by Ragen, Naomi
As a girl, she’d only seen the most pious rabbis’ wives and her Torah teachers wear wigs. Other religious women teachers had worn hats, although with visible reluctance, and the hats kept getting smaller and smaller as time went by.
Strangely, although her mother’s generation and even her grandmother’s had neatly done away with the hair-covering custom altogether, it was her generation that had set themselves the reactionary goal of bringing it back, something like Iranian girls making a revolution to put themselves into veils and under the thumb of the mullahs and imams.
How many discussions had she had with her Bernstein Seminary classmates on whether or not they would cover their hair when they got married? How many hours had been wasted describing the merits, exploring the major moral significance, and plumbing the religious joy of buying either a hat to match every outfit or a fantastically expensive custom-made wig usually reserved for chemo patients who had lost all their hair? Whatever the conclusion they came to, most agreed that—outdated custom or no—it was a religious obligation you simply couldn’t wiggle out of. Some girls even claimed it had nothing to do with modesty; that it was one of those unfathomable Divine decrees, like the red heifer, whose sprinkled ashes somehow had the mystical power to cleanse the nation of sins and impurities.
But as far as Delilah could see, forcing women to cover their hair was no red heifer; it was simply a gimmick—one of many—that rabbis had dreamed up just to make married women uglier than unmarried women, so that men could easily tell them apart, ostensibly for the purpose of encouraging them to keep their hands off the married ones.
Wig wearing wasn’t helpful in the least to this endeavor, which is why the stringency kings wanted to outlaw wigs. For many years they had waged a guerrilla war against the wig stores and shaitel makers, coming up with ever more imaginative ways of doing battle. Their ultimate coup was achieved by spreading the rumor that wigs contained hair donated by women as part of the idolatrous worship of Hindu deities. The resulting wig burnings that took place all over the religious world—reducing many a panicked matron to ugly head scarves and wig store owners to bankruptcy—filled them with rapturous satisfaction, But the rumor was eventually quashed, and the sale of wigs shot back up to normal. This time, though, wigs had to carry a rabbinical stamp of approval ascertaining no Hindu deities had been deprived of their due
Many of Delilah’s friends viewed the prewedding wig-and-hat-buying spree as just one more lovely, religiously sanctioned prénuptial extravagance. They would no more have dreamed of forgoing it than they would have given up the sterling silver candelabra they had coming to them from their mothers-in-law.
But as married life rolled on and all that wig wearing gave them headaches, ruining their natural hair; and the effort to find a hat that would match every single outfit began to drain their ingenuity—not to mention their cash—they began to realize what a fine mess they’d gotten themselves into. By then, of course, it was much too late. If a bride never covered her hair, that was one thing. But if she covered it and then decided as a married woman to uncover it, that was a major religious statement that needed to be accounted for among friends, family, and community, a monumental showdown that most religious women didn’t have the stomach for, even when their husbands backed them up.
Not that many husbands did. Given that their own religious status would be vulnerable to a staggering blow should their wives suddenly feel the joy of having the wind blow through their hair, such a man was rare. Except for the singular man of moral courage who sympathized with his wife’s frustration or had the intellectual honesty to admit the silliness of the prohibition, most men were perfectly thrilled to maintain religiously sanctioned control over their wives’ femininity.
Delilah had also bought into the hats and the wigs but had become disillusioned rather sooner than most. She immediately discarded her head covering while in the privacy of her home, ignoring the example quoted in the Talmud of the sanctimonious and insufferable matron who declared the secret to her success in mothering some outrageous number of priests in the Holy Temple had been entirely due to the fact that “the walls of her house had never seen a strand of her hair.” But that was just an opinion, not Jewish law. All rabbis agreed that you only had to cover your hair outside the house. If any man came over, she threw on a scarf, of course.
However much she longed to go back to wearing her hair the way she had as a single girl, she was painfully reconciled to the fact that it would be tricky if not impossible now that she was the wife of a congregational rabbi and all eyes were upon her, grading her saintliness. How could people rely on a rabbi who couldn’t maintain strict adherence to Jewish law even in his own home?
While she chafed under the prohibition, she made do by constantly wearing an exquisite blond wig, custom-made at enormous expense to fit her perfectly. She looked so stunning in it, she left Chaim alone. Unfortunately, constant wear and many washings and blow dryings had taken their toll; the wig, alas, had lost its appeal. In fact, it was actually beginning to look like a wig, which is the last thing any religious woman wants. Equally unfortunately, the thousands of dollars necessary to replace it were simply not available. What she was left with was buying the kind of out-of-the-box human hair/polyester weave worn by Hasidic women, Halloween revelers, and call girls, styling and length being the key differences.
She tried turbans. She tried snoods. She tried berets. She tried baseball caps worn frontward and backward. While all these things were workable, if not beautiful, adequate to run errands and wash the floors, they simply would not do when she made her slow triumphant walk down the center aisle to the front of the women’s section to the seat marked with a brass plaque: RESERVED FOR THE RABBI’S WIFE.
Hats, at least the kind worn by the women in her congregation, cost a fortune. And clothes like theirs an even bigger fortune. But what could she do? Living among the very wealthy, being invited to another Bar and Bat Mitzva or wedding almost every month, she needed something respectable and festive to wear. And since everyone she knew in the community came to these affairs, she couldn’t very well wear the same outfit each time, now, could she? Besides, it would wear out eventually, unless it was made of iron. Couple that with the constant gifts that she and Chaim had to come up with, the extra quantity and quality of food she had to buy for the unending stream of guests, the high heat and electric bills for the large house, not to mention the babysitters needed when she had to accompany her husband to unveilings, evening events, shiva calls, and many other duties that necessitated leaving little Abraham behind, and they were effectively broke most of the time.
She considered going back to work, but when you took child care into account it wouldn’t have left her that much. And somehow the business of being the rabbi’s wife, while unpaid, was slowly encroaching on more and more of her time.
She once sat down and calculated where her week went. The weekends of course were shot. Not just Saturday, but all day Friday and much of Wednesday and Thursday had to be spent shopping for food and cleaning up the house and cooking for a steady stream of weekend guests who came expecting to be served three opulent sit-down dinners, beginning Friday night and ending late Saturday night when they all cleared out.
And even shopping for food was not a simple thing if you were a rabbi’s wife. There was that time, after a sleepless night with a colicky baby, she’d rolled out of bed and shlepped to the supermarket, only to be hailed from across the aisles by a “Yoo-hoo! Hello, Rebbitzin! My goodness, you look awful! Have you been showering?” Or the time she was accosted in the frozen food section by a woman who stared into her shopping cart, examining each item’s hechsher to see if it was kosher enough. “I’m surprised you are buying things marked with a star-K instead of an OU, not to mention the half circle-K,” She sniffed, scandalized. “My husband says the rabbis supervising aren’t reliable. He won’t touch a crumb, not a crumb, if it’s not stamped with an OU. Do your guests know what they’re eating?” Or the t
ime she was a second away from her turn on the checkout line when a shul member grabbed her by the shoulders and insisted on regaling her with an half-hour’s worth of disgustingly graphic medical details, hinting broadly that she needed someone to drive her to her appointments and hold her hand during treatments. Or the stranger in a polyester jogging suit wearing a large cross, who—seeing her head covering—barred her from picking up nail polish remover, insisting on knowing if she was Jewish and, if so, why she didn’t believe in Jesus.
Sundays were spent going to unveilings or funerals or condolence calls. Mondays were when the week began again with obligations and other synagogue-related work that she had never had to worry about in the Bronx among the aged.
For example, women started showing up at her doorstep, demanding her attention and wordlessly handing her white unmarked envelopes. The first time it happened, Delilah opened the envelope, thinking it might be a donation to the synagogue, but all she found was a bit of stained white cloth. Slowly, it dawned on her where this material had been and where the stain had come from.
She confronted Chaim, fuming. “Read my lips. No-way-José am I going to examine some woman’s vaginal fluids and tell her if she can or can’t have sex with her husband. I am not touching these disgusting things. Tell them to leave me alone!”
“Listen, Delilah,” Chaim had answerered reasonably, “most rabbis’ wives are happy to do it. It’s a woman’s thing. And women feel more comfortable talking to another woman. But if you can’t, you can’t. Just give them to me.”
She was only too happy to do so. But she was still stuck with being the go-between, giving them back to the women, telling them the results, and explaining the consequences. In the worst case, it could mean another two weeks of sexual abstinence and dealing with a frustrated husband—girl, you don’t want to know . . . While Delilah sympathized, no way was she interested in becoming privy to whether or not each one of them would or would not be having sex with their husbands, thus becoming a living repository of the entire community’s sex life. Nor did she particularly want the entire community to keep tabs on hers.
This was not as easy as it sounds in a community with only one mikva. Although efforts were made to hide the entrance to the ritual bath from the street, still, once inside, everyone she met there knew exactly when she’d be having sex with her husband, the rabbi. In addition to that, they had the opportunity to inspect how short her nails were (the very pious cut them to the quick on mikva night, making long nails and manicures impossible) and how she looked without her hair and absolutely no makeup of any kind.
Moreover, the “mikva lady,” that stalwart institution of religious life, chosen from the ranks of the needy and overly pious but not overly bright, made privy to information of the most personal nature, could not always be relied upon to be discreet. “Hello, Mrs. Goldberg, I haven’t seen you in months,” said at full volume in the supermarket, for example, announced a pregnancy to the community like an engraved invitation to participate in the most intimate details of someone’s private life.
Then, of course, there was the monthly sisterhood meeting. During the intensive Metzenbaum era, it had been moved from the synagogue to the rabbi’s house, because Shira Metzenbaum didn’t have enough to do, and now no one saw fit to move it back. And it was not just a meeting, she was led to understand; it was an event.
The food that she had to prepare had to be as imaginative as the way she served it. Each meeting had to have a “theme,” to help keep the women interested in coming back, she was advised. Last month it had been a Ladies Who Lunch theme, with flower-filled shopping bags from Nordstrom’s and Lord & Taylor, and wigs and hats on Styrofoam heads, elaborately decorated to look like some of the synagogue members. She’d prepared white carrot and sweet potato soup, persimmon tuna salad, and little chocolates she had to make in special plastic molds that turned out dreidels and menorahs and other symbols of the season. Often, Delilah cursed her hyper Martha-Stewart-in-a-wig-on-uppers predecessor, feeling schadenfreude for the woman’s present life in Canarsie.
It wasn’t just the preparations that were driving her crazy. During one sisterhood meeting, she’d found two women in her bathroom discussing the hair dye and prescription medication they’d found in her medicine cabinet. At another, a woman she hardly knew told her that her baby was looking “much better” than when he was born, when he’d been “like the puppy in the litter you throw away.” After another, she’d found a silver cake server missing, and then a whole Wedgwood plate. And then there was the woman who had asked all kinds of personal questions about Chaim, finally admitting that her first rabbi had been touchy-feely Moishe from New Jersey, who had had his wife killed by a hit man, and her second, a rabbi in Florida, who had been arrested as a pedophile, so she was just trying to make sure it wasn’t her fault the third time around.
And in between, day and night, there were the phone calls—brring, brrring, brrrring!—day in and day out. The woman who called them at 1 A.M. to complain that her little Lenny had been traumatized by getting a doughnut with pink icing at the Oneg Shabbat party. The man who was incensed that the Lion of Judah giving category in the latest United Jewish fund-raising campaign was between twenty and forty thousand dollars, leaving “those who are just as pious but not as rich” out in the embarrassing cold. Could the rabbi deal with that? Can you give the rabbi a message? Can you remind him? Can you talk to him about it? Could you possibly mention that in his last sermon he spoke too long, too short, about a topic we don’t care about, do care about, but not to that extent, in that way? Can he talk about twelve-year-old girls getting nose jobs in time for their Bat Mitzvas? Can he talk less about Israel; more about Israel? Can he stop supporting the right-wing fanatics, who won’t compromise, and who will get the Jewish people wiped off the planet? Can he stop supporting left-wing fanatics, Israeli peace nuts, who are giving in to our enemies and are going to get us wiped off the planet? Can he stop putting so much pressure on our young people, who are going to wind up with black hats and beards, unemployed and with ten kids? Can he put more pressure on our young people, who are going to be drug addicts and get lost in rave parties in India?
Blah, blah, blah, like she actually had nothing better to do than to consult with Chaim on his boring sermons.
And then there were the phone calls that were actually for her. A cousin of a synagogue member, a very nice thirty-two-year-old girl with a good job as an editor at a big New York publishing firm, was looking for a very attractive lawyer or doctor who was also Orthodox but open-minded. Would she know of somebody suitable? Could she set it up?
Gee, honey, if I knew anybody suitable who matched that description, why would I give him to you? I’d take him myself, she thought. “Not right now, but let me write down the information,” she’d answer sweetly, making no effort to get a pencil. Why bother? Go find a modern Orthodox man in his thirties who wasn’t holding out for a girl who would think as highly of him as his mother, looked like Kate Winslet, was as saintly as the matriarch Sarah, and had the domestic skills of Martha Stewart. Listen, she wanted to shout at these men, the girls are all five-foot-two dark-haired teachers or social workers who will never cook you a kreplach or kiss your feet the way your mother did. Get over it!
And then there were the men who couldn’t wait to get married, who would marry anyone: the divorced men. The stingy, over- or undersexed grouches with bad tempers, body odors, and hanging bellies full of brisket and donuts who had already made one woman miserable but were anxious to make it two. They too were on the phone, seeking her help.
Even the mothers and fathers of college students, who should, for Pete’s sake, have been able to fend for themselves, were calling her, demanding she find suitable matches for their offspring so they wouldn’t bring home a sheygets or a shiksa from their ivy-covered campuses, along with their 3.9 grade-point averages and wildly expensive degrees. Some of these callers were super-religious, people who insisted on knowing the color of the girl�
��s mother’s Sabbath tablecloth. Was it white—acceptable, conservative—or any other color? And did the family have two or three sit-down meals on the Sabbath? (The third meal—which no one could possibly fit into an average stomach—being considered a sign of extra piety.) And was the boy actually going to use his law, accounting, or computer degree or put it aside and let his wife support him forever while he twiddled his thumbs and spoke on his cell phone from Talmudic study halls?
And then there were those people who saw her as the representative of the entire Jewish religion, people who would read the newspaper and then call her up to ask indignantly how a rabbi could run off with a former Russian Orthodox nun who had once been a flamenco dancer, shack up with her in a Miami condo, and leave his wife and congregation behind? “He said it was because his wife sometimes ate shrimp, but I’m not buying it!” they’d shout.
And all this, mind you, she was supposed to deal with on top of her newborn.
The baby. Little Abe.
That was a whole other story in itself. She looked down at the infant in her arms, sucking away like a leech. It had taken Delilah only several weeks to realize that, among her many interests and talents, mothering was not among them. She was as surprised to learn this as the next one.
Like most of us, she had always assumed that the ability to mother was a raw, animal instinct, hormonally supplied by the same chemicals and brain synapses that came along with the birth of a child. The truth was that the insistent, desperate cry of a newborn, added to the insistent, desperate cries of members of her congregation, was just about driving her over the edge.
“He hates me!” she yelled at Chaim, bursting into his study when he was putting the final touches on his weekly sermon on how husbands should be compassionate and unselfishness and helpful. “Just look at his eyes. Look!”
