Читать книгу Questioning Return - Beth Kissileff - Страница 12
ОглавлениеPeople are walking in the counterfeit city / whose heavens passed like shadows, / and no one trembles. Sloping lanes conceal / the greatness of her past.
—LEAH GOLDBERG, “Heavenly Jerusalem, Jerusalem of the Earth”
On Sunday, after her first ulpan class at the university on Mount Scopus, Wendy took the number nine bus through the center of town. She was glad to have the intricacies of Hebrew verb conjugations and new vocabulary to focus on to get the sensation of Donny’s kiss and her surging desire, kissing him back, out of her head. It would come back at random moments for the next few weeks she guessed. It wasn’t the biggest misstep ever, or the worst, just yet another thing she shouldn’t have done. Hopefully she wouldn’t see him again and wouldn’t have to feel like a sleaze; she’d been involved with guys in ways she regretted in high school, but not recently, and thought that was in her past.
After the bus left the center of town, it crawled down Aza Street. She asked another passenger about the stop and got off before the corner of Rav Berlin Street. The café From Gaza to Berlin was there at the intersection, as Avner Zakh, the Fulbright advisor, had told her. She was proud of herself for getting around in this new place; that only lasted until Wendy entered the air conditioned café and realized that she had no clue what Zakh looked like.
As she gazed around the room, she saw in her peripheral vision a tall man with mostly dark hair, bits of gray jutting out here and there. He was wearing a navy kipah seruga, knit headcovering of the modern Orthodox, and jaunted over to her athletically, bouncing as though he were on a basketball court.
“Wundy?”
Israelis couldn’t pronounce her name. Her ulpan teacher this morning had insisted on calling her “Varda,” her Hebrew name, which she’d always hated for the clumsiness of the sound. An awkward name, like Helga or Ursula, its syllables slogged together in an unlovely clump like an overweight older woman with a headscarf and heavy calves in orthopedic shoes.
“Professor Zakh?” she held out her hand in greeting.
He nodded at her without taking her hand. “Nice to meet. Shall we get some coffee?”
They went to the small counter in the back of the store and gave their orders: lemonade for Wendy, espresso for Zakh. They found a table by the window and sat across from each other. “I apologize in advance. I don’t have much time today. I’m attending the parsha class at the Van Leer. I’d invite you to come, but I understand you don’t have enough Hebrew to follow a lecture.”
“Not yet. Today was my first day of ulpan.”
“We have an excellent ulpan here. It went well?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I want you to tell you, I find your dissertation project very interesting. We’ve never had faculty in American religion, but we are now cultivating a donor in American studies. They want a . . . how do you say . . . department? Not that, a . . .”
“Program?”
“Right. Americanists in all departments—history, literature, political science—to make a program for students who are interested. We’ll see; these things always take time. Anyway, here’s my home number.” He took a small notepad out of his pocket, wrote his name in Hebrew and English with his number and address below it, and said, “Call with any questions. The bus lines, where to get good felafel, whatever. I’ve been Fulbright advisor for a few years. Can I guess what you need? E-mail, library privileges, pizza?”
She nodded.
“E-mail and library, go to the overseas student office, the Rothberg building. Ask for Donna. Tell her you’re with me and she’ll take care of you. Pizza. Where are you living?”
“Rehov Mishael, near Rahel Emainu.”
“Pizza Sababa; they deliver. Burger Bar, right on Emek Refaim, has the best hamburgers, students say. Tov?” he asked.
“Are other students here?”
“Not yet. No one else is taking ulpan. Our first formal meeting is not till September, when they all arrive. I’ll have my secretary send a letter. We’ll be in touch.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t want to be late.”
Wendy saved the most important question for the end. “The thing I need most help with is how to interview people. Where should I start? How should I find places to find interview subjects?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “Go to the Kotel. The recruiters pick you up; you’ll see where they send people. Yerushalayim is a small town. You’ll meet plenty of your hozrei b’teshuvah.”
“My what?”
“Hozrei b’teshuvah, returnees.”
“What’s the difference between that and baalei teshuvah?”
He laughed. “Hozer is return, and teshuvah is answer, so they are returning to the answer. If someone is dati and stops being dati, we say they are hozer b’sh’ailah, returning to the question. You, Wundy, are questioning the returners.” He got up to go. Standing, he said, “I’ll look forward to working with you this year. Naim meod. You’ll do fine.”
She watched him walk out of the café with that spry lift in his step, and wasn’t sure whether he’d helped her or not. Was he a jerk for cutting the meeting short or a good guy for making time for her? Funny, male academics, with their vanity about their time and how busy they were, did not change over oceans, she thought. The level of self-importance was a constant. Zakh did give her some advice; she’d just been hoping for more. She needed more direction: which schools would be good places to try, how to approach the administrators. What if she couldn’t get into any of these places to talk to students? What if after getting this fellowship and settling in a new place she couldn’t do her project? She’d have to try to get help, from him or someone else. No matter what, she just had to keep going. It was what everyone said about a dissertation: persistence was the most important factor. Not talent or ideas, just stubborn refusal to give up. As she finished her lemonade she opened up her notebook to study the Hebrew verb lebanot, to build, that she had started learning in ulpan that morning.
Wendy followed Zakh’s advice to go to the Kotel, the Western Wall, on her third Friday night in Israel. The prior week, she lay down for a nap Friday afternoon and woke up long after dark, exhausted from six intensive hours of studying Hebrew verb forms each day.
If Mahane Yehuda was a collision with all manner of foodstuff and produce, the Kotel on Friday evening was a confrontation with every species of humanity. Wendy was overwhelmed by the mass spectacle as she stood where the cab dropped her off by the Zion Gate, so many others thronging towards the spot. Once she arrived at the stairwell that overlooked the Kotel Plaza, she went through the security check and leaned over the railing to gaze out at the crowd. She wished she had more anthropological training. How to categorize each group? There were Japanese or Korean tourists, snapping photo after photo, all in matching white polo shirts with carnelian red trim and red skorts for women, red shorts for men, and matching white baseball hats for their tour group, so the leader could find strays easily. On the men’s side, she could see from her aerial position, there were various groups massed together, some dancing in a circle. By contrast the women’s side consisted of discrete individuals, each with her own liturgy, no attempt at unison.
There was nothing moving about any of the particulars of the scene; if anything, Wendy felt sad that the women praying at the Kotel seemed so singular, so without the protection of a mass, but each sobbing, alone against the wall. Yet, the entirety of the spectacle moved her. People came to connect with something beyond themselves. This was the place Jews had been pulled and drawn to for so many thousands of years.
As she watched women praying by themselves, leaderless, each woman separate, the voice of the mysterious harmonizer at Shir Tzion came into her mind. How did he sing with the melody of the group, yet improvise his own sound beyond it, totally individuated? Could she find a way to do that, to feel herself part of the group, not an outsider alone and detached, yet still able to sing independently?
She listened to the group of men singing joyfully on their side of the Kotel, and thought back to an undergraduate party she had been to for members of a Columbia singing group and a visiting group from another college. It was at the alumni club, a space unlike any she’d been in at Columbia, with old wooden beams in the ceiling and leaded glass windows. It exuded the solidity of a Tudor style house. She hadn’t known a building like this existed on the mostly urban campus, sandwiched among much higher structures to either side on Riverside Drive. Either the singing group’s CDs were selling really well, or there was an incredibly generous alumnus out there. The guests were drinking from an open bar and nibbling copious hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly, someone in the middle of the room started singing. People spontaneously gravitated—a powerful current of force propelling them—to the spot where the singing had started. Without choreography or staging, a natural grouping occurred, as though they were a flock of birds, a collusion of singers banding together, jamming. Wendy stood at their periphery. She wasn’t sure what exactly was so moving about the experience, whether the talent and youth of the singers, or the way she heard individual parts but also the totality, different from what each individual brought alone. Not a singer herself, Wendy was glad to be in their presence, absorbing the joy and spontaneity she felt in the room. She remembered walking home on a silent Riverside Drive with her date, and asking what he liked most about singing. His response? “Eliciting emotions from the audience.” He added, “It’s what I like most about sex, making a woman feel good and watching her in pleasure.” Then, he had kissed her.
Now, Wendy longed to know where Donny was at this moment. Would he go back to working at a restaurant one day? He seemed so different when he was chopping. She remembered walking with him, laughing about Shani’s ridiculous turban, listening to his story of his parents disapproving of him, the sight of his adorable posterior chopping, and the kiss. Would they kiss again? Wendy fantasized that he would sneak out of his yeshiva late at night and come to her apartment, knocking on her door, telling her he had to see her again. Her rational self knew that he was embarrassed that they had kissed; the fantasy scenario was unlikely. Still, watching the others praying, seeing their sense of knowing what they were here for, what they were doing, only increased Wendy’s sense of aloneness. She thought, I guess I need to pray that I make some friends this year, to have a group of people, or even just one person, to talk to and joke with, who will understand me and listen to what I am doing and care. Donny isn’t that person, but he’s the closest I’ve come in the last three weeks . . .
She descended to the Kotel and stood at the edge of the women’s section, the very back but not inside, so that men were passing her too as crowds began to gather for prayers. She wasn’t praying or even holding a book; her aura of being out of place caused a recruiter to spot her quickly. The recruiter was dressed in a black hat, suit, and Bruce Springsteen T-shirt on top of a white button-down shirt. He asked if she needed a place for Shabbos. On hearing her assent, he pointed to a place to wait, along with other guests of a family that hosted twenty strangers for a Shabbat dinner each week.
She waited for the father to lead the group to a huge apartment featuring a panoramic view of the Western Wall. The man of the house—she never did get the name straight—in his early sixties, was tall and fit, with the relaxed look of the prosperous man he was, a dealer in rare Judaica. His wife was at least twenty years younger. Under her wig, her face looked drawn and exhausted, her eyes had heavy circles, and she was either pregnant or lugging around extra weight from a previous pregnancy, though the youngest child appeared about four. There was clearly a kitchen staff, but the woman seemed to absorb the stress of these multiple guests while the man enjoyed playing host. Wendy felt sorry for her. It was generous of him to invite strangers to his lavishly appointed home each week, Wendy thought, but didn’t he have friends of his own to ask? There was something manufactured about the set up—did a yeshiva pay this family to do this? Wendy wanted to ask whether he had a security system, kept his most valuable pieces at the gallery he ran at the Cardo, or just had faith that no one invited to his home would steal?
The host began the meal by having each guest say what they were doing in Israel and what made them happy about Shabbat. At Wendy’s turn, she said she was taking ulpan at Hebrew University and writing a dissertation, and that seeing people buying flowers in the street on Friday was her favorite part of Shabbat. She was seated next to a girl named Dawn who had come to Israel to do an archeological dig and was spending Shabbat at a hostel in the Old City run by RISEN, a women’s division of the RISE yeshiva. On Sunday, Dawn was hoping to try out some classes at RISEN’s school, Bayit Ne’eman, in a different part of Jerusalem. Dawn’s favorite part of Shabbat was being at the Kotel.
The Sabbath blessings were intoned, everyone washed their hands at a sink built into the dining room for this purpose, and the Hamotzi was said over the bread. The wife went into the kitchen to get the first course, assisted by other female guests and a maid who appeared to be some sort of foreign worker. Wendy looked down at her plate of gefilte fish and lost any appetite. She picked at it to be polite and felt similarly when a plate of food consisting of a dollop of chopped liver, a piece of chicken with paprika and oil, a mound of white rice, and green beans cooked with tomatoes was brought to the table and put in front of her and the other guests, each plate indistinguishable, without variation. She wanted to feel grateful to her hosts for welcoming her to their home, but she just felt resentment at having such unappetizing fare in front of her. She felt like she should offer to help in the kitchen, but since a number of female guests had already volunteered, she thought any aid she could provide would be superfluous. She was there to observe, she knew, but she also wanted to know, were the observations in the kitchen as important as those at the dinner table? She didn’t want to be around the wife who looked as though all she wanted to do was go to sleep, not deal with all these guests. The father gave a talk on the Torah portion of the week as the dessert was arriving: clear plastic cups filled with red jello topped by whipped cream made from some kind of non-dairy chemical that left a film on the roof of Wendy’s mouth, like the patently artificial oil it must be derived from. Wendy couldn’t follow all of the talk, but it had to do with judgment, as the name of the portion was Shoftim, Judges. Somehow, the fact that the land of Israel was holier than the Diaspora demanded a different kind of system of judgment; it was held to a higher standard. He added that they were now in the month Elul in the Jewish calendar, and the initials of the month, alef-lamed-vov-lamed, stood for the phrase “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” which meant it was a time to draw closer to God. To truly do this, one must live a Torah-true life in Israel, he said. The message, to Wendy, held the same appeal as the chemically enhanced food did, both assuming one size fits all, that guests would wish to eat identical items and portions, and that, once given both food and message, the assembled would be delighted and willing to swallow them equally and gratefully.
At the dinner’s conclusion, Wendy left with Dawn and asked if she could visit her at Bayit Ne’eman because Wendy was, in her spare time after ulpan, hoping to take some other classes. Wendy accompanied Dawn back to the hostel she was staying at before trying to find a cab home herself.
At the hostel, she picked up one of the variety of brochures listing study programs for women. The brochure read:
Do you feel flattened by life?
Want to rise and find your full potential?
RISEN is here!
Not sure how to access the
jewels of your Jewish heritage?
WE have the keys to the treasure chest!
Come to RISEN (Rabbi Isaac Shlomo Elkeles Yeshiva, Nashim/women)
You will learn at our women’s school, Bayit Ne’eman, how to establish a Jewish home, ensuring an eternal future for the Jewish people!
Call Rebbetzin B. Now to find out more about classes and dorming options. Phone: 02 613 6334
The brochure reminded her of a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, loads of words, off base, crammed together. The pamphlet, with its large wording and simple language, made Wendy feel she was being screamed at. Who even thought women are fairy tale princesses looking for someone to give them a treasure chest of jewels? She clutched it as she made her way to the Zion Gate, where she heard there might be a cab.
On this August morning, Wendy woke with rays of the Jerusalem sun streaking into her room. She stretched her arms out in front of her and hugged herself, stretching, and feeling the warmth of the sun next to her bed mix with the overall chill of the room. She longed for the warmth of the sun, leaned out to it to warm her hands, extremities that always felt colder than the rest of her. Like the warmth of the sun, her goals existed within reach; getting to them and actually feeling their warmth was just slow. She was making up her questionnaires and working, gradually, on her first chapter, the dreaded literature review. Any sense of progress she had was in minute increments—intermittent progress, no large leaps or discoveries. Only in movies do people bound ahead, instantly.
Wendy lay back, rubbing her hands together for warmth, and ran through her day in her mind. She liked to try to keep something of the reverie of her pre-wakeful state, and stay focused on whatever had been in her sleeping head, to hold the images with her through the day as she went to sleep so that when she woke up she could have a sense of what was on her unconscious mind. She liked to know what swarming swirling blurred visions were able to make it over the barrier of the dream state into her conscious awareness in order to tell her what was most urgent to her at the moment. It didn’t always work. Whatever her dream had been was now buried in her to do list for the day. Errands: get to the bank to exchange money, buy more phone tokens, called asimonim, which she never seemed to have when she needed them, and do some grocery shopping to fill the practically bare fridge. She hated the state of kitchen emptiness, no food around to snack on if she felt like it. It was good to always have a reserve, something lying in wait in case she needed it. But she operated mainly without many reserves, in the cabinet and in life.
Compartmentalize, her mentor Cliff Conrad, sage as the Puritans he studied, often told her. So she lifted the notepad at her bedside and listed the tasks, a sure way to put the anxiety in its place. She wrote, “My first interview. Today’s the day.” Banal, and yet these words moved her. Writing this dissertation wasn’t, as her parents thought, some kind of whim, a nice way to pass the time until she got married, had kids, and started what they thought of as her “real” life. She needed to do this to get a job and have a life that she was creating, of her own choosing. Even though it was a small and gradual step, she savored this thought. She would be doing a preliminary interview today, getting closer to her goal.
Wendy wanted to do some preliminary interviews to see how the thing was going to proceed. She wasn’t ultimately going to use the data from these interviews in her study because she would be using them to tweak her questions.
Wendy had to see what it was like to question someone to his or her face. There was nothing the slightest bit daunting about handing a piece of paper to a person and asking him to fill it out, but the thought of actually sitting right across from another person and asking intimate questions . . . What if she unintentionally upset her subject or made some kind of faux pas, even if inadvertent? She would feel embarrassment and . . . shame. She didn’t want to look foolish. More than once she had asked a friend something that Wendy thought entirely innocuous and then found out from a third party that she had hurt the person’s feelings. How could she develop the insight, imagination really, to envision her way into the mind and emotions of someone else in order to anticipate how they might react to a given question? She lacked empathy, she worried, standing up finally and stretching her hands over her head to shake the sleepiness off her body. Was there an essential coldness in her nature that would keep her from succeeding?
It was a kind of occlusion between the way she saw others and what they expected of her, a barrier as real as a physical one. Wendy felt sometimes like she just did not know how to connect to other people. It worried her at times, that she would never have a truly intimate relationship with someone else, where each knew and understood the other. She had close friends, but always felt like, for each of them, there was some other friend who was closer. She was never the closest.
Wendy got out of bed and opened the doors of the wardrobe closet built in to the wall. She stared at the contents: the look she was going for was professional, yet not too formal. She wanted to be friendly yet tailored—hard to get the right balance.
That was what she needed to talk to Meryl about in this interview. How many of the things being newly religious demanded of women and how many were part of general chauvinism in the larger culture? The differences between the ways men and women told their stories was one of the avenues for her research. Her provisional hypothesis was that when men told the story of their conversion it was an attempt to take up more space in the world, to boast of what talented and resourceful individuals they were, that they found a way to change and find religious meaning. However, when women spoke of changes in their lives, it was in a humbling, demeaning, self-effacing manner to the tune of: “Baruch Hashem, it was the hand of God that put this person in my path and led me this way.” Women always claimed less agency in their lives. It was one of the many things that annoyed Wendy about the world—this notion that women aren’t supposed to want things. They were not to work at anything too hard, or appear to. Wendy had always wanted to have space and agency in her life; beginning as a little kid, when most of her friends shared their beds with multiple stuffed animals. She never liked having something else in bed with her. She always wanted to be able to roll around, take up space as she pleased. It was self-effacing—girls in our culture are given the message not to take up too much space. Share, be smaller, make room for others.
Leaving her apartment to go to Beit Ticho, where she was meeting Meryl, Wendy decided she would make her way up Emek Refaim and window shop as she walked.
Wendy took one brisk step in front of the next and thought about why Meryl was a good test interview subject. Miriam now—she had to respect that—had been at Brown with Wendy’s childhood friend Nina Distler. Miriam was a talented artist whose parents wouldn’t let her go to art school; she chose Brown because she was able to take classes and hang out at the adjoining Rhode Island School of Design, known to most as RISD. Brown was Wendy’s first-choice college and she didn’t get in, while Meryl didn’t like being there. Wendy was trying to not resent her. Wendy sighed and, spotting a bench in the park above Yemin Moshe, decided to sit down and go over her notes for the interview one more time. Meryl had a one-woman show at an avant-garde public school showcase gallery two years after college. It was given a review—a scant paragraph or so but an actual review—in both the New York Times and Art World magazine. Then, something had happened. It was Wendy’s task to elicit the narrative of how Meryl had gotten from the hip art world of Brooklyn, to its religious Jewish section, and then to Beis Mushka in Jerusalem.
Wendy could hypothesize—Miriam’s parents divorced and she wanted some of the stability that Orthodox Judaism seemed to provide its adherents? Or, she’d had a series of non-Jewish boyfriends and felt betrayed when they didn’t understand her dismay over their thoughtful Christmas gifts? Maybe Miriam had a drug or alcohol problem after college, and starting over with a new group of people was a way of removing herself from a druggie circle of friends?
For Wendy’s dissertation, the actual reason was irrelevant. That was for a psychologist. For her, it was how Miriam recounted her transformation. The biographical reconstruction of the life to account for the role changes that new religious commitment demanded, yet remained on a continuous plane with other aspects of the subject’s life was, Wendy contended, the most important of the rituals of incorporation that enabled individuals to be fully part of their new group.
Miriam was the perfect person to test her questionnaire, and ideas, out on, because Wendy had known her before and knew how she talked, how she thought about the world. Wendy needed to ask her questions in a way that would elicit a story. The trick was to ask enough questions to get a subject to talk and then get out of the way and listen. Wendy wasn’t sure she was enough of a listener to do this well. Or that she could ask the question well enough. If she couldn’t get the subject to produce relevant information . . . Then what? She couldn’t write a dissertation if she had crappy data . . . Then? Back to law school or her parents’ house. She needed to do this right.
Hitting the benches by the windmill in Yemin Moshe, Wendy decided to sit for a minute and look over her list. She opened her bag and took out her list of questions, and felt her anxiety dissipate. Now, she felt the same sense of excitement, anticipation, even exultation, as she had when she first opened the envelope from the Fulbright committee.
“It’s really happening,” she said to herself. The excitement at having an idea and now really beginning to carry it through, to prove to others that something of the way she, Wendy Dora Goldberg, saw the world really was true. She wanted to run all the way to Beit Ticho, with this burst of energy: she was really on the way to a scholarly career, going where she wanted to go. Nothing else in her life was so exhilarating as this possibility—she was creating something that was her own idea and would go out into the world. It was beginning. She wasn’t going to be like her subjects, humble and self-effacing: Oh it was nothing; the dissertation really wrote itself, you know. I didn’t really intend to do it; it just happened because I still wasn’t married.
She placed the folder gently back into her purple canvas messenger bag, put it back over her shoulder, and broke into a run towards Beit Ticho. After a few blocks, she stopped and continued at a walk, hit Jaffa Road and turned left, then made a right onto Rav Kook Street and went past the cabstand and up the street. She breathed more slowly, winded from fast walking. The nineteenth-century stone Arab-built house was at the end of a narrow path, right next to the house where the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook, lived. The Ticho House was a museum and café, willed to the city by artist Anna Ticho and her eye doctor husband. It housed many aspects of the history of the city: the historic house, the paintings of Jerusalem and its wildflowers by Anna, which were displayed, and the eye doctor’s diverse collection of Hanukkah menorahs from many countries and epochs. The food in the café was quite good too, even though it was too hot this summer day to sit outside on the terrace.
As Wendy entered, she spotted a woman with a big purple scarf wound around her head. Couldn’t be—Miriam wasn’t married yet. The woman did look artistic, with large turquoise earrings and a necklace to match, and a serene gaze. There were some older people sitting in a group at a table, taking advantage of their status as pensionaires, retirees, to get a discount; a young couple, both in jeans and sweaters; and a third table with three women. Wendy sat down to order some tea while she waited.
As she was looking at the menu, she heard, “Hey, you’re Wendy Goldberg,” and looked up. The woman who said this was wearing a black close-fitting ski cap with blue, green, and orange stripes, a bright orange puffy ski jacket with tags from various lifts, and an ankle length denim skirt paired with Doc Martens black boots. Wendy looked up and said, “Meryl. Thanks for meeting me. I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, no problem,” she said, sitting down and taking off her coat and hat. When Miriam removed the hat, the dreadlocks originating from her scalp flowed out, asserting themselves. Wendy thought, I do believe you are from Syosset, not Jamaica. What’s the deal? Dreadlocks on Caucasians are just too pretentious.
Miriam sat down and said, “I remember you. You visited Nina Distler at Brown. Your boyfriend was at Brown and you were studying . . . Eastern religions?”
Wendy blushed. It had been a short-lived relationship, that one. She met him at a party there, visited a few times, he visited her, and it never went anywhere.
“I’ve totally forgotten his name. Rob? Rich? Ray? I did visit Nina like once a semester. You were on her floor?”
“Sophomore and junior year. I was into the art scene and she was premed but we had friends in common; we all knew each other. Same here in Jerusalem. It’s nice to see a familiar face. No one will visit these days.”
“Even my most adventurous friends have bailed on their promised visits.” Wendy thought of Matt Lewis from grad school.
“You need bitachon and emunah to come now. My parents were really pressuring me to come home after that American got killed on a bus last month. So sad,” she said, clucking her tongue to emphasize her melancholy. She gave Wendy a serious look. “Do you ever think, even if everyone has a basherte, that you might somehow miss yours? Like if he is killed by terrorists, or in an accident? Or if you meet, but don’t realize it’s him?”
Wendy decided to use this opportunity to move into professional interviewer mode. “Good question. I don’t know. Hey, order something, my treat, and I’ll explain what I want to ask you.”
“Sure,” Miriam said, and perused the menu. She gazed over its top to ask, “I’ve never eaten here. Is the soup good?”
“Order anything,” Wendy said liberally.
Miriam continued, “It’s strange for me to be in a museum now. I got here early and was looking around since I really haven’t been in a gallery or museum since I came to Israel in August.”
“What’d you think? I know you’ve done more avant-garde stuff, so this must seem . . . old-fashioned.”
“I like the site specificity, that this family lived here from 1924 to 1980 when it became a museum. It really gives me a sense of how people in Jerusalem lived years ago. The menorahs are amazing, the creativity and variety of ways Jews find to fulfill the same mitzvah. You know the idea of hiddur mitzvah, that every mitzvah you do should be as beautiful as possible?”
“Sure,” Wendy lied.
“I loved the menorahs. The paintings . . . I don’t know. They didn’t move me.”
“Maybe Anna Ticho wasn’t such a talented painter?”
“No, it’s me, my opinion. My priorities have shifted. I want to use my talents for a purpose, to channel them, not just to shock people or display an emotion. Art should be in service to Hashem.”
“I see,” Wendy said, adding, “How does your yeshiva encourage you to channel your talents? Do they have a studio there for you to paint?”
“No, I need to be learning now. It isn’t time for me to go back to the studio yet. I was reading in the explanations about Anna Ticho that when she first moved to Israel she didn’t paint. She lived here from 1912 until World War I and left with her husband to serve in the war in Damascus. Away from Jerusalem, she started painting again, and continued when she came back. I don’t have to do it all now; I want to catch up on my learning first.”
“Your career?”
“Not now. It’s not the most important thing. I just want to lead a good Jewish life.”
“Isn’t using your talent and developing your potential part of leading a good Jewish life?”
Meryl paused and looked at Wendy. “Depends. I don’t want to spend my whole life in the studio. I want to have kids and spend time with them, even have outside interests. Being religious will give me a better shot at a balanced lifestyle, I hope. I don’t know of any super-successful women artists who have more than one kid.”
Wendy thought and said, “That photographer who uses her kids . . . Sally Mann? She had three.”
“Exception proves rule,” Miriam assented, slapping her hand down on the table.
“Are you giving up on having a career?” Wendy continued, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest.
“Why are you hostile? I thought this was an interview?”
Wendy sighed. “Okay, sorry. I am totally screwing up here.” She waved her hands to demonstrate that she was letting everything go, and added, “I wanted to start by talking to a friend, but I’m not doing this professionally enough. I want to get you to talk about yourself, and how you view your journey, and I just keep putting myself in. I have to step back. I’m sorry.”
“Mehilah granted.” Miriam added, “Pardon,” in response to Wendy’s quizzical look. “You? How will you do family and career?”
“I’m not worrying about it now. Men don’t. Why should we?”
“They don’t have biological clocks.”
“Let’s change the subject. What drew you here?”
The waitress brought their food. “Emm, blintzes givinah metukah.” Wendy pointed at Meryl and the sweet cheese blintzes were set down before her. “And marak batzel”—onion soup for Wendy.
Meryl said, “I have to go wash.”
Wendy felt annoyed at Meryl’s compunction to wash before eating bread. Wendy bit spontaneously into the warm rolls the waitress had just placed on the table with their orders. She was in the process of putting soft butter with small flecks of dill in it on the warm rolls when Meryl returned and recited the Hamotzi in an ostentatiously loud voice.
Wendy watched as Meryl cut her blintzes neatly into small bite-size pieces, not eating anything until the entire portion was pared down. As Wendy watched her she thought to herself, It’s so unnatural to cut up everything and parcel it out. Eat the damn thing? She remembered, watching, that Meryl had been anorexic. Was this some kind of ritual she created for herself around food?
Meryl eased a piece of blintz into her mouth and chewed before she began: “How did I get here? I can tell the story so many ways. I could start with my parents’ divorce when I was five and my intense desire for a more intact family. Or I could talk about having my show at the gallery and feeling, afterwards, this big . . . letdown. After the opening night party thinking, That wasn’t so great. That’s it? I’m still not happy. I thought ahead of time that if I work hard enough and have this show and it’s successful, I’ll be happy. I could talk about my grandmother who wasn’t super religious, but lit Shabbos candles and made special foods. Food was her way of giving me love. When I was a teenager, I wanted to cut myself off from my family and not accept anyone’s love; part of that was denying myself food. Now, I want to open myself up to the love in the world and reconnect with my grandmother and her candles. But I could just as easily say it was all basherte.” Wendy pretended to look puzzled just to see how Meryl would interpret the phrase for her.
“Hey, I see you need to cut the food into all those pieces. Has your eating disorder gotten better since you’ve been religious?” Wendy wondered as soon as the words were out whether they were going to sound insensitive somehow when it was meant as just a friendly question.
Meryl glossed it over: “Thanks for asking, but yeah, I’ve been fine. I do love all the rituals though. They create more meaning than my own personal ones, you know? But I’m not sure you understood what I was saying before. Basherte is “meant to be.” I was meant to be here in Jerusalem and learn and heal from all the pain in my life. That’s what religion is, a balm; you know the Psalms talk about God as the healer of shattered hearts. I mean, isn’t that an amazing gift from Hashem, to be able to mend our broken hearts through doing mitzvahs?”
Wendy nodded and listened, then worried. How to account for multiple versions of the narrative? There was never only one way to tell the story; all the things Meryl was saying were true. How could she accommodate this in writing her dissertation?
Trying not to sound too anxious, she said, “Was there a turning point for you when you knew for sure you were going to become religious?”
Meryl glared at her. “That’s the problem with ivory tower academics. You see life . . . needing to be reduced to symptoms, diagnoses. For everything there is a pathology and a cure. One Friday night last winter, I was going out to an opening for someone I knew from Providence; he’d gone to RISD. I was in a black, short leather skirt, heels, fishnets, and as I was going down the stairs of my walk-up apartment, I passed the Kaminetskys’ door—they’re Lubavitch, and lived below me. I heard laughing, voices, adorable toddler squealing. I thought about what it would be like at the opening, having to make witty allusive conversation, to name drop, to do things to get people to notice me. No one at that opening would like me just for myself the way the people in that apartment, or that toddler Chaye Mushke, would. I thought, I’ll just go in to say hi. I went in and was greeted so warmly, and Shmuel made Kiddush for me, and Leah showed me how to wash my hands and gave me two rolls to make Hamotzi on, and they said just stay and have some soup with us, and I thought, okay, I’ll have some soup and go a little later. But I never went to the opening, and I started going to them Friday night more and more often. I felt so accepted and loved just for being myself, dreadlocks, fishnets, and all. They were so unjudgmental, especially compared to the scene at the opening where you have to be someone to be noticed. I was meant to be religious and was born into the wrong family. It took me a quarter of my life to figure out a true path and now I’m where I belong.”
Wendy looked at her, “You’re lucky, Meryl, if you’ve found your true path after only a quarter of your life. It takes most people much longer.”
“There is one true path for all Jews, Wendy. It’s called Torah. If you follow it, you’ll find everything.”
Wendy decided not to debate her. “I suppose. So, look this is outside the interview, but I’m just curious. Do you miss art?”
“I do, but I don’t feel it’s compatible with a Torah lifestyle. I could see, as I was telling you earlier, making ritual objects, trying to beautify mitzvot, but not what I did before, no.”
“Aren’t you limiting yourself?”
“The rabbis have an expression, liphoom tzara agra, according to the suffering is the reward. I need to give up things I love to gain a reward for mitzvot. I’m eating now, so I need to give something else up. I don’t know if a non-anorexic can understand that.”
“Do you think you’ll be religious in the future, five or ten years down the road?”
“God willing.”
“You changed to become religious. You can change back,” said Wendy provocatively.
“I don’t know the future. I hope, with God’s help, to continue on this path.”
Wendy decided to try another tactic to get an answer reflecting the thoughts of Meryl herself, not just a repetition of her teachers’ ideas. “What is the hardest thing for you about religious observance?”
Meryl put down her fork and knife and set her palms flat on the table on either side of her plate. “Hmm. Maybe that things are so prescribed: one must say this prayer at this time, feel this way on this holiday, feel that way on Shabbat. I wish I had more room as an individual to do my thing. But I like that on Shabbat there is a shared sense of time. Everyone is resting; no one has other plans and will blow you off the way people did on weekends in college, always going elsewhere.”
“What do you like most and least about the yeshiva?”
“I love learning Hebrew, learning new things. It’s exciting, this whole new world that is my world but that I really knew next to nothing about until recently. What is hard is being back at the beginning, like a little kid, learning Hebrew, learning things religious kids know from day one. I don’t want it to be so difficult for my kids. Least, well, I don’t want to be a snob, but not everyone at Beis Mushka went to Brown, you know. Most of them went to Queens or SUNY Stony Brook and don’t have the . . . sophistication that we have. I’m not sure how to explain it.”
“More provincial? Or more sheltered?”
“Maybe. It’s just . . . most of them just aren’t the type of people I would have been friends with before. But I am changing too, so I don’t know what type of people I should be friends with now. I used to be friends with people who I thought were cool, or thought I was cool, or were also artists and we would all sort of inspire each other.”
“Can you be inspired about doing mitzvot? Who observes more or better?” Wendy added.
“Competition isn’t the only basis of friendship, Wendy. You and I were never friends in the States, yet here we are, sitting here, in Jerusalem. I don’t think either of us would have imagined it a year ago.”
“A year ago I was still finishing the applications for fellowships so that I could come here. I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it.”
“And I was getting ready for my show—it was last January. You know it’s really very postmodern. If I were to do a collage of my life story, or my return to Judaism, I’d have to find some kind of shape where all these different paths and influences led to the center, a sort of swirling vortex, where Jerusalem is at the center and all these things lead to it. As we’re talking, I’m thinking maybe I will do some kind of piece chronicling my return.”
Wendy smiled at her. “Why should you give up art?”
“I have to find a way to bring things together. To use my experiences and express them, to move people to teshuvah. The teachers at Beis tell us we have to integrate who we were before. I’ll talk to one of my rabbis.”
“Okay,” said Wendy, sort of annoyed that, though Meryl was embarking on an artistic endeavor, she felt she needed to ask permission.
Why can’t you make decisions on your own? Why do you need a rabbi? What about individuality? she thought, but was proud of herself, this time, for not saying anything.
Tuesday, after morning ulpan, Wendy got on a bus and went to a nondescript religious neighborhood on the western edge of the city, Nofe Tzedek, views of righteousness. There was something about neighborhoods on the fringes of cities, an emptiness at being so far from the center. Getting off the bus, Wendy didn’t see much of a view, righteous or otherwise. Her sight range included Jerusalem stone apartment buildings, fairly close together, and women and children, all pushing baby carriages, some with real babies and some with dolls. There was nothing else on the walk from the bus stop to the Bayit Ne’eman campus.
After she walked through a gate, empty of occupants but ostensibly constructed to house an absent security guard, Wendy saw a cluster of buildings ahead. There were signs for dorms, classrooms, and a cafeteria, where Wendy had agreed to meet Dawn from the Friday night dinner after the Kotel. The buildings were on the newish side, she observed as she followed the signs to the cafeteria. On her way, she saw a woman wearing a housedress, with a mop and bucket cleaning the floors, but noticed that the windows did not appear to have been washed in the ten years since the facility had been built. The uniform streaks of dirt covering the glass made it impossible to see out with any clarity.
When Wendy entered the cafeteria, she scanned the crowd of women to find Dawn from Friday night dinner. Seeing the students assembled to gain nourishment, Wendy viewed them all as her prey. She felt odd to think of them in this rapacious light, since she hoped she would also be genuinely interested in them. But then, she thought, seeing these women as her quarry was probably no different than the way the teachers and rabbis here saw them. The faculty’s stated goal was to hunt down ignorant and soulless Jews and bring them into a Torah lifestyle, to capture them away from the corruptness of Western values. Wendy’s investment in the students, by contrast, was merely catch and release, without attempting a hold.
Wendy found Dawn in the cafeteria and joined her in the line to get lunch. Dawn handed Wendy the coupon she got for a meal as someone wanting to try out classes. The school was generous with these, to encourage students to bring in recruits.
Waiting in line, tray held passively in front of her, made Wendy feel like a kid in elementary school, waiting for an adult to give her lunch. Once the food was on their trays, Dawn and Wendy joined a group of students who were, like herself and Dawn, from the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania tri-state area. Wendy told the others they sat with that she was at Hebrew University’s summer ulpan and she might want to take some additional classes. The group told her in unison how wonderful it was here, how warm and caring the teachers were, how they loved the other students, that she should definitely come here right away. There was intensive Hebrew here too, but at Bayit Ne’eman a student could learn so much more than just language.
“Torah makes people happy,” they kept repeating.
To Wendy, there appeared little happiness in the physical surroundings. The cafeteria was dark, and the food adhered to an institutional hue, greenish meatloaf astride graying potato kugel. Vegetables, which could usually be expected to provide colorful variety, had their nutritive value blanched out by being overcooked to a mushy green. Wendy thought that when she got back to her apartment she would make a cucumber and tomato salad. She wanted to let the vivid red and green colors of the food peek up at her from the plate, and to enjoy their tang with a squeeze of pungent lemon juice and a bit of salt that would just punctuate the intense freshness of the vegetables in Israel.
Picking at the featureless food on her plate devoid of appeal to her sense of taste, sight, or smell, Wendy focused on the conversation of her tablemates. Their desires were simple: stay in this neighborhood, marry frum Mr. Right, and have parcels of children. Wendy thought of other researchers she knew of who sat and collected anecdotes. She remembered learning in college about Henry James going to dinner parties, waiting for his données, the kernels of stories casually heard, which could become the gold ore he would mine to create his fiction. Looking around, Wendy thought that James’s soirees at grand English manor houses, being served turtle soup and oysters, were impossibly far from Bayit Ne’eman’s cafeteria in Nofe Tzedek in Jerusalem.
“I agree with Rebbetzin B. that all the problems in America are because women don’t spend enough time with their children. If only everyone could see that, and stop trying to be men,” said the girl across from her.
“I hate that Hillary Clinton. Barbara Bush, she’s a real woman,” came from the left. Wendy, from a pure blue Democratic family, gritted her teeth to refrain from arguing with them. The girl on her right said, “If we all lived a Torah true life, Moshiach would come. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
How did they get to this point so quickly? The summer program had only started three weeks ago, Dawn had told her. Wendy sensed that they were competing to see who could become scrubbed most clean, most pure in her devotions and Orthodoxy, with the least residue of her previous life. Would these women, trying to scour themselves of pieces of their earlier identities, show any fault lines to an outsider? From this casual chatting she would see what they thought. Listening without expressing an opinion was not natural to Wendy but she remained quiet. Only through listening could she formulate her questionnaire, to get the information that would be the nucleus of her dissertation, the main hub for her theoretical notions to circulate. She would never be able to theorize if she didn’t have informants who trusted her with their life stories.
Was she using them? Running this through her mind as she tried to digest the conversation gave Wendy a jolt of discomfort. Letting them speak openly without telling them that she was here to write a dissertation, was it dishonest? If they thought she was posing as one of them to gain their trust, wouldn’t they be furious on finding out? Wendy was on the verge of confessing that she had come to write about baalei teshuvah when the recitation of the Grace after Meals swept over the room, voices surging in unison, a mob of piety joining together in Hebrew. When the chant ended, the students got up from their tables, bussing their trays to the back of the room. Wendy followed Dawn and the others to class without having revealed herself as a hunter sniffing out her quarry.
The classroom was of the same ilk as the rest of the building, not very old, but seeming older, with unwashed windows and junior high school-type desks with attached writing arms. The blackboard too was streaked, as though only hastily cleaned, never thoroughly erased of the jottings of previous teachers. The students waited, whispering and gesturing among themselves, for the teacher to enter. They were talking as though about a celebrity, trying to glean small pieces of information about the teacher from the droplets he gave off in the classroom, where he lived, how many children he had, how long he’d been married.
Rabbi Pavlov entered the room, placing his black leather briefcase, with shiny silver buckles, on the desk. He stood in front of the class, looked at the floor, and paced back and forth, as though using up restless energy. He began, “The Ethics of the Fathers teaches ‘aseih lecha rav,’ make for yourself a rabbi. One must always ask a rabbi a shaila, a question. Even if you think you know the answer, there may be intricacies of the law you can’t grasp. Nothing is too obvious or simple for your rav. He wants you to ask. The whole system of halacha, Jewish law, is based on mesorah, the transmission of the chain of tradition. You, women”—he put the emphasis on this word and finally looked up directly at his female charges rather than the floor—“can’t know what a rav does, so always, always”—here he paused in his pacing—“ask your rav a shaila. If you think for yourself, you won’t be connecting to our heritage, only your own thoughts. Never make that mistake. Ask, ask, ask.”
Wendy, stifled by this train of thought, daydreamed back to her favorite college class, Contemporary Civilization, known as CC, her first year at Columbia. She had started college with plans to be a history major, Columbia’s most popular undergraduate field of study, because there were so many outstanding professors, particularly in her domain, American history. History was supposed to be good preparation for law school, which she assumed she’d do because her father, brother, and sister had. Her interests shifted when she took CC with Caroline Van Leeuwen, the religion department’s first female tenured professor. In class, Van Leeuwen often closed her eyes while speaking, as though she were possessed. When the teacher spoke with her eyes closed, she appeared as though in a trance, reciting knowledge gleaned from an otherworldly source. On leaving the classroom, if someone asked Wendy what had been discussed, she might not be able to define it with certainty; yet she knew something revelatory had occurred. What made Van Leeuwen’s classes special wasn’t just seeing the teachers’ eyes closed in a state of apprehension outside the immediate realm of the students’ grasp, but also what she was able to elicit from the students themselves.
Often, at the beginning of class, Professor Van Leeuwen would come in and tell the class that she had been up all night reading the assigned text and listening to jazz. She would stroll to the classroom’s large picture window and gaze out at the statue of Rodin’s The Thinker resting on one of the few small swaths of green on the city campus, waiting for students to respond. These moments of classroom silence were scary. The students were never sure what would come next. As the silence grew more oppressive in the classroom, someone always gave an answer. One day, Wendy spoke first. As she answered a question about the role of art and passion in Plato’s Republic, she felt enchanted, as though there were a magic spell over her, making her more articulate than she had ever thought herself capable of being.
After that class, Wendy was captivated by the power of the question. That’s what she would spend her life doing, she decided in the semester with Van Leeuwen: asking questions. She loved the ways in which questions of religion were concerned with issues of meaning and significance in the world. Her teacher’s passion for her subject was palpable—Van Leeuwen, in late middle age, stayed up all night reading. Yet, with the rumors of the teacher’s instability and frequent breakdowns leading to the nickname Van Loonen, her path seemed risky. Wendy doubted she could live as her teacher did, swayed by passion for books and music, putting the minutiae of daily life aside to be fully absorbed with ideas. Yet, Wendy loved to watch someone living in this exalted state of rapt absorption with her own ideas and those of her students. Over the next two years, Wendy declared herself an American religion major, instead of an American history major. She wanted to sprinkle magical thoughts into the minds of her future students, she decided as she filled out the graduate school applications. She wanted to both live in this world and connect to things beyond it, larger than it; the study of religion seemed like a good choice.
Wendy had to elbow herself to suppress a laugh, squeezed as she was in the tight chairs made for smaller people, as she thought of how different the classroom at Bayit Ne’eman was from the one in Philosophy Hall. These students too were drawn by ideas. They wanted to have an idea of their path in life, to be less lost, to connect with others, to find love, and to be a more ideal version of the self they had been. But the ways in which the questions were asked and the types of answers given in the two places were so divergent: one encouraging active thought and the other active obedience. But still, she knew, feeling small in the junior high-sized writing desks, that she was as needy and lost as the students around her. Though she had chosen a more intellectual approach to solving life’s problems, she was still facing the same ones the others in the class, she understood, as she continued to half listen to Rabbi Pavlov.
A few weeks later, she went back to Bayit Ne’eman. She had an appointment with the dean of the school, Rabbi Dr. Lifter, who specialized in getting even the most difficult of returnees to rise.
Wendy dressed in a below-the-elbow-length T-shirt this time, with the same modestly long wrap-around skirt she’d worn before, and found Rabbi Lifter’s office on the second floor. She had made an appointment with a secretary and was on time, but there was no one there. She wasn’t sure whether to wait in the office or the hallway, but since the door was open and there were no chairs in the hallway, she entered the office.
She sat on a metal chair with an attached cushion, marking it as a grade above the absolute cheapest metal chair. She looked at the desk in front of her, overflowing with papers and with more stacks of paper behind it. To her side were bookcases whose contents were mostly English, a bit of Hebrew in a title sprinkled in. One case had a sign: “Rabbi Lifter’s lending library. Sign out and return.” A diploma, she thought from a rabbinical institution—though it was all in Hebrew or Yiddish so she wasn’t sure—and a degree from Brooklyn College were hung on the walls along with an inspirational poster of the kind found in office supply stores. It was a garishly colored picture of a caterpillar and a butterfly, all neon pink lettering and green background, cheerily accompanied by the caption “Keep rising!”
Wendy waited, and after a minute took out some of her work from ulpan to review so she wouldn’t be wasting time. Twenty-five minutes after their scheduled appointment, a man came in, saw her, and said, “Can I help you?”
She rose to be polite and began to hold out her hand to shake his before stopping herself midair and lowering her arm. “I’m Wendy Goldberg, I had a two o’clock appointment with you. I wanted to talk about some research I’m doing.”
“Research? None of our classes require research. We want you out doing works of hesed, kindness, in your spare time. Not research.”
“I’m not a student here,” she said.
He strode in, seated himself behind his desk, and asked, “Who are you then?”
“I’m a graduate student at Princeton. I’m writing a dissertation about American baalei teshuvah and I’d like to speak with some of the students here. I sent you a letter about my project.”
He waved his hand in dismissal. “Absolutely not. We are here to mold souls. No interference.”
“I won’t interfere. Perhaps I can help. I want to understand how baalei teshuvah tell their stories, how they put their journeys into words. You might be able to use my work in your promotional material. Or your fundraising?”
“Hmm.”
“Did you get the letter from my advisor at Hebrew University, Avner Zakh? He asks your permission to let me do this work?”
“Avner Zakh? How do I know that name?”
“He told me you are related through marriage. A nephew of his, I believe, is married to a niece of yours. The last name is different, but I think his nephew is Shmuel?”
The rabbi stretched out his arms in front of him. “Yes, of course. The hassana was before Pesach; the uncle is at the university. I remember now. Good family, quite frum, direct descendants of the GR”A and the Hassam Soifer.” Wendy nodded, pretending she knew what he was talking about.
He looked and her carefully and continued, “What kinds of questions will you be asking?”
Wendy pulled out a copy of her questionnaire and handed it to him.
He glanced at it and said, “Seems harmless. You,” he pointed a finger, “you are dati?”
“Well ah,” she thought quickly. “There’s a reason I am drawn to the subject. I like the atmosphere here in Israel, the Yiddishkeit”—she was proud of herself for getting the lingo down on that one—“and . . . I think I’m growing. My grandmother keeps kosher.” She didn’t know why she blurted out that last part; he’d surely see her as an idiot now.
“A religious grandmother; you’ll come back. Religion skips a generation in galus. Make yourself right at home; sit in on any classes you like; I’ll send a note to the faculty. Of course you’ll be sure you dress modestly while you’re with us.”
“Absolutely, I’ll be very careful. Thank you so much, Rabbi Lifter. I can’t tell you how I appreciate your kindness.”
“Anytime. Come for Shabbos.”
Wendy went out the door feeling jubilant. Stage one accomplished. She had access. Whew, that felt close, but I did it. I talked my way in. Kind of funny that he let me in because he assumed that the school would impact me, without taking me seriously enough to believe I might have my own motives.
As she left Lifter’s office, she made a note to herself to call Zakh and thank him. He told her the only way things happen in this country is through protectzia. It was amazing how quickly Rabbi Lifter’s tone changed when she used Professor Zakh’s name; Zakh had told her that was the way to do things here, to know someone who knows someone, the smallness of the country operating in favor of the ease of these connections. Wendy definitely needed to revise her view of Zakh; he had helped her now despite his lack of time at their first meeting. The problem was, she wanted more specific guidance on the steps of a dissertation. He had helped her, it just wasn’t exactly the way she still wanted assistance.
Leaving the building, Wendy approached a few students she saw in the hallway to ask if they would fill out her questionnaire. She had attached stamped self-addressed envelopes and figured that if she gave out fifteen she’d get five or ten back, to give her an idea of how to start. She wanted to see what kinds of questions they would respond to, and which ones would lead to the most revealing responses. At this stage, she just wanted to give out surveys anonymously, not for data, but to develop her questions and tweak them as necessary.
Please respond to these questions as honestly as possible. Do not put your name on this—all responses are anonymous and confidential to protect your privacy.
This will not be used for any purpose other than my own information. I will be giving out a more detailed version of this questionnaire as part of my dissertation research on how baalei teshuvah tell their stories. This is a sample to help me figure out which types of questions are most useful.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at wgoldber@princeton.edu.
Thank you so much for your time.
Wendy Goldberg
QUESTIONS FOR RETURNEES
How long have you been at this yeshiva?
How did you get here?
What aspects of religious observance are hardest?
What aspects of religious observance are easiest?
What are you working on changing about your observance?
What do you think you’ll be working on six months from now?
A year from now?
Can you pinpoint one particular event or point in time that made you realize that you were becoming more religious and would not return to your former life?
As a follow-up, do you think you will still be observant in one year? Five years? Ten years?
What has guided you in your journey to observance?
Teachers?
Friends?
Books?
What aspects of your life have changed most since you became observant?
Is there an aspect of your life that is unchanged?
Is there an aspect of this lifestyle about which you are uncertain?
Why?
Have your career or family plans changed since your involvement with the yeshiva? If so, how?
The students took the papers obediently, as though Wendy herself were Rabbi Pavlov. She was curious whether they would be honest or merely give her stock answers. She fervently hoped there was a way to get at what really disturbed them, under their veneers of certainty.
