The Sabbath World (18 page)

Meanwhile, I moved a lot. I moved from Greenpoint to a room
on the top floor of a brownstone in Park Slope, then to an apartment on the north side of the Slope, called Prospect Heights. I had no idea why I kept moving. I knew that I wanted to stay in Brooklyn. It seemed to me that it still had something to say to me, something I hadn’t heard yet. I loved its decrepit brownstones, shuttered warehouses, polluted sea vistas, ethnic neighborhoods. Riding through Brooklyn on my bicycle, I imagined I was Walt Whitman on an epic American perambulation.

What was I looking at? A preference evolved for neighborhoods where the people came from somewhere else. I looked for store signs in foreign languages, preferably in foreign alphabets—Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew. I circled around churches, the onion-domed Eastern Orthodox ones, the storefront mosques in Cobble Hill, the black Baptist churches with the strangely Jewish names. Eventually, I narrowed my focus to neighborhoods with signs in Hebrew and Yiddish. I rode up and down Ocean Parkway, studying the giant letters above the grand synagogues and yeshivot that lined the service roads of the elegant boulevard. I stared hungrily at the women in their wigs and long skirts and cheap, sensible shoes, the men with their hats and fringes.

A few months before I moved out of my Greenpoint apartment, Sasha had moved back to Manhattan, and I had taken in the friend of a friend, a West German law student named Maria, who was doing a summer internship at the United Nations. She taught me rudimentary German in partial lieu of rent. When she went back to West Berlin, I visited her once, and from then on I went back every year. She shared her apartment in what was then the bohemian neighborhood of Kreuzberg with Anna, a graduate student in Jewish studies; to my surprise, this was an increasingly popular field of study in West Germany, and one that proceeded in the total absence of Jewish students. Anna had a boyfriend named Klaus, a recent Ph.D., who used to lecture me on the contents of the Jewish siddur, or prayer book. Once we went to Yom Kippur services together in a newly reopened synagogue in what had been East Berlin, and he expressed surprise at my ignorance of the fine points of the holiday and its liturgy. I was
embarrassed and resentful. How dare this German one-up me Jewishly?

Nonetheless, I became closer to Anna and Maria’s friends than to my own, which is how it happened that one day years later I found myself, along with an American friend equally obsessed with matters German, showing New York to a group of women from the former East Germany who had come to explain the advantages of Communist day-care policies to a conference on women and law. We asked them what they wanted to see first, and they said Borough Park in Brooklyn, which has one of the densest concentrations of visibly Orthodox Jews outside Israel. The women wanted to buy fancy hats, they told us, and there were plenty of those to be found in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, since married women who live there are obliged to cover their heads. My friend and I looked at each other. I felt a stab of dislike. Under the roar of the subway, I murmured to my friend that we were off to go “Juden-gucken,” which means, literally, “Jew-peeping” but if said a certain way sounds, in English, like “Jew-cooking.”

But that’s what I’d been doing: Jew-peeping. And I did it most often on Saturdays, when the men wore their silk stockings and round fur hats and the women, too, wore their best dresses and hats. I circled back and back upon the neighborhoods. I was aware of violating their Sabbath space with my bicycle shorts and my bare shoulders, but I felt protected by my nakedness, too. It made me feel safe, unseen.

Years later, I saw an exhibition of paintings by the German Expressionists known as Die Brücke, a group of male art and architecture students who greeted the turn of the twentieth century with a classic fit of art-school bad-boy attitude. They borrowed Cézanne’s fascination with the primitive—with Negroes, Samoans, full-lipped and full-breasted female nudes—but, lacking his age and wisdom and depth, also lacked his knack for jolting figures into our line of vision as fully spatial, non-objectified,
living
bodies. The primitives of the Die Brücke painters were flat stabs at something, expressions of a longing to escape to another world. They made no connection. I felt a sick wave of self-recognition. I had looked at the Jewish bodies the
way these German painters had looked at their models’ black and brown and female ones—with hunger, envy, pity, horror, and a secret self-satisfaction at my daring. I never got off my bicycle and talked to the objects of my gaze. You speak to them, I thought, and they see right through you. They know you for the tourist you are.

It was my best friend from high school who got me to enter a synagogue. The daughter of a Lutheran minister, and a pianist and poet, she moved in with me in Park Slope during a short-lived tryout of life in New York City and went to church every Sunday. At one point I asked if I could go with her, and she very sweetly said no. In retrospect, I can’t blame her. I must have been a turbulent presence.

Around that time, though, a movie titled
A Stranger Among Us
came out. It starred Melanie Griffith as a policewoman who goes undercover, implausibly, in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn. She even attends services with her so-called family. The synagogue was a picture postcard of old-world Jewry, with a bimah, or raised altar, in the middle of the room and a women’s balcony. The scene, I read in the local press, had been filmed at a non-Orthodox synagogue down the block. Its interior turned out to be as detail-rich as its exterior was blank. When the film crew came, they built the old-fashioned central altar, replaced the old chandeliers with less modern ones, brought out some pews that had been hidden in the basement, and scrubbed everything till it had the requisite spiritual gleam.

I went in one Saturday. There were the wooden pews, though the altar had been taken down; the stained-glass windows; the bronze
ner tamid
, or “eternal light,” hanging before the ark of the Torah. I sat in a pew at the back of the sanctuary, thoroughly amused by the Disneyfication of my ancestral architecture, the sheer artificiality of it all, and burst into tears.

The rabbi at the synagogue was not a gregarious man. He never came over and put a hand on my shoulder or asked me what was the matter. Nor did anyone else. I went back the following week, and was left alone again. I did this week after week. I must have been emitting radio waves of discomfort, because it was months before anyone invited me home for lunch after services, and more than a year before I
began, tentatively, to join a Sabbath community. I was glad to be left alone, and not sure that I wanted friendship. I was a fraud, an impostor, a cliché. I did not want to be acknowledged. And yet, perversely—and even though I’ve always disliked the word
spiritual
, which seems a way of averting the eyes from the accusatory glare of the holy—I sometimes think that those sad, solitary Sabbaths were the most spiritual I’ve ever had.

T
HE
C
HRISTIAN NOTION
of the holy life as a flight from earthly bonds reflected another shift: from the rule-bound, or “bureaucratic,” community to a “charismatic” one. The terms are Max Weber’s, and he takes Christ as the very model of the charismatic leader, the figure who dissolves existing hierarchies and laws and runs society on the strength of personal authority alone. Christ’s authority came from his genius for quickening spirits, not from his mastery of a method or rules or a body of knowledge.

Jesus came with his charisma to liberate the world from the tyranny of the law, that harsh and petty “schoolmaster,” as Paul put it. Actually, Paul probably only said “custodian,” a much less negative term, and meant that Jesus liberated
Gentiles
from the law, not Jews, and he may not have found the law particularly tyrannical for those who were born into it, as he had been. The church fathers who came after him, however, removed as they were from the Jewish matrix of beliefs, thought he was throwing out the Mosaic Code for everybody, for all time, and that is the view of Paul and the law that has prevailed ever since. By this reading, Paul said that Jewish law existed only to oppress all of humankind with its exacting standards, to drive us to despair and thus into the arms of Christ. Before there were the restrictions and complications of holy law, there was Abraham’s simplicity of faith.

Paul’s critique of Jewish law, even in its most limited form, had everything to do with the ethnic politics of the Jesus movement. It began as an observant Jewish sect but almost immediately tumbled
outside the borders of Palestine into a much less Jewish world. Not that Jesus’ followers thereby entered a wholly Gentile world. Scholars of late antiquity make clear that the cities outside Palestine in which Christianity blossomed, such as, say, Antioch, Rome, and Alexandria, possessed large, diverse Jewish communities. These, though minorities in an age lacking any concept of minority rights, were often blessed with political power, or had at least worked out an arrangement with the local authorities. As Christianity moved outside Palestine, it established itself on the edges of these communities. But it also drew followers from among the surprisingly large cohort of Gentile friends and neighbors who were attracted to monotheism and the high moral standards of Judaism. These adherents may have studied Torah or kept the Sabbath, but they weren’t ready or willing to shoulder the entire yoke of Jewish law. Nonetheless, synagogue records throughout the ancient diaspora reveal that significant numbers of these fellow travelers attended services or associated in some other way with the synagogue.

Christ’s evangelists baptized their way through the ranks of the sympathizers, but over time they met with increasing success among non-sympathizing Gentiles. This raised the question of whether or not the converts to Christianity ought to adopt all the customs that made the Jew seem so peculiar—objectionable, really—to Gentile observers. Should the new Christians be circumcised, abstain from pork, halt work on the Sabbath?

Such questions rubbed the early Christian psyche at its most sensitive spot. Day after day, the converts of Rome, Asia Minor, and the West were required to account for themselves. Who were these zealous, often ill-educated people? Why did they follow a Jewish preacher who had been hung up on a cross, of all the ignominious ways to die? Were they Jews, Gentiles, or neither? Clearly, they had joined some sort of minority. But was it a spiritual élite, as they claimed, or a rabblement of heretics and outcasts, a minority of a minority, as many Jews and Gentiles declared?

It is never easy to move through the world unsure of oneself, but the quest for Christian identity must have been particularly unsettling.
Conversion from one communal affiliation to another was not unheard of in the ancient world—many Judeophiles, for instance, wound up becoming Jews—but it remained the exception. Becoming a Christian back then demanded a much greater tolerance for social dislocation than it does today, because it meant leaving the known order of things and entering into an as yet unmapped society. Religious beliefs were inherited, not chosen. “What we now think of as ‘religion’ had a clear genealogical nexus then,” Paula Fredriksen writes. “People worshipped the gods native to them. To undergo a rite that would turn a pagan into a Jew would make as little sense to most pagans as would a modern person’s undergoing a ritual by which she would somehow be transformed from being, say, actually culturally English to actually culturally Italian.”

Besides, whatever the Greeks and the Romans may have thought of the Jews (and some evinced mild admiration, though more expressed disdain), they respected antiquity and sneered at innovation. The second-century philosopher Celsus, for instance, was no fan of Jews, but he had even less patience for Christians, whom he called failed Jews. They got a basic Jewish concept—monotheism—wrong, and they worshipped a man who had been crucified like a common criminal. “You make yourself a laughing-stock in the eyes of everybody,” Celsus wrote, “when you blasphemously assert that the other gods made manifest are phantoms, while you worship a man who is more wretched than even what really are phantoms, and who is not even any longer a phantom, but in fact dead.”

And yet cutting ties to families and the past is what the Christ of the Gospels demanded of his followers. He set the example by refusing to recognize his mother and brother when they asked to speak to him, saying that his followers made up all the family he needed: “‘Who is my mother? And who are my brethren?’ And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, ‘Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.’”

Paul grappled nonstop with the problem of Christian identity. So did those who came after him. The popular Gnostic leader Marcion,
writing in the middle of the second century, found
all
Jewish aspects of Christianity repugnant, and tried to expel the Old Testament from the canon of Christian books. The church fathers thought this excessively anti-Jewish and called it heresy. The Ebionite Christians, on the other hand, followed the Mosaic Code, keeping the Sabbath on Saturday and other laws well into the fourth century. That degree of inclusiveness veered too close to Judaism, and it, too, was deemed heretical.

Paul preached to the Gentiles, mostly in Asia Minor, until his death sometime between 64 and 67
C.E.
He intervened frequently in disputes about Jewish observance. His main opponent in this debate was Jesus’ brother James, the head of a church in Jerusalem that continued to follow Mosaic Law. Paul worked out his answers to James’s challenges in a series of gorgeously argued letters to Christian communities outside Palestine. His supple prose style gives these letters a richness and an elusiveness rarely found in the history of epistolary writing, and debates about what he meant to say—and particularly about what he was trying to say about Judaism and the Jews—are, if anything, more intense than ever before, the Holocaust having made early-Christian anti-Judaism seem more suspect than ever before.