Rereading: “Paradise Park” by Allegra Goodman. A Delta Book, Dell Publishing, Random House. Paperback, 360 pages, 2001. ISBN 0-385-33416-8, ISBN 0-385-33418-4.
Allegra Goodman, who, with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, is considered one of America’s leading American Jewish novelists, wrote in 2001 that a person seeking inspiration and religiosity can find it wherever she looks, but she must not forget that there is such a thing as history, and that Jewish wanderers always, if sometimes subconsciously, try to find their way home.
In “Paradise Park,” Sharon Spiegelman, on a 20-year odyssey that brings her from Boston to Honolulu to Crown Heights and back home to Boston, has her first “aha” moment about her soul’s connection to her Jewish faith while speaking with a Reform rabbi who just hired her to teach Israeli dancing at his temple.
She queried Rabbi Everett Siegel about the meaning of the phrase hinach yafa, which was the title of a song for which Spiegelman knew a dance, and a student had just asked her what the words of the song meant. “Hinach yafa rei’ati, hinach yafa, einayich yonim,” means, the rabbi answered, “You are beautiful, my love, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil.”
Spiegelman, an independent thinker, former environmentalist/hippie/folk dancer, who had been “saved” by Christians in church and gone on retreats with monks at a consciousness meditation center, was studying religion and theology at the University of Hawaii. She immediately recognized the English translation as “The Song of Solomon,” and said that she had learned in her Bible study classes that it was about Christ making love to his church.
“Or, as we call it in our tradition, The Song of Songs,” countered Rabbi Siegel. “The Song of Songs is most certainly not about Christ,” he said forcefully. Spiegelman argued back, saying that every religion had their interpretation of the unknown, noting that just because different faiths may have different metaphoric interpretations of the same text, it didn’t mean that they were wrong.
Then, the Reform rabbi said, as if his life depended on it:
“Sharon, I am a founding member of this state’s ecumenical council of Christians, Buddhists, Taoists and Jews. I have been a lifelong contributor to interfaith dialogue in this nation. And I will yield to no one in my conviction that all of our scriptures, whether prophetic or poetic, should be a bridge of understanding between the people of the world. These lines of poetry are measures of our commonality…”
…“But we had them first! … This may come as news to you,” the rabbi continued. “Nevertheless, there is such a thing as history. There are documents and texts that predate others and traditions from which others have been spawned.”
Re-reading “Paradise Park” during a time when women’s roles in Orthodox Judaism are being hotly debated, it was particularly enlightening to hear this type of debate from a somewhat secular or humanistic perspective. Spiegelman brought to the rabbi’s office an entirely non-Jewish perspective gleaned from popular culture and/or her exploration of other religions. It is particularly instructive to me, coming from the Orthodox perspective, that this defense of Jewish texts came from the mouth of a Reform rabbi, because it speaks much to how powerful religiosity is in Judaism on every level, and how important it is for rabbis to be accessible to Jews of all types and to “meet them where they are,” so to speak.
Meeting Jews where they are, however, is perhaps the flagship strategy not of the Reform movement but another community that features prominently on Spiegelman’s odyssey. Spiegelman meets a rabbi and rebbetzin, thinly veiled as “Bialystoker” chasidim from Crown Heights, who run a “Chai House.” They are clearly very thinly veiled Lubavitcher chasidim. At first, Spiegelman chafes at the separate seating for men and women and at the fact that while there were eight men and two women present (herself and the rebbetzin), the assembly still had to wait for two more men to arrive for a minyan to be made and the services to begin. Nevertheless, it is through this rabbinic couple that Spiegelman becomes “frum.”
Spiegelman had amassed a dizzying array of questions, issues and complaints about Judaism by this point, which she enumerated to her friend, the rebbetzin. “A lot of the traditions are really beautiful to me, like Shabbos lunch. But a lot of it I find just rigid and disturbing, like the hierarchies of the religion, with the priesthood and all that, and the separation of the people from other nations, like we’re better, and the separation of the men from the women, like they’re better.”
Instead of being offended, the rebbetzin acts enraptured by what Spiegelman said and makes preparations to send her to a women’s seminary called Bais Sarah, in Bellevue, Washington. There we find Goodman’s most complex attack yet on the secular world and its watering-down influence on Judaism.
Rabbi Simkovich, head of the women’s seminary, shares some thoughts with the group about technology, money, materialism and the modern world. He tells them that capitalism boils down to advertising, and that advertising is generally geared directly, and only, to women:
“They want to reach women. Because women do the shopping in this world, so they want to sell them all their products. But also, women are the pillars of the families of this world, and so they want to sell them all their lifestyles too. And now, what is the major lifestyle that has for twenty years been marketed to women, in magazines, in movies, television in everything under the sun? That lifestyle is mobility, and the so-called women’s liberation… But the question is, once you buy this lifestyle, liberation, what do you get in the long term? To have every option open to you and drift this way and that? Is this liberty? To keep every option open to you and never have to commit to anything? Wonderful. Women and men can move from one shallow relationship to another, and from one fly-by-night occupation to the next. You are sitting here today because you have decided maybe to take a closer look at those choices you are making.”
Rabbi Simkovich then makes his own sales pitch. “Where do you want to invest your life? In the cheap fly-by-night? Or in Hashem? In material things or on the holy law, Halacha?… Or you may think, someone else will study Torah, someone else will live a Torah life, not me. Well, let me tell you something. What the great Rav Hillel once said. He said, ‘If not me, who? And if not now, when?’”
It is these words that Spiegelman internalizes and with them truly becomes her own person, her own Jew. Freed from the bonds of secular thought, she briefly clings to the world of chasidut, where she meets Mikhail, the man who eventually becomes her husband, and with whom she has a baby, whom they name Zohar. Together, they are religious, in their way, and they are neither secular in thought nor strictly Orthodox, as they were shunned by Mikhail’s “Bialystoker” community because of questions associated with his mother’s conversion before her death.
But by this point, Spiegelman has found her life partner and is not concerned about her husband’s mother’s questionable conversion. She focuses instead on the positive nature of her Yiddishkeit and the feeling of her soul at rest, after a lifetime away.
The greatest lesson of “Paradise Park” is that religiosity and religion can mean many things to many people, but education and truth (and Jewish outreach!) are paramount. Sharon Spiegelman, over 20 years, discovers that the Jewish neshama (soul) can always finds its way back home.
By Elizabeth Kratz
