In the next generation, yet another shift. Brill’s son Jonas had become a religious Jew and now taught psychology at a university in Israel. Wendy hadn’t come across Brill fils yet, but had heard of him from people who asked if she’d met him when she said she was in the religion department at Princeton.
Smiling, Wendy tried to imagine what the images would be when it was her own picture on a poster. Would it reflect another transformation? Obviously, women in the academy, but what else? A new kind of scholarship, less theory-based than evidence-based, beginning with the research and being concerned with getting at how ideas generated and re-generated in the words of the subjects themselves.
What would you make of my work, old Brill? she asked as she scrutinized the face with the round wire-rimmed glasses of the century’s early intellectuals. Brill had left his family and his village—the only one of his immediate family to survive World War II—for a culture halfway across the world. Did his work provide an antidote to the Nazism spreading over Europe and poisoning his beloved café society, showing that when individuals think for themselves they can’t be swayed by an evil leader? Cliff Conrad too found himself in his work, reinterpreting the Puritans not as stuffy and awkward outcasts from the mainstream, but as forward-thinking individualists, proud to be able to express themselves freely in their new country.
And how, Wendy thought as she looked down again at her list, would she see herself in her subjects? Many of them, with their “Baruch Hashems” and “der aybishters” and “bashertes,” reviled her. Their certainty was so disturbing—didn’t they ever speculate that they might have been better off had they stayed in the secular world? They could have been comfortable if they’d stayed in the US and gone to professional school like their parents wanted, instead of taking the uncertain career paths many encountered in Israel. The artistic types, who were struggling with modest ways to express their talents, told her, “God gave me these gifts, and He’ll find a way for me to use them.” It would be great to have that certainty about anything in my life, Wendy found herself saying out loud. Can’t I just study them, see who they are, and walk away?
Shaul’s face and last words to her popped unbidden into her mind, “You can’t be certain until the day of your death,” he had told her sadly. I guess they aren’t all certain; it is a pose for many of them, she thought.
I owe it to his memory to finish this, to write something letting others out there know that certainty isn’t so absolute; even when tremendous changes are made, there are numerous ways baalei teshuvah retain their old selves—keeping up skills they had in the outside world, putting on coveralls used in a job as a garage mechanic for Pesach cleaning, playing the violin for the children as they go to bed at night, singing their kids songs from musicals they’d performed in high school, and then being surprised listening at how offensive the lyrics are . . . but still singing them.
I guess coming here was a dramatic change for me as much as them. I was willing to expose myself to a different culture and way of life. I’ve seen how a place can influence people, how different it is to be in the orbit of a new language, the universe of alien sounds creating an entirely other experience. And away from my family, establishing a new life and relationships of my own, as confusing and terrifying as it is at times. Do I stay or go? Impossible to know till I write this essay.
She began in longhand in her journal, “My subjects have created numerous changes in their lives in order to live and study in this land, and forge their own ways of connecting to it, to put themselves into the lineage of those for whom living a holy life in the holy city was an ultimate goal. An anthropologist writes of the need not only to search out the past, but to plant oneself in it. I cannot understand the journey of my subjects without being in the places they are. I wish to conduct research here to aid me in seeing how the place has shaped their journeys . . .”
FIFTEEN
Rituals of Incorporation
In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural type”; he is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social position in a system of such positions.
—VICTOR TURNER, The Ritual Process
Wendy was in her apartment, trying to write, on a Saturday afternoon in April. She and Uri had a date scheduled for when he got off duty at the hospital later on, so she was trying to have a sense of accomplishment before their outing. Wendy needed to feel she had earned the right to have fun. She always felt she didn’t deserve to relax unless she had earned it some way.
That morning, she had gone for a stroll, to stretch, clear her head, and enjoy the solitude of the empty streets. It was what she loved about Shabbat here, savoring the quiet of a city at rest by perambulating on boulevards laden with Sabbath hush, smelling fragrances of Sabbath foods from the windows of apartments with open windows, mixed with the aromatic pine smell of the trees in the city.
After nine months, it was still amazing to Wendy how aspects of daily existence could be re-engineered to accommodate a country’s value system. There was something wonderfully comfortable about being in the majority culture. What would it be like when she had to undergo what her subjects termed “re-entry” to the US and its Christian ways? America would be even more of a foreign place were she to remain here another year.
She had her laptop turned on and was opening the introduction file. She had notes but still wasn’t sure what the optimal template to organize this section might be. Open with historical material about American religion? No, maybe with psychological research on individuals transforming their religious practices and groups? Either of these decisions was a large one; it would make a huge difference to the whole. She did not feel ready to make a big decision now. What if she just finished reading the chapter from Trends and Traditions in Religious Conversion by James Zorro? That way she’d have a limited task and feel virtuous if she completed it, before meeting Uri.
Really, she wanted to put off the harder work of deciding how to begin the introduction, what date and details to install in a central position to her argument, what to jettison, and what to include merely in footnotes.
This dissertation was a piece of writing she’d be identified with for the first few years of her career. It was what hiring committees would read when considering whether they wanted her. With so much at stake, how could she possibly begin? It was too overwhelming: this gargantuan thing, the dissertation. She’d start one day this week, not today.
She read from the Zorro book: “It is necessary for the convert to reconstruct and redeploy his or her biographical sketch so as to accentuate the newly adopted system of values cutting across all planes of his or her life. Additionally, this redeployment and rearranging of a life highlights events that might previously have been thought minor, but are seen now in transition as the catalysts, bringing into focus a major and crucial life modification event. It is one of the most significant and life changing of the aforementioned rituals of incorporation . . .”
As she was underlining the passage, the phone rang. She heard Uri’s voice: “I’m off. I’m walking out of the hospital towards the Old City. Can you still meet or are you deep in the middle of something?”
“I’m working but I’m also looking forward to seeing you. Where and when?”
“About fifty minutes? Jaffa Gate?”
“Sounds good.”
Passage from Professor Zorro completely underlined, Wendy closed the book with relief. She left Mishael Street and walked down Emek Refaim in the direction of the Jaffa Gate. As she walked, she thought of Uri. She thought of the thrill she would feel when she caught sight of him from a distance. How she would watch as he drew closer, wanting so much just to give him a hug. As she crossed the Valley of Hinnom, she remembered a walking
tour she’d done in this place at the beginning of the year with the Fulbright group. The guide told them its legends, that the Canaanites had slaughtered children and thrown them here, sacrifices to Molech, their god. Could this too be one of “the dark places of the earth,” as Joseph Conrad put it in The Heart of Darkness? Wendy shuddered. Then she gazed over the vista asking, Are my subjects also offering themselves to the shades of the dead and their way of life?
Striding over this Valley of Hinnom, ground where there may be children’s skeletons, Wendy debated internally, Is my whole career predicated on dead bodies? One theory about baalei teshuvah was that their souls originally belonged to children killed in the Holocaust, given another gilgul, reincarnation, in a new body. Wendy’s current life was built now partly on the dead bodies of Sam and Benj, the violence of their deaths perhaps giving her an opportunity to remain in Israel another year. Most troubling was the death that Wendy held some degree of responsibility for: Shaul Engel’s. And that without his death she would never have met Uri.
Her entire present life was built on the bodies of others, paralleling the ghostliness of this city, one layer built on top of another, the specters and shades of the earlier level of habitation still perceptible. What had been there before, the layer of civilization previous to the current one, remained. The neighborhoods of Talbieh, Bakaa, Katamon retained their pre-state Arab names. The Israeli government had created new Hebrew ones in their place, and none of the pre-1948 Arab inhabitants still dwelt there to use the Arabic ones, but the names endured, unchanged. She mused. How many Native American place names remain in the US? There had been many more Native Americans killed in the US than Arabs in Israel. No one thought about those excisions; native names for geographical places in America replaced with the biblical ones—Goshen, Salem, Zion, Canaan, Bethlehem. All over New England, Puritans bestowed their surroundings with names that originated here, with the Hebrew Bible; no one was criticizing them. She sighed, as she realized that, despite her earlier romanticizing of the city with names connected to its own history, even here in Jerusalem there was an elsewhere, a whole group of people yearning to return to homes they once inhabited. She had no solution: she knew both that Jews have a claim on the land, and that they had displaced others to create what exists now.
She had crossed the Valley of Hinnom, bodies and all, now, and was inside the Jaffa Gate. Walking through the German Colony and Yemin Moshe, she could hear only the hushed Sabbath—befitting tones of those strolling languorously. Yet, inside the Jaffa Gate was an ordinary day, Arabs and Christians carrying on regular activity. Police cars with blaring sirens pulled up to the station directly at the gate’s entrance; tourists with backpacks spoke Danish and German, Swedish and Spanish. Arab shopkeepers verbally accosted all passersby within earshot with their claims to truly remarkable merchandise.
Wendy seated herself on a bench just inside the Jaffa Gate, by the side of the Tower of David Museum, with the Immanuel Church in view, to wait for Uri.
She took a plastic bottle of water out of the small purse slung over her shoulder and along her side. She hadn’t brought money with her, but had her credit card, just in case, and her notepad and pen. As she swigged her water, Wendy looked across the plaza to observe a man in a black hat, white button-down shirt, and black pants approach a couple with backpacks. They gave him peculiar looks. She guessed it was because they didn’t share a common language. The man smiled and backed away. The man spied another pair, two guys wearing rock concert T-shirts; she noted the listing of cities and dates on the back. The man spoke and they listened, nodded, listened more, and accepted a piece of paper from him.
Wendy knew the underside of this interaction. She saw the suited man gesture with his hands in a wide arc, a friendly, embracing-the-air motion. The man then asked the students—she knew the details from her interviewees—“if they’ve come to Jerusalem have they truly experienced all it has to offer? Don’t they owe it to themselves to check out a Sabbath meal, have an authentic experience in the Old City? It’s free, it’s fun, lots of American guys just like you are there.” Wendy saw the man gesture at what she now saw were Black Sabbath T-shirts, and guessed he would tell them of the performers he’s heard, back in the day. Then he’d say, “You like music? After Shabbos, we’ll have a concert; some of the students will be jamming, some faculty will join in; there is a guy who played guitar with Lynryd Skynryd; he usually comes. We used to have a former bassist for Eric Clapton but he’s up north in Tzfas now.” In response to their disbelieving faces, he’d say, “For real. Here, at the yeshiva. It’s yours, free. Your Jewish heritage.”
Wendy didn’t need to hear the dialogue. She knew how the black-hatted man would meet any arguments, and what the outcome of this exchange would be. One-half to one-third of the time, the recruiter would succeed in getting the recruitees to go to a class or a Shabbat meal. In approximately ten percent of the cases, a student might stay up to a week. In one percent of the cases, students stay a month or longer. Those who remain after that and commit to the religious life—the topic of her dissertation.
She should be grateful to this man in the suit; without him and his ilk she’d have fewer subjects. She watched the transaction: the recruitees at first distant and skeptical, then moving closer to him, on the pavement and out of the street when a moped came zooming into the space they’d been in ten seconds before. Finally, they were standing quite close, the three of them almost in a huddle.
Wendy watched the proceedings with the same combination of fascination and disgust she would have watching a snake swallow a mouse. She felt the same horror one would feel seeing the small creature slowly become absorbed into the larger one, only the tail twitching in agony at the end, when the rest of the its body has been incorporated. While watching, one cannot take one’s eyes off the process, at once both wanting to see how it’s done, while totally feeling revulsion from the spectacle. Wendy wanted to yell out to the students, You have free will; don’t go; don’t listen to him. But she wasn’t offering a free meal—what right did she have to intervene? On the other hand, she wanted to tell them that this man was getting paid for this. He was there to lure them into the world of the yeshiva. It was all a set-up and they should know that. The guys looked so naïve to Wendy, so guileless, though she assumed that as twenty- or twenty-one-year-old college students they felt themselves men of the world, sophisticated.
“Boo.”
Wendy jumped up, startled out of her snake and mouse visions. When she saw that it was Uri, she looked visibly relieved.
“I couldn’t resist,” he said playfully, as he lowered himself to the bench to sit beside her. “What is so absorbing?”
She pointed to the tableau vivant, the boys chatting with the man in the black suit, now gesturing, pointing straight, left and right, directions to the yeshiva. “A hooker. Nice profession for a Jewish boy. On Shabbos yet? A real shande,” Uri responded jokingly, using the Yiddish word for scandal. “What’ll happen to those kids?” he added.
“An experience. Probably, they’ll enjoy the evening, leave, and go back to their lives. One of them might stay longer, deciding he wants to be “open-minded” and give it a chance. He’ll remember going to synagogue with his grandfather who’s since passed away—maybe he’ll recapture the experience by staying? Or, he wants to really antagonize his parents.”
“Have you ever considered,” he said in his clipped British tones, “that there could be more to it than easily classified motives? That perhaps, people do things because of passion, or feeling?”
“Too simplistic. Moved by the singing, maybe. They are wearing concert T-shirts, so that is probably important to them. They may like being part of a group, observing rituals together. Emotion plays a part, but I can still scrutinize and label their responses and reasons for their actions. There are always motives behind people’s actions. If there weren’t, you wouldn’t have much of a profession.”
“I try to help people understand the motives, the
base notes if you will, for their emotions. I don’t dismiss emotions like you.”
“Who said anything about dismissal? I’m trying to see how and why individuals make choices, to see if we can understand how those individual choices fit into a larger societal context. I’m not belittling emotions. If you want to be critical of me, I’m not in the mood.”
He patted her arm, “I’m not being critical, just trying to get you to see things with more . . . more nuance. Maybe those guys will go to the yeshiva, and being there, feel some kind of powerful emotional pull. It may be something they can’t articulate fully.”
“It’s Shabbat. I am off dissertation duty. Let’s walk.”
“Let me switch hats,” Uri said as he pulled a battered olive green canvas hat with a brim around it from his knapsack. He was wearing a blue striped oxford shirt, chinos, and leather walking shoes, a nicer version of hiking boots. He looked too tailored to be the Israeli version of tour guide, which usually consisted of white T-shirt, blue cotton work pants from a kibbutz store, and always the neshek, the gun. But, he had his own tour guide accoutrements. “Now I am tour guide,” he said with a mock Israeli accent, after donning the kova tembol hat. “Come zees way,” he added, reaching out for her hand.
Uri walked holding Wendy’s hand for about twenty-five feet till they were standing at the entrance to the Citadel of David. “We are on the poet’s tour of the Old City. We will be reading from my favorite poet of Jerusalem, next to King David the psalmist,” he said with mock piety. Uri reached into his knapsack and pulled out a black and white paperback titled, Poems of Jerusalem.
“So,” he said in proper tour guide form, “you know zees?” pointing at the Citadel.
“Fifteen different layers of civilization, one on top of another, all in their way contributing to the city.” In a more excited tone she added, “It’s kind of amazing to imagine all the people who have been here, things they have thought, dreamt, imagined, yearned for, craved . . .” she said staring at the stones, seeing the differences in the layers as she looked at the striations.
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