An Unorthodox Match

by Naomi Ragen

  “I would want…”

  She turned to him, studying his face, his flaming cheeks and bright eyes. She frowned. He looked feverish.

  “Yaakov, is something wrong?”

  “I would want…” he repeated, even more softly, placing an elbow on the table and leaning in toward her as far as he could without touching her. “I would want to hold you in my arms.”

  The words were electric, making the air between them almost crackle with sparks.

  “Oh, Yaakov…” She shook her head, a feeling of excitement exploding in the pit of her stomach. “Oh, Yaakov, if only you could!”

  He took his elbow away, leaning back in his chair. “I never in my life said that to any woman on any shidduch date.”

  “Of course not.” She laughed. “They would call the shadchan immediately, and you would be blacklisted.”

  “Yes,” he agreed with a self-mocking smile. “Off their lists they would throw me. They would never find me another shidduch.” He looked up, his heart in his eyes, so tender and vulnerable. “Leah, I don’t want another one. All I want is you. Forever.”

  She knew that in the haredi world couples decided to marry after only one or two dates. Still, it was startling to her. Everything was moving at such supersonic speed, she thought, dizzy, but strangely not apprehensive. She knew this man through the children he had fathered, the home he had created, the community he was part of. She knew him as well as she had known Josh and much better than she had ever known Andrew; knew him and had fallen in love with him long ago, she realized, before they ever exchanged a single word. That was the shocking truth.

  “Yaakov, are you sure? Very sure? You don’t know anything about me, not really.”

  “I know everything I need to know, Leah, Leah, Leah,” he sang, drunk on joy.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she said, laughing softly, tenderly.

  “Marry me?”

  “Are you sure, Yaakov? Really sure?”

  “By me, it’s for sure. But what about by you? Is it for sure by you, Leah? That is the question.”

  She leaned back and sighed. “I was never surer of anything in my life.”

  “So, if this is the situation, should we call the shadchan and tell our families?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Not yet. First, I want you to know everything about me. And when you’ve heard it all, and you know it all, then you can decide.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” he protested.

  “But, Yaakov, it matters to me. I can’t marry someone unless I’m very sure he knows the truth. I can’t worry that down the road you might find out something about me that would make you change your mind.”

  “I would never be so nichshal.”

  “That wouldn’t be a failure. It would just mean you were human. And even if what you say is true, I can’t live with that uncertainty.”

  He leaned back. “So tell me everything, Leah. Whatever you want. If that is what you need to do, do it.”

  She looked around self-consciously, suddenly aware of the relaxed, casual New York couples sipping lattes or cocktails. It was not a place for drama, to make themselves more conspicuous than they already were. “Not here, Yaakov. Let’s walk down to the park.”

  The New York street was buzzing with sounds and activities. He walked beside her silently, content. This was all he wanted, he thought. To be with her. He didn’t need to talk, didn’t need to hear. But soon they turned into a small, quiet park with a single bench.

  “Let’s sit for a while.”

  He sat down next to her. Even pierced and half-hidden by skyscrapers, the moon was large and bright, transforming her into molten silver, bleaching the color from her hair, her cheeks. She seemed strange to him, otherworldly almost. A strange, unknown creature, utterly desirable in her strangeness. He didn’t want her to speak. He didn’t want anything to interfere with the soft, silver gleam that entranced him. But he saw that she would, that nothing could stop her. He dreaded it. Not for the revelations that would emerge—nothing would make him change his mind—but for how he would have to follow suit, revelation for revelation. He thought of it with horror as he watched her take a deep breath as if about to dive underwater. He felt suddenly breathless.

  She started from the beginning, going out of her way to use the most shocking language as if intent on pushing the narrative toward extremity. “My mother was a teenager when she got pregnant with me after a one-night stand.” “I only met my father twice. He had lots of illegitimate children all over the place.” She described her traditional grandparents and how her mother had scrubbed away any vestige of her Judaism, bringing her up with Christmas trees and trips to see Santa. “For her, there was nothing religious about Christmas. It was simply an American holiday, and we were Americans. But one year, she took out a Christmas movie from the video store about a little girl who prays to God to give her a pony. It was Hollywood, so of course she got it. And I thought, I can also do that, pray! So I began praying for all kinds of things, making up prayers in my own childish words. When my mom caught on, she was furious. She told me that anyone who is so weak that they can’t depend on themselves and have to make up a mythical, imaginary being to get what they want was a pitiful excuse for a human being. She said that God was ‘just a bigger version of the tooth fairy.’”

  “Tooth fairy?”

  “When American kids lose a tooth, they put it under their pillows—”

  “Why?”

  “Because in the morning they will find the tooth gone and a present instead. Their parents tell them it was the tooth fairy, but at a certain point, every kid figures out it’s his parents.”

  “So that is what God was to your mother—the tooth fairy?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Oy vey.”

  She paused, studying him. Were his cheeks redder? Or was she imagining it?

  He took her pause as an opportunity to cut the story short. Her parents, her life before she came to Boro Park, what did any of that matter? He loved who she was now, who she had become. The rest was an old story, unimportant and a bit unreal to him. “And still, despite it all, you found your way to God.”

  “I think I always believed. My mother told me that when I was very small and she took me to the beach for the first time, I sat there just staring at the ocean and the sand and didn’t say a word until finally I asked her, ‘Who made it?’ She always laughs at that story, but I think that was my first encounter with God.”

  She told him about the Hebrew school classes, and the year her mother had given in and made a seder. “She invited our Hispanic neighbors to join us. Instead of reading the Hagadah and talking about the Jewish exodus from Egypt, we talked about Caesar Chavez and his oppressed workers and how we shouldn’t eat grapes. And next to a box of matzo, she put a loaf of sesame bread, so the neighbors wouldn’t think we were weird.”

  A small, involuntary gasp escaped his throat. She nodded, perversely pleased.

  “Leah, you don’t have to do this. It isn’t important!”

  “Please!” she begged. “It’s important to me. You need to know who I am, where I came from.”

  He sighed, nodding in silent acquiescence.

  “But despite my upbringing, deep in my heart, I think I always knew I was a Jew and that there was a God and He was real.” She hesitated. “Then I got proof.”

  It had been years since she had spoken about it, but it had to be done. How else would he understand?

  “We lived around the corner from a rough neighborhood full of immigrants. They were poor, and there was alcoholism and drugs. I was walking home from Hebrew school through the park one afternoon. It was already getting dark. I saw a man in front of me. He had a book in his back pocket that kept inching up until it finally fell out. I ran to pick it up and return it to him. He was in his twenties, Hispanic, with a pockmarked face and shifty eyes. He asked me if I knew how to read, then handed me his book. When I looked at it, I felt sick. It was a porno
graphic comic book. I could see he’d added his own obscene words and drawings to the filthy cartoons, pressing a pencil brutally into the page, darkening certain body parts—you can imagine which. I handed it back to him, confused, then scared. I had enough sense to know I had to get away, so I told him it was late and I had to go home, but he followed me. He said he’d walk me home so we could “ask mommy permission” about all the things he wanted to do to me. He named a few. I guess he thought that was funny and that I’d be too young and too stupid to get it. But I understood exactly what he was talking about and that I was never going to get home.”

  Yaakov leaned forward, steepling his hands as if in prayer.

  “The park was empty. I saw his eyes flitting to the bushes, and a terrible fear settled over me as I realized something really horrible was about to happen to me and that there was nothing at all I could do to stop it.”

  He gripped the sides of his chair, his knuckles white.

  “So I whispered, ‘Please, God, help me.’ Just at that very moment, a streetlamp went on, and this big black man came jogging by with his little boy. I looked at him, and he began to slow down, taking both of us in. The pervert saw it and stepped back, then took off. I ran to the man and his son and jogged alongside them all the way home.”

  He gripped his hands, resting his elbows on his knees and bowing forward, his eyes boring into the dark pavement as he imagined what could have been. He wanted so much to hold her, to comfort her. “Baruch HaShem,” he whispered. “Such hashgacha pratis.”

  She nodded. She, too, had always believed that, and that belief had led her to enroll at a college with religion classes. She described Santa Clara, Father Joe, and the big, blond Baptist farm girl who had been her roommate. “When she found out I was Jewish, she started throwing all these quotes from the Bible at me. She was so shocked I’d never heard them before. ‘Don’t you know how lucky you are to be an Israelite?’ she said. I still remember one of her quotes, because it touched me so deeply that I looked it up and memorized it. ‘Inquire about bygone ages that came before you, ever since God created man on earth, from one end of the heaven to the other: has anything as grand as this ever happened, or has its like ever been known? Has any people heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire as you have, and survived? Or has any god ventured to go and take for himself one nation from the midst of another by prodigious acts, by signs and portents, by war, by a mighty and outstretched arm and awesome power, as the Lord, your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?’”

  He nodded in recognition, repeating the passage in Hebrew.

  “‘What I wouldn’t do to have been born into such a holy and chosen people as you!’ my roommate said, and she meant it. She made me feel as if I had won the lottery simply because my mother was a Jew and being Jewish was in my blood, in my genes. ‘Your people made a covenant with God. You can’t get out of it. It’s forever,’ she used to scold me. She, and my classes with Father Joe, and later my fiancé, Joshua, made me want to know more.”

  “You loved him very much?”

  She nodded, a lump forming in her throat. “He was a very spiritual person, very connected to God, much more than I. But for him, God was in the mountains, in the sound the wind made through the trees, in sunrises and sunsets.” Slowly, tearfully, she described how she had lost him.

  A low sound, a cross between a moan and a cry, escaped him.

  She turned to look at him. His eyes were clouded with tears. It was more than sympathy, she understood. It was a cry of recognition from a heart that had also known shattering, life-changing tragedy.

  “Oh, Leah-le!”

  “I blamed HaShem. It took me some time to figure out that my anger was connected to my faith. You can’t be angry at something you don’t think exists.”

  “This is true,” he said quietly, deep in thought. “Sometimes, it is easier to be angry at God than to put the blame where it belongs, on ourselves.”

  His wide blue eyes were soft with love for her and filled with pain for both their tragedies.

  She told him about PureBirth, about struggling with her guilt, about wishing she had done more. And finally, she told him about coming to Boro Park. “I’d tried everything the secular world had to offer and still felt empty. I wanted something else, something that would give meaning to my life. In your world, I found so many of the things I’d longed for all my life: safety, order, rules, limitations, real community, deep values. But I have to be absolutely honest with you, Yaakov. I’ve also discovered some things I wasn’t prepared for.”

  He looked at her, surprised. “What things?”

  She was afraid to speak, afraid what she had to say would ruin everything. Perhaps he could forgive her past, but this was about the present. Still, she couldn’t start a life with him without being truthful. She owed him that. She owed herself that.

  “I used to think religious people were kinder, nicer, had better characters, but I found out they’re just like everybody else, just people. Some are better, some are worse. There are the sincere ones, like you, but also the opposite: the butcher who won’t pay his bills until I threaten him with lawyers; the little girls who look me up and down in the street and tell me I dress like a shiksa; the matchmakers who treat baale teshuva like something they have stepped in and have to wipe off the bottom of their shoes.

  “There is so much—what’s that word?—gaiva, misplaced pride; so many people who call themselves frum who most of the time don’t think about God at all. It’s all about themselves: how many important rabbis they know, how strict they are about what they eat and what they wear. There is no end to the rules they make up to show off. Sometimes, it feels almost like a cult. They don’t do it to serve God; they do it so they can lord it over everybody else. It’s what in my other life we used to call social climbing. They are so strict about laws that were never written in the Torah and so lax about the laws that are actually there! I can’t ever be one of them, Yaakov. I won’t.”

  “How was it for you before, in the goyish world?” he asked her. It wasn’t a challenge, just a simple question.

  She thought about it. “I guess the same. So many hypocrites, people busy preaching acceptance and tolerance but hating and rejecting everyone who isn’t exactly like them. It breaks my heart when I think about how few genuinely good people there are in the world. You’re one of them. I want to be one of them, too, to raise children who love God and keep the Torah.” She hesitated, taking a deep breath. “I just don’t know if I can do it in Boro Park.”

  She looked down at her hands, tired and a bit hopeless. “I guess you understand now why everyone is so against us getting together. I can understand why people always worry about baale teshuva backsliding to their old ways, but I’ll tell you this honestly: I will never go back to my old, secular life because there is nothing there for me. I love you, Yaakov. So much! But I’m not the same as your family, your friends and neighbors, and I never will be. This is the truth. I won’t blame you if you decide to end things now.” She shrugged, her shoulders already accepting defeat.

  He said nothing, his face shrouded in darkness, the moon’s silver light pooling beneath the golden halo of streetlamps. And as the minutes passed and the silence grew, her heart began to ache with a growing premonition of disaster and defeat. He would reject her now. She knew it. He was just searching for the right words, the kind words, to use. Knowing Yaakov, he would make every effort to do it gently.

  “I don’t understand you,” he finally said, breaking the silence with shocking suddenness, shaking his head.

  Her head flew up. She searched his face as her heart sank. “What do you mean?”

  “Here you are, opening your heart to me, telling me every shame and disgrace you can think of about yourself like an accusing angel. You’re worried I’m going to change my mind? That you’re not good enough for me? But, Leah, why don’t you ask me anything about myself, about my sins? Because if you did, you’d hold that I am not good enough fo
r you.”

  She smiled. “Impossible. I know everything there is to know about you, Yaakov. You’re an open book.”

  “Leah, you never asked me once about my wife, about Zissele. Not once. I told you I killed her. How could you marry such a man?”

  “I know you didn’t kill your wife, Yaakov. Your mother-in-law told me everything about Zissel as soon as I started working at your house. I know she got sick and died tragically and that you did everything you could to save her. I know what it’s like to feel guilt over losing someone you loved. For years, I felt that I had killed my fiancé. Again and again, I went over that moment he slipped. And each time, I imagined my arm shooting out faster, my hand gripping his more firmly, pulling him to safety. But that’s a fantasy, Yaakov. There was nothing I could have done to save Josh. He would have pulled me down with him. It was an accident, but I wasn’t responsible, just like you aren’t responsible for the death of your wife.”

  “How do you know that? Why are you so sure?”

  She stared at him, chilled. “Now you are scaring me.”

  “You should be scared! I was a worthless husband. I did everything wrong. I didn’t even try.”

  “What could you have done?”

  He looked at her, his face contorted in grief. “Keep my statutes, and my judgments, which if a man do he shall live by them…”

  “I don’t understand.” She shook her head in helpless confusion.

  “Live by them! The Rambam says, For the sick man we may violate a hundred Sabbaths! And we’re not permitted to do it through a non-Jew or a child, but the scholars and saints of Israel must do it! And he shall live by them, and not die through them. Zissele was sick. It was my sacred obligation to help her. But I did nothing because of the shame. And now she’s dead.”