by Tova Mirvis
Instead of reciting the prayers, I surveyed the dresses of those around me and the hats of the married women, especially the outlandish one worn by a woman across the aisle, festooned with a webbed black veil and scarlet-speckled feathers. Most women had on more staid wool hats, and a few of them tucked all their hair underneath in accordance with the strictest of Orthodox injunctions that a married woman’s hair must always be covered, that it was little different than her breasts or thighs. Some of the younger married women had started opting for less obtrusive scarves or twenties-era cloches or even wide headbands, which seemed more like decorative afterthoughts than anything seriously intended to cover, a means of probing the edges while remaining inside. Each of these hats conveyed a world and a worldview. Like birds, we could be spotted and identified by the feathers and crowns on our heads.
I tried to pray, but my mind kept wandering. Under all these brims and bows, what were people really thinking? There were few clues, only the fantasies I spun out. Did any of these women ever worry, as I did, that too much thinking might unravel their lives? You were supposed to believe that this way of life was the only true one. You were supposed to tell yourself that the rituals and restrictions were binding and beautiful. And if you felt any rumblings of dissatisfaction, you were supposed to believe that the problem lay with you. My own discontent, I hoped, remained well hidden. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would have shared with my mother-in-law or sisters-in-law, who sat beside me wearing hats of their own. Along with the actual rules, there was another set of laws, equally stringent yet more unforgiving, enforced not by a belief in God but by communal eyes that were just as all-seeing and all-knowing. Inside my head, a voice constantly whispered: What will they think?
I’d learned to squelch the question. I knew how to ease doubt with the routine of ritual: Invite guests for festive meals on Shabbat. Prepare the hot-water urn before sundown every Friday so I didn’t have to perform the forbidden act of boiling liquid on Shabbat. Unscrew the light in the refrigerator and set the timers in our house so I didn’t have to perform the forbidden act of switching on a light on Shabbat. Check every package of food I bought for the proper kosher certification. Check my underwear for signs of bleeding that would make me sexually off-limits to my husband. Immerse myself in the mikvah, the ritual bath, a week after my period ended so that I would once again be permitted to him. Change the dish racks in the sink according to the kind of meal I’d prepared, wash the dishes with sponges designated for meat or for dairy so that the two never mixed. Sit on the women’s side of the synagogue and tell myself that this didn’t bother me. Believe in modern interpretations to make the rules sound more palatable. Advocate for liberal positions within Orthodoxy so that women could be more included. Tell myself that I could live with the remaining contradictions. Console myself with the thought of being part of a chain of tradition. Listen to the men recite the prayers, deliver the sermons, make the rules. Light the candles for Shabbat on Fridays, light the menorah for Chanukah for eight nights, prepare baskets of food for friends on Purim, vacuum the car for any drop of forbidden leavened food before Passover. Doubt quietly, but don’t talk about it, don’t act on it.
Now it was time for the shofar—the blowing of the ram’s horn that was the highlight of the Rosh Hashanah service—and the children, released from the play group, came rushing into the sanctuary like prisoners on furlough. Eager to hear the shofar, which they’d been learning about in school for weeks, they crowded to the front of the men’s section, where the view was better. The man blowing the shofar wore his black-and-white-striped tallis over his head, and the speckled ram’s horn emerged from underneath this zebralike covering, turning him into some sort of hybrid animal at whom we all gazed expectantly. Layla was still young enough to be allowed in the men’s section, and her white-blond curls and hot-pink dress stood out in the sea of black and white as Aaron held her, his head draped with his tallis as well. Seen from this vantage point, he looked like every other man.
Instead of the usual soft murmur of conversation, there was silence in the sanctuary. We were required to hear every single note of the shofar—all one hundred blasts—in order to satisfy our obligation. Does it really matter if we don’t actually hear each one, I quietly wondered as Aaron leaned forward in concentration, as intent on fulfilling this command as he was with the others that governed our shared lives, sometimes pulling manuals from our bookshelf to remind himself of the specific rules for a holiday. When he did that, I felt uneasy at how readily he followed even the smallest details of the law, but how could I argue with his devotion, which should have been mine as well? Now, too, I bristled as I watched him, feeling like I was spying on a stranger. What he took refuge in was the same thing that I wished to flee. If I ever tried to share how deadened I felt whenever I stood supposedly in prayer, he professed understanding but smiled nervously, hoping my discontent would disappear before it became something to be reckoned with. If I said too much, I saw in his eyes a look of fear, the same kind I felt myself.
It was safer not to talk about it. And I saw little reason to, because I was convinced that nothing could change. These words I’d held on to for years now: nothing can change. It was far too late to question my marriage or the Orthodox life in which we were steeped. Change might be something I longed for but never something I dared to bring about. I had long ago passed the exit ramp; with three kids, a husband, and a home in the Orthodox community, I couldn’t have thoughts of leaving. People who left Orthodoxy did so earlier in their lives, during college or in the years soon after, when they could still choose who they wanted to be.
That year, we’d gone with the kids to New York City, where we’d watched street performers who folded themselves, arms over legs over necks, into smaller and smaller glass boxes. I smiled and clapped along with the crowd at what seemed to be an impossible feat of enclosure, but even after we wandered on to the next spectacle, I couldn’t stop thinking about these performers, feeling like I was one of them.
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to be Orthodox,” I’d once said tentatively to my best friend, Ariel, as I continued to feel my own sense of enclosure. Like me, she was a writer and Jewish. But because she wasn’t Orthodox, it was easier to broach this subject with her.
“I’ve wondered why the rules don’t bother you more,” she admitted carefully.
“I try not to let myself think about it. I work so hard just to hold it all together,” I told her, but afraid of my words, I didn’t say anything else about it, and she, out of respect, didn’t ask.
More than anything, I wanted these feelings to go away, but they only grew stronger. One Shabbat, I had been at the synagogue we attended every week, waiting to enter the social hall after the service ended. It was like any Shabbat morning, like every Shabbat morning. People talked, laughed, milled around, and so did I, though my arms were folded across my chest, my fingers tightly digging into my arms as though I needed to hold myself intact. A debilitating headache came over me, the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head. Around me, people continued their conversations, but, startled by the pain, I rushed from the crowd. It was a brain tumor, an aneurysm. Afraid of what was erupting inside me, I pushed through the glass doors of the building. On the steps of the synagogue, I ripped the hat off my head, and the pain disappeared.
“Tekiah,” a man called out now, bringing everyone in my in-laws’ synagogue to expectant attention, and a long unbroken sound emerged from the shofar—a siren, a wail.
Shevarim—three broken blasts, like hiccups.
Then teruah—nine small blasts, plaintive sobs.
A new year, a new possibility. No matter how many times I’d heard it, the sound of the shofar was piercing. I tried to force back this burst of doubt, to locate the spot where I was getting lost. Did I believe there was a God? Did I believe there was a God who was involved in the world? Did I believe there was a God who revealed His word to Moses on Mount Sinai? Did I believe there was a God
who made known His teachings in the oral law? Did I believe that the oral law was passed down from Moses to his disciples, to the judges of the rabbinical courts, to the rabbis, to me? Did I believe these laws were binding upon me? Did I believe in a God who cared about the smallest details of what I ate and wore—God the Scorekeeper, God the Punisher, God the King?
We all believe, claimed the prayer that was sung by the men in front of me and the women beside me and in the balcony above. Do we really? asked the voice growing more brazen inside me. There was no fighting it now. It was a late doubt, slow in asserting itself, but now it broke through me, pushed me, dared me. What if someone, me, for instance, were to take on the role of heckler, yell out that, in fact, I wasn’t so sure? The stalwarts all around would shush me, all disturbances quashed, all dissent hidden away. But surely inside some of these minds burned this same strange fire, these same doubt-riddled thoughts.
The day at Kripalu begins early, with morning yoga at six thirty. I put on my regulation black yoga pants quietly, so as not to wake my roommate, and I slip out of the room.
Either randomly or by the design of the Kripalu registration office, I’m sharing a small dormlike room with a secular Jewish poet who was born in the Warsaw Ghetto and survived the Holocaust in hiding. Where the registration form asked for my occupation, I’d put down novelist, so perhaps the administrators at Kripalu enjoyed making matches; perhaps, says the Orthodox voice in my head, it’s bashert, “meant to be.” The night before, I’d arrived too late for dinner, so my Rosh Hashanah meal was a granola bar from the lobby kiosk that I ate in the room with the poet as we lay like college roommates in our narrow side-by-side beds. Exhausted from caring for an elderly mother and a partner suffering from congestive heart failure, she had yet to make it out of the room for yoga or any of the activities offered. All she had the strength to do was sleep.
“What about you? Why are you here?” she asked me as she stretched out, her eyes closing as we spoke.
“It’s Rosh Hashanah, but I’m not sure I’m celebrating it,” I told her, thinking of my overnight bag where I’d stashed a round raisin challah and a small jar of honey that I should have been eating as part of my holiday meal, dipping first the challah and then an apple slice into the honey. At the last minute, I’d also grabbed the shofar given to my older son as a bar mitzvah gift—not that I knew how to blow it, and not that I could envision myself, even at a place like Kripalu, standing in a field, raising a ram’s horn to my lips, and letting forth a blast. I’d intended to bring a Rosh Hashanah prayer book with me too but hadn’t been able to find mine. Maybe after the divorce division of books, I no longer owned one.
There had been no time to search the shelves for a lost prayer book. Aaron had come to pick up the kids for the holiday and once they left, I threw my last things in a bag and went to see William, the man with whom I’ve become involved. I was supposedly just stopping by his apartment to say a quick goodbye, but once I was there, it was hard to leave.
We sat together on the soft gray couch in his apartment in the Avalon, where he’s lived for a little over a year, since his own divorce. The Avalon, a large complex, has an air of industrial neutrality. With its modern fixtures and clean white walls, it’s a mecca for the divorced—an in-between place for those who no longer know what home is supposed to look like.
William is tall, with green eyes and dark brown hair. He is a physician, ten years older than me; like me, he has three kids, though his are older and away at school. It was Sunday afternoon, but he was in scrubs and sleepy, having been on call and awake in the hospital all night. When I got there, he went into the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later carrying a plate with slices of tomato and fresh mozzarella cheese, which he’d artistically arranged, and presented it to me with a dramatic flourish.
I ate everything, wanting to curl up inside this apartment, inside his arms, and wait out the days until Rosh Hashanah ended. I was still in a state of disbelief that I wasn’t packing up the kids’ clothing in order to spend the holiday with Aaron’s parents. But here in this hideaway, there would be no new year taking place, no repentance prayers playing in a constant loop. I checked my watch, already nervous about the drive to Kripalu.
“I really should go,” I said. “It’s Rosh Hashanah and I’m not sure if I’m observing it in my own way or just waiting for it to be over.”
William, too, is Jewish, though it occupies little of him. He grew up with no sense of religious obligation. When he talks about his Jewishness, it is about his many relatives who were killed in the Holocaust and about his grandparents, who were immigrants to the old Boston Jewish neighborhoods of Mattapan and Roxbury.
“Before you, I rarely thought about any of this. I could go for months without thinking about religion,” he said.
This I know about him: He is not someone who would be willing to live under so many rules. He prides himself on his independence. He is a “free-range William,” we joke. His strength is what has attracted me from the start.
“I still can’t go an hour without thinking about it,” I said.
“I couldn’t live that way,” he said, and his voice changed, becoming a little quizzical, a little pitying. He was still sitting next to me, but something about him became harder to access.
“I don’t know how to stop being something I always was,” I said.
An aura of devotion permeates the corridors at Kripalu, a hushed hurried feeling as people move toward the main yoga hall. There, they solemnly remove their shoes, then, in the darkened space, they curl on their mats. Except for the fact that there’s a gold Buddha statue up front, the room looks like the sanctuaries I’m accustomed to—there’s even a balcony overhead, though if all the women were relegated to it, the main hall would be nearly empty.
Once the class begins, however, there’s no mistaking this for a synagogue. Yoga pose, with its erect dignity, bears little in common with how we sit in synagogue, where we rustle, whisper, and sway. The teacher starts by quoting Swami Kripalu: The greatest form of spiritual practice is self-observation without judgment. I can no more imagine self-observation without judgment than I can imagine walking without moving my feet. Everywhere, there’s the assault of voices, a firing squad of eyes. You are bad, I hear in my head. Bad, bad, bad, the Buddha at the front of the room sneers. I am the opposite of yoga.
My body attempts downward dog, but instead of letting go of these coursing thoughts, I’m deeper inside them. I am supposed to be with my children. I am supposed to still have a husband. I am not supposed to be doing yoga on this day. I am not supposed to feel so lost and alone. Instead of focusing on my breath, my mind races in endless laps and retrieves a Chasidic story a formerly Orthodox friend once shared with me: There was a wayward yeshiva student who went to his rabbi and confessed that he no longer believed. Newly free, he would eat nonkosher food, sleep with women, bask in all that was once forbidden. His rabbi looked at him and said, “You can partake of the pleasures, but you will never enjoy them.” I imagine that rabbi issuing a warning to me as well: You can go to your nice Kripalu, you can listen to talk of letting go, you can breathe, bend, and pose, but your mind will always belong to us.
“Namaste,” the teacher says at the end of class, which means “the divine in me pays homage to the divine in you.” All around me, heads bow in devotion, hands clasped to hearts, but I resist taking part. Surely I’m the only one here hoping not to find God but to lose Him.
I try a hula-hooping class and learn—self-discovery, at last!—that when I close my eyes and stop thinking about what I’m doing, I can hula-hoop indefinitely. I splurge on craniosacral therapy at the advice of a friend, and as the therapist lightly touches my head, I tell her my story, as though with these simple adjustments, she can alleviate the knot of guilt and fear.
On the second day, when Kripalu is starting to feel like a mental institution in which all inmates wear black yoga pants, the woman who leads yoga dance advises us to let go of the stale, hard
ened spaces within ourselves.
“What would your body feel like if it were free?” she asks.
Standing in the back of the room in case my self-consciousness requires me to make a quick escape, I have no answer. I’m wary of trading one false devotion for another. Any talk of meaning and purpose, any reference to a beatific divine light, falls under the tarp of suspicion. As the people around me start to dance, prancing and floating and light and free, my legs feel wooden, my body heavy and lumbering. All I can think of are the bugs my elementary-school classmates and I used to collect at recess, tiny black crawlers that, when threatened by the pokes and prods of our fingers, curled into tight balls.
“As you dance,” the instructor says, “make eye contact with people you don’t know. Release your fear. Break the barriers that prevent you from connecting.” There’s a languid soulful song playing, and I dance a little, hands above my head in a sheepish ballerina spin. My longing for the kids comes over me. They will be back from synagogue by now, sitting around my former in-laws’ dining-room table, their aunts and uncles and cousins assembled, traditional holiday fare like brisket, breaded chicken, and an assortment of kugels before them. I make tentative eye contact with a few people dancing near me. Except for my roommate, I’ve barely spoken to anyone, but if I start to talk I might become one of those people you meet on airplanes or in coffee shops who pour out their tales of woe.