Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  After I dropped Isaac off at school, the hours loomed in front of me expensively, time I couldn’t afford to pay for, and I walked the city aimlessly to stem the panic. Up Lexington, down Park, up Madison, down Fifth and into Central Park, up to the reservoir, down to the boathouse, back onto Museum Mile and through the hushed side streets with their expensive belle epoque town houses. One day as I made my way home via Park Avenue, traversing the land of doormen, valets, and chauffeurs, I saw a strange sight that has stayed with me in perfect clarity until today. Two policemen were standing around a prone body that lay outstretched in front of the grand entrance to an elegant, forbidding condominium building. They seemed to be trying to determine if the homeless person in question was dead or only sleeping. I had seen this before; normally the policemen, having been alerted by the private neighborhood guards, would shake the homeless person awake, insisting he change his location. Hours later they would most assuredly be called to pry him from his next spot, but such was life if you were homeless in New York City. You weren’t allowed to loiter, but there was nowhere to go, so you loitered as long as you could. I spent so much time then thinking about homeless people because I was convinced it was only a matter of time before I would join their ranks. This particular person wasn’t showing the slightest response despite the increasing rudeness of the prodding by those policemen. And then suddenly, the door to the building was swung open by the uniformed valet, and out paraded a tall, slender woman with a veil of long, shiny platinum blond hair, her long legs tucked into knee-high black leather boots with sharp stiletto heels, strutting as if on a catwalk on the way to the chauffeured town car lying in wait. In those brief seconds I took note of her crocodile-skin bag, her sable coat, the way her chin was lifted up and out as if propped up by an invisible brace, and I deduced in seconds that she was wearing probably thirty thousand dollars’ worth of clothing. I watched in disbelief as she stretched a long, spindly leg over the body of the man lying on her street, as if he did not exist, or rather, as if his existence was nothing but a silly inconvenience that others would dispense of for her, before disappearing into the cavernous town car only a moment later, the door shutting behind her with a resolute thud. Off they sped into the traffic, and the police continued their poking and pushing as if nothing had happened.

  This terrible image would come to represent the city of New York to me. I would see such performances repeated in various forms all over Manhattan, but it is this one that remains crystal clear in my mind, like a video playing on repeat. In their absolute indifference to the reality of human suffering in the immediate vicinity, these ostentatious displays of wealth that I was suddenly confronted with seemed to confirm what my upbringing had led me to believe, namely, that wealth was immoral, that it was the root cause of all evil. I came to see New York City as ugly because of its emphasis on wealth at the expense of all else, and this ugliness depressed me. I lost the ability to be enchanted by the small beauties in life because they had become eclipsed by the all-consuming ugliness of a capitalist paradise.

  On that day, as the rich woman sped off in her town car, I turned away, feeling sick. Across the street from me was an enormous Catholic church, its doors open, and without thinking I crossed at the intersection and fled into its pews. In the silence and emptiness of the church I found a respite from the ugliness outside it, and to alleviate the hopelessness growing within me, I began to escape regularly into the many imposing churches that lined these affluent streets, simply because, unlike most synagogues, they were left open to the public every day. I was not seeking religion, but there was a kind of salvation in the silence to be found there, in the cool darkness of those empty stone buildings.

  I visited many churches, both Catholic and Protestant, although I preferred the Catholic, with its smells of incense, its flickering candles, its clergy members moving soundlessly over stone floors in their mysterious robes like magician’s capes. I frequented the cathedrals on Fifth Avenue, or the Anglican church of St. Thomas More on Ninety-Fourth Street, where dark wood wainscoting recalled an English manor and a priest bustled around the pulpit without ever glancing toward the dark corner where I sat under the eaves. I spent entire days sitting in churches, feeling ensconced, safe from the overwhelming chaos of the city. Very often, I drifted into a kind of trance and would awaken from it hours later without being able to account for the time that had passed. Perhaps those were my first periods of meditation. I marvel now at how my instincts functioned during this period, seeking out coping mechanisms to see me through that difficult transition.

  What if, I wondered as I sat in the back right corner of St. Ignatius Loyola, God was still there after all? What if he had been there all along, in the silence, in the aloneness, in me? What if I needed to get rid of everything, every last thing, in order to find him?

  I began to fantasize that I was finally on the right path toward God, that by being stripped of every comfort and crutch, I would come to know the truth about him. I remembered the stories I had been told about the lamed-vav’niks, about how they had achieved ultimate closeness to heaven by renouncing all earthly consolations. Perhaps I had been onto something all those years ago. Perhaps the spirit of Leibel from Oshvar did indeed reside in me.

  * * *

  —

  On most evenings, after I had put Isaac to bed, I would run myself a hot bath in the hope that it would relax me enough to make sleep come smoothly, instead of in the fits and jerks characterized by the ever-wakeful state of my anxious brain. My white-tiled bathroom was small and cramped, the tub custom-made to fit into the awkward, narrow space, but there was a tapered window on one end that I usually propped open as ventilation. On one particular evening in the spring of 2011 it had become warm enough to keep the window open during my bath, and as I emerged from the water after dunking my hair for washing I was startled by a sound, that of an otherworldly singing, which at first seemed to me music playing from a device, and yet was too diffuse and vibrant to be confined to a recording. I soon deduced it was the church choir practicing across the courtyard, the weather having allowed for them to prop open some of the slender panes in the large stained-glass windows as well. I listened to the quavering tones that trailed intermittently toward my ear, and that old conviction in me vibrated to life again along with them. I thought, this is a sign, if there ever was one. I dried off, put on a robe, and went to the kitchen window to see if I could glimpse the choir from that vantage. I could not, but the disembodied voices floated into the apartment fuller and more tangibly now, as if on a magical current of air.

  I observed the locust tree below me then, as it had just begun to flower again despite the odds, and took heart in some small way at its persistence. The church choir continued to sing, songs I did not know or recognize, with words I could not single out or understand, but as they sang, while I stood at the window listening, I felt moved, as if by very old, deep-seated forces, to pray. This would be my last prayer, although I could not know it then, and in retrospect I can now identify this same ecstatic comingling of outer and inner stimulants that led to all my previous beseechments. That is to say, in all the moments in my life in which I was moved to engage in spontaneous and effusive prayer, I entered into a state just prior to the action that can only be called drugged, much like the way I feel today after a glass of wine. The world seems to recede into a passive, benign state, and my emotions soar forth as if the canal locks have been released. Each time it seemed that forces within and without were conspiring with each other to bring me to this spiritual precipice, from which there was nothing to do but leap.

  The act of suicide is not wholly unrelated to that of prayer. In the appeal of the spirit to God there is the feeling, even the conviction, that the querent abdicates responsibility over his being and his life to God; with a suicidal leap the jumper abdicates it to death, but both acts are driven by the underlying impetus of having nothing left to lose.

  Back then, as I sens
ed myself leaping into the void that these two acts have in common, with my stomach lurching as if I truly was in free fall, I remembered the husband of my high school teacher, a follower of the Breslov movement, which propagated trancelike prayer under the influence of supportive drugs. It was later said that after embarking upon a spiritual meditation on the rooftop of the synagogue, he had in the heights of his exultation leaped unknowingly to his death.

  This was the price that prayer demanded of us. It was not enough to appeal to God from a secure vantage point; no, prayer wanted from us the willingness to take a risk, to make ourselves vulnerable. Only then would a higher power extend itself for us—when we had extended ourselves for him. A prayer wasn’t some chant one mumbled perfunctorily, or even thought or felt inside one’s own consciousness; it was an act that possessed body and soul and afflicted both with intense spasms of devotional subjugation. One who prayed in earnest invited the spirit of prayer to settle within him and occupy him from the very center to the outermost margins of his being. For this reason we had also learned to shuckle while praying, which was the art of swaying back and forth energetically in order to help the process along.

  But on this particular evening, at the age of twenty-four, I prayed the same way I had as a child; I addressed God again as if he was an old friend, as if he was quite tangible, somewhere out in the beyond listening, his character exactly how I had always imagined it, distracted yet benevolent. I formed the invocations silently, the words looping through my mind like a calligraphic engraving, as if by doing so I was inscribing them into the ether. As I murmured the words to an old and favored psalm, an image of my younger self sank suddenly and heavily into my consciousness, before I could defend myself against its onslaught.

  There I was, twelve years old, sitting outside the principal’s office. Even at that age, I was still getting into trouble for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. This time I knew the rabbi would call my grandfather, my grandfather would call my aunt, and I would get weeks of lectures and intense supervision because of something I said, or wore, or did in school without noticing. I recall myself sitting on that hard wooden bench as if it were yesterday, my shoulders hunched in a posture of defeat, looking down at the scuffed floor while I felt my eyes stinging, threatening to spill over in a deceptive portrayal of guilt, hoping in my sad and weary state that justice might intercede to put an end to this unfairness. And so I started to pray, that one prayer, Psalm 13, which I often repeated many times in succession in a superstitious ritual whenever I found myself in difficult situations. I’ve memorized it by now, this glorious hymn with its dramatic language intimating a powerful narrative, its assertive statements assuming a close and direct relationship between God and his supplicant. I whisper the Hebrew words to myself now:

  How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me forever?

  How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?

  How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart by day?

  How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

  Behold thou, and answer me, O Lord my God;

  lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;

  lest mine enemy say: “I have prevailed against him”;

  lest mine adversaries rejoice when I am moved.

  But as for me, in thy mercy do I trust; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.

  I will sing unto the Lord, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.

  And then, sometime after the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth iteration of the psalm, the door to the office opened, and it was not the rabbi standing there but the secretary, saying the principal was too busy to see me, and I should head back to class. Oh, the joy I experienced on that short walk back to the classroom, knowing I had been saved from certain punishment! How to describe the wonder in feeling that with my prayer I might have reached over some looming wall to something powerful and magical on the other side that could save me.

  Now, all these years later, I searched within myself once again for that spirit, rendered lost in the process of my alienation, because I was clinging to the belief that somewhere in me there was still that ability to manifest the impossible, to sense the invisible, to tap another dimension. I conjured the filmlike images of my desperation, those portraits of ruin that had often haunted me, playing them once again before the gaze of God so that he could fully grasp how tenuous my situation was. Was this not my special power after all, the power to invoke a response through emotive description? My prayer, the first after a long period of silence, felt like an important interview that I could not afford to fail; I needed to impress upon God the urgency of my need in order to not squander the opportunity of his audience. Should I be able to do so, much in the way I had done when I was twelve and desperate for succor; should my desperation today prove as authentic and pure as it had then, then surely now I too could arrange for my salvation.

  Soon I felt exhausted from the effort, much in the way that prayer had exhausted me as a child, as if I sensed the spiritual store emptying and knew that with each great effort to reach God the human being was left taxed. There was only a limited amount of spiritual energy in an earthly creature, it was clear, and mine had not been replenished in quite some time. After I finished my prayer I waited for a while at the window, as if hoping for a celestial response, or at least a subtle signal, but nothing happened, at least nothing as concrete as on that fateful day in school, when the secretary stood in the door like an apparition and it was as if Moses had parted the Red Sea before my eyes.

  Slowly the effects of the stimulant wore off, and the high began to wane. The choir stopped singing, and in the comparative silence everything seemed mundane once more. Although I went to bed fantasizing that when I woke up the next morning, things would be entirely, magically different, my moment of supplication at the window had already begun to seem vaguely ridiculous and childish. Within me it was as if the very last cinder of faith had been consumed in the furnace of prayer.

  After that, around once a week or so the tones of the choir would waft toward my window like the aromas that drifted from nearby chimneys, but no answer to my desperate entreaty presented itself. I did receive a job offer as a secretary in a small dance studio, which paid only enough to cover my monthly grocery bill, and though I took it for lack of something better, feeling I needed to do something to stem the panic and emptiness, I was more aware than ever how urgently I needed to meet the gap between my meager income and the exorbitant rent. During my work hours I was often so distracted by fear as to be rendered practically useless at my job. Yet I continued to repeat my mantra to myself, which I used as a psychological defense against the waves of anxiety hurling themselves at the walls of my spirit; I made myself the promise that I would endure. It was not as if I had ever thought that these years would be easy, I reminded myself. I had not been deluded about the challenges that lay before me. I would suffer gladly under the notion that it was all temporary, that eventually I would figure out how to live the life I wanted, the one I had given everything up for. One day, it would all become clear; it would be thrown into perspective. One day, all of this would just be a story, I told myself, trying to diminish the roller-coaster experience I was having into a predictable dramatic arc.

  * * *

  —

  It was around this time that Isaac began coming home from school withdrawn and irritable. It had already become such an effort to project calm around him to protect him from my fear that his new moods threatened to destroy all my efforts. At first I worried they were a sign that he saw through my facade completely, that I was failing at my most important task. But then I began to discover strange bite marks on his arms during bathing, or bruises on his body when I changed his clothes, marks that concerned me, as they did not strike me as the normal signifiers of playground roughhousing, but when I asked him about them, he stiffened into further reserve. I eventually coaxed it out o
f him that there was a bully in school. I had been somewhat prepared for this moment, having been bullied as a very young girl myself, and like most mothers perhaps, I had always preferred to imagine my son as one who would not bully others; therefore, it stood to reason that he would at some point fall into the role of the victim. Life seems to force us into these oppositional roles, as if we have to choose between the two and cannot simply refuse to participate in the duality.

  I tried to give him advice about how to handle the bully, perhaps standard American parenting advice in this regard, that is, to communicate to an adult what was happening and to trust that he or she would solve the problem, which was official policy in most preschools in New York City. But the next time I picked up a tearful Isaac from school and asked him if he had followed my instructions, he insisted he had, wailing with frustration at the injustice, for his teacher had done nothing, he said, even though he had done exactly as he was told, even though he had done the right thing. In fact, he told me, she had seen it happening and had failed to address it, instead sending Isaac for a time-out, in a sense punishing him for reporting the violation.

  Concerned, I made an appointment to speak with the teacher about this. She was a young woman whom I actually liked, as she seemed kind and thoughtful and, unlike the clientele at the school, not necessarily from a wealthy, privileged family. She seemed uncomfortable during our meeting, saying only that since she had not witnessed the events that Isaac had reported it was difficult for her to address the problem. Had she seen the marks on him? I wanted to know. She had, but again, having not been a personal witness, she found it hard to exercise her authority freely. The conversation was going nowhere and I felt vaguely frustrated, sensing that there was something I was missing, a piece of information that I wasn’t privy to. But there was no way of proving that my gut feeling was rooted in reality and not in stereotypical maternal angst. I implored the teacher to keep a special eye out for such incidents in the future. I was clear about our situation, trying to impress upon her that the two of us were too vulnerable at the moment to withstand any extra challenges. I felt certain I detected sympathy in her response, but she was careful to remain neutral in her language.