She started out as a kinky bisexual 25-year-old with a lip ring, training to be a Unitarian minister. She ended up pseudo-Orthodox, making aliyah and living on a settlement near some disputed territory in Israel.
It was the epic doomed romance of my life.
In 1995, we met at a party in the Western Addition filled with nerds on Ecstasy — a scenario both unnerving and mildly titillating. I spotted her soon after I joined the rest of the partygoers on their roller coaster ride. We quickly bonded with each other — not through the narcotic intimacy that the drug brings on, but by recognizing each other’s distinctly Jewish anxiety with our intoxication.
“Are you feeling OK?”
“My stomach hurts.”
“Lie down. I’ll get you some water.”
So our relationship had a reverse genesis: first nurturing, then physical.
We were attracted to each other in this ridiculously chemical, animal way. The vibe cut through all the cerebral stuff like a mohel’s knife.
She was Jewish on her mother’s side, but both parents were atheists. She was estranged from them for reasons too horrible to elaborate — her father had hurt her horribly and her mother refused to acknowledge his crime.
Spirituality was her way of coping with her life trauma. She tried on different traditions until Unitarianism fit. The phrase “Goddess knows” came out of her mouth frequently.
It’s all about the link, the link that brought us together and the link that pulled her into Orthodox Judaism. It’s easy for me to sit here and hypothesize that her connection to religion was a substitute for her estranged parents. She definitely had a familial relationship with her God, and also with Israel.
She made aliyah on a trip sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group funded by fundamentalist Christians. In an article about the trip in The Jerusalem Post, she was quoted as saying, “When a friend is sick, you do everything you can for them. That’s how I feel about Israel.”
I want to say I understand these links, but they’re a mystery to me. I’m talking about the link between her and me, and the link she formed with Israel and the Jewish faith.
I’m a doubter. My spiritual path involves a lot of harsh questioning. My guru would fall somewhere between Franz Kafka and early Woody Allen. Yet we were drawn to each other despite our differences.
We quickly fell into an intense relationship, filled with such strong sensations that we didn’t understand. In order to deal with the power of it all, we each defaulted to our own most personal challenges: our struggles with family, with intimacy, with sexuality. Our notion of an intense relationship in our mid-20s was to fight our individual demons in the presence of the other.
Not necessarily a lot of fun, you know? But we did it because of the connection we felt, couldn’t contain and couldn’t focus into a functional relationship.
After we had broken up and reconnected several times, she found a strong bond with a rabbi who taught at her theology school in Berkeley. She dived right in to her faith.
In the rough journey of her life, the step toward Judaism made perfect sense. Looking from the outside at someone I had loved, it seemed like an easy and sad decision: How could she put up with what I perceived as the sexism and superstition of her observance?
Once when she was visiting from Israel, we met for Japanese food and talked. I asked her what was the spiritual significance of, say, not being able to carry an umbrella on Shabbat.
For her, it was about not taking things for granted. If she gets rained on, she can appreciate the fact that God gives her the ability to be dry the rest of the week.
In that moment I stepped back from my judgment and thought about what it must mean for her to feel thankful for something and feel some kind of gratitude in return. In my detachment, I looked across the table and saw her transformed from the woman I had been crazy for into a person at peace with herself but with whom I felt little connection at all. But I reflected on her words and decided not to take for granted the link we had experienced, the inexplicable dysfunctional mystery of it all.
So we forged a new link, based on a decision not to take things for granted. And so we went our separate ways.
Jay Schwartz plays the trap drums in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and canine.