Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  Another couple, with three children of their own, was already at the table. Gittel and Solomon were twenty-five. They had grown up a few doors away from each other, married as teenagers and had the kids in rapid succession, one-two-three, as if racing to make a family before the bread cooled. Gittel was breast-feeding her baby on the couch when we walked in. She had a round, sweet baby face herself and looked no more than eighteen years old. She told the story of a recent trip to the pharmacy to buy formula. She brought along her oldest child, who was three and a half. The pharmacist asked if the little girl was her sister, and Gittel laughingly explained the situation, watching his jaw slacken. “He couldn’t believe it!” she said, giggling.

  Solomon was bellicose and fat. Before dinner, the children ran around the apartment screaming, Gittel nursed on the couch, Shaina carted plates of food in from the kitchen, Avraham gave me an impromptu lecture on that week’s Torah portion and Solomon sat at the far edge of the table and did nothing, just shouted occasionally at whoever would listen. He read celebrity tabloid magazines and wanted to know about Tiger Woods, so I tentatively ventured bits of my reporting, feeling ashamed that I knew as much about it as I did. He asked me if I had ever heard of a Hasidic fashion designer and then before I could answer went off on a tear, half in Yiddish, about how the man was a faygeleh—gay. He could not get over Cosmo and my living arrangement and kept asking questions about how it worked. I saw Cosmo shrinking in humiliation a few seats away. “Do you want to go?” Cosmo mouthed, and I shook my head, I was fine. Before he could respond, it was time for the broches (pronounced “bra-chas”): time to chant blessings and then eat.

  Avraham went around with a bottle of kosher wine, and we all held up small, engraved silver cups, which he filled to the absolute brim—a tradition meant to give a feeling of abundance on shabbas. During the week you can skimp, especially if you’re twenty-five years old with three children. But for one day, you fill your cup until it’s overflowing. We said the broche: Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who gives us the fruit of the vine. Amen—and everyone drained his glass.

  We said the broche over the bread: Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe…Amen. Shaina passed around the challah, and we each ripped off a hunk. It was warm like just-spun cotton candy, with buttery whirls of steam rising from the center. Everyone ate.

  Everyone ate but little Chaya, Gittel’s oldest, who didn’t touch her bite-size morsel. Children under three are exempted from elements of observance—an infant girl can wear short sleeves and doesn’t have to participate in services or say prayers—but Chaya was just old enough to be on the hook. She was standing right next to me, playing with plastic Hebrew alphabet blocks at a doll-size Fisher-Price kiddie table, and unlike the rest of us, who were hungry for dinner after a long week, she didn’t want to eat. Solomon saw this and a flash of anger came into his eyes. He shoved his chair away from the dining table, sloshing wine onto the tablecloth. Grabbing little Chaya by the shoulders, he shouted, “Eat!” Bewildered and terrified, she clamped her mouth shut and shook her head. With his thick sausage fingers, Solomon pried her jaws open, forced the small piece of challah inside and then held her chin tight against her skull until she managed to chew and swallow. When he let go, she began wailing, her cheeks red, her face smeared with snot and tears. I watched all of this in silent awe, like it was a documentary on the Discovery Channel.

  Gittel went over to calm her down, and Avraham pulled Solomon into the kitchen. “Be a good husband,” he said. Solomon went upstairs to put the other children to bed. When he returned he announced he was going out. He didn’t say where and didn’t say when he’d be home. Gittel begged him not to go, grabbing at the fringe of his tallit, but he took off, making a few loud jokes on the way out. He left silence in his wake. It cannot have been the first time he’d acted this way, but the others seemed extra-conscious now, since a stranger was there. Cosmo looked like he wanted to die. Gittel dusted herself off, put a babe back on a boob, and the night continued without further interruption. Before I left she asked if I’d like her to set me up on a shidduch date with one of Solomon’s friends.

  It is impossible to count, but rough estimates suggest that Brooklyn is home to hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, including the Lubavitchers, the Satmars, the Bobovers, and the Breslevers. The Lubavitchers have their own ambulances, called Hatzolah, their own hospitals and their own local law enforcement, the Shomrim. One August night during the year I lived among the ultra-Orthodox in Brooklyn, two men calmly exited a white car on Driggs Avenue, shot a twenty-five-year-old Satmar Hasid named Burech Halberstam in the abdomen and then stood over his body, pointing and laughing. A month later, a black Orthodox Jew was shot a few blocks away by a gunman hanging out of a green Mazda. That fall, the Shomrim were given bulletproof vests.

  Gruesome murders by roaming thugs are an expected if tragic part of life for a people who’ve been threatened with death for most of their history. This is not a community of people who are particularly surprised when someone shoots a Jew, then stands laughing over the body. On top of that, there is the political aspect. Nothing unifies the neighborhood and city law enforcement, whose elected bosses depend on Jewish money for their campaigns, like an old-fashioned hate crime. Schneerson and his contemporaries cultivated close relationships with elected officials, giving the Lubavitchers a prominent voice, as Jewish leaders go, in city and national affairs. In 2010, Lubavitch leader Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky was named the most influential rabbi in America by one survey, topping non-Hasidic rabbis who represented movements in the millions and who managed enormous endowments. It’s easy to caricature the Lubavitchers for their makeshift outreach efforts—the hand-painted mitzvah tanks, the pedi-sukkahs, made of cheap plywood fencing and driven around by teenage Hasids on tricked-out bicycles each fall. But the truth is, the Lubavitchers are a sophisticated international force. The Chabad-Lubavitch organization raises around $1 billion a year, according to The Rebbe’s Army by journalist Sue Fishkoff. That buys a lot of Chabad houses around the world, and it also buys a lot of friendly attention from higher offices, helping to ensure certain territories never become too hostile to the Jews.

  There are established social, economic and political pathways for confronting threats from the outside world. It is within the Lubavitch community that protections become murky. There’s a zero-tolerance policy for anti-Semitism in Crown Heights, but neither Jewish nor secular law meddles too much inside people’s homes. Lubavitchers range from billionaires to extremely poor. Many use food stamps and live in cramped apartments. In many respects, Lubavitch Hasidism is a matriarchy. Ask any Lubavitcher woman out of earshot of any of the men, and she’ll confess to wearing the pants, in many respects, in her household. They teach the children religion; they often manage the family finances and keep the community’s businesses in order while the men study and pray all day. Every morning, every ultra-Orthodox man says an extra prayer thanking God for not making him a woman, and it’s not hard to see why. Not only do many Hasidic women bear upward of six children in their lifetimes, but they are also subject to countless atavistic rules. Cosmo and I lived two blocks away from the Crown Heights mikvah, where women must go each month to purify themselves after menstruating. Cosmo told me a dedicated rabbi was on duty twenty-four hours a day to examine stains left in a woman’s underwear. Only he might determine, based on the color of the stain, whether the woman was fit for sex.

  In this climate, between the poverty and the institutionalized misogyny, domestic abuse is rarely reported and almost never publicly addressed. During my time in Crown Heights, I met many men who adored their wives, who were loving and deferential, and even in the poorest households, treated the women like queens. But I also met men like Solomon. And I heard stories about others: the fathers of six, eight, twelve, who went cruising for prostitutes in the poorest neighborhoods of Brooklyn. There is a strange feeling of lawlessness in Crown Heights, even as its residents are pinn
ed down by so many rules. When so much is forbidden, it can be hard to distinguish one sin from another: a cheeseburger from a hooker from a slap across a child’s face. And when the biggest threat has always come from the outside, I imagine it’s hard to find the time or energy to look within. A year after I moved out, an eight-year-old boy named Leiby Kletzky was walking home from day camp when a neighbor named Levi Aron picked him up, brought him home, chopped him to pieces, wrapped up just his little feet and stored them in his freezer. It was reported later that the Shomrim had been tipped off that Aron was a wacko months before the crime, but they apparently never passed that information on to the police, who discovered little Leiby’s remains after a frantic two-day search.

  Gittel watched powerlessly as Solomon manhandled their child. After he left, she chuckled and moved on. Part of me wanted to grab her and her children and haul them out of there. Part of me wanted to run away myself. Instead, I did nothing. I ate my challah quietly and left before it got too late.

  THE FOLLOWING rain-soaked weekend, I had to decline an invitation to shabbas with the Roths, another Crown Heights family, because all my earthly concerns were replaced by the “Women in the World: Stories and Solutions” summit, a conference sponsored by the Daily Beast. In typical Tina fashion, “Women in the World” was a lavish affair, drawing the boldest names from her Rolodex to the Hudson Theatre, in the Millennium Hotel in Times Square, for three days of programming focused on rape, “gendercide,” and other things you wouldn’t necessarily want to talk about over dinner. Few people can make rapid-fire panel discussions about institutionalized female infanticide feel both urgent and glamorous, but that was Tina’s special skill. The guest list was impossibly tight and stringently (but politely) enforced. Hillary Clinton came. Madeleine Albright came. Meryl Streep not only came but also played a Northern Irish civil rights worker in a staged reading of a documentary play about abused women, directed by Julie Taymor, the woman who would later be fired from the Broadway production of Spider-Man.

  Tina, in her blue power suits and perfectly frosted hair, presided regally over the conference, which so resembled her in taste and tone that it felt as if we had all gathered inside her frontal lobe. The schedule was jam-packed, with just enough time for clipped rounds of applause between panels before Tina would bound up onstage: “Wasn’t she mahhvelous? And now we’re going to hear from…” Katie Couric interviewed Queen Rania of Jordan about “the lives of girls.” Diane Sawyer interviewed Marietou Diarra, a Senegalese woman, about female genital cutting. Barbara Walters, Tory Burch, Valerie Jarrett, Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan and on and on and on: They all came and talked and made sweet jokes about their hair or clothes by way of transition into the heavier issues of the day. They all milled around in pantsuits and modest heels. They all had the Chardonnay. There were two stalls in the lobby ladies’ room and the line snaked out the door all weekend long. “We should take over the men’s room,” attendees joked throughout, but we never did.

  I had looked forward to the conference with an equal mix of eagerness and dread. I’ve always had little tolerance for anything that involves large groups of women moving one another to tears. I held out some hope of being transformed during the weekend, of finding myself sitting next to an impossibly inspiring woman and deciding, spur of the moment, to quit my job and fly off to help people in some war-torn (but picturesque) corner of the planet. Far likelier was that I would sit through hours of heartrending interviews with rape victims in the Congo and then return to my desk on Monday morning to resume reporting a story about Fendi’s $1,400 Lucite platform stripper heels, which were proving to be the hot shoe for spring.

  The Millennium Hotel is right in the middle of New York’s Theater District, around the corner from Town Hall and a block east of Sardi’s, the famous after-show meeting place for Broadway stars. I put on my go-to black-tie dress in the handicapped stall at work before heading uptown in a Town Car with my colleagues. Our first official responsibility was to act as hosts of the opening-night dinner, welcoming guests, anchoring tables and chatting up delegates so everyone felt comfortable and included. We had to fight through a busy lobby full of disoriented tourists spooked by the rain. I crammed into an elevator car with conference delegates on their way to dinner and stray hotel guests returning in defeat to their rooms. It smelled like damp novelty sweatshirts, hot-dog breath and rosewater—a strange mix of boyish pleasure-seeking scents and maternal problem-solving scents and sweat and mildew.

  When we arrived on the eighth floor, the doors opened on an Epcot-like scene. In contrast to the high winds and hurricane-like conditions outside, the atmosphere in the room was subtropical: yellow lights, orange carpet, and everywhere you looked, the walls and pillars had been decorated with thick swarms of plastic monarch butterflies, swooping and twisting ninety feet above midtown. The tables were covered in orange and yellow cloths, with large bouquets of orange and yellow carnations in the center. The whole thing had an enchantingly girlish feel, like we were just occupying the room until Kimberly Whoever’s sweet sixteen party started later that night. I half expected Melanne Verveer, the United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and the evening’s keynote speaker, to take the stage while a broad-based international orchestra played “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  I was at table eleven, just behind the head table, where Tina, Diane and the guests of honor were to sit. I parked my things and waited, smoothing the wrinkles in my button-up silk dress and worrying that my lipstick had smudged. Three hundred fifty women draped in Chanel and St. John were in the process of loading into and unloading from the three small wood-paneled elevators. I tapped my fingers on the edge of a chair and watched as they chitchatted their way into the hall amid swarms of fake butterflies.

  Over at the head table, a billionaire mogul caught my eye. He and I had met several times before, and I’d interviewed him once for the Wall Street Journal. He flashed a look of recognition and motioned for me to come over. He was chatting with a woman I didn’t recognize, whom I assumed ran some sort of major global philanthropic organization. It was just a few paces to where he stood, and as I floated over, I reflected on how lucky I was to work for a great woman, to be at this monumental conference all about women’s rights, to have the chance to meet all these illustrious Women in the World.

  “Hi, [Mr. X],” I said.

  Mr. X wore a suit that looked like it had been sewn onto his body. He had applied just the right amount of expensive cologne. He was dignified and calm, and as he leaned in close to my ear, I felt a measure of pride at having finally achieved a small level of recognition in the world. I did not think about Crown Heights in this moment because Crown Heights, and all its poverty and frumpiness and sporadic spousal abuse, did not exist in this moment. I smiled my best young professional lots-of-potential smile.

  “I’ll have a vodka tonic,” he said.

  I felt my ears turn hot and red. He pulled back and I looked in his eyes, the lots-of-potential smile frozen on my face.

  He turned to the philanthropist woman and asked, “What do you want?”

  “Ummmmm,” she said, looking off in the direction of the butterflies. “I’ll have vodka with a splash of soda.”

  I nodded, pained, and went off to find a waiter, who brusquely informed me there was no hard liquor on offer. So I did what any grown woman who’d aspired her entire life to be smart and sassy and formidable would have done. I went and hid in the bathroom until it was time for dinner.

  When I was certain everyone had taken her seat and my mogul friend had forgotten about his drink, I crept out of the bathroom and into the light. It was a long walk to my table, past survivors of genocide and rape in Africa, founders of major philanthropic organizations, authors of great books. I gathered my strength as I moved from the bathroom toward table eleven. Maybe this was the solution, I thought. Maybe my life lived in deferment was deferring to the wrong thing. Maybe the universe does send me signs, and maybe the sign tonight p
ointed to a life of good deeds and charitable service, of rescuing rape victims and setting them up with microloans.

  With each step I grew more hopeful that there was a path to righteousness and I was on it. Who knows: Whoever sat there at table eleven might hold the key to my future. She might look at me and see not a cocktail waitress, nor a fashion writer, but a wholly different person, bound for some life-affirming adventure. I was the present by the fireplace. Who could know what lay within!

  I rounded the corner amid a swarm of plastic butterflies just as Melanne Verveer took the stage. Table eleven came into view, and I could see there was one seat open. All the women looked intently up at Ambassador Verveer, and I did too. I was fully swept up in the moment. Forget the vodka tonic, forget Carrie Bradshaw, forget Crown Heights. I was walking headlong into my future, and it was a future of great women. Women who helped women. A community of meaning.

  I sat down in the seat and looked to my left.

  Sitting there, smiling, was Candace Bushnell.

  I stared at her for a full minute before collecting myself enough to speak. She looked beautiful. Her waist was the size of my pinkie. She wore a blue silk blouse that matched nicely with her eyes and a thin white fur vest over top—rabbit, I guessed. It was slim and soft. Dinner was a slab of lasagna that tasted like a beach towel soaked in marinara sauce. The creator of Sex and the City was occupying herself by graciously cutting the lasagna into small pieces and moving them around her plate so it appeared she had eaten some of it.