Michael nodded. “They did this with my Aryeh. Aryeh wanted to stay in yeshiva. Remember this, Suri? You remember?”
Suri nodded emphatically.
Aryeh, who’d been sitting quietly and observing the conversation, stopped smiling. Tall like Michael and Yossie, though thin and lithe like his mother, Aryeh had his father’s dark hair and coloring. But his personality and values shared little in common with the rest of his family. He couldn’t stand their preoccupation with money, or their ideas of what constituted success.
Aryeh had always wanted to be a “learning boy.” He wanted to sit and study the Talmud full-time for the rest of his life. He was willing to undertake a life of hardship — of poverty, even — if that meant he could study his beloved Torah, the passion of his life. The truths, the intellectual rigor, and the close relationship he felt with God — all those appealed to him like nothing else did. True, there were guys “warming the bench,” sitting in yeshiva for their reputations. To get a rich girl, a good match. But that didn’t negate the truth of the Torah, the joy and happiness he felt from learning. Rachel realized that Aryeh, too, had his passion.
But the Kaufmans had their own views about the system and their own decisions about Aryeh’s future, and Aryeh did what was expected of him. He had graduated from Touro College with high honors and a degree in accounting and business. He worked now as an accountant in the Manhattan import and export company owned by Harry Green, and Rachel wondered if he had overheard any part of the heated conversation about his boss. Aryeh could have been at a Big Six accounting firm, making double his salary — though at double the hours. No! He’d refused the fancy job offers because he didn’t want to be owned by a company. Now his parents were pressuring him to go to law school and join the family practice, and so far he had refused. If he couldn’t be a scholar and had to work to support a family, that was one thing. But to devote three more years to school instead of learning Torah was another.
The maid circled the table, clearing dirty plates, pouring water for the company.
Michael cleared his throat. “I tell you, Abe, it’s all the fault of you Litvaks. The Litvishe rabbis spread their cold elitism to the masses.”
“What are you talking about?” Abe demanded vehemently. “Thousands of young men sitting in yeshiva, not preparing for a career, is not a Litvishe approach! It’s the Hungarians who changed the style.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What? Communal pressure pushes this lifestyle, even though it can’t support itself. The girls go out to work at some garbage job to support the husbands’ learning, and babysitters raise the kids. This is Jewish? This is ethics and values?”
Michael raised his voice. “These pious kids get to sit and learn, and they look down on us lawyers. While we working men are the ones who support them! I’d love to sit and learn and have someone support me!”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Do we have to go through this discussion again?”
Really, what was to discuss? She knew what each person had to say; she could probably repeat the whole dialogue without even being there. She wished she could have a conversation with someone who was open to ideas, open to changing his opinion if swayed by a good argument. But she also knew she could keep dreaming. She’d never yet met a person like that in Brooklyn.
Debby cut the tension. “I’m getting a headache from you lawyers arguing even when you all agree. We should be getting back. I have lunch warming on the stove.”
Abe acquiesced. “Sure, Debby, we should be getting back.” He smiled at Suri. “Thanks so much for your lovely kiddush, Suri. Delicious as always.”
Michael retrieved their coats amidst farewells, and the Shines walked home.
Hindy lifted her brush from the old dresser she shared with three other sisters. Sometimes she fantasized that she was already married and had her own dresser that she didn’t have to share with anyone. But she quickly pushed that thought out of her mind, as she wasn’t one to dream. She glanced at her sturdy Timex watch, the one she had bought herself with her first paycheck three years before. It was nearly time for her Shabbos visit to the hospital.
As she brushed her hair, Hindy glanced at the initials embedded in her brush — H.B. — the same as the ancestor she was named for.
She didn’t have it easy. Maybe the bad luck comes from the name. She sighed. With each stroke of the brush, Hindy thought of the story her mother had recounted about her namesake.
• • •
It was the late 1800s and Hinda Bracha was in love. The only daughter of a Hassidic rebbe, Hinda was betrothed to a
misnaged
, a learned, pious man named Avram who opposed Hassidic philosophy and practice. Avram believed in the Law, not an emotional approach to connecting to God.
Hinda’s father was impressed with Avram, his learning and observance, and the shidduch was approved. They married, and though the first year of marriage is known to be difficult, for Hinda and Avram it was bliss. They loved each other, and that was all that mattered.
Shortly after the birth of their baby girl, the troubles started. Avram, the Hassidim said, was using perfumed soap in the mikveh, the ritual bath. The Hassidim did not approve.
“If the Law allows it, then so do I,” Avram insisted.
They took the matter to their rebbe. “Rebbe, Avram mocks our ways. In public. It is so disrespectful. It is not
frum
! It is not done!”
The rebbe sided with his son-in-law. The Hassidim still did not approve. They picked fights with Avram, roughhoused him.
Avram would not change. “I follow the Law. Not emotional nonsense.”
The Hassidim had had enough. “Divorce him,” they warned Hinda Bracha, “or he will pay.” Avram, the logical man of Law, did not recognize the extent of the danger he was in from the Hassidim, who felt disrespected.
Hinda’s father found him one morning in the mikveh, lying naked on the cold tiled floor, beaten senseless.
He would talk to his Hassidim, but he knew them well, too. Avram was not a Hassid. He did not belong.
“Divorce him,” the rebbe sadly commanded his daughter. He knew this was the only way to save Avram’s life.
Hinda cried as her little girl played on her lap. She couldn’t have it all. She couldn’t live a Hassidic life with a husband who so blatantly did not keep the community standards. He wasn’t frum enough. He would never fit in.
If she went away with Avram, she would have to give up her family, her community, her way of life. The only life she’d ever known.
Or she could stay in her community and be safe, her life orderly and neatly planned.
When Avram came home from the mikveh beaten, Hinda implored him to stop using the perfumed soap. He would not back down from what he saw was the bastardization of the Law. “Extra laws are as dangerous to the Torah as not keeping the laws,” he insisted.
Hinda realized that this attitude would get him killed, so she did it: She asked him for a
get
. A divorce. Avram begged her to come away with him from that crazy shtetl, to make a new life for themselves in America.
The story should have had a happy ending.
But Hinda Bracha would not leave everything she knew for an unfamiliar place, especially such a distant and dangerous place as America. She’d heard all the stories of pious Jews who had thrown off their religion the minute they got off the boat in America. No, she would not leave her Hassidim.
With a heart as heavy as a sack of stones, Avram granted her a divorce and left. He wrote to her from America. He’d gotten a position as a rabbi in Chicago. But he wasn’t as
frum
as her own people, so to her he was a nothing.
In all his letters, he begged Hinda to join him. His love for her never waned.
But she would not come.
Eventually she remarried a Hassid in the community. When he heard the news, Avram remarried as well.
Yet, until his dying day, he wrote letters to his daughter, though he knew Hinda Bracha wouldn’t let their child read them. It wasn’t until Hinda herself was on her deathbed that she told her oldest child about her real father, and about the letters — the letters that Hinda hadn’t let her see, that she’d saved for the right time.
Hinda and Avram’s daughter finally understood how much she had been loved, and she also understood the pressures of conforming to community standards. Standards in the name of religion that had little to do with religion at all.
When she was old enough, she left for America with the hope of reuniting with her father. By the time she got there, he was long dead.
• • •
After Shabbos lunch, Hindy retrieved Leah and Rachel for the short walk to the hospital. Two young men in black hats and suits approached from the other direction. The boys and girls lowered their eyes as they passed each other on the sidewalk, pretending out of modesty that the other did not exist. The strong smell of
Drakkar
mingled briefly with the girls’
Paris
and
Poison
and then wafted away.
“Very cute,” Leah whispered to Hindy, who giggled as the boys turned their heads to glimpse at the girls in their wake.
At the hospital they made their rounds, visiting the sick and making sure to stop in to see Mrs. Gruen in room 203. In her eighties, frail Mrs. Gruen was a regular patient at the hospital; she had diabetes and a sweet tooth, but no willpower.
The older woman lay in bed, her arm hooked up to an IV. “God bless you, girls. It’s good to see you!” she said. “Come meet my new friend.”
The girls walked over to the next bed and chatted amiably with another elderly woman.
“Can I get you something to eat?” The white-haired woman offered the girls some of her petrified lunch.
The girls shook their heads, not a bit too obviously.
“I’m sorry I have nothing tastier to offer you,” she said.
“Please, we came to visit you,” Hindy said gently, and then asked the woman why she hadn’t touched her lunch.
“I don’t know. I’m just not hungry,” the woman sighed.
Hindy nudged sweetly. “Let me feed you.”
“I think the older one gets, the less one needs to eat,” the woman said. “But such a nice girl you are! All of you, lovely
kallah maidels
.”
The girls blushed.
“You are looking to get married, I hope? I have such fine boys from my husband’s yeshiva looking for such nice girls like you.”
“Which yeshiva?” Hindy asked.
“Kaplinsky’s. You’ve heard of it?”
Who hadn’t?
Rachel cleared her throat. “Are you Rebbitzen Kaplinsky?”
The lady smiled. “I am.”
After the initial feeling of awe, the girls felt touched and honored that someone of Rebbitzen Kaplinsky’s stature would deem them worthy of matches. And that she would be the go-between — from her hospital bed, no less.
Hindy happily told the rebbitzen how to find her number, and after some conversation, Hindy, Leah, and Rachel walked home.
• • •
As the sun began to set, Rachel walked quietly up the stairs to her narrow white wooden house. Soon the sun would drop below the horizon, heralding the end of the most spiritual twenty-four hours in existence. She stopped for a moment, noticing the red-and-green-hued leaves spilling over into the front garden … the smells so intense and vivid … the colors so vibrant and real … and the gentle light of the receding sun illuminating the sky.
Such a beautiful world God created,
she thought.
So alive.
It took a lot of discipline for her to keep the commandments. The changing of seasons, the rising and setting of sun and moon — everything in Judaism was centered around time. And she wasn’t too great with time. But she liked that the religion didn’t call for asceticism to get close to God. Instead, it was about being in tune with nature; it was about balance. In the appropriate situation, everything in life had its proper time and place. All the laws she lived by elevated the most mundane actions to a spiritual existence. This made her feel complete and happy.
Well, almost complete and happy. The religion was about balance — but her community was anything but. She had a natural, emotional need to find her mate, but the accompanying pressure was not natural. It was insane. What good could come of it, to have all that pressure to get married? As if she, or anyone, wanted to be alone? And yet, she thought about her friends from FIT, who felt no pressure to marry. Would they marry?
“Hi, I’m back! Anything to eat?” Rachel called out, as she walked through the front door.
Ma sat at the dining room table, daintily eating chopped tuna salad on matzo, which she had for the third and last meal of every Shabbos.
“Boy, you cut it close. Shabbos is almost over,” Ma said between bites.
Rachel quickly washed her hands and joined Ma. “Mm … good. We met Rebbitzen Kaplinsky today in Orthopedics, so we stayed a little longer than usual.”
“
The
Rebbitzen Kaplinsky from the famous Kaplinsky Yeshiva?” Ma stopped eating and stared cautiously at Rachel.
“Mmm-hmm,” Rachel answered, her mouth full. “Love the onions. Great tuna, Ma.”
“Did the rebbitzen say anything to you?” Ma carefully watched Rachel’s face.
“Yep. She wanted to set us all up on dates.”
“So what did you say?”
“I said I’m seeing someone.”
Ma grated her teeth anxiously. “You said no to a match from Rebbitzen Kaplinsky?
The
Alter Rebbitzen Kaplinsky of
Kaplinsky’s Yeshiva
?”
“What else should I have said, Ma?”
“But you aren’t engaged yet. You’re still a free agent.”
“What?” Rachel frowned, devouring the rest of her sandwich.
“You turn down a match from the esteemed rebbitzen — this boy you are seeing better be serious. After all, you don’t throw away opportunities.”
“Ma, it would be way too confusing to see somebody else besides Daniel Gold now.”
“True, he’s a good catch,” Ma said. “But what if you keep company with this boy and for whatever reason you don’t marry? You’re wasting precious time. If you wait too long, who’ll want you?”