The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  When it’s time for the ceremony to begin, small plates of food are passed around.

  Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the tree, a woman says in Hebrew as she holds up an apple slice, and the women say amen.

  Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the varieties of grains, says one woman clutching a cracker, her face shaded by an enormous hat.

  “Amen,” the women say, resoundingly.

  With their words, God no longer exists in the far-off plains of heaven. With each amen, He is here among them, capable of being swayed.

  I feel lost, I text Ariel in between amens, hiding my phone in my purse. For her, seven hours earlier, it’s technically still Shabbat, but because she isn’t Orthodox, using the phone on this day isn’t an issue for her.

  Hold on to who you are, she writes back, and I study her words on the screen of my phone as though they can help locate me.

  “Amen,” I say along with everyone else but my voice sounds like it’s coming from a place not inside me but beyond me. I wish I could believe the gentle assurances that you can sway God with your prayers, that you can influence Him with your observance. To me, this feels like a magical proposition, an enchanted tale. I wish I could give myself over to the belief that there is a being who is watching our every move, a parent who will always come when we call. But I also know that wishing, wanting, doesn’t make something true. The world offers its own refutations, which I hear loudest of all. Each time I hear a profession of certainty, the whisper Not true grows louder in my head.

  Now it’s my turn to make the blessing. A piece of apple is handed to me, and though I feel nervous—the words of this blessing, which I know by heart, might abandon me just when I need them—I hold it up like the women before me have done.

  Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the tree, I say in Hebrew.

  A chorus of amens in response to this blessing I have offered. I want to feel something, a small last stirring, a faint but still-present heartbeat of belief. But there is none. No rousing openness, no glimmer of possibility, nothing but a hard, unyielding silence.

  This is an answer on its own.

  You leave and you leave.

  Cardigan on or off, it doesn’t matter. I can’t feel the belief that fills the people I love. It doesn’t matter anymore what others believe. Outwardly you can try to match those around you, but you believe or not on your own.

  The next day, at Mini Israel, a tourist-attraction model of the country, my brother and I walk together. “I need to talk to you,” I’d told him on the phone before I arrived, but now I don’t know what to say. All weekend, Akiva has purposefully met my eye, but it’s been hard to look back with the same forthrightness.

  “I’m not Orthodox anymore,” I say and I finally meet his gaze. We take the winding pathway that leads tourists to replicas of famous Israel landmarks—the Bahai Hanging Gardens and the Jerusalem soccer stadium and the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv. The country, already small, is now traversable in a matter of minutes. His children tread like giants, one in Tiberias, another in Eilat.

  He’s not surprised. In his eyes, the path I’ve taken—from attending secular college and graduate school to becoming a novelist—has led me here. I am confirmation of the ultra-Orthodox belief that the outside world is indeed dangerous, that exposure to foreign ideas can harm you, that Orthodox feminism only paves the way out. It is for these reasons that he has chosen this cloistered life. Once, years ago, he posed this question: If you knew that half the wells in your neighborhood were polluted but didn’t know which half, would you allow your children to drink from any of them?

  “Don’t think you can so easily walk away. A Jew can’t divorce faith. It’s not possible to do so. A Jew and faith are inextricably linked. When you don’t feel it, that’s when you cry out to God, that’s when you scream,” he says.

  “I want to know what you believe,” I say—not because I want to be swayed but to hear what it sounds like to live what you believe.

  There is God, he tells me, and there is Torah. And there are mitzvot—the commandments—which we are required to do. There is no greater joy he has ever experienced, he says, than to live in service of God.

  “And what if you don’t believe that?” I ask.

  He pauses in rabbinic fashion, looking at me kindly from behind his small round glasses of the John Lennon variety.

  “I can’t prove it to you. I don’t want to convince you. But to do mitzvot—this is the point. Be mechalel Shabbat—desecrate the Sabbath—or don’t. But the reframing, the New Age interpretations of Judaism, this is sheker, this is falsehood.”

  “But what if you don’t believe that?” I say again, feeling like a child who persists in asking a series of whys.

  “To do an averah—a sin—it creates a pgam, a stain on the soul,” he says. “Maybe you can no longer be the best judge of how you should live because of all the pgam on your soul.” I feel like I’m at the doctor’s, faced with an image of my internal organs riddled with disease.

  I swallow hard at his words but welcome the honesty. From many in the Modern Orthodox world, I hear little talk of actual belief—instead, community is sanctified and extolled. I know this is important for him too, but it’s a relief to hear someone speak of a belief that is unflinching.

  In the distance, we can hear his kids yelling across this miniature model country that we have walked through several times during our conversation. His kids range in age from one to fourteen, the younger ones full of energy, the older ones growing into early adulthood, and I wonder if all of them will follow the path laid out for them. Surely for them, as for all of us, life will sometimes prove to be confusing.

  “You can make yourself keep Shabbat and kosher, but you can’t make yourself believe. I’ve tried, and it’s soul-deadening. You close up, you harden. You don’t end up in the same place where you began—you’re farther away for having tried to do it without belief,” I say.

  “Even then,” he says, “you seek God.”

  You can believe and stay, or not believe and stay. In the end, the only choice is to stay.

  “But—” I start.

  “You’re stuck,” he observes, “you can’t go left or right. The answer is to look up—toward God. Absence from God, the answer is God. Absence from belief, the answer is belief. Doubting God, ask God.”

  There’s no secret panel to press on to release me. Outside of belief, he sees nothing but a black hole, but I am starting to see something else, a clearing, an open space. I know as never before: This is his story, the belief he has built his life on. It is not mine.

  It’s almost time for me to go to the airport and then back home to my kids, who are in a world that, from here, feels like a distant planet. He and his family will remain inside the life he has chosen.

  However ironically, our conversation releases me. You can change your life and the lives of your children. You can live according to what you believe.

  Part 2

  Pizza

  Bill’s Pizza has oversize windows that open out to Beacon Street in the middle of Newton Centre. It is a few weeks after my return from Israel and the roads are covered with snow—outside, passersby peer in at this cozy restaurant scene. Josh is far too excited about this long-awaited outing to notice my trepidation at being here with him. I can’t help but think about who might walk past and see us. I’m glad there’s a long line—still time to ponder the theological implications of a cheese slice, still time to grab Josh and run.

  As we wait, Josh eyes the toppings through the glass case. Every vegetable combination seems exotic, as do the speckled rounds of pepperoni. On the drive here, I’d told Josh there was one condition: we could order only vegetarian. In the codex of sins, plain cheese pizza is a misdemeanor, not a felony.

  “One slice, please,” Josh tells the man behind the counter.

  “Actually, two slices,” I add.

  As we
wait, I detect no signs of guilt on his face. My son is too young to know that food is as fraught as any other kind of pleasure; he has not experienced the kosher-induced anxiety that in a new place, there might be nothing you could eat. For our honeymoon trip to Italy, Aaron and I had packed two kosher salamis, one in each of our knapsacks, and in every city we visited, we sliced them thinly with a plastic knife, afraid we’d run out of food before we made it to Venice, where we’d heard rumors of a kosher pasta restaurant. For us, there was nothing to eat in Rome, where, during August, the one kosher restaurant was closed; nothing in Florence, where we finished off the last of the salamis and, still hungry, drained jars of gefilte fish into the bidet of a pensione. The discovery of a kosher Häagen-Dazs in the Piazza della Signoria was as miraculous as the sight of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi nearby.

  When Josh sees me watching him, a serious look comes over his face.

  “I need to talk to you,” he tells me, his voice hushed, his expression earnest and intent. “Bend down,” he says, and he whispers into my ear: “If one day I decide to eat pizza with meat on it, will you still like who I am?” he asks.

  His face is unbearably solemn, his eyes trained on me as he awaits my reaction.

  “Oh, Josh,” I say, and as I look into his eyes, I feel my heart breaking open. Even at his young age, he knows the price to be paid for not following the rules.

  This, more than anything, was the iron bar across the exit door—love was what tied you and kept you inside. Love was what you risked losing if you wanted to choose for yourself.

  “Do you mind if I take off my hat?” I whispered to Aaron. We had been married for a little over a year and we were sitting at a reading at the KGB Bar in downtown Manhattan, a dimly lit room decorated with Russian memorabilia.

  Every morning before I walked the six blocks to my graduate writing class, I stood in the bathroom of the apartment we’d moved into after our wedding, on 110th Street in Manhattan. I brushed, scrunched, and moussed the fake hair of my fall the same way I’d once played with my brush-hair doll, as I called it, a mounted plastic head of long blond hair that I’d braided and curled until, in a rash moment, I cut her bald.

  I pulled some of my hair forward, clipped on the fall, then used my curls to cover the place where wig met hair.

  “Can you come tell me if you see the line?” I called to Aaron from my spot in front of the mirror.

  “I can barely see it,” he told me when he joined me in the bathroom. “And only because I know it’s there.”

  Wanting to be reassured, I looked in the mirror more closely. The fall might not have been a perfect match but there was a lot of hair, some dark brown, some reddish, some curly, some mere waves. How many people in my writing workshop would be looking for a nearly imperceptible seam along my head or would notice that the fake hair wasn’t nearly as curly as the real hair? But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that it was fine, I noticed how the outer layer of fake hair slowly separated from the underlayer of real hair. No assortment of bobby pins, no amount of spray or mousse could prevent this—despite all the coaxing and styling, my own hair would have nothing to do with this outside entity, my body rejecting this foreign object. Even worse, when I studied it carefully, I noticed the bump where the fall was attached to my head, a subtle glimpse of something rising from inside.

  “It’s too obvious,” I said, and I ripped the fall off my head, then scrunched, curled, and attached it once again. Nearly a whole bottle of mousse, all in the name of God.

  I started to say, “I hate this,” but stopped myself. I didn’t want to alarm Aaron with such an expression of discontent. I was supposed to feel that, with each bobby pin, I was securing our relationship. It was the early years of marriage, a sanctified time. If we’d lived in biblical days, Aaron wouldn’t have been drafted to war during the first year to allow him to spend time rejoicing in me, his bride. For us now, it meant that we were supposed to think of this period as an extended honeymoon.

  Only once the wig was close to undetectable would I leave for school, trying not to think about my hair and to focus instead on the novel I had started writing, about a woman who converts to Judaism and moves to the Orthodox community in Memphis. I knew that I was supposed to portray Orthodoxy in largely positive terms—any critical sentence could make people angry. Sometimes I read a few pages of what I’d written to my mother, and she’d laugh in appreciation, then worry what the communal fallout might be if it were ever published. I worried as well. Anything that did not uphold or affirm—could you think it? Could you say it? Even worse, did you dare write it?

  Yet being a writer, I was learning, required a willingness to cast aside these restrictions. To write was to enter an underground that was rich and teeming—the world wasn’t a single fluorescent-lit room but a house with corners and hallways and passageways to explore. I lived in a small, small box in which I could barely breathe read the opening to a classmate’s novel in progress that we’d discussed that week. I’d put a check mark next to this sentence, then read it again, surprised by the power it had over me. I didn’t think I felt that way, not really, but something stirred inside me. I love this, I scribbled in the margin, but what I wanted to write was I’m afraid I am this.

  Walking six blocks up Broadway to the Columbia campus, I was distracted by the word wig. The sound of the wind: Wig, wig. The metal clips were supposed to be fail-proof but what would happen if my hair fell off in the middle of class? If someone were to ask why I covered my hair, I could explain why this ritual felt meaningful to other people, but the truth was that I did it because I wanted to be seen by my community as the type of woman who covered her hair. I’d once heard a story about an Orthodox woman who was taking a chemistry lab and her wig caught on fire. Rather than rip the wig from her head, she’d tried to put the fire out, allowing the wig to singe. A few days later, so this story went, she got a new wig and came to class with hair that showed no sign of having been burned, claiming to have found a magic serum that restored burned hair. When I first heard the story, before I was married, I thought she was crazy for not ripping the wig off her head—it was on fire, after all—but now I suspected I would have done the same.

  In the small crowded bar where many of my classmates sat in groups, Aaron and I sat by ourselves. Constantly aware of how I wasn’t like the rest of them—married and Orthodox and trying to hide a secret I wore in plain sight on my head—I was painfully shy. We had each ordered a Coke; the food wasn’t kosher, and drinking was foreign to us. Even though I was twenty-five and living in New York City, this—a crowded bar—was a place to which I was a young and uncertain visitor. Tired of worrying about whether I’d secured the fall exactly right, I was wearing a black baseball hat, so unobtrusive that I hoped it could pass for some kind of halfhearted fashion statement. Aaron was wearing a baseball hat too, over his yarmulke, a socially acceptable method of disguise, though his hat was emblazoned with the logo for the Boston Red Sox, the team and the city for which he pined.

  After our wedding, Aaron’s parents had wanted us to move to Boston, even though I still had another two years of graduate school in New York. I didn’t want to move; since our engagement, the relationship with them had been fraught, and I worried that if we lived close, conflicts with them would overwhelm our new independence. Marriage was supposed to confer adulthood, yet our life together often felt like an elaborate version of playing house, the hats I wore little different from the ones in the bag of dress-up clothes I’d had as a child.

  “Is it normal to fight a lot?” I asked a friend who’d gotten married a year before I did, viewing her as wise older counsel. I tried not to think about how quickly Aaron and I had gotten engaged so I wouldn’t feel the awful worry that I had married before I was ready.

  “It’s normal,” she said and assured me that by the second year, when we really knew each other, everything would be much easier.

  I tried to listen to the reading but the hat was pres
sing tightly against my forehead, the brim cutting across my view. I loosened the buckle and pulled it farther back on my head but the line of the hat still felt too constricting, as though my entire body were being compressed.

  “Do you mind if I take off my hat?” I whispered again to Aaron, hoping no one nearby would hear me.

  He looked at me in surprise. Though I’d complained about covering my hair, it never seemed possible that I would actually stop. He was sympathetic, but I knew that, unlike me, he didn’t feel as if the edges of Orthodoxy could close in on him. My question felt dangerous, as though I were asking about lifting off the marriage itself for a few hours.

  “If you want to,” Aaron said nervously.

  I took off the hat and lay it on the table, next to our refills of Coke. Viewed from this vantage point, the hat looked innocuous enough, hardly the vise I’d come to see it as.

  “Do you think it’s bad?” I asked him as I shook out my hair and felt like I could not only see more clearly, but breathe more easily as well.

  “I’m fine with it,” he said.

  “Are you really?” I asked.

  “I can see the difference in you,” Aaron acknowledged.

  When we left the reading, I put the hat back on and took his hand as we walked. The hat felt tighter, as though my head had grown larger, my hair thicker. It’s a slippery slope, the rabbi still present in my mind warned. It would be only this one time, I decided. I would try harder to keep covering my hair, just as I prayed every morning before I left for class, cooked Shabbat meals every week, immersed myself in the mikvah each month. Doubt would be stamped out, like a small fire. More than anything, I wanted to be the person Aaron had married—still the girl he’d seen when he lifted the veil at our wedding.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked as we got ready for bed. Our apartment was a prewar building set back from the street with a wide courtyard and peeling green shutters, the façade arrayed with stone gargoyles set up like sentries to watch over the building’s inhabitants.