Shiksa in Shorts, Part One of Three

The other Shabbat as I ambled past the local chabad in the neighborhood on my daily walk, I happened upon a most unusual scene.

This particular gathering place for Sabbath worshippers calls itself “Jewish Youth Library” and is on a leafy, suburban street near the corner of a fairly busy road. It also sits at the bottom of a hill on the top of which stands the high rise in which I live, so I pass it almost everyday when I leave the house. Seeing it from “above” like that as I make my way down the incline offers an interesting vantage point in terms of view. You get to look at the whole picture before telescoping further into the details. From afar it seems like a modern congregant's Breugel with a touch of Grandma Moses- grownups and children in colorful Saturday finery dotting the green landscape as members of this gathering come and go. It always imbues me with a waft of nostalgia for an illusive, earlier, simpler time; a longing for a mythical conglomeration of settings that exists only in dreams.

The chabad is housed in what easily could pass for a private residence, albeit a fairly large and newish one, with red shingles and a gabled roof. There’s a white picket fence that borders on two sides or at least a simulacra of this type of barrier made from some sort of composite material; also an outdoor, grassy play area with bright plastic toys, a slide, a red, yellow and blue kids’ climbing apparatus. A long flight of outside stairs leads to the main door located on the second level. Sometimes through the large upstairs windows you can see men davening and praying, bowing slightly as they sway back and forth. I never see any women engaged in this activity but perhaps there’s a section designated for them on the other side.

On this particular Saturday early in June the weather was pretty near perfect and services already in progress because there were no adults or children cavorting on the small, grassy play area.  Everyone was upstairs doing their thing. I was making my way down the hill and about to cross the street when I spotted the two figures. I guess the initial shock of what I saw seemed so intense, as so often happens, because of contextual factors; given the circumstances, nothing in the tableau unfolding in front of the “youth library”  jived, at all. The little scene in fact made absolutely no sense whatsoever and at first glance looked quite out of place. The entire picture blared a quality that can only be described as “naughty”- perhaps of the mild type occasionally found in slightly suggestive, soft porn cartoons. We don’t very often use that term in earnest anymore, naughty, even with children, and in some ways this is a significant loss- such a great word. . . .