He gave me the van Inwagen book, and we talked about philosophy because it was a safe topic we had in common. But when I started to share with him the startling and ecstatic discoveries I had made when I first began reading feminist philosophy at Sarah Lawrence, he gave me a blank, contemptuous face.
“I read all that,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “I think it’s bullshit.”
“Feminism is bullshit?”
“Yes, I think women are better off in traditional roles.”
“You mean to tell me you got two degrees, you read everything there is to be read about this topic, and you still think it has nothing valid to contribute to the philosophical conversation?”
“Exactly.”
The revelation disturbed me for days, so much so that I called an old college professor to tell him the story. “How is it possible to be exposed to all that knowledge and still cling to misogynist ideas?” I had always believed that education was the cure for ignorance. But my professor gently reminded me about Quine’s theory of the web of belief, explaining that Quine was the first philosopher to challenge the idea that belief systems were build like pyramids. A pyramid, Nathan said, would topple if sufficiently disrupted, but a web could adjust its margins without sustaining damage to its core. It was Quine who postulated that people could be exposed to ideas that challenged their web and simply adjust the web’s margins to go on believing in the same way. In the end, no matter how well informed we are, we choose what to believe.
Despite the dead end we seemed to have hit during our heated discussion, Jacob’s manuscript arrived a few days later, wrapped in a brown cardboard file. It was very long, close to eight hundred double-sided pages. I sat down to read it out of curiosity. I counted seven violent rape scenes, most of them perpetrated by rich white men against black teenage girls. I wondered if that had been the old Colt, a man who thought that an appropriate literary tool for the critique of systemic racism was the clichéd victimization of the underdog and the vilification of the elite. Perhaps he hadn’t really started out any different from who he was now. A new name, yes, but not a new persona. By reading his manuscript, I had gotten to meet him, and I couldn’t help thinking that his conversion had proved a marginal improvement. It had brought him to New York. It had made him a little bit more cosmopolitan and a little less arrogant. Maybe that’s what he had been going for all along, the discipline, because he sensed his need for it. Did he see himself as one of those rapists, with uncontrollable lust governing his every move, his white maleness inherent proof that he needed to chain a sexuality that he could only view as dangerous?
We stayed Facebook friends, without talking again, until my memoir, Unorthodox, was released to a great storm of controversy and shock and anger, at which point he may have unfriended me, although I didn’t realize this until a few months later, when I checked out of curiosity.
A year after Heather moved back home after getting her degree, I received a text message from her that said she was dating an army pilot in her hometown. I told her I wished her the best of luck and happiness.
Six weeks later there was another text. It read: “I’m pregnant.” “Is it the pilot?” I asked. It was.
“I went for an abortion yesterday and couldn’t do it,” she wrote. “I’m outcast from the family now.”
“Can’t you just get married?” I asked.
“It won’t change how they feel,” she explained. Leann had told her that theirs wasn’t the kind of family where daughters got knocked up and showed up in a maternity gown at the wedding. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.
A month went by, and I hadn’t heard from Heather, so I checked in with her again.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“I had an abortion,” she told me. “There was just too much pressure from my mom. Immediately afterwards I regretted it. I’m so angry,” she said with a sigh—“but mostly at myself.”
Leann was the first person I had ever met who actually listened to Rush Limbaugh and thought women shouldn’t have access to free birth control and healthcare because they shouldn’t be having sex in the first place. She believed abortion was simply not an option, because God had a reason for everything. I guess that when it came to her own daughter, those values went out the window.
Certainly I’m not foolish enough to believe that hypocrisy is a phenomenon found only in the deeply religious. But I was birthed and raised in a world where what a person claimed to be was rarely in sync with his true nature. In a society that places appearances over every other priority, that kind of behavior is necessary, and makes sense. Some people simply use their faith as a lexicon of behavioral reasoning; without that they would be forced to face their own moral and ethical failings honestly according to a secular code of right and wrong.
It’s religion that holds us up to an inhumanly high standard while acknowledging that we are incapable of measuring up, and tacks on the clause that protects us when we inevitably fail to do so. Would there be a need for the incredible acrobatics of justification that religious people engage in every day, like some would a gym routine, if we simply accepted our limitations and dealt within their parameters?
Opening a door for Jesus no longer seemed like a generous thing to do, not when that door was closed when it was convenient. How could they try to reform the Jew over to ways they preached but didn’t practice?
I once had a conversation with an atheist who said that the argument for the existence of God was like the argument for a false reality. Sure it was possible we were all living in a computer-simulated video game, he posited, but until any evidence as to that effect was presented, it was more sensible to concur that such a reality was highly unlikely and therefore not a viable part of the argument. I remembered feeling my own de-realization as a child, when everyone around me behaved like an automaton and I began to fear that I was the only person with real, absorbing desires. How frightening that possibility had felt, in that there were moments when I found it conceivable. I supposed then that the atheist had never found himself in that particular frame of mind, and did not know how closely the illusion had loomed before me once, threatening to cross the threshold of reality and invade the tangible world I inhabited.
Perhaps what you might feel is most missing in your life post-religion is the experience and ritual of worship. True, you don’t want to bow down in a show of adulation to a nonexistent or misrepresented God, but I think the human psyche yearns, in its own way, to appreciate and admire. We like to praise what is beautiful or great. It can feel like the same instinct that makes you want to hug a tree. When you’re feeling grateful for all the wonderful aspects of existence, it’s only natural to want to thank someone for them!
Leaving a fundamentalist environment, I was loath to replace it with another; although plenty do, as ex-religionists can be the most vulnerable targets for other spiritualists on a mission to proselytize. I can’t count how many times someone has attempted to convert me to their version of religion, which is invariably the “right” version. But for me, it’s always seemed unlikely that religion “lite” could impress me after being exposed to the real deal.
Without spirituality in your life, often the only other option seems to be a kind of harsh realism, and your religion can become an amalgam of Christopher Hitchens and science monthlies and maybe some MSNBC thrown in for good measure. But I’ve always believed in real magic—not the kind with wands and sparkly explosions, but the kind of magic that makes each day a surprise, each moment a new discovery about myself and the world.
In my early forays as an ex-religionist, my friends were often people who didn’t seem to need anything more, at least not in the way I did. I miss the thrill that comes with believing in the impossible. I remember how that wild and ridiculous hope opened doors for me in the past, and I wonder how I’ll ever manage to achieve anything great again without that spurring me on.
/>
The other day I was reading a wonderful, magical book that illustrates this feeling for me. It’s called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, and one of the main characters, a thirteen-year-old girl named Paloma, writes eloquently and passionately in her journal about why she thinks trees are so great. They are literally rooted to the earth, she exclaims, whereas we human beings scramble around on its surface without any real hope of taking root in the same way. Our inferiority in comparison to trees is clear, she postulates; they adapt gracefully to changing seasons and the passing of time while we wail and rail against these forces; they weather trauma with incredible endurance while we sob and sigh over the smallest of challenges; and, of course, they hang around way longer than we manage to. Enough to make anyone feel small, she says, and yet we love trees. They make the world beautiful! They remain unmarred by the human corruption that may poison everything else. A tree’s beauty cannot be contained, marketed, possessed. It just is.
It’s true that her voice has all the exaggerated pathos of a thirteen-year-old girl. I, too, remember writing passionately in my diary about this thing or the other, always convinced that I had the answers while the adults around me remained clueless. Perhaps that is why I connected so much to this character, Paloma, despite her occasional adolescent tirades. We all have our innocent thirteen-year-old selves lying dormant within us. Remember those days when anything could make you feel strongly? Passivity is a terrible thing to grow up into.
Heather used to stop and hug trees all the time, back when we were at Sarah Lawrence together. She’d say it made her feel better, and I didn’t get it at the time, but now I wonder. The other day I put my arms around a tree and closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I imagined what it must be like to be a tree, to feel the security of roots burrowing a solid hold into the ground. It felt particularly comforting to imagine that, because I often suffer from the feeling of rootlessness, a kind of panic that stems from my free-floating position in life, which causes me plenty of anxiety. As I wrapped my arms even more tightly around the base of the oak, I thought, the stronger the root system, the more you can grow. Isn’t that how it works?
In my first writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence, I found myself submitting material that would later make it into my memoir: personal recollections from my childhood, peppered with transliterated Yiddish. My fellow writers approached my material tentatively, with both fascination and reserve. Feeling ignorant about the subject matter, they were hesitant to offer feedback, but there were always questions, which I would strive to answer in time for the next class.
When one week I submitted something totally different to be read and critiqued by the class, one of the students opened her comments to me by exclaiming, with great exuberance, how glad she was that I had finally “un-Jewed it.”
“I was so happy I could understand this piece,” she said. “Your other work was so confusing.”
The other students laughed uncomfortably. It was as if she had slapped me in the face. Would I be validated only when I wrote about that which did not mark me as different?
What if the only people who would ever understand me were Jewish?
When Isaac turned four, I tried to enroll him in kindergarten at Park East Day School, a Jewish private school on the Upper East Side. After submitting my application, I had to appear before a board to qualify for reduced tuition. The board consisted of three middle-aged Jewish men, the moneyed Jews of upper Manhattan, who asked me why I hadn’t enrolled Isaac in the community I came from.
That was the funny thing about Jews that I discovered after I left. The cliquey group mentality that I had sought to escape existed in all the other communities I could find. Everybody was an “us.” I was always an outsider.
“Why don’t you just put him in a Satmar school?” one board member asked, his voice blatantly accusing.
“Because I want him to have a high school diploma someday. I want him to have a shot at a real education.”
“But why us? Why should we take responsibility for you?”
I took a deep breath. I steadied my voice. When I spoke it was quietly and respectfully.
“Chas V’sholom,” I said, a Yiddish expression, the equivalent of “God forbid.” “It’s definitely not your responsibility. I have faith that everything happens for a reason. If for some reason my son goes to public school, I know that will be because he was meant to. That won’t be your responsibility.”
I knew these were fighting words. One of the men raised his finger as if to lecture me, but his colleague reached over to touch his arm, restraining him. He turned to me and assured me that Isaac would be accepted.
But my son did not do well in that conformist environment. Much like the community I had grown up in, this Upper East Side congregation was composed of people with similar incomes, backgrounds, and ideals. I had taken Isaac from one uniform environment and plunked him down into another, except here he was doomed to be an outsider by virtue of his different parentage. It was exactly the same issue that had marked my own childhood, branding me an outcast. How could I sentence him to the same experience when the whole purpose of everything I’d done was to save him from it?
Was it the case, I worried, that we could never hope to find a community, Jewish or not, that would match up with the vocabulary we had acquired, the words we used to define the meaning of our own existence?
I could not, no matter how hard I struggled to, carve out a life for us in the full-to-bursting city that was Manhattan. I could barely carve out a space to breathe. I found myself disappearing into churches just to steal a few moments of silence; unlike most synagogues, they were left open to the public every day. I would sit in one of the rear pews, trying not to make any noise. What would I say if a pastor came out and saw me there? Staring straight ahead at the figure of Jesus on the cross, I’d wrestle with old feelings of guilt at being in a church (as a child, I would have to cross the street and walk on the other side, so evil were those imposing buildings) and the new, rational voice in my head that said, this is just a place, and whatever it might mean to others, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean to you.
Sometimes, in Catholic churches, there were candles that could be lit for a donation, and although I wasn’t sure what they were for, I sometimes lit them, just to see the flame flicker. I’d nurture some strange hope that by igniting something outside myself, I could ignite something internally as well.
I endured by waiting for things to get better. I had never tricked myself into thinking that these early years would be easy, and so I suffered gladly under the notion that it was all temporary, that eventually I would figure out how to live the life I wanted, the one I had given everything up for.
I was in my early twenties and raising a child, therefore not a typical denizen of New York. I had no resources. I went on a few bad dates with people who injured my self-esteem simply because I hadn’t yet acquired the language with which to communicate nor the padding with which to protect myself. My friends donated their old clothes to me, so I was able to wear the designer fashions that allowed me to blend in on the Upper East Side. They took me out to nice restaurants, and I was given a front-row seat at the show that is New York City. And the more I learned about people’s lives, the more convinced I became that this was not the life I wanted as a replacement. But I could still read books. And Isaac and I spent many Sundays at the Met or the Museum of Natural History, and it was those moments that reminded me why I had done it all. I held on to the hope that I would eventually be able to create a life for us.
To meet the gap between my meager income and the exorbitant rent, I donated my eggs. I pinched the fold of skin on my hip twice a day for a cold injection of hormones until my ovaries swelled to the size of grapefruits and six dozen eggs were harvested from me on some anonymous operating table in New Jersey. It took six months for my period to come back, messy and painful like a miscarriage. This couldn�
��t possibly be worth it, I thought then. Why was I continuing to struggle for the right to live in a city that brought me no sense of satisfaction or home? But where could I go? New York was the only place I had ever known.
It was Jean Baudrillard’s America that first gave me the idea of driving across the country, just after I stopped attending college. I read the book in the winter of 2010, after finding the new revised edition on a table in my favorite bookstore, and immediately became fascinated with the prospect of discovering the American landscape that was so foreign to me. I was yet unaware of the great tradition started by de Tocqueville, that of the European tour of the New World, but in many ways I already identified as a refugee in the country of my birth, and I felt a compelling need to experience it up close in an effort to define myself within or without its limits.
As a child, my idea of America had been reduced to the skyline of Manhattan, to the mass of the Atlantic that separated my community from its troubled past on the other side. America was the place to which we had come, a stop on the diaspora route, nothing more. Now here I was, exiled from a community of self-imposed exiles, neither a part of my past nor of my present. If I was an American, how was I to be one?
When I had read the great American writers, I’d found myself struggling to identify with the motives of their characters. I could not decipher the language of their culture or place their actions in any context. In Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I found the most sympathy in the stories that took place in Europe. I felt at home in A Moveable Feast, in This Side of Paradise, both for the descriptions of old European culture that felt so familiar and for the depiction of the alien on foreign soil. I came back to the old European writers for comfort, and ventured into Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck only when I felt brave enough to do so.
So I took Kerouac’s On the Road with me on the flight out to San Francisco in June of 2011, while Isaac spent the requisite portion of his summer vacation with his father. I hoped to gain insight into the American tradition of the road trip, the sort of aimless back-and-forth momentum that kept Sal and Dean swinging like a pendulum over the map of the United States. What was the source of this restlessness that kept them from settling in one spot and calling it a permanent home? Was it some grand appetite for the giant parcel of land that was their birthright, a desire to claim it all as one’s own?
Exodus: A memoir Page 12