Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde Read online

  The stranger was gorgeous. Tall, half-Israeli, with sharp features, green eyes and sleek designer clothes. He was hilarious. He was the perfect man for the girl I wanted to be. He was a high school rowing champion who’d once climbed Mount Rainier. His brother was whip smart, a future senator. His mother made delicious steamed halibut with white rice, asparagus and little sautéed cherry tomatoes. His father, a doctor, grew figs. He had a good job at a good law firm but dreamed of bigger things.

  For our third date, he took me to see the Rolling Stones at Giants Stadium. He was the official on-call attorney for the concert, which struck me then as the sexiest thing a man could possibly be. Mick Jagger running across the stage had nothing on the tall, bright-eyed litigator with floor seats in the third row. He rented a white stretch limousine to take us to the show, and we laughed like rich teenagers on the way home, when he bzzzzzzzzd up the “privacy panel” as we sat, drinking champagne, draped across the rubbery blue leather seats. The first summer brought a trip abroad to Israel, to visit his family and the café where he’d once worked as a pastry chef, making legendary tiramisu. While there, we took a detour to Me’a She’arim, the neighborhood in northern Jerusalem where the ultra-Orthodox Jews live, where they may throw stones at you if you drive on shabbas or walk around in short sleeves. In the neighborhood’s narrow, winding streets, I found and bought a children’s toy called Memory Game. It was just like the one American kids play, where you try to match pairs of upside-down face cards by peeking at them two at a time and keeping track of who’s where. Only these cards—forty in total—bore the faces of Talmudic scholars. The idea was to help young Hasids learn to distinguish between Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, for example. The problem with the game is that all twenty scholars look exactly alike: ancient white men with long beards and thick glasses, wild eyebrows, black hats and permanent scowls. It is the hardest children’s game ever made. We took the game out at dinner parties, to make our secular Manhattan friends laugh.

  The second year brought a rent-stabilized apartment in the West Village with a working fireplace we bragged about but never used. The third year brought a new apartment, bigger, on a sun-dappled cobblestoned street. I went from covering parties for the New York Observer to covering media for the Wall Street Journal to covering pop culture for the Daily Beast. Magazines flew me to Los Angeles and put me up at the Chateau Marmont to write profiles of movie stars, and sometimes he would come. Ours was a beautiful fairy-tale life. The sun was always shining, the skies were always blue and we were so ostentatiously pleased with our lot that, had this been a movie, it could suggest only one possible outcome: doom.

  Doom

  When I moved to one of the most religious communities in New York City, during one of the darkest periods of my life, I didn’t just casually not believe in God. I passionately didn’t believe in anything. I didn’t believe in peace, justice, Barack Obama or the Atkins diet. I didn’t believe in the power of song. I didn’t believe the Ronco Showtime rotisserie and BBQ oven could actually cook a whole chicken in forty-five minutes, and I similarly, but no more vehemently, didn’t believe in the ultimate goodness of humanity. I thought there were two kinds of things in the world: the known and the unknown. Love was chemicals in the brain. Faith was fear. The chicken would cook in its own goddamn time, and humanity was neither good nor bad: it was a collection of particles arranged in the shape of people, who lived for a while and then didn’t.

  I had never been a spiritual person. I had never been a person particularly capable of faith. From the age of four, I remember being so terrified of my own mortality that it would keep me up at night, alone in our overheated house on our cul-de-sac. “What happens when you die?” I’d wonder, curled up in the center of my yellow gingham canopy bed, staring at the dancing dinosaur wall banner that ran along the ceiling edge. Deep down, even then, I knew: “Nothing. There is blackness and nothingness, and you never, ever, ever live again.”

  This refrain—“never, ever, ever again”—made me an early-age insomniac and a real pleasure at other kids’ birthday parties. It’s not that I was some marauding child goth. I was a cartoonishly girly little girl, small and dainty, ferrying constantly between piano lessons and ballet class, always wearing one of six or seven frilly pastel-colored Gunne Sax dresses. It just so happened that while all this was going on, I was also fixated on my own demise. My parents weren’t exactly a comfort here. Both laboratory chemists—my father studied plastic, my mother rust—they worked long hours and spent their free time arguing about work or watching separate TVs on different floors of our house. I asked them once, “What happens when we die?” and in response they signed me up for Hebrew school, where I menaced the housewives who volunteered their Sunday mornings to be my introduction to “God.”

  God made no sense to me. The whole idea of Him struck me as awfully far-fetched. After my first few weeks at the ultra-Reform Temple Sinai, called St. Sinai by more righteous institutions in town, I quickly gave up asking questions and started acting out instead. One particularly dull day at Hebrew school, after I finished coloring in a Xeroxed picture of Moses carrying the Ten Commandments, I snuck into the school’s administrative office, flipped on the PA system and, with all the strength of my eight-year-old vocal cords, gave voice to the Divine. “Hey, everyone!” I shouted into the live microphone. “God here.” The plan was to dismiss class early, but before I could, I was tackled by my principal antagonist at St. Sinai, a third-grade teacher with a lazy eye, whom the kids secretly called Crossy. Crossy hauled me out by the collar of my shirt. I spent the next decade waiting out adulthood in those classrooms, sneaking out to smoke cigarettes in the parking lot and practicing my signature in the margins of my siddur. That one day on the PA system was about as close as I ever got to faith as a child, imitation my nearest form of piety.

  In desperation, I started doing things that even then I recognized were ridiculous. My mother taught me to place fallen eyelashes on the tip of my finger and make a wish while blowing on them, like birthday candles. And so every time I lost an eyelash, I closed my eyes and blew and wished with all my heart that there really was a God, as if, were there not, one little girl huffing and puffing on dead cells would be enough to make it so. I resented my Christian classmates, with their Easter bunny and their Jesus and their big fat holiday hams. I had contempt for the girls who got into astrology in later years, who brought star charts to school and talked about how “everything happened for a reason” and how “the universe sends us signs.” I did not believe the universe sent us signs. I did not believe we were in any kind of dialogue with the universe. I was the only child of two unhappy chemists. I believed in atoms, molecules and clinical depression.

  The day after my thirteenth birthday, I had my bat mitzvah, becoming in the eyes of my people—but not, alas, in the eyes of anyone who could actually see—a fully realized Jewish woman. We Danas were not joiners, as a rule, and so even though we paid our Temple Sinai dues every year, and I dutifully went to Hebrew school and plodded through this holy rite, I hardly had a strong identity as part of a community of Jews. Given that there were only three of us, and we had a distant and cool relationship with my extended family, we were barely even part of a community of Danas. The Internet has made it so much easier to see how fungible community is in modern American life, now that we pass our time staring vacantly into bottomless social networks. But I lived a much more abstract, analog version of this as a kid, and even well into adulthood. While I was growing up, community meant almost nothing to me. It wasn’t something I aspired to have, and it wasn’t something I felt I missed. We went to Temple Sinai and I had my bat mitzvah not because of any stirrings of faith, nor any desire to be a part of something larger than ourselves, but because my parents were Jews, their parents before them were Jews, and doing these remedially Jewish things was what one had to do to continue considering oneself a Jew. It would have taken more effort to not do them. It’s possible my parents ar
e believers; we never discussed it. As a practical matter, we calibrated our level of participation in the traditions of the oldest organized religion in the world so as to cause minimal disturbance in the relentless march of history. Jews begat Jews begat Jews, who did certain things in the course of their lives because that’s what everyone else had done in the long chain of begetting before them and would do in the endless future of begetting to come. Traditions, membership, participation at the minimal level: This was the path of least resistance.

  The theme of my bat mitzvah, because everyone who was begat in the suburbs in the early 1980s had a theme, was “Reach for the Stars,” since this blessed event fell in that tender period of youth after I attended Space Camp and before I discovered Vogue. For the nine years before I technically became a woman, I had pursued a course of study including typing, English, biology, field hockey, French, “kindness” and mathematics at my elementary school, a prim, secular institution with twenty-five students per grade. School was a mansion next to a Nabisco factory, which pumped out Nilla-wafer-scented air in giant puffs from a tall brick chimney, creating such a cloud of buttery sweetness around the little uniformed Ellis girls that looking back now, I have a distinct feeling of having grown up actually inside a cookie jar. These were happy years. I climbed trees. I got to be a Lost Boy in the school production of Peter Pan. I was a pain in the ass but smart and, against all odds, not totally unpopular.

  The summer before my eighth-grade year, when the holy bat mitzvah was to take place, I spent yet another eight agonizing weeks at Kutsher’s Sports Academy. Kutsher’s was a camp for lunky, heathen Jewish youth, and it took place near an old, deserted Dirty Dancing–style resort in the Catskills. I’d found it advertised in the back of the New York Times Magazine, and in some fit of delusion, had begged my parents to go. See, I liked sports, and there “sports” were, right in the title! What a moron I was. A Klan retreat would have been more nurturing. Why did I keep going after the first miserable summer? Because every camper who made it through three summers got a free T-shirt, featuring the contemptible institution’s hideous logo, typically rendered in navy blue, but done instead in an elite, VIP, super-exclusive navy blue plaid. It was the purple heart of camp shirts, and I had to have it. By my third year at Kutsher’s, though nothing much had improved, I had at least settled into my nickname—“Dictionary,” so given because I’d skipped a grade in math during my first summer there and had stupidly kept an algebra textbook hidden under my bed. My torturer/bunkmates found they needed something to yell after they’d ripped off my towel and begun chasing me naked around the flagpole in the center of girls’ camp, a Kutsher’s pastime, and forgoing accuracy for expediency, they chose “Dictionary.” It was zippier than “Algebra: Structure and Method, Book I.”

  By Summer Three, every girl was studying for her bat mitzvah. I had no interest in memorizing Hebrew words I didn’t understand, set to a tune my tone-deaf vocal cords couldn’t follow anyway. By then I had discovered a better prophet: J. D. Salinger. I hid his books, beginning with Catcher in the Rye, then on to the Glass stories, one after another, inside the Xerox copies of my Torah portion, pretending to study any moment I could. Holden Caulfield was fine, but the Glass family was a revelation. I had no idea what any of them was talking about, but the words rolled around in my head like marbles, heavy and smooth. I hadn’t realized families could be like this. That summer, I wanted nothing so much as a single bed in a cramped Upper West Side apartment loaded to the brim with prodigies. I wanted parents in vaudeville and my own spot on a radio show for precocious youngsters. Most pressingly, I wanted to know what happened to perfect Seymour, my dream man, after his wedding day. I didn’t find out until I got home, six weeks later, because a little soccer-playing harridan named Jessica discovered Nine Stories under my bed one day and doused it in the shower.

  When I returned to Pittsburgh that fall, Temple Sinai’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Toby, was not pleased with my lack of progress. I haven’t always been great with authority, and I regarded this man, with his Brillo-pad hair and the oblong black mole in the center of his cheek, as a petty dictator. I had never heard Hebrew spoken by an Israeli, but even still I could tell his pronunciation was fake. I winced at how prayers seemed to shoot from the back of his throat like Ping-Pong balls. “What kind of a sanctimonious asshole do you have to be to become a rabbi?” I used to think, but this was before I moved in with one.

  My Haftorah portion had something to do with the coming of the Messiah.

  “When do you think the Messiah will come?” Rabbi Toby asked one afternoon in his cavernous office, which had deep purple carpeting, slate-paneled walls and a vast dark cherrywood desk. Many American synagogues have adopted this aesthetic, favoring a heavy, windowless design over anything with natural light, giving a visitor the feeling of tunneling her way to God. Where most churches reach skyward, with big, ostentatious lofted beams and towering windows, the average shul tries not to draw attention. It is short and squat—not entirely unlike the average shul-goer—an inverted, eggplant-colored bunker just one or two stories above the earth. Architecturally, Reform Judaism is the stalagmite of religions. As the poet James Merrill, another of my adolescent WASP heroes, might say, it’s less of a lofty spiritual pursuit, more of a mauvement.

  “I don’t know,” I told Rabbi Toby, avoiding his eyes. Finally, I peered up and met his disappointed gaze. “Soon?”

  He shook his head. He had just explained to me everything that would need to happen before the Messiah came. There would have to be no more war, no more hate, no more ugliness in men’s hearts.

  “Not soon?” I tried again.

  “Not for a very long time,” he replied, using a whisper-soft voice to convey gravity. I briefly allowed myself the fantasy of flinging a whipped-cream pie in his face.

  In fact, Jewish teaching allows two very different conditions for the coming of the Messiah. One scenario, preferred by Rabbi Toby and the drivers of mitzvah tanks everywhere, is the triumph of virtue among men. The other scenario is the triumph of vice, “redemption through sin,” as Scholem called it, where the entire world turns into Sodom and Gomorrah, full of war and hatred and rampant anal sex. Given all this, it strikes me that “Soon?” is not a terrible answer to a question about the timing of the apocalypse.

  MY THERAPIST IN NEW YORK is a stunning half-Jewish, half-Italian woman whom I’ll call Madeleine. She is unmarried, drives an orange Vespa and works out of the most perfect office in Manhattan, with wood floors, a vaulted ceiling and a garden growing outside the windows that is so wild it seems on the verge of breaking in. She is exactly the person I would pick for a mother or a sister if you got to pick, which in New York, for enough money, you kind of do. Madeleine says that when a person is preoccupied with thoughts of death, it usually means something in that person’s life is passing away, since we are all in a constant process of living and dying, of casting off skins. It makes sense, then, that when you are a kid, when everything is compressed, when the gradient of life is so quick and clear—What doesn’t change in the course of nine months of grade school?—that an awareness of loss might haunt you. As I got older, I began to notice the fear would lift for a time, when I was busy with a school play or infatuated with some boy. Then, like flu season, it would return, inevitable in times of transition and often, frustratingly, at moments in life when I was supposed to be happiest.

  During what I didn’t then know were the final months of my perfect relationship, I could not get my mind off one particular imagined scene, which played itself in a loop behind my eyes: I am sitting in a white paper dressing gown on the edge of a tall examining table in a doctor’s office. The backs of my thighs are stuck to the plastic cushion, and I lift them one at a time, listening to the sound and feeling the rubber-band sting of each coming unstuck. It is freezing in the dry, antiseptic room, and I stare at my toes. The red nail polish is chipping. They are blue from the cold. Somewhere outside my field of vision, like the nanny in the Mupp
ets, a doctor speaks. I miss the exact words but gather the gist: cancer (or whatever). “You’re dying.”

  It got so I was swallowing sleeping pills every night to knock myself out before the fatal-diagnosis vision could creep into my thoughts. When my perfect boyfriend and I smoked pot, which we were doing a lot of then, I would think about not thinking about it, stoner style, and it was the closest I got to relief. Many months later, I was curled up on someone else’s big plush couch, watching a movie one Sunday night, and my heart nearly stopped when I saw a version of the scene play out on-screen: It was not the universe talking to me after all, it was the Coen Brothers, and the doctor visit occurred at the beginning of A Serious Man. But at the time, it was a mystery, an assertive, irritating, frightening nuisance. I told Madeleine about the vision, and she said, “Maybe something in your life is dying.”

  “Hmm,” I said, pretending to consider the idea. This is a woman whose every word was gospel for me, but at the time, it seemed awfully fruity. What could be dying? I had a great job, a great apartment, a great everything.

  And then one night in the middle of October, when I was still telling myself a story of uninterrupted bliss, my perfect West Village apartment flooded. I am not a biblical scholar, but I’ve read a lot of bad books and watched a lot of terrible movies in my life, and I know a heavy-handed metaphor when I see it. Before the flood, things were already chipping away in the sweet sunlit home we shared. Our tiny galley kitchen, with its painted-over French window, had already been overrun by cockroaches. A growing patch of ceiling in the hallway had long ago started to wither and crack, so there was a low-grade fake snowstorm every time one of us entered or left, like cheap special effects. But it wasn’t until I found myself stranded in the middle of our queen-size bed, with water pouring in from a gaping hole in the roof, that I had the first inkling that something more filmic was going on. My home was collapsing around me.