Paradise Park (24 page)

Spellbound I sat for forty minutes while Siegel talked. Only when he was done and the questions and answers were over and people started to leave did the spell wear off. Then I stood up, and I stirred myself. And I
was pissed! I walked right up to Rabbi Everett Siegel and I said, “Rabbi?”

“Hello, Sharon,” he said. He was reading my name tag again, as if I were his waitress.

“I wanted to make a comment to you, being one of the Jews you mentioned who is a Friend.”

“Yes,” he said. His voice was growing lower and graver by the minute.

“I just wanted to say that personally I was a little bit offended when you spoke about people of Jewish backgrounds running way. Because I am not and I have
never been
a person who is running away from anything.”

“I see,” he said.

“I happen to be a comparative religion major at UH,” I said. “I happen to be a person running
toward
spiritualism.”

He looked at me with his melancholy eyes. “The question,” he said, “is whether your spiritualism, as you call it, has anything to do with your religion.”

“My what?”

“With Judaism.”

“I never said Judaism was my religion.”

“The irony is,” Rabbi Siegel told me in his rolling tones, “we are a people who have survived by our memories. And now we are plagued with amnesia.”

“I find it a little bit offensive that you keep accusing me of being an amnesiac when you don’t even know me,” I practically shouted. “For example, I’ve been an Israeli folk dancer for years. For example, I come from a Jewish home, and my stepmother was also Jewish. It’s not like I could run away from Judaism if I tried!” And I was ready to go on, but at that moment the
bashert
happened! The Jewish fate Gary had referred to.

“You’re a dancer?” the Rabbi said. “Then come to the temple and dance.”

I wrote to Gary that night: “When he said that, I just stood there in awe of the fate that had in two seconds descended upon me! It’s just like you said about coincidences. It is exactly what you were saying, that there
are no random patterns in the universe. I’ve lived here ten years—going on eleven. I never knew there was folk dancing going on here. And now, today, I found out a group of women meet Thursday eves at Martin Buber Temple. They have music, but no instructor—since the one they had was deported back to Israel along with her sister—and they are looking to pay (top dollar!!) for a knowledgeable dancer to teach and lead them!”

I had never had a
portent
before. I had never felt fate come tap me on the shoulder. It was one of the spookiest yet most intoxicating feelings I had ever known.

The very next Thursday, at least an hour before class, I knocked on Rabbi Siegel’s office door. “Come in,” he boomed like the great big papa bear. And I entered his sanctum. I had never been in a rabbi’s office before. It was quite a shrine! The wall behind the desk was covered with black-and-white photos of bigwigs embracing Siegel and shaking his hand. There were people in tuxedos, and people with ribbons and medals around their necks. This Siegel had obviously gotten around. One of the photos was of him and President Kennedy! The office had red plush upholstered chairs and two massive desks full of plaques and gold penholders, and commemorative crystal ashtrays, and about ten thousand books.

“You’ll need this,” the rabbi said, and he gave me a tape player. “And this.” He gave me a carton of folk dancing cassettes. Then he gave me a really long official check, signed by the treasurer of Martin Buber Temple, for five hundred dollars, and said something about everyone in the group being so excited about meeting me, except I was staring so hard at the money I barely heard him.

I took the check, and the tape player and the tapes, and I set everything up in the social hall of Martin Buber Temple. No one was around, so I took off my sandals and stretched out. The floor was smooth terrazzo. Wood was better for your feet, but we’d deal with it. The space was big and airy. There was one of those accordion-pleat partitions between the social hall and the sanctuary, which was all done in earth tones, rust and ochre. As for the social hall, it was decorated with a wall mural of King Solomon in a great big crown and robes like a Free
mason. The king was holding a sword over the head of a peculiar-looking baby, and on one side of him was a woman shrieking, and on the other side a woman sulking. In gold underneath was painted “The Wisdom of Solomon.” I was contemplating this artwork when a couple of old ladies came in.

“Are you the instructor?” one of them inquired. She was very large and bosomy and wore a muumuu. Her friend had white hair and she wore a black leotard with a black-and-white check wraparound skirt over it. A couple more ladies came in behind them, and everybody kissed everybody else and called each other dear.

It took me a minute just to realize that these dames were actually my Israeli dancers!

“Are you Sharon Spiegelman?”

“Yeah, I’m Sharon,” I said, reluctantly. The ladies all rushed around me to introduce themselves.

“I’m Ruth Katz,” said the bosomy one.

A small plump blond lady also came up, and she had with her a taller woman with deep red hair and rouge and bloodred lipstick, and the blond lady said, “I’m Henny Pressman, and this is my sister Lillian.”

“Betsy Sugarman,” said the one in the black leotard and checked skirt.

“And my name is Estelle. Pleased to meet you,” said the lady with white hair, and she held out her hand.

“Estelle—that’s my mom’s name,” I heard myself say.

“Really? And where does she live, dear?”

I looked at Estelle blankly.

“On the Mainland?”

“Oh, she’s dead,” I said.

Estelle’s face fell. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t even know her. She died in my infancy.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Ruth. They were all clucking.

“And your father?”

I looked down at my feet.

“Is he living?”

“He is, but he’s not well,” I said. “He’s suffering from …” I hesitated just a fraction of a second. “Gout.”

“Gout!” said Betsy Sugarman.

“In this day and age?” asked Estelle.

And I was standing there by the tape recorder, under the wall mural of King Solomon, and I was thinking, Why did I say gout?

“But there are medications for gout,” said Betsy.

“He is one of the only people in the world who is just not susceptible to the medications,” I said. “They just have no effect on him whatsoever.”

“Really!” said Betsy. “I’ll have to ask my husband about this! My husband is a doctor,” she told me.

“Let’s form a circle,” I said.

We limped through
“Dodi Li”
as slowly as it was humanly possible to go. Yet still, when we did the turns, some of us turned one way, and some of us the other. I couldn’t get everybody going in the same direction. The music was playing softly, and my feet wanted so much to follow the music. My feet remembered the steps even there, but I thought, Is this my comeback to the world of dance? Is this really part of the grand plan that Gary kept referring to? Because maybe all the pieces do come back together again in life. Maybe there is this pattern in the grand scheme of things. But what if the pattern turns out to be less of a gorgeous mandala and more of a sick parody?

I just ached to think of that. I wanted to stop right there. It was embarrassing to be out on the floor with those old ladies. The dancer I used to be was laughing at me now. Actually she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I wanted to turn off the music, but I gritted my teeth, at least to get through the first class. It wouldn’t be right to quit on them—not then and there.

The one dance they could do was
“Hinach Yafa,”
this simple couples dance, which of course the ladies all had to dance with each other, since we had no guys. They all paired up, and I danced with Ruth. That was the one time we finally made some progress. I had the tape going, and we were all pretty much moving in the right direction, step right, one, two, three, brush, Yemenite, finger snap. Then all of a sudden Betsy Sugarman started in, “Sharon. Sharon?” And she stopped right in the middle with her partner, who was Henny, and everyone else looked up distracted, and Betsy said, “May I ask a question?”

Instantly, everybody looked over at me. All the ladies got distracted. The whole dance we’d patiently built up ground to a halt.

I let go of Ruth’s hand and glared at Betsy. “What.”

“Sharon, what does this mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“The song. What does the song mean?
‘Hinach Yafa’?”

“Beats me.” In all my years of dancing I’d never worried about the actual lyrics. I mean, there were people I knew back in Boston who could translate the words, but dancing wasn’t about
words.
Dancing wasn’t for your mouth, it was for your feet! Dancing was springing up, and bouncing. Spinning. Snapping. It would take someone like Betsy, who had lousy rhythm, to start wondering about Hebrew words like that.

After the ladies left I packed up the tapes and took the tape recorder back to the rabbi’s office. “Come in,” he boomed once again. And I came inside holding the box in front of me.

“Sit down,” the rabbi said.

So I plopped down, and when I did I realized I was exhausted.

“How did it go?” he asked.

I quit, I said deep inside myself. Still, I had that check folded inside my back pocket.

Slowly, I put the tapes and the tape player on his desk. I thought, Sharon, if you have any self-respect you’ll give him the money back. “It went fine,” I said, yet a few tears started in my eyes.

“It went fine?” the rabbi asked.

I nodded.

“Then …” He was too formal and polite to say, Then why are you crying? He said, “Then what, exactly, is the trouble?”

“Oh, just … the dancing, and the class, and the students.”

“All of it?” he said.

“All of it.”

He gave me a tissue.

I wiped my face. I pulled myself together. I said, “It isn’t the way I thought it was going to be.”

“What
did
you think?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. I mean … I thought, um, they, the class, would, you know, be able to, like … dance.”

“If they knew how to dance, they wouldn’t need an instructor,” he said.

He had me there for a moment. “I know, I know. That’s true. But I thought they’d have at least some idea.”

“Well,” said the rabbi, “some idea will have to come from you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.” I stood up. “Listen,” I said, “I have to catch my bus.”

“Take the tapes with you,” the rabbi urged. “Here, and the tape player.”

“I can take them home?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Wow. Thanks!” I felt terrible complaining when I was taking all this money and the music too. I felt guilty hating those women in the class just for their lousy timing and their interruptions. Which reminded me. “Rabbi? What does
Hinach yafa
mean?”

“You are beautiful,” the rabbi said. “Behold, you are fair.”

“Whoa.”

“Do you know where those words come from?”

“Hebrew,” I said.

“Wait a minute.” He was leafing through books on his desk. Then he swiveled around in his big leather swivel chair. He pulled a volume from his shelf and leafed some more. And then he said, “Ah.”

And I said, “Ah?”

“Come back for just a moment.” He sat down behind his desk in this hugely tall leather desk chair like a throne, and I sat back down, but just on the arm of my chair, just perched so any second I could go. And Siegel read from one of his volumes,
“Hinach yafa, raiti, hinach yafa, aynayich yonim. …”
And he translated the words into English for me in his rolling tones, “You are beautiful, my love, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil….”

And I said, “Wait, wait, I know this. This is the Song of Solomon.”

“Or as we call it in our tradition, the Song of Songs.”

“And it’s about Christ making love to his Church,” I said.

“It is
not
about Christ and his Church,” the rabbi declared.

I was taken aback. “Well, I used to do Bible study, and that’s what it said in the Bible.”

“Not in our Bible,” the rabbi said. He spoke very absolutely.

“You mean like that’s not your interpretation.”

“No,” he said, “The Song of Songs is not about Christ and his Church. That is simply not true.”

“Well,” I said. “Well, you know, every religion has a different idea of truth.”

He sat there and glared.

But I, being a religion major, said, “Every religion has its own metaphors of the unknown, you know. And just because those metaphors are different doesn’t make them invalid.”

Then Rabbi Siegel looked at me like if his conscience hadn’t forbade it he would have taken one of the pointy pens sticking out of his gold penholders and stabbed me in the heart. And he looked at me, and he looked at me, and he said, “Sharon, I am a founding member of this state’s ecumenical council of Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and Jews. I have been a lifelong contributor to interfaith dialogue in this nation. And I will yield to no one in my conviction that all of our scriptures, whether prophetic or poetic, should be a bridge of understanding between the peoples of the world. These lines of poetry are measures of our commonality….”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“But we had them FIRST!”

I nearly fell off the arm of the chair. I had to catch my breath. “Well, you know, that’s not completely fair.”

“It’s a fact.”

“Well …”

He leaned forward and stared at me with all his might, and he said, “Well, what?”

“Well, not really….”

So then Siegel started in on me. “This may come as news to you. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as history. There are documents and texts that predate others, and traditions from which others have been spawned.”

“I’m not trying to pick a fight here,” I said. “I just asked one little question, since I didn’t know the answer.”

“Granted. Granted,” the rabbi said, and he sighed again heavily. He was a man of sighs. Then he looked at me, and he said, “Don’t stop.”