What I meant by my comment was I didn’t take the class just to read about Augustine’s hang-ups, I took it to learn about religion—God, prayer, ritual, Buddha, the Madonna mother-goddess figure, transmigration, forgiveness, miracles, sin, abortion, death, the big moral concepts. Because, obviously I am not eighteen and I work, so school is not an academic exercise for me, and not just me, as I’m sure you’d realize if you looked around the room one of these days and saw there are thirty and forty-year olds and some a lot older than you are in the class. The point is, when you’ve been through journeys and relationships, multiple careers plus unemployment—the whole gamut—and then you come back to school, you’re ready for the real thing, and as far as I’m concerned Augustine’s Conception of the Soul, or Illumination of the Mind, or whatever, is not it. What is “it”? you’re asking—well, that’s what I came to find out, so you tell me. Obviously what you are paid for is to deal with the big religious issues and you are not dealing with them, which again is what I was trying to point out when I made that remark in class.
My feelings still are that basically as a “mature student” I was supposed to feel grateful that the University of Hawaii let me in or gave me a second chance on life or whatever, like I am the lowly unwashed and I should come in the gates to be blessed by the big phallus….
I was working on this letter to Raymond Friedell. Scribbling it down, and getting frustrated, and starting over. I just wanted to smoke him. I was so furious. I wanted him to see what he had done; how he had looked at me in his office and with that one look shrunk me into a little shriveling ball of snot. I wanted to tell him, because he, and teachers as a whole—they just don’t get how they can affect students, for good or bad. They just don’t get the power that they hold over us! They don’t know!
Under the sausage trees by Moore Hall, the words were pouring out into my loose-leaf notebook. All around me the undergrads were walking by in their Bermuda shorts, and going to lunch without a thought in their heads. And I looked at them, and I thought—Who are these people? I looked around the campus, and I thought, what is this place? My notebook sat there in my lap, and my hand couldn’t even keep up with what I wanted to say. Friedell thought I was just complaining about my grade, but that wasn’t it at all. For some reason when I came “back” to “school” I’d believed in the universe part of university. That it was all about Life, and Time, and Freedom, but when I got to Friedell those things were just constructs. I’d thought religion was about God, but it turned out in Friedell’s class it was just about the history of people’s conceptions of God. And there couldn’t be any saintliness in Augustine. He couldn’t be a great believer, just a great bishop, writer, thinker, et cetera.
And that was when it hit me. I wanted to learn about religion—so what was I doing in academia? I wanted to understand—so why was I reading books? It was just like Rabbi Siegel said: words are the least important thing! Poetry and light, and the sublime. That’s what mattered. The exalted. At the time I’d thought Siegel was such an elitist for mentioning the exalted. But wasn’t that actually what religion was about? So here I was at the university, and where was the exaltation? I mean, I had seen a vision. I had in a boat, with my own eyes, seen the ocean folded back upon itself. I had received this precious gift, a vision. The sea had stood up upon its tail!
The fever was taking hold of me again—the heat to see and do and know. I raced home. I collected all my notes from Friedell’s course that were lying on the floor of my room—I was thinking I would burn them! Except I had to sort out all the letters mixed in—the ones from Gary. Oh, Gary, why am I here while you’re over there? I thought. Oh, man, how did we end up this way? And I uncreased all his letters and I smoothed them all down. I looked at Gary’s letters on the Torah Or letterhead, and it was bashert again, dawning on me. Marlon was there with me, and Kathryn and Will were clattering pots in the kitchen, and Tom was practicing his dulcimer, like some clumsy angel, all thumbs and wings. I said to Marlon, “I’m going out there. I am. I am! I’m going out there to learn with Gary!”
My grumpy yet inwardly sweet cat looked at me with his yellow eyes. I said, “But don’t worry, I would never leave you unless you were with really close friends.” He went back to his food, nibbling from his dish. If I’d known then! Oh, my poor cat. My poor baby.
And I picked up the phone and I called Gary at Torah Or. All the way in Jerusalem.
There was a muffled voice on the other end of the line.
“Gary!” I said.
“Who?”
“Can I speak to Gary,” I said loudly. “I need to talk to Gary. It’s urgent. It’s an emergency! Could you get him? Please. I have to speak to him.”
The muffled voice got more muffled. It burst out something in Hebrew and then said, “Is something the matter?”
“I’m calling from the States. Tell him it’s Sharon”
“Wait. Hold on the line, please.”
I waited and I waited. At last someone croaked to me, “Hello?” “It’s me,” I burst out.
“It’s Sharon! Are you sleeping?” I’d forgotten it was twelve hours later in Israel. It must have been early in the morning. “Sharon?”
“Oh, Gary,” I said. I was about ready to burst, there was so much I wanted to say. “Is that really you? Is that really your voice?”
“Sharon, where are you? Are you all right?”
“Yes!”
“Thank God. They said it was an emergency!”
“It is! It is! But not a bad kind. The good kind of emergency!”
“Sharon, Sharon, slow down—”
“Gary, I can’t stay on the phone—this is probably costing like a hundred dollars a second! Gary, I’m coming out there.” “You’re coming where?”
“To you,” I said. “To Torah Or. Oh, Gary, I want to learn. I want to know. I want to reconnect.”
“Baruch Hashem!” he said.
“What?”
“I said Praise God!” Gary’s voice was breaking up. I couldn’t tell whether it was him being so moved, or the connection.
“Just, you have to tell me what to do!” I shouted. “I mean, to get to the institute. Could you tell me? But talk fast, ’cause I can’t even afford calling you—this is the most expensive phone call I’ve ever made!”
I don’t even remember the flight. It was this long, hazy, yet euphoric trip. There I was, sailing through the air. There I was, leaving academia and Friedell and earth behind. Cleaning out my bank account, taking leave of my job. I wasn’t sitting home reading, or teaching temple ladies left and right. There I was, with my three-week excursion ticket and my little photo of Marlon—and I was going to the source of this great religious debate! The root of all the questions in my mind, like who or what is God? And how do you get to know him/her? As in a pilgrimage. As in a quest. Like the great poet Yeats, when he picked up and traveled to Byzantium.
I was just so thrilled, having finally flown away. I was so tickled I’d up and done it after all those years. My ticket was for three weeks, but in my mind I was off to a whole new scene—maybe forever. I figured Gary and I would fly Marlon out to join us. We would send for him so we could all live together, since, in one of those huge miscalculations I excelled at, I was already convinced Gary and I were fated to get back together.
I was just floating when we finally landed; I was just levitating high up near the ceiling of Ben-Gurion International. Somewhere down below there was all this Hebrew, and all these guards, and a voice calling me, “Sharon!” I didn’t even realize who it was there calling my name. “Sharon!”
It was him, Gary, with this emaciated white face, and a beard, and a big black yarmulke on his head, and a black suit jacket. He still had the same blinky eyes, like he was getting too much sun, but now he had glasses. He still had the same reedy voice. But standing there in those clothes—so thin, and with that pale skin—he looked like all the spiritual learning he’d undergone had scooped him out. Like, if once he’d been a pumpki
n, now all the flesh and seeds and pulp were gone, so now he had this translucent candle glow, like a pale rabbinic jack-o’-lantern. Still, it was Gary. It was really him. My dancer. My letter writer. Long-distance confidant. I ran toward him and threw my arms around him.
He jumped back. “Oh, no, Sharon,” he said. “No hugs.” He looked so embarrassed, I let him go. And we just stood there, looking at each other. We both started to cry.
“You’ve changed,” he said, which was the real shocker. I’d changed? I still had my hair the same way it was back in ’74, straight to the hips like Crystal Gayle. I was even wearing an original Boston Folk Festival T-shirt.
We drove off in the Torah Or hatchback Hyundai, started ascending the hills leading up to the city, Jerusalem. All along the way were these tanks and rotted-out bunkers, monuments to the battles fought there in that land for that city, for those hills. These chariots of war were corroding into the earth. I was dizzy. I felt like I was undergoing such an Odyssey. I was so emotional and exhausted and jet-lagged and altogether strung out, I was at sea. The whole world was whirling around me. I said, “I feel like this is the culmination of my whole life.” I said, “This is the ancient city of Jerusalem; I’m going to get some answers.” And the city rose up before us, made out of Jerusalem stone, naturally, and with the olive trees and even flocks on the hillsides—I felt my whole spiritual experience was coming together as in an epiphany. This was The Land.
So, of course, I wanted to go right away to the Western Wall, but the Torah Or school was in another place called Meah Shearim. We parked the car, and walked—and we were in the middle of this funky neighborhood. I said to Gary, “Wow.” I said, “This is unworldly.” We were walking through the tiny narrow streets and past vegetable stalls buzzing with flies, and there were kids everywhere, these boys wearing black hats like black Panama hats on one block and then round-brimmed hats on the next block—these are like their school uniforms. There were shops selling silver candlesticks and olive-wood boxes. There were little stinky alleyways—these dark crevices between the buildings. And the alleys were all strung and crisscrossed with clotheslines and clothes hung out to dry. Gary was hurrying me along, and I was staring at all the white shirts strung up: shirts, shirts, shirts, little shirts, little fringes, and then this satin wedding gown hanging on the line. Everyone was rushing all around me, and on the street corners kids were buying these beige twisted candles and big feathers, like turkey feathers—which Gary said were meant for the final cleaning up for Pesach, which was Passover.
“You light the candles to search out the last bit of hametz—any crumbs of leavened food,” Gary was telling me. “You sweep the crumbs out with a feather and then you burn them….” And I’m staring at this guy, my former boyfriend, after all! Because, who would have known? Once upon a time he’d cared about threatened indigenous species, and now he was telling me all the details of Passover.
We got to this run-down old building, which was like a dormitory for the students to sleep, and Gary was probably explaining to me the whole schedule for the seminar program in exploring Judaism—but, as I said before, I was just high as a hot-air balloon. I didn’t hear a word he said.
• • •
THE first few days I just walked around glowing. Gary had to spend a lot of time in classes, so in the mornings I went out myself. I walked along the tops of the Old City walls. I walked on these incredible blocks of ancient stone. The light was so clear, the sun so bright. I peeked through the crenellations. And I saw the Arab villages in the hills outside the city; and I saw the gray ribbons of the modern roads. I saw the sky, and the old arthritic olive trees. Here I was, and every particle of me was screaming: Here I am! I am in Jerusalem, the place! Here I am. I am walking through the narrow little streets. I am passing the Armenian church! I am converging with my correspondent from the other side of the world. Let my feet step lightly. Let me step alertly on these stones. Let me worship the spirit of these rocks! I added several pages to my letter to Friedell—all about the ecstasy of breaking the bonds of academe.
The only problem was that during our separation, Gary had turned into a horrible worrywort! He looked at me, and I wanted to hug and kiss him and dance, but he said he couldn’t touch me, and he pulled these long faces, and he said, “Sharon, Sharon. Please! Calm down.”
“Why should I calm down? Why shouldn’t I be excited?” I asked him the third day after I arrived. We were sitting in the reception room of Torah Or, which was a suite of rooms in a run-down three-story apartment building. The first-floor reception area was full of these American men and women coming in and out in their various degrees of religiosity and knowledge. Some guys were dressed like Gary with big black yarmulkes and beards, and some had jeans, and some had dreadlocks. All through the building flowed these streams of young kids and older religious wanderers—along with various disheveled people who muttered to themselves and smelled bad, which normally you would associate with homelessness, yet there at the institute you felt they very probably were prophets.
“Gary, couldn’t we talk for a minute in private?”
“I’d rather talk here,” he said.
So we stood there, and I whispered, “Gary, don’t you still believe in the symmetries in our lives?”
He nodded.
I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t you still think everything, including us, happened for a purpose?”
“Yes.” He pulled his arm away. “But we can’t read all the purposes of Hashem.”
I said, “Gary, I don’t think Hashem has a problem with people jumping up and down and being joyful because they’ve arrived in His or Her—”
“In His,” Gary said.
“In His holy place. It’s not like He doesn’t know how to share! Gary, why are you always pulling away from me?”
“I can’t touch you,” he said.
“I don’t get it. Was I so much better on paper?” “I thought you came to Torah Or to learn.”
“I did!” I told him. “But also to understand Jerusalem. And to reconnect? Remember? To reconnect with you.”
He looked alarmed. “Oh, Sharon, there is so much learning; there is such a world of knowledge to uncover. You can go to class and learn every minute of the day, and all night, too, and you’ll never ever come to the end of it.”
“I know.” I was just as serious as he was. “I know. I know.”
That seemed to cheer him up tremendously. “Then it’s time,” he told me. “Sharon, it’s time for you to begin!”
That very day Gary was going to speak to the dean of the women’s division—since women and men learned separately. “Tell him I want to study the nature of God,” I said. “And how He manifests Himself in the world, okay?”
But I should have known, after all those years, that Gary never listened to me. He got me into an intensive minicourse on Judaic law and history.
I’D come out figuring I’d be bunking with Gary, but the institute had separate dorms for men and women, so I got a bed in the women’s wing, which was a maze of rooms in this really old, freezing-cold building, without any heat, next door. I had a little cot, and I slept in a room full of cots, and with these high vaulted ceilings and stone floors like ice. If Gary hadn’t lent me a wool blanket and sweater, I would have come down with pneumonia the first week, just from the shock of that frigid Jerusalem spring.
That first morning as an official student I woke up and all my muscles hurt from tossing and turning in the cold. I could barely stand to get out of bed. Still, I stumbled downstairs for morning prayers in the synagogue/cafeteria. It was a small-scale school, so they had to double up. There were about twenty-five women students, something like twenty young ones on their junior year abroad from college, like Queens College, Brandeis, and a couple from Barnard. They were, I guess, in the advanced program. And then there were a few of us beginners in our thirties and forties. I was kind of in the middle, between the college girls and the mid-lifers, since I was twenty-nine. Well, I gra
bbed a Hebrew prayer book and joined everybody praying. The college girls just sped through the prayers and sat down for breakfast, while we older ones still stood there holding our books. Then eventually I saw the older women would start finishing up. Still, I wasn’t done. Not that I was embarrassed, but I was the last one standing there, because the prayer book was all in Hebrew, except for a few English instructions. I was the last one standing there, because my Hebrew was so bad. I mean, obviously, all I knew was the alphabet! Yet I remembered what Gary said about a world of learning. I was determined to give these prayers my best shot.
It got to be a marathon session every morning. I would be spelling out the words there in the cafeteria. It took me around four hours to finish praying every morning. People finished eating. They went off to do their reading or their morning classes. These Yemenite cleaning women would come in, clear away breakfast, I was still there, praying. They’d fold up the folding chairs, I was still praying. They’d start hosing down the floor around my feet; they’d start squeegeeing the water—I’m still standing there like the rocks and the planets. There was one other woman who also took a long time. At first I was glad, since it was embarrassing standing there alone. Then I noticed she kept looking over at me to see what page I was on. She had a crew cut and severely plucked eyebrows, and boy was she competitive! She’d check my page, then turn back to her own book, bobbing up and down like a maniac. So after about a week I figured out this woman was into praying with feeling, which meant for each word you had to move your lips, knit your eyebrows, and shuffle around as much as you could. Obviously the slower you went, the more feeling you had, right? So she was envious of me, because I was going slower than everyone else, so I must’ve been the holiest one there, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to pray as slowly as I was. Every morning I drove her up a wall, since I never told her I knew hardly any Hebrew. She’d have to give up after about three hours. She’d stalk around glaring at me.