The Sacrifice of Tamar (40 page)

Invite her back home! Tamar thought. And then the image of Jenny meeting Aaron, the long, slow searching glance and perhaps those thoughts—those same, inevitable, heartbreaking thoughts that had kept her up for the last twenty years—stopped her. So instead she asked: “And what do you hear of Hadassah? Are you still in touch?”

“I get postcards every Rosh Hashanah. Sometimes from Venice or Greece or Istanbul… And we speak on the phone a few times a year. She is married again, you know. Number three. Or is it four? I forget. Someone younger this time. A set designer… producer… something. I think this one might even be Jewish. She is trying to have another child. She had one, a boy, years ago. He’s all grown up and lives with his father and stepmother in Los Angeles. She’s taking hormone treatments, shots, holistic therapy. You name it. She sent me some pictures of her gorgeous house in La Jolla—it looks like some lush tropical island. Hadassah! I’ll always love her! And I guess I’ll always worry about her, too. Her life has been so exciting, so full of adventure. She’ll never give up or give in to anybody else’s vision of her. I imagine it must be a hard, lonely struggle sometimes…

“Giving in to everyone’s expectations is not any easier, believe me. It’s the opposite side of the same coin. The older I get, the more I admire her guts. But her choices have taken a terrible toll on her family. Her mother died before her time, and her father is old and ill when many other men his age are still full of life… You must know that. He spends about half the year in Israel these days. I don’t think either one ever really recovered from the disgrace, her leaving…

“I know she tried to see her mother right before she died. Somehow, it didn’t work out. I see her father whenever I can. We’re very close. I tell him what I know about his daughter.” She shrugged sadly. “He’s never stopped caring. He’s never stopped blaming himself.”

“And what about you, Jen. Are you happy?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said slowly, thoughtfully, “I think I can honestly say I am. I have so much love from my husband and kids. I feel so connected… Everything I know and believe in and care about, it’s all right here. I just look down the street and I see the patriarchs standing there.” She laughed and then was suddenly serious. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else. But it hasn’t been easy… There was a time some years ago when I felt a certain panic, as if every decision I’d ever made was based on the wrong information. I felt maybe G-d didn’t care about me after all. And that I’d been wrong to marry Marc, wrong to move to Israel…”

“I’m really surprised!”

“After all my first euphoria wore off, I felt I was never going to fit into this strange, foreign country. I’d look at all the newscasters on TV and think: They were born here. They’ve been in the army. They go to the beach on Shabbat and discos Friday night. They’ll never accept me as one of them… And then I’d look at the people in Meah Shearim, the Hasidim, and think: They were born here, or in Poland or in Hungary. They speak Yiddish and think I should be wearing seamed stockings and shaving my head. They’ll never accept me, either. At least in Orchard Park the Hasidim spoke English. They were Americans. But these guys… It was a whole different ball game.

“And then I had all this guilt about abandoning my family. My mother was getting on in years and was all by herself with nobody to care for her. My brother was out in California. I tried to keep in touch, but writing isn’t a substitute for touching, for sharing birthdays and holidays.

“And then”—she hesitated—“there were all kinds of other problems. Starting a family…” She stopped. “So many times I wanted to call you, just to ask your advice!”

Tamar reached out to her impulsively: “I wish you had! It’s
so hard for me to imagine you needing help, though. You always seemed to have all the answers.”

“I did, when it came to everyone else’s life. With my own, it was a little bit harder…” She smiled.

“What got you through it?”

“My old
chumash
notebooks. Just reading over the lives of the patriarchs. Sara’s childlessness. Jacob’s having to run away from home so his evil brother Esau wouldn’t kill him. Isaac’s losing his son and going blind. You couldn’t say any of them had easy lives, even though G-d loved them and they were considered tzadikim. They never really fit in anywhere, either. So I stopped looking at my difficulties as a sign I was on the wrong track. I simply plowed ahead. It’s worked out, thank G-d.”

“I imagine life in Israel has never been easy. And now with the
intifada
and terrorist attacks all the time… How you must hate the Arabs!”

Jenny rubbed her mouth thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you a story. When we moved into our first apartment, we were the only ones in the building because the other apartments weren’t yet sold or finished. Living right next door to us was the Arab watchman whose job it was to see nothing got stolen from the building site. He was a thin fellow with a bright, sunny smile. Very religious. His name was Mansour. He prayed six times a day and believed that the Koran preached tolerance and love for all men. He was very handy and helped us with all kinds of problems we had in the house: broken tiles, leaky faucets… you name it!

“My husband and I got to really like Mansour. We’d invite him in for tea. He liked that. Tea with about two cups of sugar in it! Not so much the tea, as being served it in a clean cup on a tray. The courtesy of it. He began bringing us these large bunches of grapes from his vineyard in some village in Samaria. Biggest grapes you ever saw! And so sweet.

“Well, just about the same time, the son of a friend of ours
was murdered by terrorists. He was on the road hitching a ride home from his army base, and these animals grabbed him and pushed him into their car. They found his body mutilated, burned, stabbed twenty times. He was nineteen years old, a gentle yeshiva boy with glasses…” She paused, swallowing hard. “Well, one Shabbat afternoon I was getting ready to walk over to see this boy’s mother, my friend, to comfort her, and when I passed my kitchen, I saw my husband sitting there drinking tea with Mansour. And then I realized that there isn’t any simple solution. Why should we hate Mansour? Because some other Arab is a murderer? Yet how can I drink tea with someone who lives with these people, who rejoices with them, who identifies with them?

“I believe there is going to be peace here one day. And it’s going to start with us giving Mansour tea and him bringing us grapes. It’s going to start when Mansour can get up and tell his family and friends in the village: ‘What our brothers did, what those terrorists did, to murder Eliezer Cohen, it’s wrong. It’s against the teachings of our Koran. G-d, the same G-d Mohammed and Abraham believed in, wouldn’t want that!’ It’s going to start when I have the guts to stand up in shul and say: ‘Hating the Arabs is against the Torah. The Torah teaches us to pursue peace, brotherhood.’

“You can sign any peace treaty you want, give back this piece of land and that piece of land, but peace is never going to happen until those things do. It’s got to start with us learning each other’s names. With us feeling responsible for each other’s fates.”

“I don’t agree with you, Jen. You are never going to have peace with the Arabs or any other goyim, period. Because they all hate Jews! Some hide it better than others, but deep down, they can’t stand us because we’re not one of them. An enemy is still an enemy. It doesn’t matter if you invite them to tea and find out their names,” Tamar said bitterly.

Jenny sighed, thinking of Mr Adams, principal of the Head Start program in Brooklyn where she’d been a teacher’s assistant. Good, kind Mr Adams, who’d done so much for those kids, who’d kept the black teaching assistants from Harlem and the white teaching assistants from the Upper East Side from eating each other alive. And Lawrence, the handsome clarinetist she had gone to college with… Just as Mansour was never “an Arab,” Mr Adams and Lawrence had never been blacks. They had names. Had Tamar ever even met a black person or a gentile, except for that one time?

“After what the goyim did to my parents in the war… I have no use for any of them,” Tamar continued.

“I understand how you feel. But what do we do about the Torah, then? I mean, being religious means accepting the whole Torah, not just the parts they emphasize in Orchard Park. It means being part of the world, a ‘light unto the nations.’ How can we be a light if we shut ourselves off behind lead partitions? ‘Goy’ means a people. Jews are also goyim. We’re part of the world. Part of mankind, Tamar. That’s G-d’s will…”

“The same discussions we had in Ohel Sara,” Tamar said, wondering. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

This was surprising. The newly religious always took things too far, going off on tangents. But eventually they became part of the community; they understood all the unspoken feelings, the rules. Antagonism toward the gentile world was part of that. Jenny had been religious for more than twenty years now, and her opinions still had not fallen into line… Somehow Tamar found that genuinely refreshing, if a little frightening. No one she knew ever questioned anything. Their religious lives were all so neatly packaged, no one ever bothered checking the contents…

“I’m sorry for running on… What about you, Tamar? How have the last twenty years treated you?”

“I’m the most respectable matron on Twelfth Avenue and
Forty-eighth Street,” she said, smiling brightly. “I mean, my house teems the way Hadassah’s used to, people coming to ask my husband questions… I’m the rebbetzin… and now I finally understand Hadassah’s poor mother. We used to think she was such a snob, remember? But she was just overworked and constantly interrupted, that poor woman. She had no private life. She had to share everything, even her husband and children. I’m not that bad off. I mean, Josh is the
rosh yeshiva
, not the
rav
of Kovnitz. But I’ve had a taste of it. Still, I can’t complain, I have everything—fine husband, beautiful children, a lovely home, respect…” She stopped, the flow of clichés suddenly going unbearably sour in her mouth. After all these years, finally someone to talk to. Someone who would understand. She looked into Jenny’s eyes, her smile suddenly gone: “I’ve been miserable for twenty years.”

There was a shocked silence. “Why?”

She shook her head. “Because it’s all a lie. Nothing about my life is real. My husband doesn’t know anything about me. And I don’t really know him. I love him, but I don’t really trust him, not enough to tell him the truth. I guess that means I don’t really trust his piety or his goodness. Oh, he gives charity and visits the sick, and helps the mourners… but how would he feel about me if I told him the truth? How deep does his compassion really run? I wish I knew. But I can never risk finding out. The past isn’t over. Nothing has been resolved. All these years I’ve pushed it away, vacuumed it, flushed it, and swept it, and it just keeps coming back. Like dust on windowsills. It’s like I’ve been building this sand castle at the water’s edge. No matter how beautiful it is, I keep feeling it can just be washed away with the first big wave. I guess I just keep waiting for that wave to come along.”

Jenny reached out and touched her cheek. Her eyes were full of compassion. “Still rosy, like that little girl’s on that cold Purim day rushing to school.”

“It’s makeup, Jen. I lost my color long ago. I still remember that Purim, though. It started out so happy. I felt so beautiful and loved. And then it was all shattered. I guess that’s the way I see life. All our happiness is simply temporary. Only the bad things last and last and last…”

“I feel just the opposite. All the bad things are temporary. And the good things last and last. Like love. Like children. Like a home, and a country and a people and G-d… You’ve got to meet my family! We’re moving soon. To a settlement in Samaria. A place called Beit El. Built on the same spot as the biblical Beit El, you remember, from our class in prophets? Where they set up an altar and kept the Ten Commandments before King Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem?”

“But that’s over the Green Line! Aren’t you afraid to live out there? I mean with the stone throwing, the Molotov cocktails, the shootings on the roads?”

“Hey—” Jenny grinned. “I’m a New Yorker. Remember? It’s not more dangerous than navigating your way around the Bronx…” Then she turned serious. “I’m afraid. Sure. I’m not stupid.” She shrugged. “We’re always in G-d’s hands.”

Tamar played with her spoon. “No place is really safe, is it? It’s just an illusion, being able to control what happens to you.”

“In some ways. But I want to tell you something else. Once at the university, I saw this little sparrow swoop down to eat something. And as soon as she landed, ten other sparrows flew over, pecking her. She gave up and moved out of their way, trying to find a quiet spot, but it didn’t help. Wherever she went, they went after her, pecking at her, screaming at her. I remember thinking: Sometimes you just have to take a stand. You have to say: This far and no farther.

“Wherever Jews have lived, there has always been someone who didn’t think they had any right to be there. Cossacks, Nazis,
Klu Klux Klanners… Beit El is an ancient Jewish city. Every time you stick a shovel in the ground, you come up with Jewish graves, synagogue remains, Jewish artifacts… Mansour understood that. He really did. He respected the ties of culture, history, religion. ‘It’s just the troublemakers,’ he’d tell me… Well, it feels like we’ve never been apart.” Jenny laughed. “Same old arguments, same old questions…”

“Except now…” Tamar stopped herself.

“What were you going to say?”

“Except now, we’ve got so much less time to figure it all out. When I was sixteen I was sure that by the time I’d reach forty I’d know everything.”

“Only now it’s even foggier, right?”

“Right. Except now I understand that friendship is precious. You don’t just throw it away. At twenty, I thought I could replace you. Now I know I can’t.” She reached across the table and felt the warm contact of Jenny’s hand, the hand of a dear girlfriend, dearer in some ways than a husband or mother or sister, or even a child. The hand of one who really helped you get through life’s crises. Who didn’t lie or butter you up. Who helped you grow honestly and with some insight.