Dana - Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde: A True Story

AMY EINHORN BOOKS
Published by G. P. Putnams Sons
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright 2013 by Rebecca Dana
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Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 978-1-101-60917-0

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
are the authors alone.

To Nora

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

J OAN D IDION , The White Album

I ts ten oclock on a Tuesday night, a light rain is falling on the wide streets of Brooklyn and Im in my living room, strangling a rabbi.

This is the first time Ive ever physically assaulted a man of God, and I have to say, it feels excellent. My fingers, with their chipped red nail polish, are digging into the soft white flesh of his rabbi neck. My heart is pounding loudly in my ears. Normally, I am the least violent person on the planeta practitioner of yoga, a shopper for shoesbut in this moment, Im completely unhinged. Im a ballerina assassin, a ninja superstar, a platinum-haired dragon slayer in Stella McCartney vegan loungewear. Watch out, assholes: Jujitsu Blonde is in the house. (She lives here, actually. She was trying to read the December Vogue before turning in early on a work night, but then this bearded dude rolled up talking smack, and now shes on the path of destruction.)

Somewhere off in the distance, someone is blasting the 10,000 Maniacs on a wheezing desktop speaker system, and I can just barely hear Natalie Merchant whining about something, and I make a mental note to kick her ass someday too.

Who is this guy, anywaythis Hasid, this pillar of his community, this ginger-haired fucker with the squinty eyes and the placid demeanor and the beige yarmulke the size of a dinner plate bobby-pinned to his head? I want to smack the Coke-bottle glasses off his pale God-fearing face. Has he ever even seen the sun? I can tell hes wearing tzitzit, a religious garment, underneath his clothes because the fringe is hanging out like some short sham of a hula skirt. And the T-shirt hes got on over it is a trip: It has a drawing of Calvin and Hobbes on the front and a dialogue bubble with the words New York Attitude. Ill show this gentle Yid some New York Attitude. Ill show him what two hours a day of Iyengar yoga and a bachelors degree in American history and an encyclopedic knowledge of the last eight seasons of ready-to-wear from Paris, New York and Milan and a diet of sushi, soy milk and organic spinachand, oh yeah, a broken motherfucking heartcan do. Ill send him back to Russia with a collapsed windpipe and no knees!

Because the night belongs to lovers!

Youre next, bitch.

The rabbi twists around forty-five degrees and looks at me with one straining eye. Were basically the same size, only he has more padding around the middle, and hes wearing some heinous pair of frayed brown rabbi shoes that lift him up an extra half inch. But still Im thinking: no problem. I dont care how chosen this flabster is, hes going down. My hands are steel claws. I tighten my grip, taking a moment to contemplate my options: Would it be better to body-slam him down right here in the living room or drag his limp carcass out into the courtyard first so everyone can watch? Then I notice the muscles in his back tense, anduh-oh. There are muscles in his back.

In an instant, everything changes. He reaches up and grabs my wrists and performs some freaky Mortal Kombat maneuver, nearly stripping the delicately exfoliated and moisturized skin of my forearms from the bone. He pulls me toward him, into his damp right armpit, and holds me there for just one second, just long enough that I can see the fire in his eyes, just close enough that I can smell his breath: pizza. And then without warning I go down, I dont even know how, like one big bag of elbows clattering against the wood floor, blinkered and speechless, while above me, Cosmo the Rabbi grins madly.

Everyone has a fight-or-flight response, but in this case, both impulses strike me simultaneously. I want to run away, and I want to clock him. Fight and flight. Maybe its a Jew thing. Observance-wise, Cosmo and I are opposites, but in the technical aspect, we are the same. Equal in the eyes of God and the SS, we are both genetically Jews, both members of a tribe that has been chased around the world, kicking and screamingfighting while fleeingfor the last three thousand years. Millennia of genetic imprinting and a lifetime of poor impulse control nearly propel me in two directions, at him and away, but in the end both lose out, and I sit there, motionless, holding back tears.

At this point I would stomp on your face, he says cheerfully. Or kick you in the head, at least.

Thats what happens when you fuck with God.

I N MY DEFENSE , he asked for it.

Please, Rebecca, Cosmo had said. Choke me!

No, Id said. Jesus! No.

Id been curled up in my usual position on an emerald-green velvet armchair incongruously plopped in the center of our large, dirty, empty parlor. For nine days, the rabbi and I had lived together like this, in circumstances any sane person would describe as sin. We were not involved, would never become involvedget that out of your head right nowbut the means by which we had arrived at this point, and would remain suspended there, in awkward cohabitation for nine weird months, were, at a minimum, unusual. I am a twenty-seven-year-old nonpracticing Jew, a journalist whod spent her adult life pursuing the feminine ideal as laid out by the Sex and the City television series. Cosmo is an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch-Hasidic Jew, an ascetic, a practitioner of a faith that forbids an unmarried man and woman from being alone in a room together, let alone living side by side, separated by one thin wall. I dont know what the Talmud says about a rabbi drop-kicking a skinny girl in the middle of the apartment they share, platonically, but I suspect the scholars would frown on it.