Free Jephte's Daughter by Naomi Ragen Page B

initial attraction. His long legs and slim, aristocratic body that even the plain black suit (battle fatigues of the army of the faithful) could not hide, made him an exceptionally attractive man. His hair was thick and dark and curly with small payot over his ears. His face was narrow, but distinguished-looking, with large, serious dark eyes and lashes extravagantly thick for a man. His short beard was a dark brown and neatly trimmed to reveal full, sensitive lips. His hands, too, were elegant, with long white fingers and immaculately clean nails.
    He was totally unaware of the effect he had upon women. Indeed, had Isaac Harshen had the least consciousness of those who stopped to regard him with interest, he would have looked up immediately from the Talmud he was immersed in, pursed his lips in disdain, and whispered: prutzas . Whores.
    Isaac Meyer had never been out of Israel before. As a matter of fact, except for several trips to visit other yeshivoth in Bnei Brak, or to pray at the graves of saints in Hebron, Bethlehem, Safad, and Tiberias, he had hardly been out of Jerusalem. Ever since his father had wrapped him in a prayer shawl at the age of three and delivered him to the rebbes at the heder , he had followed a straight and narrow path from his home in Meah Shearim to the yeshivah and back again, with few detours.
    He had never listened to radio broadcasts, even the news, because it might taint his purity of thought; and a television, which did even more to excite the imagination, was completely treife , full—he had heard—of lewdness and all kinds of evil temptations, as were movies, concerts, plays, museums, and all other places where men and women were allowed to mingle freely, leading to adultery and all kinds of looseness. This was the clear opinion of the men who taught him and brought him up and he had never had either the inclination or the courage to question it.
    His rebellions had been brief and swiftly crushed. He had not liked the first day in heder , although the rebbe had tried to ply him with sweets, to sing and dance with him. He had wanted his mother and had cried for her. But, slowly, he had given up hope and understood that he must repress his feelings and soon his mother would come back to him. But she never did really. Not completely.
    From then on he was surrounded by a world of somber, bearded men: his father, uncles, grandfathers. They had taken him and shaved off all his long curls and left him only two long ones at the temples for payot . The stubble of his scalp had itched and itched until it grew in.
    And all day, from 7 A.M . until 5 or 6 P.M ., he spent bent over his books in the sunless classroom, endlessly repeating in monotonous rote the aleph-bais , the prayers, the words of the holy Torah. Until second grade he had rebelled in his heart and spent hours looking out of the window into the street, watching the men and the pretty women passing by.
    But then a new teacher entered his life.
    “You are wasting time for which you are accountable to your Creator, Isaac Meyer,” the teacher told him, pinching his ear and leading him to the corner as the children around him pointed and stared. “A person who passes by a tree and looks up to say ‘What a beautiful tree’ is deserving of death,” his teacher told him, “because he is wasting valuable time for learning Torah.”
    The teacher had a long stick that reached far. It smashed the nails of those whose attention wandered even for a second. It poked the ribs of those who prayed too quickly, without the proper concentration and devotion. It tore welts into the backsides of those whose speech included impure words. Even Hebrew was not allowed to be spoken, the language of the land. It was the language of the Zionists, the unholy men who had degraded the language of the Bible into a street language. They spoke in Yiddish, studied in Yiddish.
    He was afraid of the stick and desperately craved approval from his teachers, his parents,