The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  “Are the kids excited for Sukkot?” my mother asks.

  “I think so,” I say. It’s an innocent question, but I hear what lurks below.

  “How does it work with the kids?” she wants to know, and we are off, into the perilous double helix of divorce and religion. It’s hard to remember what we used to talk about. Now the questions abound—not only how the kids’ time will be divided but who shall retain possession of their beliefs.

  “You know I’m not really Orthodox anymore,” I remind her, as I have several times already, although without detailing what exactly this means. Each time, I detect a flicker of disbelief on her face, as though I’m describing an impossibility. But I can hardly blame her—I’m still surprised myself.

  “I respect your own choices, but with the kids, don’t you think . . .” My mother trails off.

  “You can leave as long as you’re willing to leave alone? You can quietly stray as long as the kids remain?” I finish the sentence for her.

  “I just think—” she starts to say.

  “Am I supposed to pretend?” I interrupt, lowering my voice so that the kids playing in the next room don’t hear. Even as I argue with her, I worry she’s right—how many changes can the kids face in one year? How can they comfortably navigate their different worlds—their father’s and mine? I’m cagey with the kids about no longer being Orthodox. They have seen me break some of the prohibitions, but I have yet to say, The rules with which we have raised you, I no longer observe; the truths I have instilled in you, I no longer believe. I’m not sure which is the greater betrayal: to change course at this late date, or to continue to raise them in a system in which I don’t believe.

  My mother doesn’t answer. There will be no stark rejection, no hard-sell coercion—though Orthodox, my parents are too open and accepting for the outright shunning that often happens in more stringently Orthodox families when the parts of a family cease to match one another. Parents stop speaking to children, children stop speaking to parents, all in the name of God. With every sentence I say, though, I am afraid of becoming unrecognizable, no longer the good daughter I am supposed to be. I worry that I will lose the sense that I belong here in this house, the only place that still feels like home.

  Once the dishes are put in the oven—my zucchini lined up in the pan like a fleet of green canoes—I leave the kitchen to go check on the kids, who are playing happily. I study them as though searching for symptoms of a dreaded fever, worried that the divorce fills their minds as persistently as it does mine, that they too cannot stop noting that this is the first Sukkot of the divorce, that during this year, everything is a first. When I was their age, divorce existed only in books or the occasional after-school TV special, part of the swath of problems that affected other people. A broken home, it was always called, and I’d imagined a house cut in half, suffering the kind of wreckage we saw on the news after a tornado had touched down nearby.

  In the den, the boys are plugged into a variety of screens, and Layla is playing with the bins of toys saved from my childhood—the wood blocks and the oversize red metal fire truck, the small Fisher-Price people I had once named Bayla and Faygie, and the milk crate of naked Barbies who, in earlier days, were dressed in sparkling gowns and bore names like Tiffany and Chrissy. “Those are good names for nice Jewish dolls,” my mother once quipped and I was taken aback. I hadn’t realized that the Barbies were automatically Jewish because they were mine.

  There are few aspects of my family not imbued with Jewishness; it is braided through every memory, part of nearly every conversation and every relationship. On every wall of this house, there is contemporary Israeli art. Books overflow onto every free surface—this is a house made not only of bricks but of books. On my parents’ shelves, novels and volumes of poetry mingle with Jewish texts and books of Jewish folktales, books about Israel and Jewish spirituality and philosophical works by Modern Orthodox rabbis who advocate integrating secular ideas with religious ones. At least on these shelves, there is an easy commingling of disparate ideas.

  In large frames displayed around the house, there are family photos of my siblings and me. My younger sister, Dahlia, who has long dark blond curls and striking green eyes, is unmarried at the age of thirty-seven. She is a therapist and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one among the many Orthodox singles who live close to one another, awaiting marriage. In a picture of my older brother, Akiva, at his wedding—which took place the same summer as mine—he is clean-shaven, the white-knit yarmulke of the Modern Orthodox on his head. His wife, in sequins and tulle, leans against him playfully. In a more recent photo, Akiva has a full beard and long ringlet side-curls and wears a black ceremonial coat and a round fur-trimmed hat like those once worn by Russian and Polish nobility. His wife’s hair is entirely covered with a gold turban, and their children are dressed in black and white, their hair cut short except for the side-curls that frame the boys’ faces. Now adherents to ultra-Orthodox Chasidism—a mystical movement started in the eighteenth century advocating for a greater emphasis on forging a spiritual connection to God—they live in the Israeli city of Tzfat; they are not allowed secular studies, not allowed exposure to art, to literature, to the outside world.

  All these photos are not just family memories but photographic evidence of the presumed threats to Modern Orthodoxy, which views itself as being under siege from the right, from the left, and from inside. There is the problem of kids rejecting the so-called pick-and-choose laxness of Modern Orthodoxy and becoming right-wing Orthodox. There is the problem of kids falling through the holes created by the relative openness and becoming nonobservant. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s the problem of singles who don’t get married at the conventional time and who linger for years, feeling that the community has no place for them.

  Now my siblings and I represent all of these. My parents, I imagine, must sometimes feel like they have whiplash from the varying paths we have taken. But even so, they have maintained this middle ground. They believe that you can remain strictly Orthodox without being a separatist. You can grapple with modern ideas, engage in art and science, believe in a limited feminism if you must, although not so much that it pulls you away. Teach your children to span two worlds and trust that they can navigate between them. But here lay the dilemma. If you allowed yourself to be a critical thinker, was religion exempt from this examination? If you raised children to think for themselves, what did you do if they thought in ways that were foreign to you? If you believed in free choice, what did you do if your children chose something else?

  “Do you know what it feels like to live something you don’t believe?” I ask my parents when I come back into the kitchen. Each time I say this outright, I leave a little more. To leave a marriage, to leave a religion, you never go just once. You have to leave again and again.

  It’s quiet in here and in the den, too, where the kids have probably made use of their special sonar that can detect when something of interest is being discussed by the adults. I look from my mother to my father. She is passionate, creative, and free-spirited, deeply engaged with religious ritual and spirituality. He makes fewer outward displays of religiosity but is in possession of an intellectual curiosity, an abiding commitment, and a quiet integrity. For both of them, there have been times when they have not fit neatly inside the Orthodox community, yet it remains the place where they belong.

  “What would you do if you felt this way?” I persist. The few moments in which they are silent tick painfully past.

  “You’re in a tough position,” my father says.

  “It’s confusing for the kids,” my mother says.

  I seek refuge in my childhood bedroom, the past intact on shelves and in the walk-in closet, where I once liked to curl up on Shabbat in a nest of pillows and read. On Shabbat, when traveling by car was forbidden, books were a permissible mode of escape. They released me from the trapped feeling I had each Friday at sundown, when the rules went into effect and it felt lik
e we were being stranded on a desert island.

  In the books I read, siblings lived parentless in boxcars; children embarked on forest adventures; a girl encountered a family who would live forever. I read of witches and ghosts, of teenage twins—one good, one bad—who went to football games and proms. No one I met in books lived as we did, but in real life, almost everyone I knew was Orthodox.

  My maternal grandmother grew up in Memphis in a secular Zionist household; her father was a native Memphian and her mother an immigrant from Grodno, a city on the Poland-Russia border. My grandmother became Orthodox on her own, as a teenager. Before that, she sometimes went to the wealthier Reform temple in downtown Memphis, where she felt like an outsider. One day, searching for something more, she decided to attend the less affluent Orthodox synagogue, made up mostly of Eastern European immigrants. She was the first one to arrive at the youth service. The second to arrive was my grandfather, then a blond-haired, blue-eyed young Orthodox man, the American-born son of Polish immigrants.

  My grandmother’s transformation to Orthodoxy was conveyed in storied tones, the religious equivalent of a fairy tale about a princess returned to her rightful home. If a rift was created between her and her parents, if she was regarded as rejecting their secular beliefs, I never knew about it, though I was aware that sometimes her father drove to our house on Shabbat but parked a few blocks away so that we wouldn’t actually see him desecrate the day. The gesture was appreciated, but still, family members quietly discussed whether we were allowed to have him over in the first place. By inviting him to a place that he had to drive to, we were causing him to sin—the equivalent, our rabbis explained, of placing a stumbling block before a blind man. All Jews, we were told, were responsible for one another. Our concern about the sins of non-Orthodox Jews was often held up as an example of our kindness and compassion, but even so, I used to wonder how my great-grandfather would have felt had he known he was our equivalent of a blind man.

  My grandmother sent her children to the Memphis Hebrew Academy, which she helped found, the centerpiece of a now burgeoning Orthodox community; she dressed her daughters for the Children’s Ball, when mixed dancing was still allowed, and organized the school’s float in the Cotton Carnival Parade. Eventually, she sent a son to a right-wing Orthodox yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey, and a daughter to a women’s seminary in New York. Only my mother went to college, to the women’s branch of the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University, which prided itself on integrating secular and religious studies.

  Though fully Orthodox, we were considered the least religious branch of my mother’s family. Modern Orthodoxy was often regarded with suspicion, seen as an intellectual way of rationalizing a laxness about the laws. To my mother’s brother’s wedding, my father wore one of right-wing Orthodoxy’s trademark black fedoras (a concession and an act of falseness that he sometimes marvels at now and says he wouldn’t repeat), and my mother covered her hair with a short curly wig that later joined our collection of dress-up clothes. My siblings and I studied the pictures of our parents dressed to fit into this alternate world. Though I was aware, from a young age, of the differences between Modern Orthodoxy and right-wing Orthodoxy, the stricter proscriptions cast an ever-present shadow. “Pants aren’t modest,” one of my cousins informed me about my jeans, and I’d been annoyed at what she said but at the same time felt I had reason to be ashamed.

  There were always reasons to feel this coil of anger and shame. In fourth grade, we learned that Eve had caused Adam to sin with her unwillingness to follow God’s directions. As a punishment, God told her that her desire will be for her husband, and va timshol ba—“he will rule over her”—the text said. For homework, I needed to translate this verse, among others, and at the small white desk in my bedroom, I felt a low rumbling of anger, the same slow burn I felt in school when the boys screamed out the morning blessing designated for them, thanking God for not making them women. Without being told, we, the girls in the class, knew to use small sweet voices when we recited our counterpart version thanking God for making us “according to Thy will.” You don’t have to feel that way, we were told if we complained to our teachers about this blessing or any other perceived slight to us as girls and women. You’re too sensitive. You’ve been corrupted by the outside. You’re looking at it the wrong way. You don’t realize that these supposed denigrations are actually the opposite, because you, girls and women, don’t need all the rituals that men require. Because you are special, more spiritual, naturally close to God. My mother came into my room and I pointed to the offending words about Eve being ruled over by Adam.

  “How can the Torah say that?” I asked.

  The book that I had been taught to revere, seemingly turned against me.

  Her eyes filled with sympathy but also conviction. “You can’t take it that way. It doesn’t mean it like that,” she explained, but I could see that she understood the problem. She considered herself an Orthodox feminist even before that term became widespread and vilified. Anywhere but in the religious arena, she would have argued against the notion of male domination. But the Torah was protected land—the words were sacred. It might have sounded confusing but she believed that, however imperfectly, feminism could coexist with Orthodoxy. A contradiction like this didn’t have the power to undo her belief. The text couldn’t be wrong; the rabbis couldn’t be wrong. If sexism was wrong, the text couldn’t be sexist. You were either reading it wrong or feeling it wrong. The laws couldn’t change, the words couldn’t change—nothing, in fact, could change—yet you could turn the words, reframe them, and reshape them, do anything so that you could still fit inside.

  I continued to feel that burn of anger but tried to allow my mother’s words to spread over me, like a calm hand cooling a feverish forehead. I didn’t want to fall outside her comfort, didn’t want to walk across a dividing line as familial as it was religious. There was one truth I knew without having to be told, not just in my family but in my community, among everyone that I knew: to observe was to be good, and to be good was to be loved.

  Searching for a way out of the problem the text presented, my mother and I read a biblical commentary that explained that this supposedly offending phrase referred to the fact that the man shall rule over the woman in the sexual act. It wasn’t exactly clear to me how this explanation made the words any better, but I was too embarrassed to ask my mother and find out. I may not have understood what the commentator meant by the sexual act, but I did know that it had to do with a part of the world that needed to remain hidden.

  When I was in ninth grade, my friends and I went to the Mall of Memphis, where we tried on prom dresses that we’d never be allowed to wear, for a prom we’d never be allowed to have. From the outside, no one could tell we were Orthodox—unlike the boys, we didn’t to have to wear yarmulkes everywhere we went—which was a relief. But even so, there was no forgetting. Usually when I browsed through racks of clothing, I automatically separated out what was allowed, what was not. At home, my parents let me wear pants—this was one of the so-called laxities of Modern Orthodoxy—but I did so with the awareness that it wasn’t really permitted. It seemed like maybe the rabbis were right—I did feel different in jeans, strangely powerful and strong. But at school, the rules were stricter. Could you see my collarbone? Could you see my knees? Was this skirt too short, this shirt too sheer, too tight, too sexy? My friends and I folded dresses over our arms and hurried into the changing rooms. In the three-sided mirrors, I surveyed myself in a strapless satin gown, marveling at the bare shoulders and arms, the beginning of cleavage. This was an impossible version of myself; it was as though these were fun-house mirrors distorting who I really was. I was used to all the ways my body needed to be covered but less accustomed to what could be revealed. My friends and I laughed at our reflections and quickly took off the gowns, worried that the salespeople surveying us could tell that we didn’t belong inside these dresses, that they’d suspect us not of shoplifting, but of impersonating teens we
would never become.

  “If you’re going to be a role model, you need to wear skirts,” one of my youth-group leaders told me when I was in tenth grade. This was just before we went on a weekend retreat. Every few months we would go on one of these conventions for teenagers from observant and nonobservant homes. We traveled to cities with large Jewish populations, like St. Louis, and small ones, like Omaha and Wichita, to instill in Jewish teens a love of Orthodox Judaism. Influence them. Convince them. Sway them, we were urged regarding those who weren’t Orthodox—runaway bunnies or little lost lambs who could be gently coaxed home. I listened to my adviser’s admonition against wearing pants because, more than my freedom, I cared about his approval.

  After a long overnight bus ride to our intended destination, we would arrive a few hours before Shabbat.

  “You are the next link in the chain,” we were told as we sang and danced in separate circles, boys and girls.

  “You are the bright light in the darkness.”

  “How do we know it’s true?” my friends and I asked a rabbi on Shabbat afternoon at one of these conventions. In class we usually raised questions about the existence of God only to waste time, but here I really wanted to know. I still lay awake at night tormented by the what-ifs, but now many of them were of the religious sort. All around me, I heard the drumbeat of supposed truth. Without God, there is no meaning. Without the Torah, there is no goodness. But what if there emerged some irrefutable proof that the Torah wasn’t true? I wasn’t sure if I was dreading this or hoping for it; I didn’t know how it would feel to watch everything that I had been taught was true crumble, just as I didn’t know exactly what form such a revelation might take—I doubted that a refutation of the Torah would be announced from heaven. But the practical questions notwithstanding, what if it was proven, beyond any doubt, that the Torah was not the word of God? Would I want to know, I interrogated myself, or would I prefer to cover my eyes and carry on unchanged? On the one hand, the forbidden world would spring free—all of a sudden we would be able to watch TV on Shabbat and eat at the restaurants whose commercials we watched and that tempted us to compile lists of which we’d try first if we could. (Taco Bell, then KFC, but not Red Lobster, which seemed disgusting.) But after the excitement faded, surely the earth would sway dangerously. It would be the same as discovering you weren’t part of your own family, like learning that your parents didn’t actually love you.