Aren’t human beings strange?
That ride up to Jerusalem I will never forget as long as I live. It was level at first, and surprisingly green. We passed orange orchards and men in horse-drawn wagons. I pinched myself and thought: I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore! Or Orchard Park for that matter.
But then the car started climbing. I could feel my whole body straining, as if I’d been walking up a mountain and suddenly reached the top. In the distance I could see this shining white vision, sparkling like some marble sculpture rising out of the ground, a mirage of something too perfect, too lovely to be real.
“Will you look at that?” the nice touristy lady in the polyester pants suit nudged me.
But I couldn’t answer her.
Jerusalem.
TPDMC.
With a vengeance.
The cab let me off at the absorption center. (I immediately, first night, had a nightmare in which sinister characters sidled up to me and said: Being absorbed, like a sponge.) Actually, it is just a residence hotel with studio apartments that new immigrants can use for a few months. The hostel managers were pleasant but offhand. My quarters were clean, plain and very Israeli. The bed was a thin slab of wood covered by an even thinner slab of foam rubber. (Good for your back, right? Almost as good for you as sleeping on the floor!)
There was orange juice in the fridge and a box of crackers. I ate the bagel and lox from the plane, drank some juice, and then fell asleep on my foam rubber torture chamber.
I don’t know how long I slept, but this knock on my door must have been going on for some time. Why do I think that? Because later the people knocking told me, “We thought Shalom Airlines had finally killed one. We weren’t surprised.”
The people knocking turned out to be my neighbors. Ariela, a postdoc candidate at Hebrew U in chemistry. Wild, curly black hair, Indian cotton skirts and the loveliest voice. Pure Boston. Joseph, a distant cousin of Golda Meir, who is going to “farm the land” just as soon as he learns something about farming. And right after he does three years as a commando or a paratrooper—that is, if he can convince the Israeli army to take him at all, with his eyesight and back problems… Tall, feather thin, with cute glasses and shoulder-length brown hair that the Israeli army will have lots of fun cutting. His parents back in Detroit—who I understand paid for four years of CPA training at Brandeis—are, he claims, heartbroken but proud.
They dragged me off to meet Joseph’s roommate.
He was sitting there shyly minding his own business when the three of us barged in on him. He wouldn’t shake hands (too religious to touch a woman), and he wears a big black skullcap. His name is Marc (Menashe) Halpern. He’s a Californian. Actually, San Franciscan. Thick dark hair cut like a nice Jewish boy’s, a broad face that I think I might call very handsome if I wasn’t afraid you’d start up the “nu, nu’s” and pick the wedding date. Greenish eyes (I think—I didn’t get close enough to actually check it out). He seemed quiet and basically unfriendly, or was that shyness masquerading as aloofness? Or was he really that absorbed in Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed”? Go tell. Anyhow, Ariela told me later he has a law degree from Stanford and will be studying in one of those baal teshuva yeshivas for the newly religious until he decides what else to do. Another Jewish American mother’s nightmare.
Why have we all wasted our expensive educations and broken our mothers’ hearts by leaving them?!
I wonder what father Abraham’s mother said to him when he told her Ur of Chaldees wasn’t where he wanted to spend his life, and he refused to go into the family’s idol-selling business? What can we do? It’s in our genes!
I start my master’s degree in English next month. In the meantime, I have to a) find a job b) find an affordable apartment c) buy a bed with two more inches of mattress d) pray at the kotel and e) stop TPDMCing all over the place every time I walk down the street.
It is so beautiful here, so exciting.
So far away from home…
Kiss Aaron for me. Seven months old already and trying to stand! A genius. We always knew it, didn’t we?
Much love,
Jenny
P.S. I got a long letter from Hadassah just before I left. She’s leaving Hawaii for San Diego. She’s doing some modeling and a few commercials. There’s a new man. Much older. Very, very, very rich. She says she was happy to hear all went well with the baby and sends you… No I won’t lie. She doesn’t send regards. But you know Hadassah. She means it anyway.
October 30, 1971
With G-d’s help.
Dear Tamar,
I am a terrible person for not answering you sooner! I will list my excuses:
1. No time
2. No time
3. No time
4. Lazy
5. Marc
If I didn’t know you were very careful about keeping all the laws that prevent a person from taking revenge and holding a grudge, I might beg you to please not punish me by waiting three months to answer me. But I know you won’t do that.
The picture of little Aaron is wonderful! Handsomest little boy in the world. Maybe someday by me, as they say in Orchard Park.
I can’t believe it’s autumn already. I miss the paper crinkle of old brown leaves crushing underfoot that there would be in New York. But here there is the compensating soft bounce of the greenest grass. There is still that lingering scent of summer dust not yet washed fully away by rain. I sat on campus yesterday just looking at the coolish stretch of autumn sky, listening to the eager keening of new birds readying for their first long winter flight. I guess I feel sort of up there with them. I’ve never been on my own this long.
Everywhere I look there are so many role models, so many different kinds of inspirations. The young soldiers going back to their bases, front lines with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt. Young yeshiva boys returning to their studies, all serious and pale. Then there was this woman I saw sitting in front of me on a bus. She was dressed in severe modesty, her hair completely covered with a kerchief, her dress clean and pressed and covering her calves and wrists and neck. A new baby was resting on her chest, and you could see by the way he was dressed, he was loved and scrupulously cared for. With one hand she patted the sleeping infant, and with the other she held a little book of psalms. She spent the whole bus ride murmuring them. I could just envision her life: the tiny apartment immaculately clean. The chicken cut into twelve pieces every Sabbath. The bare living room, the big bookcase full of Talmuds. Her bearded, yeshiva student husband making kiddush Friday night. A pure life, full of strictness and denials, full of satisfaction and fulfillment. And at first I thought: This must be it! This is what G-d wants of me! What I should want of myself. What a good person! I mean, what else
could
G-d want?
The sun was just going down, and I was looking out over Jerusalem’s hills. It was magnificent: magenta, purple, shades of gold and blue and orange. I felt my throat contract in this little prayer of thanksgiving for being alive in such a world. For having eyes to see it and a heart to feel such beauty. And when it was over, I turned back and noticed the woman hadn’t even looked up! She had let the sunset pass her by! And I thought: No. This is not it. Or at least you couldn’t really tell by looking at her if she’d faced all the challenges in her life, if she’d wrested whatever happiness was due her. You couldn’t tell if she’d the courage to seek and experience joy. I think we are also accountable for these failures. Not just for denials, for strict adherence, for sidestepping evil, but also for not appreciating good. For not living richly, savoring the beautiful earth, its colors, its light; the spring, the golden autumn…
School began right after the holidays. What a pleasure to be in a Jewish country where instead of taking off for your weird New Year in September, you are just normal, celebrating with everyone else as the whole country shuts down. That’s the most wonderful thing of all: feeling normal. Going into a greasy spoon for a hamburger, fries, and Coke and knowing it’s all under rabbinical supervision. So what if the hamburger is paper thin and inedible! So what if the fries are half soggy and half raw! You can eat it! It’s all kosher!
In that old, tired debate that’s been going on forever among religious Jews on where you should live—in Israel or the diaspora—I think I’m convinced Israel is best. I went to the Old City the other day… What can I say? How can I describe to you how it feels to touch the Wall? I think, for the first time, I understand the way Americans feel when they visit Gettysburg, or the Alamo, or Valley Forge, or the way the French feel about the Bastille. It’s so meaningful to me. Everything. I feel so connected to the people, the streets, the language. And it’s not this artificial little world, like Disneyland, all make-believe, the way Orchard Park is, that has no roots, no connection with its surroundings.
It’s all so phony, the way we grew up in Orchard Park. All those Hebrew words we wrote in English: malach, tzadik, frumkeit… All the pretense about living this Glatt kosher Jewish life steeped in pious values, when the truth is, most of the people around us were as American as kosher pizza. Their values were American values, climbing the ladder of business success, getting the kids into law school or medical school. So they bought their take-home from kosher corner instead of Gristede’s. Did that make them so different?
I know you and Josh are not like that. That’s why I think you belong here. I know you’d feel the same way I do once you got here and checked it out.
I went to the Israel Museum the other day and saw this earthenware jar holding oil they found in a cave filled with Jewish coins and manuscripts. It’s about 1,500 years old. And I stood in front of it and I thought: Those hard, stubborn ancestors of mine really had guts. They didn’t marry out or get lazy and forget. They didn’t get fed up or choose to hide in some easier guise: Canaanite, Philistine, Greek, Roman… They didn’t let the majority win. I am standing here, in Israel, a Jewish woman, because nobody in my family in those 2,000 or so years gave up.
As you can tell, I’m having a ball. School is interesting. But it seems rather a cop-out to be learning English literature at Hebrew University. I have no real career plans. You know how I love to read, and this way I can read as much as I like and make believe I’m a serious person. Maybe I’ll teach, or write. I’ve already got a part-time job working for some subsidiary of the Jewish Agency, writing little feature articles about all the nice things they’re doing on the kibbutzim, and on the farms… nice little pleasant, cheerful aren’t-the-Israelis-terrific propaganda. They pay me by the piece, and so far I haven’t earned enough to be able to afford another inch of foam rubber for my mattress, which should indicate the pay scale! But guess what? I’m actually getting used to it. The mattress, that is. It is actually starting to feel… gulp… comfortable!
This is a bad sign.
Absorbed. Like a sponge.
On the personal front, remember that guy I told you about? Marc? Well, he isn’t so shy after all. Just very sincere and in the first throes of religious conversion. You remember what you once told me about how the newly religious tend to go overboard? Well, that is what we are seeing here. He’s afraid to talk to a woman, to sit down next to her…
But nevertheless, we have managed to have some interesting talks. He went through so much of what I did in college, the same questioning, the same revelation. If only he would find some equilibrium and stop lecturing me all the time! He is so hard on himself. He’s never good enough, never religious enough…
I keep telling him all this sadness and self-loathing is the opposite of serving G-d. I remember Hadassah’s father sitting at his tisch, his hand slapping the table, singing with closed eyes, the whole room rocking with joy… I’m trying to tell him about that, about the joy.
Yesterday he came by with his toolkit and spent the whole afternoon fixing all leaking faucets. He sprayed for spiders in the bathroom. And he brought me fresh oranges from the shuk.
I hear the “nu, nu’s” all the way across the oceans and continents that divide us. Powerful stuff, that Jewish telepathy! I have a revelation for you, my dear friend. I’ll admit, I wouldn’t mind.
It gets kind of lonely at night.
Love you. Kisses for your darling little boy. Regards to Josh.
Jenny
P.S. Hadassah’s doing a movie in London. She may be getting married to one of the actors. Or was it the director? Anyhow. A blond Viking warrior. Not of the people of the book, I might add. Following Hadassah’s adventures makes me feel as if I’m looking at a trapeze artist flying through the air with no net below. Hadassah is so brave, it’s scary! I miss her.