RETREATING FORWARD

...How many of them, vintage 1930 to '40, were from environments in which their religion had been a social liability...

...And for a change, the minyan was large...

...It was then that the horror that had befallen our people came home...

...The inspiration and the effort of three Hillel rabbis, Ben Beliak of the Clare-mont Colleges, Laura Geller of USC, and Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA, and the generous support of Rabbi Yechiael Lander, Consultant for Jewish Concerns of the National Institute for Campus Ministeries, and the selfless and untiring work of a gracious woman named Joyce Ketchum, had proAl Wachtel is a Professor of English at Pitzer College, Claremont, California One of his stories, "A Clean Slate," appeared in moment, February 1976...

...Whatever, we had a miniature European front going—the Jews, Czechs, English, and Scandinavians against the Germans...

...What was more natural, more "fundamental, vital, profound" than the mysterious process which marks the transition from girl to woman, that transforms the landscape and the functioning of a human body, alters for a lifetime consciousness and purpose...

...The assembly shared within itself words that should have been addressed to others, trying perhaps to convince the outsiders within us before confronting those who had not come to Idyllwild, those who had not driven up to the mountain to meet themselves...

...Here we were, a remnant alive that could with our own help, miraculously but without special miracles, allow us to play significant roles collectively in the future, and this meeting, this little cell of purpose that had fumbled into being through an accident of numbering, was evidence that at least minimally the necessary help was forthcoming...

...I felt us to be one with Sydelle's tribe, and through it with all the tribes to which its members were related...

...After a long drive, a pleasant service, a good meal, who wanted to talk about t'fillin...

...I began to miss our babies—Jonathan, Jessica, Jacob...

...Sydelle's eyes met mine as he prepared to speak, and we both smiled...

...There were others who agreed with me, but the statement that was most moving came from one who took neither side...

...There was a birth of sorts taking place here too, I found, a new facet of humility within me...

...When Germany surrendered in 1945, Sixty-ninth Street shared the victory...

...I had come to rejoice with my family and others in our Jewishness, and instead...

...After the service, we talked a little, and,.yes, I had misunderstood his intent the night before...

...I cannot speak for the others, but my own contingent, new to each other and lacking any convenient topic of conversation but the one at hand, began to consider the issues...

...What had begun as a disappointment—for I had come to believe I knew more about the rituals of our faith than the rabbi in front of me—had ended in a deepened realization of what lay behind Judaism...

...We were together in our opinions, and our spokesman was filled with an admirable anxiety to adequately represent us...

...I looked around the room and found that Sydelle and the other women present were nodding at the rabbi's words...

...She spoke of them as if they were crutches...

...Rabbi Chaim not only knew the melodies, the chants, the gestures and words that lodged in me as surely as my genes, but he paused to explain them...

...I could hold my head as high as a Lodge, a Vanderbilt...

...Yes—and why not—it should be a celebration of the coming into both womanhood and manhood...

...And did not the Bible tell us which of the Patriarchs created the morning prayer, which the afternoon, and which the evening...

...She confessed early on that she had trouble praying and used a tallit and headcovering to help her establish "the right mood for it...

...What could he do...

...I tried t'fillin, but I couldn't get into it...

...Six thousand feet above the valleys of Southern California, in the comfortable retreat complex of USC, fifty-six Jewish academics, husbands and wives and fifty-one of their children, gathered for a religious weekend...

...The passion, suffering, accomplishments of our kind swept to the fore...

...I knew where Abraham was buried...

...In the second, she was a Reform she...

...A few days earlier the creek had flooded, flattening brush and rooting up straw, layering the tree trunks in its shortlived wake with tangled weeds...

...But I was told that just as the Holocaust had special meaning for me there were other elements in our people's history of equal meaning...

...The ostensible assignment was to distribute a hundred percent's worth of importance in units of ten among a variety of characteristics and activities that might be said to identify one as desirably Jewish...

...One member of his group, a rather hard-looking woman, sensual and attractive in her dark-haired and experienced forties, laughed deeply...

...Yet here, alone in this roomful of nominal brothers and sisters, was a man who knew less, nothing whatever of his heritage except that it existed...

...I felt like an Abraham of sorts, camped with my small band in the wilderness of Zion and determined to make God's promise prevail...

...Inwardly, I groaned...

...I wanted to see our families nourish...

...There was no pride then in my Jewishness...

...His position tugged at my feelings...

...Finally, I had gotten over the shock of dealing with "new rituals...

...I had stepped beyond whatever intentions may have informed those whom I had opposed and recognized the substance of their position...

...I wanted Sydelle with me, our children with me, and I cast an eye around to assure myself that they were well...

...The cheekbones, the heavy eyelids, the bald crown, the greying stubble on my cheeks were part of my birthright...

...Rabbi Ben asked...

...Chanting along with us, a quarter arc of the circle of worshipers away from me, was the man I thought I detested, he of the mikva and the alienated posturings...

...I argued against them, for it seemed to me that the Holocaust was not so much an obligatory memory as an obsession...

...How could one forget...

...And by the 1960's, the Judges of Old had come alive again...

...Women's lib— in a discussion of Jewish ritual...

...Oh," Rabbi Laura said...

...I thought of the seven martyred siblings of my father, apprehensive faces on a sepia picture, beauty and intelligence lost in unspecified torment in the death-camps of Nazi Germany, and I shuddered...

...He did...

...You can guess the list—from reading the Torah to remembering the Holocaust, from keeping kosher to contributing to Israel, from marrying within the faith to defending it in public, from honoring the Sabbath to eating latkes, from providing the young with models of Jewish behavior to having a Jewish mother, from rearing Jewish children to laying t'fillin...

...She caught her cheeks between her teeth to keep from smiling...

...The little miracle of reconciliation that took place between us stood me in good stead when, after a leisurely afternoon on the mountainside, Sydelle and I gathered with Rabbi Laura and a small group of others to discuss Jewish ritual...

...Most of us did not know each other's names, but we had affirmed our sister and brotherhood, we were a family that had maintained its relationships...

...Intensities were still mounting when the night sessions of Friday...

...Perhaps by chance, the Torah reading for the day was Moses' song of victory, which, Rabbi Chaim pointed out, celebrated a parting of the sea that gave birth to the free Hebrew people, just as the first parting of waters gave birth to dry land...

...Isn't that right,-r "Absolutely...

...Now, though bristling in its rocky bed, the creek seemed fixed, directed, channeled...

...And then it struck me: natural...

...When I looked in the mirror Shabbat morning, my tired eyes confronted my father's face...

...We struck a compromise: whether one married within or outside the faith, it was desirable for both marriage partners to end up Jews...

...It was helped by the establishment of Israel, by the brilliant defenses of its integrity...

...No, she had not been party to his tasteless joke...

...And what did your group choose as most important...

...forgotten numbers, cliques, embarrassed laughter...

...My own empty longing had always been to know what my grandparents were like, from where my family could trace their roots, geographically, professionally, spiritually...

...My misunderstanding of his words had been as revelatory for him as his explanation was now for me...

...She was embarrassed, even hurt, she told me later, that he subordinated group opinion to his momentary whim...

...Yes, having children was literally vital, we agreed...

...By underscoring the emptiness of mainstream American Jewish life, he had been hoping to highlight the rich possibilities of embracing Judaism more fully...

...He knew he was a Jew, but his parents had told him nothing more of his heritage than that bare fact...

...I regretted that Sally, my eldest, was in Claremont, studying those very subjects that I taught but now found less crucial than the studies of the retreat...

...What miracle there was occurred indoors, as a result of the coordinated efforts of a handful of people...

...What had they accomplished in the world...

...I was more than troubled by Rabbi Laura, I was disoriented by her...

...Where did my nearest forebears lie...

...We defined personal and financial generosity in the present, thoughtful provision for those who will follow us in the future, and a charitable appreciation of those who preceded us...

...Why didn't they stick to Shabbat candles, benching lichtl Partnered with a more worshipful Jew who had joined the discussion group, I began pressing hard on the organ chords of resurgent vitality and the primordial sacrifice implicit in a brit, the binding of oneself to the Lord in laying t'fillin...

...To remember...

...Moreover, my family had a history of Humphrey Democrats, Javits Republicans...

...The discussion swelled, overflowed its time schedule...

...The new knowledge lent color, edge, purpose, to the mappings in my memory...

...They had been reading "The Wasteland" too long—too many years with "The Hollow Men...

...How does one cause a group of educated Jews to consider the intimate facts of their relationships to a near and distant past from which their own parents may have been alienated, from which they themselves after bar/bat mitz-vah, immediately after becoming responsible to fulfill the laws of their faith, fled with relief...

...And before too long she was saying that there should be new rituals added to the old, a celebration of a girl's first period, for example...

...I knew what Moses, David, Hillel had done...

...She, it turned out, had converted to Judaism when she married...

...I was horrified...

...far more important, however, for them to be of the faith, whatever their origins, and to raise Jewish children...

...An intense discussion followed, and despite myself I was convinced...

...Of course: at some point all rituals are new...

...I'm serious," he said...

...Sunday morning saw us driving home, descending the mountain, exchanging the crisp winter air and the roaring of the current for the soft sunny valleys we now called home...

...What of Bubba Grunna and of Miriam, whose warm eyes and lips and gently tilted head invited me to enter the picture and climb up on her lap...

...While participating in the chants and prayers of the Orthodox service not forgotten from my New York boyhood, I felt my parents, their parents, all the tradition therein represented, alive in me...

...Doubtless, I am revealing more about my own mind than about the actual scene when I confess that a certain pain of oppression banded my chest...

...Maybe we'd be less ashamed of our bodies if we had them...

...Perhaps I fought them for hating me, perhaps only because they had insulted my President by calling him a Jew...

...For her, marrying within the faith was paramount...

...I chafed at the herding...

...I did not want my wife or any of our children numbered...

...But my wife, Sydelle, and I and three of our four teenagers were among those numbered and divided...

...Rituals for a practical purpose...

...Jewish contributions to modern thought, art, science-—Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka, a piece of Proust, Salk, Kissinger...

...We were a community...

...therefore the Torah was important, education, the broad lines of conduct We wanted to see a sense of community among our people, providing the contact, the sharing of knowledge, and the fostering of charity that characterizes and sustains Judaism...

...The Havdalah service that evening marked more than the end of another Sabbath for us...

...In any case, when the time came for discussion, I attacked the man, berated him for taking lightly what had also seemed to me an empty exercise, before I got caught up in it...

...There was a moment of silence...

...In the first place, she was a she...

...We were liberals, and good liberal that I was, I controlled my qualms and sat down...

...It doesn't feel natural somehow...

...Right...

...Men have rituals, why shouldn't women...

...One of our members, the mother of a son who had intermarried, was still smarting from her disappointment...

...He wanted to learn something, to know something of what it meant to be what he, in fact, was...

...Still, a miracle of sorts did happen, though not precisely along the river bank...

...Sydelle looked mortified...

...with Synthia's too...

...The discussion was heated...

...Many more were cited, Jewish gifts to western culture, whether or not they acknowledged us or we them...

...This man rose to say simply that the conflict didn't move him...

...It was well past midnight, our kiddies were asleep, and even though we would have to carry them to our accommodations and then manage somehow to rest long enough to be ready for an 8:30 communal breakfast and one of the three Shabbat services that the morning promised, we stepped out into cold clear night still caught up in the discussion...

...Here, in this little group of scholars and spouses, the zeal of a preacher took possession of me...

...My adversary and his clique asserted that the artificial format did not touch the heart of Judaism, that in America Jewishness was empty, an embarrassment, meaningless...

...So did the representatives of several other groups, one of whom included my daughter...

...Against all odds, we would flourish, multiply...

...I had always considered myself cheated by the Holocaust of my immediate family, as if a surgeon had cut away a section of memory that linked me to my past...

...They did not particularly look Jewish...

...Was Judaism to become one with those terribly misunderstood "primitive" cultures in which this or that religious act was explained away as having a practical purpose...

...The event was not without its difficulties...

...But the experience after the Shabbat serviced schooled me to be cautious...

...The rabbi nodded...

...January 22, ended...

...Of the last, my new friends agreed, remembering the Holocaust was an important part...

...In fact, I began to do so, and they argued against me with all the "you have it, why can't we" fervor of women's libbers...

...with Stephanie's and all theirs...

...Still, behind the clear forehead, within the dark eyes, the pain, fear, death of my people remained engraved...

...It was a celebration of the gift of life—in awakening, washing, eating, moving through the day, laying down to sleep...

...Behind me and to the right, the representative of Sydelle's group was rising, a man perhaps slightly older than I, with lively blue eyes and a neat mustache that balanced jauntily on the curve of his lip...

...Why should I know more of Maimonides than I did of Reb Schmuel, my maternal grandfather, of Reb Elimelech, my paternal, whose white bearded face looked kindly on me through my first twelve years from the brown tinted portrait that had adorned my parents' dresser...

...He bequeathed them to me, as surely as my heritage...

...I shuddered...

...Together they had provided an opportunity for academics, one of the most self-consciously secular and assimilated groups in Judaism, to consider their heritage...

...In this age of psychological gamesmanship the means of priming the pump of discussion the rabbis setded on was the old break-'em-into-small-groups-and-recon-vene routine...

...No, I did not want to be numbered...

...Building it and using it...

...Before more than a very few minutes had passed, we were six compatriots, acquainted with each others' backgrounds, and discussing the crucial issues of our kind...

...I wanted to argue, to use words like fundamental, vital, profound, to dispell the nonsense of "feeling better about ourselves" and "more comfortable," to point out the connection between ritual and primordial truths that coffee clatches of middle-class Americans could not begin to appreciate...

...It was like enjoining me to breathe...

...My own obsession, having filled out my family in part to replace the one my father lost, was with Jewish offspring—the sine qua non of survival...

...There could not have been one among us who did not hope for another such gathering, but whether it comes or not, we are all the better for its once having been...

...then that my father, after viewing films of the deathcamps at a Madison Square Garden Zionist rally, had a cerebral stroke...

...The aim was to encourage Judaic experiences with equal intensity...

...As I had just perceived it, the point of the discussion was continued access to an Orthodox rabbi, one who had already explained certain aspects of the Shabbat ritual...

...I wanted to run back to him, embrace him like a brother, protect him, innocent and impressionable, against the jaded and imitative remarks of the "emptiness people...

...The Friday night service and dinner went well enough, but the discussion that followed hit a snag...

...I still disagreed with the form of my adversaries' argument, but the example they had used—without question it was an experience that ritual ought to mark as fundamental, as decisive, and as profound as birth, marriage, or death...

...What did it matter that I was one of those strange "Orthodox" Jews who pause long enough in their gardening of a late Friday afternoon to snort at the lack of piety in their Reform brothers who stop to greet them on their way to worship...

...He had attended the gathering to learn...

...My youngest kids were off with the children's group, hearing about King David, no doubt, or his wise son Solomon, or Samson the mighty, or the incomparable Moses...

...It was about as natural for a woman to...

...raising them as Jews followed of necessity...

...It was a veneration of the process of growing to maturity, marrying, having offspring, and dying...

...Our choice was building a mikva," the man smiled...

...with Seth's tribe and all who were theirs...

...Yes, through me, my discussion group was related to four other such tribes, and through each of my fellows to yet others, and to others through those...

...It was he I had expected to greet us here, not the young assertive woman who confronted me...

...I found myself agreeing with the women now, but trying to influence their reasoning...

...then, in anguish at the suffering of my forebears, that pride, watered by sorrow and resentment, began to grow in me...

...Between the ages of three and five I was a volunteer stone thrower for Sixty-ninth Street in its war against the tow-heads of Memorial Street, Germans all, who chanted as they fought that Hitler was coming to America to free them from "Rosenfeld and the Jews...

...A momentary embarrassment, then a truce, then a frank discussion followed...

...Yes, for those reasons it was desirable for partners to have married within the faith...

...Yes, a woman's development was an occasion as wonderful, in its way, as the progress of the sun...

...By the time the full assembly met again, our little tribe had become a firm unit...

...I began to understand strength in numbers, and not just physically, but intellectually, emotionally, spiritually...

...There was reason to hope because we were still struggling, still working, still laughing and playing and bristling with life...

...Were we so alienated from our contexts as Jews that we could view our sacred acts as psychological tools...

...The woman next to me brisded at her vehemence...

...Face it, I told myself, we're all Americans, separated only by an invisible net from our fellows, and now arbitrarily being divided among ourselves into numbered lots...

...Unrecorded skirmishes of World War II were fought as far from Germany as the empty lots of Queens...

...Who were these strangers around us, Jews...

...The genuflections of the green, the skirts that hid the knees and ankles of the saplings, were natural...

...duced a swell of awareness...

...I had to fight the urge to get up and leave, but I managed and eventually the groups were formed and meeting...

...The rabbi did not ease my discomfort...

...Bordered by Strawberry Creek and the towering snowy peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains, they affirmed their Jewishness and considered the present state of Judaism...

...Thank heaven for nature, I thought...

...Our breath filled the air with sacred thoughts that vanished like spirits on the wind, and for the better part of an hour thereafter I lay awake, looking out through the open slats of the window blinds and the nodding branches of the Douglas firs at the teeming universe of stars...

...His wife and daughter were with him, and the pages xeroxed from the Siddur which we were using had been prepared for the girl's bat mitzvah...

...The need to assign values for varying elements of Jewishness took on life for us...

...To a person, worshiper and atheist alike, we felt renewed...

...Occasionally, his voice rose and fell as he spoke, in little melodic patterns that verged on the rhythms and melodies of prayer, but his explanations were framed in clear American English, with an historical note here, an exegetical touch there, that transformed what was once a massive memorized incomprehensibility for me into a series of revelations...

...Neither, of course, did we, but I knew our heritage, and they on the other hand had nothing to commend themselves to me except their very American faces...

...Well," the man said, "we agreed that if we found things more important than the categories you listed we could make substitutions...