Brooklyn took a long time to open her arms to me, but she finally came around. Or maybe I came around once I started discovering the murals scattered throughout the alleyways circling South 11th Street and Bedford Avenue.
I read Bedford Avenue was one of these brightening corners of the New York City boroughs, so I decided to book a temporary flat there during my next work visit and start building home there. My nook was sequestered in a sloppy building with very steep stairs, scaffolding on its outside and a C Town grocery store around the corner. As a native Long Islander, I knew the C Town food chain as a grungy store with old produce and permanently dirty floor tiles. This C Town ran more or less along the same lines.
After arriving on my first night, I took my customary nighttime walk to size up my morning commute, my closest latte, my closest park to have my shortest run, and in this exploration, I knew I found home. The Orthodox Jewish men and women pacing up and down the streets in their customary conservative black and white attire told me so.
The women with their covered heads, to minimize their beauty in front of their husbands and in turn, discourage any distraction from their study of the Torah, were alert but quiet on the streets. The little boys with the slowly growing “payes” – the curling sideburns – and their black skull caps seemed constrained but content in their small-man black suits and white dress shirts. The gender separation of a synagogue that I happen to peek into when passing an open door (I always peek in open doors) reminded me of the synagogues and mosques I saw in Jerusalem two years earlier. This community was about to get ready for its highest holy day – Yom Kippur – and I was fumbling along with a gym bag, a too-heavy computer knapsack, too-tight lululemon athletic gear and a too-open neckline from the subway for five nights straight.
I was a misfit for these men, women and children, and they were to me too. Sort of.
I am not Jewish and Wikipedia is my most recent tool for learning about the characteristics of Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn. I have barely spent any time in Brooklyn despite growing up an hour away. But I am a student of other people and other cultures. I like learning how people live, whether its in the indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian tributary waters of the Amazon or in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong where they sell shark fins illegally. Or in the predominantly Jewish quarter of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I am an endless explorer in my most familiar places and my future destinations.
My New York days run long to fit in spin classes, walk-commuting whenever possible, and social gatherings to keep me grounded from the too-many work hours this job seems to require too-often. That said, my senses were heightened as soon as I departed the Marcy Avenue subway station every evening. I was energized because I am good at being a misfit in a new place and finding my way eventually. This Orthodox neighborhood would not have considered me a “fit” for their community for obvious religious and retail reasons, but still I was delighted to bear witness to their tradition and in turn, privately celebrate my first Yom Kippur here in Brooklyn.