The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  Sufficiently warned, I decided to go to Israel for the year. I was interested in attending a women’s yeshiva that was on the liberal side of Orthodoxy, regarded as groundbreaking for teaching women how to engage in serious Talmud study. This school was where my parents wanted me to go—my father in particular had reservations about a youth-group adviser’s efforts to steer me rightward, toward a seminary that would offer heaping doses of inspiration and moral instruction. Girls would study only those texts that applied directly to women. The students who returned for a second year were set up on dates and married off. Among its detractors, the school had a reputation for brainwashing, but apparently this wasn’t a problem; “If our brains are being washed,” the students reportedly (probably apocryphally) said, “it’s only because they need washing.” Two of my classmates were intent on going there, and they had recently started wearing long flared skirts and prim sweaters, pantyhose and flats. They hadn’t yet been accepted to this seminary, but already they looked like they belonged.

  Though I hadn’t completed an application, I decided at the last minute to have an interview with the head of the seminary when he came to visit our school. Not having planned to meet with him in advance, I was wearing an oversize gray Princeton sweatshirt, my jean skirt, and a pair of leggings, a yeshiva-girl version of teenage grunge.

  He was a round, pleasant-faced man with a black yarmulke large enough to cover his nearly bald head. When he asked me why I wanted to go to his school, I knew I was supposed to say that I wanted to strengthen my belief and grow spiritually. But my teeth clenched and my stomach seized with that slow burn of anger that I was starting to recognize as resistance.

  “Do girls learn Talmud?” I asked, but already knew the answer.

  He raised his eyebrows as though I’d asked if I’d be allowed to use the boys’ bathroom. He gave the answer that I’d known he would—that Talmud study was for men, whereas women, who were already more spiritual, needed to study only the practical areas of Jewish law that would enable them to be good wives and mothers.

  “She has a bad attitude. We would have to spend the first half of the year just breaking that down,” he later told my youth-group adviser, and I had been half ashamed, half proud.

  I decided to attend the more liberal school in Israel and study Talmud. A few weeks later I was accepted to Columbia. My adviser sat stonily when I informed him of my plans. “It would almost be better for you not to go to Israel at all,” he said and I felt as though I’d failed him, or he’d failed me.

  That summer, as a counselor at an Orthodox sleep-away camp outside of Memphis, I had my first boyfriend. He too was Orthodox but he wore tank tops and lifted weights, like someone who’d stepped out of one of the teen novels I devoured. I’d been shocked when I realized he liked me.

  By day, I shepherded my campers to morning prayers, then to swimming and kickball. At night, my boyfriend and I walked out to the fields, flashlights in hand. We were supposed to be on patrol for wayward campers, but instead we sat next to each other in the grass. The heat was viscous during the day, the air thick and muggy, but at night, it was cooler. Thrilled and scared, I let him put his arm around me. He smelled of Drakkar and Deep Woods Off. He leaned toward me and put his lips to mine. My heart beating fast, more from fear than desire, I kissed him back, afraid my inexperience was apparent. I looked around, even more afraid that the camp director or the other counselors would stumble upon us, flashlights beaming on our faces. Desire, I knew, was just another word for bad. I imagined my teachers watching, scolding. We thought she was a good girl, they’d say from the guard post inside my head—eventually those voices start coming from not just around you but inside you. There was no need for security cameras installed on walls or in the shrubbery because they were embedded in my skin, expertly camouflaged inside the lens of my eye, like some new technology decades away from invention.

  With his arms around me, I leaned back into the grass, which was unexpectedly cool against my legs. I pulled him toward me, surprised that my body knew how to do this. Having been warned about all the ways this was wrong, I hadn’t realized that desire would feel like a different kind of curiosity, a rising urge to know.

  We were still kissing when I thought I heard voices coming toward us. I pushed him off me and sat up quickly. I didn’t see anyone, but still, I scooted away from him, trying to clear my face of any hint of what I’d discovered. Here was shame and danger, yet in a small spot that remained protected, here also was the entry to a forbidden realm that felt lush and pink and blooming.

  Soon I would be leaving for Israel for the year. After spending months immersed in Jewish books, I would surely repent for this sin and for the other sins I hoped to amass in the next few weeks. My goodness would be retroactively restored. But until then, I was free to kiss him again. This was my final chance. Sin, because repentance was near.

  “Let’s go outside,” I say to my kids, who have spread out around my parents’ house. They follow me out into the backyard, where my parents’ sukkah is. We’re commanded to sit in these huts for seven days, temporary homes like the ones the Jews built when they left Egypt and traveled in the desert. This is also the holiday of the harvest. In elementary school, we occasionally colored in mimeographed pages containing a few stalks of wheat in honor of the holiday, but other than that, there had been little talk of nature. We studied primarily the rules for how tall each wall of the sukkah needed to be, who was required to sit inside it and who was not.

  My parents’ sukkah is made from wooden doors hung from a wood frame that my father built. My mother is in charge of the art, and on each of the doors she has painted a biblical figure: King David with red curly hair, playing a harp; Moses’s sister, Miriam, holding a tambourine that she used to lead the women in dancing and singing after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea.

  If my children’s participation in the holiday is lackluster, it will be attributed to my bad influence, so I try to rouse my kids’ interest in making sukkah decorations. My leaving still feels so tenuous, so fragile, that any nice memory seems like a potential threat—each ritual, however nice it may be, bears the looming shadow of the larger system. Still, I can’t help but think about how much I have always loved this holiday, so much so that in the divorce negotiations, I offered Aaron every Rosh Hashanah with the kids so that I could always have this holiday with them. It’s not the rules of required dimensions and allowable building materials that I love but the story, the themes, and, most of all, the opportunity for art projects. I tell the kids how, when I was a child, my siblings and I strung frozen cranberries onto thread, making long strands that we hung across the length of the sukkah. I tell them how my father woke us early on the Sunday preceding the holiday and my siblings and I climbed a ladder, which my father held steady, and stepped onto the gently sloped roof of our ranch house, where we assisted in laying out the bamboo poles that went across the top of the sukkah.

  “Can we go on the roof?” Noam asks.

  “We can make paper chains,” I offer lamely after I tell the kids that they can’t go on the roof, and not just because the bamboo mats, purchased online at Sukkah.com, no longer require three little helpers. I can’t imagine that I could hold the ladder as steady as my father did. It’s too easy to envision them falling.

  I expect protests, but any disappointment is short-lived. Just beyond the sukkah is my parents’ hammock—my favorite spot at home, and maybe anywhere—and I make a run for it.

  The kids pile on me with giddy energy, and though there isn’t really room for all four of us, we squeeze together. Holding them close rouses my longing for their baby selves, yet every memory feels painful. Are those early days more lost to me now than they would have been? Divorce fractures the story; it draws an ever-present divide between then and now. Every memory is either preamble or postscript—every memory feels like it took place not just long ago but across enemy lines, and there is no way to sneak safely back across. I was endangering myself if I f
lipped through the photo albums that I made for each of the kids, filled with their baby pictures and birthday parties and trips to Cape Cod.

  “We should live here,” Josh decides.

  “I call Mommy’s old bedroom!” Layla says.

  Out here, there are few signs of autumn, though it’s early October and the scorching Memphis summer has finally abated. A few trees will tentatively change color but nothing like the reds and yellows that already adorn my neighborhood in Newton.

  “I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” my grandmother once said to me in her Southern drawl as she sat in the house she’d lived in for more than forty years. Memphis wasn’t just the place we happened to live but where we had been rooted for five generations. To be from a place—for a Southerner, this was the crucial thing. It was not just your address but some core element of who you were. In Memphis, the years could unravel, all experiences peel from me, and, even more so now, this is the place that would still explain me to myself. In Newton, where we now live, any sense of belonging has been shattered. Newton, a small city that is really more like an idyllic town, has a beautiful library and playgrounds busy with kids in their Little League gear, but for Aaron and me, what had mattered most was the Orthodox community—the synagogues and the kosher bagel store and the kosher ice cream store and the scores of people who lived as we did.

  As I am no longer part of this community, the idea of home feels tenuous, irreparably broken. I stumble over the word home every time I say it, not sure that I can still lay claim to its comforts. I wish, impossibly, that the kids and I could stay in Memphis—that I could give in to a leftover childhood urge to be folded up, taken in. Time will turn back, and I will become once again the teenager who lived here, the kids present by some magical doing not my own. They will feel rooted here, the next generation in this long-standing lineage.

  “The new house feels like a hotel,” Josh says now, as though he can read my mind, and Layla, who is lying on top of me, her hair fluffing in my face, nods in agreement.

  “I miss the old house,” she says.

  Noam, who is being trampled by his younger siblings, shuffles for a better spot on the hammock. His silence worries me, though I’m not sure of the way inside. It’s not just the old house they’re all missing—it’s easier to speak of the loss of the house, harder to say that it was where we all lived together.

  “It won’t always feel like this,” I answer, and I tell them how when my parents moved to this ranch house when I was six, it seemed like a mansion, the large living room a movie theater, the sunken bathtub a swimming pool. All these years later, this house feels far too permanent to ever be taken apart. I try to say more, about the idea of home and change and loss, but the exact lesson I’m attempting to impart is lost even on me.

  “I feel the same way,” I admit but don’t say that it’s not just the new house but life itself that feels like a temporary locale. Nor do I speak of how I go out of my way to avoid passing our old street, dreading the sight of the Cape house where I used to have nightmares of growing frightfully large, my head protruding from the chimney, my arms from the windows, wearing the house like a too-short dress.

  The need to sell the house was one of the few things Aaron and I could agree on in our divorce negotiations. We wouldn’t have been able to come to a decision about who would keep it, and neither of us could have afforded it in any case. Until a permanent plan was put in place, we had taken turns being in the house—nesting, as this was known in the divorce lexicon. To potential buyers, no mention was made of the fact that the house was being sold due to divorce; it was as though a grisly murder had taken place there. I cleared away anything that could reveal what was transpiring—no lawyers’ papers left lying around—but, then, what did unhappiness look like? Could it be recognized in a bowl slightly out of place, a mirror hung askew? In preparation for showing the house, we had a few small repairs done, but there was nothing we could do about the larger issues—the roof needing to be reshingled, the exterior needing to be painted—that we had allowed to go untended.

  The day after our first open house, there were three offers, one of them made by a young Jewish couple who, having seen the telltale signs of religious observance in our house—the Shabbat candelabra on the breakfront, the calligraphed Jewish marriage contract still on our wall—thought they knew how to sway us to choose them.

  We imagine that we will be as happy in this house as you were. We will raise our family here and fill our Shabbat table with as much love and joy as you did, said the note that the real estate agent read to Aaron and me as we sat stonily in her office.

  We sold the house to a Chinese couple who offered no letter, nothing but a bid higher than all others and a no-mortgage clause.

  Back inside my parents’ house, with the holiday preparations almost done, I’m again staring at the display of photos, my wedding photo in particular. In my own house now, all such pictures are stashed in the basement, in a still-unpacked box. But faced with this picture, I can’t look away. The photo feels like an impossibility, someone else dressed to appear as me. My eyes might be shining, my cheek pressed close to Aaron’s, but I believe, in my raw state, that any happiness must be discredited. If I could perform some sort of emotional forensics exam on this photo, surely my smile would reveal my uncertainty. Doubt would flicker in my eyes.

  My mother comes up behind me and puts her arm around me, and we pull back from the argument that looms.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to take this picture down?” I whisper.

  “Maybe it’s good for the kids to see it?” she murmurs.

  “I’m not sure what’s good for them anymore,” I say.

  “I’m not trying to judge,” my mother says. “I just want to understand what you want for the kids and for yourself.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say, a paltry answer when people all around me seem to have answers in abundance.

  “I realize it’s hard,” my mother says.

  “It’s hard for you too.”

  “It takes away,” she admits.

  “I’m allowed to believe something different,” I say, but it’s late, so late, to be having this conversation. I feel like I’ve arrived at a delayed-onset adolescence, like I’m becoming the rebellious teenager I never was. Back in this house, it comes over me; a part of me had ceased to grow up. I was still in need of permission. By staying inside even when I chafed, I learned to hide what I thought. By getting married so young, I didn’t arrive earlier at adulthood but later.

  As we stand here, I think about my mother’s struggle to separate from her own mother. Growing up, I heard stories of how my grandmother used to scrub clean my mother’s knees, how she had her lie down on the counter and washed her hair over the sink, then cracked eggs over her hair to make it shine. My grandmother wanted desperately for my mother to be regarded as sweet and pretty and kind. “It’s going to end with me,” my mother had once valiantly proclaimed when she was seventeen during a fight with her mother about this insistence on maintaining appearances, caring so much about what others thought. It’s a story I’ve always loved for its rebellious sentiment, even though it turned out not to be true and here we are, debating one of its variants. Did you have to match the person your mother intended you to be? Could you be who you really were and still be loved?

  It seems like such a simple proposition—that you can love someone yet see the world so differently from that person. As nice as this sounds, I know that when you change, you risk losing the people closest to you. After a divorce, every relationship has to be remade, and it’s as true of the religious sort of divorce as it is of the marital sort. Religion is not just one facet of my family but its central core—part of every story told, every promise offered. Orthodoxy was more than what we believed—it was the enclosing walls of this house, its sheltering roof, its steadfast foundation.

  And this, I understand anew, is why it’s so hard to leave. Leaving isn’t just about engaging in a s
et of once-forbidden actions. It’s about changing the family story. Orthodoxy has always been my home, and to leave it is to leave home as well.

  At sundown, when the Sukkot holiday officially begins, it’s drizzling, but we do as required and go outside, where my father holds a silver cup filled with wine and recites the Kiddush blessing over it. As we are about to move inside for the rest of the meal, the rain stops, and we can eat in the sukkah after all.

  We sit together, as my family has for decades. When I was little, we used to hear singing coming from other families’ sukkahs down the street. All over this neighborhood, all over neighborhoods like ours, people were sitting in the same small huts, under the same bamboo and branch roofs through which we could see the stars. We weren’t alone out here, not alone in our lives. As a little girl, staring up at the sky, I used to imagine that from outer space, all our sukkahs were visible—small dots of light in an otherwise dark night.

  It’s cool out, and the kids are bundled up next to me. The navy-blue fleece I’ve borrowed from my father is large enough that Layla pulls it over herself too. At night, she’s still sleeping in my bed, and I lie awake watching her. Sensing my wakefulness, she will shift, rotate, and murmur, “Hug me,” and I will, the two of us cocooned inside our blankets. When she was a baby, I lamented each passing week, wanting to remain indefinitely inside the hazy early days when I never had to be apart from her. When she was older, she, like her brothers, cried when I dropped her off at nursery school. In the throes of separation anxiety, she wrapped her arms around my leg in protest, unable to fathom that I could go and still return.