Exodus: A memoir (3 page)

“Mother Earth! We’ve gathered for the healing of all your children, the Stone People, the Plant People, the four-legged, the two-legged, the creepy crawlers, the finned, the furred, and the winged ones. All our relations, OH!”

His chant was fast, practiced. The words sped up and blurred into one another at this point. I stopped concentrating and gazed off into the distance beyond him, out the window to the field covered in snow. A squirrel hopped nervously toward the wooded edge that cut off my vision.

It’s probably not real,
I thought.
All this show, what is it really going to accomplish? Why am I here?
And a voice in my head responded:
Who cares? Since when do you say no to the possibility of something just because it strikes you as strange? What happened to your adventurous spirit? Give it a chance!

Back in the room, Ed was looking up toward the ceiling now. “Father Sun, Grandmother Moon! Great Spirit, you who are known by a thousand names and you who are the unnamable One,
thank you for bringing us together and allowing us to sing the song of life, OH!” The ceremony concluded with one last great spit in my direction, and Ed lifted his hands over his head as though clearing the air above us.

“Now you can lie down, and I’m going to explore your chakras, see where the energy is blocked.”

I eased cautiously onto the bed, resting my head on the small hard pillow that Ed had placed underneath. He dangled a string with a small weight at the end of it, making circular movements over my body as he worked his way up. He stopped at my solar plexus. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

“Your two most blocked chakras are the root chakra and the heart chakra,” he said. “But the root is the most injured. So I will put the stone you chose right there.” He laid a folded cloth on my pelvis and put the stone in the middle. Then he moved behind me and placed his index fingers on what he called “certain pressure points” behind my head.

“Now I’m going to ask you to do some work. If at any point it gets to be too much and you need to stop, just let me know, okay? I don’t want to push you too far.”

“I’ll be fine,” I assured him, grinning. “I’m not known for backing away from a challenge.”

“Close your eyes.”

I did as I was told.

“I need you to go back to your earliest memory of the fear and anxiety you described to me before. As far back as you possibly can. Where did all this start for you?”

I searched the recesses of my mind. It seemed that my entire childhood was like a sack of memories in which a stain of worry
and dread had spread, tingeing everything a deep crimson color, but somehow it was difficult to pick the memory that started it all.

Ed said, “Take as long as you want.”

“Ah!” I’d come up with something.

“Don’t tell me. Just think about it.”

I have lost something important. I lie about it because I am afraid of being punished for losing the object, but instead I am beaten for lying.

“Feel it,” Ed urged. “Go deep into the pain.”

The more I focused on the image of my childhood self cowering in a corner as the blows fell, the more my body seemed to fill with the physical sensation of that experience in the present. I began to tremble slightly. My breathing quickened. A tear fell out of each eye and rolled down into my hair.

“Good,” Ed murmured. “Good work.”

It struck me suddenly why this whole shamanic healing thing could actually work. I had recently learned about a psychotherapeutic technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which was designed to help people struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. In a treatment session, a patient recalled traumatic memories while being distracted by visual and sensory stimulation. The stimulation causes the recall process to use different neurological pathways and connections, thereby sidestepping the usual associations of anxiety and dread that are attached to the memory. The psychologist who pioneered the treatment had discovered that when a traumatic or distressing experience occurs, it can overwhelm normal cognitive and
neurological coping mechanisms. The memory and associated stimuli are inadequately processed and stored in an isolated memory network. The goal of EMDR therapy, therefore, is to
re
-process these distressing memories, reducing their lingering effects and allowing patients to develop more adaptive coping mechanisms.

What Ed was doing wasn’t too far off from an EMDR session. Distract the client with visually stimulating displays, apply pressure to sensory points, and there you have it—the forced recall of traumatic memories travel along alternate neurological routes.

And so, with this realization, I resolved to fully commit myself to the effort.

“Now, go back to the first time you felt angry,” Ed said.

“Angry?” I asked dubiously. “I’m not really a very angry person.”

“That just means you have to go deeper. Try to find the place where the anger is.”

I genuinely did try. I traced delicately over the map of my childhood memories, as if holding a pendulum of my own, waiting for it to find true north. Where, oh where, was the anger? Sadness there was plenty of. Loneliness, despair, and self-loathing I could find, but no anger.

Here was the little girl who wore hand-me-downs from the seventies, not because her family was poor, but because nobody cared enough to buy her new clothes. She watched as her cousins were lavished with cashmere sweaters, velvet hair ribbons, and lacy stockings, and so deduced that they were more worthy of love than she was. Here was the adolescent living in her grandparents’ empty nest, a house that resonated with the booming silence of deflated and abandoned dreams. She sat on sofas covered in plastic, watching the flickering candle commemorating her murdered relatives
burn through the years, and wondered how to find happiness in a world that seemed to admonish against it so strongly.

This was a girl who was considered a black sheep in her family long before she broke any rules. A product of a destroyed marriage in a community that placed all value on the health of the family unit, she was the daughter of the mentally retarded man whose condition had caused all of his siblings difficulties in finding a match, and birthed by a woman who had dreams of education and a life that was unacceptable to the Hasidic world. She was doomed before she could even talk in her own defense.

Although the Hasidic community hates me for rejecting the way of life I was taught to hold sacred, in actuality I was rejected by those same people before I’d ever even entertained the slightest thought of rebellion. Rejection was my fate, to be an outcast was my destiny. What was asked of me, then, was acceptance of God’s will, the grace to live under the burdens I had been doomed to shoulder without complaint.

Until recently, I couldn’t remember much about my early childhood. Now, the occasional beating stands out: the time when I was standing on a chair and someone tipped it over just so I would fall; when a vacuum cleaner was thrown at me so hard that I developed enormous purple bruises. Abuse was common in the world I grew up in. Parents hit their children, teachers hit their students, and rabbis claimed that the Talmud made it right. You could count yourself lucky if you went through life and didn’t once suffer at the hands of a parent, spouse, sibling, or teacher. The Satmar Hasidic community in New York is a culture of violence, not necessarily because its members fetishize it, but because the group’s only inheritance is the violence of European anti-Semitism that
culminated in the Second World War. Authority and discipline are seen as necessary, as much to preempt divine punishment as to self-flagellate for the sin of surviving a tragedy that wiped out most of our ancestors. I do not remember ever feeling victimized when a blow fell; rather, it was such an event that gave me a form of equality among my peers. Like some grand initiation into the postwar Hasidic identity, suffering brought us closer to that first generation of survivors, and it compensated somehow for all those who had died horribly, and in whose stead we now existed.

It wasn’t until I hit the very last year of my childhood, when my seventeen-year-old self detected a small spark of something that seemed like it could be—wait, was it? Yes, there it was: a small, hard kernel of anger, wrapped tightly into a ball, packed into the very core of my inner self like some seed waiting to sprout and bear fruit.

“I found it,” I said triumphantly.

“Good, where is it?”

“I’m seventeen. I’m getting married.”

“There’s nothing earlier?” Ed asked searchingly.

“No, this is where it is.”

“Okay then. Breathe deep. Be in the anger. Experience the memory.”

I went back to that time, the days and weeks after my wedding.

Perhaps it was reasonable for my aunt Chaya to see an early, arranged marriage as the ultimate solution to the problem I
presented. There were hardly any other options for a young girl. I remember it was discussed whether I should be allowed to travel abroad to a seminary for girls, considered a haven for those from a troubled background. But it was decided that the stigma would only make it more difficult to marry me off when I returned. I was very disappointed when my dreams of traveling abroad on my own were dashed.

I wonder now what prompted Chaya’s choice of husband for me. She knew me well enough to understand that a little bit of freedom and understanding from a spouse might have been enough to keep me in my place. But instead, she chose a man from one of the most fanatical families in our community, more extreme than any of our relatives. Was she trying to quell my obvious independence by trapping me in a repressive marriage? How ironic then, because I surely believe that was a major catalyst to my break from the community. Take everything people value away from them, and they have nothing left to lose—but give them some of what they want, and they may be too afraid to let go of the little that they have. In the end, I did not feel like I was losing much.

When I did get married, it was with as much hope as Chaya must have harbored. To her, my husband represented legitimacy; she assured me that if I succeeded at building a family with him, it would redeem the shame of my past. I may never have fit in with my blood relatives, but this new family would be rightly mine, she reminded me. I would be the head of it; there would be no chance of being an outcast within my own home.

Sadly, my marriage was doomed from the moment my husband and I entered our new apartment for the first time and found ourselves unable to consummate the arrangement. This was unacceptable according to Jewish law, and Chaya’s plans for me. “A man
must be a king in the bedroom,” she told me the next morning, when Eli had absconded to the synagogue for prayers. I will never forget that particular aphorism she shared with me, although I could list many others as disturbing. In that moment, she tried to reveal her secret, her means to gain the power she so craved. Satisfy a man in the bedroom, she implied, and you will be ruler everywhere else.

I could not make my husband a king in the bedroom, no matter how much I wanted to, just to get everyone off my back. Rabbis, religious counselors, my in-laws—everyone put pressure on me to achieve intercourse, as if all it could possibly take were the right words, just threatening enough, or just cajoling enough. In the end, it took a year of fruitless doctor’s visits to figure out what was wrong with me and try to fix it. In the process, my husband’s family mutinied and tried to convince him to divorce me, which he almost did. Only when I finally got pregnant was I left in peace.