by Leah Lax
Chopping, stirring, my face in the steam, and there comes a flood of memories about a girl who once thought she’d write her own future and also have her religion. You were a kid. You needed structure. I tell myself. You did the right thing. And then the retort: But I wanted religion to be a mast for my sail. I just wanted enough structure to hold me up.
It doesn’t matter anymore, I tell myself. You’re not that kid taking a seat in Rabbi Goldenberg’s class. You’re not even the girl breathless with arrival at the institute, or the one who peered down through scratched glass at a sea of black hats. You’re here now, an adult. Think of the kids. You wouldn’t dare be seen at that conference.
I could offer to be one of the speakers. That wouldn’t get me into trouble.
A number of us in the community have experience in public speaking. That’s part of our outreach, our job, presenting our take on Judaism to non-Hasidic women at Hadassah meetings, B’nai B’rith groups, sisterhoods. I think of the legions of young Hasidic men on street corners in Manhattan asking people if they are Jewish and handing out our own kind of brochures, and of the emissaries like Rabbi Frumen who have spread out around the globe. If the First Texas Conference on Feminism and Judaism were to choose me, Levi would be proud of my taking the Rebbe’s message into such a foreign place. I could go under that guise.
That’s when I get the nerve. I know I won’t be able to say what I really want to say. The truth is, I don’t even want to speak—I just want to see those women, maybe have a single unscripted chat. But still I wipe my hands on my apron and go back to the desk, where I pull out a legal pad and a ballpoint pen.
This is the part I won’t tell Levi: in my proposal, I don’t offer to teach anything. I don’t want to stand above those women in smug holiness and champion Orthodoxy. I simply offer myself, as a Hasidic woman, for an open conversation. I pause and jot a list of words in the margin to be sure to include: Dialogue. Mutual respect.
IT’S OCTOBER, the last days of Houston summer. Leibl left for yeshiva in Brooklyn, and it seems as if the house has expanded. Even little Shalom goes to school for a few hours each day, but I still refuse to return to teaching. I’m at the Hilton Hotel downtown following my escort to a conference room set up for a speaker. She’s a smiling woman with bright lipstick whom I met at the WELCOME! table.
“How many other speakers are there in this time slot?” I ask.
“Four,” she says.
“Competition,” I say. “Will anyone show for this?”
“You’ll get a few,” she says.
I chose my outfit in an effort to blend in. The wig is freshly coiffed to look as natural as possible, and the skirt of my navy suit falls boldly above the modesty line. My knees even show. But as we walk, we pass women in casual slacks, some even in jeans or cropped pants, with short-sleeved tops that show their elbows and open necklines, with their real hair shining under the fluorescent light. My daring hemline challenge to the Law goes unnoticed.
The entire back of this room is a maroon swath of frayed velvet curtain. A hotel coordinator glides across, his red jacket dissolving into the cloth. We step up onto a small stage. But everything here is muted: the man’s carpeted walk, the rustle of the audience beginning to assemble. Oh, but these women seem so unguarded. Legs crossed or even knees wide, some gesture with their hands as they talk to each other, open faces animated. I can’t even guess what they’re chatting about. I presume they have little fear of gossip or of who will marry their children.
The podium is too tall for me. My escort looks at my short frame and says, “Oh, you need a little help.” She pulls out a shallow wooden stool, and I step up, far above the eye-level place that I would have preferred.
I don’t want to represent the Lubavitch movement. I just want to be myself here. “Don’t introduce me,” I say. “I mean, please just say my name.”
“Okay,” she says.
When I first arrived, I stopped at a table full of books, expecting to find classic Jewish books that I’d recognize, like finding familiar faces in a crowd, but instead there were books by Jewish feminist writers whose names I’d never heard before: Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, Judith Hauptman, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan. A glance inside a few of them made me see that the language of these women is one I don’t know. Now, from my perch, looking over the sea of women, I think, What have I done? I should leave. I’ve wandered onto the wrong stage, don’t know the plan.
“This is Leah Lax,” my escort says into the mic, in a startling, too-loud voice. The room grows quiet.
Disaster. I can’t do this, can’t even bring myself to hint at my dissent in public. Heart in my throat, I take the mic and say, “Hello. I’m Leah Lax. I am a Hasidic woman, and a woman uncompromised.”
It’s not so easy after all to break from practiced script. I clear my throat and manage to add something unplanned. “I respect those who choose consciously to live apart from Jewish Law.” But this huge, spontaneous breakout goes as unnoticed as my hemline. “I’d like to invite a conversation,” I say. I add, “Maybe you can see us Orthodox Jews as a kind of living museum preserving the old ways, and preserving active study of our ancient texts and law codes, in a way freeing others to go beyond the Law.”
A hand shoots up. “Isn’t that kind of arrogant?” she says. “There has been plenty of Jewish scholarship outside of the Orthodox community, and plenty of that was written by women.”
Scholarship of which I’m not aware. Those books on the table when I came in…. “Thank you for that,” I say. “I think I might have needed to hear it.” The courage it takes to say this goes equally unheeded.
Another calls out from her seat. “How can you stand behind the synagogue partition between the men and women? How can you do that?”
I swallow, and then I’m back in that whispering, feminine, safe place. I want them to see it, too. “In the women’s section,” I say, “we’re also separated from any posturing of the men who might be looking us over. The space is feminine, and private. A safe place. And the Hebrew prayers? They make me look at myself. The words are like mirrors. Sometimes I even cry. The space feels private enough to do that.”
“But you can’t have any leadership in the service,” the woman says.
“I know,” I say. “And maybe there is resentment at times among the women. I can’t speak for everyone. But for me, I don’t want that leadership, so I don’t miss it. For me, prayer is a quiet, private thing.”
I don’t let on that ever since Levi scoffed at Debbie’s story, since my anger has risen and my faith has waned—and ever since I added another secret to the collection, about my father’s abuse—I haven’t stepped into the synagogue. And I don’t tell them that since our women sit there as spectators inessential to the service, they don’t have to even bother to go. No one in the community has even commented about my absence, at least not to me. I also don’t tell them that I no longer think of the women’s section as a comforting place, since the quiet of prayer and the poetry in the prayer book somehow make me look at everything I’m trying to hide. But many hands are waving now. It’s a strange feeling standing before them, as if I’m letting them peek under the wig. “There is a difference,” a woman calls out, “between choosing to deny oneself and being denied by others.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I say. But another woman is raising her hand, and I point at her.
“What if you did want to?” she says.
“Want to what?” I say.
“What if you did want to lead the synagogue services or to sing out loud there?” she says. “It’s the enforced silence that is the problem,” she explains, a little too patiently. “How do you justify having no choice—to yourself? Being relegated behind the partition?”
“Choice?” I say. I don’t know how to show her the huge, ancient stream of which I am just a single drop. “No one in an Orthodox community has real choice,” I say. “That’s not just about the women. All of us subject ourselves to the Law.�
�� Then I add, like a new idea, almost as if I’m speaking to myself, “But isn’t it a choice to have no choice?”
The murmuring in the room as I stand awkwardly above them makes me think that I may have broken something and lost the chance at real connection, however brief. But then there are more hands, and now someone is standing. She has long blond hair, and she’s wearing a full, saffron-colored top with long sleeves over a flowing skirt, almost like one of us. She looks young, gives a quick motion with her head to toss her hair aside. “I’m the president of a gay and lesbian congregation,” she says, “and I’m a lesbian. Tell me, where in your picture of religion is there a place for me?”
My chest goes utterly hollow. Go away, I tell her, but no sound comes out. “I wish,” I say into the microphone, and then I stumble. “I don’t have an answer. I wish I did. I don’t think there is an answer.” This is another one of my daring violations that go unnoticed. The Law says there is always an answer. The Torah contains all answers.
The rest of the event drops from memory, perhaps because I am too nervous to absorb the rest, until my escort steps up and thanks me and the women politely applaud, then stand, consult programs, start to move and talk. Then I’m weaving through the crowd, every bit as isolated and foreign in my leaving as in my arrival, perhaps even more so. The smell of their freedom is already fading, changing nothing for me. I won’t even try to attend other sessions. I don’t belong here. Levi is at home with the children, and I need to get back. I make my way toward the door. One of the women eyes me head to toe as I pass.
At the exit, someone stops me. I read her name tag: ROSELLEN BROWN. I’ve taken to reading book news in the newspaper—her new novel, Before and After, is on the New York Times best seller list. She is short enough that I can look right into her eyes, her face intense, kind, interested, somewhat haggard. Women part and continue past us through other doors much like in my dream. “They sure gave you a hard time in there, didn’t they?” she says.
I hesitate. “I guess I kind of asked for it.”
She looks a little sideways at me with her mouth open, like she’s thinking. Then this Famous Author says to me, “I’d like to have lunch with you sometime.”
“I think I’d like that,” I stammer, but I don’t really believe her. I think, She’ll forget me by morning. The lesbian woman who stood and spoke at my talk has also stopped. She’s waiting for me. Soon, Famous Author disappears into the crowd.
“What do you need?” I ask the lesbian woman. We go to the lobby and sit down in two gold wingback chairs. Applause drifts in from one of the conference rooms. I try to sound polite, try not to sound challenging, but really, I am in way over my head and I know it. I can’t imagine a Hasidic woman anywhere sitting down to converse with a lesbian woman. Maybe I’m the first.
“I don’t need anything,” she tells me, “but there are lots of Jewish gay men and women who do.”
I sit poised, formal, defensive. She’s forcing me to represent my whole community and I did not want to do that. I came here as a place to speak for myself. I don’t respond.
“All of the Jewish movements respect Jewish Law to some degree,” she says. “As long as the Law rejects people like me, there will be echoes of that rejection in other Jewish places outside of Orthodoxy.” She is unruffled, sincere.
I soften. “I can’t change the Law,” I say.
“But you’re willing to talk with me.”
“It’s true,” I say. But then, she is the first openly lesbian woman I’ve ever met, and how could I not sit down with her, even if I do guard myself, even if I am afraid of the way she labels herself “lesbian” like she has some kind of condition? “Is talking with you enough?” I say.
“Maybe talk, women talking together, is the beginning of change,” she says.
“But I have no answers for you.”
“Some things have no answers.” A brief companionable silence settles between us. I sigh. Then I tell her, “Then there’s nothing else to say.” And there isn’t, except that I have a husband and a family and a home and a vast array of laws and expectations over my life, and her skin glows and her eyes don’t lie and I mustn’t let her get close. Nothing to say, except that my life seems more of a sham as I leave here than it did when I came. I stand up as if lifting a weight. She leans forward. “I do exist,” she says. “I’m not going away.”
Then I am walking away from her, one foot, another, across the maroon carpet, padded so that my steps away from her make no sound, steps with no weight, no truth. Ahead is a bank of elevators. Before me floats the image of the slight dimple at the right corner of her mouth, and behind, a flush of women’s voices as a program lets out, and a table full of a new language, the books forbidden to me. I can still hear her voice. I do exist. I push the button for the elevator. It glows green, like a signal that I try to ignore.
Once I get home, Rona’s face, her I do exist, will haunt me. I will remember my visceral fear when I heard her stand and announce herself as a lesbian in a public place. She will force me to pay attention to the disappointment I feel when Levi approaches after mikvah, the pained sense of isolation that he is not capable of taking away, the way he can never satisfy me. I will no longer be able to ignore those erotic dreams.
I will do my best to turn away from her image and voice. I will tell myself that I am not an aberration, that what I feel feels normal and not like some kind of sickness and thus not something to be labeled. I don’t want a label. So what if I can’t feel anything for Levi. There’s no label for not feeling, for nothingness. But her face, her voice, will follow me.
ONE NIGHT, Leibl calls after eleven o’clock at night, New York time, from the pay phone outside his Crown Heights yeshiva dormitory. I answer in the kitchen, where I’m up cooking for the Sabbath. Levi isn’t home from work. Through the phone, I hear passing traffic and a distant siren. “What are you doing outside?” I say. “Isn’t it past curfew?”
“I want to come home,” he says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. I don’t want our kids to have to feel split, like I do, and wind up living lies of the soul, like I have. “Stay,” I say, “so your life will be good.”
“The rabbi tore up my bed in the dorm.”
“He what?” I say. “Surely—”
“He shoved me against the wall. He said I didn’t make the bed right.”
“So make it right. Follow the rules, and no one will give you trouble,” I say. There’s love there for those who follow the rules, wisdom in what they teach you.
“Get me out of here!” he yells.
“No,” I say.
My no becomes an echo that pings through my body, a sound in the night keeping me awake, bouncing into the past and far into the future, wrapping around his cry.
ONE DAY, I go to the Morris Frank branch library near home, my first time going there without kids. I step out of the summer glare through sliding double doors, through the shining entry, and past a sleepy-eyed Hispanic mother sitting on the floor with her two children and a stack of picture books. I’ve been writing fiction stories but haven’t yet thought I might need to read fiction, haven’t read a novel since before I met the Hasidim. I don’t yet have a sense of rules for writing or of what it might take to hone the craft. But I know stories. Life is stories; dreams are stories. I put together pieces of what I know. Besides, my fiction characters are so real to me that it seems all I need to do is put my hands on the keyboard and watch them try to live. But I want to write poetry.
I think every word in a poem should cut deep to the core of something. But the more I try, the more I hear an undertone in my writing of the constant posturing and admonishments among the faithful. I don’t understand the connection.
I think writing a poem has to be an act of raw honesty, courageous and real. I think a real poem should demand my attention and feeling without dictating how I attend and what I feel. I don’t want promises of immortality anymore; I just want to write poems that make me open m
yself to being human. The problem is, I try, and fail. I think I might need to read published poetry to see how it’s done.
Instead of the wig, I’m wearing a scarf that keeps sliding back, exposing inches of hair to the light. Funny, I think, that I’m risking much more serious gossip in the community because of two inches of hair than because I’m in a library. Few people will bother to gossip about a woman reading secular books—devalued literature read by devalued people—as long as she trains her children to be proper Hasidim and helps her husband to stay pure of influence. Which means, I think with a smile, that I’m taking advantage of the “freedom” of being a woman.
I locate the poetry section—two dusty shelves at the end of a row at the bottom of the stack—then glance up the aisle. Just past the stacks there’s a revolving stand of periodicals, and beyond that are four vinyl chairs where an older man squints through trifocals at his newspaper. Another man sits across from him. He looks disheveled, maybe damaged, maybe homeless. He’s asleep with his mouth open. Library as refuge. My skirt billows around me as I sink to the floor.
A half hour later, I’ve laid slim books out all around, on the skirt, on the floor, and against the bottom shelf, but that’s okay because no one has come through. I know nothing about the poetry I choose or the people who wrote it. I’m simply taking home the ones that speak to me: books by Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Amy Clampitt, Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, and Adrienne Rich. I notice I’ve chosen mostly women’s voices, although I can’t explain why. I know I’ll be back for others, but I have no time left now, have to get back to the kids. I check out the books and leave the library for the mom van with arms full.
After the kids get home from school, Libby comes looking and finds me stretched on my bed, lost in a book. I’m wondering how I can make up for all the years of having not read. I look up with a blank-eyed stare that isn’t grounded in place or time, still within her grasp but slipping. “Mommy?” Libby says. When I do hear and look up, when I actually see her, I have a pang of regret like the pang of parting.