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Pay Attention for Goodness Sake, "Cultivating a Loving Heart "pg. 243 by Sylvia Boorstein I met a woman, recently, whose practice was making things okay. Forty years after Seymour and I left the apartment we'd lived in for the first year of our marriage, the upstairs half of a two-story brown brick duplex in Boro Park, we went back for a visit. It was a whim. We were spending five days of holiday in New York, staying in Manhattan, and one morning I said, "Let's take the subway to Brooklyn." I dressed in my most modest clothing—long skirt, long sleeves, hat covering all my hair. I knew that followers of a particular Hassidic rebbe, conservative in lifestyle, were now the primary residents of the neighborhood, and I did not want to offend. Our old street looked as I had remembered it, and our house did too, but there was now a voice intercom next to the buzzers for the two apartments. When I pressed the top button, a woman's voice said, "Hello?" "I'm here with my husband," I said. "We live in California. We lived in your apartment forty years ago." "Do you want to come up?" "We do. If it's all right." "It's okay. Come on up." At the top of the stairs we were met by a woman I thought might be ten years older than I was. Her sleeves and her skirt were as long as mine and her hair was covered by a turban. I introduced myself. She said, "I'm Ruth" and shook hands with me, but not with Seymour, since it is the custom for orthodox women not to touch men outside their family. I looked around at the kitchen, renovated and remodeled and much brighter than I remembered it, and noted the two sinks that were also a sign that this family had very strict kashrut (dietary law) observance. I also noticed that Ruth had been in the middle of eating breakfast when we arrived, and I apologized for inconveniencing her. "It's okay," she said. "Come in. I'll show you the apartment. I've been here forty years. We must have moved in just after you." Ruth walked us through the dining room, also brighter and more cheerful than ours had been, and into the living room. It was lined wall-to-wall, ceiling to floor, with bookcases of leather-bound Jewish religious texts. The bookcases were new. In 1955 the walls had been bare, we'd had two armchairs, two tray tables, and a black and white TV with rabbit ears on top. "Is your husband a scholar?" I asked. "He was," Ruth replied. "He had a business, but he also studied. He died four months ago." "I'm so sorry," I said. "Was he sick a long time?" "Not so long—a few months." Ruth paused. "He was not a complainer. If he had complained more, maybe the doctors would have taken him seriously, earlier. They could have treated him. He could have lived a while." "Are you angry?" I asked. "Not so angry," she answered. "I'm sad. And I'm lonesome a lot. So I sleep late. That's why I'm still eating breakfast." I think Ruth was startled by the sudden intimate exchange. I know I was. She said, "These things happen. Come, I'll show you the rest of the apartment." The two back bedrooms were where I remembered them to be. Ruth closed the door on the larger one, the one we'd slept in, I think to hide the as-yet unmade bed. "This is my exercise room," she said, indicating the smaller room. There was a treadmill in the middle of the room, facing a TV. "I try to walk a few miles every day," she said, "and you have to keep up with the news." I noticed that I was feeling relaxed, and very pleased. This seventy-year-old woman was not fitting any of my stereotypes of older, orthodox women. We passed framed photos of her three sons and their families in the hallway on our way back to the kitchen. I could tell by their styles of dress, and the size of their families, that they were not all equally traditionally observant. Ruth watched the way I looked at each photo, one at a time, and then back at the others. "It's okay," she said. "Everyone's different. Come sit down. Let's have coffee." I asked about Cynthia and Jack, downstairs neighbors forty years before, and their two small daughters. Ruth said that her children had grown up close friends with the two girls. "They were always running up and down between the two apartments," she said. "Was there difficulty," I asked, "about the difference in religious observance? I recall that they were not so strict…" "No. It was fine," Ruth said. "They were good people. The girls are married, and Cynthia and Jack live on Long Island. They came to my husband's funeral." We sat at the kitchen table and had coffee. "I notice you have a slight accent," I said. "Where were you born?" "I was born in Hungary." "Did you get out before the war?" I asked. "No." Ruth paused. I guessed what she was about to say. People often pause to give the listener time to prepare for what they now anticipate hearing. "I was in a camp. With my mother and father and sister. My mother died. But my sister and I survived. She was so sick and skinny with typhus I had to carry her out at the end, but we survived. My father, too. I met my husband in a Displaced Persons camp. We all came to America together. My father just died a few years ago. My sister lives near here, also in the same apartment all these years. Also had three children. Do you want some more coffee? Tell me something about you. Where do you live in California? Do you work?" "I do," I said. "I'm a psychologist." Ruth smiled. "I watch psychologist programs on TV," she said. "Do you give advice?" "Sometimes I do," I answered, a bit worried now that she might ask for some. "Well, sometimes I feel so sad, I don't get dressed all day. I don't go outside. But then I think, ‘Probably I'll be okay. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel better.' Usually I do. You think that's all right?" "I do," I said. "Did you see my vitamins?" Ruth asked, indicating the plastic compartmentalized box filled with pills and capsules, different sizes and shapes and colors, counted out for times and days of the week in front of her on the breakfast table. "I watch a health program on TV. It's called ‘New Age News.' I got the vitamin catalog from them, and I send away." "Is your health okay?" I asked. "It's okay," Ruth replied. "I have a little high blood pressure, but I take pills for it." "From a regular doctor?" "Sure, from a regular doctor. I showed him my vitamins, and he said they were okay too." Before we left Ruth asked to see a photo of my children and grandchildren. I realized, as I showed my wallet photo, that they all looked California casual, very different from Ruth's neighborhood. "Very beautiful," Ruth said. "Next time Cynthia and Jack phone, I'll tell them you were here." As Seymour and I walked through Boro Park on the way to the subway, he said, "You're unusually quiet." "I'm thinking," I replied. "I notice you didn't mention anything about being a Buddhist teacher. You said, ‘psychologist.'" "Well, I am that, too." "Were you worried that she wouldn't get it? Or that she'd be put off by you? Or that she'd think you were an imposter—dressed like her, but in fact…" "I think she would have been fine about whatever I was," I said. "What I felt ‘imposter' about was presuming to know something real about dealing with pain and loss. I was thinking Ruth could be a Buddhist teacher." "What if she had asked for advice?" "I was hoping she wouldn't. The truth is," I said, "she blew me away." A week later, I told the whole story of Ruth in Boro Park to my friend Sheila. Sheila is a rabbi and also often teaches meditation with me. "I was amazed," I said, "by Ruth's kindness. She has a lot she could be mad about, but she isn't. Without a meditation practice." "Ruth has a practice," Sheila said. I thought immediately of Ruth's lifestyle, complex and demanding in form. "Do you think the orthodoxy made her wise?" I asked. "No," Sheila replied. "Maybe it helped hold her up, but her practice is staying steady through suffering. She knows about not adding rage to her pain. She's keeping her heart open."
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