A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (20 page)

For all the amusing stories I’ve recounted, the contacts made through online dating come with a serious side. The women and I have aged from our forties into our fifties; we deal with frail parents, career upheavals, troubled children, economic dislocations, and the daily reminders of our own mortality. In the face of all this, I find comfort in the rituals and beliefs of Judaism. They help me, as do fifty-year old connections to my Christian friends in Texas.

As the Christians I grew up among matured, they drew comfort from a serene faith in the existence of God and the power of prayer. This is the faith of many relatives in my intermarried family. I still find the core of their outlook to be natural and essential: God is real; prayer works. Have faith, however imperfect. Few of my secular Jewish friends think of religion in these terms and I respect their views. When people ask me what Jews believe, I simply point them to what Maimonides, the medieval philosopher wrote in his 13 Principles of Faith, beginning, “I believe with perfect faith that G-d is the Creator and Ruler of all things. He alone has made, does make, and will make all things” and ending with, “I believe with perfect faith that the dead will be brought back to life when G-d wills it to happen.”

One September I put faith and prayer into written words when I visited the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, in Queens, New York. Followers of his in the Chabad movement of Orthodox Judaism journey to his resting place, the “Ohel,” (literally meaning a tent) to leave prayers asking for blessing and guidance. I made that journey for the first time before the Jewish New Year and left a prayer pleading for the health and well-being of people I care about: my son, brother, girlfriend, ex-wife, the President, family and friends. Following the tradition of the Ohel, I wrote my prayer requests on paper, then tore them up and tossed them into a vast tank before the Rebbe’s grave, to mix with the prayers of thousands of others. The pieces of paper drifted down, and one piece landed face up so I could just read the words, “my son.”

One friend would soon need all the prayers, Hebrew and Christian, that I could muster. Two months later, my friend Ilana told me she had breast cancer. I responded in the most natural way—I turned to both Christian and Jewish prayer traditions. After all, I thought, God listens with both ears. I wrote to what I call my “Texas Prayer Patrol”—childhood friends David, Dee Dee and Lois, my cousin Linda in Tyler—and asked them to embrace Ilana in their prayers. They leaped into their spiritual work, and continued to petition the Lord for Ilana every day.

At the same time, I also called on my Jewish faith. I included Ilana when I said the nighttime
Sh’ma
, Judaism’s essential prayer: “Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” I also went online and dispatched another prayer for her to the Rebbe’s Ohel.

This intense spiritual effort worked, as far as I know. Ilana underwent surgery with excellent prospects. I wrote her a note quoting a rabbi, “The Talmud locates God’s presence lending comfort to patients by resting above their head.” I added my own thought: “I had an image of the
malachim tovim
—the good angels—around you in the hospital and at home.”

I know that Christian and Jewish prayers work in tandem to protect precious souls. God is always listening with His infinite ears.

Recently I heard about the death of a woman I once knew named Adina. She had been one of the very first women I dated after moving to New York in 1980. I found a paid death notice in a newspaper from several years back, saying she succumbed to diabetes and breast cancer. She was fifty-one—younger than I am now.

Adina and I had a tumultuous relationship, thanks to our wildly different social backgrounds and degrees of sophistication: suburban Long Island versus small-town Texas, intense Jewish education versus no Jewish education. Still, we had a connection: we were writers and Jewish and on the prowl. Adina played an influential role in my life at the time.

Our shared practice of Judaism provided many of my favorite memories of our times together. We joined her friends to hear Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach sing during Purim at B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, a favored hunting ground for singles. I attended a seder with her family on Long Island on the snowy Passover of April 1982. With Adina’s encouragement, I visited Israel in May 1982 and wrote about the experience for the
Forward
newspaper.

The little markers of memory accumulated over the months. I have photos of Adina at B’nai Jeshurun and with her friends Rena, Rochel and Marilyn. She sent me postcards from her trips to Israel and Peru. We called each other “Y.D.,” short for “Yiddish dumpling.”

For what turned out to be our last date, I stunned Adina with tickets to what I called “Bereshit,” the Hebrew name for the book of Genesis—we saw her favorite music group, Phil Collins and Genesis, perform at Forest Hills Stadium in August 1982. That was the end. She called it quits after that.

Other relationships would follow (By year’s end I was dating Calypso, whose story you will find if you keep reading), but as time passed I thought fondly of Adina. We parted in frustration, not anger. Four years later, on a rainy evening on the Upper West Side, we ran into each other again. We immediately had a long catch-up coffee klatch in a diner. Adina had left journalism to study social work, while I was several years into a stint as a globe-trotting freelance writer. Freed from the anxieties of stillborn romance, we shared a warmth and were happy to see each other.

“
Don’t be a stranger,” she said in her distinctive, cigarette-raspy voice.

We never saw each other again. The next year I met the woman I would marry. The new flame burned bright and I fed it all the oxygen I had. Old flames flickered and went out.

Long after my divorce in the new millennium, I became curious about Adina and uncovered the death notice. I mentally overlaid my life on top of her last years and wondered what type of friendship, if any, would have resulted from contact. Maybe nothing, but I like to think we would have stayed connected this time as friends with common interests in Judaism, journalism, travels to Latin America and, well, life. I had changed since we dated—becoming more at ease with myself, more Jewishly literate, comfortable in groups. In any case, I found myself aching and sorry that we had had no contact for those last twenty years. I never had a chance to say goodbye to Adina.

That’s one missed farewell in a digital world that logs birth and death regularly. I would never have known about Adina’s passing without the Internet. Online, the once-hidden and unfindable becomes common, jolting knowledge. Through Facebook, I read daily about the illnesses of friends’ families, with prayer requests and mentions of deaths of parents, siblings and, most grievously, children. On Facebook, I learned that the son of one friend from Mission, for example, was killed in Afghanistan, bringing the war to me in a terribly personal way. We’re in our fifties and older; passings happen and the pace quickens with age.

I learned about Adina’s passing at the exact same time I was experiencing something entirely new in my Jewish life—a
shiva
call to a house of mourning. I had attended Jewish weddings and funerals, but had never visited a family sitting
shiva
, or mourning a death.

“
Not even your grandparents?” somebody asked after I mentioned this anomaly.

“
No, not even my grandparents,” I said.

But a death occurred in a family close to me, an uncle of my girlfriend, and I wanted to pay my respects. I had no idea what to expect, although I knew of the traditional rituals of covering mirrors and tearing clothes.

So I visited some people I knew, the relatives of the elderly man who had died. I gave them my condolences. Some wore small black ribbons. I recognized the rabbi who conducted the service, which consisted of prayers I had heard many times before and could read and mostly say in Hebrew. This included the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. This prayer does not mention death but rather magnifies and sanctifies the Name of God. It begins,

As I looked around the room, I thought about how ancient tradition and ritual created such emotional support at a time of ultimate loss. People are not left to flail on their own in the darkness; they—we—have a way to mourn that links them to generations past and future.

The moment seemed right and as we prayed I said the Kaddish for my late friend. I had finally found a way to say goodbye to Adina, Y.D.

One of the most intense spiritual experiences I’ve ever had came after Muslim terrorists killed the directors of the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, and other Jews in November, 2008. Here’s what happened.

Once the deaths became known, Chabad of Stamford, Connecticut organized a memorial service that I attended. The service featured a video tribute to Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg. It praised their hospitality in welcoming everyone to the Chabad House and their Jewish learning. During that mournful but forward-looking night, somebody compared Gavriel and Rivka to Abraham and Sarah, the first Hebrews, who welcomed angels and others into their household.

At that moment, something momentous clicked in my soul. Perhaps the speaker made this explicit point: Gavriel and Rivka weren’t just like Abraham and Sarah—somehow they actually
became
Abraham and Sarah. Somehow, 4,000 years of history vanished and I saw the Patriarch and Matriarch.

What happened then—so long ago after Abraham heard the command “Lech Lecha” (get thee out) and left Ur of the Chaldees—assumed an electrifying immediacy in my life. I felt a more direct connection to my faith than I had ever known. A line ran from Abraham to the Holtzbergs to me.

These thoughts inspired me to rent a movie I had seen before and liked a lot:
Déjà Vu
with Denzel Washington as investigator Doug Carlin, unraveling an explosion on a ferry in New Orleans. What’s the connection? You might ask, “How is Chabad like a Denzel Washington action movie?” I’ll explain.

Washington uncovers a secret (of course) government research project called “Snow White” that enables viewers to peer into the past for short periods of time. The more he hears about the project, the more he wonders about the true nature of what he sees. Eventually he discovers that Snow White can function like a time machine. A technician tells Washington that the time machine “folds space” to link to different points, similar to a cell phone signal. In this case, the signal connects to a point in the past, not another cell phone caller. That scene exactly captured my feeling about the memorial service and the Holtzbergs. I felt a spiritual bridge open, spanning that November night and the life of the Patriarch. Abraham and Sarah stopped being distant myths of my religion, something taught, studied and filed away under “Jewish stuff” in the desk drawer of my life. They became immediately real through the selfless behavior of the Holtzbergs, who showed me who Abraham and Sarah were. Time dropped away, like in the movie. I found myself on the bridge between now and then, or, if you will, now and another now.

I am actually looking at and experiencing Abraham and Sarah, I thought. This is the way it was and the way it is.

Déjà Vu
has a strong spiritual sensibility that echoes Jewish teachings. At a funeral service after the film’s bombing, a preacher muses on God’s will and the nature of time. He says that “whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before.”

His words reminded me of the second principle of the 13 Principles of Faith written by Maimonides, the medieval rabbi also known as the Rambam, who wrote:

I read that to mean that time does not bind God, that He exists at all times. So I can extrapolate, in my “Snow White” moment, to see the Jewish people as a unity stretching forward and back. I don’t mean that in a trite, fundraiser-declaration sense (“We are one!”). I am one point in a line pointing to the past and the future; I am personally responsible for doing what I can to sustain that line and extend it into centuries to come.