“I do have connections and could probably find an easier conversion process, but it sounds like your fiancée doesn’t want to convert. I’ve talked to her in depth and it sounds like it is too painful of an idea, too detrimental to her self-identity. There are plenty of other options for you to marry her,” the rabbi says on our speakerphone.
“Well, Judaism is really important to me. I keep kosher. I wrap tefillin every morning,” Meydan states as if he is the authority on religion.
Agggghhhhh! I scream in my head as my hands pull at my hair. You think you are so special because you wrap tefillin in the morning? Well, you aren’t! You are a fake! You are a fraud! You are a cliché! Plenty of Israeli men wrap tefillin in the morning . . . right after their one-night stands or right before they go to eat their bacon cheeseburger . . . Oh, my God . . . Meydan is a cliché. He doesn’t even know who he is. He’ll never stand up for me. He’s a coward. I’d hoped for a Martin Luther King, Jr., but instead I’m stuck with an even lamer version of Kirk Cameron.
“That is something that we Orthodox do,” the rabbi replies, agreeing with Meydan’s comment about wrapping tefillin.
Is taking your kippah off as soon as you’re done praying something that the Orthodox do? Is driving, cooking, and spending money on Shabbat something the Orthodox do? Is fucking me out of wedlock something that the Orthodox do? I want to scream out loud, but instead it all just echoes in my head.
“Okay, well, we’ll look into these options,” Meydan says, fully knowing that the only option he considers “kosher” enough is me converting, since he isn’t strong enough to take a stand. “Thank you for your help.”
He hangs up the phone and looks at me crying on the couch. “We have to go. We’re late to see the apartment.”
In a few months we’re supposed to be moving into the apartment that his grandfather gave him.
In silence, we sit in my car. Everything outside is a blur. I can’t see anything through my tears.
For the past few months the only time we talk to each other is to argue about marriage and religion. I cry every day. He has yet to shed a tear. I realized a long time ago that the affection of Israeli men should not be confused with emotions. There must be a training course in the army that teaches them how not to be emotional.
When we get to the apartment, I realize that it is literally across the street from his parents . . . and grandparents. My life is going to become the Israeli version of Everybody Loves Raymond, which is a hundred times worse than the American version, since Israelis are pushy, bossy, and have no sense of boundaries or privacy. It is bad enough living ten minutes from them—his dad stops over every day unannounced, his mom brings food and laundry, and they are always asking him to come over to do jobs around the house. The country, being the size of New Jersey, is small enough as it is. It is not like we can move that far away from his family, but that doesn’t mean we have to live next door to them.
I get out of the car. I look at the street sign. The street of our new home is named Asari Tzion, Prisoners of Zion. I think to myself that there must be a God, because there is no way that this type of irony can be random.
“Isn’t it great? I can’t wait to fix it up!” Meydan says with enthusiasm after we walk in. We are standing in the middle of the dark, dusty, and grimy apartment. I feel as if the walls are closing in on me.
“Let’s go see the bedrooms.” Meydan leads me down the hall.
Israeli apartments are so small. There isn’t even room to breathe. There is no oxygen in here.
“And this is the bathroom,” Meydan says.
I start sweating.
“And this can be the laundry room,” Meydan adds, winking at me.
I’m having a hot flash.
“One of these rooms can be my office.”
There’s no air moving inside. There’s no light. It’s dark in the middle of the day.
“This is the bomb shelter. We can use this for storage or something. And look at this big window in the living room, isn’t it great?”
I feel like Carrie in Sex and the City when she had an allergic reaction to the cheap wedding gown. I feel like I’m having an allergic reaction to this low-class, bigoted neighborhood. Just the thought of the religious demonstrating against Ethiopian children being in schools together with the Ashkenazi children is making me sick. I don’t want to raise children in a racist neighborhood like this. I don’t want to raise children with a twisted sense of religion.
Or maybe I’m becoming allergic to a future with Meydan.
* * *
Before I know it, we’ve packed up everything from our kibbutz apartment into separate boxes—the things headed for my apartment and the things that will be stored at the new one until we finish with renovations. While we are still together, our future paths are looking very different. It is hard saying goodbye to the life we had here, the open door policy for dogs and friends, and even the cramped lifestyle we have shared over the past year.
Seeing the emptiness of our apartment makes me doubt that we’re strong enough to overcome the reign of the rabbinate.
* * *
We live the next two months in transit. We spend nights at my shared apartment in Tel Aviv with Orli. Meydan travels around during the day, sometimes at the new apartment with the builders, sometimes at coffee shops, and sometimes at his parents’ house. Jinjy, our dog, gets schlepped around depending on our schedules. Meydan mostly lives out of the new car he just bought, never fully moving in to any place.
As our living situation becomes more and more separate, so do our lives. Like an old sweater, our relationship is slowly unraveling. We’re coming to an end. He had told me then, in his own words, that fateful night in the car that I was not Jewish enough for him, but I would not hear it. I could not hear it. He had become my future in this country. He had become Israel to me. If he can’t accept my Jewishness, then the country won’t either. If he can’t accept me, then I won’t be able to live here anymore. So, while he’s busy putting all of his energy into fixing up the apartment, I keep fighting for this relationship and for what I’ve always hoped would be our future. I feel like I’m trying to revive a person, even though I know he’s already dead.
“Mira, I need your help,” I say. This is my last attempt.
I’m in Meydan’s mom’s crowded and messy kitchen. She is in her pajamas making a feast for a regular Tuesday night dinner.
“Sure, anything,” she says.
“Well, uh . . . I don’t know how to say this . . .” I begin crying. Meydan still hasn’t told anyone in his close-knit family about what is going on between us. I think it is because he is ashamed, but I don’t know if it is of me or of himself.
She stops and looks at me. “Did Meydan hurt you?”
“No, not exactly.”
I tell her the whole story.
“Well, of course I accept you and we accept you, but what about the children?” she says, as though I’d be passing along some terrible genetic disease to them. “You know, Moti, my husband, used to be like Meydan. He used to wrap tefillin, but after we got married, he stopped,” she rambles, her eyes wandering until they fixate on the corner of the counter. “Look at this! The counter is broken. You see? I have to do everything around here by myself. I super-glued this piece back on yesterday and now it is falling off again.”
I’ve got to keep her on track, I think to myself.
“Mira, what should I do? I can’t convert. I just can’t do it,” I cry.
Mikah, Meydan’s younger sister who is twenty-five years old and still living at home, walks into the kitchen.
“Look at you, Jessica. The onions must be getting to your eyes. I’ll open up a window,” Mira says trying to hide the fact that I’m crying from Mikah.
She doesn’t know that both Mikah and Libbi, Meydan’s sister-in-law, already know the whole story. I told them the story months ago. For how close their family is, they are full of secrets. I know Mikah will keep my secret, since I’
m keeping her secret about dating a German Muslim.
Mikah walks out.
“Well, Jessica, if you want him, then you need to do what he wants,” she says, as if she is reading a script from Leave it to Beaver.
The entire kitchen turns black and white.
Scarlet Letter
After months of arguing, Meydan and I broke up. We were driving in my car and he pulled over to pick up a religious hitchhiker. I was furious, I didn’t want a man who didn’t consider me Jewish in my car.
“What are you doing?” I had asked Meydan.
“Offering him a ride,” he replied.
Is he doing this dafka, purposely? I thought to myself. I made a disgusted face, thinking back to when I was sixteen years old and visiting Jerusalem on my teen tour. I had gone into Meah She’arim, an extremely religious neighborhood to buy challah bread for Shabbat and when I asked a religious man for directions, he refused to even look at me.
Meydan looked at me. “You shouldn’t hate them. We are all brothers.”
I know that the religious penguins typically inbreed, but I certainly don’t consider them my family. They make me feel like a disowned child. Telling me to love them like brothers is like telling Rodney King to go up and hug the police officers who beat him.
“Where are you going achi, brother?” Meydan asked.
It turned out that he was going in another direction, but offered us a prayer book.
The religious man looked at me as if he knew my secret. I felt as if I was wearing a big scarlet C on my chest. Maybe I shouldn’t have had a nose job, I think to myself, then no one would have questioned my Jewishness.
“Why would you do that to me?” I asked.
He looked at me, bewildered.
Why would he do any of this to me? I asked myself.
Everything we did came back to the same subject. We couldn’t even talk without fighting.
After that, we both let go of each other. The rabbinate won. Our love had not been strong enough . . . or maybe he had not been strong enough.
It was all over in an instant. The fighting ended. My aliyah dreams disappeared. My future vanished.
* * *
Now I sit at my desk at work, trying to distract myself with a marketing project. Every document that I work on, every email that I write, every presentation that I create, keeps me in this country and proves that I have some purpose here. As I’m working on one of the projects, my manager walks over and asks me to come to his office.
“Jessica, you know we have been having a lot of financial problems . . .” he says.
I close my eyes to hide my tears.
“I’m sorry. I did everything I could to keep you on,” he says. “Your work has been extremely valuable to the company. I hope you will continue to work for us on a freelance basis . . . if we have the money.”
I open my eyes, but I can’t look at him in the face. I stare out the window behind his desk. “Okay,” I manage to say.
“You will have to return your car to the company,” he says. All those years in the army and working under Cruella now seem meaningless. Everything I had worked for during the past eight years is suddenly gone.
As I walk out of the offices, the sun shines down on me as if it is actually a cheerful day. I try to reorientate myself, but the light blinds me. After all those years, I am back at square one. I don’t know how to pick myself up again. Or how to start over again. Where am I going to find the energy? Or the strength? I no longer have the will inside of me to start over again.
After taking the train home, I crawl into my bed. I pull the covers up above my head and draw the blinds shut so that not even a ray of sunlight can come in. I never want to leave this spot again. I stay there for a week. The only time I get up is to take Jinjy out for a walk.
I finally pull myself out of bed to go sign up for unemployment. With odd hours, strange documentation requests, and never-ending lines, Israel even makes being unemployed difficult.
Knowing that the only way I will be able to pull myself out of this hole, I turn to Orli, the only family I have left in Israel for support. I need her to hold my hand. I feel more alone in Israel than ever.
“I don’t know what to do,” I sob from under my covers.
“Jessica, you need to get up. Start looking for a job. You can’t stay under your covers for the rest of your life,” she says.
Now weighing under a hundred pounds, I literally do not have the strength to move.
“And you need to eat,” she says.
At least I didn’t get that Jewish gene of overeating when I’m upset.
“Listen, I’ve discussed this with the other roommate, and I know it’s not a good time to mention this, but we don’t want to live with a dog. You’re going to have to move out if you want to keep him.”
As I pull Jinjy closer, I start sobbing harder. I think back to the night that I had brought her family money for electricity while I was in my volunteer program. That night, I felt like I had family in Israel. Now I feel completely alone.
My real life feels like an over-used chick lit plot, but unlike the strong female protagonist in those books, my strength is gone. I feel limp. I am hopeless. I have nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Most of the olim hadashim, new immigrants, I have met along the way, or who had lived with me at Merkaz Hamagshamim, have already been back in the US for years.
Orli gets up and walks out of my room.
* * *
Day after day, I sit alone in my apartment with no one to call, no one to lean on, nowhere to go, and no way to get there. Jinjy is the only body that keeps me warm at night, when the darkness, rain, and cold wind penetrate the thick walls of my apartment.
I no longer have the strength for this country. It has worn me down. Even breathing is hard these days. It has destroyed the wide-eyed optimistic girl that got off the plane to make aliyah. But this country is still a part of me. Leaving this country would be like cutting off my own arm. I am trapped and I do not know how to get out. I do not know how to move forward.
I look over at the famous poster of the three Israeli paratroopers standing in front of the Western Wall when Jerusalem was first emancipated. Israelis always ask me why I hang that poster up in my room. To me, that picture represents the pride and hope of the Jewish people.
I think back to my teen tour, now nearly fifteen years ago. I remember how many possibilities this country offered. We spent a night at a Bedouin tent, where they made us traditional Bedouin food on the fire, served us strong tea and coffee. They told us about how the Bedouins have preserved their natural way of life as nomads in the desert. And they talked about the coexistence between Jews and Bedouins. I thought it was beautiful. Only a few years ago, I led a Birthright group of twenty-something Americans and we visited the same Bedouin tent. After listening to the same exact explanation of their custom and their beliefs, I walked in back to discuss logistics with them. And there I saw that their real home had a flat-screen TV, espresso machine, and every other appliance that your heart could desire. They were better equipped in the middle of the desert than I am in Tel Aviv.
I look back at the poster hanging on my wall. I stare into the eyes of those three soldiers, so filled with hope and awe. That is the way that I used to stare at the Western Wall, but now that same site only reminds me of the control the rabbinate has over the country’s Jewish identity. The same site that used to represent holiness now represents corruption and discrimination. The picture no longer symbolizes the hope of the Jewish people to be united in one land, it represents everything that is bad about the country. It represents how the secular Jews who fight with their lives for this country only to have it taken over by the ultra-Orthodox.
I get out of my bed. I walk over to the poster. After looking more closely at their faces, I tear it off my wall. With tears blurring my eyes, I look around my room. I see the entire country differently. Even though the national anthem is HaTikvah, The Hope, I have lost all hope in this country.
I shake with sobs. I can’t control myself. It is like the curtain has been lifted to expose the wizard as just an ordinary man.
I’m crying so hard that I can barely breathe. I fall to the floor.
I have nowhere to turn. No one to call. Everyone I ever trusted here has betrayed me. Even though many people turn to religion for hope, religion has caused me to lose it.
I am convulsing. I can’t control my tears.
Jinjy looks at me with worried eyes and his head cocked.
Unlike the author of Eat, Pray, Love, who heard a little voice telling her to go back to bed and that everything was going to be okay when she broke down, I hear the voice of Xanax from my drawer. And that voice is pretty convincing.
I take one to calm down.
I’m still crying.
I take another one.
I don’t want to hurt any more.
I can’t stop crying.
I take another one.
I just want to stop hurting.
* * *
I open my eyes. Bar is standing in front of me with light glowing from behind him. He looks like an angel. I wonder if I’m in heaven.
“Baaaaarrrrrr,” I cry. He is sitting right next to me. He looks at me with tears in his eyes.
Bar moved back to Israel a few weeks ago. He wanted to give this country another chance.
I look around. I’m no longer in my room. There is a curtain pulled around the bed. The florescent lights are flickering above me. I look down. There is an IV in my arm.
Oops, I think.
“It is okay, Jessica. Yihyeh b’seder, everything will be okay,” he says solemnly.
Orli is on my phone talking in English.
She must be talking to my parents. That must mean that my family is coming for me. For the first time, I truly believe that yihyeh b’seder.
The End of the Tornado
My mom arrived the next day and within the next week, my entire life in Israel is packed up in boxes. That is, everything except for my emotional baggage—I’m stuck carrying that myself.
My mom came to help me pick up the pieces of my life. I’d missed her more than I’d realized. It was her past that I had been running from, but she keeps running to my rescue. Her presence gives me strength. I don’t want to run anymore. I want to reclaim my past and stand up for her choice.
Chutzpah & High Heels Page 27
