Free The Sisters Weiss by Naomi Ragen

what I am doing here? Getting ready to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of some holy shidduch to an arrogant yeshiva bochur who will do me the big favor of lording it over me and letting me support him for the rest of his life? Her eyes filled with tears.
    Totally misunderstanding her distress, Rebbitzin Brindel softened. “Sha, sha. Don’t worry. Because you are a new girl, you will not be punished this time. But remember that you are forbidden to speak in Hebrew, the impure language of the Zionist apostates. We also do not learn Rashi here. That is for the men. We learn al pi taharas hakodesh. In purity.”
    “Yes, I’m sorry,” Rose stuttered, appalled. Rashi, the great medieval Torah commentator who questioned and explained the holy text, making it comprehensible to any intelligent person, for men only? Was she no longer a person, then, but a helpless baby sparrow to be fed knowledge digested and regurgitated?
    She returned to her seat. For the rest of the morning, she studied the paint peeling off the walls and the wooden floorboards peeking through the worn linoleum, waiting for the afternoon and her secular studies to begin.
    Her relief in having the lessons in English soon faded. While, like Bais Yaakov, Bais Ruchel was supposed to adhere to New York State requirements to teach English, science, history, and math, she noticed the books they were given had pages missing and sentences that had been blacked out. In none of the stories they read did girls and boys appear together. Mostly, they were about boys and horses, or boys and dogs. None of the science or history books mentioned dinosaurs.
    She felt her brain shrinking. Just being there made her feel stupider, the subject matter and teaching methods like an ill-fitting shoe that rubbed her mind and spirit raw. She returned to her grandmother’s exhausted, her fury against her parents growing, determined to have it out with them. She called her mother. “I need to speak to Tateh!” she demanded. “You have to take me out of this place! I’m not even allowed to learn Torah in Hebrew, to learn Rashi. They won’t even let us read from the Chumash, or the Prophets! How can this be what God wants!”
    But her mother refused to even put her father on the phone. “Your father is resting. I’ll tell him what you said. He’ll call you back. But remember who made your bed when you don’t like sleeping in it!” she added unsympathetically.
    Each day, she waited, praying for her father to call, for her parents to relent, for something to happen. Weeks went by, her sharp hopes dulling, a gray cloud settling over what was once the clear, blue sky of her understanding of life. The warm feeling that had once enveloped her when she prayed, taking three steps backward and three steps forward and bowing to declare: “Oh, Lord, open my lips so that my mouth may declare Your Praise,” suddenly evaporated. “He sustains the living with loving-kindness, revives the dead, supports those who fall, heals the sick, unchains the imprisoned, and keeps faith with those who grovel in dust.” The words withheld their meaning, becoming gibberish, a senseless song whose tune she remembered but whose words she had long forgotten.
    Where was He, that God? That loving, creative, powerful Being she had spoken to every day of her life? Had He too moved away, turned His back on her, for such a silly reason as looking at photos in a book? Was He in league with the Honored Rav, with her parents, then? She didn’t want to believe it. But what other explanation was there, after all, for all that had happened to her? As Rebbitzin Brindel declared: “His hand was in everything that happened.”
    She felt confused, anguished, and full of doubts. The sincere joy she had once taken in learning and praying, in discovering the wonders of the Creator in everything around her, faded and darkened. In many ways, being cut off from God was even worse than being cut off from her family. For had she