Batya
She let a cloud of smoke exit her mouth, and then rubbed her eyes and face with her left hand. The smoke didn’t come out in plumes or rings; in fact, she hardly exhaled it at all, instead just letting it fall out from between her lips in a limp cloud, as if she simply couldn’t be bothered to push out the smoke with her breath.
Her hair was similarly limp. Thin and dyed a maroon-reddish color, it just barely reached down to her shoulders—which were bare, though it could hardly be considered springtime—and it oscillated in the breeze peeling off of the tide. Her strapless top hugged her narrow chest, on top of which she wore a hoodie over her forearms and elbows, zippered up just to the base of her sternum. Her shoulders had the speckled surface of almond macaroons.
Jeremy—a rabbinical intern at the Reform Synagogue of White Plains, New York—had been uninterruptedly gazing into the depths of the Mediterranean for about an hour and a half when she sat down on the wooden bench next to him and, crossing her legs, wordlessly sparked up a joint.
Jeremy, hoping to seem occupied, opened a binder of handwritten notes. They were for a d’var torah he was scheduled to deliver later tonight during Kabbalat Shabbat services at the hostel where he and a dozen or so other rabbinical students from New York were staying on a volunteer mission to Israel. Right now they were staying at an ancient port city in the north of Israel called Akko. It was a half-Arab, half-Israeli city said his madrich—though to Jeremy it was more of a huge town than anything—and so he should be careful about his surroundings. “You aren’t in Teaneck anymore,” said their tour-guide and de-facto bodyguard in her in her Israeli accent. She was probably 17-years-old and was slinging a rifle of matte-black aluminum over her shoulder that was about half her height.
Either way, Jeremy flipped through his pages, half rereading his notes in preparation for tonight. The woman next to him began to puff away.
She uncrossed her legs and peered over Jeremy’s shoulder; apparently she could read both English and his cursive handwriting, because she said next, “it’s a good parasha this week, no?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy chuckled lightly and inched away from her. He pulled up the side of the binder that was facing her and returned to his mock reading.
“What are you shomer negiah or something?” The woman scooted over on the bench to close the distance between them.
“No, no I’m not… Yeah. It’s a good one.”
“My name is Batya. What’s yours?” Her Israeli accent was almost imperceptible.
“Jeremy—nice to you meet you Batya. Do you live here?”
“Live… in Akko? Fuck no. I’m on a business trip.”
A business trip… Jeremy darted his eyes over her body quickly and wondered what kind of business she could be in. “How wonderful.” Jeremy’s rabbinical voice always kicked in when he didn’t know what else to say.
“And you are in Akko because…” Batya met his eyes just as they traversed her right shoulder.
Jeremy returned to his binder. “I’m on a trip with a few other rabbinical students from America. We’re volunteering.”
“Tov me’od. Thank you,” she palmed her free hand over her heart—sincerely as far as Jeremy could tell—and closed her eyes. Then she took another long drag from her joint and held it in her lungs. Once again when she opened her mouth to exhale, the smoke just seemed to fall out without much motion. “Are you all um… how you say it— reformim? No—Reform?”
“How did you know I was Reform?”
“Oh, come on.” She smiled, “I can see it in your eyes, habibi.”
Jeremy blushed. “No. We’re not all Reform. Actually I’m the only one.” Jeremy considered his last few days with the group, which was actually comprised mostly of Orthodox and Conservative rabbinical students. The mission trip was supposed to be fostering ‘interdenominational collaboration,’ but so far, in Jeremy’s estimation, all that meant was that the other students collaborated in using him as the butt of every joke. He was somewhat used to being boxed out of religious spheres and so the mocking didn’t quite bother him the first few days, but this morning when he sang hamotzi over the group’s pita bread to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and everyone burst out laughing, he’d had enough. That’s how he’d ended up on the beach alone while everyone else was out touring Akko’s historic district.
“You know I grew up hareidi,” Batya said. “Those parasites can all go jump off a bridge for all I care. I didn’t fight in the army for three years just to have some curly dati tell me what I can and can’t wear out in public. I like you reformim. This country doesn’t have enough of you. Here, you’re either all the way this or all the way that. There’s no in between.”
“Really? You were ultra-orthodox?” Her wispy red hair was definitely not a wig.
“Until I was old enough to leave, yes.” Then she held out her hand with the joint in it. “You want a hit by the way? Sorry for not offering sooner.”
Jeremy considered the fact that he very well may still be high when it came time to deliver his sermon, and despite himself took the joint from Batya’s hand. “Yes, thank you.” He took a deep drag and about halfway through his inhale he felt like a piece of hot charcoal had rolled into the back of his throat. He began to cough wildly and keeled over, spasming.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s half tobacco, by the way,” she said as she grabbed the joint from his jerking hand so that he wouldn’t drop it, “we like to mix it here in this country.”
Jeremy spoke through his coughing fit, “since when do hareidim smoke weed anyway?”
“Hey! Don’t call me hareidi!” She puffed on it again. “Anyway, hareidim are all alcoholics, including my parents, so I decided to become a stoner. It only makes sense, really. Plus I was one of twelve children, so no one really cared what I did.”
When Jeremy’s coughing fit had subsided he felt a warming sensation fill his head like warm olive oil. All of a sudden he felt much closer to the shimmery sea; the water lapped right at their feet. “Why did you stop believing in god?”
“What does god have to do with being hareidi? I never said anything about god.”
“But you must’ve felt so close to Hashem… no?”
“And what makes you think that?”
“It’s just that… in America…” Jeremy felt something old and stale leaking in through the edges of his questioning.
“I don’t care what goes on in America. And I also don’t care what hareidim believe about me.”
“So you do or don’t believe in god?”
“Do or don’t… do or don’t… Are you even listening to what I’m saying?” A particularly strong and salty breeze came off the water and Batya’s hoodie plumed up like a sail.
“I am listening; I am. Can I have another…?”
She handed back the joint. “Just finish it, achi. Clearly, you need it.”
This time Jeremy managed to inhale from it several times with only a small coughing fit, and immediately afterwards the warm feeling expanded to fill his whole body; soon the edges of his skin dissolved into Akko’s humid air and whatever was bothering him about what went on ‘in America’ fell off of him in large sheets.
Batya exhaled. “I left because they didn’t care about me, only about what I believed. So I chose not to believe in anything and see who ended up sticking around.”
“And?”
“And here I am in Akko right now, of all places, with you.”
“On business?”
“Right… Nachon… On business…”
Jeremy sat basking in the warmth of the now descending sun and forgetting all about his binder, and Batya began to roll a new tobacco cigarette for herself. She spoke after licking the rolling paper and twisting it up in her narrow fingers. “Either way, these days I’m learning about god in my own way. And sometimes she tells me things. Like she just told me this, for example. Shamayim—you know, heaven—is sham and mayim, meaning there on the water.” She put the cigarette into her mouth and pointed out towards the orange, glinting horizon. “I mean just look at that. Of course that’s it!”
Jeremy followed her pointing and watched the little glowing lines break and rejoin on the water.
“But it’s not just that. Maybe heaven isn’t up there, but it’s right here—it’s just so… so… narrow that we can never get there… like a… eich omrim asymptotah?”
“Asymptote.” Jeremy nodded.
“Yes—like an asymptote! God is like that too; she’s in all the tiny little spaces between things. That’s what I’m about, you know?” Batya’s lighter flicked on inside her cupped hands and a cloud of tobacco smoke curled around and in-between her fingers.
When she let down her hands, once again Jeremy observed her let out the smoke from her lips without exhaling it. It was a curious maneuver. So focusing his vision, he peered deeper and deeper into the subtle curls and lines. In each of the tiny wisps there were many more, and inside every vortex a whole new set of vortices. And all of them were unfolding and yet spiraling inwards, still somehow floating away to god knows where, and before Jeremy knew it Batya was nowhere to be found, and it was time to deliver his sermon.
“How wonderful…” Jeremy whispered.