The book comes to Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard in a padded envelope with no note in it, which is its own kind of note.<\/p>\n
The Mikvah Year, by Nadia Reff. Self published in November. Three hundred and eighty pages. It has sold something under a thousand copies and every woman in a certain category in this city has read it.<\/p>\n
He reads it in one night at the kitchen table and finishes at 2:40 in the morning.<\/p>\n
It is a novel. It says so on the copyright page. A woman comes out of a bad life in Phoenix at thirty one and decides to become a Jew, and it takes her six years, and she does not make it.<\/p>\n
Three of the men in it he knows.<\/p>\n
He knows the first by a phrase. The rabbi in the book tells her that a convert has no family and that the family she has is the obstacle, and that until she can go a full year without calling her mother she is not ready. Grossbard has heard a living man say that sentence at a conference in Sherman Oaks in 2016 and has heard him say it as though it were Torah.<\/p>\n
He knows the second by the arrangement. The rabbi in the book puts her in an apartment. He pays part of the rent out of a discretionary fund and tells her it is a scholarship and tells her not to mention it to the office. She stops working. She helps him with his correspondence. She is in the country on a tourist visa that lapses in month nine.<\/p>\n
He knows the third by the car. Everything in that chapter happens in a car after ten at night, driving, because a car with two people in it moving through Los Angeles is not a room and does not have a door and cannot be walked out of.<\/p>\n
He does not recognize the fourth one, and lies in bed at four in the morning working on it, and that is the worst part of the night, because it means there are four.<\/p>\n
None of this is news to him. He wants that on the record with himself before he does anything.<\/p>\n
He has known since 1998. He knew before he had a pulpit. Every rabbi in Los Angeles who has been here longer than a decade and has been paying any attention at all knows a version of it, and the men who run conversions know the most detailed version, and the reason is that they talk to each other.<\/p>\n
Here is what a beit din for conversion has in front of it. A woman, usually alone, usually not from here, frequently from a bad home or a bad marriage or a bad decade, who wants something she cannot get anywhere else and can only get from the men in that room. There is no appeal. There is no deadline. There is no published standard. A dayan can tell her she is not ready and give no reason, for a year, for three years, and no one on earth can make him say why. She cannot go across town, because the men across town take his calls. Her family thinks she has lost her mind and she has stopped calling them anyway, because somebody told her to.<\/p>\n
That is the most concentrated unaccountable power a man can hold in Jewish communal life and it is held over the most isolated person in the building.<\/p>\n
Grossbard has said this out loud to exactly two people in twenty seven years and both of them were women he was warning.<\/p>\n
He starts making calls on Monday.<\/p>\n
The first is to a dayan he has known for twenty years and respects, and the conversation lasts nine minutes.<\/p>\n
“Is there a complainant.”<\/p>\n
“There’s a novel.”<\/p>\n
“Shlomo.”<\/p>\n
“There are four women in this book and at least three of them exist.”<\/p>\n
“Is there a complainant.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“Then there is nothing in front of me. There is no case. There is no file. There is no procedure that begins with a rabbi calling me about a paperback.” The old man’s voice is not unkind. “Bring me a woman who will sit in a room and say it and I will convene. I have never refused to convene.”<\/p>\n
“You know none of them will sit in that room.”<\/p>\n
“I know.”<\/p>\n
“You know why.”<\/p>\n
“Yes,” the dayan says. “I have known why for a long time. Bring me a woman.”<\/p>\n
The second call is to a colleague his own age, a serious man who runs a serious shul, and this one takes an hour and Grossbard drives to his house to do it.<\/p>\n
The colleague agrees with every word. He names one of the same men without being prompted. He tells a story from 2013 that Grossbard has never heard and will never repeat.<\/p>\n
“So sign something.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“Yoni.”<\/p>\n
“I have four children in day school and a mortgage on a house the shul holds title to, and the president of my board davens with that man’s brother in law.” He does not look away when he says it. “I’m telling you what I am. I’m not going to dress it up for you.”<\/p>\n
“That’s the most honest thing anybody’s said to me this month.”<\/p>\n
“It doesn’t help you.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
The third call is to the umbrella body, which responds within eleven days by proposing a working group on best practices in conversion oversight, and the proposed working group has seven members, and one of them is the man from the car.<\/p>\n
At the end of two weeks he has learned the shape of the thing and it is the shape he knew it would be. Nobody is protecting anybody out of loyalty. There is no conspiracy in that room. It is simpler and worse. Half the men who could act have something of their own, and the half who have nothing have children in schools that the first half fund, and every one of them believes, correctly, that a public fight would cost him more than it would cost the men he was fighting.<\/p>\n
Marla Feig, who is eighty two, says the sentence to him at the January board meeting.<\/p>\n
“They won’t move for you, Shlomo.”<\/p>\n
“Some of them agree with me.”<\/p>\n
“All of them agree with you.” She has her purse in her lap. “You’ve stood on a bimah for twenty years telling this city that every man in it is running a play and nobody is clean and everybody has a rate card. You made it impossible to be shocked. Now you need shock.”<\/p>\n
He sits with that for a second.<\/p>\n
“Yes,” he says.<\/p>\n
“You built the room you’re standing in.”<\/p>\n
“I know what I built.”<\/p>\n
Adina Reiss comes to the office on a Thursday afternoon in February and closes the door, which she has never done.<\/p>\n
She converted four years ago. She is in the Wednesday class and the Thursday class and she asks the hardest question in the room once a month, and Grossbard sent her, in 2021, to a beit din he had used for fifteen years.<\/p>\n
She tells him what happened in the eight months before her mikvah. She tells it in order and she does not cry and she stops twice.<\/p>\n
It is not the worst version. It is the ordinary version. A hand, a suggestion, a comment about her clothes, a comment about her body, an offer of private study at night, a delay of six months after she said no, and a second man in the same building who told her the first man was difficult and that he could speed things along.<\/p>\n
She finished. She has never told anyone. She has sat forty feet from Grossbard every Wednesday for four years.<\/p>\n
“Why didn’t you tell me.”<\/p>\n
“Because you sent me there,” she says. “And because you’d have done something, and if you did something I don’t get to be Jewish.”<\/p>\n
Grossbard puts both hands on the desk and does not say anything for a while, which is not a thing he does.<\/p>\n
“What do you want,” he says. “Whatever it is, that’s what happens. You say the word and I go to the dayan tomorrow morning and we convene and I sit next to you the whole time. You say a different word and I never mention this again as long as I live.”<\/p>\n
“I want to finish the mesechta,” Adina says. “That’s what I want. I’ve wanted it for two years and I’m not giving it up for those men.”<\/p>\n
“Then that’s the answer and I’ll never raise it again.”<\/p>\n
“You’ll want to.”<\/p>\n
“I’ll want to every day.”<\/p>\n
Here is what he does, because it is what is left.<\/p>\n
He stops sending anybody anywhere. Every candidate the Barn sponsors goes to one beit din whose three members he has known for thirty years and can vouch for with his own name, and when that beit din is slow, which it is, the candidates wait, and when they ask him why they cannot use the faster one in the Valley he tells them the truth in his office with the door open.<\/p>\n
He puts a woman in the process. Every candidate meets first with Shira Belfer, who drives in from Hancock Park twice a month for no money, and no candidate ever sits alone in a room with any man in this building including Grossbard, and the door stays open, and the appointments are on a calendar the office keeps.<\/p>\n
And at the first meeting he says a thing out loud, in words, to each woman, which is the part that nobody else in this city will do.<\/p>\n
He gets frozen out inside a year. Two conversions he sponsors get questioned in Israel on the grounds that the sponsoring rabbi has become unreliable, and one woman has to redo eleven months of work, and she is the one who pays for what he did, which is how it goes and which he does not tell her.<\/p>\n
He keeps a notebook in the desk drawer with names in it and it will never be published and it is not for publication. About nine times a year somebody calls him, a rabbi in Denver, a woman in Toronto, a mother in Encino whose daughter has started studying with somebody, and asks him what he knows about a particular man, and he tells them, on the phone, on the record, with his name attached, and he has been told twice by a lawyer that this is unwise.<\/p>\n
In April a woman named Kaila Devine comes in for a first meeting. Thirty four, from Reno, works in veterinary imaging, and she has been at this for seven months with a man in the Valley and has come to Grossbard because somebody told her to.<\/p>\n
Shira Belfer sits in. The door is open.<\/p>\n
“Before anything else,” Grossbard says. “Some rules, and they’re mine, and you can go somewhere else if you don’t want them. You never meet a rabbi alone. Not in an office with the door shut, not in his home, not in a car, not after dark, not at a hotel, not ever, and that includes me and this door stays open. Nobody in this process tells you to stop calling your mother. Nobody in this process gets you an apartment. Nobody in this process employs you. Nobody touches you. Nobody comments on your body or your clothing except Shira, who will tell you what to wear because that’s her job.”<\/p>\n
Kaila Devine writes none of it down.<\/p>\n
“And here’s my cell phone. It’s on at night. If anything happens that you have to think about afterward, you call me that night, not the next week, and I will believe you, and I’ll say that part again so you have it. I will believe you.”<\/p>\n
She sits there for a moment.<\/p>\n
“Why are you telling me this.”<\/p>\n
“Because a woman I know went through it and sat in my class for four years without telling me,” Grossbard says. “I’d like those four years back. I can’t have them.”<\/p>\n
She takes the number and puts it in her phone.<\/p>\n
After she goes, Shira Belfer stays to write up the file, and Grossbard walks out to the lot and stands there a while, and then he goes back in, because the Thursday class starts at nine and Adina Reiss is eleven pages from the end of the mesechta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The book comes to Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard in a padded envelope with no note in it, which is its own kind of note. The Mikvah Year, by Nadia Reff. Self published in November. Three hundred and eighty pages. It has … Continue reading