Questioning Return - Beth Kissileff

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had persisted, his career ascending with that of his advisor, Sydney Ahlstrom, one of the first to examine a trajectory of American religion as a central part of American culture. In the course of his career, Conrad had worked with documents ranging from Puritan diaries in his own dissertation, to New Age religious narratives in which people experience some kind of sudden revelation that enables them to change their lives and, in the process, earn gobs of money with a bestseller about the experience. Conrad’s interest in these New Age narratives stemmed from his sense of them as part of the continuity of American religious expression and ideology of selfhood that has made America unique. Conrad had never looked at any non-Christian narratives; he was excited about Wendy’s project because it built on his own work and extended its reach by venturing forth to unknown Jewish territory. It didn’t hurt Wendy’s chances for future academic success that Conrad was known across the country. Her primary advisor had even reached the pinnacle of success for a public intellectual—he had been a guest on daytime television talk shows that he and his peers in the academy are aware of but never admit to watching.

      Wendy lifted a third book from her shelf. Entitled, primly, Meaning in the Field, she had been told it was required reading by her anthropologist adviser, Violet Dohrmann. It was about the trickiness of the researcher adjusting her or his relations with subjects to a comfortable and appropriate level. One wants to be absorbed with a culture, but not to the dreaded extent of going native. Dohrmann had told her, “Immerse yourself in your host culture; you will be changed by it too, if you do your fieldwork properly. Yet, your hosts, particularly the community of Israeli returnees, may not always recognize your outsider status. They are always on the lookout for another recruit.” Then Dohrmann had told Wendy about her niece Ellen, raised in a good secular Jewish household and educated at Smith like Violet and her sister. Her niece went around the world on a spiritual sojourn in the early seventies, arrived in Israel, and became a religious Jew. It was the first personal information Dohrmann had ever volunteered to Wendy. That was the funny thing about this line of research, Wendy mused: it always seemed to elicit much more personal reactions, from questioner and respondent, than the average discussion of academic research.

      Wendy started reading, figuring it would be good preparation for her first Sabbath, learning to immerse herself in the lives of religious people, at least for one Friday night dinner.

       THREE

       Sabbath Peace

      As much as the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.

      —AHAD HA-AM

      An hour before the Sabbath, Wendy and her elderly landlady, Amalia Hausman, hailed a cab at the nearest bus stop and headed to the apartment of Amalia’s granddaughter and her new husband. After they climbed the three flights slowly, at the apartment’s door Shani, the granddaughter, and her new husband, Asher, greeted them. Asher took Amalia’s bag to the spare bedroom, and Wendy handed Shani the bakery packages of assorted cookies and the elaborate cake with ornate sugared confections on top, tiers of cake and parve cream within, that she had procured from the winding alleys of Mahane Yehuda.

      “You asked me to bring whatever makes Shabbos for me, so I have desserts here,” Wendy uttered cheerfully. Nothing had ever “made Shabbos” for Wendy, but she figured that any dinner could be worth sitting through if there were good pastry at its conclusion.

      Shani squealed, “Oh, Wendy, Marzipan Bakery,” reading the name on the boxes. “Did my cousin Leora tell you it’s my favorite?”

      “I spotted the bakery with the longest line, and figured,” she shrugged her shoulders, “it must be the best.”

      Shani carefully positioned the boxes, along with the homemade gefilte fish Amalia brought, on the counter of her tiny kitchen. Asher excused himself to take a shower, while Shani scuttled around the apartment, turning on and off lights, asking her grandmother what else she should remember, plugging timers and appliances in, pulling electric cords out.

      Wendy and Amalia were put to work setting the table. Wendy stretched out the white cloth while Amalia tugged the other end. They arranged the apparatus of ingestion: plates, cups, forks, knives, spoons, napkins, Kiddush cups, salt, challah board, and cutting knife. All was arrayed for the eight people who would just about fit into the space.

      Wendy walked around, laying a plate here, a napkin there, counting to be sure there was enough of everything. The rhythmic repetitiveness of this task, the assurance that there was a place for each person, felt soothing as she placed the items around the table. She felt recaptured by pleasant childhood memories, since table setting had long been marked as Wendy’s chore, a good task for the youngest in her family. She remembered Friday afternoons of her youth when she and her mother set the table together before her brother Joel, sister Lisa, and father Arthur returned from school and work. These moments provided an intimacy for Sylvia and Wendy to talk, quietly, peaceably. The week over, setting the table delivered them to the relaxed zone of weekend time, unfettered them temporarily from the tensions and constraints of the week. Wendy felt nostalgic for those Friday evenings of her youth. I should have called my parents earlier today, when it was early morning for them and they were still home, she thought, reflecting on her own youth and home as she readied that of someone else for family togetherness. Other than calling them after her arrival, Wendy hadn’t given much thought to her family, busy as she was preparing herself for her new life, figuring out what things she would need to be comfortable in this new country. Something about the onset of the Sabbath tugged at even her frayed and dispassionate feelings about her parents. It wasn’t—Wendy thought, noting how Shani looked so pleased to see her grandmother, as she came in to inspect their work on the table—that she didn’t love her parents; she did. It was that she wanted them to be people other than who they were, people who were more thoughtful and intellectual, who had opinions on things, who read the New Yorker for the writing and stories as she did, not for the gossipy, short Talk of the Town pieces, cultural listings, and cartoons. Wendy wanted them to love her for who she was and wanted to be, and it seemed currently that she was in the business of disappointing them mightily, ever since she announced that her grad school applications would be in the field of religion and not law. Wendy saw Shani hug her grandmother and speak to her in Hebrew, and so remained lost in her thoughts about whether, even though she missed her parents now, they would ever change their disapproving attitude enough to allow her to feel closer to them.

      Asher came out of the bedroom, cleanly shaven, dressed in the Israeli male Shabbat uniform of white short-sleeved button-down shirt, black pants, sandals, and white crocheted kipah with a navy and turquoise-blue diamond pattern around its rim.

      “Haven’t you benched licht already, Shani?” Asher said, looking at his watch. He steered the three women to the living room corner where a small table covered by a white cotton runner with a lace embellishment held two sets of candlesticks. A third set was quickly produced. Before Wendy had time to protest, Shani said, “We’ll each light and then say the bracha together.” Wendy’s impulse was to put her hands in her pockets, step away, and disengage, but the skirt Shani asked her to wear lacked a place to hide her hands. Wendy stood behind as first Amalia and then Shani lit their candles. Shani handed her a kindled match, blazing.

      Holding the ignited match, Wendy stepped forward to place it on the wicks. It felt so ordinary, holding flame to wick. She remembered reading an interview in a piece she admired about the symbolism of Sabbath candles to the newly religious, which juxtaposed what women said when asked to speak about their religious observances in an essay written expressly for the school they were attending, and afterwards in a follow-up interview with the sociologist. One returnee spoke in her essay of the magic of lighting Shabbes candles: that the candle detonated an explosion of the sacred into her home. The woman said she felt like a superhero action figure. Wendy had made up a title for her, Wonder Woman of the Numinous, as she herself merely put the candle to the flame, no supernal power summoned. The whole account, written for the school in the

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