Sotah (5 page)

“I
can’t believe you brought that up, Chaya Leah.” Dina shook her. “You like to live dangerously.” “I just forgot. Anyway, the truth is not so terrible.”

“Have you gotten rid of them?”

“What for? I don’t see any reason to get rid of them. They’re perfectly beautiful.”

“Mrs Morganbesser will call
Ima!
Did you ever think of that?”

“
Ima
is never home. Did you ever think of that?” she said carelessly. “Anyway, what’s it her business what I put in my ears?” She bent her head, slipping off her plain gold loops. Out of her pocket came a long, tinkling pair of silver earrings, made the Yemenite way, all filigree with little blue turquoise stones. She quickly slipped them into her lobes.

“How do I look?”

Dina widened her eyes and tried to keep her lips firm. But it was too much. “You look like one of those girls they brought to King Ahasuerus’s harem.” She grinned. “And not the one he picked to replace his dearly beheaded Queen Vashti. The other ones. The ones he tried once and then kept locked up in the women’s house the rest of their lives.”

Chaya Leah tossed her head and stopped to check her reflection in a store window.

She had as many layers around her feelings as she did around her bones, her sister thought, wondering once again at Chaya Leah’s amazing ability to slough off criticism that would have left anyone else devastated. She didn’t defend herself. She didn’t even consider taking off the earrings. Instead she inclined her head and gave one of the earrings a little tap that made it sway and tinkle.

Dina looked at her, appalled and yet transfixed with a strange admiration.

Chaya Leah laughed, delighted. “Morganbesser is just jealous! I don’t care. There’s no
halacha
which says you can’t wear earrings. So I wish everyone would just leave me be!”

“Be careful, Chaya Leah.” Dina shrugged, giving her sister’s ample upper arm an affectionate squeeze as the two girls parted for their separate classrooms.

A woman’s body, like an official map used during a border dispute, was clearly marked off by rabbinic authorities into two kinds of territories: those parts lawfully open to men’s wandering eyes and
ervah
, an erotic stimulus, absolutely closed to trespass. The border lines were these: the neck (above, all was permissible, below, all was forbidden); the elbow (above, all was forbidden, below, all was permissible); and the knees. The knees were a problem. All authorities agreed everything above the knees was
ervah
, but some felt that everything below should also be included. The disputed area—the calves—were a bone of contention. Thus, some rabbis insisted women wear dresses to their ankles, while the liberals felt stockings and a skirt that covered the knees were enough. Those who agreed that stockings were enough disagreed about what kinds of stockings. Some insisted they be opaque or black or seamed.

Mrs Morganbesser, short, plump, determined, wore blouses that buttoned at the wrist and just below the chin; skirts that fell midcalf season in, season out; and heavy, seamed stockings. In this war to keep the female form properly draped, she felt herself in the position of a vigilant general holding strict orders from the chief of staff to “hold the line.” In order to do this, however, she felt the accepted territorial map was not enough. She needed a buffer zone, a no-man’s-land, in which to ward off any enemy invasion. Thus the girls who came in round collars, just a brush above the collarbone, were sent home to get a shirt that buttoned below the chin. Girls who wore thin, pointy, cutout shoes were sent home for sensible, laced-up, rubber-soled oxfords. Girls who wore midcalf skirts with stylish open pleats to the knee were sent home to sew the pleats closed.

But Mrs Morganbesser’s biggest problem was not keeping girls within the letter of the law, but imbuing them with its spirit. Every year she girded her ample, well-covered loins for the latest onslaught from the fashion world.

This year it was leg warmers.

Technically she couldn’t find anything wrong with them. They were another layer of clothing. They covered the calves. Yet she looked at them and all the sirens in her finely wired, highly sensitive early-warning system went off screaming like the electrified fence system that kept murdering terrorists from infiltrating from Lebanon to Israel.

Anything that did that, which did not have a specific place on “the map,” she told the girls had “the smell of the street” and was thus to be excluded not only from the classroom, but from their lives until further notice. This included leg warmers; belts that hugged and defined the hips or waist; eyeshadow; high-heeled shoes or boots; long, glamorous hairstyles or too short punky ones. And, of course, eye-catching jewelry.

Mrs Morganbesser had very definite ideas about all these matters. That generations of
halachic
scholars and rabbis had overlooked such things she viewed as both a vexing and dangerous lapse, one which created an untenable vacuum she felt personally responsible to fill. Any girl walking into her class knew that she would be scrutinized and—despite all the wonderful rabbinic ordinances against embarrassing someone in public—publicly ridiculed and humiliated for any perceived digression.

Although she would never have admitted it to herself, Mrs Morganbesser’s main guideline in these matters was not the heavy volumes of the
Jewish Code of Law
, the Mishnah, or the Talmud, but simply her own, highly individual, carefully developed, and unbending image of what a religious Jewish girl should look like. She pushed and ridiculed, lectured and lambasted, pleaded and warned, until every single girl under her tutelage was patted, squeezed, or shoved into an acceptable approximation of that image.

And this was her vision: hair very long and braided or just below the ears and held back by barrettes. A light blue or white high-collared, long-sleeved, buttoned-down shirt of loose cotton or polyester, well ironed. A dark blue or black skirt that hung wide from the hips until four inches below the knees. Dark or white opaque stockings and sensible low-heeled or laced shoes. Small delicate gold earrings, a barely visible necklace, and a good strong watch.

As for makeup—young faces needed no other decoration than the beauty of their characters as displayed in their eyes, their well-washed cheeks, and pure, unsullied, prayer-filled lips. As for attracting men, the kind of men these girls and their parents should and must want would only be those who thought the same way she did.

Chaya Leah walked into the room quickly, but not quickly enough.

Mrs Morganbesser adjusted her wig, pulling it forward until the bangs practically hid her eyebrows, a nervous habit the girls had come to recognize as all the sirens going off.

Dina took the dutiful three steps forward and three steps backward, bending her knees in the prayer which began each day’s studies in Beit Yaakov Seminary for Young Women. She tried to keep her concentration pinned on the words. Mouthing them did nothing, she felt. “G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” she prayed, beginning the prayer of Eighteen Benedictions, the holiest and most important prayer in the Jewish religion, the culmination of all the lesser prayers that preceded it. It was a prayer said at least once a day by women and thrice a day by men. It was a prayer that was said silently, standing at attention, feet together in one place. It was a prayer that could not be interrupted or spoken during except if death threatened. It was a prayer that expressed the desire of the human soul to rise above its fleshly desires in total devotion to G-d’s will and service. It was a prayer of thanks for the joy, the gifts, the sustenance, daily granted to us by G-d. And it was a human promise to ensure all physical achievements, all worldly possessions, served and pleased Him.

Although the words of the prayers never varied, the experience of saying them each morning always did. Sometimes Dina found herself thinking so deeply about every word, every sentence she uttered that it brought tears to her eyes. Often she achieved a level of concentration so strong that the room disappeared, her body vaporized, and there was nothing left but her soul, naked and vulnerable, crying to an invisible yet intimate, infinitely understanding and compassionate Father. She found herself trembling, bursting with a secret joy, a connection that banished all loneliness, all doubt.

Yet there were also times when the prayers were strange in her mouth, unknown words in a superannuated language that brushed the surface of her lips, never penetrating any deeper. They were a bore and a nuisance to be gotten through. She never knew when she began to pray just which experience awaited her.

Today she felt her mind wandering. The words flew past her like birds, too high and too swift for her to glimpse more than just a flash of color, a vague outline of form. She looked up listlessly, gazing through the dusty, closed classroom window towards the campus of the nearby secular state high school. The students wore jeans, multicolored sweaters, and sweatshirts with sneakers. They sat on the ground in small groups, their legs spread open carelessly and lazily. They were seniors like herself, yet they were already making their mandatory visits to army recruiting stations, taking exams and physicals that would decide if they would be tank drivers, pilots, or foot soldiers for the next three years of their lives. They were working hard to pass exams which would earn them their
bagrut
—national matriculation certificates—their passport into local colleges and universities once their army service was completed.

She had absolutely nothing in common with them. Even though she had received a draft notice like everyone else, there was no question of her being drafted or serving. Religious girls who wanted it were automatically exempt from army service. All she had needed to do was go to the rabbinate and declare herself too religious to serve. She was then given an official letter, which her parents mailed to the army. As far as the army was concerned, she no longer existed.

She never understood exactly why it had to be this way. The Torah stated specifically that during a war of defense even the bride under the canopy was not exempt from participating in the battle, although she was forbidden to carry arms. She never did understand how the rabbis got around that. It was stated so clearly. And yet not only didn’t
haredi
girls participate in the country’s defense during war or any other time, but neither did
haredi
men, all those learning in the yeshivot, something for which there was no basis at all in Jewish law.

She had no idea that it stemmed from Ben Gurion’s 1948 concession to rabbis who demanded that their few hundred yeshiva students be draft exempt in light of all the thousands of yeshiva students killed during the Holocaust. Now the number of draft exemptions had risen into the thousands and was a constant source of antagonism between
haredim
and secular as well as modern Orthodox Israelis, whose own yeshiva students combined Talmud study with army service.

She understood more about the girls not serving. After all, how could she, or any of the girls around her, be expected to wear pants! Or be in a unit where men and women were together all the time! She had heard many stories about officers and the girls they commanded sleeping together. Going to the army was unthinkable for girls, she often thought wistfully.

Still she often found herself examining the young girl soldiers she came across in the street or on buses. Their khaki skirts and shirts seemed so tight and revealing to her, yet also wonderful. Adventurous. She wondered what it would be like to board a bus at an army recruiting station with a hundred girls she had never met; to ride off to a training camp and learn to live in a tent and crawl through the mud and shoot a gun. Or perhaps to fix a tank or work in an office surrounded by handsome young officers.

There was also no question of her, or anyone else she knew, going to the university, either. Beit Yaakov did not allow the girls to take their
bagrut
exams, much less follow a curriculum that prepared the girls to pass them. There was no reason to. Colleges, as everyone knew, were simply hothouses for the corruption of pure Jewish men and women. Not only did the sexes mix indiscriminately, but they also learned indiscriminately: alien philosophies, the lies of Darwin, the nonsense and filth of novels … How often had it been hammered into her since childhood how weak she was and how strong temptation; how she must constantly guard her eyes, her mouth, her heart, from seeing, tasting, feeling, all things that could lead to sin and G-d’s displeasure.

The reality of the army or the university was beyond frightening. Nothing in her upbringing or experience had brought her close enough to even create an unfulfilled longing for such things.

Yet she had no control over her dreams. She dreamed not of being allowed to go to the army and university, but of
being
there and how it would feel. She dreamed of it the way, long ago, she had dreamed of being a bird, or a cloud, or a lion in the jungle; or the way now she sometimes dreamed of being a bodiless soul soaring to G-d’s heavenly throne after death.

She was not hungry for the reality of new experiences, she often convinced herself, experiences that required decisions, produced complications, and bandied about temptations that led so effortlessly and horrendously into the dark abyss of sin. She felt safe in her reality. Her home, her school, the people around her, the clear lines of duty and faith, provided the strong footbridge over the turbulent, threatening world of choice, doubt, and dangers that crashed constantly below her. She walked securely, holding on to the narrow sides that encompassed and supported her. Seldom did she peek over the side. Her reality was safety. It was the promise of a good, pure life.

The need for adventure she sublimated rose up in dreams. In her imaginings she was constantly unfulfilled and constantly searching. Nothing was too dangerous, too wicked. She allowed herself complete freedom of thought, entering the churning chaos below like a ghost through the soft mist of dreams. Like a glass blower, she breathed her own living breath into her fantasies, giving them unique shapes and lovely iridescent colors. She had both worlds, she told herself. She was utterly safe, utterly protected. And wasn’t it delicious, to explore new worlds without actually being strapped in on top of that exploding rocket launcher; without feeling your body vibrate, your ears deafen, your stomach lurch. In dreams you could edit all that out, leaving only the unearthly calm of floating in space, the glorious adventure of painless, dangerless discovery.