by Deen, Shulem
The groom instruction sessions were different: intimate and secretive. Only the soon-to-be-married were invited, and we were instructed to speak with no one about them. These were sensitive matters, and we would slip away from the study hall in the evening, aware of the furtive glances in our direction.
The first session took place two months before my wedding, which was to be held in early June. When the session was over, I waited until the others left, and then asked Avremel if I might speak with him. We sat on opposite sides of the table, and I remember struggling for words. What came out was a croak, a lame attempt at verbalizing my tempestuous swings from anger to melancholy to resignation during the last four months. “I am not happy.”
Avremel’s eyes went wide in response, fiery, almost scolding. “Why?” he asked.
Again, as in the rebbe’s chamber, there was a question and I had to come up with an answer. I thought that with Avremel it would be easier, but now I realized that here, too, I couldn’t speak my thoughts. They felt inappropriate, almost sinful. I was thinking the wrong thoughts, feeling the wrong things.
“I don’t know why,” I said. And then I felt an explosion of despair, my face suddenly awash with tears. I did not want to marry this girl. The day, the hour, the moment was approaching, and I could not stop it. I wished I could escape, take off to some unknown place, where I could start a new life and be spared the shame of what I really wanted, but where would I go? Overwhelmed, I buried my face in my arm, unable to contain my sobs.
When I raised my head again, Avremel was staring at me, his eyebrows narrowed, his brow creased, as if he now realized that, yes, we had a problem. But he needed more information, he said. “Perhaps you can think on it some more.”
“I don’t know,” I remember muttering. “Maybe—I just don’t think she and I have anything in common.”
Avremel nodded slowly, then looked at the table for a long time. Finally, he said, “You were hoping for a friend.” He stroked his beard, beads of spit trapped in the edges of his unkempt mustache.
I shrugged with a half nod. Perhaps that was it.
“A wife isn’t a friend.” Avremel shook his head emphatically. “Eizer kenegdo,” he said, quoting Genesis. “A wife is to be a helpmate. Your friends will still be your fellow students.”
Avremel looked at me while I stared at the faux wood-grain patterns in the Formica tabletop and I thought about his words. After several minutes of silence, he began to speak again, more assuredly this time. I had misunderstood the whole marriage thing, he said. A wife is not a friend. A wife is not something to think about excessively. To take a wife is a biblical commandment, and so we do God’s will by taking one. A wife is there to assist with one’s service to God, nothing more.
In later years, I would have words for that which I could not articulate to the rebbe or to Avremel, words from beyond our cloistered world of tischen and Talmud study and groom instruction: Attraction. Chemistry. Compatibility. I would later learn other words—passion, romance, arousal, desire—that I wanted as well, but to want those was an unquestionable sin; those feelings and thoughts and behaviors that passed between sexes outside of our world were anathema to us and our sacred ways.
I remember when I first became aware of a world filled with forbidden passions. I was nearing fourteen, during my year of study in Montreal, and I had a curious thought.
“Have you noticed,” I said one day to my friend Avrum Yida, a Satmar boy from Williamsburg, “that here in Montreal, wherever you turn, there is a man and woman walking together?”
Avrum Yida didn’t understand what I meant, and I tried to point out what was to me unmistakably apparent. In our world, fathers walked with sons and mothers with daughters, but here, everywhere, were men and women in pairs—strolling down leafy Avenue Saint Viateur, past the many shuttered Roman Catholic churches; sitting on the benches in Outremont Park, resting hands, heads, legs in each other’s laps; eyeing the jewelry store displays in the small row of shops along Avenue Bernard, eyes glittering toward each other through the fog of their breath in the frigid January air.
It must be a French thing, I remember thinking. I had learned that Quebecois were French, and the French, I had heard once, were the most decadent of all people. Paris was the source of all shmutz, our teachers had told us. It was the place from which immodest women’s fashions were conceived and sent to the rest of the world, to tempt men to sin. This uncouth display of intersex courtship must have something to do with that.
Avrum Yida, when he finally understood my observation, dismissed it. “It’s just how goyim are,” he said. “You can see it in Manhattan, too.” Avrum Yida thought himself wise and worldly, and I was inclined to take his word for it. Not a French thing but a goyish thing.
French or goyish, however, it was sinful to gaze at. Yet I could not look away. From the second-floor window of our yeshiva, I would watch as they passed, hand in hand or with their arms on each other’s backs, heads leaning on shoulders, pecking at each other’s lips and nuzzling noses. My jaw would go slack as I observed them, until I would catch myself and turn to check that no one was watching me.
Shield your eyes, our teachers would warn us. Your eyes are the doorways to evil thoughts. From the day of my bar mitzvah, matters of holiness and purity became the obsessive concern of my mentors. If at twelve, I might have played a game of cat’s cradle with my sister’s friend Rachy from down the block, by fourteen, such interaction was strictly forbidden. If at thirteen, I could still spar with Bruchy Feldman over a book, by fifteen, I would avert my eyes entirely when a girl or woman entered a room or passed me on the street.
Guard your covenant, my teacher warned during my private bar mitzvah lessons. I was not sure what he meant until he looked at me sternly, and warned me that if I touched my covenant and it became long and hard, it could lead to the greatest of all sins: the well-known sin. And I couldn’t help wonder: If it was so well known, why did I not know it? Did it have another name, maybe? Was I allowed to ask?
“From tomorrow onward,” my father said on the evening of my bar mitzvah, “you must immerse in the mikveh each morning before prayers.” He made vague allusions to impurities occurring during the night, which the purifying waters of the ritual bath were to cleanse.
“You went to Eichler’s?” my sister, Chani, two years older than I, asked in horror when I returned home one day with an Eichler’s shopping bag. Eichler’s was a Judaica bookstore on Thirteenth Avenue, Borough Park’s main shopping thoroughfare. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near Thirteenth Avenue!” Thirteenth Avenue was filled with housewives and schoolgirls. Even my sister knew that was too much temptation for a thirteen-year-old boy to handle.
Eleven-year-old Bruchy Feldman, the sister of my friends Nusy and Eli, knew it, too, and attempted to give me a lesson about it when she caught me reading a book I had quietly taken from her room. It was during one of my return visits from Montreal, while visiting the Feldmans next door, when I wandered into Bruchy’s bedroom to browse the collection of books she had—mostly Holocaust memoirs, tales of ancient sages, and novels about Orthodox Jewish schoolgirls. On the floor near her bed, as if discarded, was a tattered, dog-eared volume, on its cover a drawing of a boy holding a pair of binoculars. Before I knew it, I was slouched on the hallway floor outside Bruchy’s room, riveted.
“You shouldn’t read that,” Bruchy said, appearing suddenly at the top of the stairs and smiling coyly as she approached. “It’s not for boys.”
I grunted in response, then inched away as she reached to take the book from me. I was thirteen, a yeshiva boy and budding Talmud scholar. I didn’t take orders from eleven-year-old girls.
Bruchy left but returned several minutes later.
“You shouldn’t read that,” she said again, her tone now reproachful, certain of her righteousness. “It’s not for boys!” she cried as she lunged for the book, her straight, unstyled, dirty-blond hair flapping across her face.
But the book was for
boys. It was not one of our books but a secular book, with the stamp of the local public library on the edges of the page. The book told the story of a boy who would gaze through binoculars to the house across the street, in which there lived a girl his age who kept her window shades open. The boy would watch her undress, then think about what he saw, and later he would find that in his pants he felt an odd feeling, a tightening bulge that he was certain everyone noticed and that he tried to cover up by wearing a raincoat at all times. He also experienced what one of his teachers called “nocturnal emissions,” which described exactly that terribly embarrassing thing that I had begun to experience over the past few months.
If I was surprised that this book was to be found in the Feldmans’ home, I didn’t give it much thought, although I was dimly aware that Bruchy had probably sneaked it into her home without her parents’ knowledge. Her father was a rabbi and scholar who spent his days absorbed in his studies and paid little attention to his children’s reading habits. Mrs. Feldman, a book lover herself, must have been lax about supervising her daughter’s reading.
But Bruchy knew, as anyone with any sense did, that this was certainly not a book for boys. Boys were to keep their minds pure and spend their days with Torah study. Girls were not required to study Torah. He who teaches his daughter Torah, the sages said, teaches her foolishness. Girls, we were told, didn’t have the urges and temptations that boys did. Girls were allowed to gaze at boys, but boys were not allowed to gaze back. Some said that women possessed loftier souls than men and therefore didn’t need to study Torah, weren’t obligated with as many commandments, were allowed to study English literature and history and even a little art and science, too, because their souls were so lofty that those subjects couldn’t hurt them, or not nearly as much as they could boys. I knew this, and Bruchy knew this, and so we both knew that it was her duty to keep me from reading a book that she, too, should not have been reading but was far more sinful when read by a boy.
It would be several decades before I learned that the book was Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, which, along with other books by the same author, Judy Blume, was seen as transgressive even by non-Hasidic standards and was banned from schools and libraries across the country. At that time, however, I knew only that the book addressed so many mysteries of my private world that I could not contain my desperate desire to keep reading it. Except, Bruchy would not allow it. Over the next few days, whenever I returned to the Feldmans’ home, I would plead with Bruchy for another glance at it, only just to hold it in my hand, and each time I would face again her righteous hissing: “It’s not for boys!”
A week later, I was back on the bus to Montreal, squeezed into a window seat beside a heavyset rabbi who spent most of the eight-hour trip offering me chulent-making tips—he claimed to be a world-class expert—while all I could think of was the boy with the binoculars. I wondered whether he ever got to speak to the girl across the street, or whether he learned anything more about the mysteries of his body. As the rabbi went on about choosing the best kinds of beans and how to cut the potatoes just right, I wondered why some books would be not for boys, what made boys and girls different, and why I was beginning to feel a strange stirring whenever this rabbi’s daughter, a pale, thin girl with a long dark braid sitting across the aisle, glanced my way.
“Perverted thoughts only enter a mind devoid of wisdom,” my teachers would remind me, and so, throughout my yeshiva years, I would try to fill my mind only with Torah study. And yet, those other thoughts still came, often when most unexpected.
If the woman plants the seed first, the child is male, I read in the Talmud, and I wondered about the ways in which such a seed might be planted.
In the Bible, I read the tales of ancient people and their many acts of “lying with”—Pharaoh and Abraham’s wife Sarah; Reuben and his father’s concubine Bilhah; Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar—and I tried hard not to let my thoughts wander to what such “lying with” might entail.
Then there was that mysterious term: tashmish hamitah. It appeared on occasion during my studies but was never explained. Teachers mumbled it without elaborating. I knew the literal meaning: “service of the bed.” I knew some things about it: It was forbidden on Yom Kippur. It was the thing—referred to by the Bible as “playing”—that Isaac did with his wife, Rebecca, while the Philistine king Avimelech watched through the window. It caused ritual impurity, requiring immersion in water before being allowed into the temple in Jerusalem or partaking of the sacred meat of ritual sacrifice. But I did not know what it was.
When I was twelve, several months before my bar mitzvah, I turned to my father one day as he headed to his study with a glass of tea in hand. The question popped out of my mouth, as if on its own: “Tatti, what does tashmish hamitah mean?”
My father stopped, startled. Standing tall and thin in his faded black chalatel, the light gabardine he wore around the house, his gartel wound snugly around his waist, he looked at me as if trying to read some secret intent behind my question. Then he asked me to follow him into his study, where he sat down in his chair and asked me to close the door.
Tashmish hamitah, my father said, refers to something very private between a husband and wife. “It involves touching in a way that expresses feelings,” he said.
He looked at me thoughtfully to see if I understood, and I nodded, feeling for a moment as if I had actually learned something. I had never seen Hasidic husbands and wives touch, and so what I now heard was so new and startling that I did not think to ask anything more about it.
“You’ll understand more when you get older,” my father added, and it was only after I left his study that I wondered what such touching might look like. My father said it expressed feeling, and so I wondered: Did they hold hands? Caress each other’s cheeks? And why was a bed needed?
Several weeks later, our rebbe, Reb Meshulam, gave his afternoon Bible lesson.
“And you shall enter the ark, you and your sons, and your wife and your son’s wives,” he read from the Bible text. It was the tale of Noah and the flood, and few students seemed to be paying attention. We’d studied this portion each year, for nearly a decade, and the story never changed. Noah built his ark. God sent the flood. Everyone perished, except those in the ark. We’d heard it all before.
“Let us study the Rashi,” Reb Meshulam said, and pointed his finger to the lower half of the page.
Rashi was a medieval French rabbi who wrote the most essential commentaries on both the Bible and Talmud. But we’d already studied this portion of Rashi, too, many times.
From across the room, Shloimy Rubin doodled in the margins of his Bible reader. Eli Green rested his chin lazily on his forearm. Next to me, one boy yawned followed by another. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and class would end in an hour.
Reb Meshulam read from Rashi’s commentary: “The men and women entered the ark separately. And so we know that tashmish hamitah was forbidden in the ark.”
Suddenly, my mind was alert. There was that term again. Tashmish hamitah. Service of the bed. This was a passage of Rashi I hadn’t noticed before—as if it had been newly placed inside our texts. So startled was I by its newness, that I blurted a question aloud: “Tashmish hamitah was forbidden in the ark? Why?”
Reb Meshulam fell silent. Shloimy Rubin stopped doodling in the margins of his Bible, and Eli Green raised his head from resting on his forearm.
Reb Meshulam looked away. “The world was in sorrow,” he said after a long pause. “It would have been inappropriate.”
Reb Meshulam continued his lesson. Shloimy returned to his doodling. Eli rested his chin back on his arm.
“You know what tashmish hamitah means?” Shloimy and Eli came running after me, when school was over. I was heading down Forty-Third Street, past a schoolyard in which a group of non-Hasidic kids were playing softball.
“We heard you ask your question,” Eli said, catching his breath. “We figured you must know.”
“I
do know,” I said.
They waited for me to elaborate.
“I can’t really say. It’s not proper to talk about it.”
“We think we know,” Shloimy said, looking at me intently. “Eli saw a picture in a magazine.”
Eli nodded along.
“Tell me what you know,” I said, “and I’ll tell you if it’s correct.”
Shloimy looked at Eli, who smiled sheepishly. Then, as Eli could not bring himself to mouth the words, Shloimy offered it instead, speaking the words almost in a whisper: “The man puts his front into the woman’s behind.”
It was now five years later, with my wedding nearing, and Shloimy’s words niggled in my mind. Could that have been what my father meant? It was hard to believe, and yet, what if Shloimy was right? Anxious to have it either confirmed or denied, I proceeded to the next level of groom instruction, a series of lessons with Reb Noach.
At Reb Noach’s dining-room table, sitting on a sweaty, plastic-upholstered chair for two hours each afternoon, I listened to instruction on a whole new set of laws: To a woman impure from menstruation, thou shalt not approach, Reb Noach read from the Hebrew Bible in front of us. A man who lies with a menstruating woman, both will be cut off from their people.
A woman emits a bloody discharge each month, Reb Noach explained; during that period, it is forbidden to approach her. It is forbidden to share utensils, to pass her any object directly, to touch her or even her garments, to gaze at her body parts that are generally concealed—upper arms, thighs, shoulders, even her hair. It is forbidden to sit on her bed, to pour her a glass of wine, or to exchange words of affection. Detailed records must be kept to allow us to be vigilant during days that her period was likely to arrive.
It was all just another elaborate set of laws, not unlike the requirement to fast on Yom Kippur, cut a newborn male infant’s genitals, or tie your left shoe before your right. Many volumes had been written on the subject. And still, the great mystery of the touching was not revealed.