One Saturday night in the Bronx, there was no place to be. The May evening eased in with good conversation after a Shabbat meal. Old friends had made new friends, and children’s toys had become a crunchy carpet on the living room’s hardwood floors. A special prayer service beckoned into the evening from the local shteibel. A new friend was honoring his father, of blessed memory, and everyone wanted to come. So, clothes were changed, head-coverings were received, and two men and two women left for the service. We met another outside the door.
The shteibel was no more than an old neighborhood home, except for a children’s picnic table and a bench for two—both plastic—by the neighbor’s fence. Its outer ring felt like a city playground, with cracked concrete sidewalks broken by the persistence of time and play. Entering through the rickety metal door squeezed you into Eastern Europe, whether you could ever return. Whether you even wanted to be there.
The door opened into a room with two or three pews, randomly scattered with old books and boxes of forgotten clothes. There were shelves with more old books on one side, a hallway into the kitchen and a bathroom on the other side. Up ahead was the gender line, a partial wall of side-boarding, half of which was horizontal plastic windows covered by a yellowing lace curtain. What had begun as a barrier-less barrier, a windowed opening into the center, had now become a woman’s veil. The women sat with the forgotten storage and the men proceeded beyond the veil. Voices of private welcome wafted over the line into the storage area. The prayer service had begun.
My ovaried compatriot and I retrieved a prayerbook from the shelf and she opened it to the appropriate section. She followed for a bit, sharing with me where we were supposed to be. Supposed to be. Something raw welled up in my throat. Where were we supposed to be? With the books no one read anymore, and the items left behind? I motioned to the outside, and she smiled, I think with relief. The evening air was both warm and crisp, inviting and edgy. We sat down on the neighborly-fenced bench and breathed into a silence, buffered by muffled prayers.
We mused in our separation, she as a Jewish outsider and I as a Christian one. She had long ago made her peace with such a place, such communal habits. I envied her buoyancy and spirit, seemingly unruffled by sitting with storage. I warmed immediately to her wisdom, shared openly as she shed light on her story, her loves, her family, her life. Here was a fullness to be cherished, whether she was aware of it or not.
But for me, there was no place to be. We thought of returning to her home, where the children were being cared for by another mother in the community. My path is a childless one. Being relegated to childcare was worse than sitting outside a shteibel. We looked into the shteibel to see where the prayers were, but nothing was there either. We returned to the plastic bench and listened as the night rolled in.
Sustaining such empty space inside me for ninety minutes was about all I could muster. The rawness in my throat got the best of me, and taking my head-covering off, I stormed the shteibel. Two men said they thought my husband was inside, and nodded their heads in his direction. I took it as invitation and stuck my head beyond the line, past the lace. A pointing to the wrist-watch, a look of impatience, and my message of impatient inquiry, desire to exist again, was received. A couple minutes later, two men returned to the outside. One, a Jewish insider, exclaimed relief at being on the outside. “Back to the world!” he exclaimed. “Where have we been?” The other, my husband, peered at me with fear and uncertainty. We kissed, but we both knew I had left and not returned. We left the shteibel for the home with the toyed carpet, minus my friend’s husband, minus me.
So where was I supposed to be? Where did ‘I’ go? And more importantly, have I returned?
This was a powerful lesson for me about how truly I am an outsider in all Jewish circles. I was not supposed to be there at the shteibel at all. “My kind,” meaning so many “Christians,” exacted such horror on the Jews of Eastern Europe that there was literally no place for me as a Christian, let alone a woman. I was supposed to be anywhere but there. Yet I had come.
So then where did ‘I’ go? The first place, I now know, was into my new friend’s life. While ‘I’ had no place to be, she shared a life and story for me to be in, for a time. A lifeline, so to speak, though without the flash of Hollywood. But with no other place to be, I ultimately went to my own darkest spaces: gender imposition, choosing childlessness, suffocating religions. The rawness would have been less raw, perhaps, if my husband had not been welcomed into the inner sanctum. Our one-fleshness was divided by a community not our own: infuriating and painful. Unsustainable, for me. Choosing childlessness is nearly incomprehensible in most Jewish communities into which I have been welcomed. It means a whole lot more and a slew of different things in those settings than it does in mine, but it is a fearful reality for many of my new friends. What if more and more Jewish women chose not to have children? What would become of the Jewish community? And my life is hell-bent against religion that suffocates its peripheries. My sister is a self-proclaimed fundamentalist whose relation to the world takes my very breath away. I literally cannot breathe in her world, nor she in mine. Religion as exclusion, those set apart for privileged purpose, enrages me, which is rather ironic in that I'm an ordained minister. That's another posting for another time. Here, ‘I’ went to each of these places in which my mind and spirit are tender, socially outraged, potentially disempowered.
But I have indeed returned. A Jewish insider welcomed a hug of return on the cracked pavement. As soon as we arrived back at their home, I changed back into my own clothes. My friend’s husband returned and as Shabbat was over, the two of us jumped into the van to pick up their daughter from her Shabbat stay-over. Familiar friends, we listened together for what was beautiful and holy about such a place, so empty for me. Hearing his own awareness of emptiness, I breathed a bit. We lamented that sometimes there are simply limits across which it is too painful to reach. And more breath returned. Then I began to hear Elvis in my head, “Jail House Rock.” I knew I was going to be just fine, in my spirited skin once again.
This may have been my first real step into a new work on learning to become an outsider. There’s more here for me to learn, of course, not least of which is examining my complete lack of desire to be in a shteibel ever again or to pray alongside men who want to be in a shteibel. But there’s great freedom in being in one’s own skin, and not attempting to be anywhere else. There’s significance in being connected with those who are irreconcilably different. But how to access it? How to honor them amidst one’s own limitations? Time and more will tell.
