An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  “I don’t know the details. The neighbors complained the music was loud and noisy, and the children, Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, and even Leah, were jumping up and down.”

  “So they were playing a game, having fun?”

  “It’s more than that. The children were naked, and she had no head covering.”

  Fruma Esther inhaled a sharp, involuntary gulp of breath. “The doors were open?”

  “No, of course not. But the windows had the shades up.”

  “They are on the second floor! Who could look in?”

  “People in the apartments across the way.”

  “How can they see anything? They’re across the street.”

  “The neighbors came up to complain about the music, and when Leah finally opened the door, they saw the children.”

  “She opened the door without her hair covering?”

  Basha shook her head. “Not exactly. They said it was ‘loose’ and her bangs hung down over her eyes, and a few red curls were hanging down her back.”

  “So the noise upset them. This is not a crime. They make loud Purim parties and no one complains.”

  “It wasn’t just the noise. It was the music.”

  There was, as far as Fruma Esther knew, no prohibition against listening to secular music, as long as it wasn’t religiously based like church music or Hare Krishna chants, and as long as the lyrics didn’t have any lascivious or foul language. Lustful songs, shira agavim, were another category. Anything that aroused the sexual desire was banned completely, especially when children were around.

  “No halacha prevents us from listening to music, Basha.”

  This, of course, was true, and both women knew it. But they also knew the problem went far deeper.

  “Of course, investigate. That is only fair, but…” Basha hesitated. She loved Leah, whom she and her husband had mentored all through her difficult search to return to her roots. She had even championed her all through her fraught courtship with Yaakov, encouraging Fruma Esther to relent. But she couldn’t help but be disturbed by these rumors, which fit in perfectly with all the conventional wisdom about not welcoming even sincere baale teshuva into the community for fear they would backslide, polluting the holy streets of their tight-knit communities with the remnants of their past, secular lives. For a woman deeply involved in bringing secular Jews into the fold who had spent years fighting against such prejudices, such rumors were drops of poison into the water she drank.

  “Even if it isn’t exactly what they’re saying, still, you need to remind her that everything a religious Jew does or says or sees or hears has an effect on the pure neshama God gave them. Especially on the children, who are so innocent. Tell her that sometimes we can’t allow ourselves even those things that are permitted because it might taint our purity. Talk to her, Fruma Esther. Explain it to her.”

  Fruma Esther got unsteadily to her feet, the sweet crumbs from the rugelach turning bitter in her mouth as she envisioned what was to come.

  6

  YAAKOV LEAVES KOLLEL

  Amid the usual cacophony of voices involved in lively debate, Yaakov’s footsteps fell softly on the floors of the kollel as he entered for the last time. As he made his way across the large hall, he saw (or thought he saw; it was no longer possible to separate his imaginative fears and shame from reality) familiar faces looking back at him, their warm smiles hiding pity and contempt. And then, of course, there were those who did not look up at all, immersed (or pretending to be) in their sacred Talmudical studies, the same studies he was now preparing to abandon for the mundane, petty existence of a balabus. And each time he felt he was being ignored, the slight was as sharp as a stiletto scraping the vulnerable underbelly of his despair.

  He looked fondly at the peeling walls with their sagging bookcases, the chipped wooden chairs and tables, rubbed to a fine patina by the hands and bodies of his fellow students over decades. This had been his home for so many years. He had progressed from cheder to yeshiva to mesivta to the bais midrash, landing finally in kollel. While many of his fellow students had dropped out along the way either from disappointment in their progress or financial constraints, he had had the good fortune to be burdened by neither. For over twenty years, he had been part of the elite of this community, learning full-time, and was well on his way—or so he had always told himself—to becoming a respected rosh yeshiva. It was in this conviction that he had heretofore invested the entire value and meaning of his life, believing wholeheartedly that only this had earned him the respect of all those who knew him: his children, parents, former in-laws, neighbors, the parents of his children’s friends, as well as the butcher and the grocer, who waited patiently each month to settle his bill. It defined him to the world. It defined him to himself.

  How could it be otherwise? From his earliest almost toddling steps into cheder, where the kindly rebbe had smeared honey over Hebrew letters and allowed him to lick it off, impressing him with the sweetness of learning the holy alphabet in which God’s word was written, it had been drummed into him that learning was the highest form of living and serving God. Doing anything else was a mistake, a failure, a sad burden. At the very least, it was settling for second-best. Not the smallest factor in this feeling was the way all the women in his world looked up to Torah scholars and how they looked down upon everyone else.

  And so it was that he had gone step by step down that path, almost without being conscious of making a choice. It was what everyone else in the community was doing; what all his friends were doing.

  And now, suddenly, it was over.

  Despite the fact that this, too, had been his own choice, he found that devastating. It was the heartbreaking relinquishment of his lifelong dreams.

  His eyes smarted as he weaved through the crowded rows, avoiding the eyes of others. The sensation of coldness, of being shut out, was not new. It had begun simultaneously with his secular night studies. He couldn’t help but notice that his voiced opinions, insights, questions—once regarded as extraordinary, the epitome of intellectual vigor—were suddenly less interesting to those around him. Whereas before, people were eager to engage with him, they now seemed to sigh and look restlessly over his head as if he had not spoken at all. Or so it seemed to him.

  “How are you, my friend?”

  A familiar voice broke through this painful reverie, and a kind arm draped itself across his shoulders. He looked up, startled, finding welcome in the upturned lips of his chavrusa, Meir, as well as an unaccustomed sadness in his friend’s usually cheerful, large brown eyes. Wordlessly, the two men embraced.

  The years studying with Meir had been the best years of his life, he thought. The pure intellectual challenge of interpreting the holy texts, squeezing out the nectar of God’s truth, God’s will, had been his highest calling, challenging all his mental faculties and the deepest instincts of his heart. It had been a privilege to share these precious hours with a partner whose dedication matched his own.

  “Have you found … Are you going to…?” Yaakov began, finding it hard to discuss his replacement.

  Meir nodded. “Someone new. The rav suggested. But it won’t be easy to start over.”

  Yaakov nodded gratefully at this kindness. “Maybe we could still find time on Shabbos, or in the evenings, after work?”

  Meir hesitated. “We are moving next week. A bigger apartment, but a longer walk.” Yaakov understood. Neither he nor Meir were the most athletic of men, and learning together on the Sabbath when it was forbidden to drive or use public transportation would entail a long trek through Brooklyn streets.

  “Maybe during the week, then? I could drive over?”

  Meir smiled. “What a question!”

  Yaakov exhaled. Once a week, then. It would be something to look forward to. And then there would be the early mornings on the subway on his way to work, and the late afternoons on the way back, and perhaps an hour or two in the late evenings, before bed and after the children had been put to sleep. He must f
ind the time to continue his lifelong passion for learning the Torah. He couldn’t imagine life without it.

  “And maybe then you could summarize what you were doing all week?”

  Meir nodded kindly. “But as it is written: It is not the study that is essential, but rather the actions,” he said in Hebrew, quoting from Ethics of the Fathers. “We learn in order to live a good life. And that’s what you are doing.”

  “Rabbi Akiva would not agree with you.”

  He knew he didn’t have to elaborate. The famous debate from the Babylonian Talmud between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon, in which the two sages argued over the primacy of study versus action, was well known to every yeshiva boy. Rabbi Akiva had championed study above all.

  “Yes, Rabbi Akiva won the debate. But only because he argued that study leads to action, and is therefore greater. Rav Huna said this clearly in Avoda Zarah 17b: He who occupies himself only with studying is as if he has no God.”

  “I will miss this so much.” Yaakov’s voice caught.

  Meir squeezed his shoulder consolingly. “It is not forever, my friend. A time will come when your children are grown, and you will have more time to devote to the things you love.”

  Yaakov thought of the years ahead: the older children’s weddings; raising Chasya and baby Mordechai Shalom to adulthood and then their marriages. Perhaps more babies with his young wife … He would be an old man by then, his mind grown dull and inefficient. As the sage Rabbi Elisha ben Avuya wrote: He who studies the Torah in his youth, is like writing on clean paper, while he who studies in his old age is like writing on used paper. It tore at his heart.

  “I hope you get your own yeshiva one day soon, Meir. You deserve it.”

  “You have always been the greater scholar, Yaakov. It isn’t fair. Twenty years of your life!”

  Yaakov shrugged. It might not be fair, but it was God’s will. Who was he to question it? “God has blessed me in other ways, my friend.”

  “You’re happy in your new life?”

  Yaakov brightened. “I feel as if I have been given a second chance.”

  “Did you ever speak to Leah about your learning?”

  “Of course! She wanted me to continue. She told me she could manage to support us for now, that I should continue if that is what I really wanted.”

  Meir could not hide his surprise. All along, he thought Yaakov’s working had been one of the conditions of their marriage; that Leah, coming from the secular world, must have insisted upon it. “So then, why?”

  “Why? Because this is my chance to be a better husband than I was the first time, Meir. Maybe if Zissele had had less to do, if she hadn’t had to work along with giving birth and taking care of the house and so many children all by herself, maybe…”

  Meir lowered his arm and stepped back, shaking his head slowly. “Yaakov, you know that wasn’t the reason. Zissel had a sickness.”

  “Yes, but maybe she wouldn’t have gotten sick if she hadn’t worked so hard all those years. I was blind to it. I am not going to do that to Leah. Never.” He shook his head vociferously.

  “All the women in our world work hard. They wouldn’t want it any other way!” Unspoken between them was the assumption that a woman’s portion in the World to Come depended upon her husband’s victories in the study hall. When a woman supported the family financially, leaving the man free to learn, she did it not only for him but for herself. They were partners, sharing in the reward.

  “So we were taught. So we believed,” Yaakov answered, his jaw suddenly clenching, his lips white.

  Meir was shocked. “And now, my friend, you no longer believe?”

  “Since I lost my Zissele, so many things no longer make sense to me. And so many of the things I trusted blindly, so many of the things I was taught, the community itself has stopped believing and observing, if they ever did.”

  Meir, gentle, trusting Meir, was shocked. “Really?”

  “Yes, Meir. Are we not taught to welcome the stranger? And yet, how was my Leah treated when she decided to live among us as a God-fearing woman? The matchmakers treated her like dirt. They matched her with the mentally ill, the physically disabled. They even gave her phone number to an African convert who had abandoned a wife and six children back home!” Yaakov put up his hand to halt Meir’s attempts to comment. “I know what you are going to say. The sins of a few. But it isn’t a few. Remember how I had to beg you to play matchmaker because not a single matchmaker in Boro Park was willing to get involved when I wanted to go out with Leah, simply because she was a baalas teshuva?”

  “I remember.” He shifted uncomfortably. His brief foray into the murky realm of go-between to facilitate romantic liaisons was something he had still not gotten over.

  “Everyone was against her, despite all the things written in the Torah about welcoming the stranger. So now I don’t care what anyone else thinks, Meir. I will do exactly what I know is right according to the Torah I learned all those years.”

  Both of them knew this wasn’t true. Yaakov—perhaps even more than Meir—cared deeply, passionately, about the exalted and honorable place he had earned over so many years among his peers and neighbors. “What will the neighbors think?” had been drummed into him—into all of them—from earliest childhood, like a mantra. It was inescapable.

  “And what about the rav, his opinion?”

  “Of course I care about the rav! But he is not an ordinary person.”

  “Maybe you should talk it over with him, then, one last time?”

  Yaakov shook his head. “No, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to work. If it was just to help pay the rent and buy food and clothes, maybe I would hold on a little longer. But it isn’t. It’s all those loans I took out. Why should my Leah work so hard to pay off my debts?”

  “Debts you made to keep a roof over your children’s heads, food in the refrigerator, when you lost your income from Zissele’s teacher’s salary! What else could you do?”

  “Exactly. So now I also have no choice, Meir. I have to work to pay it all back.”

  “Will it take a long time?”

  “It will take what it will take. I know my obligations. Is it not written in my wife’s marriage contract that I must provide for her?”

  They both knew that clause in the Jewish marriage contract was practically fictitious, piously ignored even (especially?) by the same rabbis who were fanatical in every other regard concerning strict observance of even the most minor of religious duties or customs. But it wasn’t right. Bitter words rose to Yaakov’s throat, but he forced them back. He looked at his innocent, happy, fortunate friend Meir, who was learning full-time, his wife, Bruriah, and her parents supporting him and their children. He was happy for him, and devastated at how their ways had finally—and irrevocably—parted.

  Yaakov took a deep breath, then sighed. “We have the whole day, Meir. My last day. Let’s not waste any time, my friend. Let’s learn.”

  As the day drew to a close, there was one last thing he had to do. He went to Rav Alter’s office and knocked on the door. The assistant let him in. The office, as usual, was packed with petitioners: housewives anxious to save a meat pot and its contents from being discarded because a drop of milk had leaked upon it in the refrigerator; busybodies wanting to enlist the rav’s endorsement for various causes—worthy and less so; poor people needing charitable donations; yeshiva boys in moral turmoil; parents inquiring about certain shidduch prospects … It was endless.

  “It is my last day in kollel,” he told the assistant. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Your last day, Yaakov? Come,” he said firmly, leading him past the others directly into the rav’s inner sanctum. “And may HaShem bless you, Yaakov.”

  Yaakov looked at the mahogany bookcases that reached from floor to ceiling on every wall, crammed with heavy books. Volumes of the Jerusalem Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud, the Code of Jewish Law, and hundreds of commentaries and exegeses stared back accusingly. His legs trembled with s
udden weakness. The room, so familiar to him from the countless times he had found his way there seeking comfort, inspiration, or just a simple human connection, seemed almost hostile now.

  But there was the rav. He exhaled. He never really understood what it was about this elderly man that mesmerized him so completely. Perhaps it was simply the knowledge that each word he uttered came from huge treasuries of wisdom garnered not only from decades of intense study but also countless interactions with people from every background who streamed unceasingly through these doors seeking answers that touched on every aspect of human existence.

  He remembered the time so many years before when he’d sat across from the cluttered wooden desk as a young bridegroom barely out of his teens, entering kollel for the first time. How he had poured out his grandiose dreams of achievement, as if diligence alone could uncover the wellspring of every sacred mystery of life, allowing him to find the answers that had eluded so many great scholars before him for centuries, men who like pearl divers had held their breath, diving into the bottomless wisdom of God’s sacred words, hoping to come back to the surface without drowning, bearing the rare jewels that would illuminate mysteries of life for all mankind. The rav’s face, he remembered, had been warm, betraying no skepticism or amusement at these naive outpourings. How difficult it must have been for him to hide a smile as he listened! And how kind.

  He remembered those days after the birth of his children, when the rav had been with him, rejoiced with him. And then there had been the time when death had come, and he’d sat on a low stool during shiva, his shirt ripped in mourning like the heart beneath it, his eyes wild with incomprehension and despair. The rav had sat beside him, saying almost nothing, and his presence had brought an infusion of strength and faith.

  And then there was the time that the rav had forced him to come to him, and he had entered this office a broken man. How the rav had urged him to find new life, new love! And how he had resisted that advice! But now here he was once again, instead of opening a chapter, closing it. Of all the people he knew, only Rav Alter, this man of Torah, could possibly comfort him and give him hope for the future.