LITMIR.BIZ

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lights went on in the cabin and an announcement about when breakfast would be served came over the plane’s speaker system. Their heads had been quite close together, speaking softly so as not to disturb the surrounding sleeping passengers. They were both startled by the light and began blinking, as if they had shared some kind of intimacy that seemed less appropriate in the illumination.

      Wendy was at a loss for words now, in the light.

      “Do you mind getting up?” he asked. “I need to daven shaharit.”

      “Nice to talk to you. Thanks for the advice,” she said, rising from her seat and moving into the aisle.

      He followed her and rose also, stepping into the aisle. “May I ask you a favor? I have a bad back and can’t reach up. Can you get my tefillin, that blue velvet bag, out of the overhead bin?”

      Wendy nodded and reached above her, pressing the latch of the compartment in. As she did, she felt his eyes on her chest, close. She shifted to the right, away from him, and reached up to find the bag. Fortunately, it was at the edge of the compartment. She plucked it out quickly and handed it to him, closing the hatch. He hadn’t done anything inappropriate; maybe it was her imagination, feeling vulnerable and exposed, reaching up. I should stop being suspicious of people, she thought. But her musing continued, as she gazed at Lamdan. Sometimes suspicions were warranted. Even in the Talmud, two men trust each other for years, and then with a few words, betrayal.

      “Thank you, Wendy,” he said and called out in Yiddish to a passing Hasid in black hat, peyot, long black jacket, and pants. The man replied in Yiddish and nodded, as Lamdan started following the man to the end of the plane, where Wendy could see a group of men beginning to gather in the limited space, to don tallis and tefillin.

      Watching, she felt left out, alone. Not that she wished to be one of them; but it seemed cozy, the little group of men, sharing the same activity, binding themselves with the black leather straps to God, to their faith. It was something she could never be part of, though she did see a woman in the back, standing at a respectful distance from the men. She had blonde curly hair, very frizzy and thick like a mane ringing her pretty round face, holding a prayer book and intoning her own prayers. The woman’s face looked like something out of a Dutch painting, Rembrandt or Vermeer, precise but lighted well, the light from the windows of the plane landing on the white of the prayer book, which then seemed to reflect up to her face. What had Lamdan said about the Torah being a source of light, bouncing out and being reflected back? A painter would depict this scene well, she mused, showing the holiness coming off the books into the faces. Though noting the woman’s loveliness, Wendy still had to conjecture cynically whether the fervor emanating from her face at prayer could last over time.

      Her gaze turned to Lamdan himself. Wendy was suddenly embarrassed by the unnatural proximity to others inside the plane, seeing religious men so fervent, so close up. Lamdan looked sincere, binding himself in his tefillin. As he had departed with the Yiddish-speaking Hasid, he said to her, “I can’t study with them, but I can pray with them. That’s the most important thing.” She wasn’t sure quite what he meant. She wanted to connect it to what he said about his need to question the tradition, yet be nurtured by it. Critical in study, comforted in prayer; it seemed like a nice balance.

      The men at the front of the plane bound themselves in their leather straps, kissing the boxes, putting them on their heads, opening their prayer books, their expressions changing as they opened the books—she couldn’t tell exactly why or how. They all looked raw, exposed, like someone had rubbed off the outermost layer of skin, camouflaging true expression, and now their emotional selves were on public display. The face of a man about to come during sex came into her head. She tried to get rid of it—such a profane analogy—but she saw in the daveners the same fervor, concentration, rush of emotion—the total being in the moment so that nothing could intervene to break the focus. Usually during sex she kept her eyes closed, but sometimes she liked to see her partner’s face, to fathom who he was, what he wanted.

      These men did not expect to be watched. Lamdan didn’t glance her way once, his frail body encased in the group of men around him. As more men from other parts of the plane gathered, it was harder for her to see him. As she remained by Lamdan’s seat and stared at the men at prayer, she wondered what it was like to have that trancelike state, that connection to a higher power.

      “Dossim, what you want with them?” said the Israeli guy with the nose stud and tattoos who had been sitting in the row in front of her as he walked past on the way to the bathroom. He didn’t stay to hear her response. There were other people trying to get by her in the aisle. Finally the flight attendant with the breakfast cart needed to go by. Wendy was embarrassed both to be caught staring and to be in the way of so many people.

      Wendy returned to her seat and looked out the airplane’s small windows to see sunrise: lavish pink streaks extending across the sky, the glory of the sun only glancing out carefully through the clouds. The miniscule size of the airplane window only heightened the vastness of the vista. She was startled by the unexpected beauty; she wished she had her camera. She remembered something the photographer Diane Arbus wrote: “I really believe there are things nobody would see unless I photographed them.” That was the essence of what Wendy hoped to do this year: see fascinating and beautiful things, and help others see them by writing about them.

      What she’d said to Lamdan was true: this trip, her whole dissertation, almost didn’t happen. She came to her doctoral dissertation topic in a totally meandering way, completely by indirection. Her senior year in college, she needed a thesis topic and decided to write on the changes American life wrought on the practice of Buddhism. She loved the process of writing a longer research paper—the time for rumination and digestion of facts, the ability to take the time to consider and rearrange one’s work, the digging in books for nuggets of information that will encapsulate a thesis and provide it with the necessary verve and philosophical underpinnings. As an undergraduate, she had found her time in Columbia’s Butler Library thrilling, exhilarating even. Writing a thesis made her certain that graduate school was the right path.

      Doing the work of her senior thesis Wendy loved, but the topic itself, not so much. She felt apart from it, not quite invested in the why of its importance. She didn’t understand entirely the schisms that led to different strands of Buddhism—Mahayana versus Theravada—and the regions of the world where the religion was practiced. It just wasn’t her, she finally concluded, though she loved examining the impact of America on a religious group. Once finished, she had decided she would continue to work in the field of American religion, to be able to teach about the Shakers and Quakers, Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, and how individualism and democracy in America impacted religious identity. She almost went to study with a historian of American Judaism at Brandeis. When Wendy went up to Boston to meet him, he told her that he himself had trained not in Jewish studies, but in American history, and that he saw his work on the lives of Jews in America as a subset of American history. So, she decided to do the same and study Judaism within American religion at the best department in the field. She went to Princeton to work with Cliff Conrad. The work behind choosing a dissertation topic was how to put issues she found fascinating into a dissertation that would position her as a saleable commodity in the limited academic job market. This made her subject to the vagaries of hot topics that students would flock to take courses on, thus increasing departmental enrollment and clout within the university. Her dissertation topic needed to demonstrate her command and understanding of the field as well as establish a base for her future scholarly work. Wendy wanted to do a Jewish topic. It couldn’t require extensive Hebrew knowledge that she did not have, and it needed to equip her for positions in American religion, not Jewish studies. One day, complaining on the phone to Nina Distler, her best friend from growing up in Westchester, Nina said, “Debby. Write about her.”

      Nina’s sister Debby was now Devorah, morphed with a vowel shift from the casual English “e” to the Hebraic long “o,” from a tennis playing, roller-skating all-American kid, to a sheitel-wearing, Torah-studying mother of children with impossible-to-pronounce names. Yerachmiel Zvi was followed by Baila Bracha and Sheindel Menucha. In high school, Wendy had accompanied Nina for Shabbos in Crown Heights to help her

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