“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I remember all of that. And now look how far we’ve come. We are still dancing on the same path! Sharon, I have learned this: There are no coincidences. This is truth. There are no coincidences. There are no random acts. Everything that happens in life happens for a reason. Even you and me, Sharon. Even us. We happened for a reason. You could call it karma. Or fate. They are just names. They don’t matter. I am talking about God’s will. I am speaking of bashert.”
I almost had to put Gary’s letter down on my buton where I was reading. That was pretty heady stuff there. I mean, as I used to say to Kekui, this was not how I was raised—this was not my background—this whole providential view of the world, as if God were looking down at people and taking notes for later. Yet here was Gary writing and saying—could this be? That he still loved me? And it was intentional, at least on God’s part? I looked at every typed word. The thin Torah Or letterhead crackled in my hands. A mysterious elation began to come over me. Mysterious, because my rational side just could not understand how all this might work. Elation because all of a sudden it was like the world turned inside out; the resurrection of everything I’d buried long ago. I could see my jerk ex-boyfriend transformed, and my old love reciprocated, and my dancing partner joined to me again. All of a sudden I had before me these tangible signs. And God’s will and Providence were real to me.
WHAT happened to me that weekend clinched it. Bashert was here to stay.
I had been going for a few weeks to a discussion group that Professor Flanagan had recommended to me. The discussions were put on jointly by the Unitarian community and a Quaker fellowship that shared the space. The two groups were amicable partners that met on alternate Sundays three weeks out of the month, and on the fourth week held forums for learning where different people from the community would come and give talks about their beliefs or their work, or whatever turned them on. For example, a Catholic priest would come and talk to us about Catholicism, or an astronomer would come and show us slides of planets in the solar system and speak about his personal views of the origins of the universe.
The Unitarian church was just a lovely white house from the old days with porches and dark polished koa wood floors, and there was a scratchy sisal rug in the meeting room and folding chairs in a circle, and by the door a cork bulletin board where all the name tags for the combined membership of the Unitarian community and Quaker fellowship were pinned up. You reused your original name tag every time you came, and actually it was always a friendly feeling walking in and seeing everybody’s name pinned up there. We used those name tags with the clear plastic sheaths.
Well, the Sunday right after Thanksgiving my bus rolled up on Old Pali Road and I walked over to the Unitarian church; and there, in front of the church, was this silver-gray Cadillac, and it had a placard in the front window that said CLERGY. Inside the meeting room stood a large man in a gray three-piece suit and tie and dress shoes, and also a tiepin. I hadn’t seen anyone in so many clothes in years. He was a portly guy, but also on the tall side, and he had a little bit of gray hair on top and dark eyes, and he had reading glasses on, and he was leaning over and reading all of the name tags pinned up on the bulletin board. When I came up and took my name tag from the board and pinned it on, he extended his hand and introduced himself in this deep, rolling, yet melancholy voice. And he pressed my hand in his and said, “Rabbi Everett Siegel.”
We were all there—all the regulars, in any case, which was about twenty people, and we sat in a circle, and that week’s host, Dave, got up and said, “Let’s all welcome Rabbi Siegel into our fellowship.” And he gave Rabbi Siegel one of the leis we always gave visitors, a brown lei made out of seedpods and dry long grains. And people murmured, “Welcome.”
It was an informal group. By which I mean T-shirts and shorts and the occasional muumuu, and when guests came they usually sat with us in the circle and did more of a round-table discussion, unless they had visual aids, like that astronomer and his slides. Rabbi Siegel, however, stood right up front in his suit, and he paced back and forth and he cleared his throat as if he was trying to figure out how to begin. He stood there and struggled for a few moments. Then he looked us in the eyes, and when he spoke his voice was low, not soft, but low. It was the strangest thing when he spoke. It was like he was calling us by name. He said, “Stan Lebowitz. Lucinda Stern. Henry Miesell.” He said my name, Sharon. “Sharon Spiegelman.” He just kept naming names. He named about half the people there at that day’s fellowship. I thought at first he was doing some kind of getting-to-know-you game, but then I realized he was actually reading our names off our name tags. “Dave Aronson. Mitch Kahan.” Siegel looked at all of us, and he said slowly, like he was telling the slowest saddest joke in the world, “Some of my best Jews are Friends.”
I thought, what in the world? But Rabbi Siegel kept on talking.
He said, “We have questions. We have questions about God and about life, about religion and morality. We have questions today and we seek answers. And yet, and yet, I have a question for some of you. Why is it that those of us who are born Jews look for answers in every single religion but our own? Once our people were a light unto the nations. Once our sacred Torah, the First Testament, was called a tree of life to all who held fast to it. And yet, and yet, in this age of darkness—in our century which is blackened by the greatest evil known to any since the dawn of time, since the dawn of man’s existence—our people are not a light unto the nations, but a flickering candle of indifference. Our tree of life is weakened with intermarriage, and ignorance. Our children and, in fact, we ourselves, do not know what it is to be a Jew.”
At which point I raised my hand—but Siegel just sailed on without even acknowledging me. When other hands went up he didn’t even look. Frankly, the guy was in love with the sound of his own purple prose! He was definitely not a Unitarian up there in his suit, with his Cadillac the size of a hearse. He went on and on. He said the Jewish people were God’s chosen people. And the Jewish heritage was the one true thing to which all Jews should turn. This chosen people stuff, that just made you want to slouch down in your folding chair and disappear! But there was something about him. He reminded me of someone from a long time ago. It was something in his voice—this peculiar, deeply mournful sound like muted taxi horns, or deep dark cello music. As Siegel kept talking I would catch a memory and then it would be gone, I would catch it again for an instant, and then I would lose it. And then it came to me—that voice! You could hear Grandpa Irving in the rabbi’s voice. All rueful, Brooklyn-Yiddish, dark, and smoky. You could hear him, my grandfather! Deep down underneath Siegel’s poetic diction, if you listened hard enough, he was there: Grandpa Irving! And I sat up in my chair and I closed my eyes and I thought as hard as I could, Grandpa Irving, are you there? Are you channeling through this Siegel or what? Hey, I’m sorry I gave away your watch. Grandpa Irving? What are you saying to me? But hard as I tried, I just heard the tone of his voice, not any meaning—just this endless shushing, like when you hold a seashell to your ear.
Spellbound I sat for forty minutes while Siegel talked. Only when he was done and the questions and answers were over and people started to leave did the spell wear off. Then I stood up, and I stirred myself. And I was pissed! I walked right up to Rabbi Everett Siegel and I said, “Rabbi?”
“Hello, Sharon,” he said. He was reading my name tag again, as if I were his waitress.
“I wanted to make a comment to you, being one of the Jews you mentioned who is a Friend.”
“Yes,” he said. His voice was growing lower and graver by the minute.
“I just wanted to say that personally I was a little bit offended when you spoke about people of Jewish backgrounds running way. Because I am not and I have never been a person who is running away from anything.”
“I see,” he said.
“I happen to be a comparative religion major at UH,” I said. “I happen to be a person running toward spiritualism.”
&nb
sp; He looked at me with his melancholy eyes. “The question,” he said, “is whether your spiritualism, as you call it, has anything to do with your religion.”
“My what?”
“With Judaism.”
“I never said Judaism was my religion.”
“The irony is,” Rabbi Siegel told me in his rolling tones, “we are a people who have survived by our memories. And now we are plagued with amnesia.”
“I find it a little bit offensive that you keep accusing me of being an amnesiac when you don’t even know me,” I practically shouted. “For example, I’ve been an Israeli folk dancer for years. For example, I come from a Jewish home, and my stepmother was also Jewish. It’s not like I could run away from Judaism if I tried!” And I was ready to go on, but at that moment the bashert happened! The Jewish fate Gary had referred to.
“You’re a dancer?” the Rabbi said. “Then come to the temple and dance.”
I wrote to Gary that night: “When he said that, I just stood there in awe of the fate that had in two seconds descended upon me! It’s just like you said about coincidences. It is exactly what you were saying, that there are no random patterns in the universe. I’ve lived here ten years—going on eleven. I never knew there was folk dancing going on here. And now, today, I found out a group of women meet Thursday eves at Martin Buber Temple. They have music, but no instructor—since the one they had was deported back to Israel along with her sister—and they are looking to pay (top dollar!!) for a knowledgeable dancer to teach and lead them!”
I had never had a portent before. I had never felt fate come tap me on the shoulder. It was one of the spookiest yet most intoxicating feelings I had ever known.
The very next Thursday, at least an hour before class, I knocked on Rabbi Siegel’s office door. “Come in,” he boomed like the great big papa bear. And I entered his sanctum. I had never been in a rabbi’s office before. It was quite a shrine! The wall behind the desk was covered with black-and-white photos of bigwigs embracing Siegel and shaking his hand. There were people in tuxedos, and people with ribbons and medals around their necks. This Siegel had obviously gotten around. One of the photos was of him and President Kennedy! The office had red plush upholstered chairs and two massive desks full of plaques and gold penholders, and commemorative crystal ashtrays, and about ten thousand books.
“You’ll need this,” the rabbi said, and he gave me a tape player. “And this.” He gave me a carton of folk dancing cassettes. Then he gave me a really long official check, signed by the treasurer of Martin Buber Temple, for five hundred dollars, and said something about everyone in the group being so excited about meeting me, except I was staring so hard at the money I barely heard him.
I took the check, and the tape player and the tapes, and I set everything up in the social hall of Martin Buber Temple. No one was around, so I took off my sandals and stretched out. The floor was smooth terrazzo. Wood was better for your feet, but we’d deal with it. The space was big and airy. There was one of those accordion-pleat partitions between the social hall and the sanctuary, which was all done in earth tones, rust and ochre. As for the social hall, it was decorated with a wall mural of King Solomon in a great big crown and robes like a Free mason. The king was holding a sword over the head of a peculiar-looking baby, and on one side of him was a woman shrieking, and on the other side a woman sulking. In gold underneath was painted “The Wisdom of Solomon.” I was contemplating this artwork when a couple of old ladies came in.
“Are you the instructor?” one of them inquired. She was very large and bosomy and wore a muumuu. Her friend had white hair and she wore a black leotard with a black-and-white check wraparound skirt over it. A couple more ladies came in behind them, and everybody kissed everybody else and called each other dear.
It took me a minute just to realize that these dames were actually my Israeli dancers!
“Are you Sharon Spiegelman?”
“Yeah, I’m Sharon,” I said, reluctantly. The ladies all rushed around me to introduce themselves.
“I’m Ruth Katz,” said the bosomy one.
A small plump blond lady also came up, and she had with her a taller woman with deep red hair and rouge and bloodred lipstick, and the blond lady said, “I’m Henny Pressman, and this is my sister Lillian.”
“Betsy Sugarman,” said the one in the black leotard and checked skirt.
“And my name is Estelle. Pleased to meet you,” said the lady with white hair, and she held out her hand.
“Estelle—that’s my mom’s name,” I heard myself say.
“Really? And where does she live, dear?”
I looked at Estelle blankly.
“On the Mainland?”
“Oh, she’s dead,” I said.
Estelle’s face fell. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t even know her. She died in my infancy.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Ruth. They were all clucking.
“And your father?”
I looked down at my feet.
“Is he living?”
“He is, but he’s not well,” I said. “He’s suffering from …” I hesitated just a fraction of a second. “Gout.”
“Gout!” said Betsy Sugarman.
“In this day and age?” asked Estelle.
And I was standing there by the tape recorder, under the wall mural of King Solomon, and I was thinking, Why did I say gout?
“But there are medications for gout,” said Betsy.
“He is one of the only people in the world who is just not susceptible to the medications,” I said. “They just have no effect on him whatsoever.”
“Really!” said Betsy. “I’ll have to ask my husband about this! My husband is a doctor,” she told me.
“Let’s form a circle,” I said.
We limped through “Dodi Li” as slowly as it was humanly possible to go. Yet still, when we did the turns, some of us turned one way, and some of us the other. I couldn’t get everybody going in the same direction. The music was playing softly, and my feet wanted so much to follow the music. My feet remembered the steps even there, but I thought, Is this my comeback to the world of dance? Is this really part of the grand plan that Gary kept referring to? Because maybe all the pieces do come back together again in life. Maybe there is this pattern in the grand scheme of things. But what if the pattern turns out to be less of a gorgeous mandala and more of a sick parody?
I just ached to think of that. I wanted to stop right there. It was embarrassing to be out on the floor with those old ladies. The dancer I used to be was laughing at me now. Actually she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I wanted to turn off the music, but I gritted my teeth, at least to get through the first class. It wouldn’t be right to quit on them—not then and there.
The one dance they could do was “Hinach Yafa,” this simple couples dance, which of course the ladies all had to dance with each other, since we had no guys. They all paired up, and I danced with Ruth. That was the one time we finally made some progress. I had the tape going, and we were all pretty much moving in the right direction, step right, one, two, three, brush, Yemenite, finger snap. Then all of a sudden Betsy Sugarman started in, “Sharon. Sharon?” And she stopped right in the middle with her partner, who was Henny, and everyone else looked up distracted, and Betsy said, “May I ask a question?”
Instantly, everybody looked over at me. All the ladies got distracted. The whole dance we’d patiently built up ground to a halt.
I let go of Ruth’s hand and glared at Betsy. “What.”
“Sharon, what does this mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“The song. What does the song mean? ‘Hinach Yafa’?”
“Beats me.” In all my years of dancing I’d never worried about the actual lyrics. I mean, there were people I knew back in Boston who could translate the words, but dancing wasn’t about words. Dancing wasn’t for your mouth, it was for your
feet! Dancing was springing up, and bouncing. Spinning. Snapping. It would take someone like Betsy, who had lousy rhythm, to start wondering about Hebrew words like that.
After the ladies left I packed up the tapes and took the tape recorder back to the rabbi’s office. “Come in,” he boomed once again. And I came inside holding the box in front of me.
“Sit down,” the rabbi said.
So I plopped down, and when I did I realized I was exhausted.
“How did it go?” he asked.
I quit, I said deep inside myself. Still, I had that check folded inside my back pocket.
Slowly, I put the tapes and the tape player on his desk. I thought, Sharon, if you have any self-respect you’ll give him the money back. “It went fine,” I said, yet a few tears started in my eyes.
“It went fine?” the rabbi asked.
I nodded.
“Then …” He was too formal and polite to say, Then why are you crying? He said, “Then what, exactly, is the trouble?”
“Oh, just … the dancing, and the class, and the students.”
“All of it?” he said.
“All of it.”
He gave me a tissue.
I wiped my face. I pulled myself together. I said, “It isn’t the way I thought it was going to be.”
“What did you think?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. I mean … I thought, um, they, the class, would, you know, be able to, like … dance.”
“If they knew how to dance, they wouldn’t need an instructor,” he said.
He had me there for a moment. “I know, I know. That’s true. But I thought they’d have at least some idea.”
“Well,” said the rabbi, “some idea will have to come from you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.” I stood up. “Listen,” I said, “I have to catch my bus.”