When I Was Pious
Rochelle Lipshitz2011Reflections
credit: dview.us
We would race across the grass with our pajama bottoms rolled up, our skirts thrown over them for added modesty. We wore our flat shoes with knee-socks, hair tied back, and over-sized sweatshirts to hide missing shirts. We were a uniformed troop of pious ones, waking before the crack of dawn to pray up the sun. We were a pious crew of roosters—roosters in a very great hurry to make it in time for Netz.
At three a.m., the most pious of our ranks would rise, and wash their hands as a pious one must, with cups of water prepared less than four hours earlier, washing away the evil spirits into colorful plastic basins. They would button their shirts to the very top, and fasten an extra safety pin for good measure. At three-thirty a.m., they would take their prayer books from their cubbyholes and head out. They would walk along the paved path winding its way around the campus, past dormitory buildings of Jerusalem stone, past the entrance gate and down the steep sloping campus driveway, round the winding road that circles the hill, down to the bus stop on the street below.
At three-thirty a.m., while the most pious ones made their way to the bus stop, the rest of us, my fellow pious-ones-in-residence and I, still trainees you might say, were grabbing yesterday’s sweaters and throwing on skirts and running like we had the devil on our tails to catch the predawn bus. We would race across the grass to short-cut the campus, skid our way down the steep incline, dash down the narrow staircase of an apartment complex with no hallway lights, leap out of the darkness from the bottom floor that let us out on the block below, and rush to catch the bus.
Back when I was one of the pious ones, we would walk in a line to the back of the bus in deference to the bearded men with long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats who sat up front, for they had dangling side-curls and so they were even more pious than us. We would stand so that others could sit, while we mumbled passages of Psalms and prayers, in our long pleated skirts with our pajama pants underneath—it was three-forty-five a.m.
At four-forty-five a.m. we would file off the bus from the rear door and march toward the women’s section of the Wall to pray, past a line of other pious ones: past the woman collecting money to marry off her daughter — her husband studied Torah all day and all night and this was their pious way of earning a living, past the woman beside her with a sick child and doctors’ bills to pay — her husband also studied Torah all day, past the young pregnant woman with the little girl by her side. Her husband also studied.
We would hand them a shekel because we were pious, and then they would bless us because they were pious too. Sometimes they would hand out red strings, sometimes they would say Psalms for our sake, and sometimes they asked us to say Psalms for their sake, and for everyone’s sakes. And we would advance to our stations at the Wall to recite Sh’ma with the rising sun.
When I was one of the pious ones, I saw a young girl standing by the Wall in her long, dark skirt and with her hair pulled back in a tight braid. She looked to be around thirteen years old, or maybe fifteen, the Hebrew of her prayers lilting with rolled reshes and light lameds. She was crying to the Wall, her body quivering, with some violent shaking interspersed. She was sobbing softly, her lips moving in prayer and tears streaming from her eyes. Her mouth, at one point, opened wide, as if she was about to scream, but it emitted only the faintest whisper. I wanted to help her or at least to talk to her. I wanted to hug her and to listen to her. Perhaps her mother lay comatose in a hospital bed, where every breath might be her last; or maybe the girl was an orphan; or maybe she was simply destitute. But she looked so piously deep in prayer, a harrowed piety. And I, too, was pious. So I turned back to my own few inches of the Wall that morning, in the last moments before sunrise, and pious girl that I was, I prayed for her.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine (copy of 2015-10-08). Original page in the Wayback Machine.
3 Responses
Ah, the seminary experience. I guess I was never quite that pious. I tried to be, but I was too jet-lagged and culture-shocked. Then again, I could only stand it for two months…
As I read this piece the pain grew and grew…it is just so familiar. And I still struggle with the self-righteousness that I acquired during my holy period of life.
Yeah, religion teaches you humility, selflessness, altruism and “bittul ha-yesh,” yada, yada, yada; in a pig’s eye.
Ah, the Nevey campus – even as a guy, I know it well…
But what men with side curls are you talking about? In Har Nof??