She descended to the Kotel and stood at the edge of the women’s section, the very back but not inside, so that men were passing her too as crowds began to gather for prayers. She wasn’t praying or even holding a book; her aura of being out of place caused a recruiter to spot her quickly. The recruiter was dressed in a black hat, suit, and Bruce Springsteen T-shirt on top of a white button-down shirt. He asked if she needed a place for Shabbos. On hearing her assent, he pointed to a place to wait, along with other guests of a family that hosted twenty strangers for a Shabbat dinner each week.
She waited for the father to lead the group to a huge apartment featuring a panoramic view of the Western Wall. The man of the house—she never did get the name straight—in his early sixties, was tall and fit, with the relaxed look of the prosperous man he was, a dealer in rare Judaica. His wife was at least twenty years younger. Under her wig, her face looked drawn and exhausted, her eyes had heavy circles, and she was either pregnant or lugging around extra weight from a previous pregnancy, though the youngest child appeared about four. There was clearly a kitchen staff, but the woman seemed to absorb the stress of these multiple guests while the man enjoyed playing host. Wendy felt sorry for her. It was generous of him to invite strangers to his lavishly appointed home each week, Wendy thought, but didn’t he have friends of his own to ask? There was something manufactured about the set up—did a yeshiva pay this family to do this? Wendy wanted to ask whether he had a security system, kept his most valuable pieces at the gallery he ran at the Cardo, or just had faith that no one invited to his home would steal?
The host began the meal by having each guest say what they were doing in Israel and what made them happy about Shabbat. At Wendy’s turn, she said she was taking ulpan at Hebrew University and writing a dissertation, and that seeing people buying flowers in the street on Friday was her favorite part of Shabbat. She was seated next to a girl named Dawn who had come to Israel to do an archeological dig and was spending Shabbat at a hostel in the Old City run by RISEN, a women’s division of the RISE yeshiva. On Sunday, Dawn was hoping to try out some classes at RISEN’s school, Bayit Ne’eman, in a different part of Jerusalem. Dawn’s favorite part of Shabbat was being at the Kotel.
The Sabbath blessings were intoned, everyone washed their hands at a sink built into the dining room for this purpose, and the Hamotzi was said over the bread. The wife went into the kitchen to get the first course, assisted by other female guests and a maid who appeared to be some sort of foreign worker. Wendy looked down at her plate of gefilte fish and lost any appetite. She picked at it to be polite and felt similarly when a plate of food consisting of a dollop of chopped liver, a piece of chicken with paprika and oil, a mound of white rice, and green beans cooked with tomatoes was brought to the table and put in front of her and the other guests, each plate indistinguishable, without variation. She wanted to feel grateful to her hosts for welcoming her to their home, but she just felt resentment at having such unappetizing fare in front of her. She felt like she should offer to help in the kitchen, but since a number of female guests had already volunteered, she thought any aid she could provide would be superfluous. She was there to observe, she knew, but she also wanted to know, were the observations in the kitchen as important as those at the dinner table? She didn’t want to be around the wife who looked as though all she wanted to do was go to sleep, not deal with all these guests. The father gave a talk on the Torah portion of the week as the dessert was arriving: clear plastic cups filled with red jello topped by whipped cream made from some kind of non-dairy chemical that left a film on the roof of Wendy’s mouth, like the patently artificial oil it must be derived from. Wendy couldn’t follow all of the talk, but it had to do with judgment, as the name of the portion was Shoftim, Judges. Somehow, the fact that the land of Israel was holier than the Diaspora demanded a different kind of system of judgment; it was held to a higher standard. He added that they were now in the month Elul in the Jewish calendar, and the initials of the month, alef-lamed-vov-lamed, stood for the phrase “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” which meant it was a time to draw closer to God. To truly do this, one must live a Torah-true life in Israel, he said. The message, to Wendy, held the same appeal as the chemically enhanced food did, both assuming one size fits all, that guests would wish to eat identical items and portions, and that, once given both food and message, the assembled would be delighted and willing to swallow them equally and gratefully.
At the dinner’s conclusion, Wendy left with Dawn and asked if she could visit her at Bayit Ne’eman because Wendy was, in her spare time after ulpan, hoping to take some other classes. Wendy accompanied Dawn back to the hostel she was staying at before trying to find a cab home herself.
At the hostel, she picked up one of the variety of brochures listing study programs for women. The brochure read:
Do you feel flattened by life?
Want to rise and find your full potential?
RISEN is here!
Not sure how to access the
jewels of your Jewish heritage?
WE have the keys to the treasure chest!
Come to RISEN (Rabbi Isaac Shlomo Elkeles Yeshiva, Nashim/women)
You will learn at our women’s school, Bayit Ne’eman, how to establish a Jewish home, ensuring an eternal future for the Jewish people!
Call Rebbetzin B. Now to find out more about classes and dorming options. Phone: 02 613 6334
The brochure reminded her of a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, loads of words, off base, crammed together. The pamphlet, with its large wording and simple language, made Wendy feel she was being screamed at. Who even thought women are fairy tale princesses looking for someone to give them a treasure chest of jewels? She clutched it as she made her way to the Zion Gate, where she heard there might be a cab.
On this August morning, Wendy woke with rays of the Jerusalem sun streaking into her room. She stretched her arms out in front of her and hugged herself, stretching, and feeling the warmth of the sun next to her bed mix with the overall chill of the room. She longed for the warmth of the sun, leaned out to it to warm her hands, extremities that always felt colder than the rest of her. Like the warmth of the sun, her goals existed within reach; getting to them and actually feeling their warmth was just slow. She was making up her questionnaires and working, gradually, on her first chapter, the dreaded literature review. Any sense of progress she had was in minute increments—intermittent progress, no large leaps or discoveries. Only in movies do people bound ahead, instantly.
Wendy lay back, rubbing her hands together for warmth, and ran through her day in her mind. She liked to try to keep something of the reverie of her pre-wakeful state, and stay focused on whatever had been in her sleeping head, to hold the images with her through the day as she went to sleep so that when she woke up she could have a sense of what was on her unconscious mind. She liked to know what swarming swirling blurred visions were able to make it over the barrier of the dream state into her conscious awareness in order to tell her what was most urgent to her at the moment. It didn’t always work. Whatever her dream had been was now buried in her to do list for the day. Errands: get to the bank to exchange money, buy more phone tokens, called asimonim, which she never seemed to have when she needed them, and do some grocery shopping to fill the practically bare fridge. She hated the state of kitchen emptiness, no food around to snack on if she felt like it. It was good to always have a reserve, something lying in wait in case she needed it. But she operated mainly without many reserves, in the cabinet and in life.
Compartmentalize, her mentor Cliff Conrad, sage as the Puritans he studied, often told her. So she lifted the notepad at her bedside and listed the tasks, a sure way to put the anxiety in its place. She wrote, “My first interview. Today’s the day.” Banal, and yet these words moved her. Writing this dissertation wasn’t, as her parents thought, some kind of whim, a nice way to pass the time until she got married, had kids, and started what they thought o
f as her “real” life. She needed to do this to get a job and have a life that she was creating, of her own choosing. Even though it was a small and gradual step, she savored this thought. She would be doing a preliminary interview today, getting closer to her goal.
Wendy wanted to do some preliminary interviews to see how the thing was going to proceed. She wasn’t ultimately going to use the data from these interviews in her study because she would be using them to tweak her questions.
Wendy had to see what it was like to question someone to his or her face. There was nothing the slightest bit daunting about handing a piece of paper to a person and asking him to fill it out, but the thought of actually sitting right across from another person and asking intimate questions . . . What if she unintentionally upset her subject or made some kind of faux pas, even if inadvertent? She would feel embarrassment and . . . shame. She didn’t want to look foolish. More than once she had asked a friend something that Wendy thought entirely innocuous and then found out from a third party that she had hurt the person’s feelings. How could she develop the insight, imagination really, to envision her way into the mind and emotions of someone else in order to anticipate how they might react to a given question? She lacked empathy, she worried, standing up finally and stretching her hands over her head to shake the sleepiness off her body. Was there an essential coldness in her nature that would keep her from succeeding?
It was a kind of occlusion between the way she saw others and what they expected of her, a barrier as real as a physical one. Wendy felt sometimes like she just did not know how to connect to other people. It worried her at times, that she would never have a truly intimate relationship with someone else, where each knew and understood the other. She had close friends, but always felt like, for each of them, there was some other friend who was closer. She was never the closest.
Wendy got out of bed and opened the doors of the wardrobe closet built in to the wall. She stared at the contents: the look she was going for was professional, yet not too formal. She wanted to be friendly yet tailored—hard to get the right balance.
That was what she needed to talk to Meryl about in this interview. How many of the things being newly religious demanded of women and how many were part of general chauvinism in the larger culture? The differences between the ways men and women told their stories was one of the avenues for her research. Her provisional hypothesis was that when men told the story of their conversion it was an attempt to take up more space in the world, to boast of what talented and resourceful individuals they were, that they found a way to change and find religious meaning. However, when women spoke of changes in their lives, it was in a humbling, demeaning, self-effacing manner to the tune of: “Baruch Hashem, it was the hand of God that put this person in my path and led me this way.” Women always claimed less agency in their lives. It was one of the many things that annoyed Wendy about the world—this notion that women aren’t supposed to want things. They were not to work at anything too hard, or appear to. Wendy had always wanted to have space and agency in her life; beginning as a little kid, when most of her friends shared their beds with multiple stuffed animals. She never liked having something else in bed with her. She always wanted to be able to roll around, take up space as she pleased. It was self-effacing—girls in our culture are given the message not to take up too much space. Share, be smaller, make room for others.
Leaving her apartment to go to Beit Ticho, where she was meeting Meryl, Wendy decided she would make her way up Emek Refaim and window shop as she walked.
Wendy took one brisk step in front of the next and thought about why Meryl was a good test interview subject. Miriam now—she had to respect that—had been at Brown with Wendy’s childhood friend Nina Distler. Miriam was a talented artist whose parents wouldn’t let her go to art school; she chose Brown because she was able to take classes and hang out at the adjoining Rhode Island School of Design, known to most as RISD. Brown was Wendy’s first-choice college and she didn’t get in, while Meryl didn’t like being there. Wendy was trying to not resent her. Wendy sighed and, spotting a bench in the park above Yemin Moshe, decided to sit down and go over her notes for the interview one more time. Meryl had a one-woman show at an avant-garde public school showcase gallery two years after college. It was given a review—a scant paragraph or so but an actual review—in both the New York Times and Art World magazine. Then, something had happened. It was Wendy’s task to elicit the narrative of how Meryl had gotten from the hip art world of Brooklyn, to its religious Jewish section, and then to Beis Mushka in Jerusalem.
Wendy could hypothesize—Miriam’s parents divorced and she wanted some of the stability that Orthodox Judaism seemed to provide its adherents? Or, she’d had a series of non-Jewish boyfriends and felt betrayed when they didn’t understand her dismay over their thoughtful Christmas gifts? Maybe Miriam had a drug or alcohol problem after college, and starting over with a new group of people was a way of removing herself from a druggie circle of friends?
For Wendy’s dissertation, the actual reason was irrelevant. That was for a psychologist. For her, it was how Miriam recounted her transformation. The biographical reconstruction of the life to account for the role changes that new religious commitment demanded, yet remained on a continuous plane with other aspects of the subject’s life was, Wendy contended, the most important of the rituals of incorporation that enabled individuals to be fully part of their new group.
Miriam was the perfect person to test her questionnaire, and ideas, out on, because Wendy had known her before and knew how she talked, how she thought about the world. Wendy needed to ask her questions in a way that would elicit a story. The trick was to ask enough questions to get a subject to talk and then get out of the way and listen. Wendy wasn’t sure she was enough of a listener to do this well. Or that she could ask the question well enough. If she couldn’t get the subject to produce relevant information . . . Then what? She couldn’t write a dissertation if she had crappy data . . . Then? Back to law school or her parents’ house. She needed to do this right.
Hitting the benches by the windmill in Yemin Moshe, Wendy decided to sit for a minute and look over her list. She opened her bag and took out her list of questions, and felt her anxiety dissipate. Now, she felt the same sense of excitement, anticipation, even exultation, as she had when she first opened the envelope from the Fulbright committee.
“It’s really happening,” she said to herself. The excitement at having an idea and now really beginning to carry it through, to prove to others that something of the way she, Wendy Dora Goldberg, saw the world really was true. She wanted to run all the way to Beit Ticho, with this burst of energy: she was really on the way to a scholarly career, going where she wanted to go. Nothing else in her life was so exhilarating as this possibility—she was creating something that was her own idea and would go out into the world. It was beginning. She wasn’t going to be like her subjects, humble and self-effacing: Oh it was nothing; the dissertation really wrote itself, you know. I didn’t really intend to do it; it just happened because I still wasn’t married.
She placed the folder gently back into her purple canvas messenger bag, put it back over her shoulder, and broke into a run towards Beit Ticho. After a few blocks, she stopped and continued at a walk, hit Jaffa Road and turned left, then made a right onto Rav Kook Street and went past the cabstand and up the street. She breathed more slowly, winded from fast walking. The nineteenth-century stone Arab-built house was at the end of a narrow path, right next to the house where the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook, lived. The Ticho House was a museum and café, willed to the city by artist Anna Ticho and her eye doctor husband. It housed many aspects of the history of the city: the historic house, the paintings of Jerusalem and its wildflowers by Anna, which were displayed, and the eye doctor’s diverse collection of Hanukkah menorahs from many countries and epochs. The food in the café was quite good too, even though it was too hot this summer day to sit outside on the terrace.
As Wendy entered, she spotted a woman with a big purple scarf wound around her head. Couldn’t be—Miriam wasn’t married yet. The woman did look artistic, with large turquoise earrings and a necklace to match, and a serene gaze. There were some older people sitting in a group at a table, taking advantage of their status as pensionaires, retirees, to get a discount; a young couple, both in jeans and sweaters; and a third table with three women. Wendy sat down to order some tea while she waited.
As she was looking at the menu, she heard, “Hey, you’re Wendy Goldberg,” and looked up. The woman who said this was wearing a black close-fitting ski cap with blue, green, and orange stripes, a bright orange puffy ski jacket with tags from various lifts, and an ankle length denim skirt paired with Doc Martens black boots. Wendy looked up and said, “Meryl. Thanks for meeting me. I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, no problem,” she said, sitting down and taking off her coat and hat. When Miriam removed the hat, the dreadlocks originating from her scalp flowed out, asserting themselves. Wendy thought, I do believe you are from Syosset, not Jamaica. What’s the deal? Dreadlocks on Caucasians are just too pretentious.
Miriam sat down and said, “I remember you. You visited Nina Distler at Brown. Your boyfriend was at Brown and you were studying . . . Eastern religions?”
Wendy blushed. It had been a short-lived relationship, that one. She met him at a party there, visited a few times, he visited her, and it never went anywhere.
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