Atarah looked at Wendy and said, “You know, I’m a teacher,” pointing to the galleys of her book, “now, I’m a writer. I’m not a rabbi. That was my father, alav ha’shalom, may he rest in peace. I’m one of three sisters, no brothers. When I was about eleven, my father took me to another neighborhood of Brooklyn from Sheepshead Bay, where we lived, to see a rebbe my family had known in Europe, before the war. My father was aware that this was the last time I would be able to have this kind of experience, before I was too old to mix with men. We went to the rebbe’s home. There was a room full of men, but when the rebbe saw my father come in, he gestured to the seat of honor by his side. Others moved, and we sat there. The rebbe continued to teach. At the end, he made small talk in Yiddish with my father about their town, people from it, who was where in America, Israel, Australia. When we left, I’m not sure why I asked this”—she looked at Wendy for confirmation that she was still listening, and Wendy nodded, her gaze focused raptly on Atarah—“but I asked my father, ‘Is this rebbe a genius?’ My father didn’t reply. I asked again, I guess because the veneration I saw among his followers was so different from the way my father’s congregants behaved. I wanted to understand why. My father said, ‘This rebbe is a great man, a leader. He is not a genius.’ I asked ‘Why? Why isn’t he a genius?’” Atarah paused here.
Wendy responded, “What did he say?”
He said, “This rebbe is not a genius, because to be a genius one must be challenged. When this rebbe says something, his followers listen blindly; they never question. ‘Fun a kasha shtarbt man nit,’ my father said in Yiddish. ‘From a question no one dies. One must be able to respond to challenges—that is the mark of genius, Atarele.’”
“From a question no one dies,” Wendy wrote down in her notebook. Smiling, she added, “You don’t think I harmed Shaul?”
“I wasn’t in the room when you interviewed him. I can’t know,” she added conclusively. “It isn’t you, but the system. The whole notion of the baal teshuvah yeshiva is riddled with . . . kushiyot, difficulties.”
“How?” Wendy queried, pen poised over notebook.
“My story of the rebbe points to the problem. Often baalei teshuvah find teachers who are not willing to let them develop on their own. Teachers at baal teshuvah institutions want disciples to follow them. Students can be crippled in their development when they have a need to always ask someone else. There is a story in the Talmud of two famous rabbis, Rabbi Yohanan and his study partner Reish Lakish. After Reish Lakish died, the other rabbis, trying to help Rabbi Yohanan, sent a new study partner to his house.”
“It wasn’t well received. Like buying a new pet for a kid mourning the old one.”
“Well,” Atarah said as she smiled broadly and crossed her legs, “what irked Rabbi Yohanan about the new partner was his being sycophantic. He echoed everything the rabbi said, instead of bringing twenty-four objections to an issue like Reish Lakish had, for which Rabbi Yohanan needed to find twenty-four answers. A great rabbi wants to try to maneuver his ideas to cover all contingencies. He doesn’t want a yes man.”
“If that’s so, why would a leader just want students to parrot him? Don’t all teachers want their students to progress?” Wendy looked at Atarah raptly, pen poised over her notebook.
Atarah smiled. “That’s not hard to answer. You’re in graduate school. Tell me, are there professors who keep students in the program for unnaturally long amounts of time, create hoops to be jumped through for no reason?”
“Their egos, to prove the students aren’t as good as they are.”
“Same thing in the religious world. The fear that students may veer off course, leave the reservation as it were.”
Atarah began to fidget with the papers on her desk, to signal that the interview was over. She moved them and glanced around, searching her shelves for a book.
Wendy said, “Thanks for your time; you were really . . . helpful. I’m . . . in a strange place at the moment.” She paused. “I’m grappling with what it means that I feel responsible for Shaul’s death. Intellectually, I know I’m not responsible, but on an emotional level I feel I am, no matter how much information I get from your husband about the risk of suicide being greatest when it appears that there has been some recovery. Your saying, ‘From a question no one dies,’ helps, but my human instinct is to want to be responsible for others. Shaul’s death weighs on me.”
“Look, one final thought I’ll leave you with before I must go to pick up our daughter from her piano lesson. Have you been following the controversy swirling around the climbers who tried to summit Everest last May?”
“People who died along with their guide?”
“I read an article about those climbers. One of them was a postal worker, divorced with teenage children. He had tried and failed to summit Everest the previous season. The guide persuaded his client to try again, giving him a steep discount. The second year, again, the man turned around, not feeling able to continue. The guide persuaded him to persevere, to try to make it the entire way up. They both died in the attempt.”
“Awful. But, how is it the guide’s fault? I mean, he died too.”
Atarah focused on Wendy as she spoke. “The guide was concerned with his own reputation, saying, ‘I can do it, I can get anyone up.’ The guide wouldn’t heed the wisdom of the climber himself, to turn around. You know, no one can climb that peak for you. You need to do it yourself, as an individual, though with the support, guidance, and experience of others. The hubris of both the guide and of baal teshuvah yeshivot are similar. They both say, in effect, ‘We will give you everything, all you need, and in a few weeks you will be living a life at high altitude, all spiritual peaks.’ The problem is, you may not have sufficient resources to cope with the speedy ascent. When mountaineering groups go, they take time to acclimate before attempting the summit. There are many who are critical of the whole enterprise of guided mountaineering, saying that if you can’t get up the mountain yourself, you don’t belong. You shouldn’t use supplemental oxygen. In baal teshuvah yeshivot they don’t always allow students time to adjust to the thin air at high altitude. They won’t always distribute the supplemental oxygen or other support. Or warn students they may need it.”
Atarah gazed at Wendy and continued, “Like the guide and client on a mountain, the teachers at a baal teshuvah yeshivah want to prove to themselves: ‘I can make anyone religious. I can get anyone up that mountain.’ So far as I know, no teachers have perished in the ascent.” She paused and added, “You don’t know what the effect of Shaul’s death will be on the yeshiva—I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more deaths, maybe some teachers too. It may have been that notion that he should be living at the top of the mountain all the time, that total and perfect faith is possible, that was harmful to Shaul. Your questions made him aware of the gap between his ideals and reality. The worst harm wasn’t from you. It was the yeshiva’s suggesting to him that he could summit easily and quickly. You only reminded him of his inability to reach the heights. They were the ones who brought him to the base camp and told him he could ascend. Like guides, the teachers at the yeshiva are earning their livings this way,” Atarah said, sighing with sadness. “I used the analogy because they offer tools to individuals to do things they couldn’t and wouldn’t get to on their own, but I’m not sure, like Everest guides, that they take the capabilities and capacities of their clients into account. One can’t ascend too rapidly, no matter who the guide is.”
Wendy was silent as she tried to process this. She had never heard so sharp a criticism of these yeshivot from an insider. She wrote a few notes, and Atarah added, “I have to go, but I’d be happy to see you back in class. It is important to acknowledge the places that we feel injured. Torah study may provide a glimpse of the possibilities of being whole. That is the goal of limmud Torah, making us more fully human, splendor and squalor alike.”
“I’ll try to make your class again. Thank you so much.”
Atarah ro
se, her signal that their time was over. She walked to the door of her house and Wendy followed. As Atarah opened the front door, she added, “The writer Grace Paley said, ‘The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.’ Keep asking those questions. I’ve always been fascinated by baalei teshuvah and their willingness to take on the mammoth endeavor of changing their lifestyle. That’s why I married one,” she said with a grin.
THIRTEEN
Purim: Until You Don’t Know
The entire time he is drinking he is required to examine himself to determine whether he has reached the point where he cannot distinguish between cursing Haman and blessing Mordecai which means that when he gets to such a point he still knows so to speak what it is that he no longer knows. This is the formulation of a halachic norm, and the irony pokes out from it as though restraining the commandment from itself, by itself. A commandment of commission rolled up in a prohibition: become inebriated soberly.
—ELIEZER SCHWEID, Jewish Experience of Time
Walking down Emek Refaim on Purim day, Wendy saw the city of Jerusalem in a state of intoxication. Inside a bus stopped at a traffic light, she glimpsed the bus driver wearing a curly haired clown wig in rainbow colors. Kids in Superman costumes and pirate disguises yanked the hands of parents wearing masks and wigs. Those not in costume looked incongruous. Why be sober on a day when it is a mitzvah to drink enough to blur the line between good and evil, Mordechai and Haman?
Wendy walked, in costume, through the streets of the German Colony to Atarah’s neighborhood of Bakaa. It wasn’t far enough to take a bus, but it wasn’t easy to walk either. Her skirt didn’t fit well. It was turquoise and purple paisley print cotton, with varied panels, the print alternating with solid colors. She loved it, but it was too long. Wendy was a gypsy today—always an easy costume to do. Basically, one needed bright clashing prints. She had on a white cotton embroidered peasant shirt from Guatemala, her ears laden with large gold hoops, and scarves everywhere: a scarf around her hair, not covering it like a religious woman, just wound around her head, and scarves at her waist and hip as sashes. A purse slung over her shoulder that she had bought at Mahane Yehuda, in a colorful fabric with touches of gold embroidery and beads fringing it. She was wearing a series of thin gold colored bracelets on each wrist. She jingled and clanked as she walked, calling attention to herself in a way she usually found uncomfortable. When she had mentioned to Orly that she needed a gypsy costume, Orly found a red embroidered shawl from Turkey that had belonged to her grandmother. It completed the outfit.
I hope no one seeing me thinks I am actually dressing like this, that it’s not a costume.” As she thought this, she looked at the others on the street—almost all adults taken in by her glance were, in the middle of the day, in costume. She needn’t have worried at her ridiculousness, even trying to hold up her excessively long skirt. No one she saw on the street looked quite sane, from the parents and children delivering goody baskets of food to friends, to the puking men in black hats she rarely saw in this neighborhood. That guy in a black hat and peyos—was it a costume or was it his usual attire? She didn’t know how to tell. Even for Jews, creatures of memory, there was a oneday hold on making distinctions between categories of people. Thus freed, the city seemed to release itself from the particular tensions of the year—suicide bombings on buses, the stabbings of Jews by Arabs in residential neighborhoods of Jerusalem, economic woes, worries about the future.
Wendy felt a hilarity around her, a kind of mass emotion on the street, that she’d never felt in America. As she walked, she thought about how she liked that life in Jerusalem was lived at a more primal level, without artifice. People were nosy here, wanted to know how much you paid in rent, but also hospitable, invited you over without much fuss, and could show a level of caring she hadn’t found in the States. In the weeks since Shaul’s death, she had felt people really reach out to her. Todd and some of the others in the Fulbright group had taken her to coffee; Orly and Dara called every few days to check up. She felt connected in this city in a way she had never anticipated.
It was odd, only a few weeks after she had been in Dr. Hideckel’s office, being invited to his home for the Purim meal. What was it called, a Purim Soo-dah? She knew se’uda was the Hebrew word for meal, but still wasn’t sure of the exact pronunciation. She clutched carefully the bottle of wine she was bringing, remembering that she had paid for it what she estimated was a good portion of what Hideckel would have charged for an hour. Wendy felt like she owed Dr. Hideckel for his time that day in his office. She was grateful he didn’t bill her, because she didn’t want there to be any record of her visit to a psychiatrist’s office. If her parents learned about it, she didn’t want to explain. They would tell her, “Come home immediately if you need help. We’ll make sure Wendy sees the best people in New York. Can’t leave anything to chance with our Wendy,” she could hear her mother Sylvia saying.
Wendy had bought the wine at the fancy gourmet wine store All the Gefen on Emek Refaim, a few blocks from her house. It had only been open a few weeks and had a bar with tapas samples certain days of the week; you could sit for thirty shekel, taste wines, and nosh. She had gone once with Orly, so she went back to get wine for the Hideckels instead of going to a cheaper place in Mahane Yehuda. When she answered all the questions of the adorable salesman, who had to be gay because straight Israeli men never take that much care with their hair to mousse it perfectly into place, she looked at the wine he’d given her. It wasn’t kosher. When she told him she needed kosher, he looked at her strangely. “Kosher wine is zee worse. Worse, you understand. Zhey boil all ze flavor out, no aroma.” And to get his point across, he wrinkled up his sexy mouth as though he had just actually tasted the loathsome substance. He looked at her again curiously. “You’re not a dos, motek; drink something with a taste! Ieeecchs,” that uniquely Israeli conveyance of disgust, a more distilled form of yuch, with the additional guttural adding potency.
Wendy replied, “It’s not for me. I’m invited by some dosim for Purim.”
Grudgingly, he loped over to his kosher section, in the back. He found a bottle and handed it to her. “Best kosher stuff, yes? I wouldn’t be embarrassed to drink zees. You wanted to spend 200 shekel, no?”
“Sure. Do you have a gift bag?”
“Betach,” he said holding up her choices.
So the wine was enrobed in its finery of a purple iridescent paper wine sack and a sticker in Hebrew and English, “al ha-gefen” (on the vine) and “All the Gefen,” in English, adorning it. Now, the bottle itself was costumed, looking as though it were a fancy gourmet wine, imported from Europe or California, when it was really an Israeli domestic product, produced just a few hundred kilometers from Jerusalem.
As she arrived at Atarah’s street she wondered, did she have more in common with the salesman in the store, and his attitude to the wine, than she did with the people who would be here? Why had she accepted Atarah’s invitation? Curiosity to see this teacher in a social setting? Curiosity about Dr. Hideckel? Their relationship? Daniel and Atarah Hideckel were both so polished and formal—she couldn’t imagine their passion, that they slept together without wig and kipah. But both were refreshingly honest and might even be the types to talk about their sex lives when asked, in the interests of promoting married passion—at least after a few drinks. She remembered, on the subject of teachers talking about sex, one of her professors in graduate school had told them that his parents belonged to a religious sect that absolutely disapproved of sex except for procreation. So far as he knew, his parents had only had sex a few times. She was repulsed, as were the rest of the students, by being given too much information.
Being honest with herself, she admitted she was here because she’d been invited. Wendy didn’t get enough invitations to refuse one.
She went up the walkway to the door and knocked. After standing
on the threshold a few moments, listening to the raucous voices inside, she realized it was open, and she entered to the sight of people standing and sitting in the living room, wine glasses and beer bottles in their hands. All of them, like Wendy, were in costume.
Wendy entered, walking hesitantly. No one noticed her entrance, until an Elvis impersonator, in white polyester jumpsuit edged with gold sequins at the chest and wide bell bottoms also edged in gold sequins, red cape, jet black hair and sideburns, approached her with an outstretched hand. “Wendy, so glad you could make it. Chag Purim Sameach, welcome.”
Who was this Elvis who knew her name?
“You don’t recognize me,” Elvis smiled, amused.
Wendy jerked her head back and then shook her head, quickly, twice from side to side. “Dr. Hideckel?” she queried. Laughing, she answered her own inquiry, “I would never have recognized you! You’re . . .”
“Majestic,” he boomed. “I’m the King.”
“Your Majesty,” she said, playing along with his role and curtsying. “I brought some wine for you and Atarah,” she said as she handed the package to him. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Thanks for coming.” He glanced at the label. “All the Gefen. I’ve passed there a few times. It looks like a nice addition to the neighborhood.”
“A great little place. Not kosher, but they have a kosher section in the back where I got this.”
“I look forward to drinking it. Let me introduce you around.” He looked over at the crowd sitting and standing in the living room: a clown; an individual in a feathered mask and Mardi Gras beads; a Dead Head in tie-dyed dancing bears T-shirt, ripped and faded jeans, with a bandana on his head; a doctor in a white coat and stethoscope wearing a donkey mask; a witch; a princess; and Hillary Clinton. All were holding glasses containing various species of alcoholic libations. He called, “Josh, Uri, this is Wendy. Get her a drink and introduce yourselves.”
Questioning Return Page 26