“A year ago I was still finishing the applications for fellowships so that I could come here. I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it.”
“And I was getting ready for my show—it was last January. You know it’s really very postmodern. If I were to do a collage of my life story, or my return to Judaism, I’d have to find some kind of shape where all these different paths and influences led to the center, a sort of swirling vortex, where Jerusalem is at the center and all these things lead to it. As we’re talking, I’m thinking maybe I will do some kind of piece chronicling my return.”
Wendy smiled at her. “Why should you give up art?”
“I have to find a way to bring things together. To use my experiences and express them, to move people to teshuvah. The teachers at Beis tell us we have to integrate who we were before. I’ll talk to one of my rabbis.”
“Okay,” said Wendy, sort of annoyed that, though Meryl was embarking on an artistic endeavor, she felt she needed to ask permission.
Why can’t you make decisions on your own? Why do you need a rabbi? What about individuality? she thought, but was proud of herself, this time, for not saying anything.
Tuesday, after morning ulpan, Wendy got on a bus and went to a nondescript religious neighborhood on the western edge of the city, Nofe Tzedek, views of righteousness. There was something about neighborhoods on the fringes of cities, an emptiness at being so far from the center. Getting off the bus, Wendy didn’t see much of a view, righteous or otherwise. Her sight range included Jerusalem stone apartment buildings, fairly close together, and women and children, all pushing baby carriages, some with real babies and some with dolls. There was nothing else on the walk from the bus stop to the Bayit Ne’eman campus.
After she walked through a gate, empty of occupants but ostensibly constructed to house an absent security guard, Wendy saw a cluster of buildings ahead. There were signs for dorms, classrooms, and a cafeteria, where Wendy had agreed to meet Dawn from the Friday night dinner after the Kotel. The buildings were on the newish side, she observed as she followed the signs to the cafeteria. On her way, she saw a woman wearing a housedress, with a mop and bucket cleaning the floors, but noticed that the windows did not appear to have been washed in the ten years since the facility had been built. The uniform streaks of dirt covering the glass made it impossible to see out with any clarity.
When Wendy entered the cafeteria, she scanned the crowd of women to find Dawn from Friday night dinner. Seeing the students assembled to gain nourishment, Wendy viewed them all as her prey. She felt odd to think of them in this rapacious light, since she hoped she would also be genuinely interested in them. But then, she thought, seeing these women as her quarry was probably no different than the way the teachers and rabbis here saw them. The faculty’s stated goal was to hunt down ignorant and soulless Jews and bring them into a Torah lifestyle, to capture them away from the corruptness of Western values. Wendy’s investment in the students, by contrast, was merely catch and release, without attempting a hold.
Wendy found Dawn in the cafeteria and joined her in the line to get lunch. Dawn handed Wendy the coupon she got for a meal as someone wanting to try out classes. The school was generous with these, to encourage students to bring in recruits.
Waiting in line, tray held passively in front of her, made Wendy feel like a kid in elementary school, waiting for an adult to give her lunch. Once the food was on their trays, Dawn and Wendy joined a group of students who were, like herself and Dawn, from the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania tri-state area. Wendy told the others they sat with that she was at Hebrew University’s summer ulpan and she might want to take some additional classes. The group told her in unison how wonderful it was here, how warm and caring the teachers were, how they loved the other students, that she should definitely come here right away. There was intensive Hebrew here too, but at Bayit Ne’eman a student could learn so much more than just language.
“Torah makes people happy,” they kept repeating.
To Wendy, there appeared little happiness in the physical surroundings. The cafeteria was dark, and the food adhered to an institutional hue, greenish meatloaf astride graying potato kugel. Vegetables, which could usually be expected to provide colorful variety, had their nutritive value blanched out by being overcooked to a mushy green. Wendy thought that when she got back to her apartment she would make a cucumber and tomato salad. She wanted to let the vivid red and green colors of the food peek up at her from the plate, and to enjoy their tang with a squeeze of pungent lemon juice and a bit of salt that would just punctuate the intense freshness of the vegetables in Israel.
Picking at the featureless food on her plate devoid of appeal to her sense of taste, sight, or smell, Wendy focused on the conversation of her tablemates. Their desires were simple: stay in this neighborhood, marry frum Mr. Right, and have parcels of children. Wendy thought of other researchers she knew of who sat and collected anecdotes. She remembered learning in college about Henry James going to dinner parties, waiting for his données, the kernels of stories casually heard, which could become the gold ore he would mine to create his fiction. Looking around, Wendy thought that James’s soirees at grand English manor houses, being served turtle soup and oysters, were impossibly far from Bayit Ne’eman’s cafeteria in Nofe Tzedek in Jerusalem.
“I agree with Rebbetzin B. that all the problems in America are because women don’t spend enough time with their children. If only everyone could see that, and stop trying to be men,” said the girl across from her.
“I hate that Hillary Clinton. Barbara Bush, she’s a real woman,” came from the left. Wendy, from a pure blue Democratic family, gritted her teeth to refrain from arguing with them. The girl on her right said, “If we all lived a Torah true life, Moshiach would come. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
How did they get to this point so quickly? The summer program had only started three weeks ago, Dawn had told her. Wendy sensed that they were competing to see who could become scrubbed most clean, most pure in her devotions and Orthodoxy, with the least residue of her previous life. Would these women, trying to scour themselves of pieces of their earlier identities, show any fault lines to an outsider? From this casual chatting she would see what they thought. Listening without expressing an opinion was not natural to Wendy but she remained quiet. Only through listening could she formulate her questionnaire, to get the information that would be the nucleus of her dissertation, the main hub for her theoretical notions to circulate. She would never be able to theorize if she didn’t have informants who trusted her with their life stories.
Was she using them? Running this through her mind as she tried to digest the conversation gave Wendy a jolt of discomfort. Letting them speak openly without telling them that she was here to write a dissertation, was it dishonest? If they thought she was posing as one of them to gain their trust, wouldn’t they be furious on finding out? Wendy was on the verge of confessing that she had come to write about baalei teshuvah when the recitation of the Grace after Meals swept over the room, voices surging in unison, a mob of piety joining together in Hebrew. When the chant ended, the students got up from their tables, bussing their trays to the back of the room. Wendy followed Dawn and the others to class without having revealed herself as a hunter sniffing out her quarry.
The classroom was of the same ilk as the rest of the building, not very old, but seeming older, with unwashed windows and junior high school-type desks with attached writing arms. The blackboard too was streaked, as though only hastily cleaned, never thoroughly erased of the jottings of previous teachers. The students waited, whispering and gesturing among themselves, for the teacher to enter. They were talking as though about a celebrity, trying to glean small pieces of information about the teacher from the droplets he gave off in the classroom, where he lived, how many children he had, how long he’d been married.
Rabbi Pavlov entered the room, placing his black leather briefcase, with shiny silver buckles, on the desk. He stood in front of the class, looked at the floor, and paced back and forth, as though using up restless energy. He began, “The Ethics of the Fathers