An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  “I guess I could get a babysitter, but the thing is, even though we are both working so hard, a lot of the money is going to pay off loans, and what’s left is eaten up by taxes and rent.”

  Ironically, even though they were both employed, they were worse off than their neighbors, most of whom were being subsidized by some kind of government program, many of them fraudulently. She knew for a fact that many couples got married in a religious ceremony but didn’t register their marriages with the government so they could apply for rent and food subsidies as unwed mothers. With the government paying their mortgages, some even purchased second homes that they rented out. Honestly, she couldn’t get her head around this kind of dishonesty among so-called God-fearing people. Religious law demanded that Jews strictly keep the secular laws in every country they lived if such laws didn’t contradict the Torah. These kind of unethical shenanigans were strictly forbidden: Chuka d’medina Chuka. The law of the land was also the law under halacha.

  But there was the law, and then there was how people actually lived. The more she lived in Boro Park, the more she understood how wide the gap was between the two. It was very disappointing. And as a result, honest, hardworking people like themselves were often not better off financially than those who were learning full-time.

  Of course, Yaakov’s salary would increase as he added experience to his résumé, and her business was growing month by month according to the hours she was able to devote to it. And truthfully, she’d learned to care less about material things. It helped that she’d grown up with an unwed mother, and fairly poor. You could get your clothes in Goodwill, take the kids to all kinds of free museums and parks, buy generic food in bulk. People in Boro Park were the hands-down champions of living on the cheap, making her mother look like a rank amateur! And she’d learned from them.

  “No, being poor isn’t the end of the world, HaShem, and I guess this is more or less what I expected when I married a debt-laden, widowed Torah scholar. But the loneliness! The number of hours I’m here in this apartment on my own, or just with the children! Well, HaShem, it surprises me. I thought there would be more us.”

  She hesitated. Could she do it? Talk to the Holy One Blessed Be He, Master of the Universe, like one of her girlfriends? Repeat all those things she’d discussed with Shoshana? Was she really going to entreat Him to help her overcome her revulsion to one of His commandments? She swallowed hard. How could she tempt making the God she loved, Who had given her so much happiness, angry? How could she bear to disappoint Him? Worse, would He find it sacrilegious, offensive? These were, after all, His laws. Or so she had been led to believe. He must have a reason. What could she say? And then the words came to her.

  “I know, HaShem, You can read my thoughts and see into my heart. So You already know I’m finding it agonizing to be separated from my husband for two weeks every month. It’s not … well … the actual”—was she really going to use the word sex in a prayer?—“intercourse part; that I suppose I could learn to live with. But the idea that my husband can’t touch me, sit on the same couch, hand me a plate … It makes me feel like I’m tainted. It makes me feel crazy. You made me a woman. All the things that happen to me are Your will. How could any of it be impure or unclean? Please help me to understand. Give me the courage to talk to Yaakov, to tell him the truth, and give Yaakov the wisdom to hear me and understand and help me through this, because—I’ll be honest with You—I just don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. You see, it’s just that, and please forgive me for pointing this out because I know You can do anything, but it’s just that … I thought I’d be pregnant by now! But how is that ever going to happen if Yaakov and I are separated two weeks every month?”

  She felt hot tears sting her eyes. How could I have spoken to God like that? she thought, shocked. But it was no use holding back. This desperate urge for a child had taken her completely unawares. It was an unquenchable fire that burned away her hopes. She’d even gone so far as to ask advice from Rabbi Weintraub, the principal of the girls’ program for the newly observant to which she had first applied when deciding to live a religious life in Boro Park.

  He was sympathetic, but felt she was rushing things. “It’s only been a little while,” he reminded her. “HaShem hears your prayers, but He works in His own good time.”

  Others, women like Rebbitzen Basha, had showered her with what she imagined they saw as encouraging miracle tales, stories of barren women who started volunteering at orphanages and were soon pregnant with twins. Others suggested special prayers, amulets, certain diets, visits to the graves of famous rabbis …

  The problem was, of course, that all of those spouting these well-worn suggestions already had children, not to mention grandchildren and even great-grandchildren! They would have been shocked if she’d allowed them a glimpse into her absolute fury at hearing these clichés. What could they know about her despair? About how her hopes—charred in the dark flame of monthly failure that flared up like clockwork, blackening her vision of the future, her self-image, her most cherished hopes and dreams—were wearing thin, almost disappearing? Sometimes she looked in the mirror and found someone else, a washed-out older woman whose lips, with their downturned corners, already hinted at bitterness.

  But it was not only herself she was failing, she knew. Yaakov, too, expected to have more children. He was still young. By not getting pregnant immediately, she felt—in the unreasonable and impatient way women often feel about pregnancy—that her body, which had always served her so well, and which she had always nurtured and cherished—was dealing her an unspeakable betrayal. It did not help that she lived in a place brimming with pregnant women pushing baby carriages with toddlers trailing after them. In the fecundity of Boro Park, she felt like an outcast, cursed and punished for some unforgivable sin.

  Having herself checked out medically had only made it worse, for they had found nothing physically wrong, which meant that they could do nothing to help her. When she tried to talk to Yaakov about it, as sympathetic as he was, he seemed a bit impatient. “Have faith, my Leah-le. Wait.” Easy to say if you already had five children!

  Wait. It was what everyone counseled her.

  Why was it that she could not? Why was it she was so anxious? Was it because the minute you got pregnant, all the laws of separation magically vanished for nine glorious months? Or because Yaakov had already proven his fertility with another woman, and thus the only possible place fault could be laid was at her own feet? Or was it the sad reality that these children whom she loved so much would never truly be hers, that—in the end—she was no more than a glorified babysitter?

  She rejected this shattering idea furiously. She loved all of her stepchildren like a mother, she told herself, including Shaindele and even the two older boys she saw so infrequently. As for the two little ones, Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, her Icy and Cheeky, she knew how precious she was to them and they to her. Perhaps because of that, she mourned with excessive zeal all the time she had missed out on in their lives.

  How lovely it would have been to have known Chasya when she was a week old, a month old! To watch her give her first smile, grow her first tooth, take her first step. She had been denied all that and couldn’t help but envy the woman who had gotten to spend every second with them, the woman Chasya still searched for. She wanted that for herself, to be part of a child’s life from the very moment they were born.

  How terrible it would be to never hold a child in your womb and hear its heart beat against yours, an experience that had no substitute in the life of a woman. The happier it made her to be a beloved wife and mother, the more she longed to deepen and expand that matchless experience with a child of her own, someone who would join them together forever.

  Give yourself time. But time was exactly what she didn’t have! Thirty-five going on thirty-six! But so what? Women were having babies well into their forties, even fifties these days, she tried to comfort herself. And sometimes you even read in the newsp
apers about a sixty-year-old becoming a mother! Yeah, right. That was all she needed—to look like her baby’s grandmother; to have children when she had no strength left to raise them.

  She didn’t want to have a second family, to have a baby in the house when Shaindele had already made Yaakov a grandfather, and Chasya was fifteen and Mordechai Shalom was having his bar mitzvah. She wanted to raise them as brothers and sisters; for them to play together and to be part of each other’s lives. And that could only happen if she had a baby soon, she thought.

  But what about the economic situation? Having a baby wasn’t practical, she reasoned with herself. After all, it was going to take years for Yaakov to earn significantly more money, and she was going to have to cut back when she gave birth and had a little one to care for.

  All that was true, but unconvincing. So what? Nothing she had ever done had been practical! And yet all of those impractical things had brought her so much joy: becoming a religious Jew when it was so easy to be a secular one with no restrictions, no don’ts—don’t eat this, don’t eat that, don’t watch television or go to movies. No nosy neighbors. No scanning the labels of food for exactly the right rabbinical endorsements. No dress code. No horrible wigs.

  But anything worth having, she thought, was also worth the trouble of dealing with all the problems that came with it. The easy way had not brought her joy. All those orchestra tickets to the ballet at Lincoln Center and concerts at Carnegie Hall; all those movie tickets and cable subscriptions and Hermès bags had never brought her anywhere near the kind of happiness she had experienced in Boro Park with Yaakov and his children. It was the real life she had wanted and dreamed of, full of so many good and important things.

  It was worth the effort.

  She remembered the biblical passages in which the barren matriarch Rachel passionately declared to her husband, another Yaakov: “Bring me children, or I will die!” And his testy answer: “Am I God Who can open your womb?” And then there was Elkanah, the husband of Hannah in the book of Samuel, also a second wife, who writhed in agony for her childlessness under the pitiless taunting of her husband’s fecund other wife, Peninnah. “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” the clueless Elkanah tells Hannah, missing the point completely.

  And yet both men, like her own husband, were good men who had loved their barren wives above all. A man’s helplessness and inadequacy in the face of a barren woman’s suffering was a theme in the Torah, whose sacred writings were filled with endless compassion for such unhappiness. In both cases, the women, despairing of their husbands’ understanding, had opted to open their hearts to God, Who had answered their prayers and opened their wombs.

  “Please, dear God, help me!”

  She sat there, her mind poring over all she knew about the divine, her imagination soaring like someone in a hot air balloon, up and up until she felt her consciousness expand so that she was in the clouds, above the highest mountaintops. And still her mind and soul rose, entering the blackness of outer space where stars were flung like diamonds across the firmament, sparkling with light from distant planets billions of light-years away.

  It was unfathomable, the idea of God, the one, indivisible, supreme Creator who had designed and built the entire universe and every creature in it. How could you speak to such a Creator? How could your mind encompass Him? How could your tiny, human heart, beating for such a short time, ever contain more than a minute fraction of the gratitude you owed Him for all you’d been privileged to experience in your short, earthly sojourn?

  This wondrous creation! she thought, overwhelmed by love. Who can know the astonishing, ineffable complexity of it? The beauty of it? Each thing that grew, each creature that lived, a whole universe of such magnificent and awesome diversity that the mind could never wholly grasp even one thing in its totality of being, let alone the combined marvel of it all. How is it possible to open my heart to Him, Who is the repository of all this power, all this creativity, all this goodness? How can I tell Him my petty woes and troubles?

  She felt ashamed. But she, too, had been formed by His hand. She, too, was His creation.

  “My tiny heart aches for You, dear Lord. Help me. Look into my heart and give me what I need, if not what I long for. Dear God, HaShem, My Father. Help me.”

  All afternoon as she went back to her work for her clients, she felt a sense of renewed hope, as if her soul had made a connection, touched God. It was exhilarating and exhausting. She was looking forward to getting the children home and into bed so she could make an early night of it. But when she went to pick up Mordechai Shalom, he wasn’t waiting for her outside with the other children. “He’s sick,” his teacher said. “He’s inside, lying down.”

  He was burning up with fever, she saw as she touched him, her heart contracting in fear. “What’s wrong, Cheeky?” she murmured, taking his hot little body in her arms. He flung his small arms around her neck, his little face with its still-big baby cheeks flushed a deep crimson. He pointed to his ears and tugged at them, weeping.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a virus. It’s going around,” the teacher comforted.

  Leah nodded, concerned but not overly so. Children caught things. They got sick. It would not be the first time she’d nursed him through something. She picked him up, cradling him in her arms, clueless to the anguish that lay ahead.

  By the time Yaakov came home, the toddler’s fever had risen from 101 to 103, and was still rising. While he had spent the first few hours crying in pain and tugging at his ears, he was now apathetic, almost drugged.

  “What does the doctor say?” Yaakov asked anxiously, rocking him.

  “He said it’s a virus, and I should give him baby aspirin. Which I did. He said if it gets worse, to call him.”

  Together, they fed Chasya and put her to sleep in a roll-out cot in Shaindele’s room in the vain hope of trying to isolate her from catching it. She wasn’t happy about it.

  “I want to be with Cheeky,” she wept.

  “I know, sweetie, but he’s sick. He’ll be better soon, and then you’ll go back to your own bed.”

  “I want to go now, please, Mommy, Tateh!”

  Yaakov transferred the baby to Leah’s arms and picked her up. “What if I tell you a story before you go to sleep? Would you like that?”

  “What kind of story?” she asked suspiciously.

  Despite their worry, Leah and Yaakov exchanged a secret glance above her head, amused and proud. She was so smart!

  “Well, what kind do you want, Icy?”

  “With a princess, and a golden fish, and two angels,” she demanded, her eyes beginning to close as she rested her cheek on her father’s strong shoulder. Yaakov and Leah smiled at each other as he bore her away.

  “What if it has three angels and a golden lion?” he whispered. She raised her head and smiled at him.

  It was no more than an hour later when the baby’s condition suddenly changed.

  “Yaakov!”

  The child was jerking his arms and legs, and his eyes had rolled back into his head. At his mouth, a white foam was forming. He seemed to go limp and have difficulty breathing.

  “Oh, HaShem Yishmor!” he whispered, horrified, as he lifted the child from the bed. “I’ll call the doctor!”

  “No, we’ll take him to the emergency room!”

  “If you come, who will watch Chasya?”

  “Call Shaindele to come home. She’s with her friend, right around the corner. In the meantime, we can ask a neighbor to watch her,” she said hurriedly, taking the baby from his arms and handing him the phone. “He’s burning up!”

  “Hello, is this the Glickstein home? My daughter is studying with Shulamis, Shaindele Lehman. What? She’s not? Can I talk to Shulamis, please? Hello, this is Shaindele’s father, I need to … What do you mean? You have no idea? But I thought … she said … All right, all right. Thank you.”

  His face was ashen. “Shulamis says they had a falling-out and haven’t been seeing each other for week
s. She has no idea where Shaindele is.”

  “Oh, Yaakov…”

  His jaw flexed. “I can’t deal with this now! I’ll ask the neighbor to come and then call Fruma Esther.”

  The baby was crying now and exhausted, but fully awake and breathing normally. Whatever it was, it seemed to have passed.

  Mrs. Weitz came bustling in. “What’s wrong with the baby?”

  They told her. “My Heshie used to get this all the time. It’s from the fever. You need to bring it down. Put him in a cold bath. Put in ice.”

  “Until we get him to the hospital, it could happen again,” Yaakov said, considering.

  “I’ll call the doctor’s emergency number and see what he says.” Leah dialed.

  “Let me help you,” Mrs. Weitz offered kindly, going into the bathroom and filling up the bathtub with tepid water.

  “The doctor says to put him on his side and let him rest. Then to try to bring his temperature down immediately. Even if it goes down, he says we should still bring him to the emergency room and have a doctor look at him. But if he has another convulsion and it lasts more than three minutes, we need to call an ambulance.”

  “HaShem Yishmor,” Yaakov murmured, white with fear.

  They undressed the little boy and put him on his side. Then they lifted him into the tub. At first, he didn’t move, but then he started to splash around sleepily. He even smiled. A stone rolled off their hearts.

  “I still think we should take him to see a doctor, Yaakov.”

  He nodded, taking out his phone and calling Fruma Esther.

  “She’s coming over. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Go, go. Poor baby! Not to worry. I’ll watch Chasya.” Mrs. Weitz shooed them out the door.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Weitz,” Leah said, close to tears at this kindness.

  You can never know the whole of a person’s heart, she thought, ashamed now that she had never liked this big, bustling woman with her ugly, short, dark wig covered with an equally ugly hat, whose loud voice echoed through the hallways all day long as she tried to rein in a house full of unruly children.