Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  I imagine some version of this ancient conversation, the script of which appears in Deuteronomy 6, takes place on our block most days. “I don’t care what other people do. We aren’t other people. You are not having ice cream, because we had chicken for dinner. You are not riding your bike, because it’s Shabbos. You’re not wearing that, because it’s not tznius. We are Jews, and these are the rules that Hashem gave us, and that’s final.”

  A life lived in single-hearted dedication to a high calling, and in rejection of all distractions from that calling, is not an easy one. Many of us, at times when life was tense and the future insecure, have made great resolutions. “If the tests come back from the lab negative,” we tell ourselves, “I will never take anything for granted again. I’ll quit smoking and go to Church every week and be more patient with the kids. I’ll be a different person.”When the danger is past, we launch into our new lives full of energy and excitement and gratitude, but after a while we get accustomed to feeling safe. Our acute awareness of how precious and precarious life is grows dimmer, and our old bad-tempered, lazy habits creep back.

  This is what happens to us, and it’s what happens to the Israelites when they reach the Promised Land. They begin the struggle to stay faithful and obedient and to make manifest in their national life the vision of God’s holiness they had been given. There are good times—conquest and stability and blessings. But sooner or later they go and do pretty much everything they were warned not to do. Before you know it, the people are demanding a king, “like other nations,”when the whole point is that they are supposed to be unlike other nations. God, rather ruefully, gives them Saul—a good-looking kid from an unremarkable family. At first he is humble and obedient and grateful, and he remembers where he came from and who made him king. God blesses him: his mind is clear, his enemies fall before him, and Israel is at peace. But eventually he begins to listen to the voice that hisses in his heart, “Says who? I’m the king; I’m in charge here, and I make my own decisions.”He then begins a tragic slide into a wilderness of paranoia, sleeplessness, and rage. Saul’s story is the human story, the story of Adam and Eve, the story of all of us when we brush off, in irritation, the notion that we are not, in fact, the final authorities on our own lives and deeds. And Saul’s dark fate is a foreshadowing of the darkness in Israel’s future.

  The darkness is still some way off, though. After Saul comes David, the man after God’s own heart. His story, up to a certain point, is the same as Saul’s: he begins with humility and courage but soon gets so used to the power and privilege of kingship that he abuses them shockingly and betrays both God and his own nature. But David sees what he has done, takes responsibility, and begs God to create a clean heart and renew a right spirit in him. He gives us a powerful language of repentance and humility that is as immediate as it is ancient, and his example is as crucial for Christians’ understanding of holiness as it is for Jews’. David’s story is the story of the hope that lies beyond darkness.

  David’s son Solomon asks for and receives from God such wisdom that his fame spreads throughout the nations; during his reign the Temple is built and Israel reaches the height of its power, wealth, and prestige. By now the wilderness years are a long time in the past, and it seems that nothing can threaten Israel, that she will go from strength to strength. To consolidate Israel’s supremacy and security, Solomon does what all kings do: he makes allegiances with neighboring kings by marrying their daughters. And in his old age, as wise as he is, his love for his foreign wives turns his heart from exclusive love of God. He drifts so far from the way of holiness into the normal patterns of international politics and diplomacy that he builds shrines to his wives’ gods. Solomon’s state-sponsored idolatry is a final and fatal violation of the holiness by which Israel stands or falls. So she falls. After Solomon’s death the nation splits into two rival kingdoms, and they begin a long descent into chaos, idolatry, corruption, materialism, injustice—becoming more and more like everybody else and less and less like the Holy One.

  The prophets, scorching or imploring or bitter, break their hearts trying to get the people to see themselves as God sees them, to understand what they are doing to themselves, and to turn and be healed. But few people listen, and things go from bad to worse. Eventually the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria, and ten tribes are swallowed up and lost to history. The southern kingdom hangs on longer, but their worship of God is a shallow, ceremonial affair—a far cry from the holiness to which they are called—and is not enough to sustain a society that is increasingly corrupt, materialistic, and hollow. A couple of kings walk in the footsteps of David, making sincere attempts to stop the rot and turn their people back to holiness. But their reforms die with them. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon sees his chance; he attacks Jerusalem, destroys the Temple, and ravages the land. The survivors are left to starve in the ruins while the Babylonians take the elite—those who know how to build granaries and write poems and compose music and design irrigation systems—back home with them as slaves.

  The exiles are far from home, their society devastated, their covenant with God (it must have seemed) finally ruptured. The only sensible thing for them to do is make the best of it: settle down, learn the local customs, learn to think of this foreign land as home, marry Babylonians, worship the local gods, blend in, and try to forget. Some of them probably do. But many refuse to do the sensible thing. They refuse to assimilate, to put the past behind them, to blend into the background—just as our neighbors refuse to give up their odd traditions and their odd clothes and disappear into the melting pot of American culture. The stiff-necked Jews cling stubbornly to their identity and keep alive the memory of the Law, even though they seem to have lost forever the blessings of land and nationhood that the Law was supposed to bring. They remember and are sustained by the words of the prophets, who spoke of the purifying fire of God’s anger and also of his enduring love and faithfulness.

  They remember and they do not give up hope. When, in one of the strangest reversals of fortune in all of history, Cyrus of Persia conquers the Babylonian Empire and decides to send the captives back to their own land, the Jews in Babylon have no doubt that, whatever Cyrus thinks his motives are, he is actually a tool in the hand of a God whom he does not know: the God of Israel, the Holy God who called them to be holy like him. The exiles’ return to their home is not easy; their old enemies are not happy to see them back and do everything they can to stop their regaining control of the region. But having overcome all the odds of history, they are not going to let a few hostile armies stop them. Working under enormous pressure, they rebuild the walls and the Temple.

  A greater challenge than that of restoring Jerusalem is rebuilding their culture, rededicating themselves to being the holy nation it was their God-given destiny to be. Instead of the magisterial promises and warnings of Moses or the anguish and exultation of the prophets, this time they have as their guide the tireless, vehement harangues of Nehemiah.

  Nehemiah is one of my favorite people in the Bible. He has one of the stiffest necks of all time, and he is determined, absolutely determined with every fiber of his being, that Israel is not going to mess up again. Nobody, but nobody, is going to break the Law on his watch. And it’s always his watch. He patrols the city, the book of the Law of Moses in hand.He snoops; he bullies; he pokes his nose into people’s lives and businesses and bedrooms. Where he finds that things are not being done according to the Law, he sets things straight—immediately and forcefully. He comes across people bringing goods in and out of the city for trade on the Sabbath. He writes:

  Then I remonstrated with the nobles of Judah and said to them, “What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the sabbath day? Did not your ancestors act in this way, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring more wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. . . . If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.” From that time on they did not come on the sabbath. . . . Remember this also in m
y favor, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love. (Neh. 13:17–18, 21b, 22b)

  No sooner has Nehemiah pushed Israel into proper compliance with Sabbath law than he comes across another problem: one that makes him even angrier. Some of the settlers married women from the surrounding nations and had children who did not even speak Hebrew. With the mortar hardly dry on the Temple, they were already slipping back into laziness, leaving the high and hard calling of kodesh, of being different. This time Nehemiah really loses it.

  And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, “You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not King Solomon of Israel sin on account of such women? Among the many nations there was no king like him . . . ; nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin. Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?” (Neh. 13:25–27)

  This goes deeply against the grain of contemporary America, where we are inclined to admire the courage and creativity needed to build families and communities and traditions out of diverse cultural materials. But my Orthodox neighbors are wholeheartedly on Nehemiah’s side. They have not forgotten what Solomon’s love for his foreign princesses did to Israel, and they regard intermarriage as a betrayal of their calling, as well as a serious threat to the survival of Judaism.

  “Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign,” Nehemiah says. “Remember me, O my God, for good” (Neh. 13:30a, 31b). I love the way Nehemiah reports proudly back to God. He must have gotten on everybody’s nerves and made a lot of enemies, but he never for a second doubted that he was doing the right thing: acting in the best interests of the people whom he was cursing and threatening and beating.

  I am sure that God does indeed remember Nehemiah. History certainly does. The Judaism that Nehemiah legislated and bullied and nagged into place held and is still holding. Against all logic and reason, and in defiance of all the horrors of history, Jews have survived and remembered who they are, where they came from, and to whom they owe their allegiance. They have remembered and obeyed not just when things went well—when they had cisterns and vineyards and olive groves—but also when they had nothing, when the Temple was destroyed again, when they were driven into exile, when their villages were burnt by laughing Cossacks, when they were locked in ghettos and starved, when they were hoarded into cattle trucks and gas chambers.

  All this—the persecution and violence and hatred and suffering—would have ended if only they had been willing to stop being so stubbornly different and just blend in. But their necks are very, very stiff, and once they turned to God, they did not turn away again. And here they are, on my block, in their funny hats and long skirts and wigs, peppering their conversations with strange, guttural foreign words, totally ignoring all the normal things that everybody else does—Christmas shopping, American Idol, tank tops, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese—stubbornly and cheerfully weird and countercultural and holy, not the least bit like other people. And a constant reminder to me that the ways of the Holy God are not like our ways.

  5

  Good Shabbos

  Nehemiah got very bent out of shape about violations of the Sabbath. After he chewed out the nobles of Judah, he locked down the city at sundown on Friday and posted guards at the gates. For the first couple of weeks, the merchants camped outside the gates, hoping, presumably, to pick up some business from passersby. When Nehemiah found out about this, he threatened them, with his usual vigor, and they finally got the message. For Nehemiah it was clear that Israel’s failure to observe the Sabbath was one of the sins that had led to their exile. The commandment about Sabbath is right up there at the top of the Ten Commandments, alongside the prohibitions against idolatry and graven images. Once again it is about holiness—honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Part of Israel’s calling to be a nation utterly unlike other nations is the instruction to set apart one day—the last day of the week, the day on which God rested after the work of creation—and to make it utterly unlike other days.

  The separateness of the Sabbath—which runs from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday—from the other six days of the week is one of the most distinctive features of Orthodox life. Like every detail of the Torah, the commandment about honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy has been interpreted and debated and elaborated on through the centuries. The most important bit of interpretation identifies the prohibited work as the thirty-nine activities involved in building the Temple, so on Shabbos (the Hebrew word my neighbors use) you can’t do anything that the Jews are recorded as having done while working on the Temple. This rules out writing, sewing, building, washing, buying, selling, carrying, tearing (on Friday night some families take the toilet paper out of the bathroom and put a box of tissues in instead—or so my children tell me; it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation if you’re older than ten), and thirty-one other things.

  The prohibition that probably has the greatest impact is that against kindling a fire. This, in the judgment of the rabbis whose work it has been to guide Jewish life through an ever-changing world, includes anything that creates a spark, including internal combustion engines. The most obvious effect of this is that observant Jews can’t drive on Shabbos. The beat-up vans, cluttered with car seats, strewn with cookie crumbs, and occasionally decorated with Yiddish bumper stickers, park on Friday night and don’t move for twenty-five hours. The families who crowd into them on the other six days of the week walk to shul in their best clothes. But there’s a lot more to it than not driving. Going twenty-four hours in the modern world without using electricity involves a serious reorganization of life. No turning lights on and off, no cooking, no hot water, no telephones. Getting ready for Shabbos is a big rush: a whole day’s worth of meals need be cooked and set on a low heat to keep warm, and everybody needs to take showers before the sun goes down. On Friday afternoon the grocery store up the road is full of men with big hats and small children. I can imagine harried women in chaotic kitchens yelling, “Two hours to go and we’re out of eggs! Go get some, would you? And we could use some pasta while you’re there. And take these kids with you before I step on one of them!”

  People make arrangements. Jewish tradition agrees with Jesus that Shabbos is made for man and not man for Shabbos. If you need to take your child to the emergency room, you put her in the car and go without giving it a second thought. And whatever you can do to keep life as smooth as possible is fine. There are timers for lights, special settings on stoves, and so on; so the things that need to get done can, without anybody doing anything that will create a spark.

  But occasionally it goes wrong and someone forgets to set the timer or a kid turns on a light in the bedroom or a plate on the stove overheats and starts to look dangerous. This is where my family comes in. Every now and then someone will come and knock on our door—of course, they can’t ring the bell—to ask us to turn on the furnace or the bathroom light. I love being called on as a Shabbos goy. If I hear the loud telltale knock at the door, I race Glen so I can get there first and be the one to help. Partly it’s that I take a childish pleasure in little errands and petty usefulness on any day of the week. More than that, however, I have come to like being part of Shabbos. The day does not enter our neighborhood with the grand drama in which it comes to the Western Wall, but we certainly notice it; we are aware of the sun going down on Fridays in a way we are not the rest of the week. As we unwind at the end of the week, we often find ourselves drifting out onto the porch to watch and wave as people walk by on the way to shul. Shabbos has become part of the rhythm of our lives.

  But unless someone needs me to unscrew the bulb in the refrigerator that they forgot about, we rarely see our neighbors on Shabbos. The kids who are in and out of our house all week are not allowed to come because they must be in a “Shabbos house.”
And although our kids are welcome at their houses, I don’t generally let them go, as I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be in the way. My friends always told me that they love Shabbos, but quite frankly, I never believed them. Until recently I assumed that Shabbos observance was a big nuisance—some sort of penitential thing that Jews had to make the best of and pretended to like for the benefit of outsiders. When someone summoned me as a Shabbos goy, I would do the job, chat for a couple of minutes, and then leave, assuming that they would find it an irritation to have me hanging around watching them navigate all the annoying rules.

  My attitude changed suddenly and completely when I stopped by Ahuva’s for some reason one Shabbos afternoon. An appetizing smell was coming from the kitchen; Yaakov and Simcha were doing puzzles on the floor; Yosef was bent over a Hebrew book at the table; Dovid was trying to stand on his head. Something about the scene struck me as peculiar, but it took me a minute to figure out what it was. Ahuva has eight children, runs a catering business from home, heads fund-raising for the Day School, works in the mikveh every evening from her children’s bedtime until her own, and sews most of the clothes for her own family and lots of other people besides. She is perpetually on the move, manhandling toddlers and shopping bags in and out of the car with her sleeves rolled up, flour on her nose, needles stuck through her shirt, and the cell phone clipped to her belt ringing every two minutes. In years I don’t think I had ever seen her sit down for three minutes at a time, even during meals. But here she was lying on the sofa with the little ones lolling against her, listening to Dina read a sci-fi novel. She couldn’t cook; she couldn’t sew; she couldn’t shop; she didn’t have to answer the phone. She just had to be.