Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  Then we moved to a folding chair in the center of the garage. He went over to the stereo to put on a homemade CD called Five Elements of Love: Awaken Your Immortal Body Through Inner Smile Meditation. I know that’s the name because he gave me a copy to take home with me at the end of our session. It has a collage of images from his wall on the front, and the title is spelled out in clip-art letters that look like they were cut from magazines, as if for a kidnapper’s ransom note. As we began the final purge, of toddler Rebecca from my lower back, the music came on. It sounded like his voice singing, slow and melodic, the same lyric over and over: “This is your second chance.” To complement the sound track, he sat next to me speak-singing the line in a much deeper voice, a few seconds before the recording, to create a spooky echoing effect. THE TIME FOR YOUR REDEMPTION IS NOW NOW NOW. If I’d had enough oxygen going to my brain, I probably would have laughed. We repeated the procedure of deep breathing followed by flinging me back against the chair until I was scared I was actually going to die and began begging him to stop. “If this is your time, this is your time,” he said and repeated the cycle just once more. Once I’d regained my breath, we hugged and he left the room, handing me a red envelope on the way out. I had been instructed by his wife to leave cash for the session at my discretion.

  His wife called to check on me a few days later, and then again a few days after that. I was more or less cured, she said, and would just require occasional visits with the faith healer for upkeep. She got my e-mail address and sent me a Paperless Post invitation for a session a month later, when he was making a tour through New York to accommodate his East Coast clients, but I declined. At first the whole thing seemed harmless and funny to me, just another kooky thing rich people did when it turned out money didn’t cure all their problems. But the more distance I got from my faith healing, the more it grated on my nerves. It wasn’t just that the whole thing was exploitative and ridiculous—promising to solve people’s deepest troubles with $500 worth of near strangulation—but also that it cut off the possibility of external solutions. It was anti-emotion deodorant, a little girl wishing for God on an eyelash. It was a story to tell yourself instead of the truth, an action to take in place of real action. I thought about Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the crying bit from Likkutei Sichot: “When a person destroys his own inner Temple, no amount of weeping [or, presumably, hyperventilating] can ever rebuild it. Instead, he should perform actual deeds, for ‘one positive action is worth a thousand sighs.’” After the third invitation for a checkup, I left them a message, using the most womanly voice I could muster, asking them to please remove me from their mailing list. (They did not.)

  THE CHARMS OF LOS Angeles self-destruct after seventy-two hours. It’s just too spread out, too shiny, new and distant feeling, especially when you’re used to being jostled around for most of the day. New York is lonely because of the sheer human density of the place, because you can get right up against people and still be by yourself. Los Angeles is just lonely. Everyone’s in his own airtight bubble, shouting into cell phone headsets, picking their noses behind the tinted windows of their SUVs. In New York, when things happen, at least you hear them. Police cars whiz down Ninth Avenue. Couples scream at each other on the street. Once I was in Los Angeles working on a story for the Wall Street Journal, and in my hotel, on my floor, former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards snuck in to visit his mistress Rielle Hunter and their love child. He even had a kerfuffle with a National Enquirer reporter in the hallway, but I heard none of it. I was tucked away in my noiseproof room, watching a marathon of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

  I took the red-eye back to New York the next night and was so eager to get on the plane, I arrived at the airport two hours before my flight and planted myself in a sticky booth at Malibu Al’s Beach Bar. Two piña coladas and half a Valium later, I was ready for takeoff. The flight was almost empty. While we taxied, I arranged myself along a block of three seats, cocooned in cheap felt airline blankets, a mask covering my eyes. Just as I began to drift off, I heard the two men sitting opposite each other in front of me discover a personal connection: They were both en route to Haiti, which had just been leveled by an earthquake that had killed up to three thousand people and left much of the population homeless. One of the men was a freelance photojournalist, going to document the destruction. The other was an aid worker, going to help. They talked through the entire flight about what they expected to do and see. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I thought, trying and failing to get to sleep. In the movie version of my life, I would rouse myself from my half-drugged slumber and join the conversation at this point. When we landed, I would quit my job and follow them south to document the suffering, which while not necessarily helping tremendously, at least would be better than writing about shoes. Instead I took a Town Car back to Brooklyn, slept fitfully till nine a.m., and made my way back into work.

  Finding God

  If God to you is youth and beauty, well—here He is: ten or twelve or fourteen sixteen-year-old girls in stilettos and fetal lamb fur (or combat boots and silk chiffon, or a large feather headpiece and flesh-toned underwear, or absolutely anything at all), floating down a white strip toward a wall of flashing bulbs.

  God in this form descends on New York twice a year, for eight days of presentations, parties and swanning around in elaborate hats for whoever might be looking. Fashion Week is an exquisite circus, a trade show for the world’s prettiest people and things. Its animating spirit is envy. It is an entire world governed by the belief that the right dress can change everything. These people were my people. I loved every moment and prayed for it to end quickly.

  The hot topic on the first morning of Fashion Week was a supposedly boiling feud between half the senior members of the fashion press and a thirteen-year-old Chicago-based fashion blogger named Tavi Gevinson. In Paris, the previous week, pint-size Tavi, who wrote under the name Style Rookie, had worn a large pink bow on her head while sitting in the front row of the Christian Dior show. She was photographed by an editor for Italian fashion magazine Grazia, who was sitting behind her and found her view partially obscured by Tavi’s headpiece. This lead to considerable consternation in the audience of the shows—a distress that was swapped out within a few hours of the start of the week by the news that designer Alexander McQueen, a fashion titan, had hanged himself.

  There is always a scandal or a tragedy in fashion, just as there is always someone to hate or cry over in global politics or middle school, and that’s part of what makes it fun. Fashion is a closed universe contained within a very open one. We all wear clothes, and to varying degrees we all care about what we put on our bodies. But only a very small number of us particularly care if Christian Lacroix is going bankrupt or gap-toothed models were hot this season or what the impact will be of a python shortage in Florida. Fashion people care very much about these things, and also about other fashion people. Just as you can identify your favorite athlete, I can point out my favorite market editor from fifty yards away, and I can also tell you who made her dress. I’ve never taken a sip of Guinness, but I can list a dozen pairs of shoes in socialite Daphne Guinness’s collection, and I know where her boyfriend, public intellectual and bon vivant Bernard-Henri Lévi, buys his shirts. Most of the sane world will think this is insipid, but I have always loved fashion people. They know how to live.

  That February, a new advertising campaign cropped up in the New York City subway system. Almost no one involved in the fashion business noticed because almost no one in fashion takes the subway, but I did—an hour each way, back and forth from Crown Heights. The advertising campaign was sponsored by the Times Square Church, a house of worship built during the 1980s crack epidemic. It featured a rainbow-colored word collage set against a simple white background. In the center of the collage was a question: “What is God?” Surrounding it was a few dozen stabs at definition. God is “a father.” God is “the one with your answer.” God is “powerful,” “merciful,�
�� “able to protect.” God is “the one who loves you.” God is “there when no one else is.” As I rode from Brooklyn to the city every morning, and back every night, I read through all the things God was and then played a round or two of the game myself. God is…a huge admirer of your work. God thinks you look great today. God sees all the sacrifices you’re making and your innermost desires and your greatest fears, and God wants you to know that it’s all going to work out beautifully in the end.

  A foot of snow fell on New York in the twenty-four hours before the start of Fashion Week, just as Tavi was making her way to town and McQueen was tightening the noose. I went with my friend Maria to the openings of two new nightclubs on the evening the blizzard hit, as the first few inches floated down from the sky. We drank champagne cocktails next to a small, wedge-shaped indoor swimming pool, wistfully declining, like the rest of the fashion press in attendance, the half-cut cheeseburgers passed around by aspiring models on the waitstaff. We ate dinner at a nearby French restaurant, at a table next to Katie Holmes, who was dressed head to toe in Burberry and spent the evening nibbling around the edges of a croque monsieur. After she left, the waiter told us how nice she was, how “down-to-earth.” We speculated viciously about the true cost of that croque monsieur, paid in sessions with a Scientology Center nutritionist. We ordered the poached skate and, at the last minute, a burger and fries.

  For the last time that February, Fashion Week was headquartered in adjoining giant white party tents constructed over Manhattan’s Bryant Park, just a block away from the Times Square Church. The Tents, as they were called, were guarded by bouncers, blocked off by metal gates and surrounded by photographers and hired girls handing out leaflets and copies of the daily trades. Inevitably, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would show up for an afternoon or two, to protest Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s reliably opulent furs or the occasional egregious collection, made from fur harvested from fetal lambs skinned while they were still in the womb, or some other new and luxurious atrocity everyone was dying to wear.

  It took me five years to learn the truth about Fashion Week, which is that it is a complete slapdash mess and, apart from the big-time fashion editors and tween celebrities paid to populate the front rows, no one knows anything. Anyone in a giant pair of sunglasses who affects a haughty enough attitude can breeze right in and probably get a decent seat. The trick is unwavering confidence. On the first morning, a blazing, cornea-searing glare refracted in all directions off the newly fallen snow, so I wore my biggest pair of ten-dollar sunglasses while traversing the single block between the subway and the Tents. When I walked in, pecking away at my BlackBerry, two wire service photographers without the faintest idea who I was dropped to their knees to take my picture. A camera crew from Japan rushed over and a woman tried to interview me about my shoes. I focused on not tripping and falling. I had no idea who these people were, but Fashion Week is an assembly line of these interactions. People are constantly discovering each other, only to discover someone better nearby. I spent a few seconds talking to the Japanese television host, not knowing if the camera was even on, and then I took off my sunglasses. It dawned on the film crew that I was no one, and the scrum of photographers and the Japanese television host just walked away, midsentence.

  Inside, the Tents were rimmed with sponsor booths, where aspiring models handed out Balance bars and McDonald’s coffee, directed you to the AOL media lounge or invited you to check out the Home Shopping Network display. No one at Fashion Week would be caught dead eating any of these products or visiting any of these booths, so the effect is a centripetal crush in the main tent, with women in towering heels and flamboyant outfits trying to avoid contact with any of the heathen advertisers who make the whole thing possible. Only the coolest and the least cool attendees venture to the outer realm—the people who have no reason to care.

  People begin lining up a half hour before shows are scheduled to start, forming a crowd in front of a few twenty-two-year-old publicists propped up behind a card table with lists of seating assignments. The war in Iraq was a triumph of planning and preparation compared to the average preshow mania. At some point, when at least some of the several hundred attendees have received their seating assignments, the doors will open and everyone will stream in, making their way to their or someone else’s small white padded wooden folding chair. At the back wall, at the head of the runway, which is covered in protective plastic, a swarm of photographers will have already taken their positions. As the attendees filter in, everyone checks everyone else out, scans faces for fame or recognition and constructs a mental hierarchy of the place. Every show is an instantaneously self-generating school cafeteria—you take your seat, you see who’s sitting next to you, maybe you say hello but probably not. Twenty to thirty minutes later, a black-clad publicist talking frantically into a headset pulls the plastic sheeting off the runway. The din falls to a murmur, the lights dim, the music explodes out of the speaker system. A series of spotlights illuminate the runway, a heavenly beam cutting through clouds. In this moment, fashion edges toward religion. The models are so close and the crowd is so quiet. The bass line of the music is so heavy you feel it in your bones.

  Three or four minutes later, it’s over. The lights come on. We pack and leave. Maybe there is a swag bag—a scented candle, two lipsticks, a recycled brown paper notebook with the name of the designer embossed on an organic wood pencil tucked into the binding—or maybe not. Maybe you see someone you vaguely recognize or someone you met the other night or your oldest friend, and in that case you go kiss her on the cheek and spend a minute discussing how “really of the moment” the collection was or how “derivative” and when was the last time the designer actually had a new idea? You ogle Tavi and observe a moment of silence for McQueen and make a vow you never follow up on, to have lunch as soon as the “madness ends.”

  I wanted to bring Hadassah Goldfarb, fashion lover, to a show or party sometime that week. I was desperate to make it work, but the constraints of raising three children and observing a severely restrictive set of religious obligations made scheduling difficult. Fashion Week really gets going right around the time most women in Crown Heights are throwing the first braided loaves of shabbas challah in the oven. Most shows take place in the hours when mothers are driving their children to and from Beis Chaya Mushka and the rest of the Crown Heights yeshivas. Parties start around eleven at night.

  Fashion people haul all sorts of accessories and entourages with them to the shows, and sometimes this baggage is accidentally mistaken for fashion itself. At the end of Fashion Week in February, the Wall Street Journal ran a clever front-page story about how the hot accessory this year was children—actual children, squirming in their front-row seats, leaving trails of cookie crumbs on the runways and scuttling around backstage with chocolate-smeared fingers, talking about playing dress-up with the models. I wondered what would happen if Hadassah came along and the photographers took to it, and suddenly black hats were the new black. And then I discovered that in 1993, Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall collection was inspired by the ultra-Orthodox and featured an assortment of tsnius-appropriate pieces, presented in a Paris showroom while a fiddler played traditional Jewish music. For the presentation, known as “Rabbi Chic,” models wore Mohawks and sidelocks. Menorahs lined the walls. The invitations were lettered in Hebraic-style script and the attendees, many of them Jewish department store executives, were served Manischewitz wine. The collection was a smash. After the show, Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, told the New York Times, “As a Jewish-American princess, I wasn’t offended at all. I just cut through all that Judaic stuff and looked at the clothes. Underneath that was a very commercial collection.” Hadassah Goldfarb was so 1993.

  The nineties, of course, were a more innocent time. In 2011, Christian Dior creative director John Galliano got knackered at a French café and went on an anti-Semitic tirade that turned the entire fashion business, save Kate Moss, into crusadin
g Zionists (or at least enthusiastic and diplomatic defenders of Jews). It lasted about six months.

  The first collection I saw was by Richard Chai. It paired flowing pastel chiffon gowns with heavy gray Timberland boots. One critic described it as “the broody-quirky harnessing of nineties grunge.” It looked like what Winona Ryder would have worn out to her mailbox during one of the more difficult stages of her life. It too was a very commercial collection. I wrote an enthusiastic fifty-word review. Then I went home to Crown Heights.

  COSMO E-MAILED LATER that week, as I was waiting for the Phillip Lim show to start. There was no subject line and the text read, in entirety:

  hey!

  i have some good news!

  we should celebrate!

  I was busy coveting British It girl Alexa Chung’s outfit, which she was modeling in the front row, but took a moment to write back. What was the good news?

  my papers came!!!