The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Rosa’s lips grew thin. “No.”

  Mr. Riskin looked at Leah and raised his arms in a gesture of hopelessness.

  People were beginning to file out of the living room now. In the small, formal dining room across the hall, the table settings promised a long and complicated meal. Rosa took a quick survey of the place cards and discovered, to her dismay, that she had been seated between Karen and Rebecca, directly opposite Mr. Riskin. She was about to pull out her chair when Karen grasped her roughly by the arm. “Not yet!” she said. “First we welcome the Shabbos angels!” A moment later, everyone around the table linked hands and began to sing.

  Shalom aleichem

  mal’achei hashareit

  Mal’achei elyon

  Mimelech malechai hamelachim

  After the song had ended, the adults sat down and the Reinman children approached their father, one by one, to receive his blessings. Then the rabbi rose to sing by himself. He was a short, delicately built man with little white hands and a tiny scarlet mouth that blazed out from his thick beard like a campfire in the woods. Karen explained to Rosa in a loud whisper that he was singing “Ayshet Chayil” from Proverbs, “a song of praise for a wife.” And when Rosa glanced down at the other end of the table, she saw that Mrs. Reinman’s eyes were demurely lowered. There was something ludicrous, she thought, about this elfin man yodeling a uxorious hymn to his matronly wife at the dinner table: ludicrous, yet touching, also. Her own childhood mealtimes at Perry Street had been napkinless, slapdash affairs, presided over by a fuming mother for whom food preparation was the focal point of all housewifely resentments. When she tried to picture Audrey sitting in Mrs. Reinman’s place, being serenaded by Joel, the image was so dissonant that she very nearly laughed aloud.

  Some time later, after kiddush had been said and everyone had ceremonially washed their hands and the challah had been blessed, dinner was served.

  “So, young lady…,” Mr. Riskin said to Rosa as a bowl of matzoh ball soup was set before her. Rosa gazed at him, waiting impatiently for the rest of the sentence to hobble its way down the rickety neural pathway. “…How did you like my son-in-law’s singing?”

  Rabbi Reinman made shushing gestures. “Leon, please…”

  “I enjoyed it very much,” Rosa said. “Rabbi Reinman sings very nicely.”

  The rabbi raised a hand to fend off praise. “Ah, you are kind. But I am no singer. You should hear Michael.” He pointed at Leah’s husband. “Michael is a great singer.”

  Michael shook his head. “No, no, Marty. I am only a fair singer. I grew up in a family of musicians, so I have a good idea of how limited my gifts are.”

  “Michael comes from a long line of cantors,” the rabbi explained to Rosa. “His father, blessed be his memory, was Shlomo Lamm, one of the finest and most famous cantors in all of Canada.”

  Michael chuckled in modest acknowledgment of his prestigious ancestry.

  The rabbi was distracted by one of his sons farther down the table, announcing his marks in a recent math test. Karen leaned across the table to Mr. Riskin. “Rosa works with children, you know, Mr. Riskin.”

  “You’re a teacher?” Mr. Riskin said.

  “No,” Rosa said, “I help run a program that provides after-school and vacation activities.”

  “Oh, yes?” Mr. Riskin said. “Where is this?”

  “It has two branches in Manhattan, downtown and uptown. I work at the East Harlem branch.”

  Mr. Riskin considered this. “You’re looking after, what, black children?”

  “Most of the children are African American, yes.”

  “I see! And…you like this work?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Mr. Riskin shrugged. “For me, a person should look to help his own community before he starts helping others.”

  “Well, these girls are my community,” Rosa said. “They’re New Yorkers just like I am.”

  Mr. Riskin pressed his hand to his chest and swallowed a burp. “Just like you, huh?”

  Rosa smiled coolly and turned to Rebecca sitting on her other side. “You must be having your bat mitzvah soon,” she said.

  Rebecca shook her head. “No, we—”

  “We don’t do that,” Mr. Riskin intervened. “Bat mitzvah celebrations are not Orthodox.”

  “Oh, I see,” Rosa said, not seeing at all.

  “The bat mitzvah is just something the Reconstructionist Jews cooked up so that girls would not feel ‘left out,’” Mr. Riskin explained. “Then the Reform got in on the idea, and now it’s big business.”

  “Ah.”

  Mr. Riskin patted his napkin against his flabby lower lip. “I suppose,” he said, “you are the sort of women’s libber who thinks our girls are deprived because they don’t do bat mitzvah.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about it, Mr. Riskin,” Rosa replied, “but I can see how some girls might want—”

  “Yes,” Mr. Riskin cut her off. “I suspected as much! You are one of these women who wants to be a man. The women’s libbers think it is degrading to be female, but you see, in the Jewish religion, we prize our women. They are the high priestesses of their homes.”

  Rosa stared at her soupspoon and fantasized about smashing it against Mr. Riskin’s horrid, pulsing skull. Why was she obliged to be solicitous of his tender religious sensibilities? He was not worried about offending her. “Well,” she said, after a moment, “I dare say a woman could be a high priestess and have a bat mitzvah. Couldn’t she?”

  Mr. Riskin made a shooing gesture with his hands, “You are talking nonesense, young lady.”

  Their altercation had now drawn the attention of the other family members. “Leon, please,” Rabbi Reinman said from the end of the table. “You mustn’t bully our guest…”

  “You think you are talking about religion,” Mr. Riskin said, wagging an arthritic finger at Rosa, “but you’re not. You have a chip on your shoulder.”

  After dinner, Rabbi Reinman took Rosa to one side and beckoned her into his study.

  “I am afraid that my father-in-law was a little hard on you this evening,” he said, when they had sat down.

  “Oh, no,” Rosa protested, “it was my fault. I’m sorry that I offended him.”

  “Don’t worry about that. He’s pretty tough. I hope you were still able to enjoy yourself this evening. I want you to feel at home here.”

  “I’m having a very nice time. I loved all the singing at dinner.”

  “Good.” The rabbi nodded. “So now, Rosa…I would like to know a little more about you. How is it that you have become interested in Jewish observance?”

  Rosa looked at the floor. “I don’t know, really. I come from a family that has never taken any interest in religion.”

  “I see. Forgive my asking, but are you by any chance related to Joel Litvinoff, the lawyer?”

  “Yes, he’s my father.”

  “I thought there might be a connection. I know a little bit about him. He is a socialist, no?”

  Rosa smiled, remembering all the arguments she had had with Joel over the authenticity of his socialism. “Of a kind, yes,” she said.

  “And an atheist?”

  “Oh, yes. An atheist certainly. An antitheist, in fact.”

  The rabbi leaned forward. “An antitheist? What does that mean?”

  “Well…I guess it means that he thinks religion is a bad thing.”

  “I see.” The rabbi smiled. “So he disapproves of the God in whom he doesn’t believe.”

  “He’s a good man,” Rosa said, feeling suddenly protective. “He’s very sick at the moment.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What is wrong with him?”

  “He had a stroke six weeks ago. He’s in a coma now.”

  The rabbi winced in sympathy. “That’s terrible. It must be very hard for your family.”

  There was a pause. Rosa looked up at the ceiling.

  “So,” the rabbi went on, gently, “you were going to tell me about your interest
in Judaism. You, I take it, are not an antitheist.”

  “Well, for a long time I was. Until a while ago, I would have described myself as a Marxist.”

  The rabbi’s eyebrows rose. “Marx, eh? You know, I suppose, what Marx wrote about the Jews?”

  Rosa shook her head.

  The rabbi got up from his chair and began looking through his bookshelf. After a moment, he took out a thick volume and began to read from it. “‘Emancipation from haggling and money, from practical real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time,’” he quoted. “‘Money is the jealous God of Israel beside which no other God may stand.’”

  Rosa made a skeptical face. “Marx wrote that?”

  “Yes,” the rabbi said, “I’m afraid your Mr. Marx was one of the more ferocious anti-Semites. His parents converted to Christianity when he was a boy, you know…” He broke off with a sudden grin. “Excuse me, I am talking too much. It is a bad habit that many rabbis have. Our déformation professionelle, as they say in France. Go on. For a long time you were a Marxist. And how were you cured of that?”

  “Well, I lived in Cuba for four years and—”

  “My goodness! How did that come about?”

  “I went in the summer of my second year at law school. It was a working vacation organized by a Cuban-American Solidarity group. We were meant to be refurbishing health centers. While I was there, I met a man—”

  “Aha! You fell in love!”

  Rosa laughed. “In love with Cuba, yes, maybe. When the other brigadistas went back to the States, I decided I was going to stay behind and live with this man and his family. They had a pig farm in a place called Vinales. It was very primitive, just a couple of shacks. No indoor bathroom, no running water—”

  “My goodness!”

  “But the family were very warm, generous people. The first year I was with them, I was really happy.”

  “And after the first year?”

  “Well, I guess I began to see a lot of problems with the system. A lot of repression and injustice.”

  “But you stayed?

  “Well…” Rosa hesitated. People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow. Her faith in Cuba had come with an elaborate system of defenses for coping with evidence injurious to itself, and for a long time there had been almost no contradiction within the regime, no embarrassing truth about the deprivations of the Cuban people, that she could not defuse with her stockpile of ready-made rationales. You can’t appreciate facts in a static way: facts have to be understood dynamically. To cavil about “human rights” shows that you have not yet freed yourself from bourgeois attitudes. What society has achieved perfect democracy? The revolution is still in process. Propaganda is a perfectly legitimate tool for maintaining revolutionary discipline. The success of the revolution is more important than the free speech of the revolution’s enemies.

  “I guess…,” she told the rabbi, “I guess I didn’t want to leave.”

  “Well,” he replied, “you certainly learned your lesson the hard way!”

  Rosa smiled uneasily. However discredited her former faith, there was a part of her that cherished its memory, that still felt pain when it was mocked. She was not ready to have her story co-opted as a conservative fable.

  “And Judaism?” the rabbi asked. “How did you come to that?”

  “By accident, really.” She told him the story of walking into Ahavat Israel for the first time. “It felt as if there was this huge part of my heritage that I’d been ignoring all these years. There was something…”

  The rabbi nodded encouragingly. “Yes?”

  “There was something very powerful to me about being among my fellow Jews, about realizing that I was part of something bigger….” She stopped, embarrassed by her own banality.

  “That’s wonderful, Rosa,” the rabbi said. “Wonderful! I believe it was no accident that you walked into that shul that morning. It was what we call in Hebrew ‘bashert’—intended.” He paused. “Now tell me, how do you plan to proceed?”

  Rosa squinted. “I don’t…What do you mean by ‘proceed,’ exactly?”

  “Well. Something has happened to you, Rosa. You are from a non-religious family. Nothing in your life, so far, has encouraged you to take an interest in religious matters. In fact, you have been firmly discouraged. And yet you have felt a pintele yid, a little spark of Jewishness within yourself, which has led you to shul, which has led you here to Monsey. I am wondering, what are you going to do with that spark?”

  “Oh…Do you mean, am I going to start being observant?”

  The rabbi gave her a twinkly look.

  “I don’t think I’m really ready for that,” Rosa said.

  “I see. And what do you think needs to happen for you to be ready?”

  Rosa thought for a moment. “Can I be completely honest with you, Rabbi?”

  “I expect nothing less.”

  “Well, it’s true that going to shul has been an important experience for me. And I can see now that a lot of the negative ideas about religion that I grew up with were based on ignorance. But I’m not sure I’d ever be ready to—you know—live as you and your family do.”

  The rabbi nodded calmly. “Tell me, Rosa, do you believe that the Torah is God’s word?”

  Rosa hesitated, trying to gauge just how much frankness this conversation could bear. “I guess,” she said slowly, “I guess I would have a hard time accepting that it was literally His word,” she said.

  “May I ask how much of Torah you have read, Rosa?”

  “Not much.”

  “Have you read the Prophecies?”

  “No.”

  “I strongly advise you to take a look at them. They contain things that will astound you—things that it is impossible that men two thousand years ago could have predicted themselves. ‘Ye will be torn away from the land whither thou goest…and God will scatter you among the nations…thou wilt find no ease and there will be no resting place for the sole of thy foot…And then God, thy God, will return…and gather thee together.’ This is the story of our people, the story of Israel, you understand?”

  Rosa ground her teeth nervously. She did not want to have an argument about Zionism. “But it’s a circular argument, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, the Jews wouldn’t have thought about creating a homeland in Israel if they hadn’t got the idea from reading the Bible in the first place.”

  “And did the Jews also get the idea of the Diaspora from the Bible? Did they deliberately scatter themselves, in order to prove the Prophecies right? Did they invent the Nazis? Go and look, Rosa! ‘So shall I provoke them with a non-people, with a vile nation shall I anger them.’ Does that not make you wonder just a little?”

  Rosa looked down at her lap. Why was it so important for her to dismiss these prophecies as hokum, she wondered? Surely, if she prided herself on her rational mind, it behooved her to consider the possibility that they came from God?

  “Don’t intellectualize it,” the rabbi urged. “What does your intuition tell you?”

  Rosa smiled apologetically. “My intuition tells me that the world was not built by God in six days.”

  “You know, Rosa, Orthodox teaching isn’t necessarily inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Maimonides said that ‘what the Torah writes about the Account of Creation is not all to be taken literally, as believed by the masses.’ There are many respected Orthodox scholars who believe that the Hebrew word yom, which is usually translated as ‘day,’ can also refer to an undefined period of time.”

  “So there are Orthodox Darwinists?”

  “As in all things there is a broad spectrum of opinion. Obviously, an Orthodox Jew does not believe the processes of evolution are random.” He stood up and began looking through his bookshelf again. “There’s an Israeli physicist who’s done a lot of very interesting work on reconciling Je
wish theology with modern science. I have one of his books here, somewhere. He claims that carbon dating is much less reliable a method than is generally understood. He also argues that the fossil evidence shows mutation to be a very minor phenomenon.”

  “So he’s basically trying to discredit Darwin.”

  “Well, now, why are you so certain that Darwin was right? Have you yourself studied fossils and carbon dating and so on? Or have you simply taken your convictions from other people—your father, for instance?”

  Rosa’s face darkened. This was unfair. No one could claim to have been more challenging of parental authority than she. Was it possible that the rabbi was only interested in her because of who her father was? Converting the daughter of the famously godless Joel Litvinoff would no doubt be considered a major coup in rabbinical circles….

  “Found it!” The rabbi handed her the book he had been looking for. “I hope you don’t feel that I’m browbeating you, Rosa. But this is important. You say you used to be a Marxist. Were there not occasionally concepts you came across in your study of Marxist texts that were puzzling or obscure to you? And did you then immediately throw up your hands and say, ‘Enough! I can’t subscribe to this!’? No, you persevered. You applied yourself and hoped that things would become clearer to you. Well, here we are, talking about Hashem, a power and an intelligence that passes all human understanding. Don’t you think He deserves at least the same courtesy that you extended to Mr. Marx?”

  Rosa smiled, suddenly ashamed to have imputed cynical motives to this sweet man. She studied the cover of the book. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she had taken evolutionary theory too much on trust.

  “There is a place in New York City that I would like to recommend to you,” the rabbi said. “It’s an educational institute for Jewish women who want to learn more about their religion. The head of the center is the wife of a friend of mine, and the teachers there are good. You would find it very stimulating, I think.”

  Rosa nodded politely. “Thank you. Maybe I’ll look into it.”

  The rabbi looked at her searchingly. “I understand how you’re feeling, Rosa. You have taken a huge step outside your secular comfort zone, and now you find yourself in a world in which much is alien and even disturbing to you. AlI I ask is that you live with that discomfort for a while. Don’t run away. Stay. Explore it and see what happens.”