The Human Spirit: Sight and Insight

By Barbara Sofer

She examined her face. Her hair had gone gray. The furrows that marked aging had been plowed across her forehead and chin. "Hello, Mom," she said, smiling at the unfamiliar woman in the mirror. Lieba Schwartz hadn't seen herself for 20 years, since before she went blind.

I'm visiting with a friend in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home of the Lubavitcher Hassidim. Snow dusts the brownstones on this cold American winter. We walk over to visit Lieba Schwartz, an animated, outgoing woman who lives nearby in an uncluttered flat in an apartment building. She welcomes us, shows us new purchases in her growing home library. She's discovered a source of second-hand books and is filling the shelves with the religious texts for which her thirst is unquenchable.

"When you're blind, you forget how to read and write" she says. "You get it back gradually."

Lieba was born as Marcia Schwartz in 1940. Her parents moved around a lot in her childhood. Even as a kid, she sought spirituality. "Who is God? Where is God" she remembers asking her parents. "They said, 'We're Jewish. We don't believe in God,' so I assumed they meant that Jews didn't believe in God, not just that my parents didn't believe."

So when she began a systematic search of a dozen religions as a teen in Miami, Judaism didn't make her list. The most appealing faith was one "with no idols or images" - Christian Science. After college, Schwartz worked for Christian Science and became one of its lecturers, though not "practitioners" - those designated to pray. "The church encompassed my social life and my professional life. Even so, my best friends in the church were named Kaplan, Rosenberg and Shapiro. We always sat together at meetings."