The Saturday twilight D-Train from Coney Island shuttles exhausted teenagers back uptown after a day of candy, arcades, Skee-Ball, rollercoasters, beer, hot dogs, swimming, shooting galleries, bearded ladies, and ring toss. A hot summer flash rain has drenched everybody and the inside of the train is damp with wet hair, body steam, and dragged-in sea and sand. A pair of young black lovers make out in matching neon blue sweatsuits flanked by a giant pink stuffed animal they won that could be a bunny or some weird kind of hippo. A mindbogglingly skinny white dude whose gaunt face is mapped in pimples naps on the shoulder of his chubby blonde girlfriend who stares dazed into her own reflection. It’s not crowded. On the contrary. There are plenty of empty seats.
In the far corner, one man dozes alone. He could be Puerto Rican or half-black or even just a slightly more olive white guy. He seems a touch too old for this crowd…early 20s. He’s got a paunch belly pushing through his green tanktop but his muscles are toned, he obviously works out at the gym. His jeans are stonewashed and his sneakers sport giant glittering orange laces that explode like peacock feathers. He is dead asleep, his mouth wide open, his closely cropped head bobbing with the jiggle of the train as it shoots through Brooklyn, over the bridge into Manhattan. Around his closed eyes is a stress ever-so-slight, you only see it when the train lights flicker. Is he the victim of bad dreams? It isn’t easy sleeping on trains, and too much pleasure has left him wiped out.
One hand lies open, limp. In his other hand he clutches a giant-sized swirly multicolored lollipop by its white handle. The plastic has been torn off in haste and is bunched up near the bottom. The lollipop sits sticky against his green shirt, resting on his heart. Just above it, a golden Chai on a chain. For he is an Israeli. Far, far away from home.
Now they put televisions everywhere. Even in taxi cabs and restaurants and hotel bathrooms and post offices. Somewhere somebody got the idea that we couldn’t live without this constant external stim-out shielding us from the day. That the present was so wretched, so excruciatingly unbearable, that we had to be drawn “elsewhere.” I sit down for an espresso at the deli, still waking up. And then I look up.
Above me, Beyonce pouting, puckering on the widescreen tv screen–because what deli/coffee shop doesn’t need a widescreen tv at 9 in the morning? But her hot lips and wanton looks have lost their sex appeal in the tiny deli’s streetcorner humbleness, they are for death, the human as simulacrum anti-animal, soulless, airless, a series of dots that can neither sustain nor raise up the breathing. I turn my head, it’s an effort. And–dafka–in the very same room, the giant rolls of kilbasa and pastrami behind the glass, the former animals if I may be so grotesque, are bursting with life. Alongside the bright potato salads and getting-stale croissants and plastic bowls of chamutzy tomatoes, the meat sings with the power of sustenance, like a dazzling show from a different epoch now made holy through tincture. How can the living be dead and what is dead be life?
And outside, pastel bodies floating through summer morning sunshine.
Nurit and Osnat were the daughters of yordim, born and raised in that non-entity of non-entities, the state of Delaware. Their father was a professor who defected from the University of Jerusalem in search of tenure. Their mother, a descendant of the second Aliyah, had no choice but to tag along and “go American.” The plan was to do eight semesters at a prestigious eastern university, then head home back to Ra’anana. 36 years later, the professor and his wife are still in Delaware.
Of the two girls, Osnat took to Hebrew School more passionately–perhaps due to her name which is virtually unusable in the United States. And while she never set foot in the land of Israel (outside her two-week birthright trip at sweet 16 of course) she “locked in” to the Israeli identity somehow. “My parents are Israeli,” she was fond of saying. “And I’m also Israeli. I’m, ka-eeloo, like, Israeli-American.” This alibi was her sole buffer against the frustration of being called “Oh Snot” for the rest of her life.
Nurit on the other hand grew up with no interest in Israel, Judaism, or Hebrew whatsoever. She was an urbane wanderer with dreams of major liberal diversification; at best, she reckoned, life was kind of like a Lionel Richie video with everybody transcending their stupid past to a Caribbean beat. When she looked in the mirror she saw someone from Delaware, and that was the real problem. What did Israel have to do with anything? Israel just meant that her dad shouted too much when he was in a bad mood and her mom uttered non-sequiturs in a heavy accent. After college, Nurit tried fighting for avocado farm workers’ rights in Aptos, then joined the United Way in Ghana of all places, and finally, after getting dumped by her Dutch boyfriend (they always seem to be Dutch, these “international ex-boyfriends”–they make out like bandits, the Dutch) Nurit found herself soul-searching and backpacking through Thailand where she–surprise!–fell in love with an Israeli dude. An actual Israeli dude. As in, from Israel.
Reader, she married him and moved with him to Gush Dan, where she promptly fell pregnant with a sabra-to-be.
Now back in the States, Osnat (who became a lawyer) also married an Israeli, or I should say, a former Israeli. She met her husband at her practice in Tucson, Arizona. He had approached the firm because he was being sued by the Tucson Mall for illegally selling aromatherapy pillows from an unauthorized makeshift kiosk. He had made a killing and the Arizona Mall Association wanted to recoup it all. Soon, Osnat too fell pregnant.
When sisters simultaneously grow babies, things happen. Among the myriad details, there was naturally a great hustle-bustle about what to name their respective sons. Osnat considered Ran, Orr, Zohar, and Guy, and finally settled on that Israeli staple, Tal. Nurit on the other hand, knew right away that she wanted to name her boy Ido. She just…liked the sound of it.
When their mother told Osnat the news about Nurit’s naming decision, Osnat became distinctly chagrined. She called Nurit, Tucson to Tel Aviv, 3 cents a minute.
“Why,” she asked her sister, “are you giving him such an Israeli name?”
“Well,” Nurit explained patiently, “his father is Israeli, his mother is the child of Israelis, and he’s going to be born and raised in Israel. Duh.”
“Yeah but,” Osnat said haltingly, knowing she was entering sensitive terrain, “it’s so not you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Nurit said, a little too abruptly, and they both sensed a fight coming on.
“Well, you’re not into that…style,” she said, feigning distraction.
“Style? What style? It’s a name. Like…why did you name Tal Tal?”
“Well…I’m Israelier than you!”
“You’re WHAT?”
“I mean…the people I hang around, what we talk about…”
“Osnat, you seem to have forgotten, you don’t even live in Israel. I live IN Israel.”
“Fine, nevermind,” Osnat said, hoping to defuse. But then she couldn’t resist: “Tell me who Gidi Gov is.”
“What is it, a website?” Nurit said.
“See! You don’t even know who Gidi Gov is! One of the most famous–”
“I don’t care!”
“That’s just it, you don’t care.”
“But I’m HERE, my body is physically in the Land of Israel. And you’re in the United States!”
“Total technicality.”
The sisters were fuming mad. There was nothing more to say.
My first landlord, Herman Finklestein, was a little mustachio’d man who looked kind of like guy in the “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” commercials, but older and European. His wife Shifra was a cute little woman with a knowing smile who had perhaps sat one too many times under the hairdryer at the salon. In their funny way, they took me in, made sure I knew how to get around, where to get my papers processed, how to ask for a haircut. When I asked them where they had come from, Herman rolled up his starchy shirt and showed me the fading blue numbers on his hairy arm and said, “We are from hell.”
The apartment was a tiny little hideaway in Ramat Gan above a sabich hut. Mornings, I woke up to the smell of boiling eggs and frying eggplant. They kept the old furniture in the place; it was like walking into a roominghouse in 1949. There was a basin to handwash and some lines to hang my dripping clothes. Down below, the street was mostly Russian, of course. A little Russian makolet sold almost nothing but cold cuts, wafer cookies, and imported vodka that customers would buy and open on the spot, share a little shlook with the lady at the cash register. It was also famous for having been the neighborhood where one of Saddam Hussein’s rockets had fallen, killing an old woman or maybe scaring her to death.
Regarding romance, Shiffra was a practicing oracle. She was forever predicting that I’d find true love in our shtetl. But if a girl came and went, she said, “I knew long ago that this one wasn’t for you.” Herman silenced her gentle meddling with a wave of the hand and little moan of disapproval. “Let the young man make attending to his important business.” In truth I wasn’t that young, and had no business to attend to, important or otherwise. And this, I think they also understood in their silent way.
Herman and Shifra had absorbed a kind of sleepy resignation from fifty-some years in the middle eastern sunshine, but underneath the open shirts and sunburnt arms offering pitchers of ice cold lemonana was that familiar Yiddishkeit nervousness, the wiggy fly-swatting shiver of diaspora hearts. Their kids had grown up and abandoned them for hi tech and Mega and expensive Shilav strollers and pension investments, for the suburbs near Jerusalem or Saratoga or wherever. The new generation had exchanged Zionism for a yawning suburbanism and TV’s Survivor, which made double-foreigners of my poor landlords. For Herman and Shifra had seen the world convulse with murderous insanity, you might say that they had front row seats. But that didn’t mean they could keep perspective about the little things. An exploding kitchen pipe or a flickering fuse sent them into a worrisome panic. There was always a crisis waiting to raise its head.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said to Herman after he shouted at the plumber. “It’s just a little kitchen leak. I’ll lay down some towels.”
Herman waved his hairy hand at me and dropped to his knees. “It starts with a drip, then the floor, then it seeps to every corner. And before you know it the walls are rotten.”
As I watched him scramble to wrap an old t-shirt around the pipes under the sink, the afternoon sun leaked in through our window and made the whole scene painfully vivid. For Herman Finklestein, every day was holocaust remembrance day.
Guy goes to the Jewish Agency, gets all the Zionism brochures, then takes off for Israel. But when he gets there, everyone has thrown in the towel and…
I walk along the sea in the balmy Friday breeze with that familiar squeeze on the heart–the feeling that only the sound of crashing saltwater can answer. Why are we here? What is life? It passes like a catnap dream. Some turn coals on a barbecue fire, some kiss on the grass, some watch their tottering children approach the rocks wide-eyed, hesitating as the bright blue waves kick white foam around the green mossy tidepools. What is love? Why do we suffer? The Muslim prayers on scratchy intercom are fading in the distance, the long line of white hotels reflecting a yellow splash of waning afternoon sun. For what is all this hunger? To what end? Do I ask God? I try. Yesterday passes like oceanspray over rising tide, fizzing into its own disappearance, and tomorrow–is just some wish we make up.
How well I know this feeling…but still its a surprise limbo that unfolds like bird-dragon origami, a breathlessness between stations, grabbing my heart mercilessly. Faces pass. Human eyes. Each lost in their own winding tayelet of thoughts. The scary magic of being. A fragility that we hang reasons on like funny hats on a rickety rack.
Eventually, I will turn away, walk into the city. Eventually, the noise of traffic will overtake me like a wave as the last of the Friday afternoon busses will rumble by. Eventually, one block from the sea, the concrete will rise, a counterfeit purposefulness pressing down on it all. Eventually, heartbreak, chainlink fences, personalities, and endless want, everybody with their territory and their chomrani fantasias.
But for now–wait–I stop on the zigzagging tayelet, kissed by the mist of the Mediterannean, and don’t ever want it to end.
Just how religious are you? Are you Orthodox? Conservative? Reformed? Conservadox? Reformadox? Reconstructionist Haredi Lubavitcher Reformative? Black hat? Hard hat? Straw hat? Yarny yarmulkah? Bald? Mohican Morrocan? Jew for Jesus? Jesus for Jew? Mizrachi-style Chiloni Masorti Ashkenazi with a dash of schug on your Yemenite malawach?
What this nation needs–no, what this people needs–is a Religio-Meter. Think of it as a new kind of ATM, you could have one on streetcorners and outside liquor stores. Just deposit 2 shekels, stick your finger in the blinking gadget and–BOOOOP!–let the Religio-Meter calculate. With Zero being completely unreligious and 18 being completely religious, the Religio-Meter spits out a little Fortune Cookie scroll that “has your number.”
He doesn’t light fire on Shabbat, but hasn’t read a Parashah since his 13th birthday–6.48 on the Religio-Meter.
She fasts on Yom Kippur but refuses to stand behind the Mechitza–11.2973 on the Religio-Meter.
Can’t sit still on an airplane flight–17.91 on the Religio-Meter.
A “Perfect 18″–only You-Know-Who is a perfect 18. But attending to 600+ mitzvot will get you into the upper digits for sure. Remember–we aren’t talking about how what a NICE JEWISH BOY you are, or what a GOOD MAYDELLEH you are, or how COOPERATIVE you are in line at the bank. Those things will require other machines, God help us.
On the Religio-Meter, a “Perfect 0″–I’m not sure what it takes to become a “Perfect 0″, but even breaking all ten commandments will apparently not do the trick. On the other hand, if you’re covered in tattoos from head to toe, and the only TV show you watch is “How to Cook Shrimp Delicacies” on Keshet, you’re gettin’ there.
Also–how does Zionism figure into the Religio™ Algorithm? It figures, it figures–but it’s a bell curve. If you’re FOR the state of Israel you gain points, if you’re REALLY for the state of Israel you gain big points, but if you’re totally against the state of Israel, you gain the most points. Or something like that. In addition, your personal zipcode counts too. If you are a Zionist living in Tucson, Arizona or Johannesburg, South Africa you get roughly half the points of a Zionist living in Petach Tikva but twice the points of a Zionist living in Eilat. Go figure!
A digital USB-connected version of the Religio-Meter will soon become available for Jdate subscribers. No more guessing what a potential soulmate means when they say “Modern Ultra-Orthodox” or “Ultra-Modern Orthodox”, “Spiritually Secular”, or “Sexually Spiritual”. Gimme a number, baby! No, not your phone number. Your Religio-Meter number!
Like the old joke says, everyone who is less observant than me isn’t even Jewish, and everybody more observant than me is a fanatic. With the invention of a Religio-Meter, we may have a machine to prove it.
