The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  “According to the Shulchan Aruch, it’s impermissible for a brother to hug his sister,” he said.

  At first the words were theoretical—a theoretical brother, an imaginary sister, a hypothetical touch. I knew he wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. It was nothing personal, we were just discussing the rules in which we both believed and that we agreed could never be compromised. But I also knew that when we were both in Israel that year, I had hugged him every time I saw him. Now I felt as though I’d done something wrong. I didn’t know what to say, because how could you argue with the truth? The book he was quoting was one I’d studied as well, but now it was turning against me.

  Shame touched down on my face, my arms, my legs. It didn’t matter that I’d changed. My body itself was the problem, as though it had stood too close, hugged too long, as though the rabbis warning him back were the same rabbis in high school who had noticed my too-short skirt.

  Akiva returned to Israel and I started college, where I requested an all-female floor in the first-year dorm and an Orthodox roommate so that we would be each other’s buttresses against the outside. I was one of “the skirts,” the strictly Orthodox girls in the large and active Columbia Jewish community. Our wearing only skirts was the means by which we were judged and categorized—not a private religious decision but a public manifesto. I ate with the other Orthodox Jews in the kosher area of the dining hall, and in between our classes, we studied Jewish texts in the small study hall lined with books. I woke at seven, a few hours before my first class, and I hurried to morning prayers across the nearly empty campus—only the athletes and the Orthodox Jews were awake at this hour. There were a few months during my first year when I briefly returned to wearing pants, but then I stopped, not only because I was worried about how God would regard such a slippage, but, more practically, because I cared immensely about what the Orthodox boys at Columbia would think. “He probably wouldn’t date someone who wears pants,” my roommate said of a boy I was interested in. At her words, I folded up my jeans and placed them once again out of reach. This time, I promised myself, I was putting them away for good.

  There was a clear expectation that if you went into the outside world, you would limit what you took in. I’d heard too many warnings: the yeshiva boy who studied philosophy and left the path; the English major who enrolled in a biblical criticism class and never recovered. I studied in Butler Library, where Plato and Aristotle and Voltaire were memorialized on the grand marble façade, but the cautionary stories of the students who left Orthodoxy were the ones carved into my psyche. Other people might have viewed college as a chance to figure out who they were; I wasn’t here to discover who I wanted to be but to remain who I already was.

  It was easier if I closed myself off. I made few friends who weren’t Orthodox. It was too hard to have to explain myself all the time, as my Orthodox roommate and I had done with our first-year suitemates (one Korean, one Mormon), asking them to please leave the bathroom light on from Friday night to Saturday night because we couldn’t touch the switch. There were far too many rules to explain all of them, but the one about the light switch in the bathroom seemed important for them to know.

  “So are these rules just for this weekend or every weekend?” someone on our floor asked when she heard about our request, then she tried to act like our explanation about the light switch falling into one of the thirty-nine categories of work that were forbidden on Shabbat made perfect sense to her. Until we started putting a piece of tape across the switch as a reminder, we grew accustomed to going to the bathroom in the dark.

  In a poetry seminar, where the lights in the classroom were kept off to enhance the mood, I sat among those with hair dyed and noses pierced. The college they attended was complete with raucous parties and smoky bars and lots of sex—it might as well have been miles away from the one my Orthodox circle of friends and I attended, intent on remaining safe at all costs. Every day before class, I had to remind myself of what one of my favorite writers, Eudora Welty, had written: “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” Only when the professor read aloud the poems we had written did I feel that I belonged in the room.

  In a required literature course, we studied the Bible alongside The Iliad and The Odyssey—this was as close as I would come to biblical criticism. The reading load was lighter for me during the week we studied Genesis—those stories were as familiar to me as those from my own childhood. When I wrote papers or participated in the class discussion, I had to remind myself to use the English names—Rivka was called Rebecca, Yosef was known as Joseph, as though they too were adopting disguises to live more comfortably in the outside world.

  In a class discussion of the week’s reading, a fellow student raised her hand.

  “I can’t believe people base their whole lives on the Bible. It’s like living your life according to The Iliad!” she exclaimed.

  My entire life dismissed so cavalierly, yet I didn’t know what to say in its defense. I didn’t want to raise my hand and put forth the belief that a blind poet had written The Iliad but an all-seeing God had written the Bible. If challenged, I’d have had no idea how to respond.

  While I was in college, Akiva and I talked less, ostensibly because we were both busy and far away from each other. When I called him, I hoped to be reminded of the person I’d decided to be. More than anything, I was afraid of losing the certainty I’d gained during my year in Israel. In Israel, he became a rabbi, but in his late twenties, he switched from the Modern Orthodox knit yarmulke that my father wore to a black velvet one, from a small cropped beard to a longer one, from khakis and button-down shirts to the ultra-Orthodox uniform of black and white. He joined one of the more mystical Chasidic sects that emphasized the need to cultivate a joyous connection to God and reject the outside world. He said that he had decided to grow his beard and side-curls when he looked in the mirror and the clean-shaven face wasn’t who he expected to see. Each of these changes, Akiva told me at the time, felt small, his whole life leading him, step by step, down this path. My parents were concerned about his transformation, worried that he was discarding the moderation with which we’d been raised. But despite any misgivings, my parents accepted who he wanted to be. They understood that he wanted to live in accordance with his beliefs. Roots to grow and wings to soar, my parents had written on birthday and graduation cards so frequently that the saying had become something of a family joke. I don’t think any of us realized yet how often our family would wrestle with what happened when these roots and wings pulled in opposing directions.

  On Shabbat morning, we walk in a procession to the Western Wall, along the streets of the modern city of Jerusalem, with its contemporary stone hotels and storefronts, almost all of which are closed on Shabbat. My father has stayed behind in the hotel to rest, and Akiva leads the way—me, my mother, my sister, Dahlia, and Akiva’s children following behind. Akiva wears a gold caftan special for Shabbat and a crownlike shtreimel, the fur-trimmed hat that many Chasidic men wear. From the back, my brother looks like any ultra-Orthodox man. Only when I look past the hat and beard do I recognize him.

  As we enter the walled Old City, with its narrow cobblestoned alleyways opening into wide stone-lined plazas, we pass similarly garbed men, the subtle differences in hats or coats delineating their precise affiliations within ultra-Orthodoxy. Those who adhere to a particular sect dress the same as their fellow believers, as though God were the sort of parent who liked to put His children in matching attire.

  We walk down the steps toward the Western Wall—once an outer wall to the Holy Temple that stood here and the only part to remain when it was destroyed by the Romans. As we approach the spot that is regarded as one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world, we split up, men and women. On the women’s side, women in long skirts, hats, and wigs gather close to the front, weeping and whispering into the stones. Folded notes intended for God are wedged into the cracks, innumerable crinkled pleas, prai
ses, and requests, a codex of human pain.

  From the cart at the entrance to the women’s section, Dahlia and I take prayer books creased and worn from use. Nearby, a uniformed woman is handing out scarves to cover those deemed immodestly dressed—cloaks of shame, I used to call them. We are safe, though. My skirt is long enough to pass, and Dahlia is dressed in long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt, taken from her back-closet selection of what she’s dubbed her Israel clothes. Dahlia spent a year at the same women’s yeshiva in Israel I did, but she stayed a second year, returning home more ardently religious than I had, deciding to go to the same Orthodox college my mother attended instead of to Columbia as planned. If she’d gotten married younger, perhaps she would have remained as devoutly religious, but during the years of being single, she has slowly evolved, nearer now to the Modern Orthodoxy of my parents.

  Dahlia and I move as close to the wall as we can, slipping between praying women for a place at the front. In this spot, where I once felt the thrill of being at the epicenter of belief, I open the prayer book to the Shabbat-morning service. Pray, I was taught, even when you’re not in the mood, and you will come to be in the mood. Though I rarely felt the passion visible in some of the women around me, who are swaying back and forth, their faces contorted with emotion as though beseeching a being who stood directly in front of them, I had once prayed dutifully. My lips moved, as was required, as I said every word. My knees bent at the appointed times. Often I had the sense of checking an obligation off a list over and over, the same words recited quickly every day, but sometimes, sometimes, I had been filled by a quiet, steadfast fervor—the words were not just written on a page but opened and admitted me inside.

  Now I try to say those prayers; my eyes roll over them but to move my lips feels too false a display. Still, I try to feel something, anything. I think about those folded notes, prayers penned onto every free surface of paper and crammed into every space of this wall. I remind myself of the immense history of this space and try to be swayed by that, at least.

  I try, I still try, but the gates of prayer remain firmly closed. It is the feeling of being locked out of a place that once felt like home. I hold the prayer book open in front of me but don’t recite another word.

  “Smell,” urges an old woman who approaches Dahlia and me clasping bunches of mint and oregano. She holds the leaves to our faces and instructs us to make the blessing praising God who has created the varieties of spices.

  Her face is pinched and grizzled. She is wearing a black dowager dress, her head covered in a scarf from which a few gray, wiry strands emerge. Her ankles, peeking out from the bottom of her dress, are swollen, trunks planted into the black leather ground of her shoes. If it weren’t Shabbat, on which the use of money is prohibited, there would be a legion of similar women, palms upturned, asking for charity.

  We do as she says, and the sprigs are surprisingly fragrant. Smiling, she looks us over and offers my sister (whose uncovered hair is a sign that she’s not married) a blessing that she should find her bashert—the soulmate whom God has intended for her.

  “She gave me a knowing look. I think she can tell I have a boyfriend,” Dahlia whispers to me and we laugh. Even when so many other relationships feel strained and uncertain, this is one that remains close and steadfast.

  “Are we ascribing supernatural powers to spice-bearing women?” I whisper back, but I wonder why the woman didn’t offer me a blessing as well. With my uncovered hair, I appear equally single. Maybe she is in possession of some magical power that enables her to see that I’m hardly a good beneficiary for her sort of blessing.

  “You never know,” Dahlia says.

  In our hotel room, we’ve lain awake jet-lagged, talking about boyfriends, hers and mine, as though we were still the young sisters we once were, whispering late into the night. I talk of the excitement I feel about William, how when I’m with him, I have the constant sense of encountering someone strong and alive. And I tell her about my worry that we will prove too different. She talks about how it feels now, after all this time, to be regarded with eager expectancy, dangling on the brink of engagement to someone she met through a dating website that is (actually) called Saw You at Sinai, set up by one of the volunteer matchmakers who pair like with like. Since she graduated from college fifteen years ago, she has lived in apartments with various roommates, going out on blind dates set up by her friends and then, later, using the Orthodox dating sites where you classified yourself by your religious observance. Do you plan to cover your hair? Do you wear pants? Would you date a woman who won’t cover her hair? Would you send your future kids to co-ed schools? Would you let them watch TV? Orthodox dating was like that kids’ game of Concentration: flip over the squares until you found two that were identical.

  Until this year, I’d played the role of older married sister, taking care of my kids and cooking dinner while talking to Dahlia on the phone about the exciting trips she was planning, six weeks exploring India and another trip backpacking in the Rocky Mountains. When we talked about the men she was dating, I felt an underlayer of anxiety to our conversation, concern that it would become even harder for her to find the right person as she got older and the pool of eligible Orthodox men supposedly shrunk. Inside the Orthodox community, she constantly heard the message that to be single was the worst possible fate that could befall a girl, and though I tried not to let it show, I too worried that she might end up alone.

  Why had it seemed so easy for me? I’d sometimes wondered as she described what didn’t feel right about each relationship. “Do you think maybe you’re just nervous?” I found myself asking her when she talked about the boyfriends who wished to marry her. I wanted her to find the right person, but a part of me wondered if she should just put aside her misgivings about these men and grab hold of any certainty while she could. I had barely dated anyone before meeting Aaron. I was twenty-two when we got engaged, twelve weeks after we started dating. I tried to feel lucky that in getting married so young, I didn’t have to spend years in this uncertain state. I told myself I had escaped this need to reckon and wrestle. When I felt worried about my marriage, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I too could have ended up alone.

  The spice-bearing woman is still hovering, and when she sees me looking at her, she finally offers me the same blessing—that I should find my bashert, my soulmate, speedily in our days. I know I’m supposed to thank her for the blessing but all I can do is smile tightly, wanting to ask her about the logical challenges my divorce poses to the concept of bashert. But most of all, I wonder what this weathered woman—half bubby, half witch—would say to this ending: You will find someone who is just like you, you will get engaged and follow the path, but you will be unhappy. You will fantasize of, and then pursue, escape. In the eyes of this blessing-bestowing woman, William would hardly qualify as a bashert. William, in Boston, has probably spent his Saturday biking or running or catching up on work. We’ve texted back and forth while I’ve been here, but it feels impossible to explain where I am. For him, this trip would have been a cultural experience, one that had little to do with who he is. It’s hard to imagine him in Israel with my family—it feels like trying to drop an oversize figurine into a meticulously constructed diorama.

  Before we meet my brother at the back of the courtyard, where we’ll make the blessings over the wine he has brought along and eat the jelly doughnuts that are ubiquitous in Israel in these weeks leading up to Chanukah, I turn back to the spice-bearing woman.

  I ask her in my Americanized Hebrew why she does this, gesturing to her bundle of spices. Standing right next to her now, I see that her eyes are watery and eerily pink, pools of pain.

  So you will make a blessing, she tells me.

  Yes, I say, I know. But why do you do it?

  She holds out her hands, gestures up toward the stone wall that has seen civilizations come and go, yet has remained standing. “Le-shem shamayim,” she says. This, everything, is for the sake of heaven.
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  In my senior year of college, Aaron and I were set up by two friends. “You’re perfect for each other—you’re exactly the same,” my friend Elizabeth promised me when she and her boyfriend, who was Aaron’s close friend, came up with the idea.

  We were standing in the kitchen of my suite, which I shared with four other Orthodox women in a dorm called East Campus, dubbed “the Lower East Campus” for its hordes of Orthodox students who clustered on the low floors in order to minimize the flights of stairs we needed to walk up on Shabbat, when elevators were prohibited. I had made Shabbat dinner for a group of friends, as I did most weeks, and Elizabeth was helping me serve the chicken and kugels, our standard fare. She was wearing a long red velvet dress that hugged her body—even when she dressed modestly, she managed to look seductive. Elizabeth had converted to Orthodox Judaism when she was seventeen, becoming a devout member of the Orthodox community, though the first time I saw her, at afternoon prayers, I noticed the overly deliberate way she bowed at the required places. Even before I saw the small tattoo on her ankle, I knew she hadn’t grown up Orthodox.

  “She has a story,” said one of my Orthodox friends, her eyebrows raised with suspicion.

  The rest of us were presumed to be without any such story—a preordained straight line rather than a shape with turns and bends. I knew a few people who’d left Orthodoxy once they started college, and my curiosity about them was fueled by fear. How did they stop being who they already were? I didn’t want to imagine myself ever ending up as they surely were, solitary figures who would now wander alone. I listened to the explanations offered about people like them; there was always a ready explanation. It wasn’t that they had examined their belief and found it lacking. It wasn’t that they wanted to choose their lives for themselves. Our belief was too absolute, too foolproof, for us to admit that someone else might see a few holes. People left because they had been led astray by temptation, lured by false ideas. People left only because they were depressed or because they came from abusive families or because their parents were divorced; they were unstable or defective or damaged in some way.