said, “I have to go wash.”
Wendy felt annoyed at Meryl’s compunction to wash before eating bread. Wendy bit spontaneously into the warm rolls the waitress had just placed on the table with their orders. She was in the process of putting soft butter with small flecks of dill in it on the warm rolls when Meryl returned and recited the Hamotzi in an ostentatiously loud voice.
Wendy watched as Meryl cut her blintzes neatly into small bite-size pieces, not eating anything until the entire portion was pared down. As Wendy watched her she thought to herself, It’s so unnatural to cut up everything and parcel it out. Eat the damn thing? She remembered, watching, that Meryl had been anorexic. Was this some kind of ritual she created for herself around food?
Meryl eased a piece of blintz into her mouth and chewed before she began: “How did I get here? I can tell the story so many ways. I could start with my parents’ divorce when I was five and my intense desire for a more intact family. Or I could talk about having my show at the gallery and feeling, afterwards, this big . . . letdown. After the opening night party thinking, That wasn’t so great. That’s it? I’m still not happy. I thought ahead of time that if I work hard enough and have this show and it’s successful, I’ll be happy. I could talk about my grandmother who wasn’t super religious, but lit Shabbos candles and made special foods. Food was her way of giving me love. When I was a teenager, I wanted to cut myself off from my family and not accept anyone’s love; part of that was denying myself food. Now, I want to open myself up to the love in the world and reconnect with my grandmother and her candles. But I could just as easily say it was all basherte.” Wendy pretended to look puzzled just to see how Meryl would interpret the phrase for her.
“Hey, I see you need to cut the food into all those pieces. Has your eating disorder gotten better since you’ve been religious?” Wendy wondered as soon as the words were out whether they were going to sound insensitive somehow when it was meant as just a friendly question.
Meryl glossed it over: “Thanks for asking, but yeah, I’ve been fine. I do love all the rituals though. They create more meaning than my own personal ones, you know? But I’m not sure you understood what I was saying before. Basherte is “meant to be.” I was meant to be here in Jerusalem and learn and heal from all the pain in my life. That’s what religion is, a balm; you know the Psalms talk about God as the healer of shattered hearts. I mean, isn’t that an amazing gift from Hashem, to be able to mend our broken hearts through doing mitzvahs?”
Wendy nodded and listened, then worried. How to account for multiple versions of the narrative? There was never only one way to tell the story; all the things Meryl was saying were true. How could she accommodate this in writing her dissertation?
Trying not to sound too anxious, she said, “Was there a turning point for you when you knew for sure you were going to become religious?”
Meryl glared at her. “That’s the problem with ivory tower academics. You see life . . . needing to be reduced to symptoms, diagnoses. For everything there is a pathology and a cure. One Friday night last winter, I was going out to an opening for someone I knew from Providence; he’d gone to RISD. I was in a black, short leather skirt, heels, fishnets, and as I was going down the stairs of my walk-up apartment, I passed the Kaminetskys’ door—they’re Lubavitch, and lived below me. I heard laughing, voices, adorable toddler squealing. I thought about what it would be like at the opening, having to make witty allusive conversation, to name drop, to do things to get people to notice me. No one at that opening would like me just for myself the way the people in that apartment, or that toddler Chaye Mushke, would. I thought, I’ll just go in to say hi. I went in and was greeted so warmly, and Shmuel made Kiddush for me, and Leah showed me how to wash my hands and gave me two rolls to make Hamotzi on, and they said just stay and have some soup with us, and I thought, okay, I’ll have some soup and go a little later. But I never went to the opening, and I started going to them Friday night more and more often. I felt so accepted and loved just for being myself, dreadlocks, fishnets, and all. They were so unjudgmental, especially compared to the scene at the opening where you have to be someone to be noticed. I was meant to be religious and was born into the wrong family. It took me a quarter of my life to figure out a true path and now I’m where I belong.”
Wendy looked at her, “You’re lucky, Meryl, if you’ve found your true path after only a quarter of your life. It takes most people much longer.”
“There is one true path for all Jews, Wendy. It’s called Torah. If you follow it, you’ll find everything.”
Wendy decided not to debate her. “I suppose. So, look this is outside the interview, but I’m just curious. Do you miss art?”
“I do, but I don’t feel it’s compatible with a Torah lifestyle. I could see, as I was telling you earlier, making ritual objects, trying to beautify mitzvot, but not what I did before, no.”
“Aren’t you limiting yourself?”
“The rabbis have an expression, liphoom tzara agra, according to the suffering is the reward. I need to give up things I love to gain a reward for mitzvot. I’m eating now, so I need to give something else up. I don’t know if a non-anorexic can understand that.”
“Do you think you’ll be religious in the future, five or ten years down the road?”
“God willing.”
“You changed to become religious. You can change back,” said Wendy provocatively.
“I don’t know the future. I hope, with God’s help, to continue on this path.”
Wendy decided to try another tactic to get an answer reflecting the thoughts of Meryl herself, not just a repetition of her teachers’ ideas. “What is the hardest thing for you about religious observance?”
Meryl put down her fork and knife and set her palms flat on the table on either side of her plate. “Hmm. Maybe that things are so prescribed: one must say this prayer at this time, feel this way on this holiday, feel that way on Shabbat. I wish I had more room as an individual to do my thing. But I like that on Shabbat there is a shared sense of time. Everyone is resting; no one has other plans and will blow you off the way people did on weekends in college, always going elsewhere.”
“What do you like most and least about the yeshiva?”
“I love learning Hebrew, learning new things. It’s exciting, this whole new world that is my world but that I really knew next to nothing about until recently. What is hard is being back at the beginning, like a little kid, learning Hebrew, learning things religious kids know from day one. I don’t want it to be so difficult for my kids. Least, well, I don’t want to be a snob, but not everyone at Beis Mushka went to Brown, you know. Most of them went to Queens or SUNY Stony Brook and don’t have the . . . sophistication that we have. I’m not sure how to explain it.”
“More provincial? Or more sheltered?”
“Maybe. It’s just . . . most of them just aren’t the type of people I would have been friends with before. But I am changing too, so I don’t know what type of people I should be friends with now. I used to be friends with people who I thought were cool, or thought I was cool, or were also artists and we would all sort of inspire each other.”
“Can you be inspired about doing mitzvot? Who observes more or better?” Wendy added.
“Competition isn’t the only basis of friendship, Wendy. You and I were never friends in the States, yet here we are, sitting here, in Jerusalem.
