Free The Believers by Zoë Heller

"When you've lived a bit longer, you'll be more forgiving." But Rosa had scorned these attempts to modify her wrath. For a person as deeply offended by injustice and inequity as she was--as committed to changing the world--a degree of ruthlessness was imperative, she felt. Her usual response to her father had been to quote Lenin's defense of Bolshevik tactics: "Is regard for humanity possible in such an unheard-of ferocious struggle? By what measure do you measure the quantity of necessary and unnecessary blows in a fight?"
    Now, though, this paradisiacal era of righteousness had come to an end. After a long and valiant battle against doubt, she had finally surrendered her political faith, and with it the densely woven screen of doctrinal abstraction through which she was accustomed to viewing the world. For the first time, she was charting her course without the guiding stars of revolutionary principles. To say that this was a humbling business did not begin to convey her desolation. All her adult life, she had imagined herself striding along in history's vanguard like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructivist poster. Now, she had been thrown back into the ignominious ranks of bourgeois liberalism. She had become just another do-gooder, hoping to make a difference by taking underprivileged girls on museum trips. She did not--could not--wish to have her old delusions back, but how she yearned for the self-assurance she had experienced while in their thrall!
    At 110th Street, Rosa got off the train, and after pausing for a moment on Broadway to check her watch, she walked quickly over to the Ahavat Israel Shul on Amsterdam Avenue. Evening prayers had already begun when she entered the building. In the reception area, a man was standing beneath two giant Israeli and American flags, handing out chumashes and siddurim. Rosa walked past him down a dim corridor. At the rear of the building, she climbed a flight of stairs and entered the women's balcony section. There was only one other woman present this evening--an elderly lady with a frilly, doily-like chapel cap on her head. Rosa leaned over the balcony railing and gazed down into the sanctuary, where a handful of old men were rocking back and forth in prayer.
    She had visited Ahavat Israel for the first time three months ago. One Saturday morning in December, as she had been passing the building, she had glimpsed two men in black hats slipping in the front door and had decided to follow them in. The impulse was born of a mild, touristic curiosity rather than any spiritual longing: she had never been inside an Orthodox synagogue before, and she thought it would be entertaining to see what serious Jews got up to when they prayed.
    Almost immediately upon entering the building, she had committed a serious faux pas by seating herself in the section of the synagogue reserved for male congregants. An embarrassing kerfuffle had ensued, culminating in her being removed from the sanctuary by two red-faced men and marched upstairs to the women's gallery. At this point, having had her expectations of antique taboos and cultic strangeness so promptly met, she would have happily departed. But up in the gallery, she had found herself hemmed in on all sides by davening women. Reluctant to draw further attention to herself by climbing over them to get out, she had resigned herself to remaining in her seat until the service was over.
    She had understood almost nothing of what was going on, of course. The Hebrew siddur she had been given had no English translation, and her ignorance of Jewish observance was such that she could not even be sure of having correctly identified the rabbi. The synagogue itself was a disappointment. With its plastic stacking chairs and frayed green carpet runner and sad vases of dusty silk flowers, it reminded her of the down-at-heels dental practice that she had been taken to as a child. Even the mosaic on the eastern wall--a mid-century devotional