FINDING OUT MY MOTHER WAS BISEXUAL

 When I was little, maybe between the time I was eight and fifteen, my mother used to take me everywhere with her. I am not sure why that was, because I had other siblings and they didn't go with her. It might be because I was a very sickly child and she didn't want to leave me alone or with a babysitter. I'm not sure.

At any rate, every Tuesday, for all those years, my mother went to visit her friend on Tuesdays. Her friend was this beautiful, tall, elegant woman who had the most beautiful home in the most fancy neighbourhood in my city. I called her by her initials, C.T.

C.T. and my mother liked to talk and so I was sent outside to play, near the river. There were a lot of chinese geese in the yard, with shiny black bumps on the fronts of their heads. These geese were pretty friendly, but they left their droppings everywhere, so eventually, I didn't play in the yard for the hour or so that my mother talked with her friend. I read.

Now, this went on for a LONG time. I am talking about seven years, every single Tuesday without fail, for at least an hour each time. And most of those times, I never went in and saw C.T. herself. I just went straight to the garden and sat down and began reading a book. It's not like I wasn't a curious child. I totally was. But in this one space, in this one place, I was completely incurious.

Recently, I was talking with my brother, and he said something about my mother being bisexual. I was extremely surprised. Why would he say that, I asked. He laughed and laughed. "Remember C.T?"he asked. I did, of course, remember C.T. "What did you think that was?" he asked, and in my innocence, I said, "Mum's best friend?" Not quite, he said, and I realized something then, that even though I know many LGBT individuals, and have a connection with that community, until you are ready to see something about someone you know, it will stay hidden.

My sister is clueless!

Maybe that is what is so hard when people come out to their families. Maybe the family had been seeing it all along. Maybe they already had seen it all. But they were blind to it. They weren't ready to see, just as I hadn't been ready to see my mother as bisexual until over twenty years after the fact. And then, when the family member begins to tell their truth, begins to say that they are not, in fact, straight, there is that challenging moment of "Oh no! I knew it! But I didn't want to know it! And I'm not ready now..."

What do you think?

THE CHASSIDIC WRITER: A Lesbian Mother of Seven

I’d like to give this interview as a follow-up to my “Berkeh’s Story” that was posted here a short time ago.

I was born in Dallas, Texas in 1956, into an immigrant family—my grandparents had lost all their money in the Depression and then drove down to Texas with everything they owned in their car. They were Russian Jews with an orthodox background, although we were all Reform by the time I was growing up. We were a tight family. We met every week for a big traditional meal.

I was a dreamy girl, artistic and edgy and idealistic. In adolescence, I found it painful when the other girls began flirting with boys. I didn’t understand how to do that, and knew I was different. I had friends, but somehow still felt terribly lonely. In high school, I fell in love with a girl but it was socially dangerous to even name what I felt. I wrote long letters to her, I obsessed over her.  But it didn’t have a name. I didn’t know anyone else who felt like that, either.

When I met the first Lubavitch shluchim to come to Dallas, I was still full of desire that easily became a dissociated floating desire to bind my soul to a great mystical other. I believe that for me, religion was where I put physical longing.

I’m interested in the interrelationship of spiritual and sexual desire. They both go to the core of who you are.

I never told the girl I fell in love with how I felt. She was a straight girl and I wouldn’t dare. One weekend, we had plans to go camping, but it looked like rain. This was 1971, and I was sixteen and had just graduated high school. I’d come across this poster about a shabbaton (weekend learning event that takes place over the Sabbath). Because it was raining, we went to that shabbaton instead and I fell in love with religion! My life changed by a caprice of the weather. The hassidim promised me unqualified love. They promised me G-d! I was swept away.

A young Rabbi Moshe Feller was there. I call him the consummate salesman. He encouraged us to come to his new institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn’t have money but he said he would take care of me. I was going to college in the fall but I went off that summer to St. Paul, to Bais Chanah Institute for Women, and talked my girl friend into going with me.  

After a while, my friend left. She said she really hated it. I grieved losing her terribly, but it didn’t stop my headlong fall into frumkeit (Orthodox Jewish religion). I soon had the worst case of “baal tshuva syndrome” (returnee to Judaism)—spouting mystical lines, obsessively attending to every detail in halacha with no compromise and no common sense, the kind of baalas teshuva that embarrasses lifers. That was me at sixteen.

But the shluchim in Dallas were thrilled because I was their first. When I left the Institute, I went to their home every couple of days of what remained of my summer, just to help me cope with my parents, who were so upset about my new frumkeit. I moved out and on to college, since I had a scholarship and thus means of support. I had little contact with them after that, and would not for years. I was lonely and confused, too young to be on my own, and the more unhappy I was, the more I clung to yiddishkeit. I began to study chassidus to dispel all the rising doubts, and fear, about my new Chassidic life. I studied a lot.

I used to dream I was a yeshiva boy. I would lose myself in learning, live in those gorgeous books, apart from the huge world that was looming too soon on my young life. I became reasonably fluent in learning, for a baal tshuvah. Then, when a new Chabad House opened in Austin, I transferred to the university there.

But I was a girl. I was told clearly that I could attain all those religious goals, and God’s loving approval, not through study but through marriage and children. I wound up with a shidduch (arranged marriage) at eighteen, and got married a month after my nineteenth birthday. The shliach in Austin made the shidduch. By that time, I was a Chassidic soldier—I just wanted to please G-d and do “the right thing,” and I would do anything to that end. I never thought about loving my husband, or desire. Nobody asked.

I had seven children in a ten-year span, and I fell in love with every one. That’s what my life became. I also became, of course, a day school teacher, and I was good at it. But no matter what I did, I lived with terrible loneliness, in the middle of so many people always around me! My marriage was empty. I watched the burden of supporting a big household and the inexplicable lack of anything vital between us wear him down over the years. We got so we rarely spoke, slept apart, and he lost interest in sex (can I blame him?)  He worked and worried about money, and turned always back to his learning. Today, I think it is a crime against non-homosexuals for gay people to marry them and steal their youth, waste their love. It’s not just about us. 

not the actual family

I was always sick with low-grade stuff, allergies, mild persistent asthma, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. I had gay dreams I didn't dare tell anyone about, developed insomnia, then panic attacks in my sleep. This went on for years. I never talked about these things.

My last child was a preemie, and I quit teaching. As he got older, and I got older, and had more quiet time, I simply became more conscious. But at the time, it felt like something had happened to my hormones and I started feeling like an adolescent, as if I’d frozen in place at age sixteen for years, and then, when I unfroze, felt…everything. Natural physical longing settled over me. I would lie alone in my separate bed and pray that I would get to hold a woman in my arms and feel her healing love and touch, just once in my life.

Then I became intensely, briefly attracted to one woman in the community and this alarmed and scared me. So I went to a therapist to try to put it in its place.

All of this was taking place in Texas, in a small Chabad community. I thought I was the only frum gay woman in the world.

The last thing you do in the frum community is share your secrets. I had friends, and found the frum community loving and supportive of its own, if you met their criteria, but even friends did not confide in one another. Secrets, once released, can hurt your children, hurting you in your most vulnerable place. So, I began to write, a way to finally talk, then I hid my writing under my bed. But as soon as I started doing that, I realized I wasn’t the only one hiding stories.

When you live in the frum world, you have a group identity and a group voice. Like everyone, I had accumulated my secrets over the years. But I wrote many stories through those sleepless nights, all of our secret stories. I hid them all.

Our Houston community had no high school because the shliach there felt it was important to send teenagers away from the pervasive secular influence. I found sending my kids away one at a time devastating. The yeshiva in many ways replaced us as parents. But at yeshiva, my sons sat long hours, were forbidden to speak of girls or talk to girls, and were constantly exhorted with very final answers to cosmic questions before they could even formulate their natural young questioning. I remembered being young and dreamy with that adolescent grandiosity that makes a kid feel they can choose any path, accomplish the world, and my kids didn’t seem to be allowed that. I could see what I hadn’t seen in myself, that they were being stamped onto one path and pushed quickly past their adolescence, and I began to feel terrible about the whole yeshiva thing.

Old dreams of making love to a woman returned. In the daytime, I would say to myself, why am I dreaming I’m a man, because I refused to imagine in the daytime that I was a woman making love to a woman in that dream. Panic attacks in my sleep returned, and sleepwalking, and insomnia. I wrote and wrote through those nights.

When I wrote “Berkeh’s Story,” I didn’t imagine myself to be Berkeh. I wrote the story purely as an act of empathy. Only now, years later and with a more educated eye, I can see why so many who read the story once it was published presumed the author was gay. But at the time, I wouldn’t allow myself to think the word lesbian or gay, and I thought I could hide behind the label of “fiction.” I wrote it, and hid it under the bed with the others.

I had a friend in Crown Heights, a kind, deep person, who did “spiritual counseling.” Because she was so naturally un-judgmental, one and then a stream of secretly gay women started showing up, like an underground railroad of chassidishe women from Crown Heights, Boro Park, Williamsburg. She told each one that there is nothing wrong with them, that despite whatever they thought and felt, they were good people, and they should go back to their husbands. I think this is what most of them wanted to hear and they were simply grateful for her unqualified acceptance of them as whole and good people. She was the first person to whom I admitted these feelings.

I shared “Berkeh’s Story” with this friend and she told me to submit it to a Moment Magazine short story contest. There were nearly a thousand entrants, and Berkeh won the competition! Moment Magazine had the second largest circulation of any Jewish periodical, and for five minutes, my story was everywhere—very exciting and very scary. One story had come out from under the bed.

My husband was a graduate of an Ivy League school. He worked in IT. He had suppressed a great deal of his interests to become frum and he was quietly proud of me for writing, though he wouldn’t read what I wrote because it would take time away from learning Torah. He decided he wasn’t worried about Moment Magazine because he didn’t think there were any frum Jews who read it.

Then one day, the Rav called me. I was scared to death. I had been taught, “If a Rav says black is white, it is white.” You make yourself a rav and you only ask a sha’aleh (question about Jewish law) when you are ready to accept, b’kabolos ol (with innocent and complete acceptance), one hundred percent of what he says.  Now he was calling me. He said, “Is that Leah Lax? I thought you were a fruma veiber mit a sheitl,” (a religious woman who covers her head with a wig). Suddenly I felt dishonest saying yes. Instead I said, “That’s what they say about me.” He asked how I dared to put such a story in a magazine. People had come to him about it. He said, “You‘ve hung out our dirty laundry.”

I was shaking hard. That was the first and only time I ever talked back to a Rav. It was the first time I argued. I argued for Berkeh. Berkeh is a good boy. He is many of our boys. All I did was show his real feelings. The Rav hung up on me.

I am NOT dirty laundry.

                                                   Thanks to Frum Satire, whose picture this is

I had been taught that halacha is a whole package, a contract with God. I didn’t know how to take just some of it. With that conversation, I felt the contract break within me. And it was pivotal.

After that, inside me, it was all over. In time, I let myself fall in love with a woman. I divorced my husband. I left the community. I stopped keeping halacha gradually because it was embedded in me, but I could never find a compromise. How could I continue to honor a contract that implied that the love that I have to give is dirty laundry?

I had never met an out lesbian. It would be years more before I met anyone else both gay and frum—I still felt like the only one in the world. But I had heard of this one Jewish lesbian that intrigued me. She wasn’t frum, but I wanted a friend, someone who might understand. I went to meet her, determined to try to forge an honest connection with someone at last, thinking no one in my community will know.

Falling in love with a woman the first time was amazing. The most glorious thing! It all happened hard and fast and I couldn’t sleep or eat from the rush of hormones that left me half nauseous and dreamy. I was forty-six years old going on sixteen, amazed that love could be the most natural thing in the world, and that without knowing, I knew just what to do.

But once we got involved, I was followed and people even took pictures of me pulling into her driveway.

I thought, H-shem gave me this gift that feels like a spectacular celebration of the life He gave me. Halacha judges me, people judge me, but H-shem gives me this amazing part of myself that halacha and rabbis want me to shut down. I’d say that, in a way, that first love experience was a big part of my separating halacha and rabbanim from G-d in my mind, and deepened my faith in G-d.

Still, I wish I’d had the courage to tell my husband and children “I’m a lesbian,” complete the divorce, and move out, all before getting into a relationship. The style of our parenting had always been to protect our children by keeping them innocent, so I never told them I was gay or, G-d forbid, that I had fallen in love with a woman, even though some of them were grown.  Years later, they would look back on my “protection” and the little lies I used to build it, as simple dishonesty. As betrayal. From your own mom. Whom you always loved and trusted.

Lashon hara (slander) was flying. People confronted my children and husband and never me. My younger kids began acting out. I stayed on too long, trying to at least make the bar mitzvah of my youngest son for him. That event, when it finally came, was a false show of togetherness that makes my son wince today to remember.

A while after I moved out, my husband insisted I come and speak openly to the children. I did a terrible job of coming out to them. I planned what to say for days, but I never got a word out. The kids didn’t let me speak, and all spoke at once. They were very hurt, not nearly as much about my being gay as my having an affair and hurting their father.

Being gay? Well, that part didn’t surprise them at all. Sigh. Nobody knows you like your kids. Some didn’t speak to me for months afterwards.

My two youngest wanted to stay with their father. They were thirteen and fourteen. That was hard. We lived in the South where there is less tolerance for issues of sexual orientation, and my lawyer said, “Don’t even try to get custody.” So I moved less than a mile away, and I saw my kids very often. Their father supported that.

After I left, the community treated my two youngest like orphans, with great pity, and they hated that. That pity drove them away from yiddishkeit (Jewish life). They said, “They act like you are dead!” They told me, “How can people reject you and at the same time say they love me, when you are a big part of me?” Kids really hate hypocrisy.

I lost my community, my friends, my family, in part my kids. I started over with nothing, alone. Gradually I found my way, and through it all, never stopped writing. I went to a university and developed my craft. Writing forced me to stay honest with myself. I got a job, new friends, new community. When I met my partner, what drew us together was how very much we shared in the present, not the past.

My life with her is peaceful, affectionate, funny, endlessly interesting. Having this good whole life has helped me enormously in my relationship with my kids, like a great pool from which I dip and share patience, strength, and good humor with them. I didn’t let my kids reject me. I just showed up and said, “I’m still here. I’m your mom.”

There’s some damage, on both sides. The healing continues. A few just don’t include me in their lives as much as before. I struggle terribly with their reticence about my partner, and so does she. She came into my life ready to play grandparent, with no children of her own. But all the grandkids are in frum homes, and she has had to gradually face the reality that they won’t open that door.

Years have passed. When I go to my kids’ houses, they have stopped being embarrassed, even the ones in Crown Heights. I arrive in my pants and uncovered hair and my son walks with his arm in mine down a busy street. We are close.

Not long after I left, I went to my ex-husband and said, “I never wanted to hurt you.” But he said he had forgiven me a long time ago. He said, too much was in H-shem’s hands, not ours. “We didn’t get to choose that you are a lesbian.” We’ve been on good terms ever since. Not everyday friends, but amiable co-parents. The others in that community shunned me, walked on the other side of the road, wouldn’t talk with me. He was the only one who stayed the same. Really, he got better. Warmer.

All those years of my marriage, I took women to the mikvah (pool for ritual immersion), since we didn’t have a mikvah lady. I thought it was a very spiritual and beautiful thing to do. I wasn’t conscious of any attraction to any of those women. But when I read the earlier interview with the mikvah lady posted on this blog, I cried. After the divorce, I heard that my community was freaked out that a lesbian had taken their women to the mikvah for years. At the time, I thought they were horribly wrong and unfair, but eventually I saw why they were upset. I can understand.

The last time I went to the mikvah, I felt my whole Jewish life was there, the kallah about to marry, all the times I immersed just before and after the births of my children, all the other months through twenty-seven years of marriage.

I co-created an exhibit called The Mikvah Project and it has been traveling around for fourteen years. I made it with a photographer and interviewed women talking about mikvah. The women knew they would remain anonymous. The photographer didn’t show their faces. So they opened up. It felt good to listen and to allow them to show their true feelings. It was the first time I’d heard frum women talk honestly about their inner lives.

But one woman I interviewed made me look at myself like never before. It probably snapped my last connection. She said she fell in love with other girls throughout her young years, then had her shidduch and married. She kept on saying she was happy, but emptiness was written all over her. Her shoulders slumped. Her clothes hung on her. Her face was lined and sad. But I’m happy!

I knew she was gay when she said, “I just had to make a kind of surgery on myself.” I flushed red and had to stop her and walk away to catch my breath. Finally I saw myself through all those years. She had cut out her sexuality so she could be the good wife and mother—a violence to her soul.

These days, I don’t need anything from the frum community. I don’t need acceptance. I am free. I can say what I think and not worry that I’m not complying.

But if I could, I would ask things for my frum children. I would ask for them to have the freedom, within the community, to have real friendships where you can admit doubts and sins and other normal human things you don’t talk about in the frum world. I would ask for women to be paid according to their skills and important qualities, and equally to the men, since my older daughter was a marvelous talented teacher but had to leave it because she was hungry and had no medical insurance, while the full-time male employees had a salary and benefits. I would ask for the frum community to erase that overarching pressure on all of them to conform, because that crushes everybody indiscriminately when, really, we’re all different.

Today, I will only live in a community that is as diverse as possible, one in which the only criteria for belonging is to be an individual. In that kind of community, I can be wholly present. I can offer all of myself.

My partner, Susan, and I travel a lot. And I keep on writing. Writing is my lens for discovering, late in life, this awesome, varied amazing world from which I was hidden for so very long.

THE GOOD RAV: A Chassidic Talmud Chacham and Rabbi speaks:

                                                   Generic photo of a rabbi. NOT the speaker

This is a transcription from a speech given by a chassidic rabbi, a paskening rov, who does not identify as gay but who has been very supportive of LGBT people. This was not a private answer, but something that was said in front of an extremely large audience. Any mistakes are mine and not the rabbi's. 

I’d like to start with my personal journey regarding Judaism and homosexuality. It goes back over twelve years. It was late Thursday night. I came back after a long meeting and my wife said to me “Why are you crying?” I told her I’m sad for a young Jewish man, an Orthodox young man in his mid-thirties, who’d been to yeshiva for a number of years. He had come around after making an appointment and cancelling it, and then making another appointment and cancelling that one too, and then again, until he actually took courage to come around. 

He presented me with three questions:

1) I have never been attracted to women. I have always been attracted to men. I know there is a commandment in the Torah to be fruitful and multiply. Pru urvu. I have to have children. Is it indeed incumbent on me to get married and have children?

2) To the extent that I am a homosexual in orientation, meaning that I am only attracted to men and not to women, how would you behave towards me if I came to your shul? Would you allow me to daven before the amud? Would you allow me to get an aliyah? Would you allow me to be part of the community? What would happen if you knew I wasn’t just a homosexual in orientation but I was actually active, and engaged in a relationship with another man? Would that make a difference to you?

3) If it’s true that the Torah in the Book of Leviticus makes it clear, unequivocal, that it’s forbidden to engage in male homosexual liaison, I have to ask the question; G-d made me this way or He allowed me to develop like this, nature, nurture, but at the end of the day, I never chose it. From a very young age, this is what I recall. This is who I am. But G-d says, “Don’t engage in male-to-male intercourse”, so that means that I am obliged and presumed to remain celibate for my whole life. I won’t ask you why would G-d should do such a thing, to allow a [gay] person to develop through nature, nurture, providence, biology - and at the same time, constrain him in such a way as to give him a commandment that means that he has to remain lonely, to live a loveless life, craving for closeness, intimacy, physical intimacy included in sexuality, nevertheless deprived, frustrated, living a life of misery.

[The young man] posed those three questions that night and I hope to answer those three questions here now…

With regard to marriage, I said to him what I thought then was the obvious answer. I still think it is and I am surprised that there are others who disagree. If anyone, man or woman, draws another person into a marital relationship knowing that the other person is heterosexual, if a gay person draws another person into a relationship knowing that the other person craves a normal marriage and they are gay and they don’t inform their spouse of their orientation, this is an ethical crime of the highest order. 

Even if they do achieve what might be called informed consent, such a marriage is, “generally speaking” (there are always exceptions to every rule) an unconceived marriage for a number of obvious reasons. Even though, halachically, a man is obliged to get married and have children, there are circumstances when a person is not emotionally or physically equipped to have children. If a person is not attracted to women, then this would mean he would be exempt from fulfilling the positive commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.”  Halachically, I explained that there is a category *, there is only a certain extent that a person must push themselves or expend his resources in order to fulfill any given commandment, including this primary commandment of getting married. If a person’s psychological infrastructure was such that it didn’t attract him to women, he is not obliged to steel himself and live in a marital relationship in order to have children.

Subsequently, even recently, I have realized how important it is that this message gets across. Firstly, because I myself have seen many cases where people have been encouraged by spiritual leaders, psychological counselors, lay leaders, to get married and very often these [gay] people have gotten married with the best intentions and subsequently, they’ve suffered the consequences. They, their spouses, their children. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, things become extremely messy, extremely painful for them.

The other reason is, because only recently in a kiruv journal that’s published in Flatbush, it was suggested that people who go through therapy, even though they are going to have relapses, even though it’s almost inevitable that there will be relapses into homosexual conduct, should get married. I find this to be mind-boggling! I feel it is important that people should be aware that getting married is not just a privilege, it’s a responsibility and a duty, and if a [gay] person doesn’t have the ability to remain committed and is unlikely to be able to suppress his inclination in all ways and at all times, then it’s better that he doesn’t get married. On the contrary, to give up the dream of marriage and having children and bringing grandchildren to ones own parents is an extremely difficult thing, and those people who do that, knowing that they are not able to honour the marital vows, are in actuality doing an act of altruism, in depriving themselves of blessings that they themselves may crave, the blessings of family life and children.

With regard to the second question, I said to him, paraphrasing what my friend Rabbi M said, the Torah prohibition is not about orientation, it’s about actions. Clearly, whatever a person is, no matter what his orientation is, he should be welcome in shul. He should be a full-fledged member of the synagogue, and there should not be ostracizing and then, he’d never be disenfranchised. We should accept any member, man or woman, regardless of their orientation. 

There are, however, two types of communities. There are those communities that only allow people who observe the entire Torah to be part of their community. If you do even one sin, then you are out. Clearly, such a community would not allow an active homosexual Jew to be a part of their community. But the vast majority of Jewish communities today do allow all sorts of people, many of whom don’t keep a whole host of laws, to be part of the shul membership. And it must be added, people who are dishonest in business are allowed to be members of those shuls. Dishonesty in business is an infringement of a law against ones fellow man, an interpersonal crime, whereas homosexual relations are actually only a crime between man and G-d. There is no human victim here. It’s not in an exploitative context. 

Rambam, Maimonides, writes in a number of places, in his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, that forbidden sexual relationships come under the category of Bein Adam Lemakom, between man and  G-d. Therefore, in a community that makes room for people who don’t fully observe the shabbos or the rules of niddah, Taharas Hamishpacha, family purity and so on, there is no reason they should not  allow even practicing homosexuals to be part of their community, provided they [the homosexuals] are respectful to the ethos of the synagogue. But that’s true with regard to ALL people. We allow heterosexuals to be part of our community, sometimes we have shabbatonim for young boys and girls on Friday night, we don’t check up on them when they go home, and provided they are respectful to the shul,  they behave in accordance with the ethos of the shul, then of course they can be fully participant in the shul.

I believe that most people are not compelled to do things all of the time. There may be exceptions to the rule. In terms of assessing the severity or the lack of severity of a particular crime, you have to take into consideration the context. Today, even if people know something is forbidden, and they know that’s what the Torah says and that’s what the rabbi preaches from the pulpit. Even if they know that’s what they are supposed to do, they were raised in a society that disregarded these prohibitions. Generally speaking, they are classified in halachic literature as a tinok shenisba, a child taken into captivity. 

As condescending as the term may sound, Maimonides, in his Laws of Rebels, Hilchot Mamrim, chapter 3, section 3, used this term to describe second generation Karaites, who although they knew all their Jewish obligations and were quite familiar with the rabbinical tradition, and knew what they were supposed to do, nevertheless, since they were brought up in a society that disregards these rules and did not consider them to be binding , they weren’t held responsible to the same degree type as someone who had received an education right from a young age in keeping the laws of the oral rabbinic tradition. The same thing applies here. In western society where many people are brought up under the influence of the  Zeitgeist, according to which the sexual morality of the day doesn’t necessarily honour the Torah’s view, such people, where the cap fits, can also be deserving of the title tinok shenisba.

If I say nothing else but this, dayeinu. When G-d judges people, he does not judge them according to the objective category of the crime. He judges them according to their subjective circumstances.  Now, any heterosexual, myself included, who thinks about their own challenges, knows that he often slips and falls, even when he could have done better. Think about the plight of homosexuals, such as the young man I was speaking to on that night, who was constrained in a homosexual orientation such that he was not able to have any other outlet. How many of us would actually be ready to commit ourselves to a life of celibacy and avoid all transgressions at all times? I think if we look at ourselves honestly in the mirror and if we put our hands on our hearts, we will acknowledge that this would be a very difficult achievement. 

Therefore, understanding the circumstances and the context in which a homosexual finds himself is most important. If G-d judges people according to their circumstances, we too, should do so as well. While that does not mean in any way shape or form that we want to rewrite the halacha, the law, the Torah states explicitly that which it states, nevertheless, it does make a huge difference in the way we approach an individual who is confronted with a special set of challenges, circumstances which are most difficult.

I finally come to the last question I was confronted with that night:

Lamah asah H-shem kacha? Why did G-d make me this way? This question has been so powerful that some rabbis have felt compelled to assume that there must be some magical cure, or way of transforming homosexuals, making them into heterosexuals. Recently, some rabbis issued a Torah Declaration that said that reorientation must be possible for all people because G-d, who is merciful, would not create people to have them locked in an unfulfilling life, lonely and loveless, and that the only way they could get out of this [isolation] would be through a prohibition.

This argument, in my opinion, is theologically flawed, because we find that G-d actually has put lots of people in these circumstances.  We can find many people who, whether by providence or from biology, are in circumstances where the only way to escape misery would be through violating halacha. There are people who, because of physiological, biological, emotional or even halachic conditions, can’t get married, and such people have to live a celibate life. And the only way they are able to find intimacy and physical love would be if they were to violate the halacha.

There have been, in the past, many people who were constrained and unable to have children because of premature ovulation, and the laws of niddah affected their ability to have the blessing of children. That’s an example of people committed to keep the halacha who have even suffering childlessness their whole lives, in order not to transgress the halacha. There are people in around the world who have to give up a lot, to live in destitution, even die of poverty, in order not to break shabbos. The idea that despite the nisyonos that G-d gives people, we can somehow straightjacket G-d and insist, and say G-d would never do that, is not correct and not reflective of reality. Therefore I don’t think that is a statement that can be supported. I don’t accept that as the answer to the theological question [of why did G-d make me like thus].

How then do I deal with the theological question? The answer is very simple. I don’t. I don’t have an answer. The question is an important question but it doesn’t have anything to do with homosexuality or heterosexuality or anything to do with sexuality. It has to do with all of these and many more. It has to do with the general question in theology of why do great people suffer from infertility? Why can’t great people find love and spouses? Why do great people suffer from many tragedies, and great, small, or medium-sized difficulties in their lives? We have no ability to answer that.  Therefore, it’s important to place this question in the right context. It’s not unique to the sexual portion of Leviticus. It is something about the human condition and the way G-d created us.

In my own meetings with homosexuals, I have four goals that I do believe can be achieved, I strive to achieve them and to a large extent, I have achieved them:

1.     Someone who is homosexual should not lose his life from depression, from feelings of impotence, through drugs, through ephemeral relationships and promiscuity.

2.     Someone who is homosexual should not lose their family, through them alienating their parents and siblings, or through their parents or siblings alienating them.

3.      Homosexuals should not lose their rabbis, their communities, their place in their shul, either through their shul alienating them or them alienating their shul, or through identifying themselves completely by their orientation and going off somewhere else.

4.     Homosexuals should not lose their G-d, They shouldn’t feel that just because they have such a tremendous challenge and just because they haven’t always been able to meet the requirements of this challenge according to the Torah, therefore, it’s all or nothing. Strangely, no heterosexuals seem to feel that their failings make them that way [excluded from the frum community]. For some reason, this is a mistake that’s happened; that people feel it’s either all or nothing. We have to somehow make sure that people should recognize that G-d loves all Jewish people, and the Jewish community should make room in their home for every Jew. 

      As I said before, we should do everything in our power so that homosexual Jews should not lose their lives, not lose their families, not lose their communities and not lose their G-d.

 

FALLING IN LOVE IN YESHIVAH

I was a hassidic mother, and it was that crazed hour when the kitchen becomes the hub, sparring grazing kids and neighbor kids all swirling around my efforts to make dinner. Truth is, as a carefully-suppressed lesbian, I welcomed the way that cacophony out-shouted the loneliness. Then the phone rang. That was my mothering line for three boys in yeshivas and the connection felt tenuous, so I always dove for it. It was my third, then sixteen. After talk about learning and friends, he threw in the latest gossip: a boy in the Chabad yeshiva in Manchester England had jumped off the roof of his dorm. The official word was neutral, but my son said the boy did it because he was gay. "Everyone knows," he said, as if the story was electricity shot through yeshiva world. The boy killed himself because he was gay.

The news bent me double.
"Berkeh's Story" was a place to put my empathy.

Berkeh’s Story

 (originally published in Moment Magazine and reprinted here with permission)

by Leah Lax

The young men huddle together shivering on the front stoop of their yeshiva, towels under their arms, waiting for the school bus that picks them up outside their dormitory, two blocks from the Rebbe’s synagogue on Seligson Avenue, every morning at six-fifteen. Their shirttails hang out over black, straight pants, ritual fringes dangling at their sides like a tailor’s forgotten threads. Several wear fedoras that hang off the backs of their heads. Faces are expressionless, shoulders and arms curved forward against the damp morning breeze. Two stand with backs turned to the wind and hands cupped over a cigarette, squinting smoke-stung eyes.

Berkeh is among them. He wishes he could do this alone. He dreams of a private pool where he could immerse without eyes around him. Like a fish in the ocean of Torah.

When the school bus arrives, the boys climb in with slumping postures and tired steps. Some set their feet apart and stand in the aisles to begin their morning prayer routine, trying to co-ordinate their swaying to the motion of the bus, unconsciously stroking their new soft beards as they pray. They clutch open pocket-sized prayerbooks that are so careworn they won’t quite close, pages fingered daily for months, years, the corners darkened and shining. Some sit, brows knit and lips moving silently. Others stretch growing legs into the aisle, heads back on the seat and eyes closed, trying to snatch a few more minutes of sleep. Shoulders touch. Limbs sprawl over one another. The bus bumps and snorts and sighs.

At the mikvah, the boys come alive. All but Berkeh enter the pool area and strip off clothes, chatting, then descend the steps to the small tiled pool where they jump into the warm water for this routine morning requirement, this ritual purification for prayer. The younger one’s splash one another, all elbows and jokes. They duck their own heads and each other’s under the water, laughing and spluttering, then run for the few showers.

“Kazen gets number one!”

“Lenowitz second!”

The boys are equal here, all locker-room naked, long ago past the bathing suit phase when they once hid their budding selves, when each was sure his was a singular, private thing. All but Berkeh.

There have been times, when he was younger, when Berkeh managed to immerse himself before the others came in, which he did with an urgency that left him stiff-jointed. He would step down into the pool, glance around and duck one swift time beneath the water, hoping to seize for that brief moment a feeling of free-floating submersion, to be a drop nulled in the greater pool. But if someone stepped in to join him he looked away from them and left with his head down, as if he could be anonymous by avoiding their eyes.

Now, at twenty, Berkeh’s days begin like this one. He showers as soon as they enter the building while the others are still in the pool, then waits on the bench in the inner area, dry and clothed, disappointed in himself for not joining them. He is afraid he will stare at their bodies and terrified of what they would say if he did, and yet he is unable to call attention to himself by refusing to come along. Berkeh wishes he could dull himself enough to participate. He trains his eyes on the white tiles hoping they will leave a blank white picture in his mind’s eye.

The others come out of the water, luminescent drops clinging to the wet flattened rows of hair on young limbs and shimmering in thin new beards. It seems to Berkeh as if the clothing the boys pull over themselves is a transparent, ephemeral shell obscuring nothing, but simply placing their bright flesh in an inaccessible place. He wants to crumble the shell in his fingers. Then he shakes himself to shake the wish away. He has to look at them until he no longer imagines he can see lean muscles and sinewed firmness beneath the clothing, until he stops rubbing his fingers on his palm in an unconscious caress. If he works at it, he thinks, hopes, his vision will grow clouded and his eyes might stop drawing down in a reflexive sweep below their chins.

Shivering again in the January chill beneath a gray low sky that muffles sound, the students climb aboard the ancient bus, which beeps its way into traffic and back to the study hall. Berkeh leans the back of his neck on the rusted chrome railing and is soon asleep. Shlomo is waiting when they arrive.

It is Shlomo shaking him, pulling his arm. “Come on Berkeh.  Let’s go.” The hot coffee smell of Shlomo’s breath is on his face. Berkeh’s lazy smile is a flash of pleasure aimed at Shlomo’s sandy wiry hair and quick toothy smile. “Already?”

To Berkeh it is a wonder Shlomo doesn’t go to the mikvah in the mornings.  Shlomo insists he doesn’t feel the need to go through empty motions and doesn’t fear questions. For him it is a simple matter, but how, thinks Berkeh, could it be simple?  I am here, in this yeshiva, and this is what we are supposed to do. The one time Shlomo has questioned Berkeh, it seemed as if the two spoke different languages. “Why must you go to the mikvah,” Shlomo insisted. “Can you put on a different skin?” I want to, Berkeh wanted to say. Yes. Like a chameleon. “I want a match like the others, and a wedding,” he told Shlomo. “I want this community to celebrate me when I take my place among them.” Shlomo nodded, sighed.

The two enter the yeshiva building, Berkeh’s cocoon. In the lobby, Berkeh looks up at the vaulted ceiling and then behind at the closed door. Outside, the brightness of things, the world and its contentions, dim when doors close behind them. Their world is an interior, of rabbis and the cacophony of male voices in the study hall.

The two boys meet again after the first class. They linger in a side hallway before morning prayers. For those few minutes Berkeh forgets where he is expected to be, their amity peppered with nudges, finger pokes to the chest, hands on arms, and closed-lip smiles with foreheads tipped forward almost touching.

Late last night in bed, Berkeh had to wonder if there were two Berkehs, two separate beings that flip and tug one another. When he joins the boys in class and locks his mind with theirs in Talmudic intricacies and mystical worlds, that is his reality. But when he’s with Shlomo…   

Berkeh’s eyes stay on his friend as they enter the synagogue and separate to go to their customary places. How could Shlomo be so sure, so calm?  He is like a river with a steady current as Berkeh struggles to swim against it.

At the front of the room is Rabbi Raichik, a local rabbi-turned-businessman who joins them most mornings and leads the prayers. Berkeh positions the black leather boxes of his tefilin on his head and forearm as a mass of voices surround him, wrapping them all up together like a human prayer shawl. His own lone voice rises up among them and then still farther, searching release. He closes his eyes, sways, and both hears and does not hear the words, until the last. “It is incumbent upon us to praise the Master of All, to ascribe greatness to the Creator of “In the Beginning…”

Several of the boys approach as Berkeh is putting his tfilin away in its velvet bag.  They slap his shoulders, touch his arms. 

“Hey, Berk. You ready for Goldenberg’s faher? That test’ll be tough!”

“Berkeh never gets ruffled. He’s probably got it cold!”

Shlomo approaches and Berkeh is suddenly conscious of his chest rising and falling. He holds up one hand in an affable manner to fend off the boys. Rabbi Raichik is watching from across the room. Shlomo puts his hand on Berkeh’s shoulder and speaks quiet words warm in his ear. “Let’s get a head start on that test—I haven’t done a thing.”

“Elbow grease does it, guys,” Berkeh says to the others. “Turning pages.”

Berkeh and Shlomo face one another across a narrow wooden table in the crowded study hall, the table strewn with books of many sizes in Hebrew or Yiddish. There are several dog-eared dictionaries. Some of the other students have already settled in, some still arriving. A hum and tangle of voices begins to rise as partners square off to spar over Talmudic texts. Their days are spent like this, in pairs parsing out the tangle of Law—revealing God’s Will. Berkeh relaxes. He’s ready to learn.

Whenever he digs into the oblique commentaries, he aims for each line of text to turn itself inside out and divulge the secret that nothing is as it seems. Physical light is really darkness. Simple things are complex and the complex can be distilled down to a simple vivid point of God’s essence that shimmers its way down through multiple worlds. 

Berkeh and Shlomo have been study partners since they first met at summer camp as boys. Other pairs of study partners have always surrounded them as they do now, all facing another across a table. This is just what Berkeh wants for him and Shlomo; a bond of Torah, two heads joined, separated from bodies. But Berkeh looks across the table and sees a young man with a body. He is still troubled about their conversation the day before, when Shlomo related his conversation with his father. Berkeh was horrified.

            When Shlomo was last home to visit, he went to the local beis medrash to study in the evenings. He came home one night to find his father waiting up for him. They sat together in the kitchen, his mother already sleeping. His father’s manner was gentle, but his too-steady gaze made Shlomo feel transparent, and small. It seemed, Shlomo told Berkeh later, as if a mass of elements had come together and it was time to talk. So he told his father. Everything. How he felt. What he felt. The slow, solid conclusion about who he is. And about Berkeh, although he wouldn’t say his name. 

Shlomo’s father was shouting. “You can’t do this!” he said.

 “Do this?”

“You think you can’t help it, but you can’t love a… a man.”

“Ta…”

“To’eivah! I thought you were my son!”

“You want to flip a switch in me?”

“Yes!” his father said. 

“I can’t be anyone else,” Shlomo shot back. There was desperation and a sliver of leftover hope in his voice. Shlomo was on a roller coaster, as if he could see his father’s toy-sized figure below watching him leave when he had wanted his father in the seat next to him. He wanted to span the impossible distance, reach down and bring his father back.

His father raked his steel grey hair with an agitated hand. Somehow the community and Shlomo’s life in the yeshiva were all rolled into that view.

“Your mother has found a girl for you, son, you’ve got to try…” His father said.

“Is that why you were waiting up for me?” Shlomo said, and looked away, knowing the burden he was putting on his father to tell his mother. It was the way that, with her, he was at best awkward and newly arrived at manhood.

“Stay in yeshiva.  Stay…stay,” his father begged, when eyes were half shut for both of them, against what both wanted not to see, but also from fatigue.  But Shlomo stood on now-heavy limbs to go up the carpeted stairs to his childhood room, kept intact for him like a shrine. He would not sleep, enshrouded like that in his parent’s hopes. “I’ll stay,” he said, and, “Don’t worry,” irony in his tone. Until I leave.

To Berkeh, it was as if Shlomo was speaking his foreign language again. Leave the yeshiva? And go where? They didn’t know the ways of the world. And to even imagine that Berkeh’s father might listen to him talking about forbidden desires, or be able to face him, requires thinking in Shlomo’s strange language. No, Berkeh’s father’s language is one of Law and Torah and community, in their world of husbands with wives and children. Their world is created by words—if God withdraws His Word for a single moment, the world will cease to exist. But there is no word for Berkeh, for what he is, as if he is invisible, not made by God. There is only a name for an act that Berkeh desires and doesn’t want to desire. Shlomo’s father had said it: To’eivah. Abomination. 

In the study hall, Shlomo slouches down in his seat. Under the table, his right knee brushes Berkeh’s thigh. Berkeh jumps at the touch and pulls away, then almost as instinctively leans his thigh into Shlomo’s leg and relaxes it there, and Shlomo’s leg presses back. Berkeh frowns in concentration and digs more into the text, but his pulse quickens, and he hears his own breathing, guarded and fast. He looks down at his book to find Shlomo’s blue green eyes dancing between the lines. He tries to discuss what they are learning, forces his voice forward in a halting stubborn singsong: “Two grasp onto a single prayer shawl. One says, “It is mine,” and the other says, “It is mine.”

As they proceed, Shlomo’s hand strokes the side of his other knee in time with their singsong and Berkeh picks up that rhythmic motion. He closes his eyes only to envision Shlomo’s leg and the hand stroking it. His nostrils flare. Beads of sweat arise on Berkeh’s brow and upper lip. He tries to keep his mind from forming any image other than the blurred letters.

He feels Shlomo’s hand moving up his thigh and the tightening in his groin—an involuntary reach toward that hand—and Berkeh can’t think. The study hall fades away, but the clamor of voices still goads him, chides him. He becomes weak, his head light, tongue frozen. Nothing is real but Shlomo’s hand. Berkeh is in a vortex eddying and swirling downward to that one point, his existence one thing only: Want. He wants. 

A book slams shut. Berkeh sits up shaken, numb. His gaze darts across the sea of students. Mortification leaves him queasy, the hairs on his arms standing up, goose bumps on his skin. He tries to swallow. He thinks in panicked relief of the suit jacket on the back of his chair that he can use to cover evidence of his erection. Shaking, he puts his forehead into the palm of his right hand. 

 “That’s it,” Shlomo says.  I can’t.”

“Hey, ” Berkeh says. “We have a test.”

“I can’t be here. That’s it.”

“Is it, is it me?”

“Not you. It’s here. The yeshiva. I can’t be here. And neither can you.”

Berkeh swallows, tongue-tied. Shlomo’s words shrink him. Draw him. “How could you leave?”

“I’m forced out,” Shlomo whispers.

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll find a place. Where I can learn Torah without pretending. I don’t know. Maybe my parents’ living room. Don’t you know it can’t be here?”

“No,” Berkeh said. “No!”

Shlomo takes his hand. His whisper is fierce, pleading. “Come with me, Berkeh!”

Days later, Berkeh is in the study hall when he hears his name over the intercom. There is a telephone call for him. He closes the book and makes his way around the narrow tables and out to the lobby. There is a group of boys near the phone. Berkeh sighs. Cell phones, internet, all forbidden, and one very public telephone for all of their communication.

“Hey, Berkeh. Where ya’ been? Get this already—I gotta make a call!”

“Sorry, Itz.” He lifts the receiver, still warm from the last person, and leans forward, his back to the others. “Hello?”

“Shalom Ber?” 

It is his father. Berkeh smiles, pleased, but wary. “Tatteh, is everything all right?”

“Sure.” There is a pause. “Rabbi Raichik called us.”

“Rabbi Raichik?”

“I don’t—we don’t know that much about him.”

“He’s a businessman, Ta, but he gives a lot of money and he’s a scholar. And…” Something was taking shape in Berkeh’s mind. “He’s found a lot of brides for the boys.”

“He’s most impressed with you.”

“Me?” But there is thrill in being recognized like that.

“He’s offering for you to go out with his daughter.”

There is a little explosion in Berkeh. “Me?!” His face flushes. Berkeh is grinning. Yes, he thinks. The whole yeshiva will put a crown on his head. This will be his proof, his arrival. He sees the students lifting him up on a chair as they dance at his wedding.

But Berkeh can’t seem to find his next breath. Shlomo. He can’t imagine being without Shlomo. “Ta, I don’t know what to say.” 

“What do you think?”

“What do I think. What do I think?”  He tries to envision himself married. But Shlomo. He looks around. “Ta, there are a lot of people here.”

“Just go out with her, okay? No commitment. You have to see if she’s the right one.”

There is a pain beginning in his stomach. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“Berkeh, are you ready for this?”                       

“Were you?”

His father laughs. “Of course not. You know,” he said. “You’ll learn.” 

Berkeh thinks, I can learn to love her. He says, “I can learn.”

“Shalom Ber, we’re proud of you. Mom and I.”

Berkeh’s chest goes tight with love for his father. His voice goes soft. “Okay, Ta.  Yes. I’ll call her.”

 “Good.”

“Ta?”

Silence. His father doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say he loves him. I love you, Ta. The words hang there. There’s a click.

He turns to find the impatient group of boys have grown quiet. A line of eyes. One shoots him a sly smile and points a thumb upward, a vote of belonging. Late at night there will be furtive boasting in the dormitory, exchanging notes about girls, tips, teases. Berkeh is a comrade. He has a girl.

But he sees Shlomo at a distance listening to one of the younger boys, a known gossip with red ears. Then Shlomo is searching Berkeh out. Berkeh feigns a confident smile to the boys and raises his thumb in return, then strides off past Shlomo’s pain. He stops for a moment at the front window. Outside, a young man in low-slung jeans leans against the bus stop to light a cigarette. A woman passes in vigorous stride, her dog straining ahead on a taut leash. Cars rush past. The rolling bluish clouds seep downward.

Berkeh borrows a car, an Oldsmobile that smells of cigarettes, blue paint dulled and vinyl roof laced with cracks, a cassette of Yiddish Gems stuck in the tape deck. Since his father’s call Berkeh has avoided conversation with Shlomo. When they studied, he kept his focus on the text. Only once Shlomo had closed his book and tried.

“Berkeh.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But, Berk!”

Berkeh felt he was being pulled down a dark corridor to an unknown frightening place. “Look,” he said past the constriction in his throat, even as the light glinted on Shlomo’s hair and he saw pleading desire in his eyes. “If Raichik’s daughter is good enough, I’ll marry her. Can’t you understand?” 

Berkeh stops at the curb in front of the Raichik’s home. He wants to be swept along with a tide of his peers down its old deep-set path. It should be easy. Someone mentions a girl. The parents talk. You go out with her, and then life takes its course: Engagement, wedding, buying furniture, plans for the first year—all a standard form, all his friends the same. That was the pride in it, being the same. It meant you had arrived, joined a fine exclusive club. You measured up, blended in indistinguishable, breathless at the calculated acceptance.

In the car, he hesitates. Should he go to the door? What will he say if her mother answers? His lips purse in indecision. In the end, he honks, twice. It is a quiet time in the neighborhood. Old magnolias and live oaks rustle above their shadows. 

When she emerges, she lets the screen door bang and skips down the concrete stairs, opens the car door and gets in with a flounce, smoothes her skirt, looks modestly downward and then straight into his eyes to offer the first hello. A scarf around her shoulders sets off her face above a long neck, like a long-stemmed rose.

Berkeh’s first thought is that she must have gone out with others before him. He tries to relax, tries not to think that he will say the wrong things, or that she might see that a barely visible Shlomo clinging to his shoulders. “So you’re Shayna Raichik,” he says.

“Did you expect someone else?” She is smiling.

“Just checking.”

Berkeh puts the car in gear and pulls out onto the narrow lane. They drive in silence, as Berkeh doesn’t know what to say.

“Where are we going?”

He doesn’t look up. “The Ambassador?”

It is common for the boys to take their dates downtown to the grand old lobby of that aging luxury hotel, as protocol requires they go to a public place where passers-by formed a kind of chaperone. The hotel’s location downtown and at a distance from their neighborhood is good, as the only couples allowed to be seen in public together inside their community are engaged or already married.

“Oh, no,” Shayna says, sounding playful and appalled. “That old place?” she says. “It’s stifling.”

His foot jerks on the pedal.  Berkeh is completely confused. He grips the wheel. “Then where?” he says.

“The Arboretum?”

“The Arboretum?” Berkeh says. “But no one will be there.”

“Well, not hundreds, like at the Ambassador, but oh, I don’t care—there’ll be someone there, we won’t be alone, and anyway, I can breathe there.” She pauses.

Berkeh is driving on with no destination.

“You want to know if I can be your wife, right?” she says. “How can you find anything out about me when we’re sitting on some hotel couch and chatting about, I don’t know, how many siblings we have?”

“How many do you have?”

“Eight, and you?”

“Four.”

“Small family.”

“We take what we get.”

“Mom’s going to have another in May.”

“Shayna?”

“What?”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen for two more months. You?”

“Nineteen.”

Berkeh makes a turn and merges onto the highway. He takes a deep breath. “Park Lane is off 59,” he says. “I think I can get into the middle of the park from there. I wonder if the tennis house is open.”  Soon, he turns off the roadway onto a gravel path, pulls to a stop in a lot outside the gated entrance.

“Uh oh,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Wrong shoes.”

“You still want to go in?”

“I can handle it if we walk slow.”

There is a lush garden just inside the entrance, followed by a path that is wide and well trampled through a cultivated forest deep and dense. Along the way, trees are labeled as if transplanted here for preservation. They walk slowly, looking, smelling.

Many of the trees are old and blackened, knotted branches heavy with rough bark. Olive green leaves are interspersed with spots of sunlight and the delicate yellow-green of new growth. Shayna stops at a turn in the path and leans her head back to breathe it in.

To Berkeh, the park is too self-contained and controlled. A garden of Torah. Rows of flowers stand at attention along the path, their beauty contrived, transcending the wild cruelty of the natural world. His father’s garden. But then, as they walk, he notices rot, and twisted roots, and new cuttings struggling to take hold. They pause at a tree, sprouting fresh greenery, that lies on its side, its roots torn and in the air, helpless.

“I wonder what could bring down a young tree like that?” Shayna says.

 “Maybe the soil isn’t right,” he says. “Maybe the earth here can’t hold it.”

Varieties of mushrooms are scattered around the trees. Their small, tilted caps teeter on firm upright stalks glistening from an earlier rain, seeking to spread their fecund spores. How would it feel, he wonders, to walk openly here with Shlomo, relaxed, unpressured, unjudged, unseen, the breeze touching our faces?

They drink in sun and green, tinged with car exhaust. Just off the path they find a hollowed tree, very old and large, its hole a cave. “Don’t you wish,” he says, “that you could climb in?” He imagines curling up in there away from everything, the smell of moss and greenness in that womblike peace.

“It would be delicious for about five minutes,” Shayna says, and looks at him, puzzled. Then her face softens, and there is a look of delicate interest, almost wonder, and a hint of a smile, as if she sees something rare and specialized. She looks down to his feet and then up again to his face, like a whispered touch. 

Berkeh doesn’t respond, discomfited with being examined.

After a turn in the path they find a bench with clusters of wildflowers around its feet set against a tree. They are in a clearing behind the old tennis house. Shayna sighs and sits down, kicks off her shoes, and leans over to rub the top of her foot. Berkeh joins her on the bench, leaving a proper modest space between them. 

“You’re not a big talker,” she says.

“I’m sure you already know plenty.”

“Why do you say that?”

“How many questions did you ask before you accepted the offer to go out with me?”

She laughs. “About a hundred.”

“I guess I passed,” he says.

“The preliminaries.”

“And why did I pass?”

She pauses. “Well, you have all the standard criteria.”

“Like what?”  he says, but he knows.

“A good, religious boy. Careful with prayers. Good family. Dedicated to learning. Good reputation in yeshiva.”

“You just described dozens of guys.”

“My father likes you.”

Berkeh raises his eyebrows. “That’s important.”

“Of course it is.”

“To him,” he says. “And to me. I mean, he’ll probably look for someone he can take into his business.” For a light-headed moment Berkeh pictures himself behind a desk managing real estate. 

“Well?”

“What?”

“How many questions did you ask about me?” she says.

He blushes. “Uh, zero.”

“Zero?”

“You’re Rabbi Raichik’s daughter.”

“Rabbi Raichik’s daughter,” she says. “So I could have three hands and one eye sticking out of the top of my head and you’ll still go out with me because I’m Rabbi Raichik’s daughter?”

“Well, once.”

“Once.” But she smiles. “And Shayna? Shayna without a last name, thank you. How many times will you go out with her?”

“At the present moment, he says, “the calculation is approximately four hundred and twenty three. But don’t worry. Those are just the points you got in the first hour.”

She laughs, leans back. The bright sunlight through the leaves above them make a pattern across her face. Her smile is more gentle than Shlomo’s, but it seems too soft. Everything about her seems too soft. Not unpleasant, he tells himself, resolute.

“I don’t want to go home,” she says. “I could just stay here.” She turns to him.  “You’re, I don’t know, nice to be with. I feel safe with you.”

                  He has already begun to tell himself that this could become a pleasant friendship. Then she reaches her hand toward his face and holds it there, palm close enough for him to feel its warmth, a whisper away from the forbidden touch. She is trembling, her mouth slightly open. He is frozen in place. “I wish,” she whispers. 

Berkeh reddens, shifts, looks down at his feet. “I don’t think,” he says. 

Shayna flushes and withdraws her hand. She bends over and puts on her shoes.  When she stands, their eyes meet, and then both look quickly away, embarrassed. They walk back slowly and do not speak of her almost-touch. He hopes they are walking away from that moment, for the awkwardness to pass. He wants to see them sharing space in a separate undemanding way, easier in a way, without the electrifying confusing feelings he has when he is with Shlomo.

It is growing dark, their shadows overlapping on the path. On the drive home, they speak on and off. The empty moments are easy between them, in spite of Shlomo’s stubborn image on the periphery. “Don’t forget me,” she says as she gets out of the car. 

He calls her as she walks up the steps to her home.

“Yes?” she says. She turns but doesn’t come back.

He leans across the seat so she can see his face through the passenger side window. “Next time,” he says, “wear tennis shoes!”

She laughs that laugh of hers. “You bet!”

On Sunday evening a group of boys from the yeshiva enter the cavernous lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. One of their recent graduates is getting married and the mood is high. The group is heading to the main hall for the celebration. From the wedding hall, they can hear the sounds of happy conversation, clink of catering dishes, the first soundings of wedding music. The boys are eager, already affected by the fresh joy radiating from the milling celebrating crowd. Berkeh is among them, indistinguishable from the others in appearance, camaraderie, pleasure that yet another friend has reached, in marriage, fulfillment. 

The group comes upon Shlomo in the lobby and sweeps past him with waves and greetings. But Berkeh catches Shlomo’s nod toward nearby chairs and, helpless to that, he sends the other boys on. The two then sit together in the old chairs of heavy brocade over dark wood where Berkeh had intended to sit with Shayna on their first date. The floor is covered with worn red velvet carpeting, the high ceiling studded with glistening yellowed chandeliers. 

Shlomo looks as if he hasn’t slept. Berkeh reads the familiar face, each shadow and line, as he has read it since they were boys. Berkeh sighs, then pulls his shoulders back and tells himself that he must be the ner Hashem, the candle of God, wavering, small and weak, yes, but constant in its reach to the above. Loyalty. Yes. But he is riveted to the presence before him.

This, thinks Berkeh, is what desire is. Aching helplessness. 

For a few minutes the two sit watching the wedding traffic in the lobby. An onlooker might think them bored and waiting for someone. Then Shlomo leans forward as if it is necessary to whisper beneath the vaulted ceiling that steals sound and says,

“I’m leaving tomorrow.” The words stand between them unembellished, alone because Shlomo is alone. “I’ll miss you,” Shlomo says. “I can hardly think of going without you.”

And loss washes over Berkeh. He needs to fall to the floor. Now that the loss is real, he is surprised at the size of it. He has pelted himself forward down a different corridor, but how can he cut away the part of himself that is Shlomo? Berkeh wants to grab Shlomo and beg him not to leave. If he feels that touch just once more, it will open something Berkeh can no longer stop. He will forget Shayna, forget the yeshiva. Forget his father. He wants to say something that will make Shlomo open that door. “Shlomo, I,”

Shlomo will not knock at a door he knows to be locked. He stands to go.

Berkeh swallows. Then he stands, too. Then, in the same way that Shayna had reached out to him, Berkeh reaches out to Shlomo’s face. The pads of his tremulous fingers trace the side of the familiar nose, the lips, travel across Shlomo’s cheek, fingers now curved in a caress, and rest there on the line of curled hair in the thin, blond beard.

Shlomo puts a hand on Berkeh’s shoulder and steps closer to him.

Two fellow students pass, headed back into the wedding hall. One, turns and looks back at Shlomo and Berkeh, curious, just in the moment that Shlomo raises his second hand to Berkeh’s other shoulder and leans forward. The young man’s shoes are polished, and his eyes are bright with excitement and vodka. “Hey, you guys coming?” he says. The second friend hovers, impatient. Then Berkeh sees a too-long interchange between those two sets of eyes, two knowing grins.

Berkeh steps back from Shlomo as if he’s been burned. He is nauseated, full of raw fear. “Sure,” he calls out. I’ll be right there!” The two boys look at each other and laugh, and then they are gone with a dismissive wave. 

The heat of Berkeh’s humiliation turns to rage. One look at Shlomo feed the fire in him. He spits out his words. “You go ahead and leave,” he says. “Maybe you don’t belong here.”

Shlomo’s look is narrow and cutting. He laughs. “We’ll see,” he says.

Berkeh turns to the wedding party in a fury, ready now. 

The hall for the wedding celebration is divided down the middle by a lattice partition elaborately woven with decorative ivy and flowers. The area on one side is for the women, all of them elegantly coifed and in formal gowns. The other side is a sea of black suits and black hats. At one end of the partition there is a long table heavily draped in pink satin and laden with fruits, pastries, and every imaginable type of dainty, and dotted with flowers, ribbon, and ivy, a place where both men and women hover, nibbling from flowered plates. A five-course meal will be served later.

A band is playing on the stage. The lyrics are Hebrew, often lines from Biblical texts, but the music is a wild mixture of liturgical, klezmer, rock, folk, classical music and Israeli tunes, all of it at the same fast pace, the same earsplitting volume. Berkeh enters the men’s side, Shlomo at a distance behind him, just as the band comes to a dramatic stop and the lead player shouts into the microphone in an Israeli accent, “Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. And Mrs. Yossi Bendell!” The bride and groom appear at the doorway and the band goes into a frenzy. The couple split there and are swept into wild dancing on their respective sides.

The men whirl in circles around the groom, arm over arm. They step, they jump, they sing. Hats come off. Jackets and ties and collars are opened, shirts unbuttoned. Berkeh pictures himself as the groom, makes himself want again the warm satisfaction of such honor, like an arrival. He jumps into the current. Red faces with open-mouthed smiles flew past, and his feet carry him as if on air. Berkeh dances arm in arm in one of the concentric circles around the groom, ready now to meld indistinguishable. The groom dances in the center with first his father, then his father-in-law, his new brothers-in-law and others he wishes to honor. Around and around. With each circuit Berkeh catches a fleeting image of Shlomo on the periphery, separate, different. With each sighting Berkeh steps higher and grips the shoulders of the dancers on either side of him with more surety.

Bottles of vodka are passed. Unknown hands appear at Berkeh’s face to tilt tiny plastic cups of vodka into his mouth. A flush rises into his ears.

All clasp arms, whirling, whirling. More vodka is passed, this time in a silver goblet, and Berkeh tips the cup himself now. He feels warmth in his face and head, blurring in his feet and tongue. He dances, furious, enthused, determined.

An hour passes, and part of another. Berkeh spins out of the circle to catch his breath and finds Shayna standing at the Viennese table. She flushes when she sees him. The band pauses between pieces. As he reaches for a petit four, she says to him, “You’re different from the others. I like that.”

“I doubt that,” he says, noticing the foreign slur in his voice. He grins.

“Oh yes?” she says, teasing him. The band starts up again. Dancers are wiping brows, stripping off jackets and jumping back in.

 Berkeh waves his arm with the pastry in his hand at the circles dancing again around bride and groom, the motion of his arm large and liquid. “You know,” he shouts above the music. “That could be us.” 

Shayna’s eyes widen, glistening at what she takes to be an invitation. “I would like that,” she mouths.

“Yes?” His face is bright. “Hah!” he says. He puts down the pastry and with fists raised and new, fierce joy jumps back into the whirling circle, full of the image of himself as head of a household, father, scholar and community leader, a mentch. Best of all, his father will dance at his wedding. 

A few men rush in and without ceremony strip a table of its pink settings. They put a chair on the table, lift the groom to sit on it, and lift up the table with the groom on it until he can see his bride on the other side of the partition and salute her. Berkeh dances with the others around the groom and everyone claps and shouts and sings.

It is all becoming a pantomime, Berkeh’s ears growing deaf from the music. One of the rabbis digs beanbags out of his pocket and begins to juggle. Three others appear balanced three up on each other’s shoulders like a drunken tower and waver up to the groom. Another jumps in wearing a clown face over his beard. More vodka is passed.

The men lower the table and the groom jumps off. The whirling circle breaks into several smaller ones, one inside the other, each in the opposite direction. Spinning couples of men fly in and around it. 

Berkeh moves to the innermost circle, to a place where he can’t see Shlomo past the dancing men. His head spins with the music. He, too, strips off his hat and jacket and tosses them aside and turns and turns, red-faced and grinning. His limbs are light and unconnected. He has become an inner part of a huge and noisy machine, a place where he doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to know anything but the stream of motion all in the same direction. Just move, go, and the pleasure of fitting into the larger flow and of forward motion will fill him. His feet carry him along with the others, and then he is shoved forward to dance with the groom. Just as they begin, someone hands Berkeh a larger cup of vodka and shouts “Mazel tov!” and Berkeh drinks it all. Then Berkeh grasps arms with the groom and jumps into a faster dance, and the groom’s feet trip through an elaborate series of hazy steps while the music pulsates and fills Berkeh’s whole brain with its beat and laughter spills out of him. 

The groom lets go too quickly for the next one, Berkeh’s feet are not ready, and he flies away and into Shlomo, who seems to be there waiting. Shlomo grasps first one of Berkeh’s arms and then both to steady him while the inner circle of dancers widen to encompass them, and the groom and his brother melt away, as if the spinning circles are focused now on them, including the passing faces of the two boys that saw them in the lobby who are laughing now and pointing and Berkeh laughs with them.

Now Berkeh and Shlomo are the pulse that drives the machine. For the smallest moment that seems to be between the beats of the music, Shlomo’s beard is against Berkeh’s cheek and Berkeh feels one of Shlomo’s hands at his back, feels Shlomo’s warm breath on his face. Berkeh thinks he hears Shlomo’s rhythmic words in the pulse of the music. Same. We’re same.

The music’s speed increases and the two are holding one another as a single spinning teetering top, each hand gripping a forearm against the centrifugal force that can rip them apart. For a full minute they are blurred together as the fleeting image of the laughing faces burn into Berkeh’s brain and Berkeh holds on, face contorting, shoulders rising, a wave going through him, and they are fused into a single spinning top, balanced in twirling motion. The music drives their feet and Shlomo’s pulsing arms fill Berkeh’s hands. Then Shlomo’s blue green eyes are in front of his and Berkeh feels the bear hug of Shlomo’s chest pounding against his and the cold air on the tears spilling down his cheek.