A Price To Pay

When I broke away from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, around three decades ago, doors slammed shut behind me. I don’t keep in touch with old friends; my siblings don’t invite me to their children’s weddings. I have nieces and nephews I’ve never met. I’m not complaining. I knew there’d be a price to pay, and I was willing to pay it.

Shaina Gittleman was the exception. Her friendship with me only grew and deepened after I left home. That first crazy year, she let me stay in her apartment at the edge of Borough Park, found me a job working at the Lubavitch library in Crown Heights, kept me going until I could get together the semblance of a life. Later, when I would come to New York, we’d meet at a Starbucks in the next neighborhood, or take our kids to the beach together. Afterward, I’d drop her off at the corner of her block. Her husband didn’t approve of our friendship.

She was not less pious than the people around her. She took immense pride in her Hasidic lineage, and loved spending Shabbos afternoons studying Hasidism with her father. She was devoted to a rebbe in Jerusalem, a mystic who trembled in silent sympathy when she opened her heart to him. But she loved adventure, too. One night, we whirled in an ecstatic Hasidic dance in a working-class lesbian bar across the street from where I was living, back when I was still at Brooklyn College. Shaina would never dance in mixed company, but a lesbian bar was kosher. Her gleaming black hair swung as she whirled to the disco beat, arms flung high and eyes raised as the Italian butches watched in horror. Twice she flew to Berkeley to visit me, her suitcase packed with Shabbos candlesticks and cans of kosher tuna. Somehow, her reputation had preceded her, and a circle of newly Orthodox spiritual seekers gathered on the sofa and floor of my living room to hear her tell Hasidic tales. She went anywhere, talked to anyone. Being Hasidic was a wild and blessed connection to the world, not a wall against it.

After she was diagnosed with cancer, we spent more time together on the phone. She invited me for a visit, this time to stay with her family. She was making some changes in her life, she said. No more sneaking around. There was something she wanted from me, too. Would I start keeping kosher, for her zekhus? Of course I agreed. She didn’t have to explain the idea, that a person could accrue heavenly credit to be deposited in someone else’s account.

A few weeks later I sat at her dining room table with her family. At the head of the table sat her husband, with his long red payess, her now grown-up, Yiddish-speaking sons, at his right; none of them made eye contact with me, a strange woman. Shaina was now living on the block where I had grown up, but nothing felt familiar. Finally the men tramped off through the snow to the synagogue, and we had the apartment to ourselves.

Shaina asked me, hesitantly, whether I was keeping kosher. I thought about lying, but then I confessed that I had, for a week or two, but it hadn’t lasted. I felt small. Had it really been so hard to keep kosher for my sick friend?

Shaina saw my distress and explained: The week after she learned she had cancer she had flown to her mystic rabbi in Jerusalem, but she hadn’t been allowed to see him. It turned out that he was no longer seeing women. They spoke through an intermediary, she said, who went back and forth between the outer room where Shaina sat and the rebbe’s inner chambers. After she had relayed her troubles and fears, he responded, through the intermediary, that her life would be saved if she “brought the Seidman girl back to Torah.” Shaina told the story hesitantly, so embarrassed I felt moved to stop her from continuing. But when I heard my name, a weird grin contorted my face. I thought I felt my head spin: Were people still talking about me, after all these years? Was there still an Orthodox machine primed for these recovery attempts? Was I a fugitive? But could she be talking about the same mystic she had described, so sensitive to pain that he trembled when it was described to him?

“Maybe that wasn’t him talking,” I said. “Maybe it was the intermediary.”

She shrugged, miserably, as if to say, did it really matter?

“Anyway, you tried. It isn’t your fault I sinned. Do you really think God will punish you for my wrongs?”

She was quiet, thinking. “No, I guess I don’t believe that.”

She held her hands over her face for a long moment, as she did after blessing the Shabbos candles the night before. Then she put her hands down and looked at me, her eyes clear and direct. “You don’t believe in God, do you?” It was the first time she had asked.

“No, not really.”

“Well then you shouldn’t do it. Don’t keep kosher. Don’t!” She seemed almost jubilant, blessing me and letting me go.

It was just by chance that I was in New York when she died. Two days after the funeral I went to the shiva in Shaina’s apartment, where her mother and sisters were sitting in the kitchen while Shaina’s husband and two sons sat among the men in the living room. The kitchen was crowded with Hasidic women, looking me over curiously. I was wearing a dark-blue skirt that reached nearly to my ankles and a white blouse buttoned up to my neck, but there was no mistaking that I wasn’t one of them. Her mother motioned to an empty chair beside her low stool and took my hand when I sat down. She looked at me, dry-eyed, and said, in her Hungarian-accented drawl, “You know, Shaina was always crazy about you.”

“She was a very unique person,” I said. “She didn’t operate with the usual categories.”

“What do you mean?” her mother asked, still holding my hand.

I hesitated, aware of how easy it would be to say the wrong thing. Then I told her mother something I remembered, from the year that Shaina and I had lived in Jerusalem at the same time.

“Once, in Yerushalayim, Shaina invited me to her house for supper. It happened to be December 25th, and I told her I thought I should spend the evening with my friend Claudine, because she was lonely, surrounded by all these strange people on Christmas, people Christmas meant nothing to. But Shaina wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she talked me into bringing Claudine along to her house.”

Shaina’s mother smiled at that, recognizing her daughter’s persistence. Around us, I felt the eyes of Shaina’s cousins and friends trained on me, curious about this Shaina they hadn’t known, who invited women named Claudine into her apartment, women who were homesick for Christmas. But I went on, since there was no place to go but forward.

“When Claudine and I got to Shaina’s and she opened the door, I realized she was singing something, and it turned out to be ‘Jingle Bells,’ which she didn’t really know, so she was just singing those two words, ‘jingle bells, jingle bells’ over and over again. When we got into the apartment I saw that she had decorated this little house plant with a string of pearls and that bracelet with the blue stone that she always wore. It was all placed in the middle of the dining room table.”

The room was silent, and I hurried to get to the point. “It never occurred to me to try to make Claudine feel better about missing Christmas, but Shaina did that, and she barely knew Claudine.”

It was the wrong story to tell in that room, as I could tell as soon as the word Christmas first fell from my lips. Shaina’s sister waved her hand and rolled her eyes as if to say, well, she was always a little nuts. But Shaina’s mother squeezed my hand and repeated her words, “Shaina was just crazy about you.”

“I was just crazy about her too,” I said, and for the first time since I had found out that Shaina had died, I felt like crying.

Shaina’s mother dropped my hand and turned to talk to an older woman who had just walked in. I waited for what seemed like a decent interval, and then I stood up to go. Shaina had been my connection to this world, and without her, I was just another outsider.