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There began to be moments – usually early in the morning, before I forced myself to get up and face the day – when I was more inclined than not to believe that it was all true, that I was only resisting because I couldn’t stand the pain of admitting how wrong I was. What about the prophecies … and the way modern history seemed almost a conspiracy to drive the Jews back to Israel … and the Bible… Mike and I had been going over Genesis, along with the Rashi commentary, and I had had a sudden vision, like an acid flash, of a Garden, and a Presence … and my personality, my Sagittarian compulsion to aim straight at the cosmic bull’s-eye… “The blessing and curse of being a Jew,” said Reb Noach, “is that Jews are thirsty for God, for the absolute. A Jew can never have peace. Whatever he does he’ll be the best at, whether it’s being a radical or being a criminal. It’s all misplaced searching for God. Every Jew is a neurotic...”
Insanity, decadence, call it what you please, I could never be a traditional Jewish mother. But maybe I didn’t have to be.
And if I became religious, what would I do? Insanity, decadence, call it what you please, I could never be a traditional Jewish mother. But maybe I didn’t have to be. Actually only men were subject to a specific mitzvah to marry and have children. And not everyone took the Weinbergs’ hard line on procreation – according to one rabbi I’d met, a psychologist, the halacha permitted contraception when necessary to preserve a woman’s health, including her emotional health. Nor were the role divisions in the family absolute, no law actually forbade women to work outside the home, or men to share housework. Even within the bounds of Judaism I could be a feminist of sorts, crusading for reforms like equal education, perhaps contesting the biased halachic interpretations of male rabbis. And my experience would put me in a unique position to reach women like me and bring them back.
In private I could have this fantasy, even take it seriously. Which would not stop me, an hour or a minute later, from getting into a furious argument with a man. It was one thing to consider the abstract possibility that women’s role in Judaism was not inherently oppressive, another to live in a culture that made me feel oppressed. Once when Mike and I were dinner guests of another of his teachers I complained, “You know, it makes me feel like a servant when you sit there like a lump while I help serve and clean up.”
“It isn’t customary for the men to help,” Mike said, “and if I got up I’d make everybody uncomfortable, including the women.” He had a point – when in Rome and all that – but it was a point he was not exactly loath to make. The fact was that for Mike, moving from Western secular society to Orthodox Judaism had meant an increase in status and privilege; for me it meant a loss.
One night Mike and I got together with Dick Berger, one of his best friends at the yeshiva. Mike was very high on Dick, who, he said, was an unusually perceptive person with a gift for sensing someone’s emotional blocks. He had been encouraging Mike to get more connected to his feelings. I had met Dick once and he had told me a little about himself. He had been a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, had written an unpublished novel, had been into psychedelics and Transcendental Meditation. Later he had told Mike that he felt I had seen him only as material for my article. I didn’t think that was true, but I worried about it anyway. I hated it when people claimed to know my motives better than I did, but I always worried that they were right.
The conversation that night was pleasant enough until Dick and I got into an argument about men sharing child care. Dick suggested that 3,000 years of tradition shouldn’t be tampered with, and I started getting angry in a way I knew from experience led to no good. Then he really pushed the wrong button.
“You’re so emotional! Can’t we talk about this objectively?”
“You’re hardly being objective. It’s in your interest as a man to think what you think.”
“I’m feeling detached,” Dick insisted. “By that I mean attached to my basic essence. You’re reacting out of your conditioning in Western culture.”
“You’re reacting out of your male-supremacist prejudices, only you have 3,000 years of tradition on your side.”
“But I’m not being aggressive and hostile – you are!”
“You can afford to be ‘objective’ and ‘detached’! You’re happy with the system – I’m the one who’s being oppressed by it! Why shouldn’t I be hostile – what right do you have to demand that we have this conversation on your terms…” My sentence went hurtling off into the inarticulate reaches of un-God-like rage.
Another time, another friend of Mike’s: Harvey, a tall, dark, intense South African. “I’m not here because I want to be,” he said. “I want freedom and money and the pleasures of the body. I was happy in my non-religious life – I miss it. But once you know there’s a God…”
We started arguing about design and evolution. “Either there’s a God,” Harvey said, “or all this harmony and purpose is a coincidence.”
“Those aren’t the only possibilities…”
“And there are vast odds against coincidence. If you had a dart board that had lots of red and just a little white, where do you think your dart would hit?”
“That’s a silly analogy,” I said.
“What if you had to lay money on it?”
“I’m not going to play this game! It’s ridiculous! It’s irrelevant!”
“Answer me,” the prosecutor insisted. “Would you bet on white or red?”
“I’m not Pascal!” I yelled. “And I’m not about to change my entire life because of some abstract intellectual decision about what the odds are on there being a God!”
“The Torah isn’t only a carrot, you know. It’s a stick, as well. There’s punishment – you get cut off…”
And I’m not going to play your guilt game, either! You men are not going to cram your sexist religion down my throat!
There it was, the dirty little secret: I might be persuaded to return to Judaism – but not by a man.
V. EXODUS
You know her life was saved by rock and roll. – VELVET UNDERGROUND
Mike and I were walking in Mea Shearim talking about happiness. My revised departure date was nearly two weeks away, time for plenty of changes, but I knew that I would not, at least for the present, become an Orthodox Jew. My decision had involved no epiphany, no cathartic moment of truth; my doubts remained and perhaps always would. But to put it that way was looking at it backward. The fact was that only a compelling, inescapable moment of truth could have made me religious. Nothing less could shake my presumption in favor of a life that made me happy.
From Mike’s point of view, I was refusing to accept the truth because of a strong emotional resistance; though he too had resisted, his unhappiness with secular life had made it easier to give up. On the other hand, he kept suggesting, I might be a lot less happy than I thought.
“Dick sees you as a very unhappy person,” Mike said. “And Reb Noach thinks you’re really unhappy.”
