The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  “Are you all set?” I call back to him.

  “Phone’s off,” he says, then he turns off his bedroom light and puts away his computer.

  Noam has remained strict in his religious observance. He wears his yarmulke wherever he goes. His eighth-grade classmates are all connected now by their texting and instant messaging, but he won’t use his phone on Shabbat. He eats only food that is certified kosher. “Is it hard?” I asked him a few years ago about wearing his yarmulke not just to school but to a non-Jewish day camp he attended. I knew that, had it been me, I would have been far less resolute. “It’s a good way to start a conversation,” he’d said, and I understood. The yarmulke wasn’t simply something he wore but a central part of who he was.

  “I’m still cooking,” I admit sheepishly now when he comes into the kitchen, feeling like I’m confessing to a crime. “I cook on Shabbat. I’m not really Orthodox anymore.”

  “Um, Mom? Don’t you think I know that by now?” he says.

  It’s a relief to hear him say this—to not be hiding what apparently exists in plain sight.

  “What does that feel like for you?” I ask but am afraid of the answer. What scares me even more, though, is the possibility of religion drawing a dividing line between us. All those stories I have heard over the years haunt me: a son who became Orthodox and now won’t eat in his parents’ home; a daughter who became so religious that she will no longer speak to her family.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Everything feels different.”

  “I know. For me too.”

  The day passes into Shabbat but I turn on the stove, hearing in my head the biblical prohibition Thou shalt kindle no flame. I’ve never been so aware of the laws of Shabbat as I am when I’m transgressing them. Watch as she lowers the flame, that third-party narrator intones in my head, as though this were some kind of reality show about criminals that I’m starring in. Each action is broken into a hundred actions, all of which are forbidden. It feels impossible that there might come a day when it’s simply a Friday night and I am just cooking a meal.

  On the counter next to us, my phone beeps and after glancing at the text, I try to decipher the look that flashes across Noam’s face. He’s newly entered the age of separation; more of his life is becoming sealed off from me. I’m allowed unobstructed views only in rare moments—a lifting of the gate and you’re ushered, briefly, inside.

  “Is it hard not to use your phone?” I ask him.

  “Sometimes, but I also like having it off. It’s a good break,” he says.

  “It still feels funny for me to cook on Shabbat,” I admit. “Sometimes I forget for a minute that I’m not keeping Shabbat like I used to and I feel surprised at what I’ve just done.”

  To this, I get a shrug and a teenager’s eh. Instead of getting me to back off, as it’s surely intended to, it makes me encourage him to say more. Even when I’m afraid of what I might hear, I no longer have the luxury, if I ever did, of hiding from what is painful and complicated. Before the divorce, my children and I could indulge in the fantasy that I had no needs separate from theirs, that any feelings I possessed could not possibly extend beyond the permitted range. I was their mother; it seemed, at the time, all they needed to know of me.

  After divorce, though, there is no such illusion. The façade is stripped away. My children now know that I’m just another person trying to find her way.

  “Does it feel hard that we don’t all do Shabbat like we used to?” I persist at the risk of receiving another eh from Noam.

  “I don’t know. It’s easier when everyone does it,” he says.

  Although he’s probably already too much of a teenager to appreciate the gesture, I put my arms around him and he leans into the hug.

  “I will still help you do it. Even if I’m not doing it myself,” I tell him.

  Even though it’s now past sundown and so, technically, lighting candles is forbidden, I set up the thick white Shabbat candles, burn down the bottoms until they’re securely inside the brass candelabra my mother once used. Out of habit, I still set up all five candles—one for each member of a family, if not this family.

  With the kindling of the Shabbat candles, peace is meant to spread over the house, a soft golden glow. But as the spirit of Shabbat descends, so too does the image of how it’s supposed to be. The way it is now is compared against an idyllic then that existed only in my mind. The mother who happily prepares the food; the children who are bathed and dressed in their finest clothing; the father who recites the blessing over the wine, holding a polished silver goblet. Not just one imagined family but a row of Shabbat-observing houses, a storybook planet in which candles flicker in every window. Shabbat was not a day of private observance; it was one of communal belonging. We lived in the plural, our lives rocked to the same gentle rhythm. An eruv surrounded Orthodox neighborhoods—a piece of twine attached to telephone wires so that, as part of a complicated rabbinic loophole, a public space was transformed into a private one, which enabled us to carry on Shabbat, an act that otherwise would have been prohibited. Even more than the symbolic enclosure encircling the neighborhood, a hundred lines of connection wrapped around us.

  Though we are still within walking distance of it, the Orthodox neighborhood where we used to live feels like an inaccessible strip of land. “Be prepared to lose some friends,” advised the rabbi of our synagogue when I first shared with him the news that Aaron and I were separating. I was surprised because I hadn’t yet learned that in a divorce, anything not pinned down can fall away. I didn’t yet understand how divorce stirs up an anxious nest of feelings—someone else’s decision is regarded as a referendum on your own life.

  Soon after the news of our divorce went public, I stopped going to synagogue. In that building, I was aware of the divorce at every moment, as though it were a neon sign across my forehead. I felt vulnerable to the curious looks, to comments I didn’t know whether to interpret as biting or well-meaning. “People want to know what happened,” said one of my closest friends from synagogue, one who, like many others, was soon to become a former friend. I was starting to understand what the rabbi had told me about losing friends—there were friendships you could take with you and friendships that had to stay in the spot where they began. Many of my friendships, I realized, existed only as long as I remained the person I was expected to be.

  If I had wanted to stay inside the world, this would have been the time to launch a public relations campaign and make a play for whatever friends and allies I could capture. But it didn’t seem worth fighting for a place in a community I couldn’t remain in if I really left Orthodoxy. It was easier to retreat and cede the territory to Aaron; it had become clear that in a divorce, community and friendships were among the spoils to be divided. Little, it seemed to me then, could belong to us both.

  In the weeks that followed, I began to hear what was being said about me. According to rumors, apparently I had come home one day and out of the blue announced that I wanted a divorce. I had gone crazy, some said. I was bad, others declared. I was hardly thrilled about the accusation of crazy, but bad was the one that hit the hardest.

  As months passed, I started to become aware that people I’d once seen in synagogue every week now looked at me suspiciously. For the most part, it is my friends from outside the Orthodox community—mostly the parents of my kids’ friends from school—who have let me know that they are still here; these were friendships I could take with me. My best friend, Ariel, remains someone in whom I can confide. When I run into people from my old community, it’s a welcome relief when my greeting is returned, and a true gift on the occasions when it’s returned warmly. A former neighbor who remains as close and connected as ever. A woman from the community who gives me a hug in the fruit market. A man from synagogue e-mails to say that he is wishing me well. A mother my age makes the simple yet generous gesture of chatting with me in line as we wait to buy coffee, as though no time has passed since she last saw me. Each of these kind
moments looms large, a small bolstering reminder that leaving doesn’t have to cut you off entirely.

  But all too often it’s surprise or discomfort that flickers in people’s eyes, as though I ought to have moved away or ceased to exist. When I round the corner of an aisle in the grocery store and recognize an old acquaintance, my eyes surely give off a flash of fear. I can never predict who will say hello and who will shun me. From some, there is an awkward, pursed-lipped hello, as though the word is a precious object that they have been forced to surrender. Others pretend not to see me, checking their watches or busying themselves with their phones or looking slightly away. And from still others, there is the purposefully withheld greeting. Resolute and guarded—they stand as if in possession of backup they can call in if necessary—they look directly at me but don’t say hello, as though in the space I occupy, there’s nothing but air.

  In the grocery store recently, I said hello to a woman I’d known for years, but she just looked at me—or, rather, slightly past me. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursed, and she turned her full attention to the tomatoes in front of her.

  It came over me: I was being shunned, right there in the produce section.

  I knew I should let this non-hello slip quietly by, as I did with all the others, telling myself that these slights were the punishment to be exacted for leaving, consoling myself with the thought that the angriest people were probably the ones locked inside their own misery. But there had been too many of these moments of being shunned—a word that should no longer exist in my emotional lexicon, that should have been relegated to stories of stocks and medieval towns and Puritan New England.

  “Hello,” I said again to the woman, my heart pounding as I waited to see if she was still going to ignore me. Why does it matter if she says hello? I asked myself. She’s not someone I’ve ever liked, yet I understood the meaning; I needed to know that in her eyes, I no longer existed. It was not a proper shunning if the person being shunned was unaware that she was being shunned.

  Her shoulders stiffened; her mouth tightened into a small circle. To respond to my hello seemed a physical impossibility for her—she looked outraged that such a feat was being asked of her. Her eyes still downcast, she finally produced a begrudging sound, like a greeting issued from miles underwater, then returned to her careful tomato selection, checking for any too-ripe spots.

  As the weeks, then months, passed, it surprised me how badly I wanted an invitation for a Shabbat meal—a gesture to let me know I was still welcome inside. It made me catalog all the people I’d failed to e-mail over the years or say hello to when I walked past, all the people who existed outside my own circle of vision—not because I intended to be mean but because I had no idea how in need of a kind word they might have been or because I was afraid of wading into something potentially uncomfortable. I knew how someone else’s upheaval could threaten your own tenuous security, but I didn’t yet understand how much a small gesture meant when you were the one to feel so loosely moored. We are a special community, those on the inside like to say to others equally on the inside, but it’s easy to welcome those who are safely within. If you no longer matched, you no longer mattered. If you didn’t show up in synagogue, you no longer counted—yet those moments when it was hardest to be part of a community were often when you most needed to be, when an outstretched arm, a kind word, could help hold you aloft.

  I miss some of these people, fellow congregants, community members, but mostly, I miss the feeling of being situated inside a particular world. If the Earth’s spinning were halted for a minute, I could have placed my finger on this one small spot and said: I belong here.

  I call the kids to the table, which I’ve set for four. I don’t invite William over when the kids are home. Though they know I have a boyfriend—a term that feels impossible still, even to my own ears—I’m waiting to have him over so that my children won’t regard him as one more change when there have been too many already. For now, William exists in a separate part of my life that takes place only when the kids aren’t home. And knowing how little interest William has in any form of religion, it’s hard to imagine how these disparate parts might ever become intertwined.

  Maybe in a first love you can let yourself believe that any complicated issue will stay buried, but in a later love, there’s no fooling yourself—everything submerged rises in the end. If William wasn’t before, he is now all too aware of how often religion will be part of our lives. Maybe if I had left earlier, it would have been easier to carve a clear-cut separation, but too much of my life has been lived inside. My children have been raised, until now, in this world. The questions have started to multiply. If I remain tied to Orthodoxy, will William have to be connected to it as well? If I celebrate Shabbat with the kids, will he eventually have to take part? If my months are always punctuated by the Jewish holidays, will his have to be too?

  “I don’t know if I can let go of everything,” I’ve said to him when the subject comes up, as it does increasingly these days—if discussing religion counts for anything, then we are among its greatest adherents. There are so many other things I want to talk to him about. He has a list of activities he is eager to try: hiking in national parks, teaching me to play tennis, taking up ballroom dancing. When he talks of the new hobbies he wants to throw himself into, I feel a world of possibilities opening. Yet even so, I remain preoccupied with the thing I am trying to leave. An unease settles over us now every time we wind our way back to this subject.

  “You can be part of it, but I don’t want to have to be involved in something I don’t believe in,” he said, and I wanted to both agree wholeheartedly and argue. I appreciate the way he tells me exactly what he is thinking, yet his opinions leave me tangled and spent. I don’t want to fold myself into his certainty. He rouses me to push back against his every word.

  “I don’t want to have to do everything alone,” I said.

  “I’m afraid you won’t be happy until I agree to be Orthodox.”

  “You know I’m not Orthodox anymore,” I protested.

  “A part of you still is,” he said. Can you be happy, I wonder, with someone who doesn’t come from the same place as you, even when it’s a place you’re trying to leave? Once again, religious differences are a source of conflict—the same kind of issue, just on the other side.

  When the kids come to the table, we sing “Shalom Aleichem”—the song that has started every Shabbat dinner I’ve ever attended, my whole family gathered round—but with only our four voices, the prayer feels slight and vulnerable.

  Here is the freedom and, alongside it, the price to be paid: loneliness.

  All I can think about is the legend I heard multiple times growing up, about the two Shabbat angels, one good and one bad, who visit each Jewish home on Friday night. They accompany the husband home from synagogue, and as he enters the house, they peer in the windows. Are the wife and children dressed in their Shabbat best? Is the table set; is the family gathered round?

  If so, the good angel is delighted to see God’s word obeyed and he blesses the house: “May every Shabbat be as this one.” And the bad angel has no choice but to hold back his sinfulness and answer “Amen, may it be so.”

  And if no dinner is prepared and no candles are lit, and the family is not gathered round, the bad angel is gleeful at the sight of so many sins and he laughs scornfully and blesses the house: “May every Shabbat be as this one.” And the good angel, anguished as he is, has no choice but to utter “Amen.”

  Placing my hands on top of each kid’s head in turn, as my father did each week, I bless them one by one with the traditional words: May God bless you and keep you, may God spread His light over you.

  “Should I say Kiddush or do you want to?” I ask Noam when it’s time for the blessing over the wine, which is supposed to be made by the man of the house.

  Already past the age of bar mitzvah, Noam is now able to make the blessings on my behalf—he is required, some would say, to perform this com
mandment, and he cannot have his obligation fulfilled by me, a female who has no obligation of her own. My son belongs to the official community now in a way I, a woman, never will.

  “I’ll do it,” Noam says, and he recites the blessing sanctifying this day, reading from a small prayer booklet; he doesn’t yet know this by heart, though he surely will soon. In just the past few months, his voice has turned from a child’s to an adult’s. He sounds a little like Aaron, and as he gets older, I notice how much he is starting to look like him as well.

  We dig into the challah and eat the meal I’ve prepared. Josh tells us about a game that his class played in school that week, called Rose, Bud, Thorn, in which the teacher asked each student to name one good thing that happened that week, one thing he or she is looking forward to, and one bad thing that happened. We play it now among ourselves, each of the kids sifting through their experiences to name their roses, their buds, their thorns.

  As they talk, the idyllic image of how it is supposed to look begins to fall away. I see instead just their individual faces, hear their particular voices. These months, with just the four of us, I feel closer to them than I ever have, everything outside us stripped away. We are in that in-between state, when the past is still a looming presence and the future is made of lines so faint we can’t fully see them yet, but slowly, a new possibility is coming into being.

  When we have finished eating, the kids and I clear the table. We don’t sing the traditional Shabbat songs. We don’t say the blessings recited at the end of a meal. The white candles have burned down almost entirely but still make bright flickering ovals when I turn off the dining-room lights. I’m not going to think about how those Shabbat angels would classify our night.

  In the morning, we don’t go to synagogue. I don’t miss it—getting dressed up, putting on a hat, purposely arriving late so I can sit through the bare minimum of the service. It’s probably one of the last weeks before the weather grows cold, the start of the long Boston winter, and I try to get the kids to walk to the nearby playground, walk anywhere that is allowed. I persuade them to play board games, mostly Ticket to Ride, which we love, lining up small plastic trains along tracks between cities, and I want to grab them and have all of us hop a train for one of these far-off places. The four of us will flee Shabbat as though it exists in space, not time; travel across so many time zones that this day will have ended.