Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  I felt a kind of slamming inside; doors blew open and closed at once. Put on my father’s tefillin? Heat rose to my face. It was forbidden territory—so off-limits as to seem almost sexual. But on the other hand, here was one of the greatest minds in modern Judaism offering me a profound learning experience. There was no way I was going to say no, though the thought of it undid me. What would my father think? In the 1970s, when women were first allowed to read from the Torah in Conservative synagogues, my father would quietly walk out of the temple when a woman approached the ark. He did this not in protest, but because it wasn’t in line with his beliefs. And though he never said it, I think it offended him. Women were not meant to perform aliyahs, read from the Torah, become rabbis or cantors. Daughters were most certainly not supposed to schlep their father’s tefillin to the Jewish Theological Seminary in a shopping bag on the invitation of a rabbi famous for starting the seminary’s first egalitarian service.

  Burt met me in the lobby, then led me upstairs through a labyrinth of halls. He had been at the seminary for his whole adult life. He walked briskly around corners, opened doors to hidden passageways leading to his book-lined office. All the while, I followed him, feeling frightened but also exhilarated. Back home, at the kitchen table, shaking the dust out of my father’s tallit and carefully wiping the straps of his tefillin with leather cleaner, I had felt the whole of my history brush up against me.

  We made no small talk. The mood between us was serious as I unzipped the velvet pouches and laid my father’s tefillin out on Burt’s desk. The straps were brittle and retained their shape from having been wound around the wooden boxes that protected the phylacteries for the past twenty years. The boxes weren’t in the best condition. The Hebrew letters stenciled onto them had faded, though they could still be made out. But inside, the phylacteries themselves were perfectly preserved.

  “This is the head tefillin.” Burt held up one of the two boxes. “The Hebrew says shel rosh—for the head.” He examined the other box. “And this one is shel yad—for the arm.” He looked more closely at the two boxes and the way the straps had been wound. “Was your father a lefty?”

  I was surprised to realize that I didn’t remember. This was an awful feeling—this not remembering. How could I not know if my father had been left-handed? It suddenly seemed a critical fact about him that I had been robbed of by his death. One more thing I didn’t know.

  “I could call my aunt Shirley and ask,” I said. But then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to explain to Shirley that I was in a rabbi’s office learning to lay tefillin.

  “No need,” Burt said. “Do you have the tallit?”

  I pulled out my father’s tallit from its pouch. During my wedding to Michael, we had used it as our chuppah. If my father would never meet my husband, at least we could be married beneath the tallit he had worn all his life. The embroidery around its border had yellowed, and the fringes I remembered playing with as a little girl were tangled and frayed.

  “Do you want to wear a yarmulke?” Burt asked.

  Somehow, a yarmulke seemed like overkill. I shook out the tallit’s folds, then pulled it over my head like a hood, crossing it over my face. I closed my eyes and breathed in any little bit of my father that might exist inside his tallit and said my own version of a prayer: Hope this is okay, Dad. Then I let it settle around my shoulders. My father had been a large man, and I was enveloped by his tallit. It nearly reached the floor.

  “Baruch atah adonai,” I recited with Burt. My father’s voice said the blessing along with us. He faced the windows in our New Jersey den, his Wall Street shoes shiny and ready to go. “Eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hitateif ba tzitzit.”

  “Now the tefillin. We start with your left arm.” I awkwardly placed the phylactery over my bicep as Burt led me through the blessing over laying tefillin. I was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and suddenly wished my arms were covered. The worn leather strap against my bare skin looked alien and strange. I wound it from my bicep to my wrist, then held the remaining length of the strap loosely in my hand.

  Burt helped me to place ha-rosh, the head tefillin, correctly so that the phylactery was at the top of my hairline, and the knot at the bottom of the strap’s loop nestled into the hollow at the base of my skull. His office was dead quiet; the thick walls of the seminary blocked out all sounds of traffic from Broadway down below. I felt disembodied. Floating outside myself—my feelings too intense and conflicted. Why was I doing this? Was it wrong? Burt tightened the loop around my head slightly so that it fit. Then he showed me how to wrap the remaining length of the strap in my hand: around the middle finger, twice on the lower joint and once on the middle joint. The rest was then wound around my palm, the lines of the straps crisscrossing, emulating Hebrew letters. The result of this intricate process spelled out one of God’s names: Shadai.

  “The strap wound around your finger symbolizes an act of betrothal to God,” said Burt. With him, I recited the final blessing: “I will betroth you unto Me forever; I will betroth you unto Me in righteousness and in justice and in kindness and in compassion; I will betroth you unto Me in faithfulness.”

  But it didn’t feel like God to whom I was betrothing myself. If anything, I felt like my father’s bride. He had bound himself to God; I had bound myself to him. There, in a rabbi’s study above Broadway, I felt the power and intensity of my connection to my father, as I stood wrapped in his tallit and tefillin.

  “How does it feel?” asked Burt.

  “Very strange,” I answered. “It feels like a costume.”

  “It is a costume. As far back as Juvenal the Satirist, there is record of pagan women wearing Jewish amulets. Phylacteries come from the same root as prophylactic,” said Burt. “Something that guards you. They also say that if you wrap yourself in tefillin and have a mezuzah on your door, you’re protected from harm.” He paused. “Would that it were so.”

  Would that it were so. My father had performed this ritual every weekday morning of his life from the time of his bar mitzvah. It hadn’t kept him from harm. But the tefillin were accoutrements of prayer, and the donning of them, a form of moving meditation. Maybe this simple, repetitive act gave my father courage, each morning, to face the day. Maybe it reminded him of who he was and what was important to him. And maybe, through his example, he taught me a lesson about the importance of a daily connection to that deeper place.

  79.

  The Sanskrit word for devotion is bhakta. It comes from the verbal root bhaj, which is defined as: (1) distributed, allotted, assigned; (2) divided; (3) served, worshipped; (4) engaged; (5) attached or devoted to, loyal, faithful; (6) dressed, cooked (as in food); (7) forming a part of, belonging to; (8) loved, liked.

  80.

  It took several months to clean out my mother’s apartment. She had lived in a converted three-bedroom in a new building on West Eighty-sixth Street. The apartment had a reasonable number of closets, especially by Manhattan standards, but still, my mother had built additional walls of closets in the master bedroom, the kitchen, and her office.

  I hardly knew where to begin. The kitchen seemed safest, least personal. Aside from the three sets of china, the good silver, the Danish stainless, the dozens of sets of salt and pepper shakers, my mother had kept every plastic doily and Chinese food container that had ever been delivered to her. She threw away nothing—made no distinction between valuable items and what might have arguably been considered trash. Many of the kitchen cupboards were piled high with cashmere sweaters of every color and weight. Some, folded with tissue paper and laid flat in vinyl bags, were from the 1940s, when she had been a sorority girl. Others had never been worn; some still had Saks Fifth Avenue price tags attached. In the top cupboards, which required a stepladder to reach, there was a collection of hatboxes from midtown milliners who had long since gone out of business: a leopard pillbox, straw boaters, an enormous sable thing.

  What to do? What to do with any of i
t? All that long, hot summer, I kept lists and made piles. Keep, store, toss. It was my grieving process, I suppose. I wasn’t so much mourning the loss of my mother as coming face-to-face with the absolute end of our story. The sharp sliver of hope I had always kept with me, despite what I knew, despite what anyone said—that sliver had shattered. I would be finding the embedded shards—samskaras—for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, the piles grew. Keep, store, toss. I called vintage dealers, consignment stores. I carted garbage bags full of designer clothes to a second-floor shop across town where Jackie Onassis was reputed to have sold her clothes on consignment. I thought my mother would have been pleased at the company she was keeping.

  The clothing, after all, was one of the pivotal ways in which my mother defined herself. She prided herself, quite rightly, on having a good eye. Her bedroom closets were filled from floor to ceiling with six decades’ worth of high fashion. Silk, wool, fine cotton, leather, and suede were neatly arranged according to color and season. Plastic boxes displayed scarves; there must have been close to a thousand of them. Belts of every shape and size hung in a heavy tangle from some sort of contraption. When I tried to remove it, the whole thing crashed to the floor. The closets smelled like my mother: L’Air du Temps, coffee, a faint whiff of camphor.

  I felt like a surgeon, cutting closer and closer to something essential as I went along. Who had she been? Why had all the stuff mattered to her so much? Were there clues? As I delved deeper into the closets, I slid a plastic box off a shelf and saw a Post-it stuck on top. Then I noticed that these Post-its were everywhere. Against the custom-made shelving, painted an eggshell white, they fluttered. Stuck to boxes, to the sides of garment bags.

  White Anne Klein pants

  Navy short-sleeved Calvin sweater

  Hermes belt

  Silk square scarf (Gucci?)

  What were these? Packing lists? No, I realized—they were dreams, projections, fantasies of how life was going to be. In her good white pants and navy sweater, her perfect belt and jaunty scarf, my mother was going to be…happy. Content. People would treat her as she should be treated: with admiration and even deference.

  Black Armani jacket

  Black skirt (Donna Karan?)

  Sleeveless ivory silk blouse

  Buccellati bracelet

  In her spidery hand, she wrote out these lists, each time hoping it would be different. But it was never different. I would later discover, in her office, the stacks of unopened folders and notebooks purchased each year. If her wardrobe was a reflection of how she put herself together externally, my mother’s office was a museum of unrealized ambition. The projects she was going to embark upon! The articles and books and screenplays she was going to write! As I pulled batches of notebooks still in their plastic wrappers from her office shelves, I imagined her annual trip to Staples, where she bought her supplies in bulk. I pictured my mother striding through the bright aisles purposefully, loading up her shopping cart with new folders and dividers and multicolored pens, a glimmer of an idea, a phrase, a concept, floating through her head like an aria. More Post-its, paper clips. This time—this time, she was really going to do it. She was going to write that book, that screenplay, that op-ed.

  I packed up all the brand-new notebooks and folders in a box to give to Goodwill. I would never use them myself. They seemed cursed to me, even though I knew better. As I packed, I thought of the way my mother must have felt as she had placed each notebook carefully on top of those from the previous years: excited, inspired, full of big plans. These must have been some of her most hopeful hours.

  81.

  Steve Cope calls early meditation experiences the noble failure. The first time I heard him say it, I was reminded of my great friend and teacher, the late Jerome Badanes, who once said much the same about writing novels. All novels are failures. Even at the time, as a very young writer, I knew what Jerry meant. In novels—as in life—there is no perfection. We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal. Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing—there must be a moment when we stop. When we say, This is the best I can do for now. And though Jerry didn’t apply the word noble to the failure of novel-writing, I think he would have agreed that there is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness—the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.

  These days, when I practice yoga and do sitting meditation, I am more aware than ever of the monkey that is my mind. Watch it go! One minute, I’m right here counting my breath, and I think I’ve got it—and the next, I’ve left the room, the house, the state of Connecticut. I’m in Italy, perhaps. Thinking about the teaching I’ll be doing next month. I’m in New York, at last week’s party, wondering if I said the wrong thing. Come back, I’ll tell myself. This is the magic moment that Sharon Salzberg talks about. Not when your thoughts have wandered, but when you realize your thoughts have wandered. Come back. Gently, with compassion for the self, and its poor little monkey mind destined to fail.

  82.

  We discovered that I was pregnant the fall after my mother died. We had been trying—or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we hadn’t been not trying. I was forty. Well, forty and a half. Half years had become important in matters of midlife fertility. We were squeaking in right under the wire. Blessedly avoiding the nightmare I had seen so many of my friends go through: the doctors, tests, labs, drugs, invasive procedures so often ending in heartbreak. I had been through enough. Did I think this—or is memory supplying it? Jacob’s illness, my mother’s death. The last few years had been rough. Didn’t I deserve a break? Even though words like deserve really aren’t part of my psychological makeup, still I wonder if there was a little bit of reverse hubris. A feeling that now—now things would be easier. I mean, God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. And everything happens for a reason. Right?

  My pregnancy felt bashert—the Yiddish word for “meant to be.” There seemed a sad, poetic symmetry to it: the end of one life, the beginning of another. You’re breaking the cycle, an old friend said. I knew what she meant. I had been an only child, and now I was going to be the mother of two children. The empty seat at our table would be filled. My ambivalence and fear had vanished. I was deeply, powerfully happy. I called my obstetrician, began taking prenatal vitamins, and made an appointment to see her in about a month. It seemed so right that I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

  At eleven weeks, Michael and I drove into the city to see the doctor. It was a beautiful, cloudless day. We held hands in the doctor’s office, looked through well-worn issues of Fit Pregnancy and Child. I had my blood pressure measured, my weight. We joked with the nurses. I felt no worry, no pang of apprehension. Was it the hormones? I lay on the examining table and waited.

  There are times in my life when all I can remember is Michael’s face. I remember Michael’s face the moment that Jacob was born; when the pediatric neurologist gave us the news; when he told me my mother was dead; and in the obstetrician’s office, when she couldn’t find the heartbeat. As I lay on the table, the wand of the sonogram pressed to my lower belly, I watched Michael’s face. He watched the doctor’s face. And that soft, caved-in expression—a magnitude of vulnerability—came over him once again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Isn’t it possible that it’s still too early?” Michael asked.

  “I’m going to send you for a higher-resolution sonogram.”

  That afternoon, the machine at another doctor’s midtown office detected the faintest of heartbeats. I saw it on the screen, flickering like a distant star. Bed rest for a week was suggested. Bed rest, and then we’d go back in for another look.

  “Maybe it will be okay,” Michael said as we drove back to Connecticut. “Maybe we miscalculated and you’re not as far along as we thought.”

  I was mute as we sped along. The hollows of my eyes burned. I had hit up against the hard edge of something. I knew Michael was tryi
ng to comfort me—to comfort both of us—but I also knew that it was over. That faint, flickering star on the sonogram was burning out.

  83.

  I wasn’t getting any closer to a personal relationship with God. It didn’t occur to me to ask God questions, or to expect answers. We weren’t really on speaking terms. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I heard and beheld God in every object, yet understood God not in the least. And increasingly, that was okay. I didn’t need to understand. Who was I, to understand?

  One Saturday evening, Michael, Jacob, and I were at an outdoor party in Connecticut. It was a cold, drizzly night, and a huge bonfire was blazing in an open meadow. Dogs and kids were romping, and adults were huddled under shawls and blankets, warm by the fire. I stood shivering next to a woman I had gotten to know slightly—the mom from Jacob’s school who I had first noticed all those years ago at the lake. The one whose son had a long, Samson-like mane of hair. The boy’s hair had since been cut.

  She and I were drawn into an instantly intense conversation—the only kind we ever had. Perhaps because we had both almost lost our children, we never made small talk with each other. I wondered out loud how she had known it was time to cut her son’s hair. How had she decided that she had fulfilled her bargain with God?

  “God told me it was time,” she said. Her face was lovely, lit by the orange glow of the bonfire.