What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife?

by David Harris-Gershon

  Esther crouched down and promised to stay with Jamie when she began complaining of a stomach ache, the first sign of internal injuries, a sign that she needed to be upgraded from “lightly” to “moderately.” Esther grabbed some rescue workers, said, “She needs help,” as Jamie continued to believe in the idea of “lightly.” She did not understand the burns. She did not understand the shrapnel. She thought, as I did upon receiving that first call, Just some cuts, some scrapes. When the paramedics saw pools of blood coalescing around her abdomen and realized something was wrong internally, Jamie argued with them as they moved her to where the moderately injured were lined up, saying, “No, no. Lightly. I’m lightly injured.”

  2

  I met Jamie immediately after moving to Bloomington, Indiana, for my first job out of college, a fellowship at Indiana University’s Hillel Center, the cultural home for Jewish student life on campus. It was the autumn of 1997. I had just completed an undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Georgia, a degree that, naturally, had prepared me for a career in Jewish community service.

  My job was simple: find Jews on campus disengaged from Jewish life and engage them. So I hosted Rastafarian Shabbat dinners, organized indie concerts, and established a “Matzo Ball Soup Hotline” for sick Jewish students – preparing gallons of the stuff for delivery – all in the name of connecting with Jewish students on the periphery.

  In essence, my job was to find Jamie. And on a Saturday afternoon in early September, not long after my arrival in Bloomington, I found her.

  The air that day was crisp, smelling faintly of barbeque and crushed leaves. Thousands of students were milling around Memorial Stadium, where Indiana was preparing to host Ball State in the football team’s home opener. Street vendors lined the sidewalks, grilling bratwurst and hotdogs. Coeds pranced in parking lots holding plastic cups and wearing the school’s colors, crimson and cream. Groups of clean-cut men chanted their spirited rites.

  I walked past all of them on my way to share a Shabbat meal with the local Chabad rabbi at his home. It was a clumsy attempt to familiarize myself with the competition, for the rabbi was a member of an orthodox outreach organization that proselytized to non-religious Jews, hoping they’d drop the pork, don a yarmulke or long skirt, and preface every sentence with Baruch HaShem – blessed is the Lord.

  I knocked, standing before Chabad’s large, wooden front door. A voice bellowed “Gut Shabbos” – Good Sabbath – so I let myself in. When I crossed the threshold, a liminal space that would separate past from future, Jamie was standing before me. She was wearing a summer dress, a cotton shawl draped over her arms and shoulders. Her green eyes flashed a look of expectant curiosity before she tucked her chin into her shoulder, eyes angled down, averted, a suppressed smile on her lips. I felt a sensation rising from the pit of my stomach, as though the house was a roller coaster making a precipitous descent.

  An orthodox woman pointed and said, “This is Yosepha – she’s a student.”

  Yosepha is the feminized version of the Hebrew Yoseph, or Joseph. It was like being introduced Davidina or Johnette. I was amused.

  After the introduction, Jamie was whisked into the kitchen, where she spent much of the afternoon helping the rabbi’s wife prepare and serve food for Shabbat lunch. Once the meal was served and we were all seated, eating, the rabbi began peppering me with a series of questions. While answering them, I stole glances at Jamie. I watched her eat, watched her straight hair shift around her face to the subtle rhythms of her movements, fingers twirling a fork, a napkin touched to mouth, a water glass tilted, emptied.

  When the rabbi and his wife made a rare, simultaneous move to the kitchen, leaving the two of us alone, I finally leaned over and spoke my first words to her, asking, “Is Yosepha your real name?”

  Jamie flushed and said with an eye-roll, grinning, “Oh, God. No.”

  In the months following that first lunch of stewed beef and fluffy challah, I periodically spotted Jamie visiting Hillel. Having spent a term abroad in Israel the previous spring, she’d returned to campus in her final year seeking community, unsure where to find it.

  One November morning, catching her hovering around Hillel’s front door with a friend, I walked over and ventured, “I’m leading a backpacking trip to Brown County State Park this weekend. We’re going to explore Judaism’s connection to environmentalism. Are you interested?”

  “Umm – no.”

  “Let me know if you change your mind. It should be fun.”

  “Yeah, I’ll let you know,” she said.

  After that, I began looking for her everywhere. I would poke my head in dining halls and scan the crowded tables, loiter in front of academic buildings, waiting for lectures to conclude and the masses of students to filter out, thinking, Maybe I’ll see her.

  Then, while manning a table outside Memorial Union, peddling my signature matzo ball soup, a friend of Jamie’s approached. Smiling, she blurted out, “You know, I’m a huge Jamie fan.” I grinned and knew. Knew she was looking too.

  Our relationship began secretly, since I was in essence an employee of the university. In public, Jamie and I would often exhibit a detachment that bordered on disdain, careful not to tip our hands. It was an outward disinterestedness that belied our growing closeness.

  After a full week together – a week in which we spent nearly every waking moment with one another – I rose one morning and froze. Opening my laptop, I composed an erratic email in which I expressed some misgivings. I wasn’t ready for something serious, I wrote, wasn’t ready for anything intimate, meaningful. Upon hitting “send,” I punched the wall lightly, thinking, You’re an idiot.

  After ignoring all of my subsequent messages, Jamie finally agreed to meet me on campus one evening. In front of the cavernous computer science building, she shifted on the balls of her feet and said, “Look. I’m not going to waste any more of my time. Either you want to be with me or you don’t. So decide. Right now.” Her hair was bending in the breeze, skin taut, face serious. It was an easy decision.

  When the academic year concluded, Jamie’s undergraduate studies and my Hillel fellowship had run their separate courses. We had also charted separate ways forward. Jamie was headed to St. Louis, Missouri, for a job, and I had plotted a spiritual quest to Israel.

  On her final day in Bloomington, Jamie piled boxes into a baby blue Subaru wagon and said, “Time to start a real life, I suppose.” I kicked the gravel and fixated on her tires, estimating the pressure. And then the tires were spinning, and she was gone.

  I fled to Israel, determined to engage in the earnest study of Hebrew and traditional Jewish texts, thinking the Middle East would be a refuge. The distance would dull our sudden disconnect, I thought, pave over it, make it concrete. But living out of a trailer anchored to a scrubby slope in the Judean Hills, I often found myself rising before dawn not for spiritual purification, but to use an archaic pay phone. In the dark, I would grope for a plastic phone card decorated with a pastoral, desert landscape or some political figure from among the heap that littered my trailer’s linoleum floor. Finding one, I would then climb the hill to the yeshiva’s main hall, where I’d head to a bank of orange public phones. As my peers shuffled by on their way to chant the morning prayers, I’d lift the receiver to my ear and slide the card into a slot at the phone’s base, revealing how many shekels were available for a call to the States. Then, I’d dial.

  I did this often, this rising early to catch Jamie staying up late. And the more we talked, the more marriage entered into the discussion until finally, early one morning, tired of the hypothetical, I said, “So, how would you feel if someone were to propose to you over the phone?”

  “Umm.”

  “What would you think?”

  “Umm.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  We were married in the summer of 1999, in Jamie’s aunt’s back yard in Westchester County, outside of New York City. The ceremony was a traditional Jewish af
fair, choreographed for us rather than our non-religious families. Many were not prepared for the orthodox vestiges which infused our service: the blur of Hebrew chanting; the yarmulke-wearing yeshiva students – our friends – who feverishly danced us toward the chuppah; the long, white kittel I wore over my suit, a symbol of purity that matched Jamie’s flowing dress.

  We weren’t orthodox, we were liberals, rooting ourselves in ancient traditions, staking our claim to them in an act of cultural rebellion. Which is why – after crushing a glass beneath our feet to shouts of “Mazal tov!” – we were whisked away to a private room before the festivities commenced. This solitary moment, called yichud (seclusion), is when the marriage would have been consummated in Talmudic times. For Jamie and me, it was a moment to eat pizza, embrace, and absorb what had just occurred.

  Wiping tomato sauce from my lips, I asked, “Can you believe we’re married?”

  Jamie nodded, a chocolate chip cookie between her fingers, the crumbs falling upon her billowing gown. “Are you surprised?”

  “What?”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “What are you then?” she asked as we began to feel the vibrating music and the stomping feet of our guests, beckoning us to emerge.

  “What am I? I’m happy.”

  “Good. Me too.”

  Before our wedding, Jamie and I had decided two things: 1) we would hyphenate our last names, figuring we could alienate our father figures and traumatize any future children in one, swift gesture, and 2) we would travel to Israel after a year of marriage to study ancient Jewish texts. We would throw off the shackles of societal expectations, ignore careers and titles and health club memberships.

  We would live.

  To do so, however, we needed funds. Jamie was already employed at Washington University’s Hillel. And so we decided to settle in University City, an inner-ring suburb just outside the city. As I sought work, we began making a home together in a one-bedroom, shotgun apartment, giddy at the prospect of doing so.

  We soon learned that neither of us knew how, exactly, to cook – or, more precisely, how to prepare meals that one might actually want to eat. In a kitchen no larger than a walk-in closet, we spent hours scouring cookbooks, chopping vegetables, and experimenting with dishes. Black bean casserole with cornbread topping. Curried potatoes and cauliflower. Roasted fennel soup. Much of the time, we ridiculed each other for our novice attempts, flicking water from the faucet as we did so.

  “You want to put what exactly on top of salmon?” she asked.

  “Mustard.”

  “It’s not a hot dog.”

  “Neither is tofu, but you thought that was a good idea,” I countered, unable to help myself.

  “I was experimenting.”

  “Mustard on salmon isn’t an experiment?”

  “Nope. That’s a waste of food.”

  [Flick.]

  These culinary quests were more than clumsy attempts to feed one another: they were community-building ventures. Jamie wanted to throw open the doors to our apartment and host students, friends, whoever might wander by for a Shabbat meal. She wanted to expand our existence, to imbue the newly woven bond we’d created with unpredictable Jewish hues. And because this is what she wanted, I did as well.

  We were partially inspired by our close friends, Adam and Lori, who lived across from us on Balson Avenue. Every month, they hosted Friday night services for a patchwork collection of twenty-something Midwestern Jews, the service always followed by the promise of a gourmet feast. In the beginning, the only thing Jamie and I were capable of contributing to the festivities were folding chairs.

  In time, though, our apartment also became a Shabbat destination. Jamie would do the inviting, and I would muster the psychic strength to suppress my introverted tendencies. And at the meal, we would harmonize to Hebrew hymns.

  We would sing.

  Not long after our move to St. Louis, I was able to find work teaching at an elite, private school in the suburbs. My domain was the fourth grade, a group of children mature enough to scratch the surface of complex thought while just young enough not to be inundated by the coming surge of hormones waiting to flood their bodies. Aside from recess, where I was a star on the soccer pitch, lunch was my favorite activity, and our table became famous for riddles.

  “Rich people need it. Poor people have it. And if you eat it, you die.”

  Ben:

  Poison.

  Me:

  Rich people need poison?

  Alicia:

  Time.

  Me:

  How do you eat time?

  John:

  Nothing.

  Me:

  Exactly.

  Once, on spaghetti-with-meatballs day, I was ambushed.

  “Mr. H.-G., do you stick your fork in the dirt?” asked Melissa, one of a handful of Jewish students. A giggle punctuated her question.

  “Yeah,” squeaked Abby, “Do you stick your fork in the dirt?”

  Everyone at the table began chanting, “Mr. H.-G. sticks his fork in the dirt.” The image itself, devoid of any context or meaning, was enough to elicit sustained laughter. I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Smiling warily, I waited for the next round.

  “Our Hebrew school teacher said that to make your fork kosher, you stick it in the dirt. You keep kosher, right? So you must stick your fork in the dirt. Do you do it in the backyard?” Melissa continued. Everyone looked at their fork.

  In the Jewish legal system, the laws of kashrut (keeping kosher) are extremely complex and confusing, particularly when it comes to the status of pots and utensils. A thousand years ago, in an era devoid of chemical cleaning agents, sticking a utensil in the ground was a method of scouring that could, as a last resort, render an item clean and permissible to use under Jewish law. But I didn’t know this. Abby and Melissa, two Jewish students who had been exposed in Hebrew school to this archaic tidbit that stuck, certainly did. Mr. H.-G. sticks his fork in the dirt.

  The bell rang and in an instant the room was empty, leaving me with a littered table and a desire to know about forks and dirt and everything else my tradition had bequeathed to me that had yet to be learned.

  Jamie felt the same. We were both hungry, hungry for learning, for texts, wanting to devour them together in the desert air. We wanted to construct upon our foundational love a cultural framework made from Hebrew, from Aramaic, from Talmudic inquiry.

  These were the raw materials we sought.

  We found them – or the place where they might be acquired – at a pluralistic yeshiva in Jerusalem called Pardes, a place about which Jamie and I had heard much praise. One evening, seated at a dining room table strewn with dirty dishes, we visited the institute’s website together. With pop rhythms throbbing from the upstairs apartment, I pointed to the laptop and read aloud, “Pardes faculty do not impose any patterns of observance or belief on students.”

  Jamie leaned over me, her hand on my shoulder, and continued. “Students are challenged to grow as individuals and as members of our community.”

  “Rigorous study of ancient texts. Religious diversity. Tolerance,” I added.

  Jamie nodded, and in that nod, everything that had previously been uncertain about our short-term future was contained. Our destination had been set. We would travel to Israel, intending to indulge in just one year of study before returning to the States, unaware that one year would stretch into three, that we would end up jointly enrolling at Hebrew University to pursue graduate degrees in Jewish Education. When we bought our tickets, we were aware of just this: the start of something mysterious and grand had been set into motion.

  Then the time for that motion arrived. So we boarded an El Al flight – Newark to Tel Aviv – and took off, holding hands, thinking, We are alive.

  3

  When the paramedics lifted Jamie onto a stretcher, Esther grabbed her hand and ran alongside as she was wheeled over the cobblestone pa
ths to a row of waiting ambulances. The vibrations shook a metal nut lodged within Jamie’s intestines She flinched, squeezed Esther’s hand, needed the wheels to find concrete.

  When they finally reached an ambulance and loaded Jamie’s stretcher, Esther climbed inside and dialed my number. “She’s lightly injured,” Esther said. “You should come meet Jamie at the hospital” – her casual tone implying that it might be something worth checking out.

  The taxi stopped just outside Hebrew University, a few blocks from the hospital. The driver turned and said, “Get out here.” He told me to find the back entrance, the emergency room, to push my way in, to push people aside, that it would be the only way. But after stepping from his white Mercedes, there are certain things I don’t remember. For instance, did I pay him? I don’t remember the feel of money, the stretching of my arm to place bills into his palm as I pulled myself out of the car. It’s not that such a detail is something one should remember at a time of panic, a time scrambled by adrenaline-fueled fear. But still, it’s unsettling. Did I stiff the guy who risked arrest by driving on the wrong side of streets and running red lights for this American going out of his mind? And when I got out, which I don’t remember either, did I run? I don’t recall running. You would think, given the situation, that I would have broken into a sprint, streaking across the hospital’s drive toward the back entrance, sliding over ambulance hoods blocking my path, hurdling abandoned stretchers, bursting through the hospital’s double doors panting, crazed. You would think I might have grabbed people, tossed them aside, against walls, over potted plants, barreling through women and children and the elderly to reach the emergency room where crowds of family members packed the hall and pounded on the locked doors, pushing, surging. It’s the type of scene one should remember, acting desperate, heroic.