What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (27 page)

After our day with Omri, we went home and covered up for our Orthodox Shabbat dinner with my friend’s family. Donning tights, long skirts, and newly purchased long-sleeved black tops, we put our lust-provoking hair in a bun, and tried to turn ourselves into visions of modesty.

We stopped by the Western Wall on our way to dinner, which we were told began at 6:52 (sunset). The Western Wall just before sunset on a Friday is a magnificent scene to behold. Women praying on one side, men praying on the other, mothers reaching over the wall to hand things to their sons. The sound of it all is incredible, too. So many people’s voices raised in prayer and song, and, drifting over
it all, music from another Friday-night event in Jerusalem’s Old City: Arab weddings.

Astrid and I stuck some wishes in the wall, and then joined the masses on their sunset parade up the hundreds of ancient stone steps from the Western Wall to the Jewish Quarter. Now, let’s remember we were in the most deeply conservative Jewish neighborhood in the world. In their holiest spot. On the holiest night of the week. It’s all wigs and black suits and furry hats. But about halfway up the staircase, a woman in a wig tapped on Astrid’s shoulder and pointed down at my friend’s rear. And that’s when we realized that, with each step, Astrid had been stepping on the hem of her floor-length, sadly elastic-waisted skirt such that it had been yanked all the way down to her upper thighs. So thousands of Orthodox Jews who are not allowed to shake women’s hands got a view of my blond
shiksa
friend’s thong-clad booty. She mooned the Western Wall on Shabbat.

We tried.

A
fter Astrid turned the other butt cheek, we made our way through the stone alleyways to the home of my Californian friend’s cousin Rachel. We walked into Rachel’s home, and forgetting, I held out my hand to shake hands with her husband … who of course can’t touch women. He grinned, and said in his thick Russian accent, “I can’t shake your hand, but you’re very welcome here,” and I put my hand down, apologizing.

Rachel had grown up as a secular Jew in Indiana, but
had become very religious in her twenties. While at yeshiva (religious school) in New York, she got set up with a Russian man who was living in Canada, and who had also only become Orthodox as an adult. They met a few times, decided to marry, and moved to Jerusalem, where they had “only” five children. Astrid and I obviously thought the whole thing was insane … except they seemed
really
happy and peaceful with each other, laughing a lot and finishing each other’s sentences affectionately.

“
He
wasn’t afraid to make a promise to a woman,” Astrid pointed out.

“They jumped in so fast there wasn’t any time to make pro/con lists,” I said. “Not the worst thing in the world.”

More fascinating, though, was that Rachel was a former journalist who wrote a book about the Jewish laws governing the woman’s domain of home, sex, and marriage, and so often found herself counseling women on sexual issues. Rachel’s husband had trained her in some therapeutic techniques for this purpose, since he was a therapist who developed a Torah-based brand of therapy, which also included modern psychotherapeutic techniques, hypnotherapy, and past-life regression. There were several paintings around their small apartment of rainbow-hued swirls that he said were painted by
different
patients to describe what the past-life regression process looks like. They all looked almost identical.

He does this therapy for people all over the world, sometimes via Skype, in his black top hat and long beard from his little stone pad in Jerusalem. I asked him if he thought he could do the past-life regressing to me.

“Oh, yes, it is much easier to do to non-Jews,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“Because you don’t have as many hang-ups. Jews come out of the regression therapy wanting to change, but there’s still these hundreds of rules we all have to follow every day. It makes real growth and change difficult. It’s easier for the nonreligious,” he said.

Now, I have a wing of Republican born-again Christians in my family. They are lovely people, but we are not cut from the same cloth sociopolitically. I’ve always said I’d be happy to be married by a rabbi if I married a Jew, but that I could never under any circumstances get married in a church. It just represents too much of a belief system I’ve rejected. Plus, Jews don’t try to recruit you—you’re either one or you’re not, which I appreciate.

But I gotta say, I got a new perspective on that Jesus guy during my day walking in his footsteps through the Hasidic neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Even as a nonbeliever, it was suddenly really easy to imagine what it must have felt like to be a Jew at the start of the first millennium, subjected to several hundred laws and restrictions that, if broken, could lead to, say, a stoning or, at the very least, a stern shunning. And then here comes this great-looking hippie rabbi in sandals saying, “Just love your neighbor, forgive and forget, and you’re good.” No wonder the message was so powerful. Like the Hasidic hypnotist-therapist said, it’s
hard
to be an Orthodox Jew.

There were many people visiting Rachel’s family for the Shabbat dinner, which I thought would be staid and serious, what with all the praying and holiness and all. But
it was actually very warm and raucous. While the therapist prayed, food was passed and stories were told and Arabic music from the wedding down the lane floated in the windows that offered a view of the Temple Mount. Rachel’s thirteen-year-old son cheerfully explained the reasons for all of the rituals:

“Listen, we wash our hands three times because the people who only washed their hands one time all died of the plague. And guess what—we’re still here.”

The women sat on one end of the table, and the men on the other, and there were several other foreigners visiting for dinner who were strangers to the family. Teaching outsiders about Shabbat dinner is something this family apparently does often, and they were funny and friendly with all of us. There were three twenty-year-old girls who had grown up in nonreligious American households, but had each become Orthodox, brought themselves alone to Israel, and, in some cases, had lost their families over it. This family was taking them all in.

Rachel showed me her book about the family purity guidelines for Orthodox women, and told me that because of it so many women sit at her side of the Shabbat table and lean in close to ask her questions that are always about one subject: sex.
Do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it.
So I leaned in close, and while her husband thumbed through his Torah on the male side of the table, I asked her about love and sex. I told her about my life, and the obsessive and extensive pro/con lists I’d mentally kept (and sometimes physically transcribed) on everyone I’ve ever dated, and then asked her about how
the Orthodox community goes about this whole song and dance.

She told me that since they date exclusively with the intent to marry, the conversation is very direct right from the start. You’re not sitting quietly next to each other at a movie wondering if you can get over his awful shirt. You’re interviewing. And from your first date, you’re focusing, apparently, on only three questions:

Do we want the same things out of life?

Do we bring out the best in each other?

Do we find each other attractive?

That’s it.
In that order.
You’re not allowed to marry someone you don’t find attractive,
by religious decree
, but it’s
third
on the list. And Rachel said that because you aren’t getting physical with each other, which “muddles you up emotionally so you don’t know which way is up or down,” it’s all very cut-and-dried, and so the process can happen very quickly. You also usually meet someone through a friend or a professional matchmaker, so you do extensive research about a possible mate before even meeting him, asking his rabbi and his neighbors, his teachers and his friends, all about him. Then, if you find him attractive, and some sparks fly, it’s safe—you already know he’s a good, solid person.

“That way you don’t end up in bed with some handsome guy you meet at a party, and then discover the next day that he’s all about money and you’re all about saving the world, but because you’re all jumbled up about his looks and the sex, you keep dating him anyway for a year or
two before you break up with him because he’s all about money,” Rachel clarified.

Astrid and I looked at each other, nodding.

I asked her about the love question—if you get married a few dates into meeting someone, you clearly can’t love them yet. You’re just betting that you someday will. I told her about how I had spent my adult life saying the same thing:
I’m not looking for a particular person, I’m looking for a particular feeling.
I wanted to
feel
over-the-moon in love with someone. I thought that was how I would know he was The One. So I found it amazing that couples were committing their
lives
to each other before they knew each other well enough to know if they could love each other.

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”

She also talked about why she thinks that a higher percentage of religious marriages are happy than nonreligious: they have all of these rules to follow that basically lead to them working really, really hard on their marriages. Start with the fact that all Jews are supposed to be spending their lives bettering themselves, becoming as Godly as humanly possible. And then on top of that, men
have
to please their wives sexually. It’s an order from the greatest sages. It’s also best, mitzvah-wise, if they please their wives
before
they are pleased themselves. You also
can’t
speak evil about your mate. You
have
to treat each other with kindness, and
you
must
get down there and float your lady’s boat, and you
can’t
bad-mouth each other, even to your friends over a nice glass of pinot.
God forbids it.

“Plus, men can’t touch us for two weeks out of the month, so when you have those two weeks together in one bed, it’s always really exciting,” she added. “And for those other two weeks, you have to find ways to connect that aren’t sexual, which is so important, too.”

It was all pretty interesting. And then, after I talked about my deep ambivalence about marriage, mostly because I feared giving up my freedom, she said something that really stuck:

“The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you’ve done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn’t take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are. It wipes away all that nasty ego stuff, and lets your soul shine through.”

As much as I adored this woman, my favorite person at the table was her fifteen-year-old daughter. She was a volunteer first-response medic, important in a city of narrow walking streets where ambulances can’t drive, and she planned on becoming a nurse one day. (The religious women usually work, because many of the Orthodox men spend much of their lives in religious study.) But she had another hobby that really made her light up: boxing. This was a real surprise.

“Do you box with girls? Boys aren’t allowed to touch you, right?” I asked.

“I box with nonreligious boys. I got permission from
the rabbi because it’s therapeutic,” she explained lightly. I didn’t probe.

It turned out that she boxed with boys in her long skirt five days a week, four hours a day, with a male sixty-year-old coach she loved like a father. I dug this girl—she was spunky and smart and tough.

“You’re
Million Shekel Baby
,” I told her, which of course she didn’t get.

She got married two years later, at seventeen, just like she’d always planned. She married a boy who was eight years her senior, who had kind of adopted her family as his own because he was an only child from a nonreligious family. He was a regular at their Shabbat dinner for more than a year before starting to date their daughter. He thought she was older than she was, she thought he was younger, but the family loved him, and I hear they are very happy. They had their first daughter almost immediately.
Million Shekel Baby
doesn’t box anymore.

Now, do I wish I got married at seventeen? Do I hope my daughter gets married at seventeen? Of course not. But these women were certainly doing a lot less internal wrestling than Astrid and I were. And seeing how happy they were in marriages that in no way started with that “feeling,” but, somehow, over the years, grew into plenty of feelings that sounded deep and rich and happy … that stuck with me.

I
could write about Israel forever. I even ended up going back just three weeks later, on a free trip I amazingly got
offered during my first visit. In exchange for the trip, I spoke at a film festival, and taught some Israeli film students about sitcom writing, helping them write jokes in a second language. It was during the Turkish flotilla crisis, and so partway through my trip they moved me to a kibbutz that was out of missile range of Gaza, and when I was introduced at the festival, they also informed the audience of the location of the closest bomb shelter. The Israeli comedy writers drove an hour to hear me speak, shrugging off the crisis. Israelis are some of the best in the world at living in the moment, and shrugging off possible disaster. Statistically they are also some of the happiest, which I believe is directly connected.

I had to leave a week earlier than I planned from my second trip to Israel because I got a job—on
Chuck
, my first nonsitcom, a totally new kind of show for me. At the interview, I gushed about Israel, about the Mossad (
Chuck
was an international spy show), and about all of the things I had learned from all of the people I’d met. I got the job, and it opened up a new avenue for work that is still reaping rewards, and it happened partially because of the stories I came home with from Israel.