“Take the tapes with you,” the rabbi urged. “Here, and the tape player.”
“I can take them home?”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Wow. Thanks!” I felt terrible complaining when I was taking all this money and the music too. I felt guilty hating those women in the class just for their lousy timing and their interruptions. Which reminded me. “Rabbi? What does Hinach yafa mean?”
“You are beautiful,” the rabbi said. “Behold, you are fair.”
“Whoa.”
“Do you know where those words come from?”
“Hebrew,” I said.
“Wait a minute.” He was leafing through books on his desk. Then he swiveled around in his big leather swivel chair. He pulled a volume from his shelf and leafed some more. And then he said, “Ah.”
And I said, “Ah?”
“Come back for just a moment.” He sat down behind his desk in this hugely tall leather desk chair like a throne, and I sat back down, but just on the arm of my chair, just perched so any second I could go. And Siegel read from one of his volumes, “Hinach yafa, raiti, hinach yafa, aynayich yonim. …” And he translated the words into English for me in his rolling tones, “You are beautiful, my love, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil….”
And I said, “Wait, wait, I know this. This is the Song of Solomon.”
“Or as we call it in our tradition, the Song of Songs.”
“And it’s about Christ making love to his Church,” I said.
“It is not about Christ and his Church,” the rabbi declared.
I was taken aback. “Well, I used to do Bible study, and that’s what it said in the Bible.”
“Not in our Bible,” the rabbi said. He spoke very absolutely.
“You mean like that’s not your interpretation.”
“No,” he said, “The Song of Songs is not about Christ and his Church. That is simply not true.”
“Well,” I said. “Well, you know, every religion has a different idea of truth.”
He sat there and glared.
But I, being a religion major, said, “Every religion has its own metaphors of the unknown, you know. And just because those metaphors are different doesn’t make them invalid.”
Then Rabbi Siegel looked at me like if his conscience hadn’t forbade it he would have taken one of the pointy pens sticking out of his gold penholders and stabbed me in the heart. And he looked at me, and he looked at me, and he said, “Sharon, I am a founding member of this state’s ecumenical council of Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and Jews. I have been a lifelong contributor to interfaith dialogue in this nation. And I will yield to no one in my conviction that all of our scriptures, whether prophetic or poetic, should be a bridge of understanding between the peoples of the world. These lines of poetry are measures of our commonality….”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“But we had them FIRST!”
I nearly fell off the arm of the chair. I had to catch my breath. “Well, you know, that’s not completely fair.”
“It’s a fact.”
“Well …”
He leaned forward and stared at me with all his might, and he said, “Well, what?”
“Well, not really….”
So then Siegel started in on me. “This may come as news to you. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as history. There are documents and texts that predate others, and traditions from which others have been spawned.”
“I’m not trying to pick a fight here,” I said. “I just asked one little question, since I didn’t know the answer.”
“Granted. Granted,” the rabbi said, and he sighed again heavily. He was a man of sighs. Then he looked at me, and he said, “Don’t stop.”
“Don’t stop what?”
“Don’t stop teaching. Even if your students know nothing. Especially then. Even if they don’t know the first thing. Then teach them that. You may be their only source,” he said. “Then be that source. Be an oasis in the desert. Be like Augustine in Hippo. Even here,” he said, “even on this piece of rock in the Pacific Ocean, there can be learning if you have the heart to teach.”
I looked at him sitting there at the desk and a startling thought occurred to me. Rabbi Siegel was talking about himself! That was a profound moment for me. Not just because of what Siegel said—but because for a second I’d really heard him say it, and unlike talking, meditating, questioning, seeking, and screwing up, listening to other people was something I hardly ever did. Back at the monastery Michael was always harping about learning to listen, but I’d never really done it. I’d never listened to someone else before. Now it almost knocked me down, suddenly hearing the rabbi speak out like that. Suddenly feeling the strength of somebody else’s heart. I looked at the rabbi, and that was when I realized: This man is reaching out to me, but not just because I’m a sinner, or a loser, or a returning student. This person is seeking me out because we are related. Because somehow, somewhere, we come from the same Jewish place—which is why Grandpa Irving was trying to warn me! This rabbi knows the code. He knows the Hebrew at the bottom of the Bible. He knows the text and the letters and the sound and the voice, and deep down he knows me, because I am his relative! He knew me first.
“Ah,” I said.
Rabbi Siegel put his hands together and rested his chin ecclesiastically on his fingertips. He said, “You teach the dance. And I’ll teach you the words.”
13
Minotaur
COUNTING me, there were three of us who came to Rabbi Siegel’s office each week for instruction, and we were a diverse group. There was a guy named Fred, and a girl named Alyssa. Now, Fred was about forty and quite tall but unbelievably skinny, and his face was always raw with sunburn. He did odd jobs, mainly fixing things in people’s houses, which was how he had originally met the rabbi. For about ten years Fred had been addicted to drugs and blown a few gaskets, and lost some dear friends who had wound up dead of overdoses. Finding himself alive in Honolulu, he had decided to rededicate himself spiritually, but feeling that the Catholic religion he was brought up in was not the most comfortable for him, he had for several years been searching for a new religion he could relate to. So having worked for the temple on its retaining walls, and attended some services, he’d decided to start learning about Judaism. Alyssa, on the other hand, was this smart but somewhat disturbed thirteen-year-old who actually was from a Jewish family. Her dad was treasurer of the temple. She was in the awkward position of being on the verge of her bat mitzvah but at the same time having been expelled from Sunday school for inciting an insurrection in her class against its instructor, who was found later locked in the art supply room. She was a fat freckled kid with straight, shoulder-length brown hair and braces, sparkling brown eyes, a foul mouth, and pockets full of candy and bubblegum, which she was always offering to sell you. The rabbi was teaching her, as a favor to her parents—as an alternative to Sunday school.
So we would sit in the rabbi’s office, and we would be at all different levels and at odds with each other. Alyssa would be sucking a jawbreaker and sometimes practicing the Hebrew chanting for her bat mitzvah, and Fred would be studying some book like To Be a Jew, and in between them I would be going over the Aleph Bet with the rabbi. “Aleph,” the rabbi would say, and he’d show me the large-print aleph in the book, and he would say, “Aleph has horns like an ox.” And actually it was true, you could see the head of the ox and the two pointy horns up top. “Bet. It looks like a bayit, or house.” And bet did have a nice sheltering form, and even a dot in the middle, like a doorknob. “Dalet is like a delet, or door.” Okay, you could kind of see it, with that big long hinge on the right, and the top of the door swinging out to the left. “Ayin is like an eye.” That one was fairly mystical to me, with its shape open on top, but then cupped on the bottom and with a little tail. It could have been an eye, or a well, or a fish standing with her tail up in the air. That letter could have been the source of many things.
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“Ayin. Ayin,” I’d be trying to get it down.
And Alyssa would mutter under her breath, “It’s only been a month.”
And I’d say, “Look, kid, I happen to work. I happen to work and go to school part time, and—I have three hundred pages a night of reading to—”
“So. I go to school full time.” Alyssa thought that was very witty.
And she sniggered, which was her specialty. When Alyssa giggled, she would giggle at you, and that is pretty much the dictionary definition of what sniggering means.
“Ladies. Ladies,” Fred would say, and raise his rail-thin arms, and wave his raw-boned hands. He was really a very sweet and gentle guy, but the slightly spooky thing about him was his sweetness and all the rest of his attributes had this residual feeling about them, like they were what was left over after he’d had his big systemic cataclysm. He was sweet and brittle like banana chips. He would say all the time, “Let’s not lose our concentration, now.”
After a while, when it came to Alyssa, I really had to hold it in. I had to delve deep inside of myself and try to breathe. One time I came to class and I was almost the happiest I’d ever been. I’d written a letter to John Denver, just about his music and his vision of the environment, and what it meant to me to hear him express it so well. And I’d mailed the letter several months before, and then that week I got a large envelope in the mail, and it was, I swear, an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photo of John playing his guitar. “It was as big as that one.” I pointed to the rabbi’s large photo of himself and John F. Kennedy. “And he wrote on it,” I told Fred and Alyssa and the rabbi.
“No!” Fred said, all impressed.
“He did. He wrote, For Sharon. Peace, John.”
“My goodness,” said Fred.
“He didn’t really write that, you know,” Alyssa informed me. “He probably has a hundred people working for him to do stuff like that.”
“Well,” I began, “well … what do you know about anything?” I wished propriety in the rabbi’s study hadn’t forbidden me from adding, you little shit. I’d just never imagined it could be like that, with a hundred people in an office stuffing envelopes with photos. But when she put it that way—it sounded so mean, it must have been true. I blinked. I ducked my head down. My hair fell around my face.
After a minute Rabbi Siegel said, “I had a light lunch today. Would anyone care to join me for a bite to eat?” He got up and opened the door from his office to the vestry, which was this little passageway between the office and the sanctuary where his black robes hung. He went in there and he got his briefcase, and with great dignity in his three-piece suit he took his car keys and he drove the three of us out of the temple lot in his gray Cadillac, which had a license plate that said: SHALOHA. Fred and I were in the back, and Alyssa sat in front. He drove up to this little old local store just off Old Pali Road and he parked directly in front of the door, which he could do because he had his Clergy placard in the window, and because he was a regular customer. And Fred got a pack of pistachio nuts, and Alyssa got gummy bears and Sweet-Tarts, and the rabbi and I got those large homemade almond cookies that they always had in those local stores on the counter in a jar. And the rabbi paid for everything. It was his treat. He was actually a very compassionate man, Rabbi Siegel, and also, he told us that his wife, Grete, had him on pretty much grapefruits and vegetables at home, because she’d put him on a diet. And he tended to get headaches in the afternoons.
We ended up going to the store a lot, and during those trips the rabbi told us something of his life, and how he’d been raised in an Orthodox home, very strict and scholarly, and how he had at one time wanted to be a concert violinist, but the winding road of life had changed him and his original ideals. He had found his calling in Reform Judaism, and not in the dogmatism of Orthodoxy. When he drove us all in that Caddy, it was just like sailing in a silvery gray ocean liner. He showed us the scenic places out near the reservoir where he’d married people. He talked about how this couple and that one wrote their own contracts and ceremonies. We had some lovely times. We all relaxed to the point that we students started getting along pretty well. The only thing was, we weren’t really learning all that much, or, if we were, it was at a snail’s pace.
After around six weeks I had finally mastered the Hebrew alphabet, and I was moving on to simple words in a primer about this little Israeli kid named Uri. And then, guess what happened? A newly engaged guy, Matthew, entered the class, and the rabbi had to turn his attention to teaching the alphabet to him, leaving me to struggle mostly by myself. So, of course, I didn’t get very far—actually none of us did, because the only serious learning happening there was the rabbi’s descriptions of the alphabet and his discussions of Judaism in general. I started getting frustrated, because I’d come in there with a very certain goal, which was to learn the Hebrew words that went with the dances I was teaching. I was still teaching the ladies every week, and a couple of them were actually picking up some steps. But it seemed like the rabbi wasn’t teaching me any Hebrew words at all.
Finally, after class one Sunday I hung back until the others had gone, and I brought my chair in close to the rabbi’s desk, and I said, “Rabbi, I hate to say this, but I feel like we’re all wasting time in here.”
Siegel looked at me over his suit and silk tie with its silver tiepin. “Sharon,” he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I thought I was supposed to be learning some Hebrew. Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
“Sharon,” he said, “I think you realize, that in the end, the words are the least important aspect of what I’m trying to teach.”
“Not to me!” I protested.
“Come in here,” he said.
We walked through the vestry and into the sanctuary. He flicked on the lights, floodlighting the temple’s vaulted ceiling and modernistic stained glass. We were standing on the dais looking down onto the rows of empty seats below us. And I saw the organ on the left with the seats for the choir all fenced off with a paneled wood fence, and I saw the marble altar, where there were two candlesticks with electric candles in them. The rabbi pushed a button and a pair of doors in the front wall opened, and you could see this open spotlit closet with four Torah scrolls inside, and they were covered with crimson velvet, and the covers embroidered in gold thread.
“Sharon,” Rabbi Siegel said, “Judaism is more than a few simple phrases. It’s a culture. One of music and art, poetry and light. It is the intimate and the sublime; it is the exalted and the humble. Think of the lyric music of the Psalms.” He stood up there in the empty theater, and he gestured with his hands. You could see him turning all sermonic. “While the Egyptians were building tombs, we were singing of life and love. While the monuments of the ancients were crumbling to dust, we were treading over the ruins in a tradition that arched back over the millennia, and forward to the future. Our friends in class may never remember a word of Hebrew, but if they can sense something of the grandeur of our tradition—if they can only glimpse one part of the history of our chosen people….”
“Excuse me?” I said. There he was, right back where he’d started with the chosen people. “I’m not talking about joining a people!” I told him. “Definitely not any people that thinks it’s any better than any other people!”
So naturally Siegel heaved a big sigh. He folded his arms over his orotund bod. “Each people is dear to God in its own way,” he told me. “I often make the analogy to the different states of the Union. …”
And I felt like it was my turn to sigh. He was actually a good human, Siegel, but when you asked him a question, it was like throwing a bottle in the ocean and watching it drift away over all his metaphors and comparisons, plus the incidents it reminded him of. And as far as where I was coming from with my folk background, he hadn’t a clue, because he was into “high” art. He used to say, “When I say the Bor’chu—’Bless ye the Lord’—I think how fitting a trumpet fanfare would be right ther
e.” And I’d be thinking, trumpet fanfares? That was spiritual music for him? If it turned him on—but to me God’s music was this whole-world ethnic fusion that belonged to everyone! Bluegrass, bongos, recorder, ukulele. Nose flute. Just a joyful noise, just folk. All the voices of the planet raised in song and humming like one enormous family!
THAT night after my encounter with the rabbi I sat up late in the living room writing to Gary. I was feeling so overwhelmed; I was so full of indignation. I scribbled page after page, just pouring out my heart. I felt like he was the only one I could confide in. I was consumed with this thirst, this huge desire to learn and to know, and to somehow draw near the Creator! And the reality was I was teaching a bunch of senior citizens to dance, and taking an adult ed course in Hebrew that had gone way off track—not to mention my academic trouble. Yup, I was having trouble at the university, but it wasn’t what you might think. In Professor Flanagan’s course I’d received a solid A. I was rock solid in that class. My problem was the course had ended. Now it was spring semester, and I had Professor Raymond Friedell.
“He is the antithesis of everything Flanagan stood for!” I wrote to Gary.
He is against personal expression; he is against independent work; he is against students! He actually said as much. You’d think they would take his license away! I’m serious. He said the first day he wasn’t about to stand in the front of the lecture hall and do a song and dance for us. The material was dry, and it was meant to be dry, and we’d jolly better learn it that way, from the texts, because he wasn’t going to be putting on any performances. He is against relevance of religion to modern times. He said that! I wrote it down: ’This course is not about the relevance of religious ideas, and so you may as well get the notion of relevance out of your heads right now. It is a misplaced notion. These texts are not about us; they are about themselves. They are not about our time. They are about theirs.’ Gary, this prof is anti-everything I loved about school. He is anti-Flanagan. He is the anti-Christ! Oh Gary. I dread tomorrow. I dread Mondays and coming to his class. I don’t understand his lectures at all. All I understand is this quality emanating from him of tremendous arbitrariness. Like he is drunk with power. He knows we would leave if we could. But his course is required for the major! I should quit Siegel’s Hebrew class. That’s what I should have done today, and quit teaching folk dancing too. Thursdays I should be studying. I’ve spread myself so thin. People at the house think I’m slacking off on chores. They’re yelling where’s our groceries! It’s just I’m so tired. They don’t understand all the stuff I’m doing. They have no idea. And that’s the worst part—having no one to talk to—waiting so long to hear from you. Gary, I miss you so much….