Sotah (49 page)
At the Metropolitan Museum, it was the same. She looked around at the paintings, the sculptures, the tapestries, the antique furniture and rare jewels. How much creativity there was in human beings! How could that be bad? To be like Him, the greatest innovator, the Creator of all things? It was part of all she had been caught. She watched the admiring eyes of the people around her pay homage to the timeless results of human inspiration. And suddenly she thought of all the
kollel
men, almost indistinguishable in their dark suits and beards. The society in which she was born and raised gave no value to innovation, to individual human expression! The opposite! Everyone had to dress the same, act the same,
feel
the same! Imagination, self-expression, was a threat, an evil to be throttled and repressed.
And then she thought of her husband in his work clothes, his body bent over the turning lathe, his skilled fingers carving beautiful small objects. She had never valued his talent, his remarkable creativity. She had wanted him to be like all the others. She had been ashamed of his uniqueness. But it wasn’t my fault! she cried out silently, hot with shame. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.
As she wandered through the halls, her face kept lighting up, almost incandescent. It was as if she were affected physically by the colors and shapes, her body growing lighter, almost weightless. It was the still lifes, especially the flowers, that touched her the most. They would never wither, never suffer from thirst or harsh winds, heat or cold. They were caught in their greatest moment of beauty. She remembered those moments in time she had felt made all of life worthwhile. The artist captured those moments so that you could wander through rooms and rooms of them, remembering why life was rich and beautiful and infinitely worthwhile.
Good, Charles said when she told him. Keep going.
She rode on the Staten Island ferry, saw the circus and the ballet. She sat in Carnegie Hall and listened to Daniel Barenboim. She saw
Les Misérables
and
The Sound of Music
. She wandered through little art galleries uptown and in SoHo.
This was the world she had been taught to shut out, the world that she had been taught would take the holiness from her life. Instead it was filling her with new joy, new meaning, new understanding. Like so many other things she had always accepted blindly, she saw the fear that had been bred into her was false. A lie. The fear was a fence erected to keep out temptation, evil. But instead of filtering and shading, it blocked out all light, all sun. It kept out so much that was good! And in the last analysis, it was ultimately useless: the evil in human beings was inside them.
Slowly the fear that had circumscribed her life began to dissolve.
She let the city enchant her. She could not get enough of its variety, it creativeness. Yet with all of this, she did not let it dazzle and blind her. The first time she saw a poor, homeless man lying on top of a subway vent to keep warm, she was appalled. “How can people sleep at night knowing this man is out here in the cold? Why doesn’t anyone help him?”
Joan, who never ran out of places to take her or words to describe them, couldn’t come up with a single, satisfying word of explanation. She found herself forced to focus on and explain a different side of the city she loved—its vast callousness, its wastefulness of both things and people, its frightening unpredictability. In a way it opened her eyes, too.
All along, Joan’s idea of success had been not only to help restore Dina’s hold on reality, but also to enlighten and guide her through all the wonders of Western culture: its freedom, its easy, nonjudgmental morals, its respect for individual choice and individual liberty. All the things Dina’s own culture and society seemed to lack. Slowly Joan began to realize that each of the gifts also bore a curse. The freedom also meant the freedom to watch your neighbor starve or get mugged. Individual choice gave sanction to those who chose to live lives full of filthy books and movies, selfish and careless. Or lives that were an endless cycle of shopping trips followed by garage sales.
More and more Joan found in Dina’s description of her childhood, her life, a society whose hands reached into the individual’s life, constantly interfering yet also constantly helping. You were not poor alone, nor sick, nor heartbroken. If only there could be some balance, if the helping hand could be prevented from its excesses, from the murderously unfair blows that it had been allowed to give Dina Gutman, blows that had almost ended her young life.
“I’d like to take a course,” Dina told her. “One of those you mentioned.”
Joan was delighted. “Screen painting?”
“No. I’d like a course in weaving.”
Joan looked at her curiously. “Do you feel up to it?”
She nodded. “I’m not afraid, Joan. Not anymore.”
Her first tapestries were the dark place she had been—mainly grays, browns, dark greens, and black. Yet slowly she worked in the yellow. There was the sun coming in. At last. There were blue threads—they were the sky. And green, the color of soft, fragrant spring grass. And also a red-orange, like the sunset over the mountains. Dina lifted the threads, her fingers tingling with excitement. Could they be woven into her tapestry? Could she dare to claim such things again, the beautiful memories of her old life, so rich with quiet pleasures? She looked at her loom hesitantly, wondering, afraid.
AUGUST 28
A real breakthrough!! For the first time, she expressed anger, fury at some unknown person. “I would kill him if I could!!” Yet she will not tell me who this ‘him’ is. In general, there seems to exist a certain traumatic event which is central to all this, which explains it.
She is being held back by some powerful, invisible force, like the angel with the sword of fire that stood in Balaam’s way, visible only to Balaam’s ass. I need to find Balaam’s ass.
They want her released or sent upstate. I must speed things up!!
“I think they’ve done all they can for her, Maury. I think she’d be better off with us.”
He folded the
New York Times
and looked up at his wife thoughtfully. “You would take that responsibility? You would bring a mentally unbalanced person into your home and care for her?”
“You make her sound like some kind of psychopath! She was just depressed, unhappy. Believe me, she’s a lot more normal than ninety-five percent of most New Yorkers. And a lot less dangerous. She needs me, Maury. She’s all alone. I think I can help her.”
He stared at her, touching her face. “Another kitten? And tell me, what sense does it make to give the maid’s room over to a disturbed waif who won’t be any help in the house at all?”
“Maury, please. I’ll hire someone else to do the housework. I mean, what’s the use of being rich if you can’t indulge in something as foolish as this? It would be a mitzvah. Your
bubee
would be proud of you.”
He laughed. She’d touched all the right buttons, and she knew it. “Go ahead. Take her out of there. And I’ll tell you something else. That girl doesn’t need a shrink. She needs a rabbi.”
Joan looked at him, thunderstruck.
“It can’t hurt,” Charles agreed. “In fact, she might confess things to a rabbi she feels unable to face with me. After all, I can’t give her absolution, can I? But I think it’s a question of finding the right one. Do you have any ideas?”
Joan walked into the Orthodox synagogue for the first time in her life. She had always thought only old people went to Orthodox services. But everyone here looked so young. It was filled with young singles, “yuppies” in every respect except that the men wore skullcaps. She sat upstairs in the women’s balcony. The prayers, chanted in Hebrew, were totally foreign to her. There was a lot of standing up and sitting down. Joan had no idea what was going on. Yet she felt the sincerity, the spontaneous warmth. The Hebrew gave the service an authenticity, an inexplicable meaning.
The rabbi too looked like a kid. Yet there was something very powerful about his speech that was geared to the university-trained skepticism of his audience.
Joan went up to him after the service and explained the situation.
“I don’t think I could help,” he said with startling frankness.
“Sorry I wasted your time, Rabbi,” Joan said with a touch of anger.
“Please …” His voice interrupted her bitter thoughts. “Come into my office. Sit.”
Joan sat. The room was lined with books. Idly she took a Bible off the shelf and leafed through it, the stories, the phrases, catching her eye. She felt a sudden longing to read it cover to cover. To understand.
“You were offended, insulted by my refusal, my friend,” the young rabbi said affably, closing the door behind him.
“I have no right to be. After all, it’s my problem.”
“It’s true that you have no right to be insulted, but not for that reason. All Israel is responsible for each other. I didn’t say I didn’t want to help, but that I couldn’t. Your friend is from Jerusalem. She wears a wig. Do you think she would accept my word for anything?” He smiled, rubbing his clean-shaven young cheeks. “Get someone with a beard and
payess
, preferably someone going a bit gray. Only from such a person would she accept religious counseling.”
Of course it was true. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone like that, would you?”
“As a matter of fact”—he smiled, looking through his Filofax—“I think I have just the one. A Koliver Hasid, who became religious late in life. He spent his youth on a hippie commune after getting both an MD and Ph.D. from Berkeley. Call me after the Sabbath for the phone number.”
On Sunday Joan found herself down on Eastern Parkway, only houses away from the famous court of the Koliver Hasidim, followers of Rav Mendel Mordechai Koliver.
She rang the bell, her body tensing. Hasidim made her nervous (actually, she found them sort of embarrassing) when she saw them across the street. Now she was walking right into the tepee.
The man who opened the door wore the long beard,
payess
, black coat, and hat she expected. But out of a face mostly hidden by the heavy dark growth of beard that was now turning gently gray, bright blue eyes sparkled with unexpected humor.
“Come in, come in,” he said with sweeping openness. “The natives are friendly.”
She laughed, feeling her nervousness fade. “I guess I am nervous. It seems like a different world down here. Like I’ve left America behind.”
He shrugged. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“Well, not bad, exactly,” she hedged, not wanting to insult him.
“Yes, you’re thinking, bad exactly. Weird. Cultish. You’re wondering what’s a nice MD from Berkeley doing in a place like this all dressed up like someone out of a medieval Polish village?”
“Well”—she smiled, again relieved—“something like that.”
“You know, back in the sixties I lived on a commune with about sixty other people. We were all at the university. All bright. All spiritually starving. We all basically traveled the same route: drugs and sex; travel to India and the Himalayas. Then, the ones who survived mostly packed away their tie-dyed T-shirts and joined banking firms and the staffs of large hospitals. I don’t know if they’re still starving. But I know I’m not. I can’t tell you how I wound up this way—it would take all your time and credulity. But trust me when I say that it was a well-thought-out decision that fulfills all of my needs. Can you accept that?”
Joan nodded, unsure of her real feelings but relieved at the atmosphere of candor.
“Now how can I help you?”
The conversation was long and involved. Joan found herself forgetting about the strange outfit, the stranger credentials, admitting to herself that she was sitting across from an intelligent modern physician, open-minded and knowledgeable.
When the arrangements for the rabbi to visit Dina were completed, Joan held out her hand gratefully. “Thank you, Doctor … ? Rabbi … ?”
“Please …” The blue eyes sparkled as he tactfully avoided the hand. “Just plain Eli will do. And thanks are unnecessary. You’re doing me a favor by allowing me to share in your good deed.”
“Shalom,” Rabbi Eliezer said to Dina.
She looked at him like a startled small animal caught and revealed by the searing, dangerous headlights of an oncoming car.
He sat down and unbuttoned his vest. He leaned forward, his hands cupping his knees in an attitude of expectation. “So,
maideleh
, how can I help you?”
“Can I ask how it went?” Joan asked him anxiously when he emerged about two hours later.
“Hard, very hard.” He wiped his glistening forehead. “All the unanswerable questions. Evil and good, and death and suffering and punishment …”
“Were you able to help her find some answers?”
He shrugged. “Who says there are answers? But I will come back. She seems to want that.”
D
ina was pacing the floor, running to the window anxiously to see if he had arrived. It was Rabbi Eliezer’s fifth visit. She felt the mixture of dread and unbearable expectation of a woman at the end of her ninth month of pregnancy. Something was growing inside her. She needed to push out all the old anger, the shame, the guilt, the pain, to make room for it. Slowly she had begun to reach toward G-d again, forgiving him for her mother’s death. She had looked at death as the ultimate evil, the ultimate punishment. But death was simply a point on a circle, Rabbi Eliezer had helped her realize. There was a continuation, a reckoning in which everything came full circle and justice was ultimately done.
She felt close to Rabbi Eliezer. He reminded her of the wise, good men she had known in her old world—rabbis, teachers, relatives—but somehow without their harsh judgment. She felt she could tell him things too shameful to tell her own family. Also, it was easier and more rewarding to talk to him than Joan or Charles, who could never understand the severity of her crime, who would judge leniently and forgive easily, making their compassionate acquittal worthless.