The Rabbi's Daughter

Book by Mann Reva

REPENTANCE
How do you know if you have succeeded in repenting fully? You find yourself
in a similar situation where you sinned in the past but now you do not sin.
 
­the Rambam, Hilchot Tshuva (Laws of Repentance)
 
I stare through the library window at golden sunlight reflecting off white
Jerusalem stone and long to be outdoors soaking up a tan. I want to head
down to Tel Aviv Beach, strip off my baggy clothes, stretch out on the
sands, and take a break from the rigid daily practice of soul-searching,
prayer, and study required of us at the seminary. It is scorching hot and I
imagine how cooling the Mediterranean waves would feel against my skin, how
they would wash away the perspiration that is gathering on my scalp and
dripping down my neck. But I know that sunning at the seaside is a pleasure
from my old life, the carefree secular existence that I have willingly
exchanged for the absolutes of ultra-Orthodox Jewish doctrine. Now I must
keep strictly to the modesty laws and not reveal my body in public. Yet even
though I pray and perform the mitzvot daily, I still find myself longing to
wear blue jeans or worse, a bikini.
 
The bikini I brought with me when I moved to Israel is now stuffed into the
back of my wardrobe, but I doubt it would still fit me anyway. I have put on
weight gorging on the kugel served at every Shabbes meal and the plates of
cakes and sweets at all the engagement parties and weddings which are part
of my new life. My slim body is now encased in a layer of blubber, and I
hardly recognize myself when I stand naked in front of the mirror. My once
flat stomach is protruding over formerly shapely legs that now melt into one
another at the thigh, and chubby pads of flesh conceal what used to be high
cheekbones. I have lost my looks. In the two years since I moved here from
London, I have changed from a skinny, sexy girl to a dowdy matron. Luckily,
the extra pounds are well hidden under the religious uniform­long, shapeless
skirt, high-necked, long-sleeved shirt, and thick stockings­that I wear even
in this August heat. I know I am comfort-eating, substituting food for sex,
chewing and swallowing for kissing and caressing. I feel a constant need for
the solace of foods, even forbidden foods like succulent pink lobster flesh,
for which I still have a craving.
 
My gaze wanders to the far side of the library, past the lines of shelves
housing the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, the Talmud, the Midrash, and
other scholarly texts to where Mrs. Hillman, my idol, role model of the holy
Jewish woman, is sitting reading the Zohar. Nicknamed “Hilly” by us girls of
the Light of Zion yeshiva, married by an arranged match and the mother of
fourteen children, she is unbothered by outward appearances, never notices
the cornflakes stuck to her wig or her mismatched clothes, and devotes her
life to teaching Torah. There is an ethereal quality about her that makes
her seem disconnected from the material world. I imagine she lives in the
world of Yetzirah or even Malchut, the higher worlds she has taught us
about. Rumor has it among the girls here that she is a lamed vavnick, one of
the thirty-six righteous people on whose merit the world exists. I want to
be just like her and become a holy Jewish woman, but I doubt that I will
ever be spiritually advanced enough to see beyond the externals to a realm
where only beauty of the soul matters.
 
Hilly looks peaceful as she turns the pages of the sacred book. Watching her
makes me forget the oppressive midsummer heat and my desire for the
forbidden and inspires me to return to my own study. I pick up the heavy
text in front of me, the Laws of Repentance written by the Rambam, and read
the medieval philosopher’s advice with care because here, at the Light of
Zion, I am repenting.

The Rambam encourages a repentant to veer to the opposite extreme in order
to fix himself. He gives the example of a greedy man who in order to repent
should give lavishly to charity. When his weakness is under control, he can
return to the golden middle path of balance.
 
The more I read, the more I feel the Rambam’s treatise has been written
especially for me, Reva Mann, atoning for a multitude of sins, yearning to
change my past ways and live according to Jewish law. I have learned that
once I rid myself of my weaknesses, God will place me in a situation similar
to one where I have sinned in the past. If I withstand the test and do not
give way to temptation, I will have conquered my bad traits.
 
I have been celibate for nine months now, and I am determined that the next
time I engage in relations with a man it will be with my husband, God
willing a Torah scholar, on my wedding night. But today, even though I try
to concentrate on study, the pages blur in front of my eyes and memories
force their way into my consciousness. My longing for a breath of freedom
has brought Chris, my old London boyfriend, into the forefront of my mind,
and I can see his tall body with its elongated limbs and long piano fingers,
hyacinth blue eyes, thin rosy lips, cheeks unshaven with a week’s worth of
beard. His head is bare and he is wearing the fisherman’s sweater bought on
holiday in Ireland. He is carrying his pinhole camera, the one that filters
light in through an angle to give a distorted effect. He used it often to
photograph me in the nude so he could enlarge my breasts and buttocks and
play with my shape.
 
I shake my head trying to rid myself of these images and bring myself back
into the present. I look around at the other girls here, who all seem to be
engrossed in their work. Our common desire for repentance binds us together
even if we come from different walks of life and have little else in common.
There is Dvorah, my study partner, christened Jane, born into a Catholic
Welsh family. She has told me how she was drawn by the stories in the Old
Testament, and claims to have heard Moses, Abraham, and Isaac calling out to
her. In the final stage of her conversion to Judaism, she dunked in the
mikveh waters and surfaced reborn as a Jewess. Then she declared her Hebrew
name as Dvorah after the prophetess. She is engaged to Yonatan, also a
convert and follower of the Toldos Aaron Hassidic sect. Once she is married,
she will shave off her long blonde tresses, don a wig and on top of that a
pillbox hat to ensure that the synthetic mop will not be mistaken for her
own hair.
 
Even though I am on a similar quest, I am different from her and these other
girls from secular families, who traveling in the Middle East found
themselves at the Western Wall face-to-face with a yeshiva student offering
them a free Shabbat meal or a lecture on “Proofs of God,” who got turned on
to the buzz of love and esoteric teaching and ended up studying here. I am
the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, the granddaughter of a Chief Rabbi of
Israel. This religious world is familiar to me. I already know that only an
animal that chews the cud and has cloven hoofs is kosher and that’s why pork
is forbidden. I know Jews can only eat fish that have both fins and scales.
I know how to read Hebrew and recite the prayers by heart. Yet I am also
learning that there is far more to this world than I was aware of. I
certainly never imagined the intensity of the spiritual pursuit of holiness
or the extent to which keeping one’s minds on the godly requires shunning
modern thought and culture. I always thought that my father’s approach of
straddling both the secular and religious worlds and integrating
contemporary concepts with ancient customs was the Jewish way. But here at
the yeshiva this kind of synthesis is frowned upon, as the ultra-Orthodox
believe any outside influences will contaminate their carefully
circumscribed and protected world.
 
Even though most of the girls studying here have a past, I would not want
them to know about the memories of Chris that are flooding my mind. I have
never told them that I had a non-Jewish boyfriend or that he was someone I
met at the backstage bar of the Hammersmith Odeon when he was taking photos
for Melody Maker magazine and I was tagging along with a groupie who had
backstage passes. And I would certainly never let on that he picked me up
that night and cut crystal lines of cocaine on a mirror and offered them to
me and that I sniffed one up each nostril and pulled him off the bar stool
and led him to the ladies’ toilet, where he entered me from behind. I
shudder at the memory and breathe a sigh of relief that I have found this
cocoon of purity in which to let go of the past.
 
My father often preached from his pulpit about the dangers of intermarriage.
He used to say that it only takes a lovers’ tiff to provoke the words “dirty
Jew” to slip from a gentile lover’s mouth. But I knew I could never marry a
member of my father’s community, an empty-headed London Jewish boy who
worked in Daddy’s business and blow-dried his hair. Chris was independent
and deep thinking and I felt sure my parents would have liked him if only
he’d been Jewish. But when they found out that I was seeing a gentile, they
didn’t issue any ultimatums or beg me to give Chris up. Instead they threw
me out of the house and threatened to sit shiva, the seven-day mourning
period, for me as if I had died. I had never believed they would cast me
out, no matter how serious my transgression. But my father erected an icy,
impenetrable wall around himself the night he informed me that I had
twenty-four hours to leave, to pack my possessions and never return. There
was no way I could get through to him. I felt c...