Perspective
Levenberg, Diane
PERSPECTIV! FROM PONGAMY TO RUTGERS DIANE LEVENBERG David, one of my dearest friends, has been living for the past nine months with the same woman. He called, after reaching this "relationship...
...It's the intent, he said, not the voice, that's important...
...Midrash," my friend suggested, breaking into my thoughts...
...And here it was again, the fleeting reminiscence of the old seductive mysticism, the nostalgic aura—and temptation—of their youthful pantheism...
...But there was no "shul-hopping...
...I owe Rabbi Marc Gellman (of Teaneck) a great debt for that workshop...
...He said many inspiring things: That religion is expressed through intimacy, that we have to transpose a human face onto the eternal mystery, that God is always trying to make us like Him, that we have to humanize God...
...Not like the days at Weiss's Farm, where we had held our first and more spontaneous retreats...
...Here he was, over 30, and he had never before been faithful to one woman for more than three months...
...Saturday morning offered a choice of first five study sessions followed by another choice of five services— from a beginner's service for the members of newly formed havurot to a complete traditional service...
...There, if you couldn't make it in one room, you'd shift to another, no problem...
...I knew very well what he meant, for did I not share his polygamous hunger, had not many of us here assembled spent ourselves in a soul-defeating endless search for the magic prince...
...I was at last given permission to learn Torah without commentary, shown how to create my own midrash so that from then on, it might be possible to have an endless fountain of poems and stories flowing inside me...
...I longed for something more, not an abstraction of meetings and ideas but a concrete celebration of who we were and where we had been...
...Knowing that on Shabbat no one would record his speech, I ran back to my room to make notes...
...Diane Levenberg's book of poems...
...How well these reference groups worked was summed up by a friend of mine: "You know," he said, "coming from the corporate world, I'm surprised to find how much I need this...
...But some of us still remembered the poetry of our search, and its purpose...
...Yes, I did know what he meant...
...We had our squabbles and our suspicions, and most of all our fears of being stuck with people we couldn't leave, people who might never understand us...
...There, there had been six or even ten of us to a room— choices, hiding places, escape routes...
...A dozen or fifty years from now, at the twelfth or the fiftieth Annual National Havurah Conference, people will wonder what it was like at the beginning...
...And now, perhaps, he—and we all—would not be satisfied with a community of limited commitment, with a community of floaters-in, floaters-out...
...In fact, I suddenly remembered having learned that Jewish women should never be heard singing in public lest they be capable of seducing their male listeners...
...A celebration of a true beginning...
...That's what we did at the second Weiss's Farm retreat...
...For our generation, worshipping at different times in our lives the equal truth of Shiva, Buddah, Yawheh, or the historical patriarchal gods of Freud, Marx, and Einstein—how many generations of non-begats would it take before we would settle down...
...Once again, considering the multitude of options, I thought of my newly monogamous friend...
...He led us into an experience of davening using energized sound...
...One stayed and prayed...
...Having found our God, we had still to find a way of committing ourselves to manifesting the results of our search...
...Friday night three hundred of us had a davening experience together...
...It was, I realized, these retreats that had helped him, would help others, find themselves, each other, and create still new groups of others...
...She teaches at Touro and Mercy Colleges in New York...
...The first boardwalk havurah...
...There was one final Sunday morning plenary session and all sorts of ideas were offered in answer to "where do we go from here...
...He knew I was leaving for the havurah conference on July 4 and so we talked also about our old havurah days...
...But basically we're compatible...
...For me, it was as though the universe of Torah was suddenly squeezed into an Edenie fruit so that the juices of it slowly, like the waters of Rabbi Akivah's rock, could finally penetrate my resistant sensibility...
...flirting, tasting, sampling, never absorbing, never digesting...
...We would stay with our groups for the duration of the conference, meeting to create projects, to exchange ideas for the next conference, and, as a miniature havurah, to "process" the events of this conference...
...And it was good to know that even after having found himself, and then his woman, he still needed a community...
...And Rabbi Zalman Schachter for the next, where Schachter—teacher and havurah guru—taught us about physical and spiritual energies in prayer...
...Yes," he said...
...When he finished there was subdued applause, and I knew that he had frightened many of these new Abrahams...
...But albthat came was: Reaching out for wisdom I sense the whispering breath of your kiss The same as once God kissed Adam and let him breathe...
...You know what I mean...
...And what he meant was very much on my mind as I arrived the next afternoon at Rutgers University for the First National Havurah Conference...
...There was also, at the end of this meeting, an ad hoc fund set up to help the Indochinese "boat people...
...Since this was a session primarily for leaders of services, I hadn't really wanted to go...
...Still high, we floated in to Friday night dinner...
...And on the way to the session, I considered more carefully the relationship between polytheism and polygamy...
...I sat there feeling that nothing had really come out of this hodgepodge meeting...
...Weiss herself, who always looked the other way when (to each retreat) we'd bring our latest "significant other...
...And the dormitory rooms underscored the commitment: two people to a room...
...David told me that he was thinking of getting married...
...with the intellectual—creating modern midrash by studying Torah without a rabbi...
...It was unanimously agreed that there be a second conference...
...They had spent years in the American courtyards of Terah smashing the idols of this cult and the gods of that sect...
...I asked...
...Rutgers University...
...Newcomers to the havurah movement were, I believe, convinced that not only is this a group committed to an ideology (however amorphous it may sometimes appear) but also to a neo-chassidic fervor when it comes to ritual...
...There, at Weiss's, our polygamous urges could be lived out...
...There were ten concurrent sessions to choose from, dealing with everything from the creation of new ritual to the study of kashrut...
...with the spiritual—new ritual...
...We would arrive early at the sprawling New England-type farm house on the one acre of New Jersey land where Robert Frost had written poems and Diamond Jim Brady had rusticated...
...The New Jersey evening sun filtered through the auditorium's high windows, people dressed in Shab-bat garb gleamed and radiated, sonorous voices chanted the l'cha dodi and we, the chorus, responded with warmth and feeling...
...There were other women there, many in fact, and I felt no qualms about sharing with Zalman my embarrassment regarding my lack of voice...
...with the emotional—ways of dealing with feelings related to work and responsibility in a havurah...
...A whole campus in New Brunswick, NJ to ourselves, and here we were, pantheistic roots having matured, become firm saplings, borne three fruit after our own kind—synagogue havurot, independent closed havurot, independent open havurot...
...Where do we go from here...
...It was most like a passage, entered as fragments, exited more nearly complete, in person and in commitment...
...And that to go beyond religious solipsism we need a collective—a havurah...
...How does it feel," I asked, "being monogamous...
...separately, a half hour there...
...Unlike David, the havurah had died after its last transformation...
...He was afraid he'd never get enough quiet...
...As his guest, I read some new poems, thinking how my own journey had led me, out of my desert, there, to read to old friends, members of my community, my havurah, reading about old lovers, thinking about, on a summer midnight, the meaning of April twilights and other summer Saturday nights, after Shabbat, waiting for shul to let out...
...He was a genuine "havurah baby"—various groups until he was 19, a brief flirtation with various cults until he was 24, and then five years in a havurah which, like him, had gone through changes—open coffee house, closed coffee house, closed havurah, open minyan, closed min-yan...
...We were together for just three days, and now I want to run back to have another session with them...
...Saturday night we lit candles for havdalah...
...Other suggestions were an inter-havurah summer institute, relief projects for endangered Jews around the world, and possible ways for havurot to help the home-bound elderly...
...In this cabaret atmosphere, my old friend Joel Rosenberg was to read his poetry...
...Could I draw real hope from David's example...
...Out of the Desert, will be published by Doubleday in January...
...There are whole generations of begats between monotheism and monogamy...
...There weren't that many sessions, but we sampled every one—together, a few minutes here...
...Rutgers University, and, for the first time, an act of monogamous commitment...
...And later I recalled what David had said of his first monogamous relationship, "It's not ideal...
...We had met, merged, melded, and after this union of spirit and strength this final plenary was only.an anticlimax...
...The session proved to be an almost karmie choice...
...I mean that finally you've got to stop looking, and take a stand...
...He was wrong...
...years...
...How pat, then, that at Rutgers, a time and place to search for mature monogamous commitment, I should be shlepped along to a session teaching women how to daven publicly...
...Once David and I had argued long into the night after Cynthia Ozick had spoken of the idolatry of fiction—she feeling always like a gnostic priestess when she created it, I always worshipping the god of the tale, the teller of the tale, the god of the legend...
...We grabbed our box lunches and two carloads of us headed for the beach at nearby Asbury Park, intimations of a rebirthing mikveh...
...There were sessions dealing with the physical—kashrut (after the morning jog sessions led by one of our marathon runners...
...Perhaps, I thought, looking for God in one place, we, as women, could "seduce" that God into heeding our prayers...
...The urge to sleep with every woman you meet is like looking everywhere for God...
...So I do...
...And we'd wander from room to room, bored with this session, bored with that, leaving, staying, moving, trying, getting a headache from the hundred people crowded into the few We were young and we were restless, and Weiss's was a good place for post-60's Jewish fantasies...
...Look at Abraham, I thought...
...meeting rooms for the three-day retreats...
...I don't think a relationship can survive unless you put all your energy into it...
...My old instincts were aroused, and I wanted "all of the above...
...I don't mean that Susan is God...
...Someone at the conference, I realized, had learned a good deal from the all-time record potpourri of self-improvement and spiritual growth conferences ever organized—the Association for Humanistic Psychology Annual Esalen-style feast of psyche-inspiring sessions...
...I miss them...
...After z'mirot and bentshing, we went to hear Rabbi Arthur Greene's Third Plenary address...
...Looking at my program at breakfast on our first full day, I found it almost impossible to decide which session to attend...
...I've always scorned the havurah's touchy-feely approach to things, but now I find I'm begining to miss my reference group...
...Midrash...
...For the terms here included a commitment to stay...
...We set up a mike for him and attended the new lines in his face and the new lines of his poems...
...You love stories...
...But as though afraid to let go of this coming of age at Rutgers, we danced and sang for more than two hours...
...We're growing with each other...
...Midrash...
...I was thinking also about how, soon, this conference, like the most intense part of our lives, would all be over...
...For a melave malka, the committee made a lovely gesture and set up a free bar...
...Had he been here, had it been the old days, we would have done it all...
...Thirty miles from Weiss's to Rutgers, and several light (heavy...
...Have you been monogamous all this time...
...And though she's not into much that's Jewish, she's thinking about coming with me to join a havurah that's just being formed...
...He called, after reaching this "relationship plateau," to tell me how things were going...
...Reading from Fathers and Lovers I was thinking about waiting for my father to come home from shul, waiting for him to come home, thinking of my friend and his woman and all her years of waiting, on this kind of night, for him to come home, when the stars are out, when shul lets out, waiting for when Shabbat would be over...
...Here we were given keys, privacy, commitment forced upon us...
...So midrash it would be, and a chance, perhaps, to worship in a new way, neither the tale nor the teller, not this legend or that, but the One God...
...It's not Utopia...
...I thought again of my intending-to-marry friend, of the changes he had gone through, of my own settling-down urges, of how fitting it was that I was celebrating my 34th birthday at this conference...
...Invariably, she'd hug me, move me out to the center of the kitchen and ask, "Nu, when are you getting married...
...No curious, no "friends" of the movement, no guests allowed to visit for a day, to drop in...
...We would live together, just two of us, for three days or five, depending on each other rather than on the high vibes and excitement that had filled the Weiss Farm rooms...
...The first night, we were scheduled to meet with our "reference groups," still another imposition of monogamous commitment...
...But we met three or four times, each of us trying to define him/herself—New York City representatives of independent havurot, small town members of synagogue havurot (defined as four or five families who remain as synagogue members but meet as separate havurot), West Coast members of Rabbi Harold Schulweis's "havurized" congregation, middle-aged representatives of a New Mexico congregation, college students from the South—each of us trying to establish an identity, knowing that we'd have to stay together for the duration and therefore to work out the differences between us, so that we could complete our agenda...
...We were together, united in purpose, in spirit, in absolute harmonic response to the shaliach tzibur...
...I was pleasantly surprised...
...First there would be a mad scramble for beds, then I would search out Mrs...
...many tachlis-oriented projects were conceived there—including, in fact, this conference itself, with its imposing and slightly pompous title—"First National Havurah Conference"— and its auspicious sponsor, the National Jewish Conference Center, and its donations from middle-class, middle-aged patrons...
...Of course, we fight...
...I had always known what to expect at Weiss's...
...Monogamy forces that— forces you to bring all you have to each other...
...One of the attractions of havurah Judaism is that it has learned, like other New Age movements, to become holistic...
...Weiss and kiss her hello...
...We had cholent at Weiss's, and swimming, and camp-fires, and Mrs...
...It feels right," David said...
...I wanted the beginning marked now, and others shared that want...
Vol. 4 • November 1979 • No. 10
