by Naomi Ragen
Sadly, he put the sandwich away, putting one foot in front of the other for what seemed like hours until he finally found himself at the Beit Medrash Govoha campus. It was an impressive modern building of light tan brick, cared for and prosperous, the very opposite of his own miserable state, he thought sorrowfully. He made his way through the complex to the massive doors of an impressive synagogue, where students were streaming in for afternoon prayers. He joined them. Surely there he would find water.
The main hall of white marble columns and gold decoration took his breath away. Students crowded in, nudging him forward. There was no way to turn around and walk out without calling attention to himself. And that, almost desperately, he did not wish to do.
As he studied the faces of the healthy young men around him, he decided that they must be filled with happiness and animation, projecting on them the joy he himself had always felt in having spent an entire day delving into the mysteries of the Divine word. That any one of them might be bored or miserable seemed unfathomable. How could a yeshiva student in Lakewood, unburdened by care, be anything less than overjoyed at his station in life? Once, he, too, had been like them. His Zissele had made that possible. And he had never known, never realized, that it was all her doing, her hard work, her selflessness. He had taken it all for granted that there was a second income, someone to care for his children, to clean his house, cook his meals, and iron his white shirts. He had thought his life would continue that way until the children were grown, and both he and his wife grew old.
But without his wife, without Zissele, nothing was possible anymore. It was his own fault, he knew, despite what Rav Alter had said. He had been totally responsible for everything that had happened.
He felt something suddenly break inside him. The dam that had for so long held back from him the full knowledge of the immense change Zissele’s death had brought suddenly collapsed, flooding him with sorrow so heavy and overwhelming he had to sit down. He touched his cheek, his fingertips tracing the curve of his cheekbone and the soft hairs of his beard, the arch of his nose and the hard curves and soft flesh inside his ear. Who was this? he thought, frightened. Who did this face belong to now? What kind of person? What would be his place in the world? He felt confused and lost. His entire body ached as if overcome by sickness.
When he heard the cantor begin the Eighteen Benedictions prayer, the center of Jewish liturgy, which required one to stand facing east toward Jerusalem and recite in total silence, he pulled himself up. Weak, his stomach growling with hunger, he joined the others in a collective and personal plea to his creator:
Blessed be You, Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob; the great, mighty and awesome God, God Most High, who bestows acts of loving-kindness, who creates all, who remembers the loving-kindness of the fathers and will bring a Redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of His name, in love. King, Helper, Savior, Shield.
When he completed the sacred prayer, he took three steps backward from the Divine Presence, clicking his heels as if leaving the court of a king. He felt exhausted, ennobled, scourged. He gathered his things together, avoiding the curious and friendly glances of those around him. To his surprise, he was no longer hungry or thirsty. He did not feel like himself. He did not feel human. He was a walking ache, a disgrace, consumed in his entirety by the sickening, humiliating task still before him.
He asked directions and found his way to the door of the rosh yeshiva. This would be his first stop, he told himself, the beginning of his new life of shame. He clutched the door handle, imagining the face of the beadle as he asked for permission to enter and then being led into the great man’s august chamber. What would he do? he thought in panic. Hand over the shameful certificate and then his letter of introduction from Rav Alter with its sad, undignified personal revelation of failure, personal loss, and need? He, who wanted to be recognized by the great man as a talented scholar, would now meet him as just another beggar. There would be endless compassion and kindness from the great man. And pity. Because he was now pitiable, was this not so? Did he not now have official certification of his pitifulness?
The thought blinded him with hot tears. He felt his hand drop down off the doorknob. He turned, fleeing down the steps and out of the building, making his way back to the bus stop, where the Lakewood Express was waiting to take him, empty-handed, back to Brooklyn.
When he got home, his mother-in-law opened the door. The expectation in her face soon turned questioning and then to alarm. “What happened to you, Yaakov?”
He took off his old jacket, letting his bag fall to the floor. “You can call the matchmakers, Bubbee Fruma. Tell them Yaakov is ready.”
6
Dear Mom,
So you’re mad I haven’t been in touch, and I’m sorry. I could give you a good excuse—like my phone died and I got a new one—true, by the way—but that doesn’t explain why I didn’t send you the new number.
I’m so sick of all your criticism. I’m sick of thinking twice about every word I say to you so you won’t use it against me. I’m tired of trying not to feel angry and resentful and holding myself back from telling you off, which I can’t do because my rabbi tells me not honoring parents is right up there with murder and adultery.
You think you’re telling me things I don’t know, that I don’t have doubts? Of course I do! Every single day. But I can’t go back to my old life. I was miserable there. And after all my horrible sins, I have to do some good in the world.
Yeah, I know what you’re going to say: PureBirth wasn’t my fault. We’re both so committed to that big lie, aren’t we? But the truth is, I should have investigated all those rumors. I should have quit. But I didn’t. I kept selling that crap because I wanted my salary and all those juicy bonuses. Only after I got laid off and found Andrew in bed with the CEO did I suddenly go hunting for answers. That’s the disgusting truth we both have to live with. I’m guilty, all right. But I’m also horribly sorry, and in my own way, and for the rest of my life, I am going to try to make amends.
I can’t understand why so many people are worried about polluting the environment but don’t give a second thought to polluting their own hearts and minds with what they see and read. Remember that movie we both loved, It’s a Wonderful Life? There was this guy, Potter, who wanted to cheapen and destroy the wholesome little town of Bedford Falls, turning it into Pottersville. In the movie, the little town stood united and stopped him. Well, now, people have been brainwashed into thinking this would be wrong, an infringement on “freedom” and “self-expression.” And so the whole world has turned into one big, ugly Pottersville. Everywhere I look, I just see so much violence, sleaziness, and stupidity. I just needed to escape. Can you understand that, Mom?
So this is my life now: I’m living with a lovely family in their spare room in Boro Park, Brooklyn. They’re an older couple with nine children (close your mouth—there are people here with twelve and even fourteen!). Most of their kids are married, and there are dozens of grandchildren. Their two unmarried sons spend the week in a yeshiva in New Jersey, so it’s only their youngest girl, Gittel Ruchel—a cute but standoffish fourteen-year-old—who still lives at home. She and I both have our own bedrooms.
It’s a serene home. No television, no internet, and only a little radio mostly tuned to a religious music and sermon channel, and even that gets turned off on Shabbos (Saturday), when everything changes. The house fills up with people, noise, and laughter, and the kitchen counters and refrigerators (there are two!) fill up with a catering hall’s stash of food and drink to feed their own huge clan and so many guests.
I help with the cooking. You’d roll your eyes if you could see me up to my elbows in ground carp, onions, eggs, and matzo meal for something called gefilte fish. Big difference from the gravlax with mustard sauce or beef fillet with truffle mayonnaise I made in college, I admit.
Friday night, everyone—even the babies—stays seated around the t
able listening to stories and parables. Every once in a while, someone—usually Rav Aryeh—pounds on the table and begins to sing yet another lively, out-of-tune Shabbos song. We make up with enthusiasm for what we lack in vocal chords. This goes on for hours. I can just see you rolling your eyes. But I’m not you. Try to remember how much I always wanted brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles—big, noisy, happy family celebrations. But it was always just the two of us.
Rav Aryeh treats me like one of his daughters, and Rebbitzen Basha fusses over me, ironing my clothes and making me extremely delicious and fattening bag lunches to take to work at the yeshiva office where I spend my days setting up web pages and building a mailing list for fund-raising and publicity. So you see, you don’t have to worry. I’m actually using many of the skills I learned in college.
When I finish work—usually around five in the afternoon—Rebbitzen Basha always has dinner waiting for me, something warm and nourishing. And then I go back to Rabbi Weintraub’s program and join the other young women in learning about Jewish history, the Prophets, Jewish laws for women, and something called mussar, which is basically how to build character and become a good person. I suppose that’s what I need most. That, and praying, which, by the way, I finally get. It’s not only about what you say but about what you hear back. Sometimes what I hear comes through like a local AM radio station, and sometimes like a shortwave channel in another language. I’m always struggling to understand. They say that takes patience.
The other thing I like best is volunteering. Today, I’m helping out this young family whose mother passed away not long ago so that the father doesn’t have to take out time from studying. He’s a Talmud scholar but just enrolled in an evening program to get his CPA. Apparently, they’re broke. So sad. I’m glad to help. Lives here center around performing good deeds like this. That’s the kind of world I’m in now.
Mom, let’s not fight anymore. My life doesn’t need that. Try not to worry about me, and please write me back. I promise to answer you. I love you.
Say hi to Ravi.
Leah
She folded the letter, sliding it neatly into a stamped envelope, feeling a wave of regret on how much she’d left out.
If only she knew how to distill everything she felt as she looked around her: She loved the homey takeout food stores, the candy stores with their chocolate menorahs, the neat little neighborhood grids made up of family homes, synagogue buildings, and educational institutions. And most of all, she loved the children, the little girls in their long dresses and tight braids, the little boys in their velvet skullcaps and long sidecurls, crowding the playgrounds and the fenced backyards of synagogues filled with push toys and bicycles to keep them occupied while their parents entreated God for love and mercy in long, unhurried prayer sessions.
She loved the fact that here, men not only didn’t stare at women and girls, they deliberately averted their eyes. Of course, no one would—Heaven forbid!—catcall or worse, the way men did in the city, even though there was no shortage of very pretty young girls who walked alone here, even in the dark.
The women, intent on their children, their slim arms straining under the exertion of pushing strollers that often held both a baby and a toddler, were so brave, so resourceful, she thought. Often, they cut up a chicken into twice as many pieces as had ever been imagined and made up for the lack with plentiful potatoes cooked a hundred original ways. And as busy as they were, they embraced the time-consuming weekly task of creating handmade challah bread so delicate, fragrant, and delicious that no one partaking of a slice or two could feel deprived or hungry. They added water to the wine after their husband’s mandatory sip, so that each child and guest might taste a little bit of Eden and the bottle remain almost full until the next Shabbos meal. It was not an easy life.
During the weekdays, the men studied their holy books, trying to untangle the knotty, ancient word of God, to strain out the confusion and uncertainties so that it might flow smoothly and relevantly into their lives and the lives of their families. And the wives, whether the pampered daughters of wealthy merchants or the youngest in a family of ten on the edge of poverty, took up a reciprocal burden to ease the men’s labors, to keep them glued to the task that they sincerely believed would bring them all blessing.
She remembered the fading sepia photographs of her great-grandparents who had fled Poland at the turn of the century. Her great-grandmother Chana had been a young unmarried woman courageous enough to accept an arranged match with a young widower with two small children. She had braved the many perils of the sea voyage to the new world, resolutely leaving behind her familiar life in a homeland filled with ugly hatreds, poverty, misery, and the constant threat of brutal, senseless violence, entrusting her future to her new husband and to America.
When she saw their photographs for the first time at the home of grandparents she hardly knew, she was shocked. The family resemblance was unmistakable. She stared up at the photos, mesmerized by the woman whose eyes and thick brows looked so much like her own, elegant in a dress of somber, black brocade with a lace collar so high it almost touched her small, determined chin. Her only ornaments were an elaborate gold watch held by a long, glittering chain, and tiny gold earrings. Her thick gray hair—so incongruous atop her unlined, youthful face—was parted in the middle and gently pulled back into a heavy bun on her long neck, emphasizing her beautiful high cheekbones and large, light eyes. Her full, well-shaped lips were closed and unsmiling before the intrusion of the camera.
Her great-grandmother Chana, she was told, had taken care of her husband’s orphans, then given birth to her own two daughters. But the effort proved fatal. Her youngest died in infancy, and Chana soon followed, whether from the foulness in the air of the teeming Lower East Side or grief, no one alive remembered. She and her infant were buried side by side in a Queens cemetery, leaving her husband to care for yet another motherless child, her grandmother Shirley, who was barely five.
Her great-grandfather—distinguished in his short beard and American suit and tie, his head bald under a large, square skullcap, already seemed to be looking into tragedies as yet to unfold. According to her grandmother, he was a pious man who never for a moment abandoned his religious beliefs and practices. “He wouldn’t drink a glass of water in anyone’s house because it might not be kosher,” her grandmother told her proudly. Although he’d been a prosperous landlord in Poland, in America he’d worked as a house painter to be master of his time. Unlike so many other immigrant Jews in New York, who felt it was work or starve, he’d adamantly refused to work on the Sabbath.
He wasn’t alone. But for so many of the Jews who forwent the American dream to hold fast to their God and their religious beliefs, they’d been unable to pass on an iota of their piety to their progeny. She thought of her mother running off to California. She might as well have been a child of Cossack peasants or Irish coal miners, so antiseptically had she wiped away her heritage, leaving nothing behind.
But these people, she thought, wide-eyed, filled with the wonder of the newly initiated determined to see only good to justify their great leap of faith, they were the living repository of thousands of years of tribal belief and faith and ritual, transferred to them intact with rare success by their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. And now they were in the process of doing the same for their own children.
Considering the odds, it was a miraculous accomplishment. So many powerful forces had been aligned against them, determined to squeeze them dry of their old ways in the hope of producing an empty receptacle into which could be poured the watery thin, “progressive” life of a made-up new country with no past, desiccating them of all that had made the lives of their ancestors plump and joyful, rich with meaning. For those who cooperated, their reward was gadgets and appliances, the false hilarity of commercial amusement parks and crowded, noisy beaches; but most of all, the anonymity of assimilation that opened so many desirable doors.
This place was ha
rdly America at all, she thought as she studied the modest brownstones, crushed together with no room for driveways or garages. The people too crowded together, leaning upon one another, part of each other’s lives, with all the good and bad that entailed; a tightly woven community where people lived, worked, prayed, schooled their children in the same ancient values, and married into each other’s families. It was not easy for an outsider to squeeze inside.
While the Blausteins and Rabbi Weintraub could not have been nicer, treating her like one of the family, she was keenly aware she wasn’t. She sometimes saw and felt this acutely through children who pointed at her, whispering in derision behind cupped hands as they stared in contempt. Like little Geiger counters, they detected outsiders immediately, set off by the length of a sleeve, the shade of tights, the inflection of a word. Through them, she experienced the invisible social barrier that was as high and as firmly impenetrable as that seven-hundred-foot ice wall in the Game of Thrones, erected in the far north to keep out the wildlings. On one side of that wall were the FFBs—or frum from birth—people born and raised in Orthodox tradition, and on the other, everyone else. And straddling the precipice were people like herself, BTs—or baale tshuva—the newly observant, trying desperately to make the leap over without smashing to the ground or being hounded back out.
She smiled a bit mournfully. It would take time. They’d have to be sure she was sincere. She didn’t resent that. No, this place, and places like it, needed to be sealed off, she told herself. There was a tsunami of immorality and ugliness sweeping over the world, its greatest victims women and children who no longer had any protection from abandonment and exploitation. All shame and decency had disappeared. She was living proof of that, starting with her philandering father and ending with her unfaithful partners who had destroyed her hopes for love, marriage, and family without so much as a backward glance.