In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (58 page)

Most of the women I talk to were present at the beginnings of the feminist movement, and seem in one way or another to have been connected to Betty Friedan or NOW or Kate Millett. They were the shock troops for the SDS, licking envelopes and boiling water, mimeographing leaflets and serving as intellectual punching bags. Now they’ve come full circle, poring over kabbalistic texts like dedicated Semitic scholars, taking courses with titles such as “Davenen with Your Life: Exploring Jewish Prayer Forms,” and “Devikut and Vipassana: An Exploration of Buddhist and Jewish Methods for Transforming Consciousness.”

“Lenny Bruce said, If it’s bent, it’s okay. If it’s broken, it’s not,” a man in the dessert line tells me. “We bend the tradition, but we don’t break it.” It has to be bent, he argues, or people won’t get it. And if they don’t get it, he concludes, “We will disappear.”

For many, if not most Jews, prayer seems to be an empty, time-consuming experience that leads to random acts of absurdity like hiding Mickey Spillane novels in High Holiday prayer books, or engaging in prolonged and lovingly detailed mental overviews of one’s personal financial statement during a sermon. To a sizable plurality of Jews in this country, the Judaism conveyed to them by mainstream institutions is emotionally sterile if not utterly bankrupt. It is an organizational Arnold Schwartzenegger but a spiritual Don Knotts. People are looking for something with emotional resonance, and for many, Jewish Renewal fits the bill. It links prayer to the heart. Ritualistically, though, it is the virtual antithesis of Hasidism. The image of a woman clad in a tie-dyed
tallis
, holding up the Torah with an adulation reserved for a newborn baby, would be greeted by most Hasidim with the same sort of enthusiasm that would be accorded Carry Nation if she walked into PJ Clark’s during happy hour.

But this is but a minor ritualistic faux pas in a long litany of contretemps that would send most Hasidic rebbes into apoplexy. So it is not surprising that Elat Chayyim claims to be only emotionally Hasidic, not halakhically so. “We are not a halakhic [legalistically based] Jewish movement,” the blissful executive director of Elat Chayyim, Jeff Roth, tells me. Roth, who also holds a master’s degree in social work, has a healthy predilection for giving out spontaneous hugs the way John D. Rockefeller handed out dimes.

Roth and I are walking past an imposing set of slogans written in block letters with a black magic marker on a huge drawing pad. It says, “It Is Perfect. You Are Loved. All Is Clear. I Am Holy.” This quartet of maxims is a chant of Zalman’s, and each phrase corresponds to a different kabbalistic realm.

With an infinite amount of patience, Roth takes it upon himself to give me a crash introduction to Kabbalah. After a few moments, he stops and invites me to a lecture he’s giving in the lodge this afternoon. When I arrive, he is passing around a
Shviti
, a framed diagram spiraling in an arabesque fashion around the Hebrew letters
, or yud-hay-vov-hay. This is the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, a name so holy that only the high priest could pronounce it on Yom Kippur, also referred to as Yahweh, or Yehovah.

The Shviti is hung on the eastern wall of a house in order to designate the direction to face during prayer. The term comes from the phrase “
Shviti Hashem L’negdee Tamid
, I place God before me at all times.”

Roth tells us to focus on the name for God in the Shviti’s center, which bears an intriguing sort of cross-cultural resemblance to a mandala. Jews today, he says, don’t even know how to pronounce the name of God, since we don’t know the vowel structure of the four letters. Most Jews refer to God as Adonai, which means Lord or Master, but Jewish Renewal sees this as hierarchical. God, Roth emphasizes, is immanent and inherent rather than transcendent. This is in the tradition of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who saw God everywhere.

At Elat Chayyim, God is referred to in prayers simply as “Ya,” intriguingly close to the Rastafarian Ja. So old familiar prayers with the name Adonai are replaced by the term Ya, and most everything referring to God is gender neutralized.

When Roth discusses the pronunciation of God’s name, I am reminded of yoga breathing. He intones the letters of God’s name, YHWH, without any vowels. The first syllable, yeh, is an inhalation, the second, wah, an exhalation. “One hay is an inbreath, one hay an outbreath,” Roth tells me. “The yud, the initial letter, is the empty lungs at the beginning of the process, the vov, in the middle, the straightest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, is like a full balloon, or the lung when it is full. God is a process. Zalman calls it Empty-In-Full-Out. In-Out is the flow; Empty-Full is the form. Breathing in and out is a reciprocal process. We breathe out carbon dioxide, the trees breathe it in. God breathes out into the dust of the earth. We breathe it in.”

He points once more to the Shviti, and quotes once again the passage Shviti Hashem L’negdee Tamid. “Shviti’s root, grammatically, means to equate, and l’negdee means to negate. God is me and also the inverse of me.

“Another way to look at it,” he explains, “is through the yin-yang.” You wouldn’t hear Manis Friedman talking this way, I think to myself. “The two hays are like the yin and the yang. The yud represents the dots in the yin-yang, and the vov is the line connecting the two. Vov, which means ‘and’ in Hebrew, links the lower realm of the hay, the physical world—the world of I-it, as Buber called it—to the higher realm of the yud, the world without form, beyond space and time. ‘I Am Holy.’ That’s the yud, Atziluth, the spiritual world, the first letter. ‘All Is Clear.’ That’s the hay, the intellect, when your mind understands the big picture of how God works. ‘You Are Loved.’ This is the emotional world. The vov links people to one another. It is the Great And. I-it becomes I-Thou, or I-You. Buber called God ‘the Great And.’ ‘It Is Perfect.’ This is the second hay, the physical world. So there are four letters and four realms, one for each.”

Roth concludes his lecture by repeating his assertion that God is everywhere, and reminding his listeners that this emphasis on the immanence of God puts Jewish Renewal squarely in the lineage of the Baal Shem Tov, who saw the divine in everything. “And like the Baal Shem Tov, our mission is to serve God with joy.”

As I look out the huge picture windows at the majestic scenery, my attention is drawn from the realms of God to the pool below. There, a group of mostly nude women, partly obscured by shrubbery, hold hands and dance ’round and ’round while singing
Hinay Matov Umanayin
, an old Sunday school favorite. This is their ritual immersion in preparation for the Sabbath.

Later on it’s the men’s turn. This time it’s the hot tub, where the group of men strip down to immerse themselves. We are told to close our eyes and breathe rhythmically, and to concentrate in sequential order on our head, our arms, our legs, and our genitals, the latter of which “bring us joy and which bring us trouble, which bring us hope, for a continuation of ourselves into the future.” Then once again we immerse ourselves, individually and in unison. Our speaker is Arthur Waskow, who ends the session with the song
Mayim, Mayim, Mayim
, an invocation for rain from Israel’s prestate days, usually accompanied by a dance, and a staple of the Jewish summer camp circuit.

That night and the next morning, Sabbath prayer services become impromptu jam sessions, with congregants breaking out instruments and the resident tennis instructor, a former captain of the Stanford team, tooting on his horn as Rabbi Roth strums his guitar. A woman who donated a Torah her family inherited from a Brooklyn synagogue when it closed passes it around lovingly. Another woman announces to the group that her parents gave her an English name when she was born on a refugee boat leaving Genoa for the United States in 1950, and she wants to change it to Haviva, Hebrew for “precious.” After a plethora of hugs and a blessing for good fortune and peace from the Berkeleyite, she sits down and the service resumes.

About three to four of the prayers are familiar, the rest being either improvisational renderings or totally original. Even the familiar ones are performed with a creative flair. The
Shema
is repeated four times, once in each direction. Every time that it is said, the participants make two triangles out of their bodies: one below with legs apart and the other above with arms raised up and stretched out. Then they bring their arms down to the ground to scoop up imaginary water and sprinkle it over themselves and each other. A few lines of the weekly Torah portion are read, some in Hebrew but mostly in English, with a fair amount of liberty taken in the translation.

Late in the evening, after Sabbath has ended, I hop in my car to make a run over to the Nevele, a nearby resort where Mal Z. Lawrence, the last of the great Catskill
tummlers
, or comedians, is performing. The Nevele is one of the few resorts left that still regularly features performers who cater to fans of a certain age, Frankie Valli and Tony Martin being representative of headliners. Tony Martin, who until recently I had thought of as some unsavory hybrid of Dean Martin and Tony Bennett, turns out to have sung with Sinatra in the forties.

The Nevele is a fading complex just outside Ellenville, a few miles from the Jewish Renewal retreat. It could easily serve as the backdrop for an Efferdent commercial. Everyone here looks in some way related to Albert Shanker. Gaggles of Italians who are dressed like extras for the
Goodfellas
nightclub scene and Jews who know every self-deprecating phrase in Yiddish and flaunt it with abandon circulate throughout the lobby.

The building itself is reminiscent of an Intourist hotel somewhere deep in the interior of the Soviet Union. Watermarks discolor the chipped marble foyer, and the furniture is straight out of the fifties, conjuring up images of Meyer Lansky’s Havana Riviera congealed in time for eternity by Castro’s benign neglect, its doorknobs and towel racks capable of sending any Melrose Avenue retro furniture dealer into an acquisitory frenzy. The carpet is a kaleidoscopic undergrowth of nausea-inducing swirls, and a big brass plaque affixed to the wall reads “President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson slept here, August 19, 1966.”

I step into the ballroom and take a seat. A waitress abruptly orders me to move my chair and walks off muttering, “Rude, rude, rude.” Soon the curtains open and the MC announces that Alan King will be appearing next week. An old man one table over shakes his head excitedly and says, “Forget it.”

Opening for Lawrence is a chanteuse who warms the crowd up with a little Bob Seger sung at a tempo that would put Barry Manilow to sleep. She then segues into a passionate “One Moment in Time” (“Seize that one moment in time/Make it shine”), which must be her anthem.

Then the baldheaded Lawrence comes out, looking like a cross between an aging coke dealer and a real estate syndicator in Newport Beach. He
spritzes
, or lets loose, with the requisite quota of
alter kocker
, old geezer, jokes, including a hilarious send-up of a Yiddish-accented retiree on a CB. Then he launches into a series of Hasidic one-liners. “This is the Hasidic capital here. Right here in the Catskills. Woodbourne, just down the road, has a restaurant called the Glatt Spot and a shop called Mendel the Tzitzis Rebinder. He’ll repair them for you, corn row them for you, or make them out of leather so you can flog each other with them. Two T-shirts I bought at the souvenir stand there. One was a Hasid with a revolver. It said ‘Make My Day.’ The other said ‘Lay T’fillin, Not Hookers.’”

After another hour or so it’s over, and I follow him backstage. I shake his hand and on my way out overhear him saying that he’s been married twice, once to an Italian and the other time to a WASP. Clearly, he’s not going to win any awards for promoting Jewish continuity. Even if he is exaggerating, though, Woodbourne sounds intriguing.