by Rebecca Dana
“How the hell did I get here?” I thought, meaning both existentially and literally. How did my perfect life come to this? And also, How, physically, did I end up curled around some ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s glorious throne in the middle of Brooklyn? It had all been such a blur.
“Rebecca!” Cosmo called. “Dinnertime!”
I hadn’t eaten in days. My many organs and channels were processing vodka, Valium and the trauma of a failed relationship—little else. “Come on already!” Cosmo said. “We go shopping!”
Crown Heights is home to the world’s largest community of Lubavitch-Hasidim, a sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews with a New Age bent, estimated to be about two hundred thousand strong and growing. They live much the same way their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived in territories more hostile than remote Brooklyn, where Jews were driven out by angry mobs on good days, murdered and tossed into mass graves on bad ones. The men, known colloquially as “black hats,” wear black hats, black coats, long beards and prayer shawls. The women wear long dresses or skirts and tops that cover knees and elbows. The rabbis commonly look like the face cards from my Memory Game: old, grizzled and gray. The children, of whom there are seemingly infinite numbers, are adorable.
One thing that sets Lubavitchers apart from more mainstream Jews—the regular Orthodox, the Conservative, the Reform, and the godless heathens like me—is that they’re driven by a belief in the Messiah’s imminent return. Because of this, they recruit like the army in wartime, sending out fleets of mitzvah tanks—painted buses that roll around the city spreading the word of God—and setting up Chabad Houses around the world. They train their smartest sons, like Cosmo, to become rabbis, then ship them off to distant lands to teach Jews to be more observant and non-Jews to do the best they can, poor fools. A year before I moved to Crown Heights, Muslim terrorists from Pakistan bombed ten separate sites in Mumbai, India, one of which was a Chabad House run by Rabbi Gabi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, a young couple killed in the attack. This kind of warfare is devastating but not surprising to the descendants of the original Lubavitchers, whose parents and grandparents schlepped to America from Lyubavichi, in what is now Russia, while the Russians and the Germans and pretty much everyone else on the planet ran after them with torches. This is a community that has fully internalized the magnitude of its struggle, embracing its urgency and its dire consequence. They have, as the Mafia would say, gone to the mattresses for the Jewish soul.
And I had come to them, and gone to my own mattress, and sobbed.
“The answer is that crying cannot rebuild,” Menachem Mendel Schneerson wrote in volume ten of a particularly sexy work called Likkutei Sichot, an underappreciated reference for young atheists in the throes of their first heartbreaks. Schneerson was the beating heart of the Lubavitch community, a man with small eyes and a thick beard who captivated his followers. His teachings were so vibrantly apocalyptic and he was such a compelling, enigmatic figure that many, including Cosmo, started to think Schneerson himself was the Messiah. When he died in 1994 and the world didn’t end, the Lubavitchers went about rebuilding. Among the gifts Schneerson passed on to his tribe, which aided them in this task, was a prodigious talent for fund-raising. Coffers brimming, they have continued to spread the word in their leader’s absence, performing mitzvoth, or good deeds, as he, and God before him, commanded.
Don’t be a pansy, the teaching goes, do something. In a year after the Mumbai bombing, Lubavitchers the world over raised enough money to carry little Yehudeleh, the Holtzberg’s orphaned two-year-old son, to adulthood, and, mertz Hashem, God willing, through rabbinical school. “Crying lessens the pain,” Schneerson wrote in Likkutei Sichot, “but it cannot fix what was destroyed.”
Well, if crying wasn’t going to do it, what then?
“Rebecca!” Cosmo’s calls grew louder from the kitchen. “It’s time to eat!”
For as much outreach as they do in the world, the Crown Heights Lubavitchers like to come home to their own. They have formed an airtight community in the middle of the most populous county in New York. Street signs are written in Yiddish. Proper decorum is enforced by a crew of rabbis and other sticklers known locally as the “tsnius police.” (tsnius is the Yiddish word for traditional conservative dress, and those who police it go to great lengths to make sure Hasids aren’t bombarded by sexy female elbows and knees.) Duck underground for thirty minutes and you emerge from the subway into the cheating heart of the modern world. You can watch a drag queen sodomize himself with a wine bottle on the stage of a popular nightclub or do blow off the anatomy of a male model in the bathroom of a penthouse or sit uncomfortably close to an eminent journalist during a dinner party in an Upper East Side town house, and try not to look as he runs his fingers up the skirt of a senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Back down in the subway, and half an hour later, the year appears to be 1702.
Some younger Lubavitchers refer to their neighborhood as just the “’chood,” pronounced with a soft “k” at the back of the throat, the universal consonant of Jews. The ’chood is bordered on all sides by black neighborhoods, composed largely of West Indian immigrants. Long before the 1993 Crown Heights riots that left three dead and the neighborhood devastated, the different communities of central Brooklyn were at war, over not only this world but also the next. Cosmo and I lived right on the edge of the West Indian neighborhood, and unlike my old apartment in the West Village, inhabited exclusively by white upper-middle-class yuppies and right down the street from where they filmed Sex and the City, my new apartment building was half blacks, half Jews. “The blacks are nicer,” Cosmo said as we walked through the building and the silent battle of opposing apocalypses that played out on our neighbors’ doors. TIME IS SHORT. JESUS IS COMING! said the bumper sticker on C6. MOSHIACH IS COMING! LET’S GET READY! proclaimed B3. Someone in D4 had typed up a Malcolm X quote and taped it to his door:
I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment.
The central courtyard, paved over in cement, hosted a strange collection of discarded items that never budged as long as I lived there: a broken child’s car seat, several windows, half an old station wagon divided into its component parts. Everything about the place seemed to suggest it was the last stop at the end of the world.
As we walked to a corner store in the West Indian neighborhood, me sniffling into a balled-up tissue, Cosmo breathing in the night air, we passed pairs of women pushing giant multiple-baby strollers and groups of young Hasidic men straining against the wind. Everyone stared at us.
“Is everyone staring at us?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that because you’re not supposed to be walking down the street with me?”
“Yes.”
“Is that because I look like a shiksa?” (This is a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman.)
“It’s because you look like a German.”
We walked a way in silence.
“I think I’m going to dye my hair,” I said.
“Do I at least get a say in the color?”
“No.”
“You should dye it blue.”
Silence.
“Why did you let me take the room, if this is all so forbidden?” I asked.
“Why not?” he said, affectless.
“You’re rebelling, or something, is that it?”
“Whatever.”
It took a long time to piece together the details of Cosmo’s past because he prefers dramatic gestures and untranslatable expressions to traditional linear storytelling. It also took a long time because he is an evasive, cagey, complicated and lonely person who had never really been interrogated about his life story before. Like me, he had what polite people would call a healthy imagination. In his view, he worked
at a copy shop but belonged on a battlefield. “Is there a place that needs to have a revolution? I really believe that’s my calling,” he said once. “I’m Trotsky. I’m Jabotinsky. I should be leading armies through Prussia. I shouldn’t be…here.”
That first night in Crown Heights, I taught Cosmo how to cook spaghetti, and it was the first time I stopped crying for more than an hour in days. It’s not that he didn’t know, per se, but he’d always cooked the noodles for at least twenty-five minutes, to make sure they were good and soft. I introduced him to the concept of al dente. “Is it!” he said. This was his all-purpose exclamation for things that surprised him.
I watched him eat dinner but couldn’t eat any myself.
“Do you like chocolate?” he asked.
I nodded.
“We’ll have to get some and melt it on the stove and inject it into your veins.”
“Sounds delicious,” I said.
Cosmo told me he liked a full-bodied woman. His favorite actress was Kate Winslet. (His favorite actor was Brad Pitt, whom he believed—not entirely without merit—was his perfect doppelgänger). He worshipped Lars von Trier. He was curious about my life but also unaccustomed to the porous boundaries of the Western world and cautious about asking too many questions. He wanted to be friends on Facebook. He wanted to come out dancing with my friends sometime.
“Will it be like Sex and the City?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” I said.
Lost Messiah
I didn’t learn Cosmo was a rabbi until after I moved in, when he breezily announced that I should do whatever I wanted with the living room furniture except I should speak to him if I was going to throw away the bookcase, because hidden somewhere in it was his rabbinical certificate. I took the news in stride. The bookcase was the least of the living room’s problems, a much lower priority than the mauve-colored faux leather couch with the giant gash in the middle and stuffing tufting out, or the twelve-foot-long oval oak dining table that occupied a full two-thirds of the room. Also, it was difficult to get too exercised about furniture when I was pretty sure I wouldn’t survive the winter.
The initial burst of clarity that sent me to Crown Heights quickly gave way to bottomless self-pity and a general lack of interest in life. I basically stopped eating, since all food tasted too strong. I walked around wearing headphones with no music playing, since street sounds felt like someone was jackhammering a hole into my head. I wore sunglasses because even though sweet death seemed imminent, I was still terrified of getting wrinkles. So, not everything changed. You have one year left.
Cosmo and I confounded each other at the beginning. Typically, you meet a new person and have at least a basic sense of the social rules governing the interaction. “Oh, hi” (handshake), “I’m Rebecca” (eye contact), “nice to meet you.” And in under ten words, there is now a shared humanity. I’m taller, you’re shorter. I’m dressed up, you’re dressed down. Look how much time I clearly spend on my hair! I’m probably a narcissist, but also I have an easy smile and a big laugh, so I’m almost certainly not Satan. You make a thousand instantaneous judgments in the first moments of meeting someone, and mostly they’re correct.
I had no such experience with Cosmo. The semiotics were completely out of whack. He could have been a learned scholar, an unemployed hipster or a roadie for Ozzfest. His hair was rust colored, cropped close on the pate with a thick beard about half a foot long at its tip. He wore T-shirts and slacks over a pair of brown men’s dress shoes so dilapidated they looked like they might disappear in a cloud of dust. When he smiled, it stretched out and sprang back like a rubber band, giving no indication of pleasure or displeasure, friendliness or uninterest or sarcasm. It worked like a comma in his speech. “Do whatever you want with the living room furniture” (quick smile) “but speak to me before you do anything with the bookcase, because hidden somewhere in there is my rabbinical certificate.”
“Wait,” I said, “you’re a rabbi?”
This conversation occurred the morning before I moved in, when I came to drop off my deposit and first month’s rent.
“Yes” (quick smile), “although the older I get, the less I think I qualify.”
“But you work at a photocopy shop?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“Because” (quick smile) “I’m waiting for my papers to come through.”
“How long have you been waiting?”
“Seven years.”
Quick smile.
I tried to be polite, but who knows what polite is under such circumstances, when the proper thing to do was to never have been there in the first place. In the absence of a better idea, I smiled back obsequiously. I did a lot of obsequious smiling in those first days, when I wasn’t sobbing or sulking around, and the result was we looked something like Annie’s old ward at Bellevue. One person grinning like an idiot, the other flashing glimpses of his teeth—friendly or unfriendly, it wasn’t clear.
THE MORNING AFTER I moved in, I woke up in the apartment, my eyes puffy and red. I stumbled to the kitchen to get a glass of water and found Cosmo standing at the stove, in underwear and tzitzit, frying eggs. “What’s up?” he said, slightly annoyed, as if I were interrupting.
As far as I knew, Cosmo had never lived with a woman before, and after I moved in, he didn’t change much. He sang whenever it moved him, belting Hebrew raps and Paul Simon ballads with the full capacity of his lungs. He had an unparalleled tolerance for grating noise. He was impervious to screaming teakettles and to his alarm clock in the morning, which began beeping slowly and sped up until it sounded like a person flatlining on an EKG machine. He’d let it go for hours. (For the first few weeks I lived there, I woke every morning with an acute sensation of having just been pronounced dead.)
“With jujitsu, I estimate I’ll be able to take out a group of five to seven black men,” Cosmo told me that morning as he ate his eggs. “Oh, I forgot to mention, there was a robbing at gunpoint right outside our lobby last week. A man from the apartment chased the guy down, and it turned out to be a real gun! Not loaded, though.” A note of genuine disappointment rang in his voice.
In his atheist manifesto God Is Not Great, in a chapter called “Religion Kills,” Christopher Hitchens relates a hypothetical question, posed to him by religious broadcaster Dennis Prager when the two sat together on a panel, which Hitchens locates in time “a week before the events of September 11, 2001.” The question was: If you were walking through a strange city in the evening and saw a large group of men approaching, would you feel more or less safe if you knew they were just coming from a prayer meeting? Hitchens’s answer is “less safe” in the extreme, and he recounts six illustrative personal experiences that occurred only within the letter B—Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad—to which I, never having been to those places but agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment, would only add: Brooklyn.
It wasn’t just the Jews, it was everyone. When I walked alone from the subway on my way home from work at ten, eleven, twelve o’clock at night, I felt comfortably certain that everyone on the street was just about to rape or murder me. I had been taught this since grade school, when the principal brought in a special speaker to address my fifth-grade class about how to fend off the sexual assault that no doubt loomed in our future. She was a short, angry woman with a gym teacher’s build. I remember two key pieces of advice: “Always wear sneakers or shoes you can sprint in.” Sprinting was essential. And: “Carry a whistle.” I did neither of these things, especially not the former. I am five foot ten, and I have no earthly need to wear high heels—and in fact many incentives not to wear them—but unless I was going running or to the beach, I never left home in anything else. This was a point of pride, and it became an inviolable tenet once I moved to Crown Heights. Since whistles weren’t an option either, mostly because who carries a whistle? I developed a different mechan
ism for feeling safe when I walked home alone at night. I sang.
To say I am not a singer is an understatement on par with “I am not an ultra-Orthodox Jew.” I played piano growing up, studying the Suzuki method with the mild-mannered Mrs. Kaufman, whom my father called “the cough woman” and who was so fragile she seemed to have been glued together like pieces of a broken vase. Then came more rigorous classical instruction with a Russian woman, who banged the wall to keep tempo as I played, and ultimately broke up with me via handwritten note to my parents. Her name was Snitkovsky.
If I had one wish, I would wish for the ability to sing. I tried to teach myself once as a kid: in the public library, with a book called Teach Yourself to Sing! It didn’t work. We were forced to take singing class at Ellis, but I was so embarrassed by my weak, warbly voice I cried every time I was forced to solo. Being generally nerdy and unaccustomed to struggling at school, I reacted to this by acting out, finding ever new and barbaric ways of tormenting our teacher, Mrs. Crosby, a kind enough woman with terrible nerves. Mrs. Crosby cried when my fellow atonal brats and I did nasty things, like humming while she spoke, one at a time, switching just as she laid eyes on us, so she could never locate the source of the noise. Entire classes were wasted like this, and entire afternoons spent in the principal’s office. In high school, to satisfy our music requirement, I played poorly in a jazz band. This was the whole of my experience with musical performance until I became a resident lunatic in the ’chood.
What I lack in musical ability, I at least make up for with enthusiasm. It’s possible that no one is more susceptible than I am to the emotional pull of pop music. I was the only kid with a Walkman on my bus in elementary school, and I played Michael Jackson as loud as the volume dial went. One year for Hanukkah, I requested and got a white Pocket Rocker handheld minicassette player and listened to “Walk Like an Egyptian” until the tape wore out. There is almost nothing I don’t like, and in many cases, the worse the better: I lived for Ace of Base, Boyz II Men, Kris Kross, Green Day, every terrible Europop invasion and every teen-slut nightmare built from plastic in Orlando. For my fourteenth birthday, I took two friends to see Ani DiFranco at a tiny club in downtown Pittsburgh and found the whole experience so transcendent—all the short-haired women bouncing around, armpit fur blowing in the air-conditioning—I spent two weeks convinced I was a lesbian. I have seen Phish and the Dave Matthews Band at least a dozen times. I have spent hours sobbing to Fleetwood Mac and Alanis Morissette. When I graduated to a Discman, the first disc I bought was a compilation of pop hits from 1983.