An Unorthodox Match

by Naomi Ragen

  Here was an alternative universe, one so far unsullied by this modern plague, its people still living according to a moral code that made such things impossible. While no doubt there were sinners here, too, she so much wanted to believe it wasn’t the norm, nor were one-night stands, illegitimate babies, and live-in unmarried couples. It was a different world, she told herself, where people had internalized those ancient Jewish laws she’d encountered for the first time, ironically, only as a college freshman in a comparative religion class taught by a Jesuit Catholic priest. Father Joe.

  7

  Father Joe.

  Her mind went back to the day she started college.

  Even though Santa Clara University was only a short drive from where she’d grown up, it was light-years away from her childhood. It was old California, site of one of the original twenty-one missions founded by the Franciscans and Spanish soldiers almost two centuries before. As she strolled through the wisteria-covered walkways in the mission gardens near the old bell tower, she felt joy bubbling inside her. All those lush, lovingly tended lawns and towering palms! All that jasmine-scented air tinged with the fresh, spicy odor of newly mown grass! All those carefree, healthy, uncomplicated young people in tank tops and shorts who were going to inherit the earth, and in the meantime were entitled to enjoy the fun of being in this lovely place! Now, finally, after a dreary and often complicated childhood, she’d earned the right to be one of them.

  A black-garbed priest walking past noticed her smile. “Lovely day!” he called out, nodding and smiling back. He was young and startlingly handsome, with thick dark hair and large, heavy-lashed blue eyes. She blushed, smiling back, turning her head to follow his progress as he threaded his way through the bikini-clad coeds sunbathing all over the campus lawn. Did it bother him, she wondered, all that naked female flesh? And why would a man like that choose to be celibate?

  She had a fascination with people who’d chosen to live religious lives: Buddhist priests in saffron robes, nuns, Chassidic Jews, people who had allowed their beliefs to shape their lives. What did they do every day? How were their lives different from her own? Were they happier? Kinder? More fulfilled?

  While she hadn’t mentioned it to her mom, one of the reasons she’d chosen Santa Clara—a Jesuit Catholic institution—over San Jose State despite the extra cost was because it had a religion requirement. Whatever your major, every graduate had to take at least three courses in religion.

  She hadn’t known what to expect that first day when she took her seat in the Introduction to Religious Studies course. To her surprise—and delight—the lecturer turned out to be the priest she’d passed on the lawn. His name was Father Joseph, “but you can call me Joe,” he said right off, putting the class at ease. “I guess you’re all wondering what you’re in for,” he said. “How many of you have heard stories about the Jesuits?” He looked around the room. “Come on now, be honest.”

  A few people giggled. A few hands went up.

  “Okay, a few truth-tellers among the liars.” He smiled. “No, I’m not going to ask you what you’ve heard. I can guess. But here is the truth. A Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit are arrested during the Russian Revolution for spreading the Christian, capitalist gospel. The Bolsheviks throw them into a dark prison cell. ‘Oh, if we only had light!’ the Franciscan mourns. ‘I know. I’ll put on sackcloth and ashes and pray for light.’ Nothing happens. The Dominican then begins to preach, delivering an hour-long lecture on the virtue of light. Still, nothing happens. Then the Jesuit gets up and mends the fuse. The light comes on.”

  He paused, allowing the appreciative laughter to swell and subside.

  “We are known for many things, but like all religious, God-fearing people, we have much in common with all people who seek to love and obey God. In this class, we will dwell on what we share. So no matter your own heritage, you have a little Jesuit in you, as I have a little Jew and a little Buddhist in me. What I’m hoping is that this class will help you to start on a journey of self-reflection. ‘Who am I?’ is your first stop. What is your self-identity in the midst of community? It is also the title of the essay I want you to hand in next time we meet.”

  She sat in her dorm room, staring at her computer. Where to begin?

  Hall noises, and the phone chatter of her roommate, a devout Baptist from Wisconsin, seemed to grow louder and louder. It was driving her crazy. So she unplugged her computer and carried it across the lawn, finding a quiet spot beneath the trees.

  Who Am I?

  My father was a famous psychiatrist who wrote a book that was a bestseller all over the world. People often said it started the whole genre of “self-help.” I thought, when I finally read it a week after my fourteenth birthday when my mom dropped the bombshell of my paternity, that it must have been written by a god: it was filled with compassion, goodwill, understanding, and love. He wrote such profound thoughts in such a deceptively simple way. Right off the bat, first paragraph, he tells you life is hard, that there are no simple answers, and that we should all stop moaning about it and get on with it. Love, he wrote, was action, not emotion. In his book, he tries to create in the reader the desire to become a genuinely loving person who can reach out in loving action even to enemies. It’s beautiful.

  You’d never believe the author was a bitter alcoholic who beat his legal wife and left illegitimate children all over the country and beyond, myself included. I guess I’ll never know the extent of it, and frankly, even if I could, I’m pretty sure I’m not motivated. What would we do, these sperm-sharing strangers and I? Talk about what a contradiction our dad was?

  His first wife—I think there were two, but that one lasted forty years, the second only a few months, just long enough to nurse him through a horrible double cancer that ate away at his liver and pancreas and left him totally, horribly destroyed by unbearable pain—was an eminent psychiatrist herself who had also authored a number of books that were equally good but not nearly as successful as his. I’ve read them all—his and hers—and I guess I can understand why: she, alas, had nowhere near his facility with language.

  He was a brilliant man. And yet, despite the fact that he makes a cogent case for a truly moral secular life, his own life was the opposite. This always made me wonder if even the most saintly secular person is incapable of true morality without the trappings and discipline of religion.

  My mother equated living a good life with being happy. With a strange look in her eyes—part ironic and part Mick Jagger groupie—she’ll happily tell anyone who asks how happy her one-night stand with my father made her. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, she says. And so clean! Cleanest, best-smelling man she had ever come across in her life. She will never admit having any regrets, despite the consequences—which, in my opinion, were dire. Notwithstanding our society’s current campaign to champion every variation of the fatherless and motherless family unit, I still believe that to grow up without a father or mother is a tragedy for any child. At least that was my own experience, even though my mother tried her best to raise me alone and to instill in me her own very modern attitude toward life. Mostly, I think she failed.

  The neighborhood didn’t help. We lived in a modest little house on the outskirts of San Jose. Even though Silicon Valley has pushed housing prices there up into the stratosphere, it never felt like a safe neighborhood. There was never any sense of community. Neighbors would appear and then disappear just as you got to know them. I always felt surrounded by dangers. I wasn’t being paranoid; San Jose had the same murder rate as Albania.

  Only school gave me some sense of stability. It was a bright, clean building surrounded by grass. Almost all my school friends were immigrants. Why on earth their parents had chosen to bring them to San Jose from such interesting, exotic places I could never fathom.

  “People do what they do,” my mom would answer unhelpfully when I asked her.

  She was happy in San Jose. The rootless, mind-your-own-business ethos appealed to her
. The closest person she had to a spiritual guru was John Lennon. She, too, believed there was nothing worth fighting or dying for and that people should just live in peace.

  But then came the day when I discovered that my mother didn’t know everything. A life-changing childhood experience convinced me that something—someone?—was watching over me and protecting me. Despite my secular upbringing, I still believe that. There are forces that guide the universe, that intervene in human affairs and human history, and for the most part, these forces favor good over evil, kindness over cruelty. I don’t know how this connects to formal religious beliefs, but I feel I am on a journey toward greater understanding of these forces and my place in the world.

  She read it over, frustrated. It lacked coherence, precision, philosophical depth. I don’t really know anything except what I feel, she thought. And that was childish. It was also the truth. Reluctantly, she clicked Save.

  She felt impatient for her next religion class, dragging herself through her business courses: Multichannel Retail Marketing and Introduction to Economics. After Father Joe collected the papers, he drew a huge circle on the blackboard.

  “The world and everything in it. How do we explore this place into which we were born?”

  Hands were raised.

  “By using our senses,” a girl in a green sweater proclaimed.

  He nodded. “Yes. What else?”

  “By using our intellect,” someone else said.

  “By reading what others have written of their experiences,” a third person said.

  He nodded and nodded. “Yes, all true. But let me ask you this. Have any of you ever experienced something that couldn’t be explained by your reason or intellect, or defined by your senses? Something you never read about in someone’s book?”

  Timidly, Leah raised her hand.

  “Can you describe what happened?”

  “I’d rather not,” she said. “It was pretty traumatic, and I was a child. But in the end, I perceived that according to the natural course of events, my life would have been ruined. I could even have been killed. But something outside myself, outside reason, outside the world, intervened. It was something I knew was true but could not reasonably explain.”

  He massaged his chin, studying her for a moment, his eyes serious and full of compassion. “Thank you. That was exactly what I was looking for.” He turned to the class. “How many of you have had similar experiences, or at least moments when this kind of feeling came over you?”

  Almost everyone raised their hand.

  “From the beginning of mankind, all human beings have expressed a belief in powers outside reason, outside our logic. In fact, it is only in the last two hundred years that the disbelief in higher powers has become acceptable to express publicly.

  “There are several ways of looking at this. You could say that mankind is getting smarter, removing itself from superstition and irrationality. Or you could say that human society is denying a basic truth that human beings have verified from the dawn of time, and that in removing themselves from the idea of a Supreme Being, man is moving away from all that is spiritual and moral in the world, all that is spiritual and moral in himself.”

  “Can’t you be a moral person and not believe in God?” someone asked in a tone of annoyance, which did not go unnoticed.

  “If there is no God, why shouldn’t I rape my neighbor?” Father Joseph said.

  The class looked shocked.

  “Relax. I’m quoting Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. That’s one argument. We’ve gotten used to a strident atheism. Some say we should trust in science. They want to root ethics in a naturalistic worldview. Can biologists help us distinguish right from wrong? Nature is awfully selfish! The Bible calls on human beings to ‘master the earth and subdue it.’ Is that not precisely what religion tries to do? To take the natural, selfish instincts, the animal instinct, and refine it? To help us behave not as animals but as men?”

  The discussion continued.

  Some argued forcefully that a belief in God was necessary for humans to adhere to moral rules, while others countered by saying that religions caused misery and slaughter.

  A tall, handsome jock in white shorts raised his hand. “I read this on the internet: ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’” He looked around the room, a smirk on his face. A fellow jock high-fived him.

  Father Joe grinned. “What is good, and what is evil?”

  People shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

  “Islam says good is doing whatever Allah has decreed is good. Evil is the opposite. Hinduism talks about ignorance that causes one to err and those errors are the karma of past lives that hurt one in the present. Not only is evil inevitable in creation, but it is said to be a good thing, a necessary part of the universe, the will of Brahma, the creator. If the gods are responsible for the existence of evil in the world, they either create it willingly—and are thus evil themselves—or are forced to create it by the higher law of karma, which makes them weak.

  “Buddhism disagrees. In fact, the whole of life for the Buddhist is suffering that stems from the wrong desire to perpetuate the illusion of personal existence. The Noble Truth of Suffering, dukkha, is this: ‘Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering—in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.’ Samyutta Nikaya 56, 11. According to that belief, good is the complete abolition of personhood, because that is what ends suffering.

  “The monotheistic religions go another route. Now listen to this:

  “‘When you reap your harvest, leave the corners of your field for the poor. When you pluck the grapes in your vineyard, leave those grapes that fall for the poor and the stranger. Do not steal; don’t lie to one another, or deny a justified accusation against you. Don’t use My name to swear to a lie. Don’t extort your neighbor, or take what is his, or keep the wages of a day laborer overnight. Don’t curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before a blind man. Don’t misuse the powers of the law to give special consideration to the poor or preferential honor to the great; according to what is right shall you judge your neighbor. Don’t stand by when the blood of your neighbor is spilled. Don’t hate your fellow man in your heart but openly rebuke him. Do not take revenge nor bear a grudge. Love your neighbor’s well-being as if it were your own.’

  “And overarching all these commandments is the supreme admonition not to be good but to be holy, ‘because I am holy.’”

  The class looked stunned.

  “Pretty specific, no?” He smiled. “Especially in contrast to the detachment from life of the Eastern religions. In this, we find perhaps the greatest piece of moral education and legislation ever given to mankind in all human history. Do any of you recognize the source?”

  “Gospels?” someone guessed.

  “It’s from the Old Testament of the Jews. From the book of Leviticus. We Christians have been envious of that heritage for thousands of years and have done our best to both assimilate and plagiarize.”

  The discussion continued, but from that moment on, Leah couldn’t hear anything else. The Jews! Her own religion! Something noble and true to be envied! Never once in her life had she fully understood this. Judaism wasn’t cutting out felt menorahs. It was this. Of course, everyone had heard of the Ten Commandments, but these things, so much subtler, so embedded in the stuff of everyday human life and human interactions—this was the ultimate goal of all Jewish life: justice, kindness, charity. Holiness. This was the Divine wish of the Jewish God. So small in its way. So human. She felt overwhelmed by its beauty, its amazing depth of psychological insight into the raw matter that made up the human condition. The
God who had created man knew exactly what kind of creature He was dealing with and what his limitations needed to be. For the first time in her life, she felt proud to be Jewish and deeply ashamed of her ignorance.

  How was it she had not known anything as simple and basic and profound as this?

  Father Joe smiled at the jock. “Who were you quoting?”

  The jock looked down at his notebook. “Someone called Steven Weinberg in 1999.”

  Father Joe shook his head, smiling. “Why am I not surprised? I wonder if he ever came across what I’ve just read you from his own religion? But let us all thank Mr. Weinberg for giving us this most interesting and provocative statement as a jumping-off point for our next class. In the meantime, I ask each of you to study your own religion and to come up with a summary of its tenets for good and evil and a life well lived. By then, I will have read your essays, and we should be well on our way to understanding something about the similarities and differences in our religious and moral heritages. Class dismissed.”

  Class dismissed. But it never was. It had gone around and around in her head ever since, eventually sending her forward on a long, stumbling search for truth that had finally, strangely, brought her here.

  8

  Leah climbed the stairs of the old apartment house searching for the door to Yaakov Lehman’s apartment. She knocked softly. A pretty young girl opened the door slowly. Leah watched, appalled, as the girl’s narrowed eyes took her in from the top of her blondish-red, impossibly curly hair down to her worn running shoes, passing fierce, unrelenting judgment on everything in between and obviously finding her guilty.

  Another Gittel Ruchel, Leah thought, exhaling. What was it with these snobby kids? She forced herself to smile. “Hi, I’m Leah Howard. Your grandmother—I mean your bubbee—arranged with Rebbitzen Basha for me to babysit this morning.”