Paradise Park (28 page)

It was him, Gary, with this emaciated white face, and a beard, and a big black yarmulke on his head, and a black suit jacket. He still had the same blinky eyes, like he was getting too much sun, but now he had glasses. He still had the same reedy voice. But standing there in those clothes—so thin, and with that pale skin—he looked like all the spiritual learning he’d undergone had scooped him out. Like, if once he’d been a pumpkin, now all the flesh and seeds and pulp were gone, so now he had this translucent candle glow, like a pale rabbinic jack-o’-lantern. Still, it was Gary. It was really him. My dancer. My letter writer. Long-distance confidant. I ran toward him and threw my arms around him.

He jumped back. “Oh, no, Sharon,” he said. “No hugs.” He looked so embarrassed, I let him go. And we just stood there, looking at each other. We both started to cry.

“You’ve changed,” he said, which was the real shocker.
I’d
changed? I still had my hair the same way it was back in ’74, straight to the hips like Crystal Gayle. I was even wearing an original Boston Folk Festival T-shirt.

We drove off in the Torah Or hatchback Hyundai, started ascending the hills leading up to the city, Jerusalem. All along the way were these tanks and rotted-out bunkers, monuments to the battles fought there in
that land for that city, for those hills. These chariots of war were corroding into the earth. I was dizzy. I felt like I was undergoing such an Odyssey. I was so emotional and exhausted and jet-lagged and altogether strung out, I was at sea. The whole world was whirling around me. I said, “I feel like this is the culmination of my whole life.” I said, “This is the ancient city of Jerusalem; I’m going to get some answers.” And the city rose up before us, made out of Jerusalem stone, naturally, and with the olive trees and even flocks on the hillsides—I felt my whole spiritual experience was coming together as in an epiphany. This was The Land.

So, of course, I wanted to go right away to the Western Wall, but the Torah Or school was in another place called Meah Shearim. We parked the car, and walked—and we were in the middle of this funky neighborhood. I said to Gary, “Wow.” I said, “This is unworldly.” We were walking through the tiny narrow streets and past vegetable stalls buzzing with flies, and there were kids everywhere, these boys wearing black hats like black Panama hats on one block and then round-brimmed hats on the next block—these are like their school uniforms. There were shops selling silver candlesticks and olive-wood boxes. There were little stinky alleyways—these dark crevices between the buildings. And the alleys were all strung and crisscrossed with clotheslines and clothes hung out to dry. Gary was hurrying me along, and I was staring at all the white shirts strung up: shirts, shirts, shirts, little shirts, little fringes, and then this satin wedding gown hanging on the line. Everyone was rushing all around me, and on the street corners kids were buying these beige twisted candles and big feathers, like turkey feathers—which Gary said were meant for the final cleaning up for Pesach, which was Passover.

“You light the candles to search out the last bit of hametz—any crumbs of leavened food,” Gary was telling me. “You sweep the crumbs out with a feather and then you burn them….” And I’m staring at this guy, my former boyfriend, after all! Because, who would have known? Once upon a time he’d cared about threatened indigenous species, and now he was telling me all the details of Passover.

We got to this run-down old building, which was like a dormitory for the students to sleep, and Gary was probably explaining to me the whole schedule for the seminar program in exploring Judaism—but, as I said before, I was just high as a hot-air balloon. I didn’t hear a word he said.

•  •  •

T
HE
first few days I just walked around glowing. Gary had to spend a lot of time in classes, so in the mornings I went out myself. I walked along the tops of the Old City walls. I walked on these incredible blocks of ancient stone. The light was so clear, the sun so bright. I peeked through the crenellations. And I saw the Arab villages in the hills outside the city; and I saw the gray ribbons of the modern roads. I saw the sky, and the old arthritic olive trees. Here I was, and every particle of me was screaming: Here I am! I am in Jerusalem, the place! Here I am. I am walking through the narrow little streets. I am passing the Armenian church! I am converging with my correspondent from the other side of the world. Let my feet step lightly. Let me step alertly on these stones. Let me worship the spirit of these rocks! I added several pages to my letter to Friedell—all about the ecstasy of breaking the bonds of academe.

The only problem was that during our separation, Gary had turned into a horrible worrywort! He looked at me, and I wanted to hug and kiss him and dance, but he said he couldn’t touch me, and he pulled these long faces, and he said, “Sharon, Sharon. Please! Calm down.”

“Why should I calm down? Why shouldn’t I be excited?” I asked him the third day after I arrived. We were sitting in the reception room of Torah Or, which was a suite of rooms in a run-down three-story apartment building. The first-floor reception area was full of these American men and women coming in and out in their various degrees of religiosity and knowledge. Some guys were dressed like Gary with big black yarmulkes and beards, and some had jeans, and some had dreadlocks. All through the building flowed these streams of young kids and older religious wanderers—along with various disheveled people who muttered to themselves and smelled bad, which normally you would associate with homelessness, yet there at the institute you felt they very probably were prophets.

“Gary, couldn’t we talk for a minute in private?”

“I’d rather talk here,” he said.

So we stood there, and I whispered, “Gary, don’t you still believe in the symmetries in our lives?”

He nodded.

I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t you still think everything, including us, happened for a purpose?”

“Yes.” He pulled his arm away. “But we can’t read all the purposes of Hashem.”

I said, “Gary, I don’t think Hashem has a problem with people jumping up and down and being joyful because they’ve arrived in His or Her—”

“In His,” Gary said.

“In His holy place. It’s not like He doesn’t know how to share! Gary, why are you always pulling away from me?”

“I can’t touch you,” he said.

“I don’t get it. Was I so much better on paper?” “I thought you came to Torah Or to learn.”

“I did!” I told him. “But also to understand Jerusalem. And to reconnect? Remember? To reconnect with you.”

He looked alarmed. “Oh, Sharon, there is so much learning; there is such a world of knowledge to uncover. You can go to class and learn every minute of the day, and all night, too, and you’ll never ever come to the end of it.”

“I know.” I was just as serious as he was. “I know. I know.”

That seemed to cheer him up tremendously. “Then it’s time,” he told me. “Sharon, it’s time for you to begin!”

That very day Gary was going to speak to the dean of the women’s division—since women and men learned separately. “Tell him I want to study the nature of God,” I said. “And how He manifests Himself in the world, okay?”

But I should have known, after all those years, that Gary never listened to me. He got me into an intensive minicourse on Judaic law and history.

I’
D
come out figuring I’d be bunking with Gary, but the institute had separate dorms for men and women, so I got a bed in the women’s wing, which was a maze of rooms in this really old, freezing-cold building, without any heat, next door. I had a little cot, and I slept in a room full of cots, and with these high vaulted ceilings and stone floors like ice. If Gary hadn’t lent me a wool blanket and sweater, I would have come down with pneumonia the first week, just from the shock of that frigid Jerusalem spring.

That first morning as an official student I woke up and all my muscles hurt from tossing and turning in the cold. I could barely stand to get out of bed. Still, I stumbled downstairs for morning prayers in the synagogue/cafeteria. It was a small-scale school, so they had to double up. There were about twenty-five women students, something like twenty young ones on their junior year abroad from college, like Queens College, Brandeis, and a couple from Barnard. They were, I guess, in the advanced program. And then there were a few of us beginners in our thirties and forties. I was kind of in the middle, between the college girls and the mid-lifers, since I was twenty-nine. Well, I grabbed a Hebrew prayer book and joined everybody praying. The college girls just sped through the prayers and sat down for breakfast, while we older ones still stood there holding our books. Then eventually I saw the older women would start finishing up. Still, I wasn’t done. Not that I was embarrassed, but I was the last one standing there, because the prayer book was all in Hebrew, except for a few English instructions. I was the last one standing there, because my Hebrew was so bad. I mean, obviously, all I knew was the alphabet! Yet I remembered what Gary said about a world of learning. I was determined to give these prayers my best shot.

It got to be a marathon session every morning. I would be spelling out the words there in the cafeteria. It took me around four hours to finish praying every morning. People finished eating. They went off to do their reading or their morning classes. These Yemenite cleaning women would come in, clear away breakfast, I was still there, praying. They’d fold up the folding chairs, I was still praying. They’d start hosing down the floor around my feet; they’d start squeegeeing the water—I’m still standing there like the rocks and the planets. There was one other woman who also took a long time. At first I was glad, since it was embarrassing standing there alone. Then I noticed she kept looking over at me to see what page I was on. She had a crew cut and severely plucked eyebrows, and boy was she competitive! She’d check my page, then turn back to her own book, bobbing up and down like a maniac. So after about a week I figured out this woman was into praying with feeling, which meant for each word you had to move your lips, knit your eyebrows, and shuffle around as much as you could. Obviously the slower you went, the more feeling you had, right? So she was envious of me, because I was going slower than everyone else, so I must’ve been the
holiest one there, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to pray as slowly as I was. Every morning I drove her up a wall, since I never told her I knew hardly any Hebrew. She’d have to give up after about three hours. She’d stalk around glaring at me.

“Gary,” I told him in the afternoon, outside—since he was afraid to be seen with me in private—“there’s this kooky woman every morning, and it’s like she thinks praying is some kind of competition or something. And she keeps giving me the stink-eye because I’m winning.”

Gary gasped at me. He said, “Sharon!”

I threw up my hands. “What did I do now?”

“Loshon hora
is a terrible sin.”

“A sin of what?”

“Speaking ill of other people,” he said.

“I wasn’t speaking ill,” I told him, “I was telling you the truth. You can come see. She tries to pray as slowly as she can, but she just can’t cut it.”

So Gary launched into this whole speech about how you had to guard your tongue, and never say a word about other people’s flaws.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry I mentioned it,” I said. “Look at the sty in your own eye. I got the picture.”

He looked puzzled when I mentioned that saying about the sty, and I was glad. Ha! I know something you don’t know! Then he said to me, “Shouldn’t you be at your class? Aren’t you missing the afternoon session?”

“I was just taking a break.”

“A break! You’ve been here less than a week!”

“A little fresh air.” I leaned against the damp and grimy stone wall of the building. The whole neighborhood was stone. The streets were cobbled, the shops were little dark holes in the wall. We were right near the gates of Meah Shearim, which was such a religious enclave that there were big placards up everywhere in Hebrew and in English that you should not enter the area if you were wearing immodest dress, and you should not do anything to desecrate the Sabbath. All around us men in black suits and hats were scurrying by. It had been raining on and off all day, so they all wore clear plastic bags over their black hats to protect the felt. The air wasn’t all that fresh, given the buses coughing up smoke, the crowds, the cooking smells, not to mention the occasional donkey.

“You came here to learn,” Gary was chiding me.

“Yeah, but not from Morah Zipporah!” I said, referring to my prison
warden, fanatical dictator, instructor. “Have you ever taken a class from her?”

“What’s the problem?” Gary asked. Thoughtfully, he was pulling at his beard.

“She’s a Nazi.”

“Sh!”

“It’s true! She starts every class announcing her agenda of converting us. Then she lectures about
kashrus, brachas, midos
—half the words I don’t understand. And then, if you want to ask a question, she says no. If you say, excuse me, Morah Zipporah, I’d like to ask what the purpose of all this stuff is, and maybe have some dialogue here about our origin and our Creator, then she says, ‘You are again sidetracking the class.’”

Gary kept telling me I should be more patient learning the details of the Jewish religion, because, essentially, God, or rather, Hashem, was in the details. He kept saying the point was to learn, not to get caught up in ego. “Sharon,” he said to me, pulling at his beard, “it might seem hard, but I believe in you.”

And I looked at him in his black suit jacket and his black velvet yarmulke and his face all pale, since he didn’t seem to get outside unless I dragged him, and I watched him pull his beard, and I thought, Wow, he catches on fast—since all the Torah Or rabbis pulled their beards. Or maybe, since his was kind of thin and scruffy, he just pulled his beard to make it grow. And I looked at him, and I thought, Are you my old boyfriend? Are you the dancing, idealistic, environmental, horny guy I used to know?

He was the crow-black shadow of his former self. Thin, wispy, and ethereal. Yet it turned out, as he explained to me over the next few days, that a lot of his defensiveness against me came from my sudden arrival during his learning process. And naturally it had been quite a shock to him when I’d called and when I’d flown in so suddenly. He hadn’t expected that. “I felt we were just beginning to reconnect in our correspondence,” he said.