A memorable September day

We had a hint of autumn weather here in Jerusalem a few days ago, which for me is the revelation that God may preserve my soul yet. I am a hot-natured body, and take the months of oppressive heat as a personal reproach. But I will not complain about the weather in Israel.

Instead, I will enjoy the fact that fall weather has the effect on me of madeleines dipped in tea, bringing me back clearly to a time and place in my life when I was truly happy: in Europe, just starting to figure out Judaism, wondering whether and how I could ever become a part of the North-African Jewish community I saw tiny glimpses of around me, but highly enjoying the non-Jewish culture around me, as well. That's for another posting.

What follows is not one of those good memories. It was this time of year, but a couple of years later, when I was living back in America. I was no longer in my wonderful, familiar college town, but in Big City, USA, close to it. I had not particularly wanted to live there, but my conversion rabbi had told me that that would be the only way to get to know his community: a vibrant Orthodox neighborhood full of real people. A place to find out if I really wanted to be Jewish.

So I had found a job in the city: teaching in a pluralistic Jewish high school full of rich children. It was a step down from being a graduate assistant and teaching college students, even though I and my fellow TAs probably thought our life was tough. I rationalized that these high-school students had no doubt received a Prestigious Elite Intellectual Highly Driven Jewish education all of their lives, and would be comparable to undergraduates, at least. Surely it would be the next thing to a military academy.

Given those expectations, the school year would have been a disappointment on its own merits. I did not finish my dissertation, as planned, and the devout Roman Catholic lesbian who was the academic principal of the school made sure that she owned my life, although I had only been hired to teach four classes (and even though she knew I was trying to wrap up seven years of graduate school).

The so-called Judaism I found there was bankrupt. It was either self-deluding (in the case of those who chose to remain religiously Jewish, according to their own personal definition) or cynical (in the case of those who attended the anti-minyan, slept around with each other, and drove to MacDonald's on Yom Kippur to eat cheeseburgers). I invite you to consider the choice of the word "transdenominational" to describe the supposed tolerance of the school atmosphere. Not "pluralistic", but transdenominational, implying movement from one place to another. Well, that is what I was doing, but I was going in a different direction from 99% of the student body.

The lack of discipline nearly turned me postal, and I do not say that lightly. We were told to be tough on students and not to accept their misbehavior and lack of respect, but the hippie-like atmosphere was encouraged by the administration. If I tried to punish students, I was punished instead. I assigned detention once, after a particularly hellish day with 11th graders, and the nun-principal canceled it. The students quickly learned who had more power, and the principals made sure to respect those who were truly in charge (i.e. the signators on the tuition checks, and by extension, their offspring). It became common knowledge by the end of the year that we teachers were guaranteed to be the last ones to know of any important decision.

For example, one day a few weeks into the beginning of the year, during one of my lesson-planning hours, a secretary hunted me down frantically to tell me that my class was waiting for me. "Why, I don't have a class at this hour!" I politely told her. She must have been mistaken. And then I learned that a new class had been formed. The subject established. The lesson plans... well, not prepared. The teacher chosen. Guess whom.

Nevertheless I remained senselessly optimistic about the experience back at the beginning. After all, the job paid well and allowed me to move deeply into the Jewish community of Big City, it observed all the holidays, and the fellow teachers there were a great bunch.

One of them was a Yale graduate in Jewish Studies or something like that. He was a scholar and a great guy, a member of the Conservative movement who knew all about Talmudic literature, but laughed a little at some of the "pointless" details of Orthodoxy, just like the Modern Orthodox do. I would see him in the teachers' break room between each class, surfing the news sites.

"An airplane crashed into a skyscraper in New York," he mentioned one day as we were getting coffee and checking our mailboxes for new revelations.

I thought back to a tragic accident that had happened close to the small town where I grew up. A pilot of a private plane had crashed into a television tower. We did not have ABC for years. Then they rebuilt the tower, and another pilot of a private plane had crashed into it — and had died! Another one of those freak accidents, I thought.

During the next period I did not pay attention to the rowdy seniors next door. They were usually out of control. This time, though, they were listening to the radio rather loudly. At some point a guy burst in (as he did every day; it had already become a minhag) and asked if his class could use our television. There had been an explosion in New York, or something like that.

So we watched the news together.

Half an hour later I was running from room to room, notifying the teachers of a school assembly to be held shortly. One of them did not take me seriously, thinking that was my idea of a joke. It them dawned on me that she and her few math students had been completely isolated from the bedlam of the rest of the school. "It's war!" I told her. And that's what made sense to me. Suddenly, one of the students burst into tears. I felt horrible. I had not realized they were not expecting this.

I'd say the school year pretty much went downhill from that point. You know those people who went into an extremely long slump of depression, no matter how unrelated they were to anyone involved in the incident, and no matter how many thousands of miles they lived from Ground Zero? I was one of those persons. Sure, I was functional. I did my job and developed quality relationships that year. I became a close friend to my conversion rabbi, despite being a non-Jew (until several months later) and despite his mega load of responsibility to a community with hundreds of high-maintenance families. But much of the time, especially at home at night, I crawled deep into my memory palace and mourned.

We were sure, back then, that any big American city was going to be next. I couldn't stand to drive under skyscrapers, which was part of my route to and from work. Noises in the leaves outside meant that OBL's guerillas were on the ground and had penetrated the Jewish neighborhood. I bought a firearm (don't worry — I never brought it into the school). The synagogue hired a police officer to patrol the building on Shabbat, and he became like family, although he assured us that his standing around during services was not going to stop anyone serious: why, all they had to do was park a fuel truck out front, and we'd never see what hit us.

Big City was, in fact, one of the places that the media rumored was going to be hit next. My Overly Protective Mother had always loathed and despised this Big City, because it took people out of the country towns, looking for job opportunities to make better live for themselves. And that was somehow a sin. So she certainly wanted me to move out of that place as soon as my contract was up. Besides that, I was living among Heathens and eating their Heathen food, pretending to be one of them, but not recognizing that they were looking down on me like a slave. I didn't have Abraham's blood, after all, and never would.

The pluralistic high-school teaching experience took one wrong turn after another. I learned a lot of valuable lessons, hoping as much for my students, but gladly said good-bye at the end. This situation led to a series of traumatic job- and family-related crises that finally led to my moving to Israel.


I had known I was supposed to go there anyway, since that is the morally right thing for all Jews. But I was hoping that returning to life in Europe, where I had been truly happy, would be in the more immediate future. HaShem saw fit otherwise. I needed to start a family here.

Today I wonder if there is any point in slipping into this funk again, besides that OBL video. So now I live in a partially Muslim country and am slowly learning Arabic. I even understood a few of his words and his references to the Koran. Iran has its cross hairs on us, but you know what? It doesn't worry me. As the high-school coach said on the afternoon of this very day, six years ago, "If we cancel the soccer game, we're just giving the terrorists what they want!" I should be working now, not indulging in such memories. My Israeli wife tells me matter-of-factly not to think about it.

What I would like to do, if I have the time, is go back into the archives. Not just to replay the memories as I just did, but to review the news reports and let the humanity of the event sink in again. Sure, it might be a downer, but ultimately I think that is healthier than just ignoring it.