On the evening of Yom Kippur, in preparation for the 25 hour fast, Jews the world over will offer charity, request forgiveness from friends and family whom they may have wronged, and immerse themselves in the mikveh to be purified. At some point, perhaps post-mikveh and before donning their white garments for the Kol Nidre service, many of them will stick a little something up their tuches.

I discovered this secret several years ago, here on West 90^th Street in the week before Yom Kippur when I was complaining to a neighbor about how not eating or drinking doesn't bother me, but the caffeine withdrawal is brutal. "In Monsey, there's a run on caffeine suppositories the day before Yom Kippur," my in-the-know friend shared with me. I envisioned a hoard of desperate, bearded Jews pounding on a pharmacy door, like heroin addicts begging for a fix.

The purpose of fasting is to enable us to focus on our prayers and thereby to come closer to God, without the distraction of thinking about food. It tends not to work out that way, in my experience. This same friend's wife confided that while she can pray with her whole heart in synagogue on the morning of Yom Kippur, come afternoon she is obsessed with food and so she sits at the kitchen table, reads cookbooks, and fantasizes about crème brulee. Jewish porn.

It's hard to transcend the pounding headache and slip into an altered spiritual state if you're pre-occupied with food or coffee. So if that caffeine suppository offers you a path to God, I say hallelujah. The end justifies the means.

Though my husband grew up in an Orthodox home, he never heard about going the rectal route! He jokingly considered asking his brother, a rabbi, whether this backdoor loophole is recognized in the rabbinical world as being kosher, but he knew that his brother didn't like to encourage those kinds of "frivolous" questions. "All I know," my husband said, "is that a lot of matches were made on Yom Kippur afternoon."

This was a revelation to me. "Really? Why?"

He shrugged. "I guess these guys are starving and some girl says she's got a nice brisket at home and a pie and he's in a weakened state..."

This was clearly more about my husband's fantasy of what would entice him in the long, dark, lonely hours of repentance. The fact that this conversation took place over dinner in a restaurant, (no home-cooked meal), was not lost on me.

But it was a curious idea--that on Yom Kippur, when you have bad breath and are cranky and can't wear lipstick and you smell (no bathing or anointing the body, which means no deodorant or make up - in my case, that ain't ever happenin'!)--you will attract a mate. Yet, a little research corroborated that my yeshiva-educated husband was correct. In the Mishnah, Rabbi Shimon ben Galmiel wrote that in the times of the Temple: "There were no festivals in Israel like... Yom Kippur, for on them the young women of Israel went out in borrowed white dresses...and danced in the vineyards. And what did they say? `Young man, lift up your eyes and see what you choose for yourself.'"

While the men may have been viewing the women with visions of brisket dancing in their heads, my guess would be the women were looking at the men and seeing spirituality. Whether either of them could in reality offer tender roast beef or whisper sweet-nothings in Aramaic was beside the point. It was Yom Kippur, and if it was possible to start anew with God, you could consider starting anew with another human being. It's that kind of hope that keeps Jewish matchmaking sites like http://www.sawyouatsinai.org in business.

Like everyone else on my block and in the greater, observant Jewish world, I'm not averse to seeking out ways to alleviate the effects of the fast (before the fast begins, have a teaspoon of honey; drink Pedialyte with juice...) However, I've noticed that there's a pointed lack of discussion between people on what is supposed to be at the center of the day - our relationship with God. I truly think my neighbors would flip out if I stopped them to confide that I worry if God heard my prayers, or if I inquired if they'd felt God's presence as much as I had in synagogue. Better, I should speak of suppositories than of my personal soul-searching.

On Yom Kippur, the presumed duality between the body and the soul seems even more pronounced. Our preoccupation with our hunger and our bludgeoning headache only serves to re-enforce how very earth-bound we are, and as a result the two feel to be at odds with one another. Perhaps the idea that the physical and the spiritual are not in conflict but are part of the whole is the lesson that can be learned from the custom of the young women dancing and chasing the men on afternoons many millennium ago in the old country. On what other day are our physical and spiritual selves so on display and available, and our awareness of our own and others' quite so heightened?

May Yom Kippur be a time of spiritual beginnings, in your partnership with God and with others. I wish you an easy fast, whatever route you take.

"Lift up your eyes, and see what you choose for yourself."

There is a certain element of schizophrenia to it--biblical verses run through my head even during the sexual encounter--‘I know this is wrong, I'm sorry G-d'-but at a certain point those voices are silenced by the sheer physical pleasure of it.

Single Woman

We tend to think of "queer" as referring to homosexual orientation.  But within the Orthodox Jewish community, the term queer can take on a more subtle meaning.  As an Orthodox individual, any step I take outside of the mandates of halakhah, or Jewish law--whether in the sexual realm or any other realm--makes me queer.

Let me explain:  In general society, which is heteronormative, "queer" is juxtaposed with "straight" in thinking about sexual identity. However, in the Orthodox Jewish community, halakhah defines the norm, or the "straight", and the acts marginalized by halakhah leave a large space open for the queer, including heterosexual individuals.

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I'm walking on West 90^th Street talking on my cell phone when I spy my friend, Leslie, shuffling toward me in flip flops. Leslie looks up from her introspection, sees me on the phone, lifts a foot revealing chipped toenail polish, and mouths, "Pedicure!" I nod my head up and down, and she flip flops away. We are pedi-buddies, and when we sit in those vibrating chairs - after spending an undue amount of time trying to choose the perfect red or hot pink pedi-color - our conversations veer this way and that, a little lashon ha-rah (gossip) here, a little shtuch (pointed poke) there, whose children have tutors up the wazoo, and whose kid could use a good shrink, whose spouse is clinically depressed but you'd never know it, who has cancer but pooh, pooh, pooh, will be okay, and whose child we suspect might come out as gay in a few years. The usual.

In addition to being a pedi-buddy, Leslie falls into my own personal category of "children of Holocaust survivor" friends. At times, the Upper West Side seems to be one big reunion of "2G's" as my friend Eva would say, the second generation of the Holocaust. Many of those 2Gs are my friends, and because this is the small community that it is, I know their families' stories.

Leslie's mother was hidden as a child in a Polish neighbor's attic. My friend Ulrika's father was taken in by a cold, fanatic, Calvinist family in Holland, a family who didn't love him and forced him to show his circumcised penis to guests, not as humiliation but to re-enforce how strange Jews were, and isn't it wonderful that we are taking care of this little Jewish boy? Eva's mother picked cotton in below zero temperatures in Uzbekhistan, and to this day, even when it is eighty degrees outside in Miami, she will tell her daughter, "Eva, put on a sveder, a sveder, Eva, it's cold outside!" My friend Judy's mother improbably survived several death camps, camps where she'd been sent to be exterminated, but in being moved from one to another, she'd stayed ahead of the game. Her mother is in a home now, and she will curse at the nurses, "You're all Nazis! Nazi bastards! You should all rot in hell!"

It wasn't until I went to college that I met any Jews or had any Jewish friends. Today, I'm hard put to scrounge up many non-Jewish friends. But one friend, Alise, dates way back. She befriended me at church when I was eleven, a few months after my older sister, Abby, had died. Alise confessed not so long ago that the dead sister, not my engaging personality, was the big draw. Luckily, after the initial morbid thrill had worn off, Alise discovered she liked me well enough on my own to continue our friendship, and now, when we see each other we slip into our giggling, girlish ways.

I haven't set out to collect 2Gs as friends, nor do I look at them and immediately see Auschwitz. But initially, I will admit, I was drawn to their stories, much as Alise was drawn to mine. Their stories of loss, of not having extended family, and of their sense of being displaced are so different from my story, for I grew up playing with my brothers and sisters and mob of cousins in the log cabin my great-great grandfather had built in 1850. I've found that 2Gs are tenacious about family and friendships. If I had my appendix out or screwed up my hair color, my 2Gs would come to the rescue. Perhaps they actually look for opportunities to rescue to compensate for their parents not having been rescued.

When I return home several hours later from my various errands, I see Zoe on her cell phone. Zoe smiles and waves really big at me, as I did to Leslie, and then she's on her way. I am both happy and sad to see her. Bittersweet, I guess, is the feeling. She was my daughter Anna's best friend since they were 2 ½. Anna practically lived at Zoe's home, eating Shabbat dinner there almost every Friday night, a proper dinner with proper plates and silverware that included vegetables and fruit. Zoe's father is a 2G, who grew up in Europe and has an old-world, European sense of civility. Anna spent weekends at their summer home in the Hamptons, she and Zoe played dress-up and took baths together and skipped, literally, down West 90^th Street hand and hand. Sunrise... Then they grew up and grew apart. Sunset... Different schools, different friends, different interests. Yet when I look at this seventeen-year-old, tall, graceful, cool-looking, lovely, 3G Zoe chatting animatedly on her cellphone, I still see the four-year-old girl in the bathtub with Anna, white soap bubbles covering their smiling faces. And I see friendship.

Standing over her father's casket after the slow but steady unraveling of his wits and body towards death, the daughter of the anonymous hero of Philip Roth's 2006 novel Everyman quotes her father's code for surviving the cruelty and isolation of his spiritless world: "There's no remaking reality," he would say. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way." Separated from Everyman by 2007's Exit Ghost, Roth's newest novel Indignation grapples with the results of its hero's almost identical pragmatic code within a swirl of indiscriminant events in an equally random world.

It is the early 1950s and kosher butcher's son Marc Messner escapes the oppressive worries and smallness of his Newark, New Jersey family life for the bucolic but equally oppressive Winesburg College in quaint Winesburg, Ohio. There he tests a worldy wisdom - in words that Everyman himself might have uttered - learned eviscerating chickens at the back of the family store:

That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

DNA, detail:
Jennifer ZackinMessner begins his career at Winesburg (a fictional stand-in for Oberlin or Kenyon College) girded by an immigrant-style steely will to "do what you have to do" in order to rise up the Jacob's ladder of the American Dream. He is determined both to study hard in order to become a lawyer and to stay out of trouble in order to avoid the draft the Korean War requires for non-matriculated young men his age. But within weeks of starting school, the foreignness and expectations of Messner's new surroundings thrust him into a rapid, fateful fall. Navigating the hypocrisy of Winesburg's sanctimonious WASP social system fractures his resolve to be a good boy, and in the moments before puking on Dean Cauldwell's shoes, desk, and trophies, Messner girds himself for a precocious change of course: "I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word on the English language: ‘In-dig-na-tion!'"

Once Marc Messner spews in every direction in front of the alumnus esteemed for his "drop kicks for Christ," his life is flung in a very similar direction. Indignation trumps the expected "do what you have to do" of getting the right grades and the right girl and the right job. Though the girl he gets is more than ready to give him everything he ever wanted, she is also suicidal, alcoholic, and pregnant. His job in an off-campus bar (where upperclassmen shout "Hey Jew" as he buses tables past midnight) along with his straight A's end abruptly when he is called to take up arms for Uncle Sam in Korea. Despite the danger Messner knows his indignation is certain to cause him, being indignant emerges as the epitome of "do what you have to do" - a son's inevitable interpretation of a father's immigrant creed.

Even with his sexual transgressions and personal failures - typical foibles in the heroes and anti-heroes (as if there is a difference) of the world of Roth - the hero of Everyman travels the well ruled road of an upper middle class career and family into oblivion. That is what he has to do. Marc Messner deigns to pull up such shoots long before they can grow.

The timing of the release of Indignation is compelling. In an election season once again pitting red state insecurities embodied by the morals of Winesburg, Ohio versus the erratic complexities of the Newark blues,  amidst a war without a convincing rational explanation echoing circumstances not unlike the Korean conflict Marc Messner dreads, Philip Roth continues punching out novels that nail today's America to the wall for its hypocrisy and missed opportunities. Indignation adds another link in a heavy rattling chain of parables for a nation imbedded in the imagined tale of single families' tragedy.

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My friend, Sophie, who I met in Israel during college, fled her abusive husband and landed in my home on West 90^th Street. At the same time, my mother-in-law's friend, Hilda, had flown north from Florida to attend a great-granddaughter's birthday party in Manhattan and she, too, was staying "by me," as they say in the old world.

For five days, they stayed by me. Within minutes of meeting one another, Hilda had already advised Sophie of two things: never return to her husband, and lose weight. On hearing this, Sophie put down the bagel with the schmear of cream cheese, and said, "I only had a third of it!" At the end of their first breakfast together Hilda, still wearing her long, white nighttime T-shirt, breasts hanging halfway down her chest, proudly pulled a small container of something out of her Ziploc bag. "I never travel without this," she showed us. It was OxyClean. "I have these bosoms," she explained, "and when I eat, I drop everything on them, there's a spot here and here and here and here," (this was physically demonstrated by poking at her 'bosoms'), "and I spray this on and it's all gone. You've got bosoms, too, Sophie." These newfound friends bonded over their bosoms and bagels.

Both Sophie and Hilda were prone to burst into tears, and it was impossible to be forewarned when the floodgates would open. Thus Hilda, at the end of the day, said to me, "Angela, come here, I need a hug." I obediently hugged her, not completely certain when she would let me up for air, even as I heard her muffled voice saying, "Oh, Angela, you don't know...you don't know..." and when she finally released me, she was weeping. Sophie, naturally, was tapping right into the same Weltschmerz, and joined in to keep Hilda company. Hilda offered to house Sophie if she decided to move to Florida. Tears slipped from Sophie's eyes, and she hugged Hilda and said, "May you live to be 120." Hilda's lips quivered and she hugged Sophie, and said, "You'll be fine." And Sophie responded with the Hebrew phrase, "B'ezrat HaShem," with the help of God. This was entirely too much crying and emotion for this not-to-the-tribe born, stoic, German Midwesterner. I escaped and checked my e-mail.

A man I'd sat next to at a benefit a year and a half ago recently made an appearance at a gathering of friends. He emailed me to tell me he'd changed jobs, moved to the Upper West Side and was wondering if he'd made the right decision two years ago to break up with his girlfriend who had been pushing for marriage. (Why had I become such pals with this guy? Well, I liked him, and I liked minding other people's business. That was it.) Now he had discovered that he, too, wanted to meet someone and create a life as part of a couple. (He didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the gist of it.) He asked me if I knew anyone to introduce him to--though he was Jewish, he didn't want anyone too religious.

I pondered the possibilities. I could set him up with one of my divorced girlfriends who liked younger men but that wouldn't be fair, because they didn't want more children and would probably only be interested in him for the good times. The challenges of a modern day matchmaker!

Taking the dog for a walk that evening, I contemplated how it's come to this--so many people I know are either escaping a bad relationship or looking for a good one-- and on Central Park West and 90^th Street I bumped into a guy I'd met at a mutual friend's son's bar mitzvah a few years ago. (The bar mitzvah was held at a Conservative synagogue, and the Torah portion that week had to do with the laws against homosexuality. Every time the lesbian rabbi mentioned the words "anal sex," my then-twelve-year-old son's eyes popped wide open.)

I smiled in recognition at the man, but he didn't smile back, and then I realized that: 1) His wife was standing with him and holding his hand and 2) At the bar mitzvah party, he had confided in me that it was hard to remain faithful after being with the same person for thirty years. Because our spouses had been standing just a few feet away, it hadn't occurred to me immediately that he was making a pass at me. When I finally figured out that he was subtly asking me if I was interested in a discreet liaison, I decided to play the dumb blonde, a role I'd perfected in college. I nodded and furrowed my brow and he gave up, probably thinking me entirely clueless and impossible. Which I actually was.

I headed into the park with my dog and made a mental list of people I could introduce to one another, bearing in mind their age and height and weight, as well as their level of Jewish observance and family background. In the old country, anal sex wasn't discussed from the pulpit, abused women rarely left their husbands, and attempted hook ups with strangers at bar mitzvahs would have been scandalous. Today, hook ups are easier to attain than a match which, if not made in heaven, is made by someone who actually knows both people. But the place where the new world meets the old is in our ongoing attempt to bond with one another, with the help of God, with the help of our friends, over bosoms and break-ups.