Free A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life by Dana Reinhardt

everyone just called him the Rebbe. He lived in a suburb south of Boston with his wife and seven children. That’s right. I said seven. Apparently Hasidic Jews don’t believe in birth control, but beyond that, they believe that God commands them to have tons of kids. God said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” And they do because that’s what God said. So I guess having sex is a way of serving God. (Maybe Cleo should have tried out this excuse on Jules when Jules found out that she and Darius are having sex. More on that later.) Anyway, Mordechai was the spiritual leader of this small but densely packed Hasidic community south of Boston. Hasidic Judaism, I’ve learned, because I’d never heard of it before, is a type of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. You can picture Orthodox Jews, right? All I know is that the men have big beards, heavy dark clothes, and funny hats, and the women have long skirts and bad hair. (The hair is actually a wig!
That
I didn’t know.) So Mordechai was the spiritual leader of this community, and that’s why they called him the Rebbe.
    Every Friday night and then again on Saturday morning all these Hasids would gather in the Rebbe’s rather large home and worship and pray and sometimes read from the Torah (which is what they call the first five books of the Old Testament) and listen to the Rebbe’s sermons. And basically, this started to piss off some of the Rebbe’s neighbors. Because like I said, the Rebbe lived in this suburb south of Boston. And when I said that the community was densely packed with Hasidic Jews, I meant that there were a lot more Hasidic Jews living there than there are in most other communities, like mine for instance, but I didn’t mean that there were
only
Hasidic Jews living there. In this suburb there were also tons of Irish Catholics and all sorts of other Christians and nonbelieving people like me. On the Rebbe’s street there was a businessman who commuted to the city and his schoolteacher wife, a family who owned a gardening shop, and a woman who worked out of her house selling computer software over the telephone. None of these people took kindly to the Friday night and Saturday morning parades of Hasids marching up and down their street on their way to the Rebbe’s house. So what did they do? They called the town zoning commission and ratted out the Rebbe. Because according to the zoning laws, it was forbidden to operate any kind of business, which includes a house of worship, on a residential street. And what did the Rebbe do when his disgruntled neighbors ratted him out? He called the ACLU. And that is how Mom comes into this story.
    This might seem strange given what you know about Mom and her devout atheism and her fight to get the cross removed from our town seal, but she didn’t hesitate in taking the Rebbe’s case. The ACLU, she will tell you, exists to defend the freedom and liberty of everyone. That includes protecting not only an individual’s freedom from religion but also an individual’s freedom of religion. In other words, the government shouldn’t force you into a religion like they do when they put a cross on your town seal, but they also shouldn’t prevent you from being able to practice whatever religion you choose. Mom took the case because if the Hasids of this little suburb were not allowed to worship in the Rebbe’s house, then they would have been unable to worship at all. Hasidic Jews can’t travel on the Sabbath. They can’t drive cars or take buses or taxis. They gathered at the Rebbe’s house because there was nowhere else for them to worship within walking distance of where they all lived.
     
    When Mom first met the Rebbe, she disliked him immediately.
    His wife, Hannah, led Mom into his study for their first meeting about the case. Hannah knocked gently on his door, opened it slowly, and said, “The lawyer from the ACLU is here.” My mother, twenty-eight years old and sporting a new leather briefcase, entered his poorly lit