Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  The rabbi talked on about Jewish women lighting Sabbath candles all over the world, about how Jewish women have been doing the candle ritual on Friday evenings for thousands of years. He called those women noble and important. Images of this simple simultaneous act of lighting candles played in my mind, the little flames lit by women around the world, always at sundown, flickering shadows on dining room walls, covered heads bowed over centuries. That was solidarity, global, historical—a true sense of belonging. The rabbi said that we women brought light to the world.

  He paused and gave us a long gaze, then raised his voice for dramatic effect. “It is time,” he said, “for the women to inaugurate the holy Sabbath.” He gestured toward a long table at the other end of the hall set with unlit candles. He turned and stretched out one arm as if we women were honored guests he was ushering through a doorway into his own home. But it also seemed we had no choice.

  Around me, the sound of women rising, a rustle and movement, gathering of pocketbooks, murmurs, the click of heels. Our new mission was an important one. Together we would light those candles and create a peaceful island of time, a Sabbath Island, for our People. And so Ana and I glided away among the women, leaving the men behind.

  Near the kitchen was a single narrow table with many little brass candlesticks and a pile of matchbooks at one end. Ana’s eagerness made me smile. We all gathered around the candle-covered table, maybe twenty of us.

  “I can do this one. It’s basic Sunday School,” Ana said.

  “I feel weird,” I murmured back.

  Ana took a book of matches from the pile and lit two candles, then covered her eyes with her hands and recited the Hebrew blessing. But this faux kind of female-ness we were taking part in was yet another set of rules that I couldn’t begin to intuit. Shyness settled over me like a veil.

  Then, standing there deep within that female group, I was suddenly grateful for this rare sense of belonging among women. Here we were, all immersed in the same moment in the same prayer, the same ritual. I, too, took up a matchbook. Struck a match. A sizzle rose up, then a blue and yellow flame. I also remembered what I’d been taught in Sunday School. Hold the flame to the wick, I thought, until it burns small and strong on its own. Recite the blessing, hands over eyes. Baruch atah adonoi elohenu. Then I stood surrounded by the others’ whispers, magnetized to them among their wafts of perfume, tiny swaying movements, Ana’s sleeve brushing my arm. Before me was a horizon of wavering little flames. Maybe, I thought, maybe we were more than just blips in history, more than statistics. We could be women who, as the rabbi said, had just changed the world with the strike of a match.

  We could mean something. Because, like God, we could create a day.

  WHEN I WAS SMALL I was afraid of the dark. One night, I woke up terrified in the black night. I wanted my mother. Once out of bed, unable to see in the dark, I waved jerking, trembling hands in front of me for obstacles and somehow found my way into the hallway. All along the hall, I knew, were the huge canvases my mother had painted; we lived in her narrowed, cluttered chaos edged in her tilting planes of color, although in the dark the colors were only memory. I groped my way past my sisters’ rooms, curling my toes as I crept, wide-eyed and blinded. A lurch, then a halt, fingertips guiding me as they brushed the stippled wall.

  The wall ended at my parents’ doorway, and without it as my guide I was in a void, breathing hard. I dropped to my knees and crawled forward like a blind infant, particles and fibers in the musty carpet pressing into my palms. At the end of this long journey I met the drape of my mother’s bedcover and stood with a rush. I became a toddler, moving sideways inch by inch around her bed, holding on.

  I fully expected my mother to send me back to my room, but she muttered and moved over—no open arms or caress, but I could stay. I slept then and dreamed, but even though I had gotten myself to where I wanted to be, the boy I was in my dream was still looking for his mother. In the morning, I woke with that need for her, the wish for her love a sharp place in my throat. I suppose I have always been compelled to set out clueless through the dark for new places while at the same time looking for safety, heading away yet hoping against logic that in the end I would find I’d come home.

  FOR THE SABBATH EVENING prayer service we moved to the other end of the social hall, where they had set up more rows of chairs in two sections with a partition down the middle.. The women were to sit on the left. We took a seat.

  Another Hassidic rabbi introduced himself as Rabbi Geller and explained that he was in charge of the weekend. He was a short, dark-haired man who bounced as he spoke. Then he positioned himself squarely in front of the men. Soon the men started reciting the Hebrew prayers out loud and very fast, not at all together, sometimes breaking out into joyous deep-voiced song.

  I knew enough of the Hebrew alphabet to know that reading it is phonetic. One can sound out the words without understanding anything. Still, I was surprised that so many of the men could participate so fluently. “Wow,” I whispered to Ana. “They are really going fast.”

  “You think anyone understands what they’re saying?” Ana said.

  “At that speed?” I said. “I wouldn’t even understand if it were in English.”

  The male cacophony fell over us like a startling rain. We were not to mix our voices in prayer with the men, not to raise our voices. A few of the women read from their prayer books. The rest of us sat quietly and waited for the service to end.

  I was becoming restless. There were two Hassidic women in the row in front of us. I knew they were Hassidic because they were wearing wigs in addition to their modest clothing. In those wigs it seemed almost as if they were in a play, in costumes filling the roles of being women. One was older, in a blonde nylon wig. The other had a sleepy thumb-sucking toddler glued to her lap. Both sat up with a self-conscious propriety that I took as elitist. They, too, whispered their prayers. Around us, whistling streams of air from more whispered prayers became audible in tiny moments between the men’s songs.

  I put the prayer book down on the seat next to me and shifted in my chair, tugging at my skirt. I was bored, disconnected from the prayer service, and because of this disconnect the old sense of feeling myself an outsider loomed again. I got up. I told myself I wasn’t rejecting anything, that it was just as if I’d been browsing the booths at a fair and wanted to move on and see more. Ana was still enjoying the old melodies when I slipped out.

  LATER, AT DINNER, the men and women sat on opposite sides of the room. The tables were covered in white and laden with enormous trays of kugels and salads, dishes of eggplant, carrots, eggs, pickles, and thick hand-cut slices of challah. There was a head table across the front connecting the two sides where Rabbi Geller and others of his group were assembling into a line of black coats, beards, and black hats.

  The image of Rabbi Geller and his friends was starting to make sense. Maybe it was the repetition, each of them the same, the message projected again and again. Outside of this room, the Vietnam War was grinding on. Every night there were men on television looking purposeful and serious in identical uniforms.

  “Look at those guys at the front,” I said to Ana.

  She rolled her eyes. “Fashion statement,” she said.

  But now their Hassidic garb spelled out a statement of mission to me. They were God’s elite corps. “It’s not about fashion,” I said to Ana. “And it’s not a costume.”

  “No?” she said.

  “It’s a uniform,” I said. “They are soldiers for God.”

  Ana’s eyes laughed.

  But the self-assuredness that comes with internalizing clear rules, and the nobility of purpose that comes with a sense of mission, were just beginning to take form inside of me. Besides the uniforms’ clear message, the Hassidic rules were defined, even written down—so unlike what I had encountered up until now. And their rules seemed to promise an almost maternal Godly love. Sitting there at the table, I didn’t think this as much as feel it: Unlike with my mo
ther, and unlike in school, where I didn’t know how to be what other girls called a “woman,” here maybe I could get the rules right. I was excited by the newness of it all, by the possibilities.

  RABBI GELLER STOOD UP holding a silver goblet of wine and began to sing the Sabbath kiddush wine prayer. I recognized the tune, even though I knew it from my tone-deaf father, who remembered it from his Brooklyn childhood. When I was small and my father was well, he sang it to me in a one-note monotone, sitting on my bed before I slept. Something about those quiet moments in low light would start him talking about his immigrant parents and their old Jewish ways, the songs and habits they had brought from Russia. My grandparents had both died, both gone. In a way, so had my father. But he told me on those long-ago nights of how his mother had polished the silver wine goblet and candlesticks every Friday and set out the challah under a white cloth, preserving a steadiness and order that had been lost in our family before it got to us. Then he would stretch out beside me and sing old show tunes. You say potato. I say potahto. Let’s fall in love.

  I lifted my chin and sang the kiddush along with the rabbi.

  We were served an enormous meal. I was long past full, sleepy, lulled.

  After the meal, a quiet moment. Rabbi Geller then sang a moving meditative and wordless Hassidic song in a melodic minor key. He had a rich tenor/baritone voice that made me think of a cello, and he sang with his eyes closed, Na nana na.

  Gradually, others leaned back into their chairs and joined him, even hung their heads back as they sang. Some closed their eyes. Ana did the same. The tune wandered, lingered, sad and searching. Laced with Ana’s soprano, the voices slowly rose and filled the room, ebbed and swelled, rolled over us in waves. The song became a separate place of great feeling.

  I, too, closed my eyes and sang. As I did, the tension I normally carried rolled out of my fingertips. I relaxed into the waves, let myself be carried. Communal song wrapped me in warmth and security like a human prayer shawl.

  Suddenly, the rabbi came to a halt. Everyone grew quiet. I opened my eyes in the dead silence to find he had put up his palm like a stop sign. “A woman’s voice is a precious jewel,” the rabbi announced in a slow and careful voice. “Of course a jewel shouldn’t be flashed around. A jewel should be kept in a safe and treasured place. That is why women are not to sing in public.”

  I woke up then, to find myself just a woman, and deeply embarrassed for projecting my voice. Ana shook her head. But, I reasoned, we were being honored with this enforced silence. It was supposed to be an honor. Still, I looked down at my hands.

  When Rabbi Geller began again, only the men joined him. The singing grew, and grew, until the rabbi raised his arms, urging them to get out of their uptight secular selves, and the men all rose, full of righteous spiritual energy, willing and eager now to let themselves go. For God. They danced as one, a roomful of singing men, stomping feet and dancing rhythm.

  We stood at the side of their exuberant closed circle dance as they jumped and sang, hands on shoulders and backs. Faster and faster; the whole place filling with zeal. Shirttails came out. Ties were pulled off. How they danced! Some of the Hassidic men took off their long black coats, tossed them aside, and rejoined the fray, white strings flying at their hips. Mouths open, singing, singing, voices going hoarse. Faces red and beaded with joyous sweat. The whole room reverberating in deafening song.

  Ana’s face was lit, absorbing the electricity, and I forgot about being silenced. I tapped her arm and gestured at the dancing men, nodding at them with my chin and smiling, smiling at the scene and the fervor, carried away by the irresistible Hassidic confidence in their own rightness and goodness, this demonstration of Godly joy. In my mind, I was in the middle of those dancing men, my hand on a sweating back, feet swept up in the beat, singing out loud, all of us bound together by a single pulsing rhythm of faith in exclusive and holy intimacy. This was where I belonged. Yes—I was one of them, among them, not a woman on the sidelines. I had escaped everything. It’s true, I thought, exultant. You can lose yourself in God.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, in spite of the rules that forbade musical instruments on the Sabbath, Ana spread out her bedroll on the floor and sat on it cross-legged to play her guitar. She picked at the strings quietly, singing to herself. Behind our closed door, I reasoned, we weren’t exactly singing in public, so I sang with her. We became a little bolder, raised our voices, harmonized.

  Then, a knock on the door. Ana’s hand fell flat on the strings. We eyed one another.

  But there were no Sabbath police at the door. It was just a girl about my age who introduced herself as Janice—small-boned, her brunette hair fine and straight. She had come from Fort Worth with her mother for this event, knocked because she had heard us singing.

  I welcomed her, and once I closed the door, we had our voices again. Janice’s singing was clear and fine. We sat and sang in three-part harmony, all of us cross-legged on an open bedroll. Ana led on guitar with me leaning toward her, our eyes locking in the tune.

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke early but skipped the morning services. Ana was still sleeping. Near the coffee urn I met Seema, the Hassidic woman with the blonde wig I’d noticed at the prayer services. “What’s your name?” she asked. She sounded like an official greeter.

  “Lisa,” I said.

  “And what’s your Hebrew name?”

  I had recently asked my mother that question, because it was a blank to be filled out on the registration form for this weekend program. My mother had rolled her eyes. “We’re Americans,” she said, with all the vehemence of a first-generation American. It seemed Hebrew names from the Old Country didn’t fit that view. But I managed to get the story out of her: how for social reasons she had wanted my name announced from the pulpit at the temple after I was born, how she’d been told by the temple secretary that, in order to do that, I had to have a Hebrew name. “So the rabbi just gave you one,” she said. “We were never going to use it, anyway, so it didn’t matter what it was.”

  “And?”

  “It’s Leah.” She said the name with obvious distaste.

  “Lay-ah?” I said.

  “That’s how the rabbi pronounced it.”

  “It’s Leah,” I told Seema, proud that I knew the pronunciation. “Why?”

  “That,” Seema said, “is the name of your Jewish soul.” She turned then to the table next to the coffee urn, put a blueberry Danish on a paper plate, and offered it to me, touching my shoulder with the other hand, an intimate gesture, as if she’d known me for years. “Have something to eat?” she said.

  I accepted the plate as if it were an invitation into an elite society, an exclusive club. How could I not step in? I had a moment of guilt about my non-Jewish friends, how they would be excluded here without a Hebrew name and Jewish pedigree to give them entry, but still I nibbled the sweet dough, and before we parted I had accepted Seema’s offer to teach me more. She would call, and I could come to her home to spend a Sabbath.

  It was like this: Seema smiled at me, touched my shoulder. Said I belonged. In that moment, with the touch of her warm hand, my few conscious objections seemed to fade into irrelevance, as if her warmth, her smile, her touch dream-launched me into weightless flight that would float me right into Hassidic arms.

  Seducing God

  Joshunda Victoria Sanders

  My mother’s devotion to her faith had taught me to chase after God—from the small Catholic churches in Philadelphia, where I was born, to the cathedrals of New York City. We lived in many places when I was a kid: shelters for homeless families and battered women and the homes of distant relatives or friends, not landing in our own apartment until I was thirteen. But no matter where we lived, Mom made sure we were always within walking distance of a Catholic church.

  Maggie, the mother of five children (of which I was the last), was a black and Cherokee Indian woman with high cheekbones and reddish-brown skin. She had been raised in a traditional Southern family as an orphan, since
her own single mother had died when she was young. In 1976, her youngest boy, Jose, had been struck and killed by a bus when he was twelve years old. I was born in January 1978.

  I was his namesake. “A miracle,” she said often. “A gift from God.”

  Her God, though, was white, like the majority of congregants in the churches we attended. At home, she collected pictures of a pale-skinned Jesus—his Sacred Heart beaming red and gold—and his mother, the Virgin Mary. Her collection of religious artifacts from items she’d purchased in the St. Patrick’s Cathedral gift shop included calendars bearing smudges of her maroon lipstick where she kissed Jesus’s likeness.

  Maggie wore a safety pin of about a dozen small medals bearing the figures of saints that she affixed to her bra each morning. For years we woke early to attend 7:30 AM mass. Witnessing her fervency, coupled with the realities of our challenging life, complicated my own relationship with God.

  I loved God the way I loved Maggie—deeply, but with skepticism.

  Her distant God had given us to each other, I reasoned. And our complex mother-daughter relationship—shaped by her borderline personality and bipolar disorder—mirrored my relationship with Him.

  I tried to make sense of Maggie singing His praises from the front row of cathedrals from state to state as we went hungry and usually asked priests or rectors for subway tokens or dinner money. I was acutely aware that we were poor black women in a world that favored a white male God and white skin. How could we possibly be made in a white God’s image? I wondered. Were we really like the cursed children of Cain, destined to be slaves because God made it so? And if He really loved us, how were we, His children, allowed to suffer so much?