On Shabbat morning the fifth day of Tammuz, the last Saturday in June by the secular calendar, Drean Hanley ascended the bima to deliver her midrash on the day’s Torah portion, as she’d done so many other Saturdays at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock. Since Drean and her husband, Chris, had discovered L.A.’s second-oldest surviving synagogue, she had emerged as Beth Israel’s Saturday morning Kiddush maven, the warmest of greeters, the guiding force behind the temple’s charitable food drives and one of the pillars that kept the institution from collapsing during its most challenging years, when membership dwindled to a handful and the historic congregation had little to sustain it besides the tireless commitment of the likes of Drean and a handful of her fellow stalwarts.
The Torah passage that morning was the story of Korach, from the Book of Numbers—a startling, through-the-looking-glass tale in a sacred text so prone to punishing the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for straying from God’s laws and gravitating toward graven images and golden calves. Here, the reprobates are punished because they feared that Israel’s leaders were becoming a little too golden calf-like themselves, resplendent with a God-given authority that the rest of their brethren could not hope to share.
As Drean explained, Korach, with his band of fellow Levites, challenged Moses and Aaron for what one Torah translation describes as “going too far”—assuming a position of privilege in regard to the Almighty over the rest of the people of Israel. Through their lofty state, the prophet and his brother, the high priest, were flouting what Korach and his followers thought God had decreed, that “all the community is holy, all of them—and the Lord is in their midst.” Korach and his minions got the rawest of biblical deals. In a display of divinely inspired power, Moses gathered his detractors altogether, and, just as he predicted, the earth opened, and swallowed them all into the ground.
Drean, who led Beth Israel into a resurgence in the 21stcentury, held no high office; her leadership derived only from the warmth and devotion and drive of her character. As she guided Saturday’s minyan through the spiritual and moral implications of Korach’s revolt, she didn’t mince words about which side she was instinctively on. “Had I lived at that time,” she said, smiling out at an audience who knew her well, “I would have been with Korach.”
This was to be the last drash Drean would give, and the last Shabbat morning she would attend. Near midnight on July 2nd, driving back to her home on Los Angeles’ northeast side from a long night of work at the Wells Fargo office in Irvine, she was struck by a driver —allegedly drunk—with such force that she suffered catastrophic injuries. She struggled for another week, but right after family Shabbat services concluded last Friday at Beth Israel, the congregation heard the awful news that she had passed.
Drean Hanley was raised in the upstate New York town of Glen Falls. Her mother is Orthodox, but as a freshman at nearby Adirondack Community College, Drean already seemed more an independent child of the late-1960s than the cheder student of just a few years back. “At the time I met her she was in rebellion,” Chris says. “She was very ‘Korach’ at that time.” Not that she was as mutinous against the establishment as Chris, a math whiz who had dropped out of several universities he’d attended on full scholarship, and now, after many misadventures, found himself sitting in the back row of the kind of introductory Algebra class he’d blithely skipped years before, in order to satisfy Adirondack’s basic requirements for an associate’s degree. In those days, he carried around a puppy and puffed a scholarly pipe. The slender, olive-complexioned Drean caught the eye of this blond-haired pale giant, who’d been raised Lutheran but already had embraced Judaism before he was halfway out of his teens. “Prayer in Judaism wasn’t about begging, like Christianity,” Chris says, recalling Adonai’s chief selling point, “it was more like a conversation and request of God.”
Though Chris might already have been more than halfway towards conversion, the 18-year-old hippie-chick wasn’t particularly impressed by what she saw in first year Algebra, but she still needed to pass the course, so she asked Chris to tutor her. Soon enough, she found herself dating him. Each loved the other’s sharp sense of humor, the irreverence that was their shared portion. And yet, Chris didn’t always make the best case for himself as spousal timber. “Since I couldn’t type, Drean would type some of my papers for English class,” Chris said. “In one of those papers, the professor asked for three quotes, and I quoted Sartre, Margaret Mead and myself. Drean truly disapproved of that kind of audacity.” When Chris and Drean told his parents that they would be getting married only a year after they met, his father, who adored Drean, turned toward her and made a prediction: Either you’re going to bring him up to your level. Or he’s going to pull you down to his.
“She changed my way,” Chris says now. The two of them wandered, pitching their chuppah in Salt Lake City, St. Louis and suburban New Jersey, both of them moving up the ranks in banking and insurance. Drean worked most of those years for subsidiaries of Citibank in ever-higher positions of responsibility. All this time the couple were what Chris calls “Christmas/Easter Jews,” attending High Holy Day services, trying on different temples for size, but finding little to sustain their interest past the sounding of the shofar. Nevertheless, Drean’s sense of tzedakah remained deeply rooted, year-round. She would raise money and collect toys for children during Salvation Army holiday drives, and any coin or stray bill she found on the street was destined for a pushke that, once full, wound up in her mother’s mailbox to help with her synagogue’s summer camp. As a vice president of asset management at Wells Fargo, Drean not only won the Golden-Spoke award for superior performance, but also was instrumental in the bank’s yuletide adopt-a-family program.
After moving to greater Los Angeles, Drean met a social worker charged with taking children from abusive homes, who told her that what these kids who were losing so much needed most was a stuffed animal to cling to, but that the state of California didn’t consider this a legitimate expense. Drean became the social worker’s major supplier of plush dogs, cats and zoo creatures. One day, the social worker dropped out of sight; when she finally resurfaced, Drean promptly delivered a couple of boxes of stuffed animals, which had taken up residence in the Hanley condo for the previous two years.
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, Drean discovered Beth Israel while flipping through the Yellow Pages for something lost to memory, but surely more mundane. The temple, for a newcomer, was a bit surreal. Built in 1930, the tiny sanctuary flaunted a design that could be called Spanish-Mission-shtetl. Henry Leventon, the temple president, greeted the couple at the door with a brogue right out of Belfast. From that day, Drean and Chris were a part of the synagogue’s fragile fabric. Drean loved how participatory it all was, that the temple was led not by a rabbi but by a common sense of compassion and a thirst for doing. Chris, being a mathematician and prone to logic, was also smitten, but thought the community that welcomed them into its embrace couldn’t last very long. “When we first went there,” Chris says, “the average age was about 112, and most of the people we knew then have since passed. I thought the temple was dying; Drean didn’t. She was right; I was wrong.”
Drean wasn’t above tipping the scales in her favor, joining the few stalwarts who made enormous exertions to keep the tiny congregation alive. Taking the lead from Leventon, she became a fervent greeter to Beth Israel newcomers; rushing over in her flower-print dress; the thick braid that went midway down her back even going a bit airborne as she clasped your hand and declared how wonderful it was to meet you, how much of a better morning it was now that you had arrived. The temple’s finances were so fragile that even the Shabbat Kiddush seemed capable of pushing the books into insolvency. Drean assumed the costs and took over the organization of a feast that won almost as many new adherents as the services. Her High Holy Day appeal for the temple’s bi-annual SOVA charity food drive for Jewish Family Service was fine and entertaining oratory, mixing simple compassion with wit and puns. Drean made frequent, quiet visits to temple members who were ailing or dying, often bearing birthday or get-well cards the size of a flat screen television, which she’d buttonholed the entire congregation into signing. She had an empathetic sense that was almost uncanny. When an ultra-Orthodox visitor from Portugal hung around at one of Beth Israel’s Kiddushes, regaling the morning’s minyan with his tales of Jewish life there, only Drean noticed he hadn’t taken a bite of anything, and rushed into the kitchen to find unopened kosher food for him to eat on a paper plate.
A few years ago, as the temple board was considering launching its first children’s program in nearly half a century, Chris declared that he and Drean would donate a good chunk of the seed money, prompting others to follow suit. When Drean attended the family Shabbat this past June, though too modest to take some credit, she didn’t hide her satisfaction that the sanctuary was filled with at least 20 members well under the age of five, that her own sweat equity had proved her right and that the temple she adored indeed would endure.
Despite their marriage of 40 years, Chris says now that he still can’t explain the events or impulses that drove Drean to overflow so much with giving. “There isn’t something you can find in someone’s life that made them a mensch,” he says. “Some people can learn to be mensches, but she just was a mensch, that’s just the way she was. She was a songbird among the sparrows.”
In addition to Chris, Drean Hanley is survived by her parents, Shirley and Sid Kanofsky; her brother Mike (Margaret) Kanofsky; her sister Lynne (Jim) Greene; and many nieces and nephews. Services will be held at a synagogue in her hometown of Glen Falls, N.Y. In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory will be welcome at Temple Beth Israel of Highland Park and Eagle Rock; and at the SOVA food pantry (jfsla.org/sova).
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