I’m religious enough, thank you
Hands off my soul, please!
Bracha Altshuler* wore her religion on her sleeve, and on her head too. As a Hasidic woman, she kept her arms covered almost to her wrists and her hair hidden beneath a short no-nonsense sheitel.** She worked on the other side of my acrylic-walled cubicle, one of two dozen back-office accounting proles. Bracha’s higher purpose in life made the dullness of her auditing work bearable, as she told me at the water cooler where we met, two Jewish girls in an office of Italian Catholics from Brooklyn and Queens.
Bracha went to work on me right away.
“Would you like me to find you a man to marry?” she asked me.
Bracha’s question threw me into a panic. I had just devoted four years in college to overturning eighteen years of religious instruction. My mission had been helped along by various professors who boasted about their divorces, infidelities and family estrangements, as if shame from a previous era were now milestones of a modern-day heroine’s quest. I had a sixth sense about avoiding the path my professors called “liberation,” but I dreaded reentering my childhood prison of religious prohibition.
“No,” I said, and added “thank you,” because I knew Bracha meant well. She had grown up with no exposure to religion and for several years had seen art…
