The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  At a prior convention, this rabbi had come upon me huddling close to a cute boy in the basement of the synagogue, and he had pointedly put a pillow between us. According to the Torah, it was forbidden to touch boys; wrong to kiss, wrong even to hold hands. Because I was one of the good girls, the rabbi had looked at me with surprise. He was right to react in this way. I had never kissed a boy; barely touched one, for that matter. Though I cringed at the thought of disappointing anyone, I studied the so-called bad girls in my class, the ones who wore short skirts and, it was rumored, at one of these conventions, had snuck out of their houses at night to hang out with, and possibly kiss, boys. Didn’t they feel that their every action was watched, judged? Didn’t they feel communal eyes burning marks of shame onto their skin? It was something I had always known: you existed only as you were created in the eyes of others.

  This boy and I sat close, our arms brushing against each other’s. We’d pretended not to notice, though with the lights off and no one else around, the tickle of his skin against mine was the only sensation that existed—the rest of my body came to a standstill in the face of this discovery. I’d been taught about how sinful and soul-damaging it was to have any physical contact with boys, but no one had talked about the feeling that more of your body could come to life.

  Here at this convention, though, as my friends and I asked questions about God, the rabbi wasn’t police officer but teacher. He didn’t have to offer me a disappointed shake of the head and a reminder that I was someone from whom he expected more. He described his own crisis of faith, when he decided he couldn’t live on the fence. Though it was clear what he’d chosen—one look at his beard and black hat dispelled any questions—I still wanted to hear him speak of the existence of these doubts. It was easy to fall for the illusion that there was only contentment, only righteousness, but I was hungry for someone to expose the underworld of dissenting feelings—even to admit it existed at all. We all believe, I heard again and again, but was it possible that there were outliers who didn’t always believe exactly as they were required to? Was there some hidden place where people admitted what they really thought—maybe inside a small box that locked with a mini-key like the one that closed my diary or in some subterranean room where, in the dark of night, they laid bare their confessions? Only in fleeting moments was there ever a hint that this alternate world existed—scandals that ripped a jagged fissure in the way the community was supposed to look, discussed by the adults at the Shabbat table, the topic abruptly changed when the children wandered back in for dessert. Each overheard story offered a small piece of understanding that I was only starting to assemble. People weren’t necessarily who they appeared to be. Good and bad weren’t always so neatly divided.

  With my friends and I sitting around him, the rabbi told us that according to the Torah, animals needed to have split hoofs and chew their cuds in order to be considered kosher. However, a certain number of animals had one of these traits but not the other.

  “The proof that the Torah was written by God,” he said, “was that the text states the exact number of animals in this ambiguous category.”

  If a human being wrote the Torah, how would he know how many animals had one trait and not the other? Why would he risk specifying the number of animals, a fact that could easily be disproven when new lands were discovered and our knowledge of the earth expanded?

  “To this day”—he paused dramatically—“that number holds.”

  The hair on the back of my neck bristled. Here was proof. The Torah, the laws, the rabbis were true after all.

  “Remember the certainty you feel in this moment,” he said. “You won’t be able to hold on to it, but you can remember that right here, right now, you did feel it.”

  When Shabbat was over, we sat on the floor of the synagogue social hall. With the lights dimmed and the band playing softly, we swayed back and forth. A pure heart God created in me, we sang in Hebrew as a candle was passed from person to person. This was the high point of the weekend, why we had traveled all these miles. We would name how we had grown. We would inspire our peers to grow as well.

  “I came feeling like I had no friends, but now I belong,” said a girl who cried as she held the candle, her face flickering in and out of view.

  “I’m going to tell my parents I want to go to yeshiva instead of public school,” said a lanky teenage boy with spiked hair.

  The candle came to me. “I hope I never lose the certainty I felt over this Shabbat,” I said. But already that bristling sensation at the back of my neck—the feeling that I was being shown indisputable facts—was fading.

  But don’t give in to doubt. Don’t be influenced by the pull of the outside. Keep the flame of tradition burning. Bear the torch, be a light unto the nations. So many Jews had died, we were told, without the freedom we possessed. With the lights still dimmed, one of the rabbis told a story about a man who died and went to heaven. With God watching, the angels piled the man’s good deeds on one side of a scale and his bad deeds on the other. The scale teetered back and forth and then, lo and behold, it came out exactly even.

  “Go back to earth,” the angels advised this soul. “Bring three good deeds to sway the Holy One, blessed be He, so that you may be admitted to heaven.”

  The soul flew to earth and found a Jew performing one of God’s commandments. He scooped up the good deed and carried it to the waiting angels. But it wasn’t enough—“We need two more,” said the angels—so the soul flew back to earth and found a second good deed, which he brought to heaven.

  But it wasn’t enough. One more. So the soul flew across the ocean, across the years. To Russia. To a small village. The czar and a band of Cossacks were riding horses through the street. Atrocities and suffering the likes of which you’ve never seen, the rabbi told us, his voice rising and falling dramatically. A Jewish girl, thirteen years old, tied to a horse by her long hair. Dragged through the streets. A crowd of jeering onlookers.

  “A last request,” the girl begged.

  The czar was intrigued, amused. Who was this girl who dared to ask such a thing?

  “Quiet,” he commanded. “Let us hear her wish.”

  “Two straight pins,” she pleaded.

  The crowd scoffed as she was handed the pins. But this didn’t deter her.

  She took the pins and stuck one through each side of her skirt, plunging them into her flesh so that her skirt wouldn’t ride up, so that her modesty would be preserved.

  I was still with anticipation as I imagined this girl who would do anything to remain covered. The only thing stopping me from being covered was the impediment of my own flawed self.

  To heaven the soul flew, clasping a bloody pin. Upon presenting it to the jury of angels, to God Himself, he was admitted to heaven.

  At the Yeshiva of the South, where I was one of eighteen girls in the entire high school, safety pins were kept in the office to fasten shut a low-cut blouse or a skirt with an offending slit. Mothers had to be called if a new skirt needed to be procured; a spare skirt was kept in the office for those times when a mother wasn’t reachable. Modesty mattered above all. Singing was immodest (though not being allowed to sing didn’t bother me as much as the other laws—I had a terrible voice and steadfastly refused to sing in front of anyone). Our bodies too were immodest—to see a woman’s thigh was to see her nakedness. Pants showed the forbidden form of legs. Knees were equally problematic. So was any writing on our shirts that would draw men’s eyes to our chests. We might have been distractions, temptations, but modesty cleansed us of any potential sin. Modesty prevented us from tempting the weak men, who were less spiritual than we were. Modesty was for our own benefit, so that we remembered we were holy. After all, the glory of the king’s daughter is within—so said the psalm that was produced to snuff out any disgruntlement. We might have been the king’s daughters, but God, the rabbis, and all the men were the kings.

  We were taught, we were told, we were watched. The rabbis existed not just
in the classroom but inside my head, small disapproving figures monitoring both what I did and what I thought. They spoke not as individuals but in a collective voice. In the face of this, my own voice seemed weak and uncertain. The only available subversions were small. I mastered the art of adjusting my skirts, rolling them up or pulling them down on my hips depending on who was around. Shame and defiance wound themselves together. The male teachers reported any immodesty to the female teachers, which made us quietly ask one another, “Well, why were they looking?” But everyone was looking; this was a given. Our knees, elbows, and hair were discussed in black-scripted rabbinic texts, featured prominently in the school rules, in notes sent home reporting infractions. We were always subject to inspection, our bodies divided and measured and mapped.

  The days, too, were divided, secular subjects in the morning, Judaic studies in the afternoon. We were taught to believe in reward and punishment and the world to come. We were supposed to believe the laws were eternal and unchanging. We talked of God as though we could understand His every move. “Think of life as a board game,” a teacher told us. “Would the inventors of Monopoly have created the game and neglected to give you the rules?” The Torah was a rule book as authoritative as the instruction pamphlet in a fresh set of Monopoly, the money rainbow-arrayed and all the properties organized by color. Everything happened for a reason, we were told, yet when a teenager from our community was killed in an accident, when a young woman died unexpectedly, there was no denying that events didn’t always make sense. Only then were we grudgingly forced to encounter a God whose ways we couldn’t understand.

  In between prepping vocabulary words for the SATs and practicing lines for a Shakespeare play, we learned that we were not to talk to any of the three forlorn boys who made up the entirety of a separate and equally restless boys’ high school that was housed in a different wing of the building—here, at least, there was room for mystery. These three lone boys wore basketball jackets (though there weren’t enough of them for an actual team) donated by a crusading member of the community in exchange for their agreement to wear dress jackets for morning prayers, a sign of religious devotion. We weren’t supposed to talk to them—since we started high school, they had become off-limits, creatures we glimpsed out the window of our classrooms as they played two-on-one basketball on the playground or when we happened to walk past them in the school hallway as they went in one door and we went out another.

  As forbidden as these boys were to us now, the same boys, or their equivalents, would become permissible when it was time to get married, which we would all do, preferably within a few years of our high-school graduations. On a school trip to North Carolina—for which we brought coolers full of kosher food—our teachers created a game in which we identified the qualities we valued most in a potential husband. An illusory feeling of love was hardly reason enough to get married. Instead, you needed shared religious values, an agreed-upon path to walk together. We rolled our eyes at the activity—we were far more interested in locating some real-life boys—but played along nonetheless. There were slips of paper and we were to select the ones naming the traits we desired: Someone who studied Torah all day. Someone who would make a good father. Someone who was handsome. Someone who was lenient enough to watch TV. I selected the qualities I thought I wanted—yes to TV, no to learning Torah all day—but since I had yet to have a boyfriend, it was hard to be sure of exactly what I was looking for in a husband.

  In a class on the books of Prophets, we learned about King David, who spied the beautiful Bathsheva bathing upon a rooftop and desired her and took her for his wife. I was sitting at my small wooden desk, sticking the sharp tip of my pencil into the hem of my almost-to-the-knee-if-you-looked-at-it-from-just-the-right-angle faded denim skirt—my most ardent goal was to fringe my way around the entire skirt before the end of the school year. I stared at the clock, whose faint ticking was audible if you listened closely, willing not just the hours to pass but the years.

  “‘King David gave word that her husband, Uriah, was to be sent to the front lines of the battle so that he would be killed,’” we translated from the Hebrew.

  When we were in elementary school, our teachers had skipped over the juicy portions of the Torah. Only when there was no other choice would they reluctantly acknowledge that the Patriarchs and Matriarchs weren’t always perfect. At the story of Bathsheva and David, I stirred to attention. This was starting to sound a little like Days of Our Lives, which I watched during summer vacations and was allowed to tape once a week. Every Friday afternoon, I rushed home to Bo and Hope, even though my mother pointed out that we didn’t share their values.

  It bore some resemblance too to the novels that existed on the other side of the line drawn between the secular and religious. In English class that year, I’d fallen in love with The Scarlet Letter. Here, in the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was blustery New England; here were other people’s rules, so strict that they made my own seem almost lax in comparison. And here, in no uncertain terms, was the punishment for sin. When Hester wears the embroidered A on her chest, “every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact . . . expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere.” And yet, that letter allows her to see people more fully. “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts . . . the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s.” Seeing my love of books, my English teacher—a non-Jewish poet who smoked a pipe and had a renegade spirit that was gloriously out of place in the school—encouraged me to talk to him about what I was reading. “You’re going to love college. You can explore anything you’re interested in,” he told me.

  “King David didn’t sin,” my Jewish studies teacher insisted, trying to tamp down our curious looks.

  She showed us a rabbinic commentator’s explanation for why King David’s act of sleeping with another man’s wife wasn’t wrong: Every man issued a get to his wife before he went to war so that, in the event that he didn’t return, the wife wouldn’t be rendered an agunah, a chained woman whose husband was unable or unwilling to issue a divorce and who thus could not remarry. As soon as Uriah was killed, the divorce retroactively went into effect, so when King David slept with Bathsheva, she retroactively was not married and was thus permissible to him.

  I stared back in confusion—this explanation for why King David hadn’t sinned sounded a little contorted, the sort of excuse I wouldn’t dare offer for breaking a rule. Questions of desire and power seemed so apparent in the actual text but not in the version we were given. I said nothing, because to outwardly challenge a teacher would have been worse than not doing your homework or talking out of turn. I sunk lower in my seat and focused on the hem of my skirt. Be good, said this teacher. Be good, the community said. Be good, my name reminded me. But could the inside of your mind be made to conform as readily as your body could—your thoughts covered with the equivalent of a long skirt? I knew without needing to be told that an indispensable part of being good was a willingness to hide what you really thought. There was one way to be good and there were infinite ways to be bad.

  The teacher drew a diagram on the chalkboard, as though a little clarification was all that was needed.

  “It’s hard to understand,” she conceded. “But he didn’t sin.”

  There was always an underlayer, I was realizing. Even the rules contained secret passageways, trapdoors, and hiding spots that could be accessed when necessary. But this I didn’t say. I parroted the teacher’s explanation on the test and received an A.

  As much as I admired my English teacher, I imagined myself becoming like my religious teachers. I would get married young; I would be a good Jewish wife, sheltered inside the promise of contentment as far as the eye could see. Only sometimes did I allow mysel
f to spin out other possible stories, imagining a version of myself in college—sophisticated and worldly and no longer religious—but that was as far as the story could go. I didn’t know what other kinds of lives might look like.

  It was my senior year of high school and I was trying to decide what to do next. I was applying to college and also to gap-year Orthodox schools in Israel, which was the customary path for Modern Orthodox teenagers like myself—spend one year immersed in religious study, a last-chance inoculation against the dangers of secular college. At the same time, there was also the danger of kids being so inspired by their years in Israel that they became too religious and refused to come back home. Above all, the parents’ central wish: Be as religious as we are, no more and no less. I’d grown up hearing the nervous talk about a distant cousin who had gone to secular college and not returned. She’s not religious anymore—words so shocking they needed to be mouthed rather than said aloud. Though I barely knew her, this cousin was the bellwether of what could happen if you ventured too close to the edge—she Icarus, Barnard the sun. How would I answer the challenge of someone schooled in evolutionary science? What if a nonreligious roommate invited me to a party where there would be the temptations of sex and drinking? The college campus was formed not of the green lawns and brick walkways pictured on the glossy brochures but of slippery slopes down which we Orthodox students would slide, dark forests that could consume us if we dared to stray from the path. To survive these perils, we needed not courage but obedience.