Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  Hadassah Goldfarb, six months older than I, was just another of the harried Hasidic women I saw every morning, dragging children through the streets. Her house was a screaming mess. There were toys everywhere. After just two hours there I had a migraine I was pretty sure would actually split my head in half. But from somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain—in the recesses of my soul, the Lubavitchers would tell me, since every inkling toward an observant life is attributed to neshoma, to the God-given force within—there came a strange feeling of envy amid all the easy pity I was accustomed to feeling. My body wanted to run away, to put on high heels and blast the ache out of my skull with loud music and whatever else. But then after that, I knew I’d be right back where I started, on the armchair opposite Cosmo, watching him smoke cigarettes and wondering where to go from here. Hadassah and Shlomo had none of that. Young and settled, confined and exhausted, they seemed freakishly content.

  FULL OF HADASSAH’S HEAVY, greasy food, Cosmo and I trundled home. He was wearing a brand-new brown wool coat he’d bought the previous week at Century 21, a discount clothing store in Lower Manhattan. To pass the time, he fished for compliments.

  “This coat fits nicely,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I’m very happy with it.”

  He also wore a brown felt hat that he’d bought a year earlier for one hundred dollars.

  “It was worth it,” he declared.

  When we got home, I collapsed into one of the armchairs.

  Cosmo got another beer and settled on the couch. “I have made a decision,” he announced.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I have decided to give myself the same advice I give everyone else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing begets nothing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you want to get something out, you have to put something in.”

  “And…what does that mean?”

  “It means I have decided to take a little more control of my life.”

  “Wonderful!”

  He nodded and began to roll a cigarette.

  “So, do you have a plan?”

  He nodded solemnly. “I’m thinking of shaving these,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with the backs of his knuckles, indicating the side parts of his beard.

  “You know, you really should try jujitsu,” he said, flicking ashes out the window into the cement courtyard below. “I talked to the woman at the gym about you. I told her you’re nervous to try it, and she said she’d spar with you any night you want for free.”

  There was no way to communicate just how unappealing the prospect was of commuting an hour to Bay Ridge to wrestle around with some strange woman, so instead I said, “Sure. I’ll give it a try.”

  “It’s made me strong,” Cosmo said. “Not physically. Well, physically also, but more mentally. I realize all the things I was afraid of, I’m not afraid of anymore.”

  He put out his cigarette.

  “So, do you have a plan?” I asked. “What about going to school?”

  “I’m thinking I’m going to try to get into a band,” he said.

  “But what about the copy shop? Are you ever going to leave?”

  “I’m not sure I want to make decisions like this,” he said. “Maybe the best thing is to wait and have the decisions make themselves.”

  “That sounds like a terrific idea.”

  “You know, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness,” he said, “being proactive.” He pronounced it “pro active,” as two separate words, like it was some junk science he was in the process of demolishing.

  “You’ve been working there for seven years,” I said.

  “Don’t rub it in,” he said.

  We sat in silence for a minute.

  “You should make a plan,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied. “I cannot expect a long-legged Harvard woman to just walk into my life. I have to go out and do something.”

  “Eh,” I said. “Harvard women aren’t that great.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “And long legs are overrated.”

  Journey to the Warm Reaches of My Jewish Soul

  People don’t talk about loneliness much in New York, even though it is by many accounts the loneliest place in the world. There are more single-person households here than anywhere else in the country, more people jammed together in high-rise apartments but parceled out in little cells inside. The days after my breakup, I walked around the city sobbing, and no one said a thing. Later in the year, wonderful things happened to me, and I walked around beaming, and still no one met my eyes. It wasn’t a surprise—I never meet anyone’s eyes in the city, never ask anyone who’s crying on the subway what’s wrong—but still, being in Manhattan felt increasingly unbearable that winter. As much as I’d always told myself I was fine on my own, I’d gotten soft. On bad days or good ones, I wanted someone to tell. On cold days or any days, really, I longed for human contact. And it was not there. Companionship is hardly a guaranteed cure—my loneliest moments happened while I was packed in a car as a kid with my parents or tucked into bed as an adult next to Chad—but companionship, like a good outfit, at least fixes the outside.

  “Sometimes I just want someone to hug,” I told Madeleine.

  “Sometimes there’s no one to hug,” she said.

  But there was someone to hug: Hadassah Goldfarb. And there were warm kitchens and people to talk to, even if I couldn’t talk much about my actual life. You can’t really explain the Boom Boom Room or Sex and the City or Isaac the twenty-two-year-old luxury-denim model to a twenty-five-year-old Hasidic woman with three children. But you can watch her mix the Hellmann’s into the iceberg lettuce and pretend for a few hours that nothing else exists in the world. You can ruffle the curls on little Yehudeleh’s head and feel the warmth of his scalp and get him a nondairy kosher brownie if he wants one.

  Instead of finding excuses to avoid Crown Heights, I started lingering there. I got to work late because I was killing time at Judaica World, looking at light-up ballpoint pens with little floating Stars of David inside and tiny plaster of Paris yeshiva boys glued on top. I started turning down invitations to dinner parties in Manhattan on Friday nights in hopes of being invited to shabbas dinner. Just as Cosmo was licking his chops at the lure of secular life, I was retreating into the soft belly of Orthodoxy. When could he come with me to a party? he wanted to know. When were we going dancing with my friends? That busty girl at my office I told him about, the babe from California—when, oh when, could they meet? I had other thoughts. Where were we going for Purim? What were our plans for the second night of Pesach? I didn’t give a damn about these holidays—could give only the most cursory retelling of the fables behind them—I just wanted more excuses to go hide in someone’s crowded living room.

  One frigid winter morning on a lark, I stopped by Machon Chana, the Jewish women’s school down the block, and picked up a glossy brochure. It had a picture of an austere hotel lobby with Danish-modern furniture and a glowing fireplace on the front. It looked like a pamphlet for a boutique hotel in Norway but it was actually for “Yeshivacation,” a program for Jewish women who felt they weren’t quite Jewish enough. I was not one of these women. It was not God but something else that tempted me. The name Yeshivacation was charmingly awful: a clunky portmanteau of “yeshiva,” or religious school, and “vacation.” Floating above the fireplace was a tantalizing offer: “Take a trip to the warm reaches of your Jewish soul!”

  Inside the brochure was a picture of a bottle of red wine and two long-stemmed glasses, set out suggestively in front of a roaring fire. “Do you feel a sense of emptiness, your soul stifled by its involvement in mundane life?” the accompanying text asked. “Is your soul yearning for spirituality, thirsting to bask in the knowledge of your Jewish heritage? Warm up your soul by immersing it in study! Fan the embers of your soul until they burst forth in flame! Treat your soul to the gift of freedom to soar freely and break t
hrough the limitations of this world!”

  When I got to work, I wrote to the e-mail address printed on the back of the brochure. I introduced myself as a nonobservant Jew who found herself inexplicably interested in what a program like this might have to offer. I sent this off under the subject line, “Too late to join Yeshivacation?”

  I had no idea at the time, but the arrival of my e-mail in Adinah Moscowitz’s in-box in the administrative office of Machon Chana set off something like a fire alarm in Crown Heights. A wayward Jewess was there! A gettable, retrievable, teachable Jew of marrying age was “interested in attending.” My cell phone rang seconds after I hit send. Adinah introduced herself and thanked me for my query. No, as it happened, it was not too late to join Yeshivacation, Baruch Hashem, Blessed the Name. Could she just ask me a few questions about myself? Great.

  The question she asked, over and over again, in the grand Jewish tradition of asking ad nauseam until everyone exhausts himself and goes to bed, was Why? Why was I interested in attending? Why had I moved to Crown Heights? Why had my family not been more involved in our synagogue in Pittsburgh? Why, why, why, and also who. Who was I living with? Who did I know? Who was I and who did I want to be? Adinah was blunt and unsparing. She did not hide her disappointment upon hearing that no, I did not say the morning prayers each day, nor did I have my own copy of the Tanakh. She was relieved to learn that I knew the Hebrew alphabet. She was more enthusiastic when I told her about my yearly fast on Yom Kippur, omitting that I did this mostly as a crash diet before Fashion Week. When she asked whom I lived with, I dissembled, mumbling about having just moved in and not knowing my roommate well, using gender neutral pronouns throughout. Something told me platonic cohabitation with a Hasidic rabbi would be a disqualifier for Yeshivacation, if not a reason to haul in the tsnius police.

  At seven the following Monday morning, with a heavy snow pounding down from the sky, I reported for my first davening class at Yeshivacation. Adinah was in the front office. She took one look at my cropped hair and my white alpaca snow boots with bright red laces, which I’d bought for a ski trip the previous year, and quickly introduced me to a pretty young woman named Ruchel. Ruchel would be my tutor for the week because…Wow, did I need help. Petrified of doing something wrong, I asked twice before helping myself to a foam cup of Maxwell House coffee and nondairy creamer out in the hall. Ruchel ushered me into the classroom and handed me an annotated edition of Tehillat Hashem, a standard prayer book. She had long brown hair exactly the same color as her long corduroy skirt and wore a pale blue sweater that matched her eyes. She was an instructor and dormitory supervisor at Machon Chana. Kind and genuine, she said that yes, there was much I didn’t know, but plenty of time to catch up. I told her I was a writer, that I was single and that I was twenty-seven years old.

  At this last revelation, every head in the room snapped toward me. I looked up and found nine sets of pitying eyes fixed in my direction. Twenty-seven years old and unmarried! I was an old maid. I looked at Ruchel, who nodded encouragingly in the direction of my borrowed prayer book. I clumsily read the first line of the schacharit, or morning prayers, silently cursing all the time I’d wasted terrorizing my teachers at St. Sinai. The class listened as I fumbled through an effort to thank God for restoring my soul to my body, a prayer they’d all said the moment they woke up that morning. And she’s illiterate! It is a Hasidic woman’s primary job to teach her children Judaism, to make sure they speak Hebrew and Yiddish, that they say all the proper prayers at the proper times. Until you’ve mastered the fundamentals—something Lubavitchers achieve by the age of sixteen or so, after a lifelong intensive religious education—you cannot hope to marry. Who in God’s name would want you?

  “Don’t worry,” said Ilana, a heavyset eighteen-year-old goth Hasid, who wore earrings in the shape of gambling dice and chipped black polish on her nails. She came up next to me during break and clapped a friendly hand on my back. “You’ll get it.”

  Up at the Boom Boom Room, twenty-seven was young and single a good thing. But down here at Machon Chana, I was a full-grown woman who had wasted ten of her childbearing years—doing what? They didn’t want to know. All was forgiven; let’s just turn to page three of Tehillat Hashem, please, and try to take fewer than twenty minutes sounding out the Hebrew this time. I had never thought of myself as old before, or even particularly as “aging,” though my peers were already getting their first shots of Botox and beginning to fret about finding someone to marry. But now there were all these young girls looking at me like I was all washed up. It was an odd feeling. I had come here expecting to pity them—did pity them, pitied them every day when I bopped down Eastern Parkway to the subway that would take me out of Menachem Mendel’s territory and into Tina Brown’s. It made me sad to think that they would never have the feeling of absolute freedom and limitless possibility that I felt on my best days. It made them sad to think I would never be a sixty-year-old woman with twelve children and three dozen grandchildren wreaking havoc around me all the time. When I looked at them, I saw girls who would have only one first kiss in their entire lives; who would never read Anna Karenina, let alone have a passionate love affair; would never know the satisfaction of a great day at work followed by a late night blowing through someone else’s cocaine. They looked at me and saw someone who very well might end up old and alone.

  The schedule was jam-packed with seminars and activities, the vast majority of which I skipped for work. The first day was light—a tour of Crown Heights and a challah-baking workshop—but each day thereafter was a rigorous exploration of a major theme in Jewish life. Day three was devoted to “Love and Marriage—Hasidic Style.” Day four was a fast. (The Jewish calendar includes lots of fast days, and this happened to be one.) Day six had a number of panels on the subject of kashruth, or the laws of kosher living, including “Toiveling Dishes, a Hands-on Demonstration” and an evening talk, given by the kind but decrepit Rabbi Garelik called “Moshiach—Why the Urgency?” The highlight of the week, and the unmistakable apotheosis of the teachings of Yeshivacation, came on the eighth night, when they took all the happy girls in the flower of their youth (and the one strange, dim twenty-seven-year-old) to a real live Hasidic wedding.

  My week at Yeshivacation was a logistical nightmare. I attended morning davening class, worked a full day, then returned after dark for the evening program. This required me to leap back and forth across the vast sartorial gulf that separated Crown Heights and Chelsea. Every day, I slid into some horrible, dowdy amalgamation of every long item of clothing I had, terrified someone would catch me looking like polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs’s sixth wife. Arriving at work, I tiptoed into the ladies’ room and changed into my usual work outfit, something short and tailored and black. Evenings brought a scramble back into tsnius. Because I was too vain to do this at the office, I changed in a dark corner on Eastern Parkway, in an alcove between houses. This process involved hiking a long skirt up on my waist and shimmying out of my secular clothes. In place of heels came flats. In place of bare legs came kneesocks. I was just like Clark Kent, shedding the spectacles that disguised him as a journalist. Only instead of Superman, I became frumpy. Any Hasids passing by surely thought I was deranged.

  In this fashion, Manhattan life meshed awkwardly with my newly deep engagement in Crown Heights. On the one hand, there was Anya, the young married mother of three who once confessed to me she couldn’t remember her own age. (We sat down with a piece of paper and figured it out: She was twenty-five.) On the other hand was a weeklong work project I undertook at the behest of my boss: “Stars Who Age Backward,” a gallery and essay identifying celebrities who looked younger going into 2010 than they had at the turn of the millennium. One day I wrote a tribute to Alexander McQueen’s Armadillo heels: twelve-inch claw-shaped python-covered hooves that retailed for $12,000. Another day I went to a Chinese auction, where Hasids bid on hand-painted portraits of Menachem Mendel Schneerson and listened quizzically as popular Jewish com
edian and writer Joel Chasnoff told jokes about such topics as basketball, which fell far outside the typical Lubavitch woman’s frame of reference. Women in Manhattan cheered on Elin Nordegren for her graceful divorce. Girls in Crown Heights dreamed of purple velvet wedding gowns with lace trim at the wrists. One afternoon at work, when I was supposed to be researching a profile of Molly Ringwald, I found myself transfixed by an obituary for Yitta Schwartz, a Hungarian émigré and member of the Satmar Hasidim. Yitta, who had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, left a progeny of two thousand—children, grandchildren, great- and great-great-grandchildren—when she died at the age of ninety-three. The Times memorialized her under the headline “God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever.”

  This whiplash reached an apex on the final night of Yeshivacation. We had learned about mikvahs. We had eaten jelly candies while a shorn mother-daughter pair talked about shopping for wigs and convincing agnostic husbands of the importance of a kosher kitchen. Now, at the teleological conclusion of all our training, we were ready for the big show: a wedding. My outfit for the evening was a long black skirt with a red and blue plaid shirt tucked in. Plaid was having a nice moment in fashion, and I usually wore this top unbuttoned in what came to be called the “off-duty model style,” with a pair of jeans and flat ankle boots. I wore the ankle boots that night with a pair of green wool ski socks pulled up under the hem of my skirt. I looked like a homeless hipster, like I’d taken an extra-potent hit of mescaline and wandered out of Williamsburg, picking up articles of clothing out of garbage cans and putting them on along the way.

  I walked into the wedding and was shocked to see a parade of couture. The women were dressed gorgeously, their hair and makeup done to perfection. I recognized designer gowns: Versace, Gucci, Vera Wang. As they danced, holding hands and kicking up their feet in one large turning circle, I saw the red soles of a dozen Louboutins. Half the noses in the room were identical ski slopes, with a straight bridge and small round nostrils—certainly not the noses they were born with. I was shocked! I was mortified. I looked down at my ridiculous homeless hipster outfit and felt the urge to run away.