by Tova Mirvis
I take a magenta scarf from the shimmery pile, feeling ridiculous. I’m not sure if being here is less or more absurd than standing in a different sanctuary in a different costume counting out the blasts of a ram’s horn. What if the people in the sanctuary in which I’ve spent the Rosh Hashanahs of years past were to break out in such movements? Dance your prayers, your sins, your wishes. The women would lift their hats so they could see unimpeded. The men would hold their prayer shawls like billowing scarves. Arms outstretched, they would open their hands, their hearts, to the world: We are in child pose, in submission to God above us. We are in mountain pose, in worship of the creation we celebrate today.
In this room, I feel my clenched resistance begin to give way. It’s a little easier to face my fears, a list lying in wait—nightmares of my hands slipping from the roof of a building, of falling off the edge of a cliff, falling from an airplane, falling from a thin wire, falling for no reason at all, just falling. The fear most of all that I would come unmoored from all that was supposed to hold me.
What I have most feared is now what I have chosen.
It’s a good thing there are no mirrors in here. For one rare moment, I stop thinking. My arms come free from my body and I twirl and circle the room. It doesn’t matter who else is here, who might see me, or what they, or I, might think. My arms are waving branches. I am part of the grass, under the sky.
In this moment, it feels both exceedingly simple and impossibly out of reach: there are other ways to be.
Day of Judgment
With a few hours until Yom Kippur begins, Aaron comes to pick up the kids—according to our new schedule, this year, this holiday belongs to him as well. Yom Kippur, which comes ten days after the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, is the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. Aaron is in a hurry to get the kids to his house so they have enough time to eat before the fast, which begins at sundown. A sense of urgency surrounds us, exacerbating the anxious solemnity already present in the hours leading up to this holiday, during which we won’t eat, drink, or shower, during which we ignore most of the physical needs of our bodies.
Trying not to look at me, Aaron stands in the entryway of the house I’m renting from a friend of a friend for a year or possibly two, until she’s ready to sell it. It looks strikingly like the old house we all lived in together, as though I’ve intentionally re-created an approximation of what was before. This house, though, has half the furniture that used to be ours and is now mine—a few weeks before we each moved, Aaron and I had divided the contents of the house “like a sports draft,” Noam, our oldest child, quipped as Aaron and I sat in the backyard on the wooden chairs and table that would soon belong to me alone, a late-round pick. With each selection—You take the gray sectional couch we bought when we first moved to Boston; I’ll take the breakfront in which we’d stored our wedding china—we were disassembling our lives. The mirror we bought while on vacation in Cape May, New Jersey. The Ikea desk we’d put together in the first weeks of our marriage. The desk had been in possession of more parts than we’d anticipated, none of which fit together smoothly due to the incomprehensible directions—our first lesson in married life. We’d assumed the desk would last only a few years, but it had far exceeded our expectations—the seventy-five-dollar desk from Ikea had outlasted even us.
Awkwardly, I hand Aaron the bag I assemble each time he comes to pick up the kids—today it’s the kids’ dress clothes for synagogue and books to entertain them while they’re there. Intent on avoiding any conversation that might lead to a fight, we discuss only practicalities. In front of the kids, we are restrained, trying to foster the illusion that divorce happens quietly, politely.
Even so, despite my attempt at sounding natural, my voice is false, my body rigid and on guard. Aware, as I always am, of his anger toward me, I can leave no vulnerable spots unprotected. In his mind, this is all my fault. Every conversation risks reverting to a drumbeat of blame: I have changed. I have broken the rules. I am bad, I am bad, I am bad. “You have no right to your own version of this story,” he said on the doorstep of my house a few weeks earlier, when I tried to explain again why I had chosen this. Even as every part of me rose in revolt at his statement, his words played in an endless loop in my head, no longer just in his voice but in my own as well.
“We need to go now,” Noam says, aware of how close it is to sundown.
“Do we have to?” asks Josh, more interested in finishing the video game he’s in the middle of than in fulfilling the obligation to pray and repent.
Noam is now thirteen, perceptive, thoughtful, and responsible. Josh, who is nine, has an impish smile and is both exuberant and reflective. Layla, almost five, has a shock of curly blond hair and a free spirit. Inside me, there live spaces carved out in their images, as though my body still carries the shell of each of them.
“This is the plan,” I say carefully, worried that everything I say could be used against me. I have been the mother who picks the kids up at school every day, makes dinner, packs school lunches, reads bedtime stories, and tucks them into bed each night, but now, because of the divorce, I feel like I am constantly on trial. I need to prove that I am still capable, responsible, and, of course, good.
The need to uphold the agreement has been drilled into me by our burgeoning staff of lawyers and therapists. In our temporary agreement, the weekdays are divided, as are the weekends. The holidays too have been divvied up so meticulously that even the lawyers who weren’t Jewish became versed in the details of every Jewish holiday. We had originally tried mediation, but that turned out to be an expensive way to argue while the mediator helplessly murmured, “I know this must be so hard for you.” There was too much anger, too much pain—an entire marriage’s worth compressed and then released. Now we each have lawyers, which feels like a surreal fact, as though we can still wake from this nightmare that I’ve purposely chosen. There have been months of negotiating—angry e-mails, bitter texts—about the parenting plan, about the division of whatever money we have left, about anything over which two people can fight.
While the religious divorce was finalized in the get ceremony in May, the civil agreement is slated to be completed in December, a few months from now. We had arrived at a temporary agreement in August, a few hours before a pretrial hearing. Early one morning, I’d waited in line to have my bag x-rayed by security before I entered the courthouse, but that seemed pointless; the whole building could have been brought down by all the explosive anger inside. Here in this building lay the collective underbelly of love. The marriage license bureau should be housed here, all brides made to pass through. They should show films of this place to engaged couples, like those of deadly car wrecks screened in driver’s ed.
Inside the courthouse, I saw Aaron on the other side of the mezzanine. At the sight of him, I veered between guilt and anger. I couldn’t stop staring at him in the way I sometimes mined the kids’ faces for remnants of the babies they once were. He was two people simultaneously, still the man I was married to, still the man I was divorcing, yet it felt impossible that he was either—impossible that we were ever married, impossible that we were getting divorced. I felt his anger every time he looked at me, but in that tense, coiled anger, there was safety. When it lifted, there would be room for the sorrow, his and mine, which was what I feared most of all.
As we waited for our time with the judge, our lawyers completed last-minute negotiations. Aaron and I sat for hours on wood benches on opposite sides of the mezzanine—like children in trouble at school while the adults determined the punishment. When finally an agreement was reached, we signed a document headed with both our names—names I was so used to seeing together, though hardly in this oppositional formulation, lined up as though preparing for war.
On the wall of the courtroom that looked like a DMV, a sign announced that a failure to dress appropriately would result in a penalty, although the nature of the penalty wasn’t specified, nor did the sign indicate w
hat exactly was considered inappropriate. I’d opted for synagogue-wear—a knee-length black skirt, a purple blouse with a ruffle around the collar, and low heels—trying to look proper, respectful, good. But apparently no one dresses up to get divorced. The people around me wore tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops as they waited for the judge to dispense rulings on their lives. Not realizing these were public proceedings, I’d imagined that the judge would sit privately with us, a wise, all-knowing marriage counselor whose opinion was binding. Each detail of the parenting plan—should the kids be picked up by Aaron at 6:00 p.m. as he wanted or at 6:30 p.m. as I preferred—would be given careful judicial review; perhaps he’d split the disputed time in half and arrive at a Solomonic 6:15. Instead, parenting plans, financial arrangements, all forms of bitter grievances were dealt with in minutes in front of an audience of lawyers and other petitioners who halfheartedly listened, tired of waiting but relieved to hear of separations more fraught than their own.
Before our names were called, a tiny wispy-haired man in a brown suit did battle with an obese ex-wife, who stood with the aid of a cane, over missed alimony payments and alleged attempts to hide income.
“But Judge,” the man said in a thin, whiny voice, “she has a history of claiming she’s on the verge of being evicted.”
Who was right, who was wrong? Here everyone was both and neither, wrong and wronged. We awaited our ten minutes with the judge, then were quickly given a seal of approval for the temporary agreement—the provisional map until December, when the borders between our now-divided country would be permanently negotiated.
With the start of Yom Kippur rapidly approaching, I walk the kids out to Aaron’s car, a dark blue Honda Pilot, the companion to my light brown one. I hug the kids goodbye but what I really want to do is apologize to them profusely then grab hold of them and keep them here with me—tuck them somehow inside my body if need be and revert to an earlier stage of motherhood, when they were always part of me. I had once been a mother who aspired to smooth away all imperfections, present my children with a world that was safe and whole. I glued photographs into albums to create the definitive stories of their early years. I changed the words of songs as I rocked them to sleep; down will come baby, not cradle and all, but safely in my arms. When an old lady swallowed a fly, there was no perhaps she’ll die but perhaps she’ll cry—the outer limit of the bad that could exist. Of course I knew, even back then, that no absolute protection could, or even should, be ensured. I knew that events beyond our control might shake us loose from the story of how things were supposed to be. But I would never have believed that I would be the one to bring it about.
When Aaron and the children leave, I want to chase after the kids and tell them I didn’t mean it, didn’t mean any of this. I don’t want to go back inside the house, which will feel eerily quiet—an empty stage set. Everything that appeared three-dimensional—the furnishings, the view out the window—will turn out to have been painted on cardboard. I hadn’t been able to imagine, until I’d arrived here, how it would feel to watch the kids drive off to what seems like an alternate life that exists half a mile away; how it would feel to scroll through the calendar in dread of which days with them I would miss. I didn’t know that alongside the pain of separation, I would hear, screaming inside my head, a constant, accusing voice: You wanted this. You chose this.
It’s getting dark and I haven’t yet decided how I will observe this holiday that once filled me with trepidation. As much as I want to hide from the press of rules, I can gather no distance; for someone who is trying to leave, I haven’t made it very far. I’m considering blocking from my mind the image of Jews the world over fasting and praying for forgiveness, yet to skip this day feels far graver than sitting out Rosh Hashanah. The punishment for not observing Yom Kippur is karet—your soul shall be cut off from your people, this supposedly the ultimate penalty. But it occurs to me, as I stand outside, that this is exactly how I feel, like an astronaut whose connection to the spaceship is severed; outside the law of gravity, you endlessly float.
A few days before, a friend had told me about the nontraditional spiritual service she and her family were going to in Weston, a few towns over, in a barn in someone’s backyard. “You should come with us,” she’d said.
“I’ll think about it,” I told her, not sure whether I wanted to embrace a more freewheeling religious practice or do away with religion altogether.
When I go back inside the quiet house now and check my e-mail, I see that my friend has forwarded me a message from the leader of the barn service. It contains an exercise to help prepare for the purpose of the day.
In the e-mail, he noted that the central command of Yom Kippur—va’aneetem et nafshoteichem—was typically interpreted as a need to “afflict our souls.” But there were other possible meanings, he wrote. The word that we usually translated as “afflicted” could also mean “answer, respond to, be occupied with, busy ourselves with, or sing.” The word that was usually translated as “soul” could also mean “body, life, self, desire, or passion.” Yom Kippur, he told us, was a call to examine how the phrase applied in our own lives.
We are given an assignment: Decide which meanings of the phrase va’aneetem et nafshoteichem are most moving to us. Do we want to think of this as a day of afflicting our souls, or of answering our passions, or of occupying ourselves with our lives? We are to consider the combinations of sentences that these varying definitions can make and choose the ones that express our deepest longings. Then we are to ask ourselves how we put this into practice. For example, how would we finish the sentence I afflict my body when I . . . ? Or I answer my soul when I . . . ? Or I am responding to my passion when I . . . ?
We are to write our answers on index cards and hand them in at the service, where they will be shared with the group. When I was newly married—a young Orthodox woman with my hair covered, as was required of me—I was enrolled in a creative writing graduate program. In one class, a teacher instructed all the students to write down our deepest secrets. We didn’t have to read them aloud or show them to anyone; just writing the words was a feat of bravery. All around me, my classmates started to write. I’d stared anxiously at the blank sheet, aware that there were sentences that could hardly be thought, let alone written down. I had no great secret in mind; all I could have written was that I harbored a fear that also felt like a fantasy that one day my orderly life would erupt. Afraid to let this sentence linger in my head for too long, I folded the blank paper into a small square and threw it away when I left the classroom.
Now, though, when I’ve learned that those bare-all sentences never stay buried for long, I quickly write something on an index card and put it in my bag.
Going to the barn service, I text William. All day we text back and forth, so much that just the sight of my phone makes me think of him. At night, when the kids are asleep, we talk on the phone. I whisper so as not to wake Layla, who sleeps in my bed these days and shifts at the sound of my laughter.
Enjoy, William writes.
Want to come with me? I ask.
No religion for me, he answers, as I knew he would. He is skeptical, rational, scientific. He decries false piety, organized religion, public demonstrations of righteousness. For him, religion is designed to divide people; it’s not a search for truth but an exclusive club. In being with him, I know that I’ve chosen the opposite of what came before.
Please? I persist.
You don’t believe in it, so why are you holding on? he writes back.
I have no simple answer for this.
A few minutes later, I’m rifling through my closet looking for a pair of nonleather shoes, which are required by Jewish law as a sign of deprivation on Yom Kippur, when my phone beeps again. My heart leaps, as it always does, when I see William’s name.
I can drive there with you if you want and wait for you outside, he texts, an offer I appreciate, but I tell him I can go by myself. My religious journey is one I need to make on m
y own.
It’s almost dark by the time I head out to Weston; my car is my chief vehicle of transgression. Not wanting anyone I know to see me driving on this day, I carefully plot my route—the map inside my head is still marked with streets that are impassable on Shabbat and on holidays, roads allowed and forbidden. On the streets I take, no one I know will be walking to synagogue, noticing me in my car. By driving to this service, I’m supposedly doing something wrong, yet all along the street where the service is being held, cars are lined up, people emerging, doing something they believe to be good. The feeling of wrongdoing appears to be mine alone.
Really, this is a barn in name only—it’s actually a beautifully refurbished structure out behind a sprawling house. There is a small basket filled with index cards by the front door, and I add my own card to the heaping pile.
I walk in tentatively, wishing the kids were with me. In one of the rows of this barn turned synagogue, I see my friend, her husband, and their children. They saved me a seat in case I decided to attend, and this act of friendship fills my eyes with tears—as does any small kindness these days.
We sit in a semicircle of rows. The leader is an earnest, soft-spoken rheumatologist with a soulful voice. The mood is warm and gentle as he plays the guitar and a congregant beats a drum, both technically forbidden today according to Orthodox rules. Until this year, I might have been intrigued by this barn service, but I would never have considered attending it. It was too different from the Orthodox services I was used to, and there were too many barriers—not just that driving to the service was forbidden but that it didn’t comply with the rules of Orthodoxy requiring men and women to sit separately, requiring the traditional liturgy to remain unchanged. It wouldn’t matter if I found the experience moving, not if it meant trespassing upon any of the laws. I was so used to feeling compelled, I had long ago ceased to consider what I wanted this to mean. Even now, when the singing is rousing and heartfelt—a room of people passionately engaged—I sit stiffly, unmoved. I can’t help but see it all through my Orthodox eyes. Too crunchy, I think, too spiritual; I tabulate all the ways this service doesn’t adhere to the letter of the law.