Acts of Faith (20 page)

I could no longer look at him with the same eyes.

And I wondered if I could believe in a God who lets
evil spirits fly around the world and has to be propitiated by black candles, spells, and the bleating of rams’ horns.

One thing became disturbingly clear.

If exorcisms and the like were ceremonies that the Silczer Rav believed in, I could not be his successor.

D
eborah’s dark brown hair was streaked with copper—the natural result of working in the sunbaked fields of Kfar Ha-Sharon.

Boaz had arranged to give her as much time as possible outdoors, although he could not totally absolve her from serving and cleanup duties in the dining room.

During her first weeks on the kibbutz, her diet seemed to consist entirely of aspirin and orange juice—the first to bring relief to aching muscles, and the second to replace the perspiration she lost each day.

Despite all the physical discomfort, she was euphoric. And, for the first time since she had been in Israel, she began to make friends.

Boaz and his wife, Zipporah, were really more like parents. He, for all his brawny masculinity, was like a mother bird sheltering a wounded fledgling under her wing.

There were a hundred or so families on the kibbutz, each couple having a
srif
—a spartan wooden hut—to themselves. Meanwhile, their offspring joined the other children, who all lived in a separate dormitory.

Of the surprises Deborah had encountered, this segregation was the most radical. Yet the youngsters seemed to enjoy living with several dozen other “siblings,” and accepted
as completely natural the fact that their parents visited them only in the late afternoon. Their time together was brief, but passionate.

She herself shared a
srif
with four other female volunteers—a German, two Dutch girls, and a Swede, each of whom was there as a six-month visitor.

They were all dedicated Christians with varied and complex reasons for having come to Israel.

Almuth’s father had been a captain in the German army, but had never talked about his war experiences. It was only when her parents were killed in an accident on the autobahn, and she and her brother Dieter were going through their personal effects, that she discovered documents and campaign medals showing that her father had served with distinction in Greece and Yugoslavia organizing the deportation of Jews. Like so many other young Germans, Almuth felt compelled to make some kind of gesture—if not of expiation, then at least conciliation.

The others had been inspired by various religious feelings—like wanting to learn Hebrew to read the Old Testament in the original. But all were unabashedly candid about their more terrestrial motives. The glorious sunshine not only warmed them, but turned the faces of attentive Israeli men to a more handsome bronze.

The kibbutz did observe the Sabbath in its fashion. They lit candles and sang songs—then, after dinner, screened a movie.

On Saturdays, instead of working, they would take a bus to picnic in the hills or at the seaside.

Sometimes they would visit an archaeological site, and as a change from laboring in the fields, would wield trowels and dig enthusiastically for antiquities, while the professionals watched with amusement.

At first Deborah faithfully obeyed the injunction against traveling on the Sabbath. But finally, when all the others were planning a trip to the Dead Sea, she could resist their blandishments no longer.

Early that Saturday morning, she packed a towel and bathing suit—which, though it was standard kibbutz issue,
looked embarrassingly skimpy to her—and walked to their very own antique, a rickety all-purpose school bus.

It was then that she hesitated.

Boaz, who was herding a happy crew of kibbutzniks into the bus, noticed her standing motionless by the open door. “Deborah,” he said gently, “everybody in that bus has read the Bible too. But doesn’t the Torah say that the Sabbath is for rest and joy?”

She nodded nervously, but still did not move. At last he put his arm around her and remarked, “Besides, if you believe the words of Zechariah, even if you sin a bit, God will refine you like gold or silver, and you can still go to Paradise in style.”

She was swayed by the prophet’s words.

As she sat down next to Yoni Barnea, the kibbutz physician’s teenage son, she thought aloud, “If you guys are so unreligious, how come you all know the Bible by heart?”

Yoni grinned, his eyes brightening. “Ah, Deborah, you don’t understand. For us the Bible’s not a prayer book—it’s a road map.”

She smiled, then leaned back in her seat, trying to forget how many Sabbath prohibitions she was violating, and determined to enjoy the day of rest in a new way.

Deborah had never gone to summer camp. Such frivolous activities were frowned upon by her parents and their circle. Summer vacation had consisted of a week or two in an enclave of Spring Valley, where Brooklyn was transplanted from concrete and asphalt into grass and forest, the brownstones exchanged for tired wooden bungalows. But the faces stayed the same.

This bus ride was the first she had ever made simply for “fun.” The very word was alien to her childhood experiences.

And throughout the dusty, bumpy journey the grown-up kindergartners sang and clapped to a repertoire that ranged from biblical songs to tunes from the Israeli hit parade (which sometimes coincided).

When the passengers were not themselves singing,
the loudspeakers reverberated with the latest from the American Top 40—courtesy of Abie Nathan’s “Voice of Peace,” a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship “anchored somewhere in the waters of the Middle East.” Its renegade director believed that the magnetism of music could succeed where the diplomats failed—to draw Arab and Jew onto the same wavelength.

They stopped for Coca-Colas at Tall as-Sultān, location of the ancient ruins of Jericho, the oldest inhabited city in the world.

Most of the kibbutzniks carried dog-eared guidebooks, and everyone seemed to be an expert on one site or another. Here it was Rebecca Mendoza, an immigrant from Argentina, who read aloud, translating into Hebrew from her
Guía de la Tierra Santa.

“Jericho was an important Crusader city, and there are still many Christian points of interest. The Monastery of the Temptation,” she explained, “is built on the spot where Satan tempted Jesus to prove Himself by transforming stones into bread. And Jesus answered, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’ This can be found in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter Four—”

“You forgot to say something, señorita,” one of the elder kibbutzniks heckled. “Jesus was quoting Moses—‘Man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.’ Deuteronomy eight, verse four.”

“Wrong as usual, Yankel,” another chiding voice piped up.

“What do you mean?” the old man retorted with histrionic indignation.

“It was verse
three
!”

As they returned to the bus, Deborah was already dog tired, her feet aching.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” Boaz trumpeted, as he bounded aboard after rounding up the last straggler. “And the best is yet to come.”

Gazing at the tireless sexagenarian, Deborah whispered to Almuth, “Where does he get the energy?”

The German girl shrugged. “Almost all the Israelis are like that. It’s like six days a week they’re plugged into an electrical generator, and on the seventh they just let it all zap out.”

The bus ricocheted southward, passing Qumran, where in 1947 a shepherd boy, chasing a stray lamb, wandered into one of the many mountain caves and chanced upon a cache of ancient papyrus scrolls, later to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. He traded them to a crafty antiquarian in Jerusalem for the extravagant price of a new pair of shoes. In the fullness of time, the youth’s footwear had turned out to be worth more than five million dollars.

Less than an hour later, they were on the banks of the Dead Sea.

“Lowest point on earth,” Boaz lectured. “A quarter of a mile below sea level.”

“Hey,” a young woman called out, “look at those people in the water.”

“They’re not
in
the water,” Boaz corrected her, “they’re
on
it.”

All eyes turned toward the bathers, who were lounging on the surface as if on invisible mattresses. The high salt content had turned them into human corks.

In her excitement, Deborah temporarily forgot her anxieties about donning a bathing suit and swimming in mixed company. A few minutes later, she and her friends were bobbing up and down, giggling.

Something was transforming Deborah’s whole outlook on life. Could it be the magic water, the balmy air? For a few fleeting moments, she thought she might even be happy.

As she slipped the paper into an envelope and licked two colorful stamps, Deborah thought of the final verses of the poem she had quoted in her letter:

The world seemed filled with expressions of her love for Timothy.

I
  had recently celebrated my eighteenth birthday, and I was living on borrowed time. The Law requires a man to marry when he reaches age eighteen. Do you know, there is no word for “bachelor” in the Old Testament? That’s because the Jews couldn’t even conceive of a man being unmarried. Marriage would be his only way of coping with the Evil Inclination. After all, eighteen is the age when the male sex drive is at its peak.

There was no question that my libido was in full flower, and I think I would have had erotic dreams even without having seen those exotic foreign films at the Thalia. Moreover, I was painfully aware that the Talmud regarded sinful thoughts as tantamount to the deeds themselves.

I concluded that if I was going to be punished just for thinking of sex, I might as well try the real thing. But of course I had absolutely no idea how to go about it.

Then, consciously or not, Beller afforded me the opportunity.

Toward the end of April, he invited me to a party at his home. It was mainly for his students at Columbia, but I knew I would also encounter girls from Barnard. Still, no one could accuse him of leading me into temptation. He
merely opened the door. It was I who walked in of my own accord. Eagerly.

He never said it, but I knew that even my best Sabbath clothes would not fit the bill for such an occasion. And so I made a self-conscious expedition to Barney’s, where I bought my first secular garment: a neat blue blazer.

Then came the moment of real soul-searching. Could I attend a New York cocktail party with curly sideburns rolling halfway down my cheeks? Admittedly, I had seen posters of some rock and roll performers whose coiffures were far longer and more stringy than my own. But since I couldn’t sing or play guitar, I thought it best to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

I therefore visited a barber (twenty blocks away from school) and asked him to trim my sideburns till they were just long enough to satisfy the biblical decree forbidding hair to be cut above the juncture of cheek and ear.

“What about the curls, mister?”

“Uh, sort of … shorten those too,” I responded nervously.

“No way,” he dissented. “You’re not the first Orthodox kid I’ve had in my chair. You’ve gotta make up your mind—if it’s short enough to be ‘modern,’ it won’t be long enough to be kosher. Know what I mean?”

Alas, I knew all too well. I closed my eyes—a gesture he correctly interpreted as assent. His blades were swift and painless. My subsequent pangs of conscience were neither. I took to wearing a low-brimmed hat, a practice my fellow students assumed was one of deepened piety. More hypocrisy.

I tried to convince myself it would be worth it.

What first struck me was an orchestration of new sounds. The tinkle of ice against glass, the voice of Ray Charles (as I later learned) on a stereo, loud conversation rising above the music, everything blending into a buzz, which sounded like the whir of my mother’s Mixmaster.

I stood on the stairs to Aaron Beller’s sunken living room and gazed in disbelief.

There were men and women everywhere talking freely to one another. Some were even touching. It all looked … alien.