly gentleman who sat in the back of our shtiebel and dispensed Sunkists and had numbers on his arm. I’ve been told that when he recited Yizkor for the victims of the Holocaust, he was not satisfied to simply list “those killed by the hands of the Germans,” as the prayerbook indicates. No. He named every camp. “The ones murdered in Auschwitz. The ones murdered in Buchenwald. The ones murdered in Dachau.” On and on. That’s my candyman.
He wasn’t alone. I heard enough stories about survivors-turned-candymen that I stopped treating it as a fluke. There was a man in White Plains, New York, who insisted on purchasing his shul’s candy out of his reparations checks from the German government. In a Manhattan synagogue, the candyman was a father whose children had been murdered in the camps. Did those New York kids know this horror? They couldn’t possibly. Maybe that’s why he liked being near them.
There’s something healing in the simple act of making children happy. Maybe you can redeem the past by pampering the future. One candyman began his journey with an aunt dying in a nursing home. Fearing that nobody would check on her, he put a basket of candy in her room so attendants would stop by. The woman died before the candy ran out, and the man was left with a large pile of Christmas chocolates. He gave them away. He’s been buying and distributing ever since.
I became a candyman because my relationship with shul was falling apart. My connection with prayer, which had long been on shaky grounds, fell off a cliff as soon as I became a dad. Before, synagogues were at least places for quiet contemplation, but my beautiful children robbed me of even that. Sitting through a whole service was impossible, so I bounced between shul and hallway, satisfied with exactly neither.
In the hallways, I talked to my kids, also bored, and because it was shul, we talked Torah and then, as things evolved, the Book of Samuel, the tortured and compelling story of Saul and David, Israel’s first two kings. Samuel is a great story for children; its characters are compelling, flawed and violent. After a while, other kids became interested, too, and soon I began bringing candy to sweeten the deal. Occasionally, I recalled that candymen normally encourage children to sit in the sanctuary, not loiter outside of it. I felt it was close enough.
Because the candyman is an unofficial position, the only way to know he exists is by having someone point him out to you. Small children aren’t used to identifying strangers; if you’re not family, friend or teacher, you’re just another face seen from below. The candyman, sitting inconspicuously four rows from the back, is a character to be unlocked. To know him is to know the synagogue itself, to be introduced to the soft power of networking. The candyman is the first taste of community.
But it’s a double-edged sword. Candymen aren’t vetted, and those who don’t follow the rules — who ignore allergies, who abuse the affection they engender — ruin the magic. Some synagogues have banned candymen. If children can’t roam the synagogue halls safely, it is hard to feel at home there.
Most candymen are old. It’s fitting that a questionable practice only grandfathered into acceptability is mostly conducted by grandfathers. The very old and the very young always struggle to communicate, and yet we powerfully hope that they do, that we can push living memory to its very limits and remind ourselves that the past is not that far away, that the last witness to Lincoln’s assassination lived long enough to talk about it on television, that a Supreme Court justice shook hands with both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy.
I don’t remember my candyman’s name — did I ever say anything but “thank you?” Childhood memory is a funny thing. People in their 50s and 60s can recall exactly what kind of candy they were given, but not the name of the giver. Perhaps their names don’t matter. They’re just part of the shul, a piece of furniture, an eternal light. They illuminate — and then they’re gone.
One cold Shabbat morning, I came home from shul and left my tallis bag outside. When I retrieved it a few hours later, it had been gnawed to pieces by some animal, likely smelling the candy within. This was February 2020. I shouldn’t have worried; a month later, we weren’t going to shul at all. I never did come back to the role, and my relationship with prayer has fallen apart again.
My children are getting older now, and I find myself missing the exhausting days of strollers and sleep schedules and inconvenience upon inconvenience. They still want candy, but they also want bigger, more complicated things. Maybe a sense of belonging comes easier at life’s extremes; maybe candy is only a medium of exchange for people who want nothing more than to be present in their lives. I’ll try again when I’m older. I’ll try again when there is nothing left to give but sweetness.
