Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  “True. I just heard about the case of another American yeshiva student who committed suicide. He was at Emmet ve’Emunah, a place I haven’t had any contact with, but apparently he mentioned Shaul in his suicide note and felt that Shaul’s suicide gave him permission to take his own life. I feel indirectly responsible for his death. What kind of person am I to carry on with my project? On the other hand, I can’t just quit. I have a fellowship and expectations from my advisors that I will finish. I feel stymied.”

  “Come see me in the office for a few sessions if you want to talk about it. You might also want to go to one of my wife’s classes. I must have a card with her schedule.” He reached into the front pocket of his coat to produce a black leather wallet. He opened it and handed her a card.

  She remembered being on Emek Refaim with Noah about three months ago when the man walked out of his car to hand Noah, and no one else in the crowd, a flyer about a yeshiva. Now, she was on the same street, being handed a card by someone she had bumped into accidentally. Was there a fate in store for her as well, or was it coincidence?

  Wendy took the profered card, put it in her pocket, and said, “Thanks, Dr. Hideckel.”

  He smiled and said, “Shabbat Shalom, Wendy. Good luck,” and sauntered off without expecting anything more of her. No commitment to attend the class, no promise that she would see him for a few sessions. She appreciated that. Did they learn this in psychiatry rotations, that sometimes you leave people alone?

  TWELVE

  Meeting Atarah

  Fun a kasha shtarbt man nit. (From a question no one dies.)

  —RABBI CHAIM BRISKER

  On a Thursday morning, Wendy went up a short flight of steps and entered a drab hallway in a community center on Sholem Aleichem Street in the Talbieh neighborhood of Jerusalem.

  From the dull bracken-brown tiles on the floor to the sickly yellowish tint of the brick on the bottom half of the walls, all was in a state of heightened ugliness. The whitish-bluish upper half of the wall was painted to approximate the hair color of a matron who makes the attempt to color her white hair, but hasn’t tried hard enough to make the coiffure actually look good. The feel of the place was unadorned and institutional, down to the smell of disinfectant from floors that must have been recently mopped. Wendy hadn’t felt so deflated by a classroom since being in the dreary building that housed her junior high school. She wasn’t sure which room on the long hallway she would find Atarah Hideckel in, but figured she would just keep poking her head into the rooms until she found her class. She would sit in the back and leave when she found whatever rhetoric this woman was sure to emit as tedious as the surroundings. Hopefully, she wouldn’t bump into Atarah’s psychiatrist husband again, but if she did, she could say she had attended one of Atarah’s classes and had attempted to assuage her guilt.

  Wendy poked her head into the first room on the right—empty. First room on the left, also empty. The second room on the left was, by contrast, full. As she walked farther in, she saw it was quite full, not yielding even one empty chair. She asked the person closest to the door if this was Atarah Hideckel’s class. The woman was wearing a floppy blue velvet hat whose brim overshadowed her face, making her appear like a giant hat with a miniature face underneath. She nodded a yes and then said, “If you want a chair, borrow one from one of the other rooms. Go quickly; she’s about to start.”

  “Oh,” Wendy said. Then she asked the woman, “Is there something special today?”

  A laugh came from under the hat. “No,” she replied. “It is always this full.” Then, looking again at Wendy’s jeans and backpack, she said, “Is this your first time hearing Atarah?” When Wendy nodded in reply, the woman said animatedly, “You are in for a treat today. A real treat.”

  Somehow, I don’t think our ideas of treats are the same, lady,” Wendy would have said to her had they been speaking a few months ago. I’m from Princeton. I regularly have the chance to hear the greatest minds on the American academic scene give lectures. Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur scholars, Guggenheim fellows. That’s a treat. This? Not so much. And, what’s the deal with the paint on the walls? But now, post-Shaul, Wendy plodded out of the room obediently, to grab a chair from the other room. She dragged it back, sullenly musing, Why don’t they just hold the class in a bigger space if it gets so crowded?

  The din in the room was grating. Do women have to talk so loudly? Weren’t any men here? She spotted a pair of male retirees in the front corner, sitting with crocheted kipot next to women she presumed to be their wives. A few rows behind them was another retired man, dapper in a striped bow tie and matching handkerchief in the pocket of his navy blazer. No one in Jerusalem dressed like that. He must be a retired rabbi from the US trying to keep up his image; he needed to preserve his identity by continuing to dress formally in a country of informality, she guessed. Wendy continued to look around at the hundred or so people who filled the room. The crowd was mostly women in their forties, fifties, and sixties with children old enough to be in school or out of the house. There were some younger women, around Wendy’s age, mostly with their hair covered with fashionable scarves or bandanas or funky hats, not the drab and dowdy looking head coverings. There were also a few whose hair wasn’t covered, so Wendy didn’t completely feel that she stood out. Even babies were here, mostly asleep in those little carrier contraptions with handles. Wendy didn’t immediately see anyone else wearing pants, but on closer inspection, she saw a woman a few rows ahead wearing maroon corduroy pants, her hair covered with a matching maroon beret. That’s a first, Wendy thought. From what Wendy had observed over her past six months in Jerusalem, women who were religious enough to cover their hair wore skirts always, and women who wore pants didn’t cover their hair. Here was category overlap, a challenge to the usual assumptions Wendy was conditioned to make about people in this holy city.

  Suddenly, the din ceased.

  Wendy looked up from placing her backpack on the floor next to her and saw a woman in her early fifties seated at a desk. The desk was elevated on a slight platform so that she could be seen by each student in the class. The woman sat erect and held her head, beautifully coiffed, in a pedagogical demeanor. The hair was pulled back off her face with an elaborate metal barrette, and the rest of it hung slightly below her shoulders.

  As Atarah Hideckel moved her head with a slow smile, from the right side of the room to the left, taking in with her glance and nod each of the students present, the hair stayed in place, stiff. Could it be a wig? When Wendy saw women with wigs on Jerusalem buses, usually the ones who got on at the Meah Shearim stops halfway between the university on Mount Scopus and the center of town, it was patently obvious that the hair on their heads was not natural. The hair was the wrong color, or didn’t sit quite right on their heads. Wendy felt sorry for those women—wigs seemed to go with heavy clumping orthopedic shoes and clothing that came only in hues of dark blue or darker black. The hair of these women appeared to be constantly minimizing itself, shrinking to the background, from the young girls whose long hair was always in two tight braids at the side of their heads, to the women with the stiffest wigs imaginable. By contrast, Atarah’s remarkable wig was the beginning of her hip demeanor. She was wearing a loose-cut dark emerald-green velvet jacket and matching long skirt, and the shirt she had on underneath looked to Wendy like a Rubik’s cube, blocks of color in orange, purple, green, and yellow, with a scooped neck attractively fitted but not tight. Her earrings and necklace were beads with a similar array of colors. She would look chic anywhere.

  Atarah began tapping the portable microphone on her lapel and asked, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” To the murmurs of assent, she replied, “Good. Let’s begin.” Atarah pressed the button on the small taperecorder at her side, as students held pens over notebooks, expectant.

  “This week’s parsha is Yitro. Now we know, Yitro is Hotain Moshe, father-in-law of Moses. Is there more to him? Why does he merit the section containing the aseret hadibrot, th
e Ten Commandments, to be named in his honor?” Wendy became apprehensive, knowing, I’ll never get any of this if she keeps throwing out all this Hebrew.

  Wendy’s eyes wandered the room beginning to zone out, trying to fathom what all these people were getting out of this class, but realizing it would be rude to leave now, so soon after the beginning. As she looked around, she saw expressions of rapt fervor on the faces of the students. She thought about the expressions she encountered on her students’ faces when she was a teaching assistant at Princeton. Wendy had never witnessed a flicker of joy in her students’ features during class. The moment class ended, their visages became more animated, alive, awakened from the stony frowns of concentration exhibited during class. Oddly, each student in this dingy room in Jerusalem looked radiant, happy.

  Wendy tuned back in to hear Atarah say, “This parsha begins with a simple narrative, a reunion of a man and his wife and children. One would assume that here the Torah would speak of the beauty of family life, the power of love. We know from the story of Jacob and Rachel the power of romantic love, recalling Rashi’s comment that Jacob wept when he met her because he saw by divine prophecy they would be buried separately in the future. That is passion, something we certainly all yearn for: to be loved so furiously that our being is missed for all time . . .” Did Atarah and her husband have such passion—was it true, as her baalei teshuvah claimed, that rules of the permitted and forbidden made sex sweeter?

  Wendy listened again as Atarah spoke while turning her head slowly and gradually from side to side to see students individually, her face reflecting the seriousness with which they faced her. “The Torah does not choose to tell us what kind of reaction Moshe’s wife or children had to his return, just his father-in-law’s. Can anyone recall for us another story of in-law relationships in Tanach, our Bible?”

  Wendy saw several hands shoot up, and Atarah nodded at the man in the bow tie and navy blazer. “Rabbi Hurwitz?” Atarah called, nodding in his direction.

  He stood up in his seat and addressed Atarah: “Saul and David. Then, Lot’s sons-in-law are mentioned, and Shechem ben Hamor, who wants to be Jacob’s son-in-law.”

  “These three, yes. Two others are the pilagesh at Giva, the concubine that concludes the book of Judges, and Samson negotiating with his father-in-law. These relationships are all fraught with tension and violence. Shechem takes Jacob’s daughter violently and then falls in love with her. It is ironic he has such passion for her since Dina is the unloved Leah’s daughter, not beloved Rachel’s. Saul attempts to eliminate David by putting him in a situation where he can be killed. All these relationships have incredible rivalry. More positive in-law relationships in Tanach?”

  A young woman, probably Wendy’s age, with a rainbow-striped scarf wrapped gaudily around her head and a baby in a Snugli carrier snoozing on her chest, raised her hand. Atarah said, “Yes?” The woman said proudly, “Ruth and Naomi have the same kind of loving relationship as Moshe and Yitro. The example of one brings the other to gerut, to become Jewish, in both cases.”

  Atarah said succinctly, “Nice, Rivky, thank you,” and nodded at her. Unfortunately for Rivky, her speaking startled the baby snoozing at her chest, who began to wail. She got up to comfort the baby and began pacing and shushing in the back of the room. “Ruth and Naomi. Let’s look at the frame story. Which character appears at both the beginning and end?”

  Several students called out, “Naomi.”

  “Absolutely. So why do we read Megillat Ruth, not Megillat Naomi? The book of Ruth begins, like the portion of Yitro, with a nuclear family: father, mother, and two sons. The family is not at first separated; they stay together and move to another country, an alien land, Moav. This place is another echo of the in-law relationships from the story of Lot.” Wendy was confused. What do Moav and Lot have to do with each other? Should she write down her questions so she could ask someone later or were there too many, was it too overwhelming?

  Atarah continued, “The family of Naomi is separated by death; husband and sons die. Naomi is left with her daughters-in-law. She tells them she is too old to have sons for them to marry, that they should leave her. Clearly, this is a depressed woman. My husband is a psychiatrist, so I feel qualified to make a diagnosis. I checked the DSM, the diagnostic manual.” The class gave a little laugh. “Naomi says initially, why do you want to be with me? The hand of God is against me. Is there anything that will lift her out of her depression? Over the course of the story, we have a changed Naomi, capable of praising God. How does that transformation occur? Before we answer for Naomi, let’s see what kind of transformations occur in our parsha in Exodus. The first three aliyot, specifically.”

  Wendy saw the students flipping through their Bibles. Most Bibles were in Hebrew; some had a larger Hebrew text in the middle and more squiggly Hebrew lettering on the sides and at the bottom. She glanced around, and the person next to her, a woman in her fifties with uncovered hair, wearing a light gray cashmere sweater set with a coordinating Hermes silk scarf in orange, black, and gray swirling patterns, with a darker gray wool skirt and pearls, gently held her Bible out to Wendy and nodded. Wendy responded, “Thanks, but my Hebrew isn’t that good. I’ll just listen and try to follow.”

  Atarah’s voice continued, “Preparation for revelation, the ability to hear God’s teachings and be transformed. That’s the purpose of standing at Sinai. All heard, yet not all were prepared to take it in.”

  As she listened, Wendy thought about other times she had heard someone speak words of Torah. The last one she could remember was at Dara and Jason’s for Shabbat dinner a few weeks ago. Jason gave a marvelous speech about the dreams of Joseph, and how he converted them from mere visions into something solid, with interpretation, and each of them was moved to add a personal interpretation of the story. Dr. Hideckel—what was it he had told her about the “god of the winds?” A leader needs to deal with each individual in accordance with his own temperament. That moved her too. Maybe there was more to Torah study than what her baalei teshuvah said: “I go to my rav. He’s the expert. He tells me what to think.” This kind of Torah study demanded individual thought and input. This teacher, bewigged and quoting Derrida, intrigued Wendy.

  After class, Wendy decided that she would like to ask Atarah a few questions. She went to the desk at the front of the room. She waited as a long line of people spoke with Atarah. When Wendy’s turn came, she introduced herself and told Atarah that her husband had recommended she come. Wendy asked whether there was a time they could speak? Since there were still more students waiting, Atarah gave Wendy her card and told her to call to set up a meeting.

  A week later, Wendy walked through her neighborhood, the German Colony, to the adjacent neighborhood, Bakaa, where Atarah lived. Wendy was surprised it was so close. As Wendy turned onto Atarah’s street, she thought about the descriptions some of her interviewees had given her of going to see their rosh yeshiva, the trepidation they felt. If only they knew the appropriate questions, he had answers to explain what troubled them. And then, the exhilarating sense they had when leaving: “Some mystery has been solved, he understood me. I am in the right place, this is the leader for me.” Wendy wished she could know whether she would ever have the feeling they described. She had moments of elation in the library or while writing a paper—the “aha” moments when her ideas came together and she knew that she was on the right track; this bit of information or way to synthesize her ideas was the right one. She hadn’t had those moments with a person, though.

  The Hideckel house on Shalom Yehuda Street was a one-family house, a rarity in a densely populated city. It was set back from the street, reached by going in a gate, which surrounded the small garden area in front, and walking on a path. Though by Wendy’s Westchester standards there was nothing particularly special about the house, she had been in Jerusalem long enough to know that this one was unusually nice. She couldn’t even recall having been in a one-family home since arriving here.

 
She knocked on the door. Atarah answered and ushered Wendy past the living room, into her study through an adjoining door. The room was incrementally smaller than the rest of the house, less than the size of a single room in a college dorm; books filled every space. Shelves extended to the ceiling on three walls, with the exception of the one narrow wall at the back where there was a window and the shelves extended only as far up as the window. The window extended from the middle of the wall to the ceiling, and the books did not block its light. The titles were in both English and Hebrew, with a few shelves of French as well. Wendy was awed by the erudition encased on the shelves. Generally, when she entered a professor’s office, she looked at the books to see which ones she had also; she often used a common title as an icebreaker to start conversation.

  Atarah gestured to a chair in the corner for her guest while she seated herself at her desk chair. The desk was a long plank of wood, attached to the wall, with some space around it, but otherwise books were above it on the wall and on either side. There were a pile of spiral notebooks on the desk and the bound galleys of Atarah’s book, along with a tangle of photocopied texts in English and Hebrew. Atarah wasn’t wearing a wig today; instead, her hair was covered loosely by a yellow chiffon scarf, the color of a newborn chick’s fuzz, giving her a youthful, girlish look, as though she were going driving in a convertible, ready to wave at passersby.

  Once they were both seated, Atarah asked, “Well, Wendy, how has your year been going so far?”

  Wendy exhaled and raised her eyebrows. “Where to start? It’s just been . . . crazy? Nothing’s what I expected. In the fall, I was dating someone. A man tried to seduce him, in the summer before we met, and that man was killed in a pigua. My boyfriend was, is, in complete turmoil about his passions, what they are. Then, I interviewed a young man—who, I later learned, was one of your husband’s patients—and he killed himself after the interview. So . . . now . . . I am . . . I don’t know . . . How can I keep going when my work had a role in a death?”