In parshat Bereishit Adam the first man and by extension all humanity sins by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. For this he is expelled from the Garden of Eden. This is generally understood as a desire for promiscuity and this is by far the most common sin of humanity. The idea of a desire for virginity would seem to be very alien from the secular world. However my personal experience often is much different.
In college I had a friend who fell in love with a girl. They made love for the first time together. After which the girl broke off the relationship with the intention of playing the field. My friend was crushed. However after he recovered, he became quite wild, and could score at will. When I was impressed, to my surprise he said that he would give up all the chickadees for his sweetheart. He explained that the other girls meant nothing to him but his beloved meant alot. I pondered what he said. His sweetheart was very pretty and far prettier than the girls he subsequently dated. I thought to myself that if I had the choice between his sweetheart and his other interests, I'd take the sweetheart every time. In this case to me variety was pointless.
Sometime later I moved to Manhattan. There I got involved with Orthodox Judaism. Living with my parents, I had gone to synagogue regularly. My family were leaders of the Jewish community and both Jews and non Jews considered us to be royalty. By the time I graduated high school, I had absorbed everything Conservative Judaism had to offer. More importantly I needed to find my own way.
I also made a number of trips to Israel. On the first trip I decided to move there. However, when I discussed it with an immigration counsellor, I could barely get the words out of my mouth. It was as if Israel was on the other side of the Sambatyan. The Sambatyon is a mythical river in Jewish literature that is uncrossable because it is flowing with fire and stones. However it seems to be a metaphor for emotional and pychological barriers, basically estrangement. It took four years for me to get my head and heart in the right place to get on a plane with a one-way ticket. It turned out that the flight was the easiest part of my moving to Israel.
While this was happening I started to date a girl I met while taking courses at NYU Graduate School. She was unusual because she wanted to convert to Judaism. It was basically platonic. However, when things started getting romantic, she said to me that she must get the wildness out of her system, after that she would be my virgin. I was taken aback and replied that I never had thought in those terms, but whatever my point of view was, it was not that. As it turned out I moved to Israel before anything happened.
Once in Israel I moved to the Haredi neighborhood, Geula, and spent alot of time studying Torah in yeshiva. The subject of Ruth Blau kept coming up. She was generally considered a great woman. She wound up marrying the chief rabbi of the Neturei Karta and living in Meah Sharim. She struck me a high maintenance woman living in a total slum. She was quite beautiful, but the Neturei Karta specifically makes their women ugly. When asked how she got into so many unusual situations, she replied that at every step she made the best decisions she could and this is where it brought her. The comment remained with me.
In short her story was that she was a convert who came to Israel and Judaism out of love of religion and the Jewish people. She had done some wild things which can be expressed in the words of the Billie Joel song, "You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for". People often said she was a night club singer. Everone agreed she had never been a nightclub singer, rather it was a euphemism for sordid aspects of her life.
Generally I reacted with boredom and irritation. I had suffered myself in life and had always been a friend of distressed people. At the time I was working as a caregiver for psychotics. They were in and out of mental institutions, taking lithium, and receiving electroconvulsive therapy. The seamy side of life for many was titillating, for me it had no entertainment value whatsoever because I had seen too much human suffering and depravity.
Even worse Rebbitzen Ruth Blau was much like my Aunt Kaye. When I was young my mother had a nervous breakdown requiring hospitalization. Nobody knew when she was going to get out if ever. It was a family of six children and my father was looking for a housekeeper. Kaye was staying at the home of a friend of my mother and the friend told my father that Kaye could do the job and he would only need to pay her a small amount of money. Kaye took the job. It turned out she was a fundamentalist Christian, who frequently quoted the Bible and told stores about Jesus. She loved the Jews and saw them as God's chosen people. She was fifteen and a half, truant, came from a dysfunctional family, and had a boyfriend who was not her first. My older sister and I reacted to her with love. So did my uncle, who was over twenty years her senior. Lenny was recently divorced and a womanizer. He wrote her a love letter that got quick results and they dated for a short time. When my mother recovered, he married Kaye. She had just turned sixteen and they subsequently had two children.
This did not go over well with my Grandmother, who was basically a religious fanatic. That Kaye was sixteen and from a distressed background, did not bother her all that much. The fact that she was not Jewish made my grandmother all but impossible to deal with. For Kaye this played into her hands. She converted with her little children to Judaism and sent them to an orthodox Jewish day school. The strange thing was that all the time Kaye was with my uncle, she looked and behaved like a virgin.
In a recent book about Ruth Blau an incident is recounted with a befuddled tone, how she started making a scene in Meah Sharim, crying, and screaming she was a virgin. I was not befuddled. It seems to me her loss of purity tormented her that much, and this seems to be her greatness. It may be an example to the world, especially the Jewish people, how upsetting our lack of purity should be. And this may be the rectification of the sin of Adam the first man and our return to the Garden of Eden.
Things did not end well for Kaye and Lenny. Lenny was anti religious and pulled the children out of Jewish day school. Kaye had another walk on the wild side. They got a divorce and my uncle died of cancer a few years an later. Years after that, when I returned from Israel to attend the weddings of two of my sisters, I unexpectedly I got a call from Kaye. We chatted some. Still reckoning herself as a Jew, and still a spiritual seeker she told me of her trip to India and stay on an American Indian reservation. Suddenly she broke out crying sobbing she never loved a man like she loved my uncle.
It seems to me often paradise is a frame of mind with fleeting aspects of it in this world. It can be seen in the pristine blue of the Mediterranean when travelling from Tel Aviv to Haifa, in Venus sparkling like a diamond in the sky, the birds singing in your yard in the morning, and in the view of the Temple Mount from the promenade in Jerusalem's east Talpiot neighborhood.
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