Exodus: A memoir (16 page)

When I was growing up, I often heard people talk about converts in disparaging ways. Converts were considered dangerous, because although they may have been pious at the time, their past still tethered them to the world outside, one they might still be able to join. Those born inside had no such option, and were thus considered less of a flight risk. In addition, the fervent ardor and enthusiasm of the typical convert was mistrusted. Much like a woman who has an affair with a married man and later distrusts him because he cheated with her, a convert was distrusted by Hasids, who are leery of those who stray from their origins, even if those origins are judged deserving of abandonment.

“Aren’t you past marriageable age?” I asked Jacob. In the Hasidic community, marriages were arranged at a very young age, and I was confident that the ultra-Orthodox followed the same standard, if a bit more flexibly.

“I am a little older than would be desirable,” he admitted.

“But you converted when you were still young, twenty-two right? Couldn’t you have married then?”

Jacob’s shoulders drooped ever so slightly. “It’s harder, you know, when you’re a convert.”

I did know. I was only feigning naïveté. I knew Jacob couldn’t ignore the fact that he was being blatantly discriminated against in the world of
shidduchim
, or arranged marriages. He may have convinced himself that he was being fully accepted as the real deal by his peers, but he couldn’t deny that his status as a convert made him a very unattractive prospect for marriage.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish fathers do not want to consign their pure and precious daughters to marriages with converts. People would whisper about the family, wonder what was wrong with the daughter that she had to settle for someone who hadn’t been born or raised Jewish. There was always the danger of the convert changing his mind and dragging his wife with him, or even worse, becoming too extreme and enslaving his wife in an unnecessarily stifling lifestyle.

“But don’t they set you up with other converts, or maybe
ba’al teshuvas
?” I asked. A
ba’al teshuva
, better known as a BT, is someone who was born a nonpracticing Jew but became religious later in life. It’s not as bad as being a convert, certainly, but subject to a similar level of mistrust.

“They do,” he said. “I’ve dated a lot of them, but . . .” and here he trailed off. Something in his manner told me that he had swallowed the party line and harbored a mistrust of others like him.

“That’s a form of self-hate,” I cried.

“It isn’t that,” Jacob insisted. “It’s just that I know my commitment to Judaism is rock solid, whereas other converts and BTs just don’t give me the same impression!”

So Jacob yearned for his own pure Jewish princess much in the same way that I yearned for the WASP knight played by Robert Redford in
The Way We Were
(obviously, I am so Barbra Streisand in that movie). Cultural differences may or may not prevent me from shacking up with a Hubble, but Jacob’s dreams were even more impractical. I couldn’t see how he could ever land the girl of his desires. The circumstances would have to be extraordinary.

“Are you dating anyone right now?” I asked.

“Yes, actually. She’s a BT from Los Angeles.”

“What’s she like?”

His description made her sound like every blond California girl I’ve ever met. Tan, tall, athletic—and Jewish. He didn’t sound especially inspired by her, but not bored either.

We spent the evening walking around the Upper East Side. The more he discussed his Judaism, the more I felt the niggling sense of loss that I had not been able to meet him in his former incarnation, and was instead stuck with his overzealous new character who disdained all the things I had recently discovered I loved.

He called the next day to invite me to his friend’s birthday, which was being held at a bar in the Lower East Side that boasted a mechanical bull. These were his non-Jewish friends, and I suppose that was why he felt comfortable bringing me. At the party, he drank some Maker’s Mark and got on the bull. I watched him handle it deftly, and it occurred to me that he really was made for that life, riding bulls and taming wild things, and that maybe the wild thing in this case was himself, and he thought he needed taming.

I was there with him because I still had faith in the person he had once been, and apparently he felt the same. “I came into your
life so that you could come back to your Jewish roots,” he assured me as we walked to the subway. He wanted me to be the Hasidic woman of his fantasies, not the stubborn and independent person I was now. Our desires to be with each other’s ghost selves lined up perfectly and miserably.

On our next outing, we went to Brother Jimmy’s BBQ on Third Avenue. I invited Heather, thinking her Southern roots would help Colt/Jacob feel more at home, maybe bring out the Southern boy in him. Indeed, as Heather’s drawl came out, so did Jacob’s, longer and thicker and much more redneck. I was entranced all over again, just listening to him.

Heather had always been a bit of a Jewish fetishist, one of those people who hail from the land of Christian conformity to whom Jews are mysterious and mythical creatures. She found Jacob’s new self charming, but she thought he had taken her own natural curiosity too far by converting, and alienating his family in the process.

When she went home, I was left with the task of seeing a drunken Jacob safely back to his apartment near Yeshiva University in Washington Heights. I had to steer him three blocks to where my car was parked, surprised at my own capability in handling a man easily three times my size.

During the ride uptown, I tried to engage him in a seemingly innocuous conversation. Having never been as drunk as he was, I didn’t quite understand what it was like to answer questions without being aware of doing so, but my gut told me that if ever I
wanted to extract a truthful response from Jacob, now would be the time.

“So, when was the last time you had sex?” I asked. I expected an impressive answer, an amount of time as long as the years he had spent as an official Jew. The ultra-Orthodox are firmly against all premarital touching, and he had already told me that he was fully committed to that way of life, despite the seemingly impossible restrictions (such as no masturbating). I had started to feel a little awe at his commitment at that point, and a willingness to respect him and his choices as a result of that integrity. I was going to forget about the old Colt and embrace the new Jacob, for the sake of our friendship, which was certainly eccentric and therefore worth preserving.

And then Jacob answered my question, and it all went to hell. “I had sex on Saturday with that BT girl I’m dating. She asked me to come over, and I couldn’t help myself.”

The next day he called to apologize for being so drunk. He remembered that much.

“Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked.

“No.” A pause. “What?”

“You told me you had sex on Saturday with your girlfriend.”

He was shocked. He couldn’t believe he had released that information. There was a long pause, some hemming and hawing, and then a surge of justification and righteousness.

“You don’t understand,” he finally said haughtily. “The point is, I try. And I’ll keep trying. No, I’m not perfect. But I know it’s the right way to live and I’m going to work on myself.” He was rightly angry at me for tricking him into his admission of guilt.

I tried to understand how it could still be okay, but I was struck
by the futility of adopting a set of rules for oneself that were impossible to live by. It seemed self-punishing, self-defeating. Could that experience in itself make him feel good?

I met Jacob one more time after that. It was a Friday in July, and the summer heat had settled into a low, oppressive haze of malignant odors and breezes. We were standing at the intersection of two streets in Washington Heights, and it was a Friday, so young Jewish men were rushing by us on their way to preparations for the Sabbath.

Jacob, who somewhere along the way had managed to attain an excellent education and was still, underneath his beautiful form and passionate religious ideas, one of those very smart, learned men I had come to admire and curate in college, was going to lend me a book by the philosopher Peter van Inwagen. We had tacitly agreed to stop talking about religion and focus on the shared intellectual ground between us. He had always wanted to be a great American novelist, and he admired my success and my ambitions as a writer. And of course he wanted to send me this novel he had written about racism in the Deep South.

He gave me the van Inwagen book, and we talked about philosophy because it was a safe topic we had in common. But when I started to share with him the startling and ecstatic discoveries I had made when I first began reading feminist philosophy at Sarah Lawrence, he gave me a blank, contemptuous face.

“I read all that,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “I think it’s bullshit.”

“Feminism is bullshit?”

“Yes, I think women are better off in traditional roles.”

“You mean to tell me you got two degrees, you read everything
there is to be read about this topic, and you still think it has nothing valid to contribute to the philosophical conversation?”

“Exactly.”

The revelation disturbed me for days, so much so that I called an old college professor to tell him the story. “How is it possible to be exposed to all that knowledge and still cling to misogynist ideas?” I had always believed that education was the cure for ignorance. But my professor gently reminded me about Quine’s theory of the web of belief, explaining that Quine was the first philosopher to challenge the idea that belief systems were build like pyramids. A pyramid, Nathan said, would topple if sufficiently disrupted, but a web could adjust its margins without sustaining damage to its core. It was Quine who postulated that people could be exposed to ideas that challenged their web and simply adjust the web’s margins to go on believing in the same way. In the end, no matter how well informed we are, we choose what to believe.

Despite the dead end we seemed to have hit during our heated discussion, Jacob’s manuscript arrived a few days later, wrapped in a brown cardboard file. It was very long, close to eight hundred double-sided pages. I sat down to read it out of curiosity. I counted seven violent rape scenes, most of them perpetrated by rich white men against black teenage girls. I wondered if that had been the old Colt, a man who thought that an appropriate literary tool for the critique of systemic racism was the clichéd victimization of the underdog and the vilification of the elite. Perhaps he hadn’t really started out any different from who he was now. A new name, yes,
but not a new persona. By reading his manuscript, I had gotten to meet him, and I couldn’t help thinking that his conversion had proved a marginal improvement. It had brought him to New York. It had made him a little bit more cosmopolitan and a little less arrogant. Maybe that’s what he had been going for all along, the discipline, because he sensed his need for it. Did he see himself as one of those rapists, with uncontrollable lust governing his every move, his white maleness inherent proof that he needed to chain a sexuality that he could only view as dangerous?

We stayed Facebook friends, without talking again, until my memoir,
Unorthodox
, was released to a great storm of controversy and shock and anger, at which point he may have unfriended me, although I didn’t realize this until a few months later, when I checked out of curiosity.