Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  “Bruno has Uncle Moe ready upstairs,” Shirley said. “Come.”

  I followed Shirley and her great-grandchildren up to the master bedroom. Moe was in a wheelchair, wearing black trousers and a white business shirt. A yarmulke rested on top of his thin gray hair. Bruno, his home health aide, stood behind him. In the center of the bedroom, a very large computer monitor had been set up on a rolling cart.

  “This should work,” Cheryl said as she turned on the computer. “I tested all the equipment yesterday.” With a few keystrokes, the screen was suddenly filled with a crowded ballroom. Hundreds of chairs were set up on either side of an aisle bedecked with white satin ribbons. In the front of the ballroom, a chuppah.

  “See?” Shirley turned to me. “I told you we were going to a wedding.”

  Someone—probably Cheryl’s husband—was holding a laptop on the other end, slowly panning the room. Video-chatting.

  “Will you look at that.” Shirley smiled. “Moe—Moe, can you see?”

  My uncle’s eyes were glued to the screen.

  The faces of an older couple appeared.

  “Moe? Shirley? Is that you?”

  “It’s us,” Shirley called out.

  “Mazel tov! We wish you were here!”

  “This is as close as we could get,” Shirley said.

  The screen then filled with my cousin Mordechai. His black hat, long dark beard, twinkling brown eyes.

  “Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!” He then peered closer. “Wait a minute—is that Dani?”

  I waved from behind Moe’s wheelchair. Once again, inappropriately dressed for a family function.

  The ceremony was beginning. Through the shaky, handheld laptop connecting the ballroom in Chicago to the bedroom in Brookline, we watched as the groom walked down the aisle, flanked by his parents. He wore a black hat and a black overcoat, which he had wrapped around himself. Underneath the overcoat, I knew, was a kittel, a shroud just like the one in which he would someday be buried. He looked like a character in a nineteenth-century novel.

  “He’s a psychoanalyst,” Shirley whispered.

  The groom had reached the chuppah. He turned to face the screen. Mazel tov, he mouthed. Mazel tov.

  Naomi was now walking down the aisle, her parents on either side of her. She took her place next to her husband-to-be, then smiled and gave a small wave to her grandparents.

  “She’s a wonderful, very special person,” Shirley said. “A beautiful bride.”

  We watched as the sheva brachot—the seven marriage blessings—were recited, each by a different rabbi. Naomi circled the groom seven times, her face serene beneath her veil. Shirley held Moe’s hand. The great-grandchildren sat on the floor next to his wheelchair. Were those tears in my uncle’s eyes? I couldn’t tell.

  In just a few minutes, the ceremony concluded with the breaking of the glass, and more calls of “Mazel tov!” from the wedding guests. But before the new husband and wife even looked at each other, before they embraced their parents or walked back up the aisle, they both turned to the laptop screen and spoke to the grandparents—the ninety-three-year-old man and eighty-six-year-old woman who were simply too old and frail to have possibly made the trip from Boston to Chicago.

  “Mazel tov, Gram!” Naomi called. “Mazel tov, Grampa!”

  “Mazel tov, sweetheart!” Shirley called. “Mazel tov, Meyer!”

  In Chicago, the wedding guests began to dance. The women danced with women, and the men danced with men, in ever-widening circles. And in Brookline, Shirley reached her hands out to Cheryl, to her great-granddaughters, and to me. She was regal, incandescent as we danced around Moe’s wheelchair—our circle connecting to that hotel ballroom and far beyond.

  93.

  Michael’s parents are getting old. His father’s eightieth birthday is coming up, and his mother just turned seventy-seven. They’ve been together for fifty-four years, and their marriage is one of the happiest I know. Partners in everything—they started their own real estate business together at their kitchen table and grew it into a sizable firm—they’ve hardly ever spent a night apart.

  Like most couples, my in-laws have their own narrative: a story they’ve told themselves about how the rest of their life together is going to play out, based on what’s come before. In this story, if one of them is going to suffer from poor health, it will be my father-in-law. Overweight, diabetic, he smokes cigars and eats foie gras. He enjoys a good scotch. Last year, his blood pressure dropped so precipitously that by the time he got to the hospital, the doctors didn’t know how he could possibly still be conscious—much less have driven himself to the emergency room in his own car.

  But it turns out that my mother-in-law—fit, slim, highly independent—is the one who is frail. She’s been in and out of the hospital numerous times recently. Her condition is delicate. Her arrhythmic heart, it seems, is not cooperating with the narrative of their marriage. Now, she’s the one who needs taking care of. Neither of them had been expecting this.

  We talk on the phone most Sunday nights. These days—since a recent episode in Florida in which she passed out, injuring her knee in the process—I can hear the frustration in her voice. “Bill won’t let me out of his sight,” she says. “I can’t even go to the bathroom by myself.” I think of my father-in-law, who is gruff at the best of times, and how frightened and bewildered he must be. This wasn’t what he had in mind. He was living one story, and suddenly he found himself in another. It’s a lot to ask of an eighty-year-old man. It’s a lot to ask of any of us—and yet this is what happens, again and again.

  We are always adapting to new circumstances. We think we’ve found an answer that we can carry with us for our whole lives—and then it turns out that the questions themselves have changed. We think we’ve hit on something that will ease our suffering, or protect us—a talisman, a ritual, a form of prayer—and if we are honest with ourselves, even these keep changing.

  When I first learned the metta phrases from Sylvia, they went like this:

  May I feel protected and safe.

  May I feel contented and pleased.

  May my physical body support me with strength.

  May my life unfold smoothly with ease.

  A year later, at Garrison, I realized she had altered them. The original phrases she taught at Kripalu were musical, melodic, complex. I had been quite attached to the language, which absorbed and occupied my mind. Now, the phrases Sylvia taught were starker. Less musical. She used fewer words. At first, I didn’t like them as much, and was slightly resentful that she had rewritten them. After all, why mess with a good thing?

  May I be safe.

  May I be happy.

  May I be strong.

  May I live with ease.

  I recently asked Sylvia why she had simplified the metta phrases. I knew there had to be a reason. She smiled at me, then beyond me, as if looking over my shoulder into the distance. She nodded, as she often did before formulating a response.

  “I wanted something I would always be able to say—in old age, in sickness—and have it be realistic,” she said. “No matter what happens, I can always wish for strength.”

  I thought, then, of the first words I had ever heard Sylvia speak: The whole world is a lesson in what’s true. The whole world is a lesson—and the lesson keeps changing.

  94.

  Any place can become a sanctuary. Some of my most revealing moments have taken place in unlikely spots: the church basements where I attended AA meetings in my twenties; a particular bend in the road near our house where the sky opens up at the top of a ridge; an apple orchard in our town where the carefully pruned skeletons of trees can be seen stretching over the gentle hills and into the horizon. These are places that have made my heart soar, which is the closest thing I understand to a sacred experience. But is it necessary to have a more formal setting—a temple, church, mosque, zendo—where prayer might be possible?

  I received a call from a man who is the director of a therapeutic boardin
g school a few miles from us. I had vaguely known the school was there—I noticed a discreet sign on the side of a road I drive every day—but I hadn’t really given it much thought. But now the director was calling to invite me to pay a visit. It turned out that he had read my novel Family History, part of which is set in an imaginary therapeutic boarding school, and while he had liked the book, he felt that I had portrayed a harsher environment than the one at his school. He wanted to give me a tour.

  One blustery winter afternoon, I drove down the hill to the school, which is nestled into a glen tucked behind the main road. I parked in the visitors’ lot, then walked past what looked like the main house—a restored New England farmstead—to the administration building. The director introduced me to a few of his colleagues, then began to show me around the campus. We walked through one of the dorms, then a few classrooms. The school seemed like a caring place, warm and serious. A place to get well. As we carefully traversed the icy paths, we talked about what I might do for them. Maybe come in and give a writing class to some of the adolescent girls?

  We stopped, then, at a plain wooden structure, different from all the others. It was almost Amish in the simplicity of its design.

  “This is our newest addition,” the director said. “We’ve just built a chapel.”

  I climbed the wooden steps to the austere interior of the chapel. It was freezing inside, the wind whipping through it. I figured they must not be done building yet. The chapel itself was empty of furnishing, save for a low bench that ran around the perimeter of the room. The late-afternoon sun cast its last light across the floorboards. I stood in the center of the chapel and breathed in deeply. The air still smelled of new wood, but there was something else. A surprising scent. It took me a moment to realize that the chapel was a hayloft.

  They were done building. The walls didn’t meet the floor. The wind whipping through had been intentional. The smell of hay, of barn life. Nature would always be present in this space. The interior and exterior worlds seamless, existing in concert. I had an image, then, of my father’s casket at his funeral. That simple, plain pine box. Meant to fall apart in the ground. Dust to dust. I took another deep breath. I was a little choked up, and tried to get a grip on myself. I didn’t want to cry in front of the director. What was it about this place? It felt…sacred. Just standing there felt like a form of prayer. Precisely because of its emptiness, it vibrated with all of life.

  95.

  Yes, I had begun to recognize sacred places when I stumbled upon them. I had developed rituals that put me in closer touch with another dimension. I was a more contented and most definitely saner person. Some of the is-this-all-there-is despondency had been replaced by a greater sense of connectedness to something larger than myself. But—there was still a big but. I knew that in one important regard I was failing my son. No matter where else I might glean wisdom, we were Jews. Complicated with our Judaism and needing to deal with it.

  My search for a rabbi and a congregation—a place to belong as a Jew—continued. It probably would have been easier in New York, or at least this is what I told myself. In New York, we would have had hundreds of options: Orthodox, Conservative, Conservadox, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Reform. Towering synagogues that felt more like cathedrals, and homey shuls with rabbis who played guitar and sang Bob Dylan songs. There was something for everyone. You couldn’t walk a block without tripping over a gifted rabbi. I heard stories from my friends in the city about wonderful congregations they had discovered in Park Slope, or on the Upper West Side. But given where we had chosen to set down roots, our choices were limited.

  The modern white synagogue on the hill with its baseball-joke-cracking rabbi was out. So was the coalition where we had spent the High Holidays. Two members of the board had staged a coup, firing Tamara, the spiritual leader to whom I had felt a profound connection. In her place, they hired a retired rabbi who was a divisive figure. The phones were abuzz with gossip.

  This all felt familiar. It was the petty, spiritually bankrupt mishegas of my childhood. Temple meant gossip. Temple meant small-minded politics. Temple had nothing to do with spiritual connection. If this was temple, I didn’t want any part of it. What was the point in finding the Jews if they were people with whom we had nothing in common? I wasn’t sure where this left us. We had only a few years until Jacob would be of bar mitzvah age. There had to be another way.

  I called Burt for advice, and he pulled out his directory of rabbis. Who knew that there was a directory of rabbis? It turned out that in a small, run-down industrial city twenty miles from us—in a direction we normally had no reason to drive—there was a shul. The rabbi was an old seminary friend of Burt’s.

  I made an appointment to meet this rabbi. As I drove to the shul, I was full of trepidation. I passed the place several times before spotting it: a low, nondescript building set back from the street, across from a parking lot. I sat in my car for a few minutes, gathering my thoughts. That old feeling—alienation, futility—came roaring back. I wasn’t going to fit in here. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I was a yeshiva-educated, overly assimilated Jew who still dreamed and prayed in Hebrew but could no longer speak a word of it. My desire to belong to a shul was all tied up with my love of my father—but he was long gone. I was a yogi, a tentative Buddhist, a meditator, a mom searching for meaning. How could I possibly explain any of that to a rabbi?

  With considerable effort, I got out of my car and walked up the uneven sidewalk to the front doors of the shul. Inside, there was a bulletin board, a raincoat hanging on a hook, a basket of yarmulkes. The place seemed empty. The lights weren’t on. There was no receptionist. Maybe, I thought, the rabbi had forgotten our appointment. Maybe I could just leave.

  Just then, a slim man wearing jeans and a polo shirt, a woven yarmulke on his salt-and-pepper hair, poked his head out of an office.

  “Dani? Rick Eisenberg.” He stuck out his hand.

  We sat down in his simple, uncluttered office. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head.

  “So tell me. How do you know Burt?”

  I told Rick about Torah study, and how Burt and I had become friends. I then tried—haltingly—to explain my recent attempts to find a place to call home. I told him about my family background. The move from New York. The modern white synagogue on the hill. The coalition.

  “I feel like a lost Jew in Connecticut,” I said. But even as I said this, I realized it wasn’t the whole truth. By now I was fairly certain that I would have felt like a lost Jew no matter where I lived. Complicated with it.

  As we talked, Rick explained his path to me—from presiding over a large congregation in suburban New Haven to a decision to go back to school for substance abuse training, to this place in his life: a part-time position at this little shul and a full-time position as a substance abuse counselor. He was easy to talk to, intellectually curious, nonjudgmental, welcoming.

  “Let me show you around,” he said. “And listen—I know it’s my job to try to get you to join the congregation. But don’t join. Just come to services. Bring your husband and son. One Friday night a month we have services and I play the guitar. Lots of Shlomo Carlebach. See how it feels.”

  The building was nothing to speak of: tired, worn, badly in need of updating. The Hebrew school was made up of a series of windowless rooms in the basement. The sanctuary itself was simple, with a plain bimah and windows overlooking the street. But as I walked through the shul, I felt something I had begun to give up on feeling. I could imagine sitting there with Michael and Jacob. I could imagine coming for the occasional Friday-night service. I felt like myself, here in this house of worship. My past, my present—my samskaras, my contradictions—I could bring it all with me and just simply belong.

  96.

  Sometimes when I’m sitting in meditation, my sense of my physical body falls away. I am inside my breath—the breath breathing me, as the yogis say—and I experience something close to pure consciousness. There is no
inside me, no outside me. Just a mind perceiving. A mind at one with what it perceives.

  Sitting cross-legged on my yoga mat, in the quiet of my bedroom, I face the windows overlooking the meadow, one or both of the dogs lying quietly on the rug nearby. My eyes are closed. For a few fleeting seconds there is nothing to grasp. Nothing to hold on to. How long does it last? Impossible to say. Thinking about it breaks it to bits, of course. Examining, wondering, noticing—all of these pierce the magic and bring me back to my same old self.

  But increasingly, I am able to carry that feeling—that pure awareness—around with me. It exists. I have felt it. And even though I can’t always touch it, I know it’s there. If I sit often enough, without expectations, it pays a visit. All that is required is to be quiet and mindful. To fight off the urge to jump up, check e-mail, jot down that idea. To sneak a glance at the clock. Surely twenty minutes have gone by. Time to get back to work.

  Buddhist teachers often use the word cultivation. They speak of cultivating awareness. Of cultivating a practice. The minutes add up, then the days, weeks, months, years. Something takes root, and invisibly flowers. Cultivation is defined as the process of fostering growth. As it relates to biology, it is the way in which an individual organism grows organically; an unfolding of events involved as an organism changes gradually from a simple to a more complex level.

  97.