Right. I want to know why the women aren’t allowed to dance with the men. My anger sounded to my own ears flat, cool, confident, the way I wanted it. They should enjoy themselves, too.
The man drew himself to his full height and looked down upon me with chin upraised. Now I understand: he was trying quickly to calculate what should be said in response. What would be of most benefit to this sad girl with the scared eyes? Is she from a Reform congregation? Is she one of those feminists?
“The women do not need to dance, because they are on a higher level than the men.” He squinted a little, trying to hit the right note with this hostile, melancholy American Jewess. He hoped to. “Do angels need to dance?”
Something opened up within me, some channel. I wanted to believe . . . him? The anger melted for a moment in my desire, the desire which had brought me to this painful place in the first place, where I felt impure and unworthy. Do angels need to dance? I tried to take it in. He’s saying I don’t need to dance, because I’m an angel.
Their lives and mine were hardly on the same planet
But it was hard to keep my feet still.
Therefore, I’m unangelic?
I wish I were angelic.
“Do angels need to dance” . . . It sounds like a compliment. It’s surely a compliment. But not for me? Because I need to dance?
I wanted . . . something, and waited for more.
The rabbi, however, seemed to have completed what he had to say, and expected me, apparently, to go now.
Out I stepped into the wet Manhattan night, with his answer in my emptied heart.
Speeding along in this bus now, two decades down the road, a sorrow seized me for that child, almost as if she were a daughter to me rather than myself. I wished the well-meaning rabbi and his wife had told me that, of course, separate dancing by women is permitted, and explained honestly why women can watch men as they dance but not vice versa. I wished they’d convinced me that although none of us is an angel, I too would fly one day; and that sometimes I’d even transcend the prison of my human limitations by restricting myself according to halachah (Torah law).
I wished that, somehow, they had known how to make me feel included, that cold and rainy night, rather than ostracized.
But how could such things reasonably be expected? Culturally speaking, their lives and mine weren’t taking place on the same planet. Just as mine hadn’t prepared me in any fashion for them, theirs had in no way prepared them for relating to modern young American women. And in those years, there were no women’s seminaries yet in Manhattan, designed to speak my language.
As familiar shadows of Jerusalem rushed by in the darkness, it struck me, though, that even if the rabbi and his wife had given me those frank replies, perhaps I wouldn’t have had ears to hear. The whole notion of separation of men and women would probably have seemed to me so old-fashioned and oppressive and strange that I might have rejected uncompromised truth, had it been proffered.
G‑d Himself was waiting for me, however, just as I had hoped. A few weeks later, one of the couples in the neighborhood invited me to a Friday night meal. When the woman lit two candles for Shabbat and covered her eyes, I found the sight so very beautiful, and was so touched that this was a Jewish ritual, part of my own heritage, that I sat right down, took out my drawing pad, and executed an exquisite charcoal line drawing of the candles and their burning flames.
She said nothing. I sat there, blithely unaware that I was doing anything wrong, and drew my picture—until she distracted me with her baby (she saw that her guest was a newborn, too)—and felt that perhaps this world could be mine, after all. I was on my way.
Reprinted from an email from Chabad.org Magazine.
