Jewish Extensions
Cowan, Paul
JEWISH EXTENSIONS A legacy retrieved, a community renewed PAUL COWAN I don't believe there are epiphanies in Judaism. Since it is a religion that insists on concrete deeds, not on blinding...
...But even that argument was too rational for him...
...We were so terrified of losing our autonomy that we had great trouble in reviving something like a synagogue—or creating a progressive political party—which might force us to adhere to majority decisions or adhere to common standards of practice...
...That might open them up to the Almighty...
...That was the question that perplexed Wolfe Kelman on the Shabbos Rachel and I had lunch at his house...
...I would have flown to Boston on Saturday morning...
...What if obedience to the Torah's laws, not our compromised version of halachah, was the thing that enabled a person to exude such joy, such unreserved passion and compassion...
...All these people were part of a Jewish cultural renaissance...
...So we began to find ourselves in intriguingly incongruous situations...
...Streisand had endowed a day school in the community (the Emmannuel Streisand School, named after her father, a Hebrew teacher), which had attracted about 100 children, mostly from non-religious homes...
...I also feel strengthened by affirming publicly that an important step in being the person I want to be is being Jewish...
...Ours prepares them to live in a pluralistic country like America, Rachel answered...
...Don't close your mind...
...He didn't want to sanction what he regarded as a violation of the law with his physical presence...
...For she had to decide what kind of bet din she wanted, a relatively complicated matter...
...But I was even more afraid that, if we did ask him, he'd make halachic demands on the two of us that we couldn't accept—and that our attitude would rupture our friendship...
...Early one very rainy winter morning, Rachel set out to meet an Orthodox rabbi whom Steve Shaw had suggested...
...In a different form, you saw it in the New York Havurah, which was part of a nationwide havurah movement of several thousand people...
...The word itself carried a worrisome reminder of my father's decision to suppress his Orthodox Jewish past...
...It was flecked with glamour...
...They all read the same portion of the Torah...
...Sometimes those sessions grew quite intense...
...Today marks an important step for me, a step in the search we all share to lead lives that are meaningful to ourselves and useful to each other...
...that she didn't want to feel she'd betrayed Rabbi Singer every time she violated a commandment...
...Bill Aron was exhibiting his photographs of the Lower East Side and Jerusalem...
...We brought our own matzos to rural Pennsylvania, and were careful about the foods we ate at restaurants...
...Maybe in five years you'll agree with me...
...As Rabbi Singer talked, I tried to read Rachel's face for clues to her emotions...
...So we rarely discussed conversion...
...An American Rabbi Singer could only grow out of an indigenous movement—a havurah movement, perhaps, if it dug in and endured—that allowed Torah and Talmud to merge with the realities of this age just as the early Hasidim had let the Holy Books merge with the realities of theirs...
...he asked teasingly...
...Bill Novak and Moshe Waldoks were completing The Big Book of Jewish Humor...
...Kosher laws, he insisted, were irrational...
...It was a slightly fragmented conversation since Rabbi Singer was constantly interrupted by old people who came to shul to complain about the apartment he'd obtained for them, or to ask for help with some confusing portion of a social security form he'd given them...
...Its most talented members might leave a durable legacy, but there would be no structure, no coherent body of intellectual or liturgical work, no distinct change in ritual practice that would give permanence to the havurah movement...
...So, that evening, Jerry Raik agreed to davven Maariv...
...They needed younger, creative Jews to revitalize the place...
...But Rachel wanted a conversion that would be officially recognized...
...In less than six months, Ansche Chesed had become home for several minyanim, for the Havurah School, for the older people who had wondered whether the synagogue would survive, for hundreds of unaffiliated Jews who had a new curiosity about religious life...
...Since the Jewish life I saw in Venice involved my contemporaries, my professional counterparts, I was forced to face questions that never quite presented themselves when I was in my teacher...
...I remembered the day, eight years earlier, when I had failed to wear a yarmulke in the yeshiva—the day I'd phoned Rachel, who had never seen the neighborhood, and watched, confused, while the religious Jews stared at me with an amusement I mistook for anger...
...You saw it in the baal teshuvah yeshivas—places where newly observant Jews learned Torah and Talmud—which attracted thousands of spiritual seekers as students...
...We should forgive him for leaving such an important conversation...
...Steve Shaw felt that she should have an Orthodox conversion, because no one would question its authenticity...
...Together, those people formed the rudiments of a community...
...And he mentioned the conviction all Orthodox rabbis share, that men—and men only—should be permitted to bless the Torah or read from it...
...I was flattered by the familiarity of her words...
...We concentrated on learning about the religion, on trying to understand its rituals, on studying the Hebrew language...
...That was probably the case in his world...
...Those encounters were always laced with discussions of Ansche Chesed...
...It would oblige them to come into contact with one another, with unaffiliated seekers like Rachel and me, with kids like the ones in the Havurah School, and older people who still attended services at the synagogue...
...But they always got stuck on the formal issues, like the best way of establishing a democratic decision-making structure...
...She was the wife I loved, no matter what she chose to call herself...
...to my friends here tonight and the larger Jewish community...
...That winter Rachel and Jerry Raik, who was now a teacher at the Havurah School, had organized a small davvening group where about six friends recited psalms and prayers in English or Hebrew, then read the Torah at our own pace, pausing to discuss any questions or reservations that ocThere was a long distance between her decision to convert and her appearance before a court of three rabbis...
...He was concerned that he would be converting her into limbo, when he believed that the very essence of Jewish life was its institutions, particularly synagogues, where the religious community gathered...
...He asked Rachel her opinion of his ideas, but the synagogue phone rang before she could answer...
...As always, he made us promise to call him the next time we were coming to the neighborhood...
...Rabbi Singer had guessed at those feelings, just as he'd always sensed that Rachel would convert...
...He was rabbinic aristocracy from a very specific milieu...
...The act of giving up leavening enriched the story of the Exodus by incorporating a daily reminder of it into our lives...
...She was covered by a tallis, woven by David Weiderman at the Munkaczer Tallis Factory, and she held a siddur between her hands, which rested on her lap...
...Every Thursday night, the synagogue's rabbi, Daniel Lappin, gave Torah classes for the 70 men and women who could cram into the house where it was held...
...But there was a long distance between her decision to convert and her appearance before a bet din, a court of three rabbis, who would ask her questions about her beliefs and her halachic commitments, and then accompany her to the mikveh, where she would say the blessings that would make her a Jew...
...In the 60s the New Left and the havurah movement were both ideal places to find one's political or religious identity...
...She held the Torah against her shoulder...
...When she finished talking, Rabbi Singer remained silent for a moment...
...In their 20s and 30s now, they worked in the Jewish world or in the professions—as professors of Judaica or as Hebrew teachers, as architects or psychiatrists...
...And 1 was ambivalent about her conversion, too...
...Two hours ago I had been ecstatic...
...That congregation consisted of old people...
...Within a few months, the prospect of reviving Ansche Chesed altered our Jewish world...
...For years, it is true, Rachel was loathe to convert to Judaism, for she thought that might mean severing herself from the family she loved, from the New England past that had shaped so much of her character...
...But the question itself was unrealistic and hypothetical, for there was no way in the world that Rachel or I could follow Rabbi Singer's route and wind up with his force...
...In June 1980, about a dozen Jews in the neighborhood called for a meeting in the synagogue's chapel to discuss its future...
...Sometimes we'd have to focus on mundane subjects, like pricing a new boiler for the building...
...I distrusted any kind of certainty...
...By 1980, the congregation had dwindled to about 100...
...There were courses on Jewish women, in beginning Hebrew and on the book of Job...
...I didn't like the mechitzah at the Bay Area Synagogue, or the fact that, because the shul was Orthodox, women couldn't read from the Torah...
...They developed almost identical styles, which encouraged intimacy and virtually outlawed authority...
...But we had to admit that the rabbi had articulated a problem we had been reluctant to face...
...By late October 1980, when Rachel converted, Ansche Chesed was already a bustling synagogue...
...However, there was nothing spiritual about my weekend in New York...
...They had used as many drugs, danced as much rock and roll, as most of our friends in SDS...
...To me, this is a very important moment, a moment of passage, but one that is part of a continuum...
...They feared they might never see their own homes again...
...Each week, there were three Talmud classes, with about ten students apiece...
...To my astonishment, she told me that she planned to convert...
...Someone was even willing to give a quarter of a million dollars to help repair the synagogue's damaged boiler system and its flooded basement...
...Often our new friends would discuss their own projects...
...Rabbi Singer mentioned the medical argument and the romantic one, but only in passing...
...In the end, of course, catastrophe was averted...
...It would be recognized, if at all, as one of a dozen liberation movements that had flowered during the promising 60s, that had been fertilized by publicity during the novelty-hungry 70s, then faded when the intellectual climate of America proved to be chillier than any of us expected...
...I hadn't...
...When I fell in love with Paul 17 years ago, I began to identify with the Jewish people...
...His American counterpart hadn't yet been born—we, the Jews, hadn't been in this country for a long enough time for that to happen...
...In the three years since I had met Rabbi Singer, he and Rachel had developed a great deal of affection and respect for one another...
...plied scientific information to lay people, to help me understand the story as well as photograph it...
...So, for the moment, the religious precept that seemed so promising—to heed the Sabbath and call it a delight—simply meant an idle Saturday, a time when I longed for sundown so that I could work again...
...After a 45-minute discussion, she and Dorien Grunbam, a friend who had spent 18 months of her childhood in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, who was almost like a sister to Rachel, had gone to the mikveh with the three rabbis...
...That was why Wolfe saw Ansche Chesed as such an important challenge...
...There were about two dozen people in their 70s and 80s, cheered by the sight of two relatively young newcomers...
...So when I returned home, soaking, I was worried that I'd missed a crucial episode in our new Jewish life...
...And I felt it personally in the scores of letters readers wrote when I published "Jews Without Money, Revisited" in the Village Voice, and then, again, in the even more intense letters I got when I wrote about Rabbi Singer...
...I didn't want to compromise Shabbos...
...between their love of Judaism and the Jewish people and their distrust of its traditional authority structure...
...She's beautiful...
...1 remember one Saturday in October 1979, when I was tempted to cover the opening of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston—an event that would keep Teddy Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, who would soon be locked in a dramatic primary battle, on the same stage all afternoon...
...We'd been doing it on a universal scale, in Mississippi, in Ecuador, in the anti-war movement...
...Since it is a religion that insists on concrete deeds, not on blinding revelations of Divine Power, a newcomer like me who decides to become part of it—who has only recently laid claim to his Hebrew name, Shaul—has to do so slowly, one mitz-vah at a time, in order to transform himself without losing himself...
...As we got to know the people in the area—devout Christians, who were extremely generous about inviting us into their homes—we found that they were glad to help us fulfill our dietary requirements...
...While the men stood outside the door, Rachel immersed herself in the water and recited the blessing that made her a Jew...
...we'd plan ways of moving a program that worked with elderly people into the synagogue...
...For instance, members of SDS and the havurah movement sat in circles when they met, not in rows...
...When she finished the three sections that comprise the Shema, she put aside her siddur and began to speak in her clear, direct voice...
...to fantasize about the concerts and theatrical events that would occur in the building once we had enough money to restore its ballroom and auditorium...
...She can drive and hike, fix a car and pitch a tent better than most men, and rages at women who become helpless and flirtatious whenever they have to function in what most people define as a man's world...
...Rachel sat on the bimah, wearing a deep purple shirt and a brown leather skirt that had belonged to my mother...
...it had taken centuries of Eastern European hasidic Judaism to create him...
...Do you think I'm going to give you a wig—so that you can settle in Borough Park...
...He transformed the most casual conversations into exciting trips through the Talmud...
...He engaged Rachel in a substantive discussion of his halachah, his Torah...
...We didn't know what to do in the interim...
...It couldn't be Balkanized...
...In response, Rachel summoned all her courage and told Rabbi Singer that observance wasn't really the main issue for her...
...Then, he began to talk about the laws of family purity, which demand that husbands and wives refrain from sex during the time of the woman's menstrual period, and until she purifies herself in the mikveh a week thereafter...
...From his own very religious point of view, he half agreed with the Havurah School parents...
...That day, we talked about the religious laws we found most troubling— those that concern women and sex...
...He had an emergency, he said—a woman who lived nearby had locked herself out of her apartment and he had the only other set of keys...
...Nessa Rapoport, an editor at Bantam Books, was just publishing a novel about love and friendship and faith, written from the point of view of a young, religious Jewish woman...
...Then one Saturday during the intermediate days of Passover 1980, Rachel and I had lunch with Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, a neighbor, a noted teacher at The Jewish Theological Seminary, who loved sharing his knowledge with neophytes...
...Over time, I have felt that identification broaden from him to his parents, Polly and Lou...
...Rachel was calm but depressed...
...And both organizations provided specific outlets for their adherents' social consciences—in the South or in antiwar demonstrations in the New Left...
...I respect it...
...For years, the place had served our secular needs...
...In a way, he and his wife Jackie made their home, with its wonderful blend of gossip and theory, its delicious food, its emphasis on using books to track down every stray fact, a religious version of my parents' apartment...
...Sharon Strassfeld had just finished writing The Jewish Family Book with her friend Kathy Green...
...After lunch, when Rachel and 1 said we were still searching for a place to pray in New York, that we missed a community that was committed to Judaism and receptive to people as open and ignorant and full of questions as we were, he mentioned the Bay Area Synagogue and said that you didn't have to be Orthodox to create the kind of environment 1 had described...
...Some of them were present the night Rachel converted...
...The religious community existed in the midst of gaily dressed roller skaters, joggers, bicyclists, clowns and former hippies who read Tarot cards...
...So the intimate nature of the fights was undisguised...
...we began to plan a new day-care center, to devise community-wide forums on politics or literature which would attract people who weren't interested in religion...
...But I decided not to go that day...
...She planned to dwell on one crucial aspect of the truth: that she wanted to be a Jew, but she wasn't ready to take on all the mitzvot...
...They all wanted to play a role in reviving Ansche Chesed...
...Both organizations insisted on a leadership that was rotated frequently, arrived at all their decisions by consensus, not by votes or by the decree of some central committee...
...We talked about Rachel's conversion for hours, sitting near the bimah, at the dark brown table where Rabbi Singer usually studies Talmud before he begins to pray...
...We were links to the future, signs that the religion that had been at the core of their lives would endure—and at the place where they had always worshiped...
...There is a phrase in Hebrew, tikun olam, which means repairing the world...
...Although some of these people were friends of ours, although we were very attracted to their form of worship, we were still too uncertain of our ability to function on the alien turf of Hebrew-language Torah and prayer to ask if we could join them...
...What you do is on your conscience...
...One Shabbos Rachel and I went to the traditional service in the synagogue's chapel...
...1 was lucky that Rachel was launched on a quest that was similar to mine...
...Now Rachel, a third-generation feminist, is sensitive to any remark that denigrates women even slightly...
...And I agreed with her—or, to put it more honestly, even though I loved the experiences that were available to men in Rabbi Singer's world, I knew I'd feel a constant mournful guilt if I embraced a kind of Judaism that made her feel excluded and angry...
...So now we were starting once again, in our own home, in our neighborhood, in our place of worship, and hoping that from that very finite, concrete base we could reach out to all sorts of people everywhere—reach out in person and by example—and become what we'd always hoped to be: part of a force that had the practical wit and the spiritual will to repair the world...
...For the first time, I felt embarrassed about this teacher...
...Wolfe, whose liberal ideas had forced him to break, very painfully, with his hasidic family, made Judaism come alive in words in very much the same way as Rabbi Singer did in deeds...
...Every year or two, members of the New York Havurah and the various minyanim held meetings to discuss ways of reviving it...
...Of course we were—and are—outwardly the same people—a journalist and a community organizer/photographer, a blond, WASPy-looking woman and an ethnically indistinguishable man—no matter what aspects of practice our inward journeys began to encompass...
...Ironically, the havurah movement's strength lay in the very parochialism that sometimes made it seem frustratingly narrow...
...We might be big-city journalists, employees of an avowedly left-wing newspaper, but we had roots in something that was real to them, the Bible...
...Soon, they were dancing outside, on 100th Street...
...and to the country Israel...
...Those conversations were always inconclusive...
...Those quarrels could be painful, of course, but at their worst they led to the creation of another new minyan, not to the totally separate organizations for the women, the Blacks, the gays, the white men whose inability to cooperate destroyed the New Left...
...It turned out they couldn't quite understand Jews who weren't observant...
...After a tumultuous discussion, everyone agreed that the place should become both a community center and a new sort of pluralistic religious institution, a display case of faith, where each kind of group, from havurah minyanim to some Orthodox women who wanted to davven together, to the synagogue's traditional congregation, whose average age was about 60, would pray in its own way...
...For, on a fundamental spiritual level, the worst enemies in the havurah movement had to cooperate...
...It's a matter between you and the Almighty...
...Her family was astonished that she had become religious at all but glad that she had decided to become a Jew, not a devout Christian...
...Soon she began to lead the congregation in prayer...
...Forty more people were on the waiting list...
...He barely looked at me while we talked...
...She said that she had been thinking about the idea for months, ever since she discovered that worshipping as a Jew released something inside her which enabled her to think about God, to feel, at rare moments, a faith whose intensity startled her...
...It wasn't even likely to become a hotbed of sectarian strife, since the disagreements were rarely ideological...
...Nearly a thousand people had prayed there during the High Holy Days...
...Besides, if Rachel converted with Rabbi Singer, he'd cease to be a friend and become a religious conscience...
...low rate of cervical cancer...
...But his words had more resonance for Rachel than he possibly could have known...
...There was a seminar on kosher cooking, taught by a former cordon bleu student...
...It was her own participation in religious life...
...He wished us a good Shabbos...
...By contrast, the equality of sexes was the ideological foundation of the New York Havurah and the minyanim it had spawned...
...worried that his attitude toward women, his explanation of family purity, would fill Rachel with depression or dismay...
...For dozens of marriages founder over these mitzvahs, which sound bizarre and abstruse at best, maniacally inconvenient at worst, to people who don't see them as the substance of God's law or as milestones on an inner odyssey...
...Our davvening group didn't meet that Saturday...
...On the festive Simchat Torah, about 600 jubilant people had come to the evening service, to pray and to dance with the Torah...
...Her spirit would only flourish when she felt fully accepted as a Jew and as a woman...
...For example, they wanted to maintain some balance between their reverence for the past and the unassailable fact that they had been shaped by the forces that pervaded post-World War II America...
...now he and his wife, Jeanne, were opening a gallery of modern Jewish art in their apartment...
...Now I was terrified that I'd feel torn between them...
...They all observed the same holidays...
...That love started as a respect which my parents taught me for the Jewish people...
...It had never occurred to us that a synagogue in the neighborhood could be an interesting, welcoming place...
...For, when you try to rebuild the world for everyone, you don't rebuild it for anyone—least of all for yourself...
...Conversion, he said, is like marriage...
...During the intermediate days of Passover 1979,1 wanted to cover the near meltdown at Three Mile Island and I asked Rachel, who was then working for an organization that sup-Paul Cowan is a staff writer for the Village Voice and the author of 'The Tribes of America and The Making of an Un-American...
...Do you think you have to be as obervant as me...
...At the Bay Area Synagogue all newcomers were made to feel like welcome additions to any Shabbos table, not like people whose lack of Jewish knowledge slowed down discussions of Torah, whose ignorance of the community interfered with old friendships...
...Everyone in the Havurah School, including our children, Lisa and Mamu, regarded her step as an unnecessary formality since they perceived her as a de facto Jew already...
...the equality of women in Jewish life was part of the havurah's creed...
...Richard Siegel had organized a festival of ethnic Jewish music...
...Don't be sure you've gone as high as you can go...
...From his point of view, that opinion represented an apology for the Torah: a retrospective effort to rationalize the irrational so that Judaism would seem-palatable to post-Enlightenment Gentiles...
...Then, with a calm expression on her face, she opened her siddur and began to read the central words in the Jewish creed: Shema, Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad...
...First, he talked about his belief that synagogues should have mechitzot to separate men from women because mixed seating can cause one to flirt, to think about sex, not about the Almighty...
...I used to think that conversion meant that you stopped being one thing in order to become another, and therefore I resisted it...
...But now I knew that I felt stronger because Rachel was one of us, too...
...But in New York, we hadn't found a community in which we could explore our new, active attempts at observance with people who were like ourselves...
...By the time he.retumed to the shul, Rachel had figured out a tactful way to describe her feelings...
...Built in 1927, it had once claimed 1,700 members...
...They all returned to their towns...
...The fights within the Havurah were almost as bitter as those within the New Left, but since everyone involved was a Jew with some commitment to religion, personal conflicts and power struggles—like those between Stokely Carmichael and his white peers—couldn't be confused with ethnic prejudices...
...It allowed us to feel that we were part of a spiritual community that was creating a movement and an institution, that was interested in social service and in art...
...Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One...
...For years I had thought I was completely indifferent to Rachel's religious decisions...
...The Purple Circle, the day-care center that Rachel had founded, was located on the fourth floor of the educational building, and the Frog Pond, an afterschool program we'd both helped launch, was on the third floor...
...I was afraid we'd offend him if we didn't ask him to be part of the bet din...
...And, in Venice, the hunger for Jewish learning was incredible—especially when one realized that most of the young people there had only become interested in religion a year or two earlier...
...But most of them had been primarily identified as Jews, not as leftists...
...Most of them relived the hysteria they'd felt just a few weeks before...
...And I felt uncomfortable with the hip Hollywood types who punctuated every sentence about their health or their work with the phrase that seemed so natural when Rabbi Singer used it: "Baruch HaShem," "Blessed be the Name...
...What was logical about forbidding people to mix meat with milk...
...And all this was happening among worldly people in Venice, California, not among Hasidim in Borough Park...
...Rachel and I had always worshiped together in living rooms like Jerry Raik's, or in somewhat scruffy apartments, like the one the New York Havurah used for its High Holy Day services...
...You saw it in Manhattan's remarkable Lincoln Square Synagogue, where the charismatic Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Riskin had involved hundreds of people, from secular and traditional backgrounds, in study groups, friendship groups, religious services...
...Most of them shared our political outlook...
...Those halachic principles were so important to him, he said, that he would never give any sort of speech (even a secular one about life on the Lower East Side) in a synagogue with mixed seating...
...In an inchoate form the revival was spreading on the Upper West Side...
...For he had attained the degree of spiritual elevation he was describing...
...It was Pilzno's religion...
...That night I called Rachel from my brother Geoff's house, intending to describe what I had witnessed...
...That afternoon she had gone alone to a bet din, at Rabbi Wolfe Kelman's house...
...There was no salaried rabbi at Ansche Chesed—we didn't have enough money for that...
...By the time I found the right building, Rachel was gone...
...Those diverse forces would enrich the new Jewish culture and help it grow...
...But as a religious center the place was in decline...
...Its focal point was a synagogue on Venice's boardwalk, the Bay Area Synagogue, where screenwriters, lawyers and doctors—mostly in their 30s, many with as little religious background as I had—prayed alongside the elderly retirees who frequented the Israel Levin Adult Home—alongside an 80-year-old tailor from Chicago, an 87-year-old chicken-market owner from East Flatbush, a 75-year-old optician from St...
...by working with elderly Jews or supporting Soviet Jews in the Havurah...
...I think I know how you feel, Rachel," he said...
...As we walked down East Broadway, from his cubicle at the United Jewish Council to his synagogue—under the Pitt Street Bridge, past the kosher chicken market, past a graveyard for old cars—we began to talk about a favorite topic: Rachel's and my preference for an ethnically varied community like the Upper West Side as against his belief that Jewish children should grow up in a completely observant neighborhood like Borough Park...
...It combined the rough-edged, slightly crack-brained Old World attitude 1 loved on the Lower East Side with the sophisticated blend of religion, intellect and worldly interests that made Medved and his friends resemble people I'd met in the havurah movement...
...Then, more seriously: "You wouldn't be betraying me, Rachel...
...Then he blessed her...
...Anyway, their newfound religious assurance troubled me in the same way as dogmatism had in the New Left...
...Still, no one really cared if a former member of a minyan became Orthodox and chose to worship elsewhere, or if a current one was becoming alienated from religion and ceased to worship at all...
...But there was a crucial difference between the two movements, which emerged clearly as idealism ebbed, as conflicts arose...
...She felt a steadfast certainty that she had exactly the same right to religion as I did...
...His way prevents kids from getting confused by different standards of Jewish practice, he said...
...My Jewish development had been too unpredictable to rule out any future changes, but as I spent time with people at the Bay Area Synagogue, it became increasingly difficult for me to see how I could become Orthodox...
...In doing so, it helped establish a pattern that disciplined them in their prayers...
...I have always been proud to be a Yankee from New England...
...But we were both scared to tell Rabbi Singer that we had made that decision...
...Moreover, unlike the minya-nim, the Bay Area Synagogue was resolutely multigenerational...
...curred to us...
...Just before Chanukah, a new glossy magazine, Jewish Living, assigned me to go to Venice, California, a very hip seaside suburb of Los Angeles, to describe an Orthodox community that had developed there in the past two years—a place where young people combined traditional Judaism with an outwardly worldly life...
...After I'd spent a week there I began to realize that Rachel and I were part of a widespread phenomenon...
...I wondered whether I should suggest Rabbi Singer to him...
...Couples fight bitterly over whether to have a kosher home, for example, or whether to turn Saturday into a Shabbos of sanctified time...
...You even saw it in the Havurah School, for all the parents' ambivalences...
...In the past several years, the New York Havurah had spawned several minyanim, prayer groups of young, religious Jewish men and women...
...He said that family purity forced people to discipline themselves in their lives...
...Dozens of people we knew saw the place as a potential community resource...
...These tensions had produced seminal works like the astonishingly popular Jewish Catalog whose editors, Sharon and Michael Strassfeld and Richard Siegel, all lived within three blocks of Ansche Chesed...
...It was inevitable that our energy—that our generation's energy—would begin to ebb...
...He thought that Rachel's commitment to Jewish law was the important thing, that a trip to the mikveh was a mere formality...
...She might have been angry with him, she said, if she'd read his words in a book—but in his presence even an idea as alien as family purity seemed to possess an emotional logic...
...Her mother was in the congregation, still confused that she had a religious daughter, but very proud...
...In high school and college, in their Jewish student movements and their synagogues, they had taken the same sort of risks to oppose the war and fight for civil rights as we had in the Peace Corps...
...It wasn't in hers...
...As we neared his shul, we passed the Masaryk Cake Box, where Frieda Provda always gives Rabbi Singer enough challah and cake to make kiddush on Shabbos...
...Indeed, it was the absence of logic that intensified the power of the laws...
...David Roskies, a professor at The Jewish Theological Seminary, had finished a movie called The Shtetl in Fact and Fiction...
...One week that summer we went to the Havurah Institute in Hartford, Connecticut, where we studied prayer and post-Holocaust theology, the writings of Eastern European Jewish women and the hasidic interpretation of the book of Genesis, went tubing on the Housatonic River, played tennis and Softball, and had a full, peaceful Shabbos...
...She knew that he believed, with all his heart, that the Orthodox way was the Almighty's way, and that Orthodox women were even more profoundly rooted in Judaism than Orthodox men...
...They taught me and my sisters, Connie and Peggy, and my brother, Richard, always to speak out against anti-Semitism and racism...
...But they only occurred once every three or four weeks...
...Lisa and Mamu and I sat near the bimah so that we could open the ark that held the Sefer Torah, which Rachel would hold while the congregation prayed...
...Then, one Friday morning, we went down to the Lower East Side to talk to him as frankly as possible...
...As soon as he left, Rachel and I began to talk...
...Then, once their problem was resolved, they'd hover, lonely and fascinated, on the periphery of our discussion...
...Our new friends in the havurah movement thought she should convert with them, by taking the halachically acceptable step of immersing herself in a body of flowing water—which is, by definition, a mikveh—while three people witnessed the process, heard her recite the blessings and reported her actions to a rabbi...
...By the summer of 1980, it was no secret that Rachel planned to convert...
...Frieda had become a good friend of mine, but she had never met Rachel...
...In fact, she had never realized I was married...
...a Judaism of mysticism and revelation, not reason...
...His friend Barbra Streisand and her ex-husband, Elliott Gould, had chosen to have their son Jason celebrate his bar mitzvah there...
...The story had the eerie sound of a pogrom that never occurred...
...Without knowing those words, Rachel and I had been trying to practice the concept most of our adult lives...
...Of course, many feminists, including Jewish women who keep kosher and observe Shabbos, see the laws of family purity as a sexist statement that women with their period are unclean...
...But I didn't see how she—or I—could adhere to his strict religious standards, or embrace a view of women that made sense in his world but that was completely alien to ours...
...Wolfe urged us to pursue the plan that had been raised and dropped so often: to urge people in the havurah movement to join the synagogue...
...Rabbi Singer's, enchanting, alien, Orthodox Lower East Side world...
...After lighting candles, we would have eaten a special meal off my mother's Wedgwood plates, and played charades or board games, or read poems that appealed to us...
...He wanted to meet with her alone and I had a book review I had to finish, so I agreed to join them after they'd talked for an hour...
...He was absolutely convinced that the laws of family purity contained more mystical importance than any human being could possibly understand, and that men and women who heeded them, who saw monthly trips to the mikveh as a source of holiness, achieved a degree of spiritual elevation that he would not describe...
...But the Israeli Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz gave me a more organic metaphor...
...After a week in Venice, I felt certain that it could be fused into the coherent, tangible community that hundreds of people like Rachel and me wanted to find...
...We could do the same sort of thing at Ansche Chesed...
...From the book An Orphan in History by Paul Cowan...
...Over the next few months, Rachel and I grew increasingly close to the people in the minyanim whose knowledge had so recently threatened us...
...A year earlier I would have assisted at the Havurah School on Friday afternoon, then spent Friday night with Rachel and the kids...
...Secular Jewish friends—feminists, journalists, people we'd known in the New Left— couldn't understand her motives...
...Now the neighborhood was my second home...
...But in what form...
...Plainly, a completely unexpected, very pluralistic revival of religious Judaism—of a Judaism that combined learning and social service—was occurring in America...
...Hundreds more ate potluck dairy suppers under a rooftop sukkah, which one of the minyanim had fashioned...
...More poetically, they sometimes describe the laws of family purity as a pause to mourn for the life that fails to flourish each time a woman has her period— and then a burst of celebration for the prospect of a new life each time she begins the cycle again...
...He was able to explain all sides of every religious issue, to use his prodigious memory for Torah texts, hasidic stories, his page-by-page knowledge of the Talmud, to help his guests discuss abortion or the West Bank or conversion as if we were all spanning 4,000 years of tradition...
...For example, when he talked about the dietary laws he didn't try to justify them with the familiar argument that Jews in biblical times somehow knew that pork causes trichinosis...
...When we left the Masaryk Cake Box I walked between Rachel and Rabbi Singer, happy that, on such a beautiful, early summer day, I was with two of the adults I loved most in the world...
...Actually, there was a handsome yellow brick synagogue, Ansche Chesed, just a block away from our apartment...
...And, at first, Rachel agreed...
...Nahma Sandrow had written a long book on Yiddish theater...
...For she had loved the yellow brick synagogue ever since we moved to the neighborhood in 1969, and she had felt a commitment to it ever since the Purple Circle began there in 1975...
...Wolfe had read my Jewish Living article about the synagogue in Venice, California...
...He walked us to the street outside his synagogue, in keeping with the tal-mudic injunction that a host must walk his guest past the door sill to the point of departure...
...Now I'm proud to be a Jew...
...In our own lives, Rachel and I had both decided to refrain from eating chametz during Passover...
...UI gave Shaul his tefillin...
...Michael Medved, the co-author of the extremely popular book and television series What Really Happened to the Class of '65, was the president of the synagogue...
...It would give focus to the diffuse Jewish groups that honeycombed the Upper West Side...
...He knew that we were embracing new mitzvot slowly, knew that we believed in equality between men and women, and seemed to accept us wholeheartedly...
...Panicked, I ran to every door in the five-block area of his building, asking doormen if they had heard of the rabbi...
...If Wolfe was right, Ansche Chesed could provide a community for us...
...You are joined to a new community, but you bring to the union the strengths and the values that have been your foundation all your life...
...Then he smiled at both of us, and thanked us for coming down to see him...
...Jay Greenspan, a teacher at the Havurah School and a skilled Hebrew calligrapher, had just published a book describing his art...
...Inevitably, we'd feel a degree of guilt toward him that would undermine the relationship that had been at the core of my religious odyssey...
...They had thrown a lavish, kosher-catered party for the community's residents...
...The longing for some sort of Jewish Center was more widespread than any of us had realized...
...Still, the Venice environment was more hospitable than the one our friends in New York had managed to create...
...Indeed, at times, it had been a second home for our kids...
...But would he feel free to convert Rachel...
...Indeed, she thought he was one of the most charismatic people she had ever known...
...I feel strengthened in that need by my husband, my parents and siblings, and by my friends...
...His children, now adults, had all been part of the havurah movement and that was one reason that its fate concerned him so deeply...
...But the tensions had made them as loathe to create large institutions as their counterparts on the New Left...
...Copyright 1982 by Paul Cowan...
...We decided to help revive it...
...They described hurrying to school, using newspapers or old coats to protect their children from radiation...
...Only do me this favor...
...It blended the best of college and summer camp...
...They were caught in tensions that forced them to be creative...
...Almost everyone had a dovish view of Israel...
...He felt that way even though he knew that such talks could raise appreciable sums of money for his shul from suburban Jews...
...For they—and we—were part of a generation that had never worked out the proper balance between the individual and the community...
...Some Saturdays that spring, we would pray with people in the minyanim—or, rather, wrestle with our meager Hebrew while they prayed—and then discuss Torah or Talmud or Jewish history at lunches in their houses...
...Steve, a remarkably energetic man, with scores of friends throughout the Jewish world, had his own list of potential rabbis...
...Published by Doubleday and Co., Inc...
...So, to protect that friendship, to make sure that our evolving religion remained a source of joy, not guilt—to make sure, indeed, that we took on new mitzvot for ourselves and not for Rabbi Singer—we decided that the most practical step was for Rachel to have a Conservative conversion in the fall...
...But I'd written down the wrong address for his apartment...
...No wonder you've been hiding her," she said, with a note of fond reproach in her voice...
...But he would be back...
...Conversely, our explanation of the fact that we weren't eating leavening so that we could remember the hastiness of the Exodus paralleled their sacrificial period of Lent...
...Throughout the spring, she discussed conversion with Rabbi Singer...
...For they were part of the larger incomprehensibly intricate covenant the Almighty had made with the Jewish people...
...It has become increasingly important to me not just to identify with Judaism, but to be a Jew...
...The only time she and I had gone to an Orthodox service she was overcome with rage—and sorrow—at the fact that women were segregated from men, and from the Torah...
...It served as a bond, not a barrier...
...Rachel and I responded to Wolfe's idea because it promised to help us find the community we were seeking, and because our years in the New Left had convinced us that creative impulses can only be sustained through permanent institutions...
...Louis...
...But she had to take the first step toward conversion herself to be sure that it stemmed from her own private decision to become a Jew, not from a residual wish to please me...
...It had never occurred to Rachel or me to join a synagogue...
...sorting through a lifetime's worth of possessions as hastily as possible, then loading what seemed most precious into their cars and fleeing to a relative's house 50 or 60 miles away...
...Many Orthodox Jews often try to rationalize the laws on romantic grounds—insisting that it renews the passion in a marriage every month— or on medical ones, pointing out that Orthodox women have an unusually While the men stood outside the door, Rachel immersed herself in the water and recited the blessing that made her a Jew...
...We were in a sort of no-man's land...
...That day, she said, she'd talked with Steve Shaw, a Conservative rabbi we both knew, to find out how to do so...
...Thank the Lord...
...They all said the same prayers on Shabbos...
...We asked the people in those rural Pennsylvania towns to describe the morning they thought the nuclear power plant would explode...
...He knew that if its energy weren't channeled into something permanent, something adult, its influence might permeate the Jewish world, but the movement could die an unrecognized death...
...So, because of halacha and tradition, their generational rebellion would endure, in one form or another, as the New Left's had not...
...My conversion officially marks a love I've already experienced very deeply...
...The rabbi was less concerned about the details of her Jewish observance—which were unpredictable anyway—than about the fact that the Jewish world that attracted us, the havurah movement with all its tiny minyanim, was so casual, so freewheeling, that it might disappear...
Vol. 7 • October 1982 • No. 9
