“Oh, I’ll just die if he talks to us! What will we do?! What if somebody sees and tells our parents or one of our teachers!” Tamar said in a whispered shriek.
“Let’s just go… run!” Jenny suggested.
With an abrupt about-face, they turned and took off at a pace that caused the staid matrons of Orchard Park to wrinkle their noses, bunch their mouths and shake their heads in disapproval.
Turning the corner, they sat down on the steps of Temple
Emanuel, trying to catch their breath, to control their hysterical panicked giggling.
“What if he catches up?” Tamar asked anxiously.
“We could always go inside,” Jenny suggested.
They looked up at the imposing doors of the Reform synagogue. Built in the early twenties to serve German Jewish immigrants who wanted above all else not to offend the gentiles, to put the word
respectable
in front of the word
Jew
, it was now a shameful oddity with a dwindling congregation in Orchard Park, where Hasidim proudly wore their dark coats and long
payot
and spoke to each other in Yiddish, totally contemptuous of outside opinions.
The girls had heard of, but had never dared see for themselves, the synagogue where men and women sat next to each other in the pews instead of decently separated by partitions; where an organ played music, desecrating the Sabbath; and where a beardless rabbi wore priestly robes and spoke in unaccented English.
“We couldn’t hide in
there!
” Tamar protested, scandalized. “What if someone saw us?”
“So what?” Hadassah countered.
“What if your father found out?” Tartar asked. “Aren’t you scared?”
“He won’t,” she answered confidently. “And I can always say I didn’t know it was off limits, that I’m sorry.” Her face fell easily into an oft used, well-practiced “I’m-a-good-girl-and-it-wasn’t-my-fault” mode, lower teeth biting upper lip, eyes crinkling prettily with worry.
The other two stared at her, impressed.
“I don’t know how you can lie to your father,” Tamar said in amazement. ‘ “Honor your father and mother so you’ll live a long life.’ That’s what the Torah says.”
She hugged her knees. At the moment, she wanted to live
a very long life. The world was such a beautiful place, full of such interesting things to see and do, new people to meet on every corner, the trees all budding, the flowers sweet! G-d had arranged everything in the world so pleasantly for those who followed his commandments. She wanted to live forever! Forever. Always in His protective shadow.
She settled her skirts modestly around her until they practically covered her ankles. She liked the pretty new dress, even though it was homemade and the material was an inexpensive cotton that didn’t stand out half as far as Hadassah’s taffeta or Jenny’s blue sateen. At an abrupt point years past, Jenny had suddenly started wearing the loveliest clothes. She wondered again how her poor widowed mother managed it.
She tried not to be jealous. For some time now, her own mother had been scouring cheaper and cheaper stores for bargains to clothe her and Rivkie. For reasons her parents never discussed, money had long ceased to be that comfortable, taken-for-granted commodity that graced their lives with small luxuries.
But as she rested her chin on her kneetops, taking pleasure from the firmness of her own young bones, her joy stirred again. Nothing bothered her for long. She was in love with being alive. She felt well and happy in the knowledge that she was on the edge of womanhood, time sweeping her down like a white river rapid toward some fearsomely sweet embankment. Only the other day she had taken her dolls out to play and had held them at arm’s length, puzzled that they had suddenly, without warning, turned into heavy, lifeless plastic. With a sense of frightening finality, she’d tossed them back onto her closet floor.
I’m such a pretty girl, she thought secretly, the knowledge of those soft breasts, growing like sweet new fruits beneath her childish dresses suddenly filling her with deep pride and pleasure. I like myself, I really do, she thought.
‘ “Honor your father and mother’! There’s a verse for
everything!” Hadassah complained, stretching out her legs and examining her new white shoes, bought for Passover a month before. They had the tiniest heels, but enough to make all the other girls long with envy for the day their own parents would allow them to pass over the line from flats to heels, a passage as pivotal as any Bar Mitzvah.
Their own coming of age—that is, the legal age when the Torah and the community would hold them responsible for their own sins—was months away. They expected it to come and go with little fuss. A girl’s Bas Mitzvah was a year earlier than a boy’s and was routinely ignored. The boys, in contrast, got to stand before the entire congregation and read the Torah portion, to feel candies and mazel tovs rain down upon their heads, to dance to real bands and reap a cornucopia of gifts in noisy, crowded, expensive affairs held in catering halls.
This discrepancy was barely noticed by most religious Jewish girls, American feminism being years away from pointing it out to them. Their wedding would be their true coming-of-age celebration, as well as the first and last time they would be in the public eye.
“I don’t see what you’re making such a big
tsimmes
about,” Hadassah pointed out. “After all, we’re not going in to pray, just to hide, or maybe to look around. I mean, it’s not like going into a church or worshiping idols, or anything.”
“I don’t think we should,” Tamar said, shaking her head vehemently.
But just as the words came out of her mouth, a familiar acne-covered face turned the corner, his eyes seeking them out.
“Would you rather people see us talking to a boy? Come on!” Hadassah giggled, running up the steps and into the synagogue. Jenny and a reluctant Tamar followed close behind.
It was almost deserted, and except for the scuffing of their own measured footsteps, absolutely silent.
“Let’s go into the shul part,” Hadassah suggested.
“All right,” Jenny agreed.
“Really, I don’t think my
tateh
would like…” Tamar protested weakly.
“Tamar, don’t be such a baby!” Hadassah scolded her.
Not wanting to go home by herself when “a boy” was out there somewhere, Tamar reluctantly followed them.
The synagogue, with its enormous stained-glass windows and upholstered benches of polished oak, was a striking contrast to the
shteibels
Tamar prayed in—crowded, makeshift prayer groups set up in the living rooms and dens of local homes.
The girls stared at the muted colors of the filtered light, the lovely golden sheen of the oaken pews. They walked up the aisle toward the beautiful ark that held the Torah scrolls.
“Could you imagine sitting here and davening?” Jenny asked. “I mean, it’s so quiet, and you could see everything…”
“I wouldn’t want to see what they do in a place like this!” Tamar said, piously resisting the temptation to be impressed by its beauty. “Just look at this siddur!” she gasped, scandalized, holding up a prayer book. “It’s all in English! And all the prayers are changed. It sounds so
goyische
. I wonder if they’ve changed their Torahs, too?!”
“I’m sure the Torahs are the same. Nobody would dare do that! I’d love to open the ark and kiss one!” Jenny exclaimed.
“Why would you want to do that?” Hadassah gasped, flabbergasted. “Besides, girls aren’t allowed to touch the ark or the Torahs.” Her voice took on an uncharacteristic tone of haughty piety.
“You’re so funny, Hadassah! One minute you’re leading us up the steps and telling us how you’ll lie to your father, and the next you’re preaching to us like some
tzdakis
,” Jenny said puzzled, but without malice.
Hadassah went scarlet. “I’m not a
tzdakis!
I just don’t know
why you’d want to… I mean, I live right on top of my father’s synagogue. I could do it any time. But why would I?”
“Why not?” Jenny challenged her. “Aren’t girls worthy enough to touch the ark, to kiss the Torah, the way the men do? Why do we always have to be closed off from it, to be kept so far away? Where’s it written?” she demanded.
They stared at her speechlessly. Jenny was always taking them by surprise, questioning things they both took for granted.
For Tamar, who accepted her religion and enjoyed it the way a French child accepts wine instead of milk with his meals, this attitude made no sense. Religion was like breathing, she thought. It was not something to question. It was something to get used to, to accept blindly. Seeing how things were done in her family and community was enough. There was no point in asking the why of any of their practices. If she did, there would always be some long, involved explanation that would bore her to tears. You either did what you were supposed to or you secretly, guiltily, didn’t.
“I don’t know where it’s written, but everybody knows a girl can’t go near the ark or touch the Torah.”
“You don’t mean touch,” Tamar corrected her. “My mother always kisses her pinkie, then sticks it through the partition to touch the Torah when it passes by…”
“Okay. But I mean to hold it, like with both hands, like a man, or to go up to the ark and stand there…”
“I always did when I was little,” Tamar remembered.
“Well, that’s when you were a baby, so it doesn’t count,” Hadassah hedged, uncomfortable in her sudden role as religious mentor. She was much happier being the bad girl and having the others lecture her. But somehow the idea of going up to the ark and touching the Torah appalled her in a way she couldn’t explain.
“It was so nice! I used to sit on my father’s lap during the whole davening… until I was five or six,” Tamar remembered
wistfully, recalling those lovely days of being only touching distance away from the Torah scrolls, of hearing the voice of the hazan so easily and seeing her father’s face so clearly. Now, banished to the women’s section, however she craned her neck and drew aside the curtains, she could only catch a pale glimpse of those glories for which she had once had a front row seat.
“Well, if you can’t tell me where it says you can’t, then I’m going to do it,” Jenny informed them, taking long, deliberate steps down the aisle toward the ark.
“You shouldn’t! What if Hadassah’s right? G-d might punish you!” Tamar wrung her hands. But Hadassah only watched, a strange look of fear and puzzlement on her face.
Jenny walked to the end, climbing the steep carpeted steps until she reached the platform that held the imposing, gilt-framed ark. She pulled back the gold-embroidered velvet curtain, sliding open the wooden doors. Inside, it shone like a precious treasure hoard, light bursting from the silver-and-gold ornaments, burning against the scarlet-and-green velvet scroll covers. The faint light of the eternal lamp that swung gently above cast strange shadows along the inner walls. She clasped the nearest scroll, hugging it to her. It felt warm and good, almost human in her arms. Again and again she kissed it.
Hadassah watched, feeling a sudden ache as a flood of poignant memories washed over her: following her father up to the
bimah
as he lifted the Torah before the congregation; burying her face in his tallis, feeling the tickle of the fringes over her cheeks. She couldn’t have been more than a tiny child of three or four. By the time she was in kindergarten, she had already been banished to the women’s section. And the more she grew toward womanhood, the more he continued to distance himself from her, as if growth itself were somehow tainting.
“It’s so beautiful! Why don’t you both come closer?”
Hadassah shook her head vehemently.
Tamar, on the other hand, found herself stumbling slowly down the long aisle, propelled by something she couldn’t explain. She climbed the steps in a dream, her heart pounding as she neared the holy ark she had seen only from a distance for so many years. As she climbed the steps, her face grew hot.
She stared inside the open ark. It was like nothing she had ever seen or even imagined. It was not just the ornamentation. It was the idea of approaching the holiest of holies, the spot on earth closest to G-d. This idea made her tremble.
“Go on. Hold one!” Jenny smiled encouragingly.
She felt her body freeze. She was just a girl. What right did she have to put her arms around such a holy object? But then she remembered Simchat Torah, the holiday when all the Torah scrolls were taken out of the ark by the men and boys and danced around the synagogue. Jonathan Markowitz, a boy two years younger than she who picked his nose and wiped it on the wall, had been handed a Torah to hold. He had not felt unworthy. He had clasped it to his chest.
She reached out timidly, touching the velvet scroll cover, tracing the thick gold embroidery. Then she moved closer, breathing in the slightly acidic smell of the leather scrolls, the warm, musty scent of the rich fabrics. She put both hands around the scroll and leaned her cheek against it, closing her eyes and feeling a strange quiet contentment wrap itself around her heart.
“Somebody’s coming!” Hadassah called out in a panic.
Quickly, they closed the ark, running out into the spring sunshine.
“You two are really nuts!” Hadassah glared, unreasonably upset. “I mean, of all the crazy, dumb things to do…”
Tamar and Jenny walked slowly behind her, lost in thought, feeling weak and strangely elated, as if they’d spent a whole day in fasting and prayer.
* * *
“I’m home,” Jenny called out. She could hear the TV blaring and her mother banging pots in the kitchen and singing. The change from the sublime to the ordinary almost broke her heart.
“Have a nice time with your little friends, honey?”
“Yes, Ma. Ma?”
“Come into the kitchen. I’ll make you something to eat.”
She sat on the kitchen stool, watching her mother turn on the gas and light the stove. “Ma,” she began hesitantly. “You know, you really… it’s wrong. You shouldn’t be lighting a fire on the Sabbath. It’s a terrible sin. I mean, people used to get stoned to death for lighting a fire on the Sabbath.”
Her mother looked at her, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “Don’t you start in with me, young lady! Don’t you start with all that fanatic stuff! I’ll take you out of that crazy school faster than a jet plane!”