25
The hottest summer on record became my season of carefully crafted letters. I stayed indoors in the coolest, darkest room in my house, drafting odd requests and entreaties. The first of these was to Haskel Lookstein, a well-respected New York City rabbi who had known my dad. I let him know in an email that I’d made a stunning discovery about my paternity and was hoping to speak with him about the halachah, an area he was uniquely suited to discuss with me.
The week I wrote Rabbi Lookstein followed on the heels of his involvement in a controversy. He had been invited to deliver the benediction at the Republican National Convention, and his acceptance of the invitation had caused uproar among many members of his Upper East Side synagogue. Though he had changed his mind about offering the benediction, he was probably still dealing with the fallout. As I sent him an email, I wondered if he’d have the energy to meet with me. He was eighty-four years old. But I didn’t have long to wait. I heard back from him that same day, inviting me to visit him in his office at the Ramaz School, the yeshiva founded by his father.
The morning of my meeting with the rabbi, I scoured my closet for my most modest skirt. It was a sweltering day. My longest summer skirt hit me two inches above the knee. My shoulders had to be covered too. I checked my reflection in my bedroom mirror, turning this way and that, beset by a feeling of not-quite-rightness. It was familiar—this sense of being inappropriate that came upon me whenever I entered observant society.
The city sidewalks outside Rabbi Lookstein’s office shimmered. Two double-parked trucks had created a bottleneck on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. I was early for my appointment and stood in the shade of an awning across from the entrance to Ramaz. Once again, I was dizzy, light-headed. I jumped at the sound of a jackhammer. I was nervous about meeting with Lookstein. He would have been a young rabbi at the time my parents were making their trips to Philadelphia. Was it possible that my father had consulted with him on the halachah? That the rabbi had direct knowledge about the circumstances of my conception? Or not. Maybe Lookstein knew nothing at all, because my father had known nothing at all.
Part of my father’s history resided within the red-brick building abutting the ornate synagogue across the street. He would have attended services at Kehilath Jeshurun with his first wife, Susie’s mother. I could picture them, a handsome couple, entering the arched doors in their Sabbath finest. Perhaps he would also have gone to services there with his second wife, Dorothy, before her illness took its final turn. It was only with my mother that my father left the fold, moved to New Jersey so they could begin anew.
It had always been true that in synagogues, when I heard the melodies and language of certain prayers and songs, I would hear my father’s voice, close to my ear, as if he hadn’t been gone for decades. Adon olam, asher malach. I would sense his presence in these sanctuaries where he had felt most at home. I could hear him now, as I stood no more than a hundred yards from the closed doors of Kehilath Jeshurun. I could feel the smooth, worn fabric of his tallis, the silky fringes I played with when I was very young. B’terem kol, y’tzir nivra. How could it have been that I felt so close to my father but not at home in his world?
I was buzzed in by the security guard and slowly climbed the steps to Lookstein’s office. The building was hushed, quiet. School wasn’t in session. Seated in the receptionist’s area, I leafed through copies of Eretz magazine. I pulled my phone from my bag and texted Michael. My longest skirt is the shortest skirt in the building.
Rabbi Lookstein was a slight man with a trim white beard. He invited me into his cluttered, book-lined office. On the far wall behind his desk was a portrait of Joseph Soloveitchik, another beloved Orthodox rabbi who had been close to my family. Soloveitchik was considered by many to have been the greatest leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. On the floor near the door was a huge blowup photo of Lookstein wearing a Mets jersey and cap, standing by the dugout at Citi Field. One of the team’s owners was probably a congregant.
He seated himself in a chair facing me.
“I think I know why you’re here,” he began.
He did? All I had told him was that an issue had arisen about my paternity. What could he have gleaned from that? I braced myself for whatever he was about to say.
“Your mother had a first marriage before your father,” he went on. “And you’re worried that she never received a proper get.”
A get is a Jewish divorce. The rabbi had thought about this. What other issue could I possibly have been bringing to him? At that moment, I realized that Lookstein knew nothing. There was no memory, no ethical dilemma about whether to be honest about a long-ago conversation. I felt flooded with relief. How desperate I was to believe that my father had been in the dark right alongside me.
“Um…no,” I replied. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I launched into the story I’d learned to tell without feeling the shock of its impact. I began with my DNA results.
“I’m not even sure that halachah recognizes DNA results,” he interrupted. But as I proceeded, he grew quiet and listened carefully, his hands folded in his lap.
When I finished—telling him only the salient details, leaving out my correspondence with Ben Walden, which seemed, in that context, like a betrayal of my father—he nodded and stroked his beard.
“What concerns you most?” he finally asked.
After managing to keep my feelings tamped down, suddenly I was crying. “Whether my father knew,” I answered. “The halachah—it seems so unlikely that he would have gone through with it. Whether my mother deceived him, or—”
“You’ll never know,” the rabbi said.
You don’t know who you’re dealing with, I thought but didn’t say. You’ll never know was unacceptable. You’ll never know simply could not be what I was left with in the end. Who was I without my history?
Lookstein gave me a long, searching look.
“Which story would ease your heart?” he asked.
“The true one,” I answered.
“No matter what, you’re Jewish,” he said. “Your mother was Jewish. Jewish egg, Jewish woman giving birth, the child would be Jewish. There would have been no need to convert you.”
None of this had occurred to me, nor would it have mattered. One of the more minor surprises thus far had been how little I seemed to care about my acceptability as a Jew.
“And your son is Jewish. No issue there. Jewish mother, Jewish son.” He said this kindly, as if offering me relief.
“But do you have any sense of whether my father would have sought rabbinic advice?” I asked. “And what you—or another rabbi—would have told him?”
Lookstein had the sad brown eyes of a basset hound, set in an elegant, elfin face. He crossed his legs, touched two fingers to his lips. His eyes traveled to the portrait of Joseph Soloveitchik behind his desk.
“Kol hakavod to your father,” he suddenly said. All the honor. “If, god forbid, I had been in that situation myself, and my wife very badly wanted a child, I would have agreed to it.”
“What are you saying?” My stomach roiled. The room expanded and contracted like an accordion. “Are you saying you think he knew?”
“Yes,” Lookstein said.
“But the halachah—”
“I would give your father the credit that he wanted your mother to bear a child. He would have been fulfilling the mitzvah of pru u’rvu—the first thing God said to Abraham. Be fruitful and multiply.”
I couldn’t keep this version of the story in my head. My mother’s logic, now rendered moot. It couldn’t be true. My father had been many things. He had been fearful, terribly anxious. At times he’d had a temper. He was prone to depression. But he was an honest man. Could an honest man keep the truth of his daughter’s origins from her?
“So you’re telling me that my father would have proceeded with total acceptance?”
“What I’m telling you,” Lookstein said, “is that he would have felt he had done a huge mitzvah.”
I left Ramaz with the rabbi, and we headed west to Park Avenue. His head was covered by a straw fedora, and he clasped his hands behind him as he walked. I was less steady on my feet than a man in his mid-eighties. I didn’t believe this story. I wasn’t even sure Lookstein believed this story. I thought back to his first words to me: You’ll never know.
The bright sun beat down on us. Every few moments a passerby greeted him and he tipped his hat. Hello, Rabbi. Good afternoon, Rabbi. This square block was his fiefdom. Was he just trying to make me feel better? Was it his rabbinic judgment that easing my heart was all that mattered?
“This was a more difficult question than the one I thought you’d have,” he said. “If you send me your phone number, I wish to speak with a friend—the chief rabbi of Jerusalem—who might have further thoughts on the halachah.”
As we rounded the corner of Park Avenue, Lookstein spoke fondly of my father. It was comforting to be in the presence of someone who had known him. There were so few people left. Lookstein and my father had been part of the same circle during all those years before he met my mother. When I had written my piece for The New Yorker about my father’s ill-fated marriage to Dorothy, I had interviewed Lookstein’s sister, who had been married to my dad’s best friend. That tight-knit group of young people in postwar Manhattan seemed to have lived contented lives shaped by ritual and faith. But my father had been unlucky within all that simple contentment. Divorced. Then widowed. The great Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson himself had counseled my father to postpone the wedding until Dorothy died, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. Instead, he moved forward with an indelible action that carried with it agonizing consequences. He took a short, harsh journey on behalf of the woman he loved.
Lookstein nodded and tipped his hat as we parted on the corner of Eighty-fourth and Park. Was it my imagination, or were his eyes brimming with tears?
“We thought your father was a hero,” he said.