Swimming Across the Hudson (14 page)

Tara too was receptive to the experiment, perhaps because these rituals seemed exotic to her. I'd shown her the mezuzah I'd bought, along with the Hebrew text to be inserted in it. She'd pretended to read the Hebrew, babbling in a foreign accent, making nonsense guttural sounds.

I gave Jenny a book about sabbath observance, and explained to her the origins of the sabbath—that the Israelites, when wandering through the desert, were commanded by God to rest on the seventh day, that God Himself had rested on the seventh day after creating the world. The Israelites had worked on the tabernacle in the desert, and the sabbath prohibitions were related to that work. Thirty-nine types of work done in the tabernacle were forbidden to Jews on the sabbath, as were all the corollaries to those types of work.

“What about turning electricity on and off?” Jenny asked. “They didn't even have electricity back then.”

She was right, I said. But the prohibition against electricity was part of the larger prohibition against work. I told her it was forbidden to carry anything on public property; you couldn't even wheel a baby carriage. Some men “wore” their keys by turning them into tie clips. I described the concept of
eruv
. If you were able to enclose public property—with a wall or even a piece of string—and if that enclosure complied with certain laws, then public property became private. My freshman year at Yale, several Jews had “purchased” Old Campus for a dollar so that they could carry on it. Even the
eruv
around Manhattan was accepted by some Orthodox Jews. Manhattan was an island, after all. It was surrounded by water.

“That sounds like a loophole,” Jenny said. “What's the point of observing the sabbath if everyone's looking for ways to get around it?”

There was the letter of the law, I said, and the spirit of the law. Everything depended on the reason behind it. If you could find a loophole in a law in order more fully to observe the sabbath, then why not use it? My father had put the lights on a timer so that they were on when we were awake and off when we were asleep; that way we wouldn't have to sit in the dark. But he refused to use a timer for the stereo or TV. “There are loopholes,” I told Jenny, “and then there are loopholes.”

“What about the
shabbes goy
?” Jenny was fascinated by the idea that Jews could ask non-Jews to do work for them. What was the difference between doing work yourself and having someone else do it for you?

If you had a non-Jew purchase clothes for you, I said, if you had that person turn on the TV or CD player, then you surely weren't adhering to the spirit of the sabbath. But there were good reasons to use a
shabbes goy
.

“Like what?”

“To wheel your infant to synagogue.”

“I don't see the difference,” Jenny said. “If you're asking someone to do work for you, you might as well do it yourself. And what difference does it make if the person's not Jewish?”

“Jews are commanded to observe the sabbath. If you ask a Jew to break the sabbath you're getting that person to sin.”

“You believe that?”

“No. But this isn't about what I believe.”

“What's it about, then? And how about your father? Lots of his colleagues must be secular Jews. Does he think of them as sinners?
Would he ask me to turn off a light on the sabbath, but not one of them?”

“Jen,” I said, “I can't explain my father. He probably can't explain himself either. But yes, that's what he'd probably do.”

She read the books I'd given her and asked me questions when she didn't understand. I did my best to answer her. I'm not a rabbi. I have a good memory, but I've forgotten some things over the years. She took seriously this crash course in Judaism, but she was also ironic about it. She became a fount of hypothetical questions, rivaling my philosophy professors at Yale, rivaling the rabbis of the Talmud in her pursuit of counterfactuals.

“Let's say you wake up,” she said, “and you're riding in a taxi on the sabbath.”

“How's that possible?”

“What if you're on the way home from work and you get stuck in a traffic jam and it gets dark?”

“Then you get out and walk.”

“What if you're in an airplane?”

“Are you asking me if you jump?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. “No, Jen, you don't jump.”

She was curious about Judaism, but she's a curious person. She'd be as interested in learning Hindu practices or in picking up a few words of Swahili. Perhaps if I'd talked more about these rituals when we'd met, what was happening now would have made sense to her. But my interest was sudden—related, she suspected, to my having met Susan. On her mother's side, Jenny's family could be traced back to the
Mayflower
. But we didn't reenact early American rituals. Jenny didn't dress up as a Pilgrim.

Still, she looked forward to our sabbath meal. I wrote out the blessings over the wine and challah in transliterated Hebrew. I did the same for a couple of sabbath songs, and taught them to her and Tara.

The day of our sabbath meal, I came home after school and cooked. I showered and put on a dress shirt and slacks. Jenny and Tara had showered too, and were wearing skirts and blouses. Jenny had on a touch of makeup.

“You two look beautiful,” I said. I kissed them each on the cheek.

Jenny said the blessing on the sabbath candles, placing her hands over her eyes and repeating the Hebrew words after me.

We sat down at the table, where I recited the kiddush. Between courses, we sang the songs I'd transliterated. Jenny and Tara caught on quickly to the tunes. It reminded me of Friday nights when I was younger, when I knew there was nothing else I could do besides sit and spend time with my family.

“This is nice,” Jenny said.

I agreed. “You don't even have to think of it as religious.” I wasn't sure whom I was saying this for—Jenny, Tara, or myself.

“It kind of
is
religious,” Tara said.

“But you don't have to be religious to participate,” I said. “And it's only a small part of the meal. It's really just a chance to think.”

“Are you becoming religious?” Tara asked me. She looked down at the transliterated Hebrew.

“Not really.”

“Because I like you the way you are. Most of the time. And it's my home. I was here a long time before you.”

“That's true.”

“So you can't just show up and change things.”

Jenny rested her hand on Tara's arm. “Ben and I asked you if it was okay if we did this.”

Tara didn't respond.

“And you agreed. We wouldn't have had this meal if you didn't want us to.”

“This better not be the beginning of something else.”

“Like what?” Jenny asked.

“Whatever religious people do. Sacrificing animals.”

I laughed. “There will be no animal sacrifices. I can promise you that.”

“And I'm not interested in being a Jew.”

“No one's asking you to be one,” Jenny said.

“Or a Christian either.”

“Or a Christian.”

“Or a Jew for Jesus, or anything, Mom.”

“What did you think?” I asked Jenny when we were doing the dishes.

“I liked it. It felt festive.”

“Jen—if, hypothetically, I asked you to convert, would you consider it?”

“Why, hypothetically, might you ask me to do that?”

“You know what I mean. If we were going to stay together for a while—maybe even forever.”

“You mean get married?”

“Sure.”

“Say the word ‘marriage,' Ben. It isn't going to kill you. It's not like I'm pressuring you to marry me. God knows we have things to work out.”

“All right,” I said, “what if we got married? Would you think about converting?” If Jenny had been Jewish, we'd have avoided some of the controversy we had that night. I'd also have avoided disappointing my parents. But I couldn't live for my parents. It was unreasonable to ask Jenny to convert for them, especially since they'd made little effort to get to know her. Converting would make things easier for our children. They Wouldn't be confused about who they were. But Jenny and I hadn't even discussed children. Who knew whether we wanted to have them? I could have asked her to
convert for me—I
was
asking her, wasn't I?—because Judaism was important to me. But why did it have to be important to her too? We were different in many ways; you don't look for a clone in a lover. Perhaps religion was an excuse to avoid contemplating the future. I was still spinning my wheels, convinced more than ever that something had to happen before I could think in those terms. Maybe this too was an excuse, and I was suffering from something as banal as an inability to commit.

“You heard what Tara said. She's not interested in being Jewish.”

“I'm not talking about Tara. I'm talking about us, Jen—you and me.”

“I'm talking about us too. Really, Ben, think about it. You wouldn't want me to go through a sham conversion just to make things easier. I'm not religious, and I never will be. And I didn't grow up with Jewish culture, so I'll never be Jewish in that way. I liked dinner tonight. I'd be glad to do it again. But I'm interested in it because of you—because you said it was part of who you are.”

“Well, it is.”

“And that's enough of a reason for me. But it's your religion and your culture, not mine. Nothing's going to change that.”

 

J
enny had more pressing things on her mind than the question of converting to Judaism. She'd been a public defender for six years and was busier than before at work. She'd gone from working on misdemeanors to defending felony criminals, many of them violent. She'd gained respect in her office, winning cases no one thought she could win, plea-bargaining successfully on numerous occasions so that her clients were given probation or short sentences when they had expected to spend years in jail.

I was struck by her aplomb. She was always professional, never grandstanding, simply doing her job. Jenny is calm when most people wouldn't be—when I, certainly, wouldn't be.

But when I came home one evening at the end of May, I found her sprawled across our bed, looking anything but calm.

“What's wrong?”

“I got assigned a rape case.”

“So?”

“Ben, I'm going to be defending a rapist.”

“An alleged rapist, you mean.”
Alleged
was Jenny's favorite word. She could cite examples of forced confession, police brutality, and tampered evidence; jurors sometimes followed their prejudices and disregarded the orders of the judge. She could list the names of people who had been wrongfully convicted—defendants later proven innocent, some of them too late, they'd already been executed. At her insistence, we'd rented
A Thin Blue Line
, even though I'd already
seen it once and she'd seen it three times. She stopped the tape again and again, pointing to the ways the state used its power, all the forces aligned against the suspect.

Through a combination of luck and careful maneuvering, she'd avoided getting assigned any rape cases. But now that she had risen within the office, it had become simply a matter of time. She told me she'd considered trying to get off the case, but how could she justify doing that? She hadn't been raped. If she had, she might have been more eager to take on the case, to prove that she'd overcome what had happened to her.

“I met him today,” she said, “and he gave me the creeps.”

“The creeps?” This didn't sound like her.

“When I saw the guy leering at me, all I could think was, Get me off this case—I don't want to have anything to do with you.” Jenny was doing laps around the room, cogitating, ruminating, like a basketball coach, not knowing where to direct her energy. “I kept thinking, Your fingerprints match, you don't have an alibi, and the semen's at the lab and I have no doubt it will match. Just cop a plea. Don't sully me with this.”