Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  “I’ve totally forgotten his name. Rob? Rich? Ray? I did visit Nina like once a semester. You were on her floor?”

  “Sophomore and junior year. I was into the art scene and she was premed but we had friends in common; we all knew each other. Same here in Jerusalem. It’s nice to see a familiar face. No one will visit these days.”

  “Even my most adventurous friends have bailed on their promised visits.” Wendy thought of Matt Lewis from grad school.

  “You need bitachon and emunah to come now. My parents were really pressuring me to come home after that American got killed on a bus last month. So sad,” she said, clucking her tongue to emphasize her melancholy. She gave Wendy a serious look. “Do you ever think, even if everyone has a basherte, that you might somehow miss yours? Like if he is killed by terrorists, or in an accident? Or if you meet, but don’t realize it’s him?”

  Wendy decided to use this opportunity to move into professional interviewer mode. “Good question. I don’t know. Hey, order something, my treat, and I’ll explain what I want to ask you.”

  “Sure,” Miriam said, and perused the menu. She gazed over its top to ask, “I’ve never eaten here. Is the soup good?”

  “Order anything,” Wendy said liberally.

  Miriam continued, “It’s strange for me to be in a museum now. I got here early and was looking around since I really haven’t been in a gallery or museum since I came to Israel in August.”

  “What’d you think? I know you’ve done more avant-garde stuff, so this must seem . . . old-fashioned.”

  “I like the site specificity, that this family lived here from 1924 to 1980 when it became a museum. It really gives me a sense of how people in Jerusalem lived years ago. The menorahs are amazing, the creativity and variety of ways Jews find to fulfill the same mitzvah. You know the idea of hiddur mitzvah, that every mitzvah you do should be as beautiful as possible?”

  “Sure,” Wendy lied.

  “I loved the menorahs. The paintings . . . I don’t know. They didn’t move me.”

  “Maybe Anna Ticho wasn’t such a talented painter?”

  “No, it’s me, my opinion. My priorities have shifted. I want to use my talents for a purpose, to channel them, not just to shock people or display an emotion. Art should be in service to Hashem.”

  “I see,” Wendy said, adding, “How does your yeshiva encourage you to channel your talents? Do they have a studio there for you to paint?”

  “No, I need to be learning now. It isn’t time for me to go back to the studio yet. I was reading in the explanations about Anna Ticho that when she first moved to Israel she didn’t paint. She lived here from 1912 until World War I and left with her husband to serve in the war in Damascus. Away from Jerusalem, she started painting again, and continued when she came back. I don’t have to do it all now; I want to catch up on my learning first.”

  “Your career?”

  “Not now. It’s not the most important thing. I just want to lead a good Jewish life.”

  “Isn’t using your talent and developing your potential part of leading a good Jewish life?”

  Meryl paused and looked at Wendy. “Depends. I don’t want to spend my whole life in the studio. I want to have kids and spend time with them, even have outside interests. Being religious will give me a better shot at a balanced lifestyle, I hope. I don’t know of any super-successful women artists who have more than one kid.”

  Wendy thought and said, “That photographer who uses her kids . . . Sally Mann? She had three.”

  “Exception proves rule,” Miriam assented, slapping her hand down on the table.

  “Are you giving up on having a career?” Wendy continued, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Why are you hostile? I thought this was an interview?”

  Wendy sighed. “Okay, sorry. I am totally screwing up here.” She waved her hands to demonstrate that she was letting everything go, and added, “I wanted to start by talking to a friend, but I’m not doing this professionally enough. I want to get you to talk about yourself, and how you view your journey, and I just keep putting myself in. I have to step back. I’m sorry.”

  “Mehilah granted.” Miriam added, “Pardon,” in response to Wendy’s quizzical look. “You? How will you do family and career?”

  “I’m not worrying about it now. Men don’t. Why should we?”

  “They don’t have biological clocks.”

  “Let’s change the subject. What drew you here?”

  The waitress brought their food. “Emm, blintzes givinah metukah.” Wendy pointed at Meryl and the sweet cheese blintzes were set down before her. “And marak batzel”—onion soup for Wendy.

  Meryl said, “I have to go wash.”

  Wendy felt annoyed at Meryl’s compunction to wash before eating bread. Wendy bit spontaneously into the warm rolls the waitress had just placed on the table with their orders. She was in the process of putting soft butter with small flecks of dill in it on the warm rolls when Meryl returned and recited the Hamotzi in an ostentatiously loud voice.

  Wendy watched as Meryl cut her blintzes neatly into small bite-size pieces, not eating anything until the entire portion was pared down. As Wendy watched her she thought to herself, It’s so unnatural to cut up everything and parcel it out. Eat the damn thing? She remembered, watching, that Meryl had been anorexic. Was this some kind of ritual she created for herself around food?

  Meryl eased a piece of blintz into her mouth and chewed before she began: “How did I get here? I can tell the story so many ways. I could start with my parents’ divorce when I was five and my intense desire for a more intact family. Or I could talk about having my show at the gallery and feeling, afterwards, this big . . . letdown. After the opening night party thinking, That wasn’t so great. That’s it? I’m still not happy. I thought ahead of time that if I work hard enough and have this show and it’s successful, I’ll be happy. I could talk about my grandmother who wasn’t super religious, but lit Shabbos candles and made special foods. Food was her way of giving me love. When I was a teenager, I wanted to cut myself off from my family and not accept anyone’s love; part of that was denying myself food. Now, I want to open myself up to the love in the world and reconnect with my grandmother and her candles. But I could just as easily say it was all basherte.” Wendy pretended to look puzzled just to see how Meryl would interpret the phrase for her.

  “Hey, I see you need to cut the food into all those pieces. Has your eating disorder gotten better since you’ve been religious?” Wendy wondered as soon as the words were out whether they were going to sound insensitive somehow when it was meant as just a friendly question.

  Meryl glossed it over: “Thanks for asking, but yeah, I’ve been fine. I do love all the rituals though. They create more meaning than my own personal ones, you know? But I’m not sure you understood what I was saying before. Basherte is “meant to be.” I was meant to be here in Jerusalem and learn and heal from all the pain in my life. That’s what religion is, a balm; you know the Psalms talk about God as the healer of shattered hearts. I mean, isn’t that an amazing gift from Hashem, to be able to mend our broken hearts through doing mitzvahs?”

  Wendy nodded and listened, then worried. How to account for multiple versions of the narrative? There was never only one way to tell the story; all the things Meryl was saying were true. How could she accommodate this in writing her dissertation?

  Trying not to sound too anxious, she said, “Was there a turning point for you when you knew for sure you were going to become religious?”

  Meryl glared at her. “That’s the problem with ivory tower academics. You see life . . . needing to be reduced to symptoms, diagnoses. For everything there is a pathology and a cure. One Friday night last winter, I was going out to an opening for someone I knew from Providence; he’d gone to RISD. I was in a black, short leather skirt, heels, fishnets, and as I was going down the stairs of my walk-up apartment, I passed the Kaminetskys’ door�
�they’re Lubavitch, and lived below me. I heard laughing, voices, adorable toddler squealing. I thought about what it would be like at the opening, having to make witty allusive conversation, to name drop, to do things to get people to notice me. No one at that opening would like me just for myself the way the people in that apartment, or that toddler Chaye Mushke, would. I thought, I’ll just go in to say hi. I went in and was greeted so warmly, and Shmuel made Kiddush for me, and Leah showed me how to wash my hands and gave me two rolls to make Hamotzi on, and they said just stay and have some soup with us, and I thought, okay, I’ll have some soup and go a little later. But I never went to the opening, and I started going to them Friday night more and more often. I felt so accepted and loved just for being myself, dreadlocks, fishnets, and all. They were so unjudgmental, especially compared to the scene at the opening where you have to be someone to be noticed. I was meant to be religious and was born into the wrong family. It took me a quarter of my life to figure out a true path and now I’m where I belong.”

  Wendy looked at her, “You’re lucky, Meryl, if you’ve found your true path after only a quarter of your life. It takes most people much longer.”

  “There is one true path for all Jews, Wendy. It’s called Torah. If you follow it, you’ll find everything.”

  Wendy decided not to debate her. “I suppose. So, look this is outside the interview, but I’m just curious. Do you miss art?”

  “I do, but I don’t feel it’s compatible with a Torah lifestyle. I could see, as I was telling you earlier, making ritual objects, trying to beautify mitzvot, but not what I did before, no.”

  “Aren’t you limiting yourself?”

  “The rabbis have an expression, liphoom tzara agra, according to the suffering is the reward. I need to give up things I love to gain a reward for mitzvot. I’m eating now, so I need to give something else up. I don’t know if a non-anorexic can understand that.”

  “Do you think you’ll be religious in the future, five or ten years down the road?”

  “God willing.”

  “You changed to become religious. You can change back,” said Wendy provocatively.

  “I don’t know the future. I hope, with God’s help, to continue on this path.”

  Wendy decided to try another tactic to get an answer reflecting the thoughts of Meryl herself, not just a repetition of her teachers’ ideas. “What is the hardest thing for you about religious observance?”

  Meryl put down her fork and knife and set her palms flat on the table on either side of her plate. “Hmm. Maybe that things are so prescribed: one must say this prayer at this time, feel this way on this holiday, feel that way on Shabbat. I wish I had more room as an individual to do my thing. But I like that on Shabbat there is a shared sense of time. Everyone is resting; no one has other plans and will blow you off the way people did on weekends in college, always going elsewhere.”

  “What do you like most and least about the yeshiva?”

  “I love learning Hebrew, learning new things. It’s exciting, this whole new world that is my world but that I really knew next to nothing about until recently. What is hard is being back at the beginning, like a little kid, learning Hebrew, learning things religious kids know from day one. I don’t want it to be so difficult for my kids. Least, well, I don’t want to be a snob, but not everyone at Beis Mushka went to Brown, you know. Most of them went to Queens or SUNY Stony Brook and don’t have the . . . sophistication that we have. I’m not sure how to explain it.”

  “More provincial? Or more sheltered?”

  “Maybe. It’s just . . . most of them just aren’t the type of people I would have been friends with before. But I am changing too, so I don’t know what type of people I should be friends with now. I used to be friends with people who I thought were cool, or thought I was cool, or were also artists and we would all sort of inspire each other.”

  “Can you be inspired about doing mitzvot? Who observes more or better?” Wendy added.

  “Competition isn’t the only basis of friendship, Wendy. You and I were never friends in the States, yet here we are, sitting here, in Jerusalem. I don’t think either of us would have imagined it a year ago.”

  “A year ago I was still finishing the applications for fellowships so that I could come here. I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it.”

  “And I was getting ready for my show—it was last January. You know it’s really very postmodern. If I were to do a collage of my life story, or my return to Judaism, I’d have to find some kind of shape where all these different paths and influences led to the center, a sort of swirling vortex, where Jerusalem is at the center and all these things lead to it. As we’re talking, I’m thinking maybe I will do some kind of piece chronicling my return.”

  Wendy smiled at her. “Why should you give up art?”

  “I have to find a way to bring things together. To use my experiences and express them, to move people to teshuvah. The teachers at Beis tell us we have to integrate who we were before. I’ll talk to one of my rabbis.”

  “Okay,” said Wendy, sort of annoyed that, though Meryl was embarking on an artistic endeavor, she felt she needed to ask permission.

  Why can’t you make decisions on your own? Why do you need a rabbi? What about individuality? she thought, but was proud of herself, this time, for not saying anything.

  Tuesday, after morning ulpan, Wendy got on a bus and went to a nondescript religious neighborhood on the western edge of the city, Nofe Tzedek, views of righteousness. There was something about neighborhoods on the fringes of cities, an emptiness at being so far from the center. Getting off the bus, Wendy didn’t see much of a view, righteous or otherwise. Her sight range included Jerusalem stone apartment buildings, fairly close together, and women and children, all pushing baby carriages, some with real babies and some with dolls. There was nothing else on the walk from the bus stop to the Bayit Ne’eman campus.

  After she walked through a gate, empty of occupants but ostensibly constructed to house an absent security guard, Wendy saw a cluster of buildings ahead. There were signs for dorms, classrooms, and a cafeteria, where Wendy had agreed to meet Dawn from the Friday night dinner after the Kotel. The buildings were on the newish side, she observed as she followed the signs to the cafeteria. On her way, she saw a woman wearing a housedress, with a mop and bucket cleaning the floors, but noticed that the windows did not appear to have been washed in the ten years since the facility had been built. The uniform streaks of dirt covering the glass made it impossible to see out with any clarity.

  When Wendy entered the cafeteria, she scanned the crowd of women to find Dawn from Friday night dinner. Seeing the students assembled to gain nourishment, Wendy viewed them all as her prey. She felt odd to think of them in this rapacious light, since she hoped she would also be genuinely interested in them. But then, she thought, seeing these women as her quarry was probably no different than the way the teachers and rabbis here saw them. The faculty’s stated goal was to hunt down ignorant and soulless Jews and bring them into a Torah lifestyle, to capture them away from the corruptness of Western values. Wendy’s investment in the students, by contrast, was merely catch and release, without attempting a hold.

  Wendy found Dawn in the cafeteria and joined her in the line to get lunch. Dawn handed Wendy the coupon she got for a meal as someone wanting to try out classes. The school was generous with these, to encourage students to bring in recruits.

  Waiting in line, tray held passively in front of her, made Wendy feel like a kid in elementary school, waiting for an adult to give her lunch. Once the food was on their trays, Dawn and Wendy joined a group of students who were, like herself and Dawn, from the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania tri-state area. Wendy told the others they sat with that she was at Hebrew University’s summer ulpan and she might want to take some additional classes. The group told her in unison how wonderful it was here, how warm and caring the teachers were, how they loved the other students, that she should definitely come
here right away. There was intensive Hebrew here too, but at Bayit Ne’eman a student could learn so much more than just language.

  “Torah makes people happy,” they kept repeating.

  To Wendy, there appeared little happiness in the physical surroundings. The cafeteria was dark, and the food adhered to an institutional hue, greenish meatloaf astride graying potato kugel. Vegetables, which could usually be expected to provide colorful variety, had their nutritive value blanched out by being overcooked to a mushy green. Wendy thought that when she got back to her apartment she would make a cucumber and tomato salad. She wanted to let the vivid red and green colors of the food peek up at her from the plate, and to enjoy their tang with a squeeze of pungent lemon juice and a bit of salt that would just punctuate the intense freshness of the vegetables in Israel.

  Picking at the featureless food on her plate devoid of appeal to her sense of taste, sight, or smell, Wendy focused on the conversation of her tablemates. Their desires were simple: stay in this neighborhood, marry frum Mr. Right, and have parcels of children. Wendy thought of other researchers she knew of who sat and collected anecdotes. She remembered learning in college about Henry James going to dinner parties, waiting for his données, the kernels of stories casually heard, which could become the gold ore he would mine to create his fiction. Looking around, Wendy thought that James’s soirees at grand English manor houses, being served turtle soup and oysters, were impossibly far from Bayit Ne’eman’s cafeteria in Nofe Tzedek in Jerusalem.

  “I agree with Rebbetzin B. that all the problems in America are because women don’t spend enough time with their children. If only everyone could see that, and stop trying to be men,” said the girl across from her.

  “I hate that Hillary Clinton. Barbara Bush, she’s a real woman,” came from the left. Wendy, from a pure blue Democratic family, gritted her teeth to refrain from arguing with them. The girl on her right said, “If we all lived a Torah true life, Moshiach would come. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”