Get Me To A Nunnery
Ochs, Vanessa
GET ME TO A NUNNERY A Jewish woman's inadequate options. VANESSA OCHS I am a Jewish woman who, to the amusement of those who know me, writes about a nun. In my fiction and plays I make her fall...
...For this reason: she has taken a clear significant action...
...She saves herself, or God saves her, or I intervene, restoring her faith, serenity and self-respect...
...By my actions I am no hero either...
...Her costume indicates she is a professional, but still feminine...
...Even a 19-year-old girl...
...That's not the life for me," she said...
...My knowledge of why women become nuns is hazy...
...I think also of the translucent women in Marc Chagall's paintings, who become purified and enchanted as they beckon the light over their Shabbos candles and bring peace to their homes...
...Give us the secular honor that counts in the way that Kovod does not...
...Not a public leader, religious teacher or pioneer, but a woman who leads a religious life...
...This leaves me a mere footsol-dier in God's army...
...Women attack my nun...
...I could be an actress in Israel...
...This is the Jewish woman, which I am, and her world is the milieu I know intimately and am at home in...
...Poor soul, I also torment my nun when I am the narrator who snoops on her most private interior monologues...
...The teachers at camp acknowledged I had a curious mind, a largely Western mind...
...Is it the least bad of limited options...
...They threaten her with the blankness that will follow her in the book of genealogy...
...It was a nice thing for an 18-year-old girl to do...
...She is the misfit heroine of their jokes, the parochial school teacher who locks herself in the closet at 3:00 and goes down with the burning school...
...Women would make my nun believe that a woman is a real woman only if she allows herself to be possessed and determined by her biology and a real human only if she can lovingly touch the filth of her own child...
...From what I could tell, I was serving God's best interests...
...In my fiction and plays I make her fall into the clutches of old lovers who remember her when she was a ripe fruit, but mis-routed by spiritual love fantasies of the nun movies and shattered by roving, inquisitive, violating hands in the backseats of cars...
...Be like Leonard Bernstein, conducting world famous orchestras on Shabbos...
...The more energetic of both sexes, those who were idealistic and temperamentally zealous, could make aliyah...
...I tried it out, summers during college, teaching children Genesis through pageants, puppet shows and shadow plays...
...It would be a perversion, a defiance of gravity and the will of the strong invisible man with a beard who was then my God...
...The boys could become rabbis...
...The religious women I know, Orthodox Jews who might be my role models, do not leave the contexts of their families and homes, and therefore, have no difficulty adhering to what I think of as the domestic spirituality of classical Judaism that has been open to women...
...She was dating a pilot...
...still, she is more whole and more sane than before...
...And I can be certain she will come out winning...
...The girls could become Jewish educators...
...But I am a modern Jewish woman...
...Along with my friends, I was ashamed of our parents' reliance on America's material comforts...
...It seemed to solve the problem of what I was going to do with all my acting training when I couldn't act on Shabbos without hating myself...
...Amy told me she would also make aliyah because in Israel, even the bus drivers were as idealistic as young poets: they woke up every morning and spent their days in a meaningful enthusiasm, charged with the vision of a Jewish land...
...I fell in love with a man who made life meaningful, me happy, and my parents appear humorous, even loveable...
...She always wears a soft blue cashmere sweater and a tweed blazer, delicate pearl earrings and sensible shoes...
...it was mine...
...I married him, and lost my need to run away...
...For her, I seed the possibility that her faith might be faltering and her love might be far from unconditional...
...But beyond that, they suggested, through shrugs and indirect words, "Love Judaism, that's fine as long as you don't get carried away...
...I could escape my father who monitored all my comings and goings to prevent me from pregnancy, or worse, from another cold...
...Don't be like Mrs...
...Children mock my nun...
...Like Sophocles and his friends, I'd like to write about a hero, a big person whose every word and action resonate with universal applicability...
...One form of heroism remains, a private one, one you get no credit for, no Kovod pins, except for the ones you give yourself...
...I attempt to emulate certain aspects of their lives, particularly their ability to create a sensual world that fills a child's memory with unforgettable beauty...
...I could choose a more obvious character, one who meets all the requirements of the dicta "write about what you know...
...I didn't want to be like Mrs...
...I hesitate for a number of reasons...
...Unlike me, I imagine she senses herself unified, the same spiritual person in both public and private spheres...
...my Tante Feigie who speaks with authority to groups of Hassidic women on the rules of Kashrut and family purity, and then returns home to her little son and urges him that HaShem wants him to hang even more cranberry strings in the Sukkah...
...I have bungled every opportunity to play the Jewish hero role...
...I wanted to be a hero, some worldly incarnation of the Shabbos queen...
...I went to Israel as a summer student...
...They tell her no diversions she could ever create would curb their passionate quest to appease their sexual curiosity, by which they mean, having boyfriends and girlfriends and touching one another...
...Lacking real models, I must create a Judaism for myself, one rooted in tradition, which informs both my home and work lives...
...I wouldn't even consider wanting to do what a man did...
...She filled our home with light...
...Rubenstein, even though she was the one who first made theater so exciting to me...
...Literary nuns must be protected from such diffuseness...
...Only one heroic act remained: making aliyah...
...I think of my Grandma Sally who layers the same ritually unmeasured amounts of potatoes, beans, carrots and flanken in the cholent pot each Friday afternoon, making Miami Beach smell like a small town in Russia for 24 hours...
...I teach, hide from students who quote me and threaten to apply what I have said in class to their lives...
...I would bring the creative arts to Jewish education...
...What a saint she was...
...They tempt her with the words of physical love that resonate with eroticism: cocktail, cigarette, sweat and sheets...
...Yet even this role is problematic...
...I want that for myself...
...I admire her...
...Don't be second rate," they said, "not for the sake of religion...
...I sprinkle a few grains of salt on my Shabbos chicken because I mistrust the butcher, assure my daughter that sitting on a potty is a blast, assure my husband that at least I believe his new philosophy has some validity, and in the remaining minutes of the day, suffer joyously over my typewriter, braving a writer's internal artillery of self-inflicted pop-gun wounds...
...They taught me morality first through Kant, and then through Pirke Avot...
...It is more probable she will point to a Xeroxed picture of me from the Syracuse paper and say, "This was my mother...
...Women hadn't been ordained yet, and I was no maverick...
...Having achieved this, I will be a hero, and will write about Jewish women who are heroes...
...This nun, who heralds the transition to modernity, leads a life that is far too complex: she is no model for my fictional nun...
...But at that time, being a Jewish educator was a good possibility...
...I'll have a Jewish woman whose strength of character and firmness of belief I can test and taunt...
...nevertheless, we all rethought aliyah and decided against it for America's intellectual and social comforts...
...They learned...
...I could escape my mother who embarrassed me wearing a mink coat and sneakers...
...Her body is neither desired by men nor demanded by children...
...They weren't like my Hebrew school teacher with the bushy eyebrows, Mr...
...I know only one real nun...
...The solution for me seems to be an acceleration of my spiritual growth...
...Honey, our people give to Israel, but we don't go...
...I wanted to be the grown up equivalent of the best girl in Hebrew 'x school earning the grown up equivalent of the little pins I won in the shapes of torahs and stars, each one engraved, "kovod...
...I was good...
...I won't need the nun...
...The teachers at camp were, in the winter world, principals at Solomon Schechter schools, professors at Columbia and the JTS: certainly an elite and heroic corps...
...Levine, who timed me reading Yishtabach out loud, and gave me a jelly bean when I came in under 20 seconds...
...They flaunt the details of caring for a baby, in a physical way: waking at night to clean a child who has vomited, offering a sore nipple to nurse a child whose hunger is never satisfied...
...Or does it represent a safe place where the confusion of sexual feelings and the conditional love of men have no place...
...The question still remains...
...I didn't want to be second rate...
...Regardless of the knives I have thrown at her and the twists they take inside her gut, she emerges intact...
...These women have the power to create the aesthetic environment that I want to fill my own home...
...But when her pilot was discharged from the army, became a farmer and asked her to become his farmer's wife, she flew back to America and the intellectual zion of graduate school...
...By nature, I am no hero...
...We just want to make sure it's still there if we have to go...
...The kids liked me...
...It is a sound, closed vessel for her personal spirituality...
...Rubenstein, the nice Jewish lady who writes and directs original Chanukah cantatas for our Long Island Hebrew school, and can be seen followed by three well dressed children every Saturday as she walks, it's incredible, over a mile to shul, even in the rain, without an umbrella...
...I am not suggesting that I disrespect these women...
...I examined my options...
...In Israel, we could be happier...
...It seems unlikely my daughter will ever hang a sepia toned photograph over her dining room table and instruct her children, "This was your Bubba Vanessa...
...My family was proud...
...Is it because a holy order is the obvious option for girls who are sent through Catholic schools and colleges...
...I dress mine in black and restrict her to a Catholic world...
...Being a rabbi was out...
...One day, when I had something to offer, I would come back to live...
...of all my characters, she is the one I would like to be...
...Certainly, I could be a Jewish educator...
...Still, I hesitate to write about the Jewish woman, whether she is me, my mother, grandmother, daughter or best friend...
...Her Vanessa Ochs is a lecturer in English at Colgate University and director of the writing workshop at the Humanities Studies Center, Syracuse University...
...She has made the choice of faith that is radically reflected in her life...
...Self-conscious, self-hating and self-strangulating, if I were Oedipus, my play wouldn't be about seeing my true nature...
...For my fictional nun, I prefer a more mythic explanation: she has been seized by a faith so strong, a calling so clear that it makes her breasts a useless ornament and her vagina a metronome for a biological rhythm that has been silenced...
...She is discreet: she teaches, publishes, goes to dinner parties, and when it is time for the rest of us to go off on vacation, she retreats to her religious community...
...As I explain them, I know they are all rationales, good ones, because what I really want to do is to write about the Jewish woman, with respect...
...That is why I turn to my fictional nun...
...Instead, it would be about worrying how it would look if I poked my eyes out, and what people would say...
...The ones who returned did so for love, for the lure of academic or professional training, or for their parents who again obliquely suggested, "Having warm Zionist feelings is one thing, but breaking a parent's heart by not coming home for yomtov is another...
...They knew solid learning came from direct experience, and taught me what it was like for the Israelites to enter Canaan by sending me down a steep hill with paper mache grapes held over my shoulder...
...I fear that the kind of religious reform that will facilitate such a unification for Jewish women will eventually evolve, but in a too distant future...
...We teach at the same college...
...I have made this imaginary nun my clown's face, my Bip, my alter ego...
...When I was a teenager, at Camp Ramah, it seemed as if there were heroic choices young American Jews could make...
...I can still choose to be a devout Jewish woman...
...As long as you do something important in the world that will make you famous, even happy, and bring real honor to your family...
...How guilty I tried to make her feel as I stood at the porch door crying...
...Why, when I am searching for a character to be the locus of my concerns, which is to understand the person who believes and is capable of living out a life of believing, do I choose a nun and surround her with a thoroughly researched, authentically reproduced Catholic world that is absolutely alien to me...
...I could act on week days, pray on Shabbos, eat Kosher food at cast parties and fill my family with joy...
...The only ones who remained beyond the ulpan and the absorption center were those who found life in America absolutely intolerable and any form of American fellowship inadequate...
...Wearing Yemenite earrings and an embroidered peasant blouse from the Arab market, I sat on a cactus-flowered hillside with my friend Amy and watched Jewish sheep graze on Jewish land and respond to a Jewish shepherd...
...She leads a religious life that transcends home and family...
...It seemed as if Israel wasn't the It seems unlikely my daughter will ever hang a sepia toned photograph over her dining room table and instruct her children, "This was your Bubba Vanessa.*' life for any of my friends who plotted aliyah...
...In Hebrew, I told Amy the land was beautiful...
...Amy stayed...
...heart beats quickly and her hands shake...
...My nun always comes out OK...
...The domestic spirituality that informs that part of my life that goes on at home does not address my life at work...
...I remember when she used to give lectures and left me at home with a peanut butter sandwich and a baby sitter...
...I went back to America, to prepare myself for Israel...
Vol. 1 • December 1981 • No. 7
