The 50 or so minutes it took the crew to set up the E Street Band’s equipment were the longest of my young life. It was more than just the weight of the wait, though that was considerable. Rather, the longer Bruce took to come onstage, the greater the likelihood that I would miss the midnight train home, end up sleeping outside Grand Central Terminal, and miss my appointment in synagogue. If he didn’t get started by 10, I figured I was sunk.

I was. Springsteen came on late, played a magnificent 90-minute set, and forced me to pass Yom Kippur morning with the bums. I did not make it to services until early afternoon, another in a series of broken promises made to my long-suffering parents. Yet if the point of prayer, according to Kaplan, is to seek one’s “higher self,” and if “holiness” means “the quality anything in life possesses insofar as it serves to inspire or guide man in his effort to achieve his destiny,” then, dammit, I was in the right place on Kol Nidre.

This was not just music anymore. It was something bigger, more powerful; more like a religion, if only religion did what it was supposed to do, which was to bring together people of faith and inspire them to go out into the world and be their best selves. That night, Bruce premiered “The River,” and a more moving or powerful performance I have yet to hear. That night, I and (I’m guessing) everyone else in attendance believed in the Promised Land.

More than 30 years and well over 200 Springsteen shows later, I got a chance to talk to Bruce. The occasion was a reception for Steve Van Zandt’s Netflix show about gangsters hiding out in Lillehammer, Norway. It was a small party—I don’t know how I got invited—and the fact that Bruce was there inspired a great deal of anxiety. I had always maintained that what was meaningful to me was the art, not the artist. I had never tried very hard to interview Bruce, even while I was writing a book about him. I could tell he was a decent guy, but I still did not want any human imperfection to potentially pollute the space his music had occupied in my life. And there was certainly a good chance that I would say something silly and never be able to forget it. But then again, when was I ever going to get another chance like this? Wouldn’t I regret it for the rest of my life if I just chickened out?

So we talked. What I decided to tell him, I kid you not, was the story of my daughter’s bat mitzvah. I explained to Bruce that I had written the service myself, and that he was the only Gentile whose writing had made it into the program, because one of his lyrics had convinced me, in my 38th year, that maybe I did want to have a kid after all. It’s from the song “Living Proof,” which Springsteen wrote after the birth of his son Evan. The key lyric went:

In a world so hard and dirty

so fouled and confused /

Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy /

I found living proof.

I won’t pretend that the song by itself changed my mind about procreating. But it haunted me over time, forcing me to turn the matter over and over in my mind. Living proof of God’s mercy. That sounded pretty damn compelling, and I trusted Bruce, as I trusted few people in my life, to tell me the truth.