You never realize how accustomed your eye grows to a familiar variety of human species in a particular place, including that place’s indigenous freaks and weirdos, until a bizarre specimen native to elsewhere suddenly gets lost and wanders in and skews the mix. In Jerusalem, for example, who even bothers to look up when a prophet in the throes boards the light rail at the Mount Herzl military cemetery, or when a messiah in white robes astride a white donkey trots down Jaffa Road past the municipal center blowing his horn? A disorientation of this sort occurred not so long ago in the environs of Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market, when an extraordinary type began regularly to appear such as might be considered entirely normal and not meriting a second glance in the streets of New York City or San Francisco, but in Jerusalem would be a certified misfit and oddity, distorting the landscape utterly.

From the shoulder and up this was a specimen taller than everyone else, husky in body, the face coated with a foundation base to mask the stubble that nevertheless relentlessly bored through, topped by a long wig with bangs fashioned from synthetic rodent-brown hair and a black felt pillbox hat for an added head covering. To the unclouded eye the specimen was male, yet dressed even so in a modest long black skirt from under which two giant feet in ladies’ pale-pink sneakers protruded, and to complete the ensemble a loose oversize sweater suggesting protrusions and indentations by blurring them, the entire outfit accessorized with a matching beige plastic handbag. For the zealots who absorbed her existence (yes, we honor her gender preference), the inconsistencies were non-negotiable, since as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy, a man is forbidden to put on the garments of a woman, this is abhorrent to God. What difference did it make if the cross-dressing male decked himself out as a devout woman of faith? It is a sin.

Still, apart from the discordance of her costume, in every other respect she seemed to conduct herself in public as befits a decent Jewish matron, and except for the disturbance in the field of her very presence itself, she made no trouble at all. In good weather she passed much of the day sitting on a bench in one of the small courtyard parks of the gentrified Nachlaot neighborhood across from the market, her head bent over a miniature Book of Psalms, now and then drawing out from her plaid shopping wagon a dented tin can with a faded Beit Hashita pickles label still stuck to it, thrusting it out toward a passerby who might drop in a shekel or, as regrettably happened a number of times, spit into the can in an expression of righteous disapproval. In the evening she rolled the cart into the market to stock up on some fruits and vegetables and maybe half a loaf of bread and a piece of pink herring as a treat, radically reduced in price at the close of the business day. Nobody knew where she lived—definitely not in new-age Nachlaot, which, unless she was a mad mogul in disguise, would have been well beyond her plastic pocketbook’s clasp. Local mystics claimed she descended every night into a cell underground where the forgotten sisters burrowed and from which they sometimes flashed forth when the streets emptied out to scavenge among the rotting leftovers. Nor did anyone know her name, though a recent returnee to the faith married to the only man in Nachlaot who did not own a guitar reported that on one occasion she had “reached out” to this lost soul and had ventured to ask. What followed was a reddening of the face burning fiercely even through the layers of skin paste studded with bristle, a sputtering denoting an effort to control spasms bordering dangerously on rage, as if a sacred line had been crossed into a forbidden zone, as if the questioner had taken an impermissible liberty, violated a hallowed privacy, dared to inquire after the name and all the secrets it revealed—Rumpelstiltskin? Yahweh? The Tetragrammaton itself, never to be pronounced out loud? At last a hormonally unmistakable voice was heard. Call me Boosha, it resonated—on the face of it a proper feminine-sounding name with an “ah” ending. Yet, as everyone knows, boosha means shame.

The curious fact is that even when she lived in America, when she was a boy growing into a man among the insular, ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidim in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, no one seemed to know his name either (we are now officially regressing to the birth-assignment pronoun). Even from his first day at cheder, when he was only three years old and his hair was cut for the first time (silken blond curls that his mother kept in a bag with the first shearing of all his brothers), everyone called him Schulman, which of course was his surname. He had been a sizable child, from the start bulkier than average on the growth chart, tending toward a corporeal sponginess, and it was said that his own father also called him Schulman—Schulman 11, as that was his number in a family of fifteen offspring. In his early twenties, however, he acquired a title—Rabbi—conferred upon him by the head of his small yeshiva—a private seminary operating from the basement of a split-level house in the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York—who, by virtue of having been certified in Jewish law, had earned the right to lay on hands and transmit to his students the title along with the clerical privilege to teach and instruct on all matters forbidden and permitted. In this way Schulman transitioned into Rabbi Schulman and, for all intents and purposes, Rabbi became his first name. In his rabbinical practice, he inclined toward ruling on the forbidden, that was his preference; when in doubt, he played it safe and forbade. Yet everyone agreed that in matters of law he could be relied upon for scrupulousness and incorruptibility.

It goes without saying that he never served as the type of synagogue rabbi familiar to most enlightened audiences, enthroned up there on an elevated platform in front of the congregation, draped in a rich prayer shawl and skullcap, now and then approaching the podium to announce in pontifical tones, Please turn to page such-and-such in your prayer books, All members rise, and so on. In fact, in his entire career he never held a pulpit at all, spending the major portion of the first two decades of his rabbinical service primarily as a pitifully underpaid teacher of aleph-bet and of basic holy studies and religious practice to very young boys. He was known for his strictness, even physically striking on occasion the troublemakers and daydreamers, sometimes using a ruler or a strap with the full approval of the parents, yet he was also appreciated for what was regarded as his kind heart. Passersby would marvel at how on the hottest days of the year, when the children were running around like liberated chickens and playing so intensely in the yard during their recess, their side curls plastered to their red flushed faces, fringed ritual garments clinging with sweat to their soaked white shirts, he would shuttle tirelessly back and forth, filling and refilling a watering can and sprinkling the boys with water as if they were flowers. He also had a side job, for which he was paid nothing at all but which mattered to him vitally, endowing his days and especially his nights with drama and life, filling him with purpose. He was a Hatzolah volunteer, a first responder in his local free ambulance service, the original Williamsburg branch that had pioneered the whole movement dedicated to the rapid emergency rescue of all people in distress regardless of race or religion but, as everyone knew, specializing in Jewish troubles and afflictions, which its Jewish volunteers knew so personally from the inside and therefore could handle with impeccable precision and delicacy.

It was because of Schulman’s acts of loving-kindness that, when finally, after much searching, a wife was found for him and it was deemed necessary that he earn a proper living to support his future family, God willing, community leaders banded together and found for him a respectable job to go with the wife, drawing on their connections and clout even outside their immediate tight circles to arrange for him to be hired by the local Modern Orthodox rabbinical council to serve as the official shaliach in its divorce court. It was a job for which he was judged to be perfectly qualified, as he was neither deaf, dumb, nor blind, he was not a heathen or an imbecile, and so on as stipulated, he had a beard and side curls that proclaimed him to be reassuringly authentic, the real thing, and he also had his rabbinical degree as a seal of authority. What the job entailed was to stand in as the agent for a man who, for one reason or another, could not personally be present to hand the divorce document to his wife as was mandated. Maybe the guy was too busy, maybe he had moved to a different country, maybe he just couldn’t bear the sight of her one second longer. In such cases—and they occurred far more often than anyone might have imagined—Schulman would act as the designated agent or proxy on the divorcer’s behalf.

He was in his early forties when he was married, well past the recommended age of eighteen for a man to stand under the wedding canopy, though eighteen, as it happened, was how old his bride was, more than two decades younger than him, plucked fresh from another generation. Everyone looked at each other and asked the obvious question—Nu, so what’s wrong with her?—and especially because she was from such an illustrious family, a descendant of the Hasidic Chernobyl Rebbe—The Chernobyler himself—under normal circumstances the most aristocratic of husbands in her own age bracket from the most distinguished of dynasties would have been found for her. But then there were the rumors, already bouncing along the airwaves for at least two years, that she had been caught more than once at a public library or in a profane café rapt in front of a computer screen, which was strictly forbidden and for good reason, that she had been seen talking to boys and other strays outside the local kosher pizza store and at other even less savory venues, and that on another occasion she had been spotted standing in line with all kinds of lowlife and bums waiting to get into a live concert of some pagan sort in Greenwich Village, a place with a reputation and fate even worse than Sodom. Clearly this was an emergency, something needed to be done instantly to save her, the obvious solution was to marry her off at once.

Her name was Basha, and to her mother and everyone else’s surprise, when she was shown a picture of Schulman as potential husband material, she stared at it for a long time and did not make a face or stick a finger down her throat as if she were gagging, as some girls in their bridal hour had been known to do when presented with potential candidates. In contrast, Basha for her part merely shrugged and said, Why not? Since the hot weather had already set in, it was then proposed that, because this was such an important life decision not to be taken lightly, just to be certain, she station herself across the street from the schoolyard and observe how Schulman so sweetly watered the boys. Basha stood there and watched for less than a minute, then turned to the matchmaker who had accompanied her and said, Okay, sure, he can shpritz me too.

She did not mean this in any way irreverent or flippant or lascivious, God forbid, the matchmaker insisted when she recounted Basha’s response during Sabbath prayers behind the opaque screen in the ladies’ section of the synagogue. She meant it in the most positive way: Schulman would cultivate her, he would help her to sprout and blossom into a proper woman of valor. After all, he was nearly legendary for his rescue work as a Hatzolah volunteer. So now he would save Basha too, not only her body but more crucially her soul. He was more than twice her age, a fact that did not escape Schulman himself, friends with whom he had grown up and had sat beside on the same bench learning in yeshiva for years already had daughters as old as she, already married, already pushing double strollers down Lee Avenue. Nor did it go unnoticed by Schulman himself as well as by others that his marriage inauspiciously aligned with the start of his new job in the divorce court, essentially falling within the same window of time. Well-meaning people rejected the notion that this coincidence was a bad omen, insisting instead that as a certified rescuer who in his Hatzolah role pulls the victim out of the lowest depths to full recovery, Schulman would also extract from his daily immersion in the scum of divorce the wisdom that is required to maintain the good health of a marriage.

In the divorce court, as it turned out, it wasn’t such a casual matter for Schulman to face one strange woman after another standing there opposite him with her hands cupped together in front of her like a beggar as she had been instructed to do by the presiding Modern Orthodox rabbi, into which, acting for the husband, he, Schulman, was obliged to drop the get document after speaking on the husband’s behalf the words, You are hereby permitted to all men. Certainly he was not offended by this ancient formulation for the sake of the woman, like some unnatural and perverse male feminist acting against his own interests; it would in fact never have occurred to him to see anything amiss with this statement. After all, the Torah states that only a man has the power to initiate a divorce, he could get rid of his wife for a good reason or for no reason at all—because she burned his soup, because he woke up one morning and found her repulsive, that’s just how it was, straightforward, plain and simple. Schulman was only affirming the obvious as the husband’s spokesman, he was releasing her to go her way, he was letting it be known to all and sundry that she was available, that she would get what she deserved.

Yet it happened to him more than once that when he spoke those words, glancing down from under his brow at the soon to be divorced female standing across from him with her supplicant’s hands cupped together, he would see his own wife Basha there in her place like an apparition, her small form modestly attired as is required and her head encased in a proper matron’s wig with a little hat perched on top. It would be Basha there with her hands out assuming the position to receive the bill of divorce, lifting it up as instructed to acknowledge receipt, acceptance, then tucking it under her arm against the warmth and privacy of her body as if claiming the document as her own personal property, turning her back, the backside of a woman that strangers ogle automatically as their inalienable right, and walking a few paces down the runway symbolically into the future, marked forever as a discarded woman. Quickly he would seek to cast off the intrusion of this vision—what did the thoughts such as they were of Basha or any other female matter in a situation involving grave religious strictures? Even more acutely, it troubled him that these disturbing Basha emanations in the divorce court meant that in his heart he felt himself to be the unfortunate husband of a problem female, a girl suffering from influences.

Not that he knew for a fact that she might have opinions deviant or otherwise on this or on any subject. They never discussed such lofty matters, or, as was proper, rarely talked at length or in depth about anything other than basic day-to-day household operations and schedules, they were separated not only by sex, which was hazardous enough, but also by years, a nearly insurmountable gap. She left their apartment early to attend her occupational therapy training program, the perfect career choice for the lifestyle of an observant Jewish woman looking forward to the blessing of a large family—flexible hours and workplaces, some much appreciated extra income as the secondary wage earner, it made such practical sense, everyone was astonished that she had chosen this sensible profession but at the same time they were delighted, thrilled, relieved, the realities of marriage had matured her as is inevitably the outcome sooner or later. And while Schulman continued his volunteer work at Hatzolah, which regularly summoned him out of his warm bed at all hours of the night, so, too, Basha staggered into her cold bed often past midnight after fulfilling her requirements as an OT on-call intern, depleted from her labors nurturing the disabled and the injured, she turned her back, drew the quilt over her head, curled up, and, like the child she was, instantly fell asleep, breathing so softly. When it happened that Schulman would venture past the nightstand separating their two beds and alarm her with a tap on the shoulder, almost invariably she would mumble that it was, you know, her time of the month, or that she had not found a free moment yet to go to the mikvah and immerse herself in compliance with the laws of family purity—Sorry Schulman, not tonight. Once again he was reminded of how irregular she was as he plodded back to his own barren bed. In this way more than a year passed since the wedding, and still nothing doing, as the neighborhood chorus intoned.

He threw himself more intensely into his job as the shaliach in the rabbinic court, devoting an unprecedented amount of time to painstakingly checking the twelve lines of the bill of divorce written by the scribe in the husband’s name, on whose behalf he, Schulman, was acting. Because of his meticulousness in examining the document, the entire divorce procedure often stretched well beyond the two hours or so allotted for it, slowing down the assembly line, the two male witnesses flipping back the cuffs of their suit jackets and glancing at their watches over and over again as Schulman, heedless, went on with his checking. Opposite him as he checked sat the soon to be ex-wife, usually accompanied for emotional support by a female family member or friend, both women wringing their hands or panting in agitation as Schulman sat at the table poring over the get, his head bent over the writing, entirely oblivious to their distress. It was not uncommon for one or even both of the women to spontaneously burst out crying, clutching each other as they sobbed and not letting go, and there was even an occasion when the wife waiting to be released passed out completely, slid off her chair onto the floor and banged her head, requiring emergency medical intervention from Schulman as a certified Hatzolah volunteer, immediate ambulance transport to the hospital, where she received thirteen stitches, forcing the prolongation of her marriage due to the need to reschedule her divorce appointment.

Letter by letter, pointing with a thick finger, Schulman went over those twelve lines of the get written by the scribe in Aramaic, checking for errors, focusing in particular on the accuracy of the names of the divorcing parties and the names of their fathers, of the city in which the divorce was taking place and its nearest bodies of water, of the date, so that there could never be any doubt that it was the divorce of this couple and of no other couple on the face of the earth. When Schulman would spot something suspicious, he would get up and shuffle, head lowered, to the next room, where the scribe sat ready with ink and quill to make a correction, at times minor, but on other occasions requiring even a complete rewrite at Schulman’s behest as the husband’s emissary. He would vanish for an excruciating stretch of time, like a surgeon privately consulting with colleagues and other experts, examining with them the images and test results, reappearing at last to face those condemned to wait with the fatal diagnosis and give them the news.

Complaints began to pour in, but the Modern Orthodox court was loathe to dismiss such a genuine article as Schulman for what could only be interpreted as exemplary piety—to do so would certainly not reflect well on their institution. As a consequence of this situation, however, more and more wives tried to outsource—to request that proxies be appointed to accept the get on their behalf, which remarkably was their right. Now when the husband showed up but not the wife, Schulman was obliged as the official court shaliach to act as her surrogate, to take on her role, to be her agent, all of this, as Schulman knew, possible according to the oral law. And in those instances when both the husband and the wife failed to appear, the court usually opted to assign to Schulman the role of the wife, since the wife’s part involved nothing potentially more complex or time-consuming than to receive the document—to just take it and walk. A surrogate was then found to serve as the agent on the husband’s behalf, male or female, incredibly it made no difference at all, either was acceptable. Schulman had even heard of a case in which a woman acting as the shaliach for the husband delivered the get to a wife who turned out to be herself, a feat of acrobatics too twisted to imagine, a mockery. It was a sordid business, he had not expected this. It had never been explicitly stated in the job description that he could be put in the position of impersonating the woman, acting as the woman’s understudy receiving the document from another woman playing the man, who more and more now when he ventured to look had Basha’s face. On the deepest level, Schulman felt himself to be defiled and ridiculed by his participation in the whole process, the butt of a joke perpetrated by the too-clever Talmudists seeking to one-up each other with preposterous possibilities, having their fun at Schulman’s expense.

Yet even in that dark hour at least there was Hatzolah, and it was there that Schulman sought refuge. Spiritually, the rescue service now was rescuing him, delivering him from the mire, not letting him sink—deep down Schulman recognized this truth. He dedicated himself to Hatzolah with even greater ardor than before, never failing to remind the dispatchers of his complete full-time availability, nothing was more important than coming to the rescue of the sick, the wounded, the victims of water, fire, sword, wild beasts, pogroms, and so on, he craved the jolt of the radio summons to an emergency day or night, it was a reprieve from the confusion of his life. And even though such a call inevitably heralded the suffering of another human being or, in drawing him away from the court, prolonged the torment of a marriage by interrupting or even postponing a divorce procedure already scheduled or in progress, it nevertheless goes without saying that saving a life—and how much more so the life of a fellow Jew—always takes precedence, as everyone knows, trumping even the Sabbath. Indeed, the Sabbath was usually one of Hatzolah’s busiest times, possibly due to the overeating that was among the highlights of the day—heart attacks, strokes, ulcer flare-ups, complete prostration due to the cholent and the kugel. Babies were also known to be born on the Sabbath, they were not always so considerate as to wait for a weekday when it is permissible to drive or be driven to the hospital, women in their capricious way went into labor on the Sabbath and holidays too, even Yom Kippur. Regardless what day, he, Schulman, and his partner, Kaplan from the hardware store, always got the job done, in the worst-case scenario, with as much modesty and discretion as was humanly possible, especially when dealing with those ladies from the community who were giving birth to their eighth or twelfth or to their number-who’s-counting, which always came fast and faster, they practically spit them out—only not, as Kaplan liked to remind him, you should excuse me, not from the mouth. Schulman and Kaplan were a team. For their dedication and overall excellence they had been rewarded with the distinction of being assigned their own ambulance, their own designated gleaming red-and-white chariot of healing with the shield on each door, donated by professor dr. mendy pfeffer, phd and family. There was nothing better than riding to the rescue together in the Pfeffer ambulance, bonding in their sealed vehicle, men only (not counting now and then the patient who of course by definition was a nonparticipant), their response time was unmatched, they knew their territory cold. In their day-to-day life they might be treated like losers, but in the ambulance they were heroes whom everyone in trouble awaited, like the messiah, yet unlike the messiah, they actually arrived.

Schulman’s territory encompassed the Williamsburg of his childhood, the very area in which he had lived his entire life and where he still resided as a married man with Basha his wife. He knew this territory like the back of his hand, backward and forward, every street and alley, every apartment and hole in the wall. His partner Kaplan was sensitive enough never to risk insulting him unforgivably by turning on the GPS when racing together to a call, sirens blaring—GPSchulman, he called him. Directed by Schulman they never failed to pull up to the exact destination in record time. Schulman also knew his clientele inside out, mostly Satmar Hasidim who kept themselves so apart except by necessity when it came to business and money, reaching in rather than reaching out, his own people, their aches and pains, which one was a chronic complainer and which a real case demanding extreme alertness, the subtleties and nuances of handling them professionally yet respectfully. It’s true of course that Hatzolah was committed to transporting not only Jews, generously it answered the cry of all, whoever was in need or distress, the mixed mob, free emergency ambulance service for all as stated in the Declaration of Independence. But as it happened Schulman’s Williamsburg territory was almost entirely Jewish, even on the other side of Broadway that the kids had taken over, the hipsters and the artistes with their cafés and clubs who were such a dangerous influence on the pious youth on the good side still following the correct path—even those spoiled brats in their ironic black clothing and thrift shop rags were almost all Jewish, with Jewish papas who paid top dollar for the wrecked apartments and broken-down storefronts they bought and redecorated so outrageously without even wall-to-wall carpeting, almost one hundred percent of this now wildly overpriced real estate owned as it happened by the Satmars from the other God-fearing side. In any case, most of these hipsters were still young and in general did not require the service of an ambulance; in their pride and arrogance they weren’t yet afflicted with the ailments that would inevitably catch up with them in time as Schulman knew very well, the kinds of urgent breakdowns that made up the bulk of his business from the side where he and the faithful dwelt. There was the occasional bicycle accident on the hipster side, more often a substance abuse issue such as a drug reaction or overdose. Most of the time these kids didn’t know better and dialed 9-1-1, but if by chance they called Hatzolah, which usually occurred when the victim was a former Satmar seduced by these sinners now rightfully getting what he or maybe even she deserved, certainly Schulman and Kaplan swung into action at once and got the job done.

So when a call came that summer after midnight from one of the fabulously high-priced boutique hotels that had sprung up on the hipster side that a kid had fallen into the swimming pool at some kind of party on the roof and they were having problems getting his breathing going, Schulman and Kaplan grabbed their gear and set out at once. “Probably from all that junk they stick up their noses or into their you-know-whats,” Kaplan was saying in the car when the phone rang. It was Srulik, the owner of the hotel, who sat in the front row in Schulman’s shul, one of the wealthiest members of their community. “What’s taking you so long?” Srulik was yelling in Yiddish. “Do you realize who this kid’s father is in the mayor’s office? We’re gonna lose all our benefits if you don’t get here this minute, and I’m gonna be sued right out of my gatkes.”

They arrived at the hotel in almost no time and ran up the stairs, maybe ten flights, lugging all their equipment, including the oxygen, which Kaplan as a paramedic had been trained to administer. With the lights flashing, the music blasting almost as loud as at a Jewish wedding, the DJ on the mic pulsating nonstop, kids naked and almost naked dancing in what looked like an ecstatic trance, like Hasidim in the aura of their rebbe, writhing and jerking in the pool and out, their eyeballs rolled back in their heads, it was difficult at first to identify the injured party. The bouncer at the entrance, bigger even than Schulman, a giant like an unmovable boulder, finally detached from his guard position and led them to the casualty—a skinny kid with a Star of David tattoo on the side of his neck retching between two lounge chairs, surrounded by some misfits unable to grasp the party spirit, one of them trying perfunctorily to administer a version of CPR or some other type of lifesaving technique, maybe Chinese or holistic.

Schulman and Kaplan cleared the area and went to work at once as the music kept on pounding. The kid would make it. Thank God, he’ll live, Kaplan muttered grimly. Even so, Kaplan intubated him through the nose as a precaution, maybe simply because he could, or maybe just to teach the kid a lesson. They lashed him to a stretcher to transport him to the hospital to be checked out and triaged into the detox system most probably, paying no attention at all to the crowd amassing around them as always happened when they worked—humans were drawn to disasters like flies to fresh dung—until one of these bystanders raised her female voice and cried out, “Stop the music, I need to say something!” By some miracle, silence descended, and Schulman looked up. It was the voice of a young woman standing arm in arm with another girl, both of them wearing only what looked like their underwear, wet patches almost transparent barely covering their essential power points. For some reason, as would happen to him in the divorce court, she morphed before his eyes into the image of his wife Basha, but of course this could not have been Basha because Basha was at her occupational therapy on-call internship, and anyway he had never seen Basha standing up in or out of her underwear wet or dry, and certainly he had never seen her standing up outside in the open air practically naked, which no good Jewish woman would ever do except when being rounded up and shot by Nazis.

“Listen up, guys,” she was articulating slowly, as if dredging up an entirely new thought, never before brought to light. “This is so wow. Unbelievable. This big guy here with the cool beard and cute ear curls? He’s my guy, it’s Schulman, like, I’m like married to him. Yeah, this dude is my husband according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” She passed a little giggle. “And for your information, Schulman here doesn’t just rescue assholes stoned out of their minds flipping into pools, no way,” she went on, one word dragging after another. “He’s my rescuer too. For sure. He rescued me from my house of bondage, the house of my mother and father. He was my ticket out. Marrying Schulman, that was the first step out the door. And guess what? He’s also a divorce guru. So next step he gives me my divorce and—walla!—I’m gone, totally, one hundred percent. Free at last! Thank God Almighty—and thank you, Schulman! Schulman, you’re my hero. Stand up and take a bow, Schulman. Let everyone see you, man.” As if from behind a screen, like a cataract clouding his vision, they were all smiling at him, applauding. Schulman wondered if it was because he had actually taken a bow. Could he really have been swayed to do such a thing? Jews do not bow down to humans or idols, only to God is it permissible.

The divorce took place within the month at the Modern Orthodox rabbinic court. Neither Schulman nor Basha made a personal appearance. Each was represented by a proxy, both women. To Schulman it seemed as if forces beyond his control were more and more conspiring to assign to him the role of a woman, reducing him for his sins to a woman, sending him a message. In such a debased form it was no longer possible for him to remain in his holy community. There is only one place a Jew can go when everywhere else he turns he is degraded, even a Satmar Jew who rejects the existence of the Zionist state as heresy and continues to faithfully await the coming of the messiah at the appointed hour. Schulman made his way to Israel as to a prison, to serve out his life sentence as a woman.

As Schulman was sitting hunched on a bench in Nachlaot one morning some years later beside the plaid shopping wagon, reading over and over again from the miniature Book of Psalms the verse “God will help her at the approach of morning,” two women approached, one of them with a baby harnessed to her breast. Boldly the mother with her baby approached and said, “Schulman, you’ve transitioned. Mazel tov!”

What is this “transitioned”? Schulman was thinking, but Basha did not elaborate, she only went on to introduce her girlfriend as her wife, another incomprehensible revelation, and the baby trussed to her chest as their daughter, Menachem Nachum, named for her famous ancestor, the Chernobyl Rebbe. Then Basha looked at Schulman, not without tenderness, and said, “Well, maybe you’re just gender-fluid, Schulman. That’s also okay. Whatever your choice—male, female, all or none of the above—it’s all good.”

Schulman did not know what gender-fluid was, maybe some kind of liquid having to do with matters decent people do not discuss except with a licensed practitioner. Schulman also did not think it was all good. From the earliest years of her life she had sat among the men and boys reciting the morning blessings, thanking God for not having made her a woman—so how could it be all good? Women were God’s afterthought. She wanted to explain this to Basha but did not know if it was permissible to prolong the conversation as they no longer were married. But then she remembered that now they both were women in the eyes of the world, it was only women’s talk, of no account, so she said, “Against my will I have been turned into a woman. It is my punishment, my penance. See what has become of me.”