She pulled her main dissertation advisor Cliff Conrad’s first book off the shelf. She had read it for a senior seminar at Columbia, and it inspired her to go to Princeton as his grad student. Legible Promises: American Transformations in Puritan Diaries and Sermons, 1636–1740 had won numerous awards and established Conrad’s career. Its title was a quote from Cotton Mather: “America is legible in [God’s] promises.” New England preachers saw America as a place to re-create the narrative of an errand into the wilderness of Israel by a chosen people. Her research, in the actual country of Israel, was studying members of the original elect people, also going voluntarily on their own mission of return. She felt both anxiety and excitement to know that Conrad was interested in her work for its extension of the lineage of his own, and hoped she was up to the responsibility of upholding his high standards of scholarship and writing.
Conrad’s serious work on American religion at the beginning of his career had marked him as a maverick. His advisors had encouraged him, but they didn’t share his interest in American religion as a subject worth a major study, particularly for a dissertation and first book. It was thought at Yale’s religion department in the sixties, the time he was working on his dissertation, that to develop a body of work of any stature one must work with some kind of philosophical phenomenon, preferably something involving lots of German, which would lend an imprimatur of heft and gravity to even the most trivial of subjects. There was still the attitude that American religious thinkers were less important subjects for study than their European counterparts. Conrad had persisted, his career ascending with that of his advisor, Sydney Ahlstrom, one of the first to examine a trajectory of American religion as a central part of American culture. In the course of his career, Conrad had worked with documents ranging from Puritan diaries in his own dissertation, to New Age religious narratives in which people experience some kind of sudden revelation that enables them to change their lives and, in the process, earn gobs of money with a bestseller about the experience. Conrad’s interest in these New Age narratives stemmed from his sense of them as part of the continuity of American religious expression and ideology of selfhood that has made America unique. Conrad had never looked at any non-Christian narratives; he was excited about Wendy’s project because it built on his own work and extended its reach by venturing forth to unknown Jewish territory. It didn’t hurt Wendy’s chances for future academic success that Conrad was known across the country. Her primary advisor had even reached the pinnacle of success for a public intellectual—he had been a guest on daytime television talk shows that he and his peers in the academy are aware of but never admit to watching.
Wendy lifted a third book from her shelf. Entitled, primly, Meaning in the Field, she had been told it was required reading by her anthropologist adviser, Violet Dohrmann. It was about the trickiness of the researcher adjusting her or his relations with subjects to a comfortable and appropriate level. One wants to be absorbed with a culture, but not to the dreaded extent of going native. Dohrmann had told her, “Immerse yourself in your host culture; you will be changed by it too, if you do your fieldwork properly. Yet, your hosts, particularly the community of Israeli returnees, may not always recognize your outsider status. They are always on the lookout for another recruit.” Then Dohrmann had told Wendy about her niece Ellen, raised in a good secular Jewish household and educated at Smith like Violet and her sister. Her niece went around the world on a spiritual sojourn in the early seventies, arrived in Israel, and became a religious Jew. It was the first personal information Dohrmann had ever volunteered to Wendy. That was the funny thing about this line of research, Wendy mused: it always seemed to elicit much more personal reactions, from questioner and respondent, than the average discussion of academic research.
Wendy started reading, figuring it would be good preparation for her first Sabbath, learning to immerse herself in the lives of religious people, at least for one Friday night dinner.
THREE
Sabbath Peace
As much as the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.
—AHAD HA-AM
An hour before the Sabbath, Wendy and her elderly landlady, Amalia Hausman, hailed a cab at the nearest bus stop and headed to the apartment of Amalia’s granddaughter and her new husband. After they climbed the three flights slowly, at the apartment’s door Shani, the granddaughter, and her new husband, Asher, greeted them. Asher took Amalia’s bag to the spare bedroom, and Wendy handed Shani the bakery packages of assorted cookies and the elaborate cake with ornate sugared confections on top, tiers of cake and parve cream within, that she had procured from the winding alleys of Mahane Yehuda.
“You asked me to bring whatever makes Shabbos for me, so I have desserts here,” Wendy uttered cheerfully. Nothing had ever “made Shabbos” for Wendy, but she figured that any dinner could be worth sitting through if there were good pastry at its conclusion.
Shani squealed, “Oh, Wendy, Marzipan Bakery,” reading the name on the boxes. “Did my cousin Leora tell you it’s my favorite?”
“I spotted the bakery with the longest line, and figured,” she shrugged her shoulders, “it must be the best.”
Shani carefully positioned the boxes, along with the homemade gefilte fish Amalia brought, on the counter of her tiny kitchen. Asher excused himself to take a shower, while Shani scuttled around the apartment, turning on and off lights, asking her grandmother what else she should remember, plugging timers and appliances in, pulling electric cords out.
Wendy and Amalia were put to work setting the table. Wendy stretched out the white cloth while Amalia tugged the other end. They arranged the apparatus of ingestion: plates, cups, forks, knives, spoons, napkins, Kiddush cups, salt, challah board, and cutting knife. All was arrayed for the eight people who would just about fit into the space.
Wendy walked around, laying a plate here, a napkin there, counting to be sure there was enough of everything. The rhythmic repetitiveness of this task, the assurance that there was a place for each person, felt soothing as she placed the items around the table. She felt recaptured by pleasant childhood memories, since table setting had long been marked as Wendy’s chore, a good task for the youngest in her family. She remembered Friday afternoons of her youth when she and her mother set the table together before her brother Joel, sister Lisa, and father Arthur returned from school and work. These moments provided an intimacy for Sylvia and Wendy to talk, quietly, peaceably. The week over, setting the table delivered them to the relaxed zone of weekend time, unfettered them temporarily from the tensions and constraints of the week. Wendy felt nostalgic for those Friday evenings of her youth. I should have called my parents earlier today, when it was early morning for them and they were still home, she thought, reflecting on her own youth and home as she readied that of someone else for family togetherness. Other than calling them after her arrival, Wendy hadn’t given much thought to her family, busy as she was preparing herself for her new life, figuring out what things she would need to be comfortable in this new country. Something about the onset of the Sabbath tugged at even her frayed and dispassionate feelings about her parents. It wasn’t—Wendy thought, noting how Shani looked so pleased to see her grandmother, as she came in to inspect their work on the table—that she didn’t love her parents; she did. It was that she wanted them to be people other than who they were, people who were more thoughtful and intellectual, who had opinions on things, who read the New Yorker for the writing and stories as she did, not for the gossipy, short Talk of the Town pieces, cultural listings, and cartoons. Wendy wanted them to love her for who she was and wanted to be, and it seemed currently that she was in the business of disappointing them mightily, ever since she announced that her grad school applications would be in the field of religion and not law. Wendy saw Shani hug her grandmother and speak to her in Hebrew, and so remained lost in her thoughts about whether, even though she missed her parents now, they would ever change their disapproving attitude enough to a
llow her to feel closer to them.
Asher came out of the bedroom, cleanly shaven, dressed in the Israeli male Shabbat uniform of white short-sleeved button-down shirt, black pants, sandals, and white crocheted kipah with a navy and turquoise-blue diamond pattern around its rim.
“Haven’t you benched licht already, Shani?” Asher said, looking at his watch. He steered the three women to the living room corner where a small table covered by a white cotton runner with a lace embellishment held two sets of candlesticks. A third set was quickly produced. Before Wendy had time to protest, Shani said, “We’ll each light and then say the bracha together.” Wendy’s impulse was to put her hands in her pockets, step away, and disengage, but the skirt Shani asked her to wear lacked a place to hide her hands. Wendy stood behind as first Amalia and then Shani lit their candles. Shani handed her a kindled match, blazing.
Holding the ignited match, Wendy stepped forward to place it on the wicks. It felt so ordinary, holding flame to wick. She remembered reading an interview in a piece she admired about the symbolism of Sabbath candles to the newly religious, which juxtaposed what women said when asked to speak about their religious observances in an essay written expressly for the school they were attending, and afterwards in a follow-up interview with the sociologist. One returnee spoke in her essay of the magic of lighting Shabbes candles: that the candle detonated an explosion of the sacred into her home. The woman said she felt like a superhero action figure. Wendy had made up a title for her, Wonder Woman of the Numinous, as she herself merely put the candle to the flame, no supernal power summoned. The whole account, written for the school in the article, seemed exaggerated and ridiculous—Pow! Blam! Boom!—an attempt to make a dull life seem more exciting.
Actually, the article, by exposing the gap between what the baalei teshuvah wrote expressly for the school and what they said in conversation, was a great model of how a researcher got subjects to speak about their feelings about religious practices. Wendy loved the section about conversation, how the speakers sounded like those who had no excitement in their lives trying desperately to seem like they did; it reminded Wendy of girls she knew in high school who were obsessed with soap operas because the thrill in the sensationalized fictional world made the girls themselves more interesting for being absorbed in it, this drama so disconnected from their actual lives. What irritated Wendy most so far about baalei teshuvah was their flatness, like the dull girls in high school; many BT’s were white kids from the suburbs trying to glom on to a newly ethnic identity to give their bland lives some spice. She’d have to write about that—Did baalei teshuvah exaggerate to make themselves seem more interesting? How would she put on exhibit and showcase the various sides of the ways they spoke about themselves? Her notebook was in her bag—could she sneak off to take notes in the bathroom?
Now, Shani and Amalia covered their eyes and recited the blessing. Wendy stood to the side, having moved over after she touched flame to wick. Reluctantly and slowly, she followed their gestures and summoned her hands over her eyes. She felt like she was back in Hebrew school with someone telling her to read the foreign alphabet, when she didn’t want to make a mistake or embarrass herself, hoping to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Wendy recited the blessing in an undertone, echoing Shani and Amalia, and quickly removed her hands from her eyes. She gazed at Shani and Amalia, their hands lingering over their eyes, standing in front of the candles, obviously deep in recitation of some kind of private prayer that Wendy was unaware of, though she had lit candles with her mother for her whole life at home. Shani removed her hands from her eyes and gave her grandmother a big “good Shabbos” hug.
Candles lit, Wendy felt a shift in the apartment. She couldn’t pinpoint its source. The contrast between smoldering candles suffusing the room, and the last glimmerings of natural light outside, or something in Shani’s mood? Now Shani hugged Wendy, all her movements leisurely and unhurried rather than her previous bustling and stress. Wendy was a bit stunned at the hug, this unprecedented level of intimacy for someone she had met moments ago, but she hugged back, mustering her gratitude for the family’s trust in her as a tenant.
The four of them headed off for the synagogue after a quick glance around the apartment to be sure the food was warming properly and the key was with them. Shani held one of Amalia’s arms and one of Asher’s, while Wendy followed behind the threesome. As they walked through the quiet streets, Wendy was startled at how the city had shut down.
No cars zooming about the street, or bicycles careening in their lanes. No kids goofing around on the sidewalk. The contrast with the clamor and commotion on the street a few hours earlier was stark. It felt to Wendy like a Sunday morning in the suburbs, an indolence overtaking the residents, no one rushing to be anywhere. A general somnolence pervaded the streets, yet it mixed with an effervescence beneath the surface, a rejuvenation in the calm.
When they arrived at what they indicated was the synagogue, all Wendy could see was an ordinary cement box, a school building plunked down, without design consultations, in a spot where the Jerusalem municipality granted the land. Asher took Amalia’s elbow and helped her ascend the steep cement steps at the school’s side to the top level.
Shani turned to Wendy, “It’s probably not what you are used to in a shul.”
Wendy, heaving herself up the narrow stairs, replied, “Synagogues in the States have to be handicapped accessible. This would never make code,” she said, nearly slipping on the cramped steps.
“Adjust your perceptions. You’ll see how special Shir Tzion is once you experience the davening,” Shani added.
Once up the steps and inside, they faced a door, which led to a large gymnasium. They entered separately; Asher stayed to the right, the men’s section, while the three women filed through the back of the men’s section to the left, partitioned off by white muslin curtains on metal frames, hung by what appeared to be round metal shower hooks. There was no art or decor on the walls. Nothing in this space suggested an arena in which to access the sacred. Basketball hoops mounted on either side of the room appeared like heads of a netted animal overseeing the proceedings. The metal folding chairs were of the most clattering and uncomfortable variety.
Wendy couldn’t see the men on the other side of the divider from her seat next to Shani in the middle of the women’s section. She felt disgruntled and disempowered, unseen and unnecessary: They are leading the service; we are here to answer amen and look pretty. But she thought next, It isn’t my life, these Orthodox synagogues. I’ll go to a liberal congregation, or none, next week. I need to just remember that being here is fieldwork. Violet will be proud. And strictly speaking, most of this group isn’t my population since they are religious from birth like Shani. I can just see what is happening, experience it, without thinking about my dissertation. Wendy looked around as the afternoon service wended its way through the litany of words. The prayer leader standing in front was the only man she could see clearly. Women were continuing to enter, a gentle flow of bodies filling up the space, most of them around the age of herself and Shani, though there were older women with older children and young mothers with babies in slings attached to their hips, cradling their offspring as they walked. There was also a sprinkling of women in Amalia’s generation, white and gray hairs still piously covered.
The elegant and colorful dress of the women—long skirts and matching headscarves in vibrant summer prints—contrasted with the overall dinginess of the gym and the thin crust of dust on the floor. Wendy mentally compared the site to the suburban synagogue she grew up attending, Beth Tikvah, with its immaculately kept premises, never a burnt-out lightbulb anywhere. The building was in pristine physical condition, an underutilized empty shell most of the year, except during the High Holidays. Wendy liked those fall holidays, with the hullabaloo of jumbled people, the bathroom where she and her friends tried to spend as much time as possible, to not be in the sanctuary. The restroom overflowed with various excesses and sme
lls from the massive hordes that contrasted with its top-of-the-line fixtures and carefully planned color scheme. Wendy found something about the swarming crowds irresistible; the sheer numbers of worshippers emitted an energy that the synagogue lacked during the rest of the year. The assemblage on an ordinary summer Friday evening, here in this school gym, seemed more akin to a High Holiday crowd in the States, especially in its variety.
Wendy turned to Shani and asked, “Is there a bar mitzvah or wedding? There are so many people.”
Keeping her rhythmic back and forth rocking motion in prayer going, Shani replied mechanically, still poring over her prayer book, “It’s always this way.”
Shani handed Wendy the prayer book she herself had been using, opened at the proper page, and took the one Wendy had been clutching, closed, in hopes that the tighter her grip, the easier it would be to follow.
As Shani handed the book to Wendy, Wendy observed that a new guy had gone to the lectern at the front of the gym to switch places with the one who had been leading the weekday afternoon service. Wendy was surprised to see that both men were wearing informal clothing, the equivalent of casual Friday dress in the States: white button-down shirt, black pants, and sandals.
As the buzz of humming from the wordless tune started by the prayer leader grew from a softer and soothing to a more joyous and raucous level, Wendy found herself relaxing, feeling calm, closing her eyes. She realized, suddenly, the tune was familiar from Friday nights at her Jewish summer camp, Kodimoh.
Questioning Return Page 4