LITMIR.BIZ

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have the keys to the treasure chest!

       Come to RISEN (Rabbi Isaac Shlomo Elkeles Yeshiva, Nashim/women)

       You will learn at our women’s school, Bayit Ne’eman, how to establish a Jewish home, ensuring an eternal future for the Jewish people!

       Call Rebbetzin B. Now to find out more about classes and dorming options. Phone: 02 613 6334

      The brochure reminded her of a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, loads of words, off base, crammed together. The pamphlet, with its large wording and simple language, made Wendy feel she was being screamed at. Who even thought women are fairy tale princesses looking for someone to give them a treasure chest of jewels? She clutched it as she made her way to the Zion Gate, where she heard there might be a cab.

      On this August morning, Wendy woke with rays of the Jerusalem sun streaking into her room. She stretched her arms out in front of her and hugged herself, stretching, and feeling the warmth of the sun next to her bed mix with the overall chill of the room. She longed for the warmth of the sun, leaned out to it to warm her hands, extremities that always felt colder than the rest of her. Like the warmth of the sun, her goals existed within reach; getting to them and actually feeling their warmth was just slow. She was making up her questionnaires and working, gradually, on her first chapter, the dreaded literature review. Any sense of progress she had was in minute increments—intermittent progress, no large leaps or discoveries. Only in movies do people bound ahead, instantly.

      Wendy lay back, rubbing her hands together for warmth, and ran through her day in her mind. She liked to try to keep something of the reverie of her pre-wakeful state, and stay focused on whatever had been in her sleeping head, to hold the images with her through the day as she went to sleep so that when she woke up she could have a sense of what was on her unconscious mind. She liked to know what swarming swirling blurred visions were able to make it over the barrier of the dream state into her conscious awareness in order to tell her what was most urgent to her at the moment. It didn’t always work. Whatever her dream had been was now buried in her to do list for the day. Errands: get to the bank to exchange money, buy more phone tokens, called asimonim, which she never seemed to have when she needed them, and do some grocery shopping to fill the practically bare fridge. She hated the state of kitchen emptiness, no food around to snack on if she felt like it. It was good to always have a reserve, something lying in wait in case she needed it. But she operated mainly without many reserves, in the cabinet and in life.

      Compartmentalize, her mentor Cliff Conrad, sage as the Puritans he studied, often told her. So she lifted the notepad at her bedside and listed the tasks, a sure way to put the anxiety in its place. She wrote, “My first interview. Today’s the day.” Banal, and yet these words moved her. Writing this dissertation wasn’t, as her parents thought, some kind of whim, a nice way to pass the time until she got married, had kids, and started what they thought of as her “real” life. She needed to do this to get a job and have a life that she was creating, of her own choosing. Even though it was a small and gradual step, she savored this thought. She would be doing a preliminary interview today, getting closer to her goal.

      Wendy wanted to do some preliminary interviews to see how the thing was going to proceed. She wasn’t ultimately going to use the data from these interviews in her study because she would be using them to tweak her questions.

      Wendy had to see what it was like to question someone to his or her face. There was nothing the slightest bit daunting about handing a piece of paper to a person and asking him to fill it out, but the thought of actually sitting right across from another person and asking intimate questions . . . What if she unintentionally upset her subject or made some kind of faux pas, even if inadvertent? She would feel embarrassment and . . . shame. She didn’t want to look foolish. More than once she had asked a friend something that Wendy thought entirely innocuous and then found out from a third party that she had hurt the person’s feelings. How could she develop the insight, imagination really, to envision her way into the mind and emotions of someone else in order to anticipate how they might react to a given question? She lacked empathy, she worried, standing up finally and stretching her hands over her head to shake the sleepiness off her body. Was there an essential coldness in her nature that would keep her from succeeding?

      It was a kind of occlusion between the way she saw others and what they expected of her, a barrier as real as a physical one. Wendy felt sometimes like she just did not know how to connect to other people. It worried her at times, that she would never have a truly intimate relationship with someone else, where each knew and understood the other. She had close friends, but always felt like, for each of them, there was some other friend who was closer. She was never the closest.

      Wendy got out of bed and opened the doors of the wardrobe closet built in to the wall. She stared at the contents: the look she was going for was professional, yet not too formal. She wanted to be friendly yet tailored—hard to get the right balance.

      That was what she needed to talk to Meryl about in this interview. How many of the things being newly religious demanded of women and how many were part of general chauvinism in the larger culture? The differences between the ways men and women told their stories was one of the avenues for her research. Her provisional hypothesis was that when men told the story of their conversion it was an attempt to take up more space in the world, to boast of what talented and resourceful individuals they were, that they found a way to change and find religious meaning. However, when women spoke of changes in their lives, it was in a humbling, demeaning, self-effacing manner to the tune of: “Baruch Hashem, it was the hand of God that put this person in my path and led me this way.” Women always claimed less agency in their lives. It was one of the many things that annoyed Wendy about the world—this notion that women aren’t supposed to want things. They were not to work at anything too hard, or appear to. Wendy had always wanted to have space and agency in her life; beginning as a little kid, when most of her friends shared their beds with multiple stuffed animals. She never liked having something else in bed with her. She always wanted to be able to roll around, take up space as she pleased. It was self-effacing—girls in our culture are given the message not to take up too much space. Share, be smaller, make room for others.

      Leaving her apartment to go to Beit Ticho, where she was meeting Meryl, Wendy decided she would make her way up Emek Refaim and window shop as she walked.

      Wendy took one brisk step in front of the next and thought about why Meryl was a good test interview subject. Miriam now—she had to respect that—had been at Brown with Wendy’s childhood friend Nina Distler. Miriam was a talented artist whose parents wouldn’t let her go to art school; she chose Brown because she was able to take classes and hang out at the adjoining Rhode Island School of Design, known to most as RISD. Brown was Wendy’s first-choice college and she didn’t get in, while Meryl didn’t like being there. Wendy was trying to not resent her. Wendy sighed and, spotting a bench in the park above Yemin Moshe, decided to sit down and go over her notes for the interview one more time. Meryl had a one-woman show at an avant-garde public school showcase gallery two years after college. It was given a review—a scant paragraph or so but an actual review—in both the New York Times and Art World magazine. Then, something had happened. It was Wendy’s task to elicit the narrative of how Meryl had gotten from the hip art world of Brooklyn, to its religious Jewish section, and then to Beis Mushka in Jerusalem.

      Wendy could hypothesize—Miriam’s parents divorced and she wanted some of the stability that Orthodox Judaism seemed to provide its adherents? Or, she’d had a series of non-Jewish boyfriends and felt betrayed when they didn’t understand her dismay over their thoughtful Christmas gifts? Maybe Miriam had a drug or alcohol problem after college, and starting over with a new group of people was a way of removing herself from a druggie circle of friends?

      For Wendy’s dissertation, the actual reason was irrelevant. That was for a psychologist. For her, it was how Miriam recounted her transformation. The biographical reconstruction of the life to account for the role changes that new religious commitment demanded, yet remained on a continuous plane with other aspects of the subject’s life was, Wendy contended, the most important of the rituals of incorporation that enabled individuals to be fully part of their new group.

      Miriam

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