Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  72.

  Seventy-two. According to the Kabbalah, God has seventy-two names. A friend had signed me up for a weekly Kabbalah tune-up e-mail from a rabbi in Beverly Hills. Each week, I opened a new e-mail to find a new name, there in bold Hebrew letters. “Scan from right to left” was the helpful suggestion. That week’s name was accompanied by a New Age meditation: I find the strength to restrain selfish longing. Through this Name I ask for what my soul needs, not what my ego wants. The whole thing made me feel like I was playing with voodoo, and eventually I stopped opening the e-mails.

  One longs for a device that is not a trick, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Still, lists seemed important. I liked making lists. Numbers were meaningful. Eighteen, for chai. Twenty-three, for the age I was when I lost my father. One in seven million, for the odds of Jacob having fallen ill.

  The story of the seventy-two names originates in Exodus 14, verses 19–21. Israelites stood at the shore of the Red Sea. The Egyptians were closing in on them. They were trapped—they had nowhere to go. They cried out to God, asking for his help. And this was God’s answer: Why are you calling out to me? I had always thought God’s response to the Israelites to be typical of him. Who are you talking to? What makes you think I’m listening? I’ve got better things to do. That was certainly the God I had grown up with: if he was paying attention at all, it was a punishing kind of attention. But as I explored the story of the seventy-two names, I began to understand it differently.

  Why are you calling out to me? God was imploring the Israelites to look elsewhere, because the answer was right in front of them. At the moment they were helplessly calling out to God, Moses revealed the seventy-two names. These names pierced the collective soul of the Israelites, who began marching into the waters of the Red Sea. On they went into the churning depths, and when they had reached the point of near-drowning, when there was no turning back—Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—then, and only then, did the waters part.

  73.

  Before Jacob turned six months old, people started to ask when we were going to have another one. I was thirty-seven. We didn’t have much time. Better get going! What are you waiting for? Something about new motherhood seemed to allow for these questions. I had almost gotten used to the way that pregnancy and nursing had turned my body into a subject that was apparently open for discussion. “Any day now!” my doorman would say each morning I lumbered past him to collect the mail. Mothers at the playground—bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived—lived in a universe where no subject was too personal. How long are you planning to breast-feed? How was the birth? But the questions about another baby irritated me. I felt quick flashes of irrational fury every time someone asked. None of your business, I wanted to say. Why did everyone assume we’d have another baby? Maybe we had no intention of having another baby! Maybe we were planning to have just one.

  I kept a mental list of only children I had known. In particular, I kept a mental list of happy, smart, contented, successful only children I had known. It wasn’t a long list, but it comforted me. I had been an only child myself. (Well, there was my half-sister, but she was so much older than me, and we had never lived under the same roof.) When I was a kid, I had longed for a brother or sister. Whenever I thought about having—or not having—another baby, my own childhood self rose up and confronted me.

  You have to have another one.

  No, I don’t.

  You’ll be repeating history.

  It wasn’t all bad.

  Didn’t you always want a gaggle of kids?

  Oh, that was a childhood fantasy.

  But the truth is that I was terrified. I was a big believer in not pushing my luck. I viewed Jacob—perfect, beautiful, healthy Jacob—as the greatest possible piece of good fortune. I wanted a baby and had one. The pregnancy had been unremarkable. From the time of his birth, I had marveled at him. Ten fingers and ten toes! Legs and arms and a little round head! Knees and ankles and elbows! Despite the fact that women had been giving birth for quite a few centuries, deep within myself I hadn’t believed that it would be possible for me. Still, I didn’t completely rule out the idea of another child. I told myself that I had time. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…women were having babies into their forties, weren’t they? The world seemed increasingly populated by fertility twins.

  Then Jacob got sick. His illness took the question of another baby off the table. All of my energy was devoted to making him better. The year of medication passed. Then the year of catching up: the speech therapy, the occupational therapy, the endless worry. We left the city. We moved to the country. My mother was dying. And then there was the ultimate frightening question: Were infantile spasms hereditary? It didn’t seem so—but so little was understood about the condition. No one could say, for sure.

  Eventually, much to my relief, people stopped asking. But I didn’t stop thinking about it. Another baby? Did I dare? It had become the central question, a steady hum beneath all other thoughts. One beautiful fall day, I glanced out my office window and saw Jacob in the front meadow, kicking a soccer ball by himself, and something went through me—a pang so sharp my breath caught in my throat. He had to have a brother or sister. What I felt—my own fears and worries—simply didn’t matter.

  Michael and I started talking about it. “I’ve never regretted what I have done,” he said at one point. “Only what I haven’t.” I knew he was right. It seemed there was an empty seat at our table. Did I want to look back, some day, and know that it was fear that had stopped me? Risk was everywhere. Getting out of bed in the morning was a risk. Driving the car down the driveway was a risk. Turning on the stove to cook dinner was a risk. I wanted a crystal ball, a guarantee—but I knew there were no guarantees. Not of anything, not at any time. Pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, as the Buddhists say. All lives contain all of these. Moving through fear is its own leap of faith. And so, at forty, I closed my eyes and leapt.

  74.

  The Pali word dukkha—often translated as “suffering”—is central to Buddhist teachings. When Siddhartha Gautama (otherwise known as Buddha) emerged, enlightened, from his spot beneath the Bodhi tree, he offered the first of the Four Noble Truths, which is that life is dukkha: “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.”

  Modern translators warn against the idea that there is one correct translation for dukkha. The word itself, it seems, is bottomless. According to a contemporary definition by the Buddhist scholar Francis Story, dukkha is: “Disturbance, irritation, dejection, worry, despair, fear, dread, anguish, anxiety; vulnerability, injury, inability, inferiority; sickness, aging, decay of the body and faculties, senility; pain/pleasure; excitement/boredom; deprivation/excess; desire/frustration, suppression; longing/aimlessness; hope/hopelessness; effort, activity, striving/repression; loss, want, insufficiency/satiety; love/lovelessness, friendlessness; dislike, aversion/attraction; parenthood/childlessness; submission/rebellion; decision/indecisiveness, vacillation, uncertainty.”

  75.

  My mother did not want to be buried in the Shapiro family plot. She hadn’t been too fond of my father’s family when they were alive, and wasn’t keen on spending eternity with them. “I’m sorry for you,” she told me, sounding anything but. “You’ll have to visit your parents in two different cemeteries.”

  It started this way—the planning of her own death—with an outpouring of fury. She threatened to disown me and leave her estate to Dorot, a Jewish eldercare organization with headquarters around the corner from her apartment. She changed her will multiple times. She made arrangements to be buried next to her parents in southern New Jersey, rather than next to “those people.” Still, as death approached, my mother grew slowly sweeter. As the terr
ible noise that must have been inside her head subsided, suddenly there was space to see the world, not as the unwelcoming place she had always imagined it, but as it really was.

  One afternoon, she came by car service to visit us at our house in Connecticut. We all knew it would be her last visit. She was beginning to fail. First her legs went, then her balance, then memory, one story at a time. She was in a wheelchair, bald from radiation, wearing a jaunty hat. It was an early spring day, warm enough to sit outside. We wheeled her around the back of the house, and she and I sat there, blankets around our shoulders, and watched Michael and Jacob throw around a football. My mother observed them quietly. What was she seeing? A beautiful child running, laughing. A doting husband and father, tackling him. The snow-drops—delicate white buds—beneath the tree out back, beginning to bloom. I kept looking at my mother out of the corner of my eye. She was shaking her head slightly, smiling. Gone was the judgment (Shouldn’t Jacob be wearing a warmer jacket? The house sure could use a paint job, couldn’t it?). Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.

  “Michael’s a good father,” she said, turning to me in surprise. Her face, caught in a bright angle of sunlight, was soft and vulnerable. It was the first kind thing she had ever said about my husband. A few weeks later, she slipped permanently into unconsciousness.

  76.

  I met Sylvia Boorstein for an early dinner one cold, wet night in New York. I had been looking forward to it for weeks. We sat at a window table in a restaurant in the Time Warner Center, overlooking Columbus Circle, the headlights of cars flitting in all directions like so many fireflies. The world outside, which moments earlier had felt oppressive to me—freezing, crowded, too loud—now looked inviting from our cozy perch.

  Sylvia had become, in a short span of time, very dear to me. As was the case the first time I heard her speak at Kripalu, her words seemed to enter me without dilution, deflection—without my turning them around and examining them to decide what was true. Everything was true. And so as we sat together over our Niçoise salad and vegetable risotto, I tried to stay in the moment. Not to be thinking: How much time do we have left? When will I see her again? She lives in northern California, so far away. She’s getting older. What if something happens to her? I tried not to lean so far into the future that I squandered the present.

  We caught each other up on our lives: Sylvia’s teaching, my work, our travels. We talked about a particularly wonderful Alice Munro story we had both recently read in the New Yorker. The final sentence of the story—I grew up, and old—had stayed with me. Is that what happens? We grow up, then old? The story had touched on a constant, gnawing sadness that was always with me. This sadness wasn’t a huge part of me—I wasn’t remotely depressed—but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there.

  “I think of it as the edge of melancholy,” Sylvia said, “and it’s where I live—but at the same time I am easily cheered.” Where else was a sensible person to live, but on the edge of sorrow? I pictured myself and Sylvia, on some sort of window ledge, our legs gaily dangling beneath us. Not falling over, but all the while aware that a world of pain simmered below. Sylvia had written beautifully about this: “In the best of circumstances, a loving family, good health, adequate financial resources, and untroubled times are the palace walls that protect our childhoods and early consciousness and allow us to move into our adult lives with confidence. And then, sooner or later, we see what the Buddha saw. We see the truth of change. We begin to understand how fragile life is and how, most surely, we will lose everything that is dear to us. At some point, in some way, we ask ourselves this question: ‘What is to be done? Is there some way I can do this life with my eyes open and my heart open and still love it? Is there a way not to suffer?’”

  Our waitress came by with refills for our coffee. Plates were cleared, dessert offered. I fought the urge to look at my watch. I felt the way Jacob sometimes feels when he’s having a really good time. He always worries about the endings of things, even as they are beginning. He gets it from me. But now, I resisted the future’s tug. I was right there, right then, with a remarkable woman whom I was lucky to know.

  “I’m always aware of time passing—of loss, coming around the corner,” I said to Sylvia as we sipped our coffee. “Whether it’s being middle-aged, or watching Jacob grow up, or seeing my in-laws getting old, or even this dinner—” I stopped. This was it. What the Buddha saw: the fragility of life, the truth of change. Whether something small and simple, like dinner with a special friend, or something unbearable to contemplate, like the loss of loved ones, change was inevitable. Change was happening right at this very minute.

  Sylvia was nodding, smiling her beatific smile. Beaming with empathy. “I remember, after my father was diagnosed with cancer, I watched him one day struggling with his cane, and suddenly I saw the father of my childhood,” she said. “We used to go to Coney Island when I was a little girl, and he was a very athletic guy—he used to walk on his hands into the ocean. And I saw that young man walking on his hands, and the old man who was walking with a cane…” She trailed off. We both looked at each other. We were talking about painful things, and yet I think both of us felt unaccountably happy. Easily cheered. This sharing, this acknowledgment of what it is to be human—this was the faint light of hope from the edge of melancholy.

  We settled the check, then hugged good night. The time we had together—as Jacob would put it—had flown by. I took a deep breath. The metta phrases I learned from Sylvia ran through my mind, in what had become habit. May I be safe; may I be happy; may I be strong; may I live with ease. I rode the escalator down, past brightly lit shops and restaurants. Outside, on Columbus Circle, Sylvia would be getting into a taxi. May you be safe; may you be happy; may you be strong; may you live with ease. I directed the phrases at my friend as she headed back uptown. I hoped—it was all I could do—that we would meet many times again.

  77.

  So what is to be done? It was the question at the core of all the questions I had been asking. Life is suffering. There is no way around it. The human condition—the knowledge of this—drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life’s fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt. What is to be done?

  The key word was doing. Not thinking, or wishing, or contemplating. Not staring into space. Not succumbing to dismay. Recently I went to see a friend, a psychopharmacologist, because I had begun to wonder if thinking about all this stuff all the time was making me unwell. “You’re not having a chemical crisis, Dani,” he told me. “You’re having an existential crisis.”

  It wasn’t getting easier because it isn’t supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life,” he wrote. “Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie.”

  Doing was what was necessary. Action has magic, grace, and power in it, as Goethe once wrote. Whenever I took an action—yoga or meditation practice, trying a new shul, reading a bit from the Buddhist wisdom book to Jacob in the morning, expressing gratitude at the dinner table—I felt…better. I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love.

  78.

  I climbed the stairs to the glass front doors of the Jewish Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, carrying a shopping bag. Inside the bag were several velvet
pouches, embroidered with silver and gold thread.

  “I have an appointment to see Rabbi Visotzky,” I told the guard. I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—by the high level of security. My bag and I passed through a metal detector and into the lobby, where I waited for Burt.

  A few weeks earlier, he and I had been having coffee when he asked me if I still had my father’s tallit and tefillin. I was certain that they were somewhere in my house; probably boxed up in the basement. I didn’t stop to wonder why Burt was asking. But before we got up to leave the cafe, he circled back around to the subject.

  “I say this in full awareness of the responsibility it entails,” he said. His intense dark eyes were even more intense than usual. “If you would like me to teach you to put on your father’s tefillin, I would be honored.”