The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  “Is it still Shabbat?” Layla asks.

  “Just a little longer,” I say, wishing the sun would set early and we would be free.

  “But are we even keeping Shabbat?” she asks.

  “There are lots of ways to celebrate Shabbat. We’re doing it our own way,” I say, trying to sound like I mean it.

  As the day drags on, Josh turns on the TV, another act technically forbidden on Shabbat but that I have decided to allow. In the year before the divorce, Josh used to sneak down to the basement playroom of our old house on Shabbat afternoons and watch TV. It was against the rules, but he hadn’t felt as daunted by that as I would have when I was his age. Aaron and I always used to joke that our kids were far more assertive than either of us ever were, and taken aback by the force of his resistance, we’d made only halfhearted efforts to stop him. Now watching TV on Shabbat is no longer something that needs to be hidden. During the week, I’m bothered by the incessant sound of electronics, but on this day I welcome the noise.

  Noam will watch if it’s on—this is not technically a violation of the laws of the day—but he won’t press the button himself. In the space between the laws, there exist these loopholes. You could not turn a light switch on but you could set a timer beforehand to do it for you. You could not directly ask a non-Jew to perform a forbidden act for you, but you could do so indirectly. My mother used to knock on our non-Jewish neighbor’s door on Shabbat and say leadingly, “The light in the refrigerator is on . . . ,” hoping in this roundabout way to elicit an offer to come turn it off. Eventually, upon seeing my mother at her front door, our neighbor automatically came over to correct whatever predicament had befallen us.

  “If you let us watch TV, why can’t we drive?” Josh asks, a good question, and there are a hundred more good questions that can easily follow: If you don’t believe in this, why do any of it? And if you do believe in this, why do less than all of it? In the past, when one of the kids asked why we observed a particular rule or why a certain act was forbidden, I knew what I was supposed to say. Even if I could never bring myself to say with absolute conviction that we did it because God said we should, I did talk about how the Torah was what we followed in all areas of our lives. I invoked tradition and community and said that this was who we were.

  “Add it to the pile of religious confusion,” I tell the kids now.

  They laugh at the image, and so do I. We are all lulled by the TV, finding vegetative consolation in the shows’ nontraditional families: adopted children being raised by a Texas nanny and a cranky butler; a family of restaurateur-wizards; a songwriter girl in Miami living with her father while her mother, divorced, is in Africa tending to apes. Around us, in real life, divorce is a rarity. When the school directory arrived in the mail at the start of the school year, I scanned the names and counted how few families were configured like ours.

  An episode of Shake It Up comes on, a Disney sitcom about teenage dance stars and a divorced mother who is on the verge of remarriage to a police officer who is so anxious that he can’t stop sweating profusely. The mood in the living room tightens at the mention of divorce and remarriage, and I study the kids for any sign of what they are thinking.

  “How does it make you feel when you see this?” I ask, trying for casual interest.

  There is little but a murmured acknowledgment of my question. On the show, the day of the wedding arrives at last. With a burst of exuberance, the family dances down the aisle. Relaxing, I bask in the scene and want to say to my kids, See, we’re not the only ones. Families come lots of different ways. Happiness is still possible. But then, a plot twist: The parents have been spotted in a kiss. The parents still have feelings for each other. The news breaks moments before the marriage ceremony is over. The wedding is called off. The children’s hope of reunion is realized. Even better, there are no hard feelings—the sweating police officer is the most relieved of all.

  It’s almost enough to make me want to reinstate the no-TV-on-Shabbat rule. I’m afraid to look at my children. When the show ends, I shut off the TV for the remainder of the day.

  The sky darkens. Shabbat ends close to six o’clock. We can drive somewhere—anywhere. Go bowling! Ice skating! To a movie! And even if we go nowhere, I no longer feel trapped.

  To mark the end of the Shabbat I’m supposed to recite the Havdalah prayer, smelling the sweet cloves to console us over Shabbat’s departure, holding up a braided candle like a torch to light the way into the coming week. I’m supposed to make the blessing—one more that I’d heard every week but never recited myself—praising He who separates between holy and profane, between light and dark, between Israel and the nations, between the seventh day and all other days. But these words extolling such clear-cut divisions aren’t ones I want to say, not when I’m trying to navigate painful but necessary rifts in so many parts of my life. Not everything, I am realizing anew, can be so easily separated. This week, as every week now, I leave the candle and spice box in the drawer.

  Israel

  A few days after Thanksgiving, my brother’s daughter—the lone girl among seven sons—is becoming a bat mitzvah, and I’m going to Israel for four days for the celebration.

  Even when my parents generously offered to buy me a plane ticket, I wasn’t sure I’d go, afraid of seeing my brother and his family, afraid of my relatives in Israel, all of whom are strictly religious. They know, of course, about the divorce; in my extended family, as far back as I can trace, I count only one other divorce. But my religious leave-taking makes me even more suspect—it feels like an almost impossible proposition, to be different yet still belong. It’s easier to become the marginal relative seen rarely at family gatherings, whispered and wondered about. As tempting as that feels right now, it’s all the more reason why I need to go. I don’t want to preemptively cede my place in my family out of fear of how I will be viewed.

  Packing requires pulling out old clothes, searching for skirts that approximate knee-length, cardigans that provide the necessary sleeve length. It’s an undercover mission back into a former land. Every skirt of mine seems too short, every ordinary shirt plunges too low. Assembling what I will bring makes me aware, more than any other time, of my body. Collarbones, knees, and elbows become landmarks that demarcate your position in contested territory. It still hasn’t sunk in that I can now wear whatever I want. This past summer, when I first wore something sleeveless (the most forbidden dress-code infraction of them all), I loved the feeling of my arms bare and unencumbered, but even so, I made sure to have a cardigan handy, not in case I got cold but in case I ran into someone Orthodox.

  As I wait to board the flight to Tel Aviv, a group of Orthodox men sitting at the gate gathers to recite the afternoon prayers. There are nine of them but they need one more for the required quorum of ten men that constitutes communal prayer. They scan the crowd looking for another man—their eyes pass over the women without seeing them. They rouse a bearded, yarmulked man from his preoccupation with charging his iPhone to ask if he will join them. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know one another—in this extended community, there are no strangers.

  The man admits that he hasn’t yet fulfilled his obligation to pray but nonetheless he declines to participate. Is he too trying to shed the person he outwardly appears to be? I am overexcited at the prospect that he might be pretending as well. When informed that he is the much-needed tenth man, he grimaces but joins. He stands back from the other men, but they all face the same way—eastward, the required direction for prayer—as the designated leader softly mumbles the words they all know by heart.

  Watching them too are the other passengers waiting for the flight to Tel Aviv. Many of them can’t be unfamiliar with this sight, yet they still seem mildly annoyed. One passenger who notices me watching gives me a knowing smile. In jeans, which I’ll wear until I change into a skirt in the Israeli airport bathroom (there should be kiosks there for those like me—leave your forbidden clothing at the airport, reclaim them upon
your departure), I’m taken for someone who is not Orthodox. I still feel like a spy, though I’m not sure for which side.

  When I arrive in Jerusalem, my family is on a day trip to the city of Hebron, visiting the tombs of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and I set off in search of falafel. Walking around Ben Yehuda Street, I spot the American girls on their post-high-school year in Israel. Some of the girls wear ankle-length denim skirts and have an angelic air; others are dressed in knee-high boots and tight skirts, albeit regulation length, and look styled and hardened, able to pass the modesty requirements but only technically.

  A few decades earlier, I was one of the girls in a long baggy jean skirt with an earnest, serious expression. During the year I spent in Israel, between high school and college, I studied Talmud all morning, then Bible and Jewish law in the afternoon. Unlike high school, where feminism was a bad word and women’s places were limited and defined, this school encouraged us to wrestle with the texts in accordance with the belief that women’s roles within Orthodoxy could slowly evolve.

  On our first Shabbat at school, we ate dinner at long tables in the book-lined study hall, and one of the female teachers made the Kiddush blessings over the wine, though there were men present. As she recited the words I’d heard every week, I stared at her. My curiosity was aroused as some of the girls around me—many of whom would be attending Barnard or Penn or Columbia—traded glances warily: Just how feminist was this place? I shared their uncertainty. “She’s trampling upon the very laws she claims to be observing,” my former teachers and rabbis would have said, reminding us that though society around us might change, the laws of God and the rabbis did not.

  After the blessings over the braided challahs, also recited by a woman, the teacher took out photocopied pages of Jewish texts and taught us why, according to a more liberal interpretation of the law, it was permissible for a woman to recite these blessings, even on behalf of men. Women couldn’t lead prayers or read from the Torah scrolls in front of men, but the laws for making Kiddush could be reinterpreted so as to allow women to do it.

  In my high school, girls weren’t permitted to study Talmud, so I lacked the necessary skills to understand these pages of Aramaic words, to wrestle sentences to uncover their hidden meanings, to hold each interpretation of what a word meant and then the various interpretations of each of those interpretations. Much of my life was based on these texts but they were incomprehensible to me. I stared blankly at my study partner, who was only slightly more knowledgeable than I was. The oversize folio pages of the Talmud—the cryptic unpunctuated lines of Aramaic, the tiny Hebrew letters of the rabbinic commentaries— were like unintelligible maps, leaving me to wander, lost, inside the tangle of streets.

  It surprised me how badly I wanted to find my way. When I didn’t have to shape myself into a form that felt too tight, I liked what I was learning—essentially a legal tract detailing the rules of returning property, the financial obligations of ownership, like a book of torts that bore the invisible hand of God. It wasn’t spiritual or theological concepts being debated, just the minute details of the law. One word necessitated an explanatory sentence. A paragraph required an extended commentary. Each interpretation inspired two subsequent interpretations. I pushed my mind as hard as I ever had, teasing out which rabbi agreed with which position and for which reasons. How could their disparate opinions be brought into agreement? How could a countertext refute an opposing viewpoint?

  I put in long hours in the study hall, consumed with the desire to hand myself over entirely to these religious texts. During Yom Kippur, I prayed fervently for forgiveness for my fringed too-short high-school denim skirt, for having wanted to ask too many questions of my teachers, and most of all for having kissed my camp boyfriend. This was the worst sin I could come up with, or at least the most tangible one—something concrete on which to pin the feeling that I used to be a little bit bad but now I was becoming entirely good.

  During the holiday of Sukkot, I spent time with my brother, Akiva, who was a year older than me and was studying in an Israeli yeshiva. That I was so serious and focused during this year of religious study came as a surprise to me, but there had never been any doubt that Akiva would love his time in Israel. “That one is going to be a rabbi,” predicted a friend of my mother once when, years before, she’d come over and heard Akiva belting out the prayers. When he was little, he used to keep a suitcase packed under his bed so that he’d be prepared if the Messiah arrived—as centuries of Jews had prayed for—and we were quickly gathered in from our long exile. It sounded nice enough as a theoretical prayer, but as a teenager, I wouldn’t have minded if the Messiah tarried a little longer. I worried that if God finally made good on that age-old promise, I would have to stop caring about clothes and boys and soap operas and move to Israel, where we would have to live in the throes of religious devotion; Temple sacrifices in lieu of Days of Our Lives.

  Akiva and I went, on Sukkot, to one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem where, every night, the various sects of Chasidim held celebrations. On the main floor, Akiva joined the bearded, hatted, frock-coated men who danced in ecstatic circles while I went upstairs to sit with the women who peered down from the balcony, faces pressed to the metal grating for a glimpse. Did being relegated up here bother them? Did they ever wonder what lay beyond this barrier, or had they gleaned some secret to contentment that my Modern Orthodox friends and I had failed to understand? I searched their expressions for clues. Did any of them, maybe once in a while, ever want something else? Akiva could blend into the dancing circles of men, but the differences between me and these women seemed so vast as to make us barely part of the same religion. I preferred to watch the men, who displayed spiritual passion of the sort I’d never experienced. For me, religious devotion lived far more quietly: a dedicated spouse who made no grand displays of love, offered no flashy gifts, but day after day dutifully packed a lunch, prepared a dinner, rubbed a sore back.

  Weeks passed, then a few months. I sat in front of my Talmudic tracts and pushed my way in. Slowly, slowly, I reached the beginning of comprehension, so that the letters organized themselves into recognizable locales, their black lines now like roads onto which I could venture. A word sharpened into meaning. I knew that one. And then another, and another. A word became a question, which led to another question. One word turned a sentence back on itself, offering a refutation.

  For the first time, I understood how the laws progressed from a biblical phrase to a Talmudic explication to a rabbinic dictate. I was part of this chain—not just a subject of the laws but part of their transmission. The texts belonged to me as well. I adopted a theology of obedience to God’s will in which it was good to question but necessary to obey. The loftiest of inquiries about belief weren’t what mattered—instead, it was each small moment, every specific act. I could debate the exact nature of a divine being as long as I prayed to Him three times a day at the proper moments, reciting each word not necessarily with passion but with precision. I could question various understandings of commandments as long as I accepted my obligation to say the right blessings before and after I ate. I would not pick and choose which laws I would observe. Each rule was a load-bearing wall in the overarching structure. I would study Jewish texts every day. I would not touch boys, not even a casual hug, because this was forbidden. I would stop wearing jeans. I didn’t necessarily believe they were immodest but I wanted to align myself with the group to which I now fully belonged.

  Here—at last—was the promise of goodness. All I had to do was be steadfast in my observance. Here—at last—was the pleasure of belief: to feel certainty about who I already was.

  There wasn’t enough time left—the months were passing too quickly, and there was so much I didn’t know. As my time there came to an end, I toyed with the idea of returning for a second year but was swayed by the Columbia sweatshirt I’d worn for months and the college-course catalog with its seemingly endless choices. Before I left Israel, I
went to a Jewish bookstore—not to one in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, where banners admonished women to dress modestly and where booksellers refused to sell many religious texts to girls, but to a Modern Orthodox one in the Old City of Jerusalem, where every book was permitted to me. I browsed the floor-to-ceiling shelves: commentaries on the Bible, explications of various aspects of Jewish law, philosophical treatises on God and the commandments. Each of them seemed crucial—it was impossible not to know their entire contents. I lingered for hours, wishing I could pour each of these books inside me. I carried home my heavy bags filled with the volumes I’d selected, solid reminders of the path I was now on.

  In the last week of school, I sat on the bed in my dorm and took out my notebook, which I’d used to write letters to family and friends, and this time I wrote myself a letter: Do not change back. Do not go to college and be swayed. Do not return to believing tepidly, to observing nominally. I described the new person I was trying to be, a young woman firm in her convictions, learned and strong, who didn’t waver or bend. She was still engaged in the outside world, but the truth lay fortressed inside her. I could see her so clearly—all I needed to do was press the edges of my old self against this new image so that we formed a single figure.

  When I came back from my year in Israel, Akiva was home as well, though in a few weeks he would be going back again to Israel, where he’d decided to attend college. A few days after we both returned, we were in his room talking. There was a pause in the conversation, and Akiva looked at me awkwardly, like he wanted to tell me something but wasn’t sure how.