Paradise Park (37 page)

So I took a good look at him with the kids, and I walked right on past. I took my backpack and guitar, and hurried all the way out to the concession stands, and bought myself a bag of trail mix, which despite my stomachache I opened up and started eating. And I looked way down to the escalators and to the glass doors of the baggage claim, where my suitcase and my sleeping bag and my cardboard box would soon be circling round and round. The thought definitely crossed my mind, the thought of leaving. But there I was with the stubs of a free ticket all the way from Honolulu to Seattle. I knew running off wasn’t right. I headed back to the gate.

The people there were thinning out, but the rabbi and his kids were still standing there expectantly. I hung back out of sight for maybe five minutes and I watched them waiting, looking all around for me. Then I put down my backpack and I watched them a little more, and as I watched, I nibbled on my trail mix. I was willing myself to come up to them, but I was nervous as a squirrel, nibbling, nibbling. Ready to run.

Finally I went up to the rabbi and admitted who I was.

“Sharon!
Baruch habah!”
Welcome! he exclaimed, and he took my backpack, and the kids swarmed around me. They were all about four years old. We went down to the baggage claim, and piled into the club wagon, and the rabbi drove us out to Bellevue.

The roads were big, and they were long—and they weren’t circular like the ones in Hawaii; you knew they were connected up to big freeways and highways, by which you could drive clear across the country. All around us were verdant Mainland trees, deciduous ones, and evergreens. And there were mountains, also green, and huge enormous shopping plazas. Everything was large scale and bright and new, and then downtown Bellevue came up, and it had two office towers of tinted
mirror glass, one bronze, and one blue. We kept driving out along this pretty green lake, which I thought was Lake Washington, but later I found out was Lake Sammamish. I saw boats in the lake, and kids fishing, and ducks. I had my eyes glued to the windows of the van; I was trying to get my bearings and check out the surroundings, but at the same time this music was pounding through the van’s sound system. It was that Bialystoker pop song about the Messiah who they called Moshiach, and it was very cheery and up tempo and loud, “Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Moshiach, come today! Hey!” The kids were busy offering me candy and also eyeing my bag of trail mix to the point where I started looking at it myself. Peanuts, raisins, dried papaya and pineapple chunks, banana chips, dried coconut flakes. Was this stuff somehow not kosher? So there I was checking out Washington State from the inside of a Moshiach mobile.

We started driving through some real old-growth suburbs with Tudor houses set back and plush green lawns, and oak trees. I thought, Well, this is nice, but where are we really going? Where’s Bais Sarah going to fall out? And then we started up a sweeping drive, and there on the hill I see a great big mama house, all red brick and turrets, a Victorian castle with a slate roof and bay windows and the biggest front lawn of all the houses we’d seen yet. And it turned out
that
was the Bellevue Bais Sarah Institute. Whoa! From the outside the place looked just magnificent.

When the rabbi opened the door, we came into a vast entrance hall with curving stairs, and everywhere was marble and carved wood, except the walls were peeling and stained yellow. The mansion was seriously run-down, but no one seemed too worried. Up in the stairwell hung a grand portrait of the Bialystoker rebbe in a niche in the wall that looked like it had been designed for an even bigger painting.

“The house was left to us,” the rabbi said. “Alice Rosensweig,
oleva-sholom
, left it to us in her will five years ago.”

“You mean, she didn’t have kids?” I asked.

“She did have kids,” the rabbi said. “But she left the estate to
CHAI
of Bellevue.” And he put up his hand, like nothing more should be said. So, of course, I said nothing more.

Then the rebbetzin came down the stairs, with all these women, the ones who studied there in the institute, and they milled around me, and they started asking questions, about the flight, and about Hawaii, and
the rebbetzin, whose name was Chaya, was asking all about her sister, back in Hawaii, and about Ruchel and Dovidl’s kids. Chaya Simkovich was very plain and skinny, despite having so many kids. She had a somewhat long, horsy face, no resemblance to Ruchel, and this sardonic way of talking that made me think she was a real New Yorker.

I was pretty much mobbed. There were fifteen women already studying there for the summer, and there were maybe five girls who were called
madrichot
, who were teenaged counselors who had come from back east in Crown Heights to help guide the students and give them one-on-one tutoring, and then there were more little kids, I wasn’t even sure at that point how many, but later I found out there were eight, and the kids were all the rabbi’s and his wife’s.

My arrival was a big event in the house. Everyone was so excited I’d come all the way from out in the Pacific Ocean, and they couldn’t do enough for me, carrying all my stuff up to the second floor, showing me my bed, which they’d pushed up near the window. I was going to be bunking with three other women in a grand old bedroom with flaking paint, and a pocked and pitted hardwood floor, and a fireplace with a mantel carved out of marble veined green like Stilton cheese. Above the fireplace there was the rebbe again, like Chairman Mao, watching from his picture frame. My bed had just a bare mattress with black-and-white ticking. Everybody slept in sleeping bags like at camp. A little black prayer book lay where my pillow would have been. There were two dressers in the room, and I got the top half of one. There was a washstand right in the center of the room, for ritual washing right when you rolled out of bed. For regular washing there was this mildewy powder room with rusty old sconces and a claw-foot tub and a shower rigged up with a voluminous plastic shower curtain that you pulled around you.

Everyone was fussing over me, and talking at once, and then suddenly Chaya said, “Girls, look at the time! It’s time for afternoon
shiur!”
meaning, afternoon class. And she said to her own children, “Kids, go downstairs now. Give Sharon time to rest.” And they all left me alone so I could unpack and settle in and take a shower. They all stampeded back down the dark wood stairs.

I was tired, but too jazzed to lie down. I unrolled my sleeping bag onto the bed. Then gently I laid my guitar on top. I started unpacking everything into my drawers. All my new T-shirts, nightgowns, and skirts,
brand new from GEM in Honolulu. I undressed and stuffed my bra stash in with my socks.

Stepping into the claw-foot tub, at first I couldn’t figure out how to make the handheld shower come on, and then I ended up spraying myself in the face with cold water. I washed my hair really quick and got out shivering. I got dressed in a white T-shirt and a long, pretty much ankle-length blue skirt, and my white socks and my blinding white athletic shoes. And I combed out my hair, all down to my waist, and started walking around the bedroom nervously with that extra bouncy step you get when you’re wearing brand-new running shoes. My hair was squeaky clean down my back, and my clothes were new and fresh, and I was wearing a slip. I just felt so peculiar, and expectant, and clean, and yet strung out. There I was, dressed up like Alice in Wonderland. There I was, thirty-eight years old. The newest girl at the orphanage.

W
E
were all called girls at Bais Sarah. I wasn’t even the oldest one there. One of my roommates, Ruth Ann, was fifty-two. Another one, Linda, was forty. And then the third, Nicole, was just seventeen. We were all called girls, because we were in school, and because we weren’t married. Some of us had been married, but weren’t anymore. Some of us had even been homeless, or addicts, or turned tricks on the street, but at the program none of that mattered. Everyone was back in fresh clean skirts, like we were starting over, like we actually could be girls again. So, in an old house in Bellevue all covered with vines, lived sixteen big girls in two straight lines. We woke each day at seven
A.M.
We said hi to the rebbe in his frame. At seven-twenty we broke our bread. At seven-forty grace was said. We prayed in small groups from eight to nine. The beginner’s group was, you guessed it, mine.

Every morning we sat in a circle in those school-type chairs with built-in desks, except that Rabbi Simkovich had an armless chair, because he was too big to fit comfortably in a desk chair, and also when he got inspired he hopped up and walked around as he talked. Every day he would take some little tiny passage from the
Tashma
and we’d all turn to it and read it, him in Hebrew, and most of us in English on the facing page, and then he’d explicate it, and extrapolate from it, and basically develop out of that one passage this entire lecture about the Jewish
philosophy of life. He’d take just a few short phrases, and he’d be off for hours on this whole improvisational mystic odyssey. For example, he would say, “Turn please to page four hundred eighty-five.” He’d start reading in Hebrew in this singsong voice, and then he’d look up and say, “What does this mean? There are two types of love. And we’re speaking here about love for our God, Hashem. The first type is
‘ahavah be-ta’ anugim,’
which is love with delight! Ecstatic love for Hashem! Can everyone feel this way?” He looked around the room.

I was thinking, Yeah! because I had felt that kind of charge before. Sometimes in confused circumstances, but yeah.

“No,” Simkovich said. “Not everyone can attain this kind of love for Hashem. This love is born into the very few, only to the tzaddikim, the greatest of saints. This is the love of tzaddikim dancing from their own goodness, and rejoicing from their delight in Hashem.”

Whoa, I could be a saint, I thought in my little desk-chair.

“But the second kind of love is for all of us to attain, and what is this? A love which we feel as yearning and desire. This is the desire of our spirits to come closer to Hashem, through our prayers and our mitzvos. Every Jew can follow this type of love. Not only that, every Jew, no matter what he or she has done in the past, has this yearning love and desire in her heart. No matter what wrongdoing she has done, that yearning is still inside of her! Now, since this yearning is inside of us, right here!”—he tapped his chest—“then what prevents us from taking advantage of it? What’s stopping us?”

Everyone looked at him, but nobody said a word.

“The so-called modern world is stopping us, that’s what. And the culture we have been taught in the schools and in the neighborhoods of that modern world. What is that culture about? It’s about technology and money and materialism. It’s about capitalism, and do you know what capitalism boils down to? Advertising. Now, advertising is so prevalent in our world that we don’t even notice it! And yet do you know who the greatest consumers of advertising are? What is the market that all advertisers are trying to reach?”

I raised my hand.

Simkovich hadn’t really expected someone to answer the question, but he nodded to me.

“They want to reach women,” I said.

“That’s right!!!” he thundered. “That is one hundred percent right! They want to reach women. Because women do the shopping in this world, and so they want to sell them all their products. But also, women are the pillars of the families of this world, and so they want to sell them all their lifestyles too. And, now, what is the major lifestyle that has for twenty years been marketed to women, in magazines, movies, television, in everything under the sun? That lifestyle is mobility, and the so-called women’s liberation. These are the two big
metziyas
being offered to women, they should have the chance to go wherever they want, and do whatever they want!

“But the question is, once you buy this lifestyle, liberation, what do you get in the long term? To have every option open and to drift this way and that? Is this liberty? To keep every option open to you and never have to commit to anything? Wonderful. Women and men can move from one shallow relationship to another, and from one fly-by-night occupation to the next. You are sitting here today, because you have decided maybe to take a closer look at those choices you are making. You have decided, maybe, to look more critically at how you spend your time.

“It’s a very simple question. Where do you want to invest your life? In the cheap fly-by-night? Or in Hashem? In material things, or in the holy law, halacha? Do you want to take your time and spend it on quick pleasures? Or do you want to move that time from checking into savings? And invest it all in Torah? So you may think, Later there is time for that; in the future; when I’m older there will be time. Or you may think, Someone else will study Torah, someone else will live a Torah life, not me. Well, let me tell you something. What the great Rav Hillel once said. He said, ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’”

And Simkovich would go on. He would go on and on, and we all sat there in that circle, and we were galvanized by what he said. He was really one of the only speakers I’ve ever heard who could compare to my old pastor—I mean, Pastor McClaren at Greater Love. Listening to Simkovich, I would forget the time. Sometimes when I left that room, I was shaking, just from the power of everything the rabbi said. Because it seemed like every thread he picked out of the
Tashma
he could connect to something about me. He could read this mystical text, and it would become a horoscope, so every quotation he made was relevant to your own situation! I mean, I’d been through relationships, and classes, and
jobs, and I’d had all the choices in the world, but what had they left me with?

The rabbi wasn’t embarrassed to say, Hey, the old days
were
better, and sisterhood was powerful for women. Separation from the guys actually gave us more freedom to be ourselves. Nowadays, women were trying so hard to be equal to men that in fact they were forgetting they were better than men—we had powers of purity and spirituality that no men could match. And so, in fact, women all around were giving up their specialness that they had been born with, their pure white mantles were getting all stained, their own mitzvos were being forgotten, and their modesty violated because they weren’t taught to protect it.