The Adventures of Freydel the Meydel

The men will assemble in the clearing tonight to celebrate the full moon. Now it is still dusk; summer evenings here fade slowly. The meager dinners have long since been blessed and consumed, but as yet only one star winks above the shtetl’s tilted rooftops; the moon still lingers below the horizon.

At each of the houses huddled along the lane, a door creaks open; a man in black, his face obscured by a broad-brimmed hat, exits. Each turns to latch in his weary wife and children. He does not greet the others also exiting their houses, also latching in their weary wife and children. The men shuffle into line; their heels click on the cobbles. The line lengthens as it winds downhill. After the last house, the pavement yields to dirt. A wakeful cow lows; fragrance wafts from patchwork fields of ripening wheat. Where trees overtake the meadow, the first man turns and the line swings behind. The men step along an avenue of birches, then under arches of somber oaks.   The path narrows and winds among ferns and skunk cabbages, between briars and boulders bearded with moss, over twigs that the men might by daylight have bundled into kindling.

The trees crowd closer. It is already dark under their interlaced leaves, but the men know the way. Their fathers and grandfathers grooved this path into memory as well as the forest floor; such men have walked here as long as there have been full moons and Jews to celebrate them.

The men tramp through blackberry thickets, past an abandoned pail; thorns snag their long coats, so they gather the hems in one hand; the other cradles a prayer book as tenderly as a firstborn son. They bring these books because they always have, but they know the words by heart. Repetition has grooved them into memory, too, along with the rhythms of sunrise and sunset, of winter’s chill yielding to summer’s heat, of the Shabbos rest that punctuates the endless labor of repairing the world that keeps on breaking, and will until the Messiah finds his way at last to their corner. These men keep an eye out and an ear cocked, but they don’t hold their breath; they are as accustomed to subterranean grief over his absence as to the fringes that swing below their hand-hemmed shirts.

The passage under the trees opens into the clearing. The moon now hovers above the horizon; low beams slant between the trunks and flicker in mists that rise from the cooling earth in slow, smoky swirls.

Back in the village, the men often squabble. One or another might fail to return a hammer, or restrain a goat from decapitating the roses, or hush a colicky baby whose cries sawed the nerves. But here, differences between even sworn enemies dissolve, and the disparate cohere into a minyan. By daylight they are milkmen, ditch-diggers, or roofers; now they metamorphose into priests. The night itself transfigures from a nap on the couch while the children invent new forms of chaos, into a holy interval, a pause in the spinning cycles of time.

Freydel, you know they don’t have couches. Or, probably, roses. And why have you dressed them in long black coats on a summer night?

But never mind. Why let such mundane considerations interfere with your fantasies?

In your imagination, you have followed them here, but they don’t know that. They cannot see you as you rise on tiptoe to peer over their shoulders into the books you cannot read—not only because the moonlight is dim; even if you could make them out, you could not decipher the ancient symbols tumbling backward across the tattered pages—but because you are here only in your own imagination, not theirs.

You are a girl, and girls cannot be here.

What they cannot imagine, they cannot see.

You have attempted to circumvent the prohibition. Impounded a coat. Glued a hank of wool to your hairless chin. Stuffed your curls under a hat. You even chewed a chunk of raw onion, forced down a bony, salty, oily herring, to simulate the bad breath of poverty. Practiced twirling an earlock around a finger, rocking as you mimicked the cadences of their sacred words.

The moon at last lifts above the treetops, plump and brilliant. Its unimpeded beams sweep the shadows from the clearing; the mists disperse. The men conclude their recitations and gaze up at the lamp that their god had hung in the sky. This is how it all began, when the Creator divided the primal chaos into light and dark, land and water, animals and birds, and, ultimately, into themselves. Jews. Who are not goyim. Men. Who are not women. The wonder of it fills their minds, washes away toothaches and headaches, the aftertaste of a burnt stew, the worries about a cross-eyed daughter, overdue taxes, or a limping horse.

The men stack the books on a shawl spread over a stone. They arrange themselves into a circle, and each places a hand on the shoulder before him. A hum emanates from a bushy beard, strengthens, and spreads; it vibrates along the men’s chain of arms and down their spines. It lifts their knees; it stamps their feet. The circle starts to spin. The raw hum separates into syllables, lai-la-lai-la, that moan, laugh, and croon. The men’s voices merge, surge, and split into chords; they braid into spontaneous harmonies. La-dee-la-dee-diddle-liddle-la. We are here, together now, rotating like the world itself, as the Creation renews in this spilled light—and that is all, that is everything.

How to express it, the gratitude that circulates in you like blood?

You long to insert yourself, place your hand on the rough black cloth covering the shoulder in front of you, and spin and stomp on the packed ring of earth while a song rises from deep in your belly, and your voice interweaves with the others in patterns you didn’t know you knew. Yet you shrink back into the dark recesses under the trees. You sense that, were you to reveal even your cannily disguised self to the dancing phantoms you have conjured, you would not be welcome. They belong by birthright,  by virtue of their beliefs, as much a part of them as their bones. Beliefs which you, when you wake from this dream, will repudiate. Which, frankly, you despise.  

Because you are a modern girl, Freydel. Through and through. You were reared in a world capital, not some backwater. Your days hurtle into the future, sped by machines; you are not mired, like these men, in one of those centuries too undifferentiated to name or number, in which nothing happened.

Besides, you could not last one day, much less one night, in the men’s crowded, dirty, smelly hovels, in their underfed and unwashed bodies and ill-fitting clothing, their oversized noisy families. You never had to brave the dark and cold to seek relief in an outhouse; never had to kick away the siblings crowding a lumpy fleabag unrolled on the floor; never knew a hunger pang to gnaw your belly. You never had to fling salt over your shoulder to blind an omnipresent evil eye that tracked you like a nightmare.

You don’t know how to live surrounded by threats like a fish by the ocean. You have never to your knowledge been hated. Never had to cower with spiders and siblings under Mama’s bed while enemies slashed whips, pistols, and curses, never had to pray amid the racket that they would not smash the door. Never had to squelch the thoughts of the unspeakable things they might do once inside. Never had to fend them off as they chased you like hornets through your dreams. Against whom your supposed god hadn’t since the age of myth lifted a holy finger to protect you. No matter how many commandments you obeyed. No matter how worthy you were—you tried to prove it again and again—of being Chosen.

For what? For this? Hated and abandoned by everyone—even, apparently, your own Creator?

Who for you, Freydel, does not exist. Whom you have discarded along with teddy bears and the Tooth Fairy. For you, there is no thin-skinned, erratic overlord, prone to twist your guts for the slightest infraction, to set sadistic loyalty tests that command you to murder your child or forbid you to take one last look at your burning home—for yielding to any such compulsion of love of anything that is not him.

And free from his endless finicky prohibitions. These men—whose circle tomorrow you will berate yourself for longing to join—are obsessive compulsives shackled by rules from waking to sleeping. And you know it. Say thank you before the first sip of water, upon using the toilet, upon seeing a blooming tree. Or else! Or what? Then you would not be a Yid, which means a person. A Righteous One, a descendant of Moses, a Lion of Judah, dignified in a silk robe and fur hat every Friday whatever the weather, an ambassador welcoming the Shabbos Queen, bells jingling from her ankles, who folds you to her perfumed bosom while singing of milk and honey—no matter in the work week how dirty your nails, how bent your back, how empty your pocket, belly, bed, or heart, how exhausted your muscles or mind. Worth it? Consider, Freydel, how wearisome, this obligation to perpetual gratitude. As if life weren’t your birthright, but a debt you were forever paying off.

Why, Freydel, would you dream of going back there, to this fictional version of a world your ancestors fled? Why fantasize that such rusty shtetl dwellers are blighting poverty, ignorance, and prejudice with ritual ecstasy? And what do you need to blight, pampered as you are? What do you seek, in this place that doesn’t exist as you imagine it and never did, or if it did has been burnt to ash,  you who are not really here and would be ousted if you were? Can you pretend for more than a minute that you’ll find that this dizzying circle-dancing is a cure-all? That blessings and chantings scare off misery, ignorance, and darkness more effectively than, say, antibiotics, the internet, and incandescent bulbs? Why do you assume these pious men know something you don’t? They who have read one book while you have read thousands? They who have had one teacher while you have had multitudes? They who have been nowhere but here, while you have hit the hot spots of nature and culture all around the globe? They who have never even ridden an elevator, while you have gazed from airplanes at the rippled topsides of clouds. How could you bear their constrictions?

Apparently reason cannot dissuade you, Freydel. You press the fake whiskers to your chin; you button the scavenged coat. You gulp the night air like schnapps, tiptoe out of the shadows, and tap a dancing man on the shoulder. Luckily for you, his eyes are closed; he is lost in spin and song. He lifts his hand and you are knitted into the chain. You catch the rhythm; you step on cue. You catch the tunes; you chant as if you too had absorbed them since curled in the womb. Round and round you go, eyes closed but body suffused with light.

Freydel! Your cheeks are warm from dancing! The glue melts; the wool slides. You pull out of line to clap it back on. Startled, the man behind you opens his eyes. He gasps. He draws back his hand and lands a slap. You topple, an overturned bug out of Kafka. Your coat flops open; your hind legs flutter midair, exposing your skinny jeans.

Stained from something unsanctified that had dribbled down your leg, drawn forth by the full moon. You clap your knees shut to hide the shameful sight.

The dance sputters to a halt; the song skitters into silence; the chain breaks. The men crowd around, their beards pocked with open mouths of astonishment. You can’t suppress a shriek as someone yanks off your remaining whiskers and shakes them like a threat. You can’t understand his spitfire speech, but you can follow his pointing finger: No Girls Allowed! Didn’t you read the sign?

What sign?—Oh, the one nailed to the clubhouse. With the fine print: No atheists. No modernists. No individualist assimilated cosmopolites whose history is cut off at the root and who invent, buy, or borrow our myths to anchor their drifting selves. Stop mooching! the man seems to shout. Long ago you traded in Abraham and Moses for George Washington and Martin Luther King. Klezmer for Elvis. The Torah for Shakespeare. The Seven Days for the Big Bang. What do you have to do with Paul Revere’s ride? Yet you know it better than our flight from Egypt.   Just because you came out of a Jewish womb that came out of a Jewish womb, just because you can imagine yourself here, do you think you belong? Do you think we want you? Despite your rain-bath shower gels, your organic hair care products, you are unclean! Get back! Broad jump across the centuries, oceans, and languages to your manicured lawns, paved sidewalks, and enclosed malls. Your vaunted individualism. Your liberty and pursuit of happiness.   Pfeh! What is all that, compared with our holiness? We would trade a million of your air-conditioners for our ecstasies!

You scramble to your knees. You grasp the ragged hem of a coat. Please. Just one more bimble diddy bim bom.Let my secular girl voice blend with your sacred male voices. Let my step match your step. Let my voice and step no longer be mine alone, but ours. For a moment more, let me escape the cage of myself and be a people.

The grayest beard intervenes. What would our sages advise? Aha! This is what they live for. They twirl their earlocks as they rummage through the crowded libraries in their minds; they confer in whispers and assertions, with headshakes and gesticulations. They pull out a carrot or a radish for a sustaining nosh. They locate a text here, a commentary there, a point of law over there. Contradictory injunctions about which for a thousand forevers the learned rebbes of blessed memory, and their followers and theirs, have been delivering contradictory interpretations.

You too rummage through your quotations: Hmm. “All men are created. . .” and “The moral arc of history. . .” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged. . .” but nothing seems quite right. And the men are too busy arguing to listen.

Someone hoists you to your feet, yanks down the coat scrunched under your armpits, and grips your wrists. Judgments fly from the beards. Throw her in the mikvah. Purify her of pollutants and modernity. Then send her off. Because even then, she would not be welcome. Not a girl. Not in our circle.

Fortunately for you, Freydel, there is no mikvah here. Not even a stream.

The graybeard raises his arm like a rifle. He fires off the collective judgment: “As the Torah says, Get thee out.” “Go, go, go!” volleys from the other beards. The command ricochets among the trees. “Go back inside, and make children and chicken soup!”

Expelled. Eve out of Eden. You wish you could curse as they can. May their heads grow in the ground like onions, stuff like that. But, well, why bother. You brush off your posterior and throw back your shoulders, trying for a little dignity. You turn and head alone into the forest, blinded by sudden tears. You hope not to ruin your exit with a crash into a tree. You hope your feet, with no ancestral memory to guide them, find the path.

While you stumble along, the knotted canopy of leaves seems to snicker as it blocks any moonlight that might have eased your way. You blink against the dark, darker than any you have ever experienced in your whole electrified life. You shudder at every rustle and crackle. You fear lions and tigers and bears, or, like any Jewish kid, Cossacks and Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition.

But stop. Brush off that stump over there, lit by a lone ray that slips through a gap in the trees. Sit. Consider.

These men you long to join, Freydel: Aren’t you mad at them for rejecting and ejecting you?

And why are they kicking you out?

Because your charming charms threaten to distract them from their serious manly worship of their manly god. Hell hath no fury like that guy when scorned.

You object that you are not pretty. It doesn’t matter. You might have a big nose or a fat middle, but any curve, any siren note however off-key, overwhelms their fragile minds with dreams of the soft moist paradise you possess.

So you want to argue? And aren’t we all sculpted out of the same red clay? Didn’t your creator give me a mind, too?

Don’t waste your breath. Back in your real life, Freydel, you might be a scholar with a wall covered in diplomas, an office crowded with endowed chairs, a brain stuffed with the great ideas of Western Civ., but all that is as worthless here as this mumbling at the moon would be there.

So why, Freydel, are you sliding off that stump and creeping back to where you are not wanted? Stop. Why, if you are traveling back in imagination to the life of your alleged ancestors—this crazy quilt that you have stitched from scraps of stories, from shreds of desiccated memory—don’t you enter among the women? Why not slip into any of the huddled houses some Shabbos eve, where the woman of valor has crowned herself with lace and is waving over candles?

Is it because you, Freydel, could not endure that disguise? Could not shave your head even in imagination? Could not sacrifice the blow-dried tresses that are your pride and joy? You refuse to look even in the mind’s private mirror like a penitent, a war whore, a victim of chemo or a concentration camp. Couldn’t you compromise and pull on a wig? No, not even that. You know without ever having done so that it would be hot and itchy and slide over your eyes. That it would look as silly as a dunce cap, belying the ambitions you have stowed underneath.

So go as a meydel, Freydel, a mere scarf tossed over your irresistible attractions. Even now a whiff of delicious cooking wafts into the forest and beckons like a finger. That herring didn’t fill you up; you need dinner. So follow. Skip back through the forest and fields and up the cobbled hill. Slip in among arriving aunts, uncles, and cousins. Fit into the lineup of children, squeezed around the best tablecloth, yarmulkes sliding off adorable little heads, restless little feet kicking underneath.

Hush everybody. The home-sweet-home, however humble, is about to become a cathedral: the family the choir, the parents the priests, the smell of soup the incense, the challah the host.

Dim the lights. The Woman of Valor is about to emulate the primal gesture, in a domesticated version of the menfolk’s forest dance. With a scrape of match, she illumines the candles as her Creator did the sun and moon. She eyes this fleck of divine brilliance through the protective lattice of her fingers. To look straight at the power that fuels the universe—the blaze of sun or fire in the ark—would scorch the eyeballs, even kill. So here is a domesticated little sparkle, tethered to a wick, enough to figuratively warm the hearth. Its brief little light renders visible the halo around the ordinary. Blessed is everything: the food, the night, the home however rickety, and the children, each a shining miracle, however rude and snot-nosed, unwanted and disappointing.

Out, out, brief candles. The Woman of Valor, though she may be more precious than rubies, must get to work. The other women jump to join her. The men praise the universe while the women ladle out the borscht. They balance brimming bowls while hauling yet another incipient kaddish-sayer in their bellies and everyone’s needs in their heads.

Freydel, squelch your modernist feminist objections for now. Relax. Look down the row of faces that look like yours. Savor the familiar flavors of the mamaloshen, the emotional cadences that you understand with your heart though not your head. Savor the ruby soup, chewy bread, and sugary wine. Imbibe the blessings that remind you that soup, bread, and wine sprout from the inedible earth. If you understood the words, you’d be busy objecting to deism, monarchism, and tribalism. Sexism. As it is, you can pretend they say only what you wish: How miraculous it all is, how splendid. How, even crowded here in this hovel among these scrawny provincials, everything seems made radiant by the divine—whatever that may be.

Nice to fit in, isn’t it, Freydel? To eat, to laugh, to tap along with a little song on the tabletop? Linger where all is familiar, oiled by repetition? But ask yourself: Does all this cozy domesticity satisfy your soul? Is it worth giving up modernity for candlelight, ruby soup, and the row of little faces? A tune or two after dinner before you too jump up to scrape the plates and escort yet another fearful toddler to the outhouse?

And maybe you are not so safe, even here. Will the women catch and expel you, as did the men? Detect the jeans beneath your modest garb, suspect the tattoo on your navel, smell the forbidden fruit on your breath, peer into your head teeming with ambitions to remake the world? Will they notice you cupping your ear to catch the men’s debates, instead of joining the gossip?

Meydel, how can you be so old and unmarried? The women put down their ladles and turn you around: Is that face attractive? Are those hips sturdy, the survival instincts ferocious? Can she boil laundry, haggle with butchers, and barricade a door? Breed on loaf heels and onion peels, burnt bits scraped from pots, marrow sucked from stew bones? Quick, before she gets a minute older, fetch the matchmaker!

Oh no, Freydel. Concealed under your scarf, your mind, that infinite universe, pounds against the nutshell of such limited expectations. You make a beeline as if to the outhouse, and out of the house.

Alone again, into the darkness.

Into a blank where your imagination founders.

Now where, Freydel? Where can you find what you seek?

So here’s a question for you, Freydel, as the descendent of a people who question every question with a question; who celebrate by asking four of them; who credit no answers but only perpetual interrogation: Why not stay tucked in your own life, in the familiar round of machine-eased housework and computerized cogitations and multicultural dining?

What calls you here, Freydel? Why do you want to kick off your Birkenstocks, your running shoes with orthotics, and clomp in hobnail boots over the stony ground?   Shouldn’t you get busy and invent a vaccine, program a robot, design the city of the future, feed the hungry, and help the sad to feel happy again? Okay, so sometimes you long to be different from what you are. Not just a consumer, professional, or concerned citizen. Not just a doer of laundry, duster of dust, or runner of errands. Instead, something spiritual: a note undergirding a chord or topping a harmony, a tone in the crystal ringing of the spheres.

So tonight you are testing whether communal ritual elevates the ordinary. Finds a use for the useless. Blends the solitary into a community. Makes whole and holy the flawed, the broken. Shapes amorphous time.   Forges a narrative out of the random firings of an indifferent universe. Gets you out from behind your computer, unplugs your headphones, and lifts your eyes from the phony lights onscreen to the actual ones in the sky.

So if it does all those wonderful things, why don’t you believe in it? Why restrict it to fantasies like this one, rife with inconsistencies? Why don’t you do it for real, weave it into your homework and housework, bearing and rearing, and inexorable aging? Why do you sit around perusing the so-called news when you could be contemplating the marvels of existence? Why do you waste time online when you could be dancing with actual people under the actual moon? Why not?

Because it would feel silly. That’s why.

Your whole life is the wrong context. Such an activity would be as out of place there as you are here.

That doesn’t stop you from longing. Because admit it, Freydel (if that’s what we must call you for now, although your given name is Debbie or Elizabeth or Sophie or whatever your assimilating parents chose): For all your orthodontured teeth, birth control, smattering of Romance languages, diverse acquaintances, international cuisine, you are infected with the modern plague.

Loneliness. It doesn’t take a doctor to diagnose it. You’ve got a bad case, despite your tallied Facebook “friends.” Just now, if the ole troublemaker in his red Halloween costume materialized between the trees, you would sell your modern soul cheap, in exchange for the men’s certainty of who they are—or so you imagine them to feel.

Because maybe they don’t. Maybe their minds are wandering—to a belly cramp or a hunger pang, a full bladder, or a twinge in an arthritic hip—the body refusing to be transcended. Maybe they don’t believe. Maybe they are bored—oy, every month another moon. Maybe they still can’t stand each other. Maybe, if they had the choice, they would rather be home cooking shrimp scampi or playing video games. Maybe they’d have run away yesterday to the biggest city down the furthest railroad line if they could. You have idealized their piety because you have none. You impute to them the self-transcendence, the un-ironic sincerity, which just now you long to feel.

As you perch on that stump, Freydel, getting chilled as night deepens, your optimism crumbles. You suspect that whatever vague thing you crave tonight is impossible to attain. First because it is not you. Second because it doesn’t exist. Third because it never did. Fourth because even if it did, your trained post-Enlightenment mind would rebel. After five minutes, much less five months, much less five forevers of round and round, you would get bored. You would long for foreign films, NPR, and city lights. Another meal of herring and onion, however blessed, and you would crave sushi, wood-fired pizza, and bacio gelato. After an hour of chanting, you would miss Janis whoah-whoah-ing, Otis transcending, and Coltrane channeling. The men’s hands on your shoulders would feel heavy and sweaty. You would long to be tucked back in your turtle shell of a private self, much as you would miss your heated and cooled multi-room home with indoor plumbing, double-hung windows, and padded coil mattresses. And locks on all the doors.

Time to let this fantasy dissolve, Freydel. Time to wake up, get busy living your androgynous, liberated, modern life in which you can go anywhere, do everything: read, eat, think, or drink anything that was ever invented anywhere in the whole history of the whole world.

So, get going. Wend your way back through the dark, over the sticks and stones. But to where?

You are crying a little.

Freydel, your distress moves me. I am a more merciful creator than your ancestors’ overlord or the physics that assembled us out of dots and strings. I will grant you a different ending. Let’s rewind to when you were knocked flat on your back,  legs aflutter, coat parted to reveal your stained jeans. The men’s shocked silence is about to fill with protestations. But this time, an elder raises his hand to forestall them. In a silence filled only with the rustle of leaves, he extends that hand.

To you.

Oh yes, the men recall. Love thy neighbor. Welcome the stranger. Do unto others. They murmur affirmations in a softer register than you have ever heard them use before.

You take the proffered hand. It is warm and solid; it covers yours like a mitten. The elder raises you to sitting, lets you get your bearings, hoists you to your feet. He brushes the leaves and twigs off your borrowed coat. He replaces your hat. He extracts a flask from somewhere. The liquid stings but clears your head.

“What brings you here, meydel?” he asks in a language that somehow you understand.

“I want,” you mumble. You hesitate, glance around the little crowd, faces bedewed with perspiration that catches the moonlight. “I felt, I needed,” you struggle to explain. “To dance and sing. Not by myself. With you.”

“You are welcome,” he says.

He motions to the others to regroup. He draws you into line. He shuts his eyes, emits a rumble from deep in his chest, and points a finger up at the moon, now perched on the summit of the sky. Lai la-lai la-lai lai lai. The men pick up the tune, play with it, toss it back and forth, twine it with harmonies, slow it, speed it, raise it, lower it. Their impulses align as if their voices emanated from one central source.

Your voice tinkles like broken glass, but it mends itself. It wavers and searches but at last settles into its niche in the wall of sound.

Once again the men are moved to dance. As the biddle iddle’s pour forth faster, feet lift higher, stomp harder. The circle accelerates; centrifugal force presses the men outward; the chain breaks and each spins his own little tornado. They know their god is clapping along, laughing as his creatures enjoy the pleasures with which he has blessed them.

Freydel, who is coming down the path? Their laughter reverberates among the trees. Yes, the women have tossed aside their ladles, handed the children to eager grandparents. They prance into the clearing, swirling colorful skirts. They ululate as they rip the wigs from their heads and fling them into trees; their long hair swings free. They wave their scarves, and the men grab on. Pairs twirl together, then break and reform.

And you, Freydel, pass from hand to hand so fast that that the trees and moon and dancers blur. Bless and extol, laud and praise! All is One, including you, Freydel. You are in the center now, kicking, stomping, whirling. Till your soul spins out of you and merges with the forest’s breath and your ancestors’ songs.