t’s February in Montreal, and outside it’s freezing. I am walking through the echoing corridors of the Jewish Y on Westbury Avenue with three Hasidic men, two of whom are playing wind instruments. Doron is on sax, and David is on piccolo. Another guy, a local, is running ahead of them, peering into the windows of closed doors, looking for possible audiences. We are being kicked out of every room we enter. The Sephardic centre asked us gently to leave, the restaurant less gently. The nursery school told us to go away right now, assuring us that if we went near the Jewish library across the street, security would be called, if not the police.The boys and their instruments reach one of the Y’s banquet halls, where 300 sixty-something, very blond Jewish ladies in spangled sweaters sit at card tables. A lady whose bouffant peaks at my shoulder scolds us before slamming the door in our faces. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you see we’re playing bridge? Go back to wherever you came from.
“These are cold Jews,” says Doron. “Cold souls. There is a great darkness in this city.” Doron has this rather scriptural way of speaking. He has been asking me the same questions all day. Where is the light? Where are the young Jewish people?
He and his cohorts are a new kind of Hasidic Jew. They have a message to spread. And even though they are on what seems to me the least considered spread in the history of missionary positions, they are very much in Montreal to plant a stake. In Israel, their sect — the Na Nach — is already notorious, known for raucous, sometimes surreal guerrilla street parties in which Hasids pull up just about anywhere in white vans, cranking out ear-trouncing trance music. YouTube videos show them dancing everywhere from the trendiest street corners, to schoolyards in suburban slums, to Israeli Defence Forces checkpoints.
The Na Nachs create their scenes of urban misrule as part of what they call hafatza — outreach. In addition to dancing, they give out books and stickers and offer suggestions for classes, bookstores, and study groups. Why I am on this particular hafatza run with them is a question I have increasingly been asking myself, especially since they appointed me their Montreal Jewish community tour guide.
I met Doron in Tel Aviv a month ago, at the house of a Hasidic rav — a tzaddik, a holy man. I was there for what I thought was a purely journalistic mission: a long newspaper story on the new face of ultra-orthodoxy in Israel. But the article is now so late I’ve started to forget why I wanted to write it in the first place. The paper has likely given up hope that I’m ever going to file. It’s just me and three religious crazies, unceremoniously ousted from Ladies’ Bridge on the coldest February day Montreal can muster.
The Y was not the first stop on our tour. That was the Cavendish Mall, which is frequented mainly by assisted-living condo dwellers. “Why do you bring us to places of death?” the Hasids asked me. “There is nothing we can do here.” So we went to the Hillel House, but it was closed. At one point, David and Doron stood outside Herzliah High, parping desolately into their instruments as they waited for school to let out, but they got too cold, so we headed for the Y, which at least was heated.
Finally, with dusk settling in and nowhere else to go, I tell them the only place they might find a captive audience is the Jewish General Hospital. We are, of course, evicted from every ward, until we reach the one for highly infectious diseases, the quarantine ward. David and Doron get into gloves and gowns, eschewing masks so they can play their Jewish music. The patients are enchanted. The doctors ask me where these guys came from, and if they can come again.
After visiting the room of a clearly dying patient, a woman, I remove my gown and wait for the Hasids by the elevators. The scene is more than I can bear. I think about how, not too long before, I might have looked like that woman in her bed: swaddled in hospital bedclothes, sicker than she’d ever thought possible, pitched toward an early grave. A thought keeps running through my head: No quest ends where you think it will. And if it does, was it ever a quest at all?
didn’t originally go to Israel to write about the ultra-Orthodox. I was hoping only to put in some beach time in Tel Aviv, maybe do some hiking. The hiking was of particular interest. Even before I stepped off the plane, I was fantasizing about the photos I would circulate to people back in Montreal — portraits of my extraordinary recovery. For five years, I’d been consigned to a bed or a wheelchair, the carrier of a spinal cord gone insane, its sheath shredding like Kleenex, the cerebrospinal fluid leaking everywhere but where it was most needed, which is around the brain, creating a cushion. I’d undergone fourteen spinal cord procedures, all of them failed. An aneurysm seemed like an inevitability. After my last, unsuccessful procedure, a doctor gave me a book on coping with extreme pain. One exercise encouraged patients to draw a picture of their pain. When I showed my drawing to my husband, he covered his eyes, then advised me to throw it away and never show it to anyone else.There are hometowns of the body, and hometowns of the soul. Tel Aviv is the setting of many of my childhood memories, and most of my peak experiences after that. No matter where I lay my head, my dreams tend to travel there, amid the beautiful, crumbling Bauhaus buildings and the blue ribbon of the Mediterranean, never far from view.
My family are steadfast Tel Aviv people. If you’ve ever lived in Israel, you know what this means: not Jerusalem people. We are sandy beach, not ancient ruin; culture, not religion; earth, not sky. We reliably say we find Jerusalem “spooky” or “heavy.” My mother was a professional Israeli folk dancer in her heyday, the perfect barefoot archetype of the muscular, secular, free-spirited New Jew. My brother moved there from Montreal twenty-two years ago; he can count on one hand the number of times he’s graced the inside of a synagogue.
When I’m in Tel Aviv, I always stay at my uncle’s place. My mother’s brother, he is constantly under fire from ultra-Orthodox groups for keeping his chain of mini-marts open on the Sabbath. Upon arrival, I found my fourteen-year-old cousin, a budding journalist who pores over newspapers as if they were the Bible, reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, just out in Hebrew translation. Why, she asked, did Hitchens think he had to fight so much? “Everything he writes is so obviously true,” she declared.
I spent my first days in Tel Aviv refamiliarizing myself with the city. There were jags of pleasure from the most mundane things. Walking to the beach in flip-flops after years of lurching around in puffy Brooks jogging sneakers was nothing less than joy distilled. Swinging grocery bags around by myself, I was the richest woman alive.
At night, I’d wander the blackened streets of the White City, not so much looking for trouble as trying to remember how I’d once so effortlessly found it. I sat on café terraces, drinking wine and soda and trying to look nonchalant, contemplating my normalcy in a notebook. I’d once had a good and exciting circle in Tel Aviv: editors, authors, and journalists famous enough that my family was proud of me for knowing them. But I couldn’t phone anyone from that fast scene. I was afraid I still carried some tail of nightmare. One wrong move, and everything would turn to shit again.
Back in Montreal, the people in my everyday life had changed, too. Since I’d left my sickbed, my social tolerance had been limited to a handful of friends and family, and what I jokingly called “assorted people in robes.” I’d become a walking cliché: the mid-thirties Jewish female seeker. There had been silent “mindfulness” retreats with Vietnamese monks, sessions with qigong masters, trips to a Vedic palm reader. Eventually, I’d joined a small, serious Rinzai Zen centre and started going every week.
The teacher had helped me find a Rinzai place in Tel Aviv, telling me she was surprised how many branches of Buddhism were represented there. This was not news to me. Since the mid-1990s, Israel has seen a boom in Eastern religions and spirituality. By the time Yitzhak Rabin was shot in 1995, a new social type had even emerged. Israelis sometimes described these dharma-minded, ashram-centric bohemians as being shanti. It was a novel word for members of a new cultural class in what some were seeing as a new post-Zionist age.
By 2001, more than 50,000 Israeli backpackers — close to one percent* of the country’s population — were heading to south Asia every year, the overwhelming majority right after completing their compulsory military service. They arrived in Goa or Koh Samui, Rishikesh or Dharamsala, wounded by wars that were increasingly difficult to comprehend. Many found drugs. Others found Tantra, or Mahayana, or Tibetan Buddhism, often taught by landed Israelis who could translate the dharma or the Bhagavad-Gita for export back home. In 2005, the last time I was in Tel Aviv for an extended time, shanti types lined the beach in the early morning, adroit on their meditation cushions, earnestly displaying their citizenry in the New Age.
So when I struck out from my uncle’s one morning at 6 a.m., bound for that same beach with a meditation cushion of my own, I was expecting some shared vibrations. To my surprise, I found myself sitting completely alone. As the days passed and my jet lag eased, I started doing my morning session later and later, until one day I was sitting at 9 a.m., with American tourists and oily brown retirees starting to populate the beach. A Russian couple took a photo of me. I sat like a statue, the space between my ears increasingly colonized by the question one might expect of any highly self-identified Jew sitting alone on an Israeli beach in silent, folded, ninth-century Japanese style: in short, what the fuck am I doing?
I got up and walked to Sheinkin Street, a good place for shanti spotting. I decided to get breakfast at a crepe stand advertising a brand of pomegranate juice it claimed would fight “even the worst hangovers and H1N1.” In true Tel Aviv style, the stall blared terrible Euro-techno music, music like a demented pipe organ scoring an Estonian porn set. (Put your hands up! Now get that ass up!)
