Sotah (50 page)

She was happy when she heard his footsteps in the hall and then walking up the steps. It was late afternoon. The room was bathed in soft shadows. “Let’s not put on the light, Rabbi Eliezer. I feel better this way,” Dina said softly. What she had to say would be unbearable in the harsh glare of full illumination.

He nodded.

“When I was sick, it was always dark. I remember feeling that I could not escape it. That it was hopeless. That the only solution was just to sleep and not to let anyone wake me. Sometimes I’m sorry I did. Wake up, that is. I don’t deserve to live after what I did.”

“Dina, I want you to listen to me.”

She sat up, startled. His voice was very firm, nothing like his usual gentlemanly, hesitant probing.

“A sin can never be altered. It is what it is. But the bad deeds never cancel out the good ones. They are completely separate. The most terrible deed in the world can never alter the existence of even the smallest good you’ve accomplished. Every kind thought, every helping hand, they all exist, too.”

“But you’re saying I can never undo the harm. That it will always exist!”

“I didn’t say that. In fact, every human being has the G-d-given ability to transform the past, to transform himself, to direct his own destiny at any moment he decides. G-d wants you to get well. That’s why you are alive. He wants you to be happy. He wants to forgive you.”

“But how can he? I can’t forgive myself.”

“No? Well, you studied the Torah, didn’t you? Here, open this and read it.” It was the first chapter in Leviticus.

There was silence in the room as she slowly turned the pages. “But what does it mean? All those sacrifices in the Temple. We have no Temple.”

“Dina, read it again.”

Again the pages turning, rustling softly.

“If a person sins … If the high priest sins … If the whole congregation sins …” she read softly.

“You see? No one alive is blameless. Sin is part of life. But G-d throws no one out. He’s made provision for our foolishness, our stubbornness. As it is written in
The Song of Songs Rabbah
: ‘My sons, open for me an aperture of repentance as narrow as a needle’s eye and I will open for you gates through which wagons and coaches can pass.’ Of course, if you’ve hurt other people, you must ask them directly for forgiveness. G-d cannot forgive in their place.” He paused. “You have a child, don’t you? Now I ask you, what could your little boy do that would be so terrible you would never forgive him?”

“There is nothing in the world he could do!” she cried out in anguish. “Nothing so bad I wouldn’t love him forever!”

“Of course. But if you were a good parent, you would want to see him become a better person. You would want to be sure he sincerely understood what he’d done wrong and that he regretted it. Deeply. So deeply that he’d changed into the kind of person who would never do such a thing again. It’s this transformation that cuts a person off from the past, so that they’re no longer the same person who did that wrong. In a very real sense, such a person is given a new heart by G-d which is blameless, released from the responsibility of all his former deeds. It is possible for anyone to make such a new beginning. Dina—look at me. No, not at the wall, look at my face. Who do you see?”

“I see a rabbi, a Hasid. A pious man.”

“Fine. Now look at this photograph. No, don’t avert your eyes. Study it. Fine, good. Who do you see?”

“I see a goy, a half-naked wild man, a man surrounded by immodest women. A man who cares for nothing …”

“You see two different men. And yet both are me! What would you say if I told you I had never entered a synagogue until I was thirty years old? That I had never said a prayer, or put on tefillin? That I had eaten every forbidden food—pork … You shudder? Shellfish, rabbits, crabs … Yes, yes. And I knew women. Married and unmarried ones … Nothing was sacred to me. Take your hands away from your face. Yes, yes, such Jews exist, such people exist. You never knew that, did you? So you magnify all your own sins.

“All these bad things I brought with me when I decided to change my life. I couldn’t change the things that I’d done, the food I’d eaten, the women I’d known. But I was no longer the same person capable of doing such things. And so, the person I am now is not held responsible by his Father in heaven for the past. The slate is washed clean, Dina. The scarlet thread becomes as white as snow. This is the work of our compassionate Father. Now, I repeat, is there anything your little boy could do which you would never forgive?”

Her weeping was loud, almost hysterical.

“We are G-d’s children,” he said gently. “He loves us the same way we love our own. He is always there, waiting for us to come home. Come now, take your hands away from your face. Here, blow your nose … What? Say it louder. You are not qualified to punish yourself. Of course you can be forgiven. Didn’t G-d forgive the executioner of the great Rabbi Hananya Ben Teradyon, who all at once regretted and repented his whole life in one, supreme moment by jumping into the flames and dying with his victim? And so, Dinaleh, what have you done that was worse than the executioner of Rabbi Hananya?”

There was a pause as her labored breathing filled the room. It was almost like being present at a birth, he thought. A hard labor. If she succeeded, she would give birth to herself, clean and new and ready for the rest of her life. But if she failed …

“I want to tell you.” Her voice was a broken sob.

Something stung the rabbi’s eyes. It was such a pitiful sound.

“I met a man who was not my husband. His name was Noach. At first, it was his words I wanted. My husband gave me everything else: love, tenderness, care. But he didn’t give me enough words. And I felt that what I wanted was simply to listen, to be comforted by ideas. And more than that … I wanted to do something on my own. It seemed that all my life I had been pushed and shoved. What I learned, what I wore, how I spent every minute of every day … Even the man I wanted to marry was denied me … I wasn’t sure when I married my husband that he was the right one for me. There was something about him I thought I could love if I could just find it, explore it. Also, I felt—given my choices—he was the least objectionable. But that isn’t a real choice, is it?” She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “I didn’t touch Noach, not at the beginning. He didn’t seem to want that so much. I told myself it was wrong, but if I didn’t touch him, it might not be so wrong.

“But then, I realized, that for Noach, the words were not the important thing. He wanted my body. He made me think I wanted his. I was confused. It got worse and worse. I didn’t know how to stop, or even if I wanted to. He asked me to meet him and stay with him overnight. And I wanted to. My feet flew down the steps.”

She stopped, weeping with heartbroken abandon. It was the kind of sound the rabbi had heard only in places like the waiting rooms of intensive care units or in the halls of pediatric oncology.

“Go on, Dina,” he said encouragingly. “Still the sin has not reached that of Rabbi Hananya’s executioner, remember?”

She took a deep breath. “I lied to my husband. I met this other man … We went to the beach. I had never been to a beach where the men bathed with the women, but only to the separate women’s beach in Tel Aviv, where the only man was the lifeguard. I saw the bodies of the men and women, so tan and free. No one seemed ashamed. I liked it. I liked it very much. Can you understand that? We sat together. We held hands. And then … we … went …”

There was a long, long silence. Then, firmly but not unkindly, he completed the sentence for her: “To the hotel room.”

“I couldn’t say the words, you see. Yes. To the room. It had a big double bed and dark red curtains. Even the light coming in seemed red. Like blood, like heat. Then he held me. I was still wearing the wet bathing suit underneath my skirt and blouse. I was even still wearing a wig. His hand felt damp, clammy, as it pressed against me. I didn’t like the way it felt. He pushed me down on the bed. He didn’t say a word to me. He seemed so different without his words. I didn’t even remember who he was, or what I was doing there …”

“Go on. Don’t stop. This is the first step, remember,” he urged her.

“He began to … take off my blouse. I saw his fingers on the buttons, and they were very different from my husband’s fingers … And, suddenly, I felt afraid, and so ashamed.”

She stopped.

“And then?”

“Rabbi, this is … the thing I … I pushed his hand away and he slapped me. And a wonderful thing happened. I woke up. I saw how small he was, how petty and unremarkable. He was pinning me to the bed, but I somehow found the strength to push him away. He called me a whore. His whole face was full of hatred—he, who had been so loving! I ran out. I spent the night on the beach. And then I went home.”

“And that was all?”

She nodded with strange relief. “You see? I do deserve to die. An adulteress deserves death.”

“But, Dina, you aren’t an adulteress!”

“We bathed together at the beach! I let him hold me and kiss me! I did it behind my husband’s back …”

“Dina, that was all wrong, all a sin. But not the sin of adultery. Your punishment is not death. And Judah doesn’t have to divorce you. This is the law.”

“He doesn’t? But he should. I don’t deserve him.”

“You have to tell him the truth, then let him decide. You have to ask his forgiveness for all the things you did to hurt him. But not for all the things you didn’t do.”

“He came here, to see me. This man. This Noach,” she said hopelessly.

“Here?” There was a sense of shock in the rabbi’s tone.

Dina clasped her hands together tightly. A sudden painful relief coursed through her. To tell it all, now, everything. “He asked me to be his mistress. And you see, the worst part, the worst thing … He hasn’t lost anything. He still has his wife, his children. How is it that I have been punished by losing everything … how is it that rabbis, scholars—Rabbi Kurzman and the others—forced me to write lies, to tell my husband I’d slept with Noach? … Forced me to leave my home? How could a rabbi make me lie like that? He seemed so righteous, so good, and yet …”

“You can’t tell anything about a person by his outer shell, his appearance. Not every Hasid is a Hasid. Not every hippie is a hippie.” His blue eyes lit up with mischief.

Dina let herself relax, wishing she could hug him as she had hugged her father and mother. Those who had given her life.

“Dina, there’s something else I want to tell you. A message for you to hold on to. You won’t understand it now. You might even laugh. But one day it will be there for you like a great torch of light when all you see is blackness. It’s … it’s only one word.”

She waited, almost breathless. “What is it?”

He hesitated. “Sift.”

Dina bit her lip in disappointment. She had expected some astonishing revelation, some wisdom, some truth beyond anything she had known. “Sift? Like with flour?” Her tone was dazed.

“If I explain it to you, it will come to you from the outside in, through your ears only. But if you come to understand it yourself, it will come from inside you. It’ll transform your life forever. Just think about it. Try to apply it to your life, everything you’ve seen, and learned; and experienced.”

“That’s all? I feel so empty, as if my whole life is finished.”

“Dina, you’re just at the beginning! You’ve taken the first step. You’ve faced your past. Now there is the next step. You must do it as soon as possible. I think you know what that is.”

“I can’t. I can’t face them.”

“You have to. You remember the cliff in your dream, the one you stood at the edge of? You must go back there, and this time instead of jumping, you must turn around and face them, your accusers and all those you love.”

She wept for a long time. It was pathetic and heart-sickening, almost unendurable to listen to. Rabbi Eliezer was about to get up and leave when Dina suddenly lifted her face up toward him. It was a mother’s face after birth, when the hope of the moment suddenly pushes the pain back into dim memory.

“I’ll go,” she told him.

When he emerged from the room, he wiped the sweat from his forehead. “She’s going to be all right,” he told Joan, who had been listening outside the door, wringing her hands.

Chapter forty-eight

D
ina was oddly subdued the week following her session with Rabbi Eliezer. Joan, braced for some dramatic announcement, felt strangely deflated when she said nothing. Yet she seemed more relaxed and peaceful than Joan had ever seen her, spending even more time at her loom.

She was working on a new tapestry. This one was all white, as before it had been mostly black. It had small splashes of color: splendid blues, turquoise green, a dash of red. Still, there was a restraint, a holding back, as if the full palette were somehow not yet available to her. She made up for it with an endless variety of shapes—fantastic, flowerlike objects, each one a separate vision.

The idea of each flower being different, and yet each achieving its, own kind of beauty, she had explained to Charles recently, was very significant. To bloom in your own way within the fencedoff garden. To be watered and allowed to grow toward the sun.

He had understood the metaphor perfectly. He too had felt something of that sense of strangulation in his yeshiva days. He had been a good student, but his interests had ranged far beyond his classmates. There had been no way to stay, to grow alongside them in the walled-off garden, a flower of a different shape and color. So he had left, carelessly, tearing out all roots, even the ones that had given him nourishment.

Joan watched her working, fascinated by the swift, sure movements of her delicate fingers.

“It’s beautiful, Dina.”

She looked at Joan and smiled.

“Dina, these are for you. Bertha brought them.”

Dina looked at the letters apprehensively. The first mail she had gotten from home! She reached out and touched the envelopes, tracing the handwriting as if trying to feel the warmth of familiar hands.

She wandered slowly back to her room. Kneeling girlishly in her bed, she examined the envelopes. One was in Chaya Leah’s messy, large hand, full of furious cross-outs and write-overs. The other was in her father’s neat, almost miniature script, rivaling that of Rashi’s. The third, beautiful and simple, was from Judah. And the fourth, in a thick cream-colored envelope, was addressed in a very masculine hand she did not recognize at all. Yet, instinctively, she knew exactly who it was from.