“This is a good one,” Mira whispers to me.
“From an early age, Zusha was invested,” the rabbi says. “In his family, in his own sense of self, in Judaism, in passion. He used to sit and read the Torah, and if he didn’t understand a portion, he would sit and cry and wouldn’t stop until someone came and explained it to him.”
Everyone laughs a little. I wonder if they already know this story, like Mira does.
“As a child in Hebrew school, Zusha heard the passage from Exodus ‘And God spoke to Moses.’ Zusha was so overtaken by this, so overwhelmed by the idea of God reaching someone so closely, that he repeated ‘God spoke, God spoke, God spoke’ over and over, and he was removed from his class for causing a disturbance.”
Another laugh.
“Zusha grew up to be one of the greatest rabbis Jewish history has ever known,” our rabbi says. “As he grew older, he never lost his emotional connection to prayer, and to Judaism, and he passed it on to his many students.”
“Daddy, I want a yogurt,” the rabbi’s daughter says.
“Me too,” he says. Again, we laugh.
He sets her down, and she runs to her mom, sitting in the front row. I don’t know why I’m surprised the rabbi’s wife is here. I guess I thought she wouldn’t be here, in the Reform service, like we wouldn’t be good enough for her.
“Deuteronomy 34:10,” the rabbi says, abruptly. “ ‘No one will ever be as great as Moses.’ Pretty straightforward. But then the Talmud says—what?—‘Everyone is responsible to be as great as Moses.’ So what do we do? How do we engage in a world that tells us we have to be something that is categorically impossible for us to be? What does God want from us? What did he want from Zusha?”
I twist my hands in my lap.
“When Zusha was on his deathbed, after a long, beautiful life, his students came to visit him. They expected to see a man at peace. Someone who had been captivated by God his whole life, someone driven to tears with the marvel of the universe and the idea that God could speak to him, was about to encounter everything he’d dreamed of face to face. But Zusha was not at peace,” the rabbi says. “He was terrified, and his students couldn’t understand why.
“They sat by him and held his hand and relayed back stories of everything he’d accomplished. Still Zusha wasn’t satisfied. They told him how he’d inspired them, all the lessons he’d taught them. Still it wasn’t enough.
“And his students told him, ‘Rabbi, when you get to heaven, you’re going to be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. Think of all the good you’ve done for the world. Deuteronomy 34:10: “No one will ever be as great as Moses”—but God will look at you and say, “No one could have been more like Moses. No one could have been more like King David.” ’
“And Zusha said, between tears, ‘I’m not worried that God will ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses. Why I wasn’t more like King David. I’m worried he’ll ask me, “Why weren’t you more like Zusha?” And what will I say?’ ”
I feel like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
The rabbi pauses in his walking.
“What excuse do we have?” he says. “For why we were not the biggest, most obvious versions of ourselves we could possibly be?”
* * *
***
My ex “I don’t know, just didn’t think of me as Jewish,” but he definitely thought of me as a lot of other things that even back then always felt…coded.
Too loud.
Too dramatic.
Too picky.
Taking
up
too
much
space.
Get smaller and smaller until my nose straightens, my hair uncurls, my last name drops some clusters of consonants, my cultural baggage fits into a perfectly leveled teaspoon.
Get smaller and smaller until my stomach touches my back and I can finally pull my chair all the way in at a WASPy dinner party.
How long does something like that take?
How long ago did we start?
* * *
***
I wait for Mira outside the bathroom after the service, watching people hug and chat in the Hillel lobby. I wrap my arms around my waist and feel something like longing.
“Tina?” a voice says. It’s the cantor, that junior I know.
“Hi,” I say. “You, um. You did a really beautiful job.”
She smiles. “Thank you. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”
“Yeah, my girlfriend’s more observant, so I’m…”
She nods encouragingly, and somehow words just fall out of my mouth.
“My mom’s not Jewish,” I say. “We have a Christmas tree at home.”
She nods thoughtfully, then says, “Christmas trees are beautiful.”
I swallow. Breathe. “Yeah. They are.”
“I hope you come back,” she says.
Mira comes out of the bathroom, exchanges some small talk with the junior, wraps an arm around my waist. “Have a meaningful fast,” we all tell each other, and Mira says, “Ready to go?” to me.
I fit my hand into hers, easily. “Yeah.”
We kiss gently outside my dorm. I forget about my unbrushed teeth, don’t think about my breath until afterward. It doesn’t matter.
* * *
***
Services have been over for two hours, and I’m just sitting here. Mira went back to her room to take a nap before evening services and break fast. It’s still three hours before sundown, when we’re allowed to eat.
But I feel electric.
I feel big, and I could be bigger, and maybe I am also big enough.
It’s wild.
It’s a mitzvah to eat on Yom Kippur if you’re sick, Mira had said, so I roll my desk chair to my bed. I dig around underneath, and I grab a granola bar and take a huge bite.
My chewing sounds like applause.
FIND THE RIVER
BY MATTHUE ROTH
We used to swim naked together. Four years old, then six, then seven, all of us, boys and girls together. Other instances of public nudity made me feel shame, but in the lake alongside everybody else it made me feel better about myself, saggy and underdeveloped, a boy with the perfect girl’s body. Across from me, Alix Blitman, who in school always wore blue jeans and plaid button-down shirts that looked like she should be going to a job, not class, who was tough and beautiful and untalkable-to, now was just another kid, just like me, only her head and birdlike shoulders visible, vulnerable and splashable.
And then Henry Bagelman, who everyone called Challah and who was my best friend, cannonballing between us, his face like a puppy’s, asking, “Hey, Alex, I finally got here. Did you miss me?”
And neither Alix nor I knew which one of us he was talking to, since we’d sat next to each other in class all year, and we had somehow never realized that our names—the boy version, the girl version—when shortened, came out sounding like the same thing.
Challah was bigger than any of us. With his shirt off he was like a round rubber snowman, his belly a perfect sphere, shiny skin reflecting the yellow summer sun. This was Tookany Creek, a river running straight through the row houses and factories of Northeast Philadelphia, and was probably toxic, but we weren’t thinking about that. When Challah jumped in, he covered us all in waves, but we didn’t mind. That was what we came for.
Later we lost track of the river. We went away for summers, to camp or school programs or family trips, or the ones of us who had to get jobs. And we were still friends, most of us, but we became different types of friends to each other. I’m not sure there’s anyone I would’ve let see me with my shirt off.
By ninth grade, Henry Bagelman was twice as tall and three times as wide as anyone else in our grade. We still stuck together, because there wasn’t really anyone else for
either of us to stick with. We weren’t nerds—neither of us was that smart—but we kept to ourselves for the most part. We liked the same music, read the same comic books.
A few months into the year, he started disappearing some nights. I’d send him a text and not hear back for a few hours. In our language, that was weeks. What wormhole are you disappearing down? I asked him.
Synagogue, he wrote back.
I thought he was kidding. But a few days later, when we were playing Ms. Pac-Man at the local pizza place and a bunch of kids I didn’t know walked up to us and started talking to him, three guys and two girls—the guys with their heads covered, the girls in skirts, and all of them a little more prim and well dressed than anybody we knew—I said, without looking away from the screen, “What gives, Challah? Are these your rabbis?” He got a little shy and a little embarrassed. “Please don’t call me that anymore, Alex,” he said. “My name is Hillel now.”
We all got pizza. Challah took off his baseball cap, and there was a yarmulke under it. It’d been hiding there the whole time.
He said a blessing before he took a bite. He whispered it quick and quiet, but I heard. Of course I heard.
I was a little furious at Challah for his ambush, but the others seemed pretty okay. One of the guys knew a ton about X-Men—the comic version, not the movies—and one was in the middle of the same game I was. Mostly, though, they were just cool. When you talked, they really listened.
One of them looked really familiar, and I guess I was staring too hard, and he started laughing, at first a little bit, then harder and harder till no one could ignore it, and he said, “What’s wrong, you don’t recognize me with my shirt on?”
His name was Effie Spiegelman, and he was the rabbi’s son. To Challah’s astonishment as well as my own, he used to sneak away from his yeshiva, which ran all summer as well as the year, to join us on our swimming expeditions. He was always coy and nonchalant about it, as though showing up when we did was no big deal, but there was something about his attitude, the way he held his body and the way his gaze lingered too long in certain places, that we could tell this was an alien experience to him, that he was out of his element. And yet, he was still more funny and charming and flirtatious than I could ever manage, even at that young age when none of us really knew how to be.
“But how did your father let you?” I asked, horrified.
Effie laughed again and said, “Oh, my father lets me do anything.”
“What he means,” said Challah, and I hated him more for trying to explain it to me than I did for keeping all this a secret, “is that his father doesn’t let him do anything, anything at all. So he does just about anything, and gets away with it.”
None of the Orthodox kids questioned that, so I felt like I shouldn’t either.
We finished eating and said goodbye, and unsurprisingly the other kids told me I should come to youth group with them. I said I’d think about it. Then they left, and it was just Challah and me alone. “You really should come sometime,” he said. “Just to check it out.”
“Challah,” I said. “They brainwashed you. Don’t you realize? Can’t you even see it?”
“You mean Hillel,” he said.
“And anyway, what were they doing here? Were they stalking us?”
“I’m sure they weren’t stalking us,” Challah said, and his face turned red, and I knew he had sent them to us.
* * *
***
The youth group was all-consuming. You couldn’t just go to one event. You had to go to them all. They had a way of getting under your skin, scheduling events at exactly the right times: Friday nights, Saturday afternoons, Sunday days. Half days at school became half school, half youth group.
The problem was, I liked them. Not the events but the kids. I didn’t care one way or the other about roller-skating nights or cold-cut lunches, but the people were cool, fun, these low-impact and low-pressure friendships where we could just hang out and do whatever and say anything that was on our minds. I didn’t know what we had in common with each other, except I guess we were all Jewish. It didn’t even really matter that much to me. Maybe it made them easier to talk to, knowing there was some part of my genetic makeup, something invisible inside me that, whatever made me different from everybody else, all the people at school I feared and resented and avoided, it was different about them, too. Did we have anything in common? Did they understand me, truly understand me? No way. Neither did Challah, though, for years. That was it, I realized one day. Hanging out at youth group was like hanging out with a roomful of Challahs.
But casual hang-outtage had been enough to seal our friendship. Maybe that was all I needed from life.
Well, that…and girls.
I didn’t remember when girls had gone from invisible (they were like guys, only not) to weird (they’re really not like guys, and that’s gross) to awkward/exciting/dangerous (they’re really not like guys, and I want to know more). Sometime between the days of swimming naked in the river and now, we had stopped talking to them entirely; they were an alien species, with their own language, culture, rules, and desires. The thing about youth group was it was coed. And along with all my new guy friends—who I didn’t trust absolutely with my life, but I trusted for a good night—it was a way to meet girls, to see them and study them up close, but within a socially appropriate setting where you didn’t have to approach them on your own.
Which is why it was so weird when, at one of the first Sunday-afternoon youth group roller-skating parties, I staked out a bench on the sidelines, right next to the bowl of potato chips, and found I was sitting directly next to Alix Blitman.
“Alex?” she said, doubling over and gaping at my face in what, if she was wrong about who I was, would’ve been the most explosive social blunder ever.
“Alix!” I squeaked in joyous bewilderment—then cleared my throat, lowered my voice into whatever it was becoming these days, and said once again, “Alix. What are you doing here?” I leaned in for a hug, which we never did as ten-year-olds, but that’s what everyone seemed to do these days when a guy and girl saw each other, then froze up when I saw she wasn’t moving to comply. Then I noticed she was wearing long sleeves and a skirt, which might not’ve been weird or noticeable on its own, but within the context of youth group it meant something completely different.
“Skating. Only, not. I’m part of this youth group, and today is skating day, only I—”
“Absolutely hate the idea of putting yourself on wheels and throwing yourself into a vortex of a cold white rink,” I finished for her. I was smiling so hard my cheeks were throbbing.
“Alex, are you spying on my brain?”
She was smiling hard too.
I didn’t give in completely. I wasn’t not interested in G-d, or becoming Orthodox, or following all the rules and doing whatever the youth group rabbis wanted us to do, but it just didn’t seem that important to me right now. G-d created us, right? So at this point, G-d probably just wanted me to try to figure out the operative points of Creation.
One day, Rabbi Yakov, the director of the youth group, told us that he wasn’t satisfied. By now, our numbers had grown to include almost half the Jewish kids in our public school class. Some were devoutly interested; others, I sensed, were just there to meet girls. But we all watched the propaganda films, ate the potato chips, drank the kosher Kool-Aid. We didn’t all do a hundred percent of Shabbos things a hundred percent of the time, but at youth group, at least, we were good about being Jewish. We didn’t bring our phones to the Shabbos events. We didn’t wear short shorts. We didn’t eat at McDonald’s.
“Not good enough,” said Rabbi Yakov. Being Orthodox, he said, wasn’t about the things you didn’t do. It was about what you did. What you were.
He announced a study day. Rabbi Yakov needed a catchy title, so he called it Torah-Rama instead. Rabbis came from
all over the city to speak. So did kids, although most of them were already in religious day schools and didn’t need the reinforcement and protection from evil that marked our youth group’s Torah-Rama classes.
“I’m not going to that,” snorted Effie Spiegelman, who didn’t really count—he always said he wasn’t going to anything, then showed up anyway. One time I’d really cornered him, asked him why he put up with the rest of us Bible thumpers, and he admitted that this was the only place his father permitted him to hang out with secular kids. “So maybe I’ll be there,” he admitted stonily. “But I’m not letting those rabbis into my head.”
The truth was, I wasn’t so sold on Torah-Rama either. My motives for being here were purely non-Orthodox. I wanted earthly friends, things to do because I was bored, not because I thought G-d needed me to do them. Afterward, in the hall, I confided as much to Alix.
“Just because you show up, it doesn’t mean you’re never going to turn on the TV on Shabbos in your life,” she said. “But who knows? Maybe it will change you. We aren’t supposed to be the same people our whole lives.”
“Do you think you’ll change from Torah-Rama?” I asked.
She blushed a little and shrugged and said in a quiet voice, “I don’t know,” and I realized that maybe she already had.
Torah-Rama was on a Sunday. They held it at the Jewish Community Center, on the edge of town, a bus or a car trip away, since there was no synagogue in the neighborhood large enough to hold us. We’d scheduled ourselves into what was eight hours of solid learning, in both small groups and larger lectures.
The building looked like a giant Rubik’s Cube, fluorescent and huge and crumbling with disrepair. The classes were held in classrooms that smelled like old people.
Most of the speakers were rabbis. They were insightful and inspirational and hard to listen to. It wasn’t that they were boring, or that they weren’t good speakers, but they kept tossing around words in Hebrew and Yiddish, which we might have understood in isolation, but they spoke hundreds of them a minute, and we were lost.
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