by Tova Mirvis
When Josh was born, four years later, I was finishing a second book, about two Orthodox families whose children marry. In my work, I continued to explore the boundaries of Orthodoxy, but in my life, I had come up with a way to stay inside. I would try not to focus on those parts of Orthodoxy that I disagreed with. I would craft a smaller segment in which I could live, one remaining sliver while a larger swath was washed away. Compartmentalizing was a way to remain within. Disengagement, I was realizing, could be a comfortable place to rest. I would keep kosher, observe Shabbat, go to the mikvah, follow all the laws about which there could be no discussion. I didn’t need to be moved by these rituals so long as I continued to do them. I no longer made a point of regularly studying Jewish texts as I once had. I stopped praying every morning—not a deliberate decision but a practice that slowly fell away. I didn’t go to synagogue every week, not because I was making any kind of statement but because I was staying home with my children. In Jewish newspapers, I read increasingly of intramural squabbles in the Orthodox community over women’s roles and gay rights and the dangerous influence of the outside world, the battle lines drawn, rabbis more stringently patrolling the borders lest any outliers try to pass themselves off as Orthodox. I didn’t agree with the positions espoused by many of the Orthodox rabbis, nor with the angry tones that they employed to enforce their views. These were presumably the leaders of my world, but they didn’t have to speak for me.
Underneath this disengagement, lurking quietly, was a larger question: Did I believe in it? I had no clear-cut answer, but Orthodoxy, I was told, was not about belief but about actions. It didn’t matter what I believed as long as I continued to observe and belong. If the threads of belief began to fray, community was the net that kept you from falling. God was the prerequisite, presumably, for the religion, but sometimes He seemed like an embarrassing parent of whom it was better not to speak too often. Actual belief seemed like a small line in the fine print of the membership forms. How hard is it, the man selling the grand all-inclusive package seems to say, to leave those questions unasked and bask in the rest of what we have to offer?
“Are you coming home?” I asked Aaron over the phone late one night, long after I had put both boys to bed.
“Soon,” he said with an air of having been beaten down by the taskmaster partners at his law firm. He was doing the best he could, he told me; there was nothing he could do differently.
I fell asleep, then woke at two in the morning to discover that he hadn’t come home yet.
“Are you still there?” I said over the phone in a groggy haze.
“It won’t always be like this,” he promised. I had been with the boys all day, not a moment to myself, yet I felt alone. But all I needed to do was try harder—to do everything for the kids and our home, to allow him to work as long and as late as he needed. Try, try, try—the word that kept me wound, in constant motion.
“Could you see yourself living in Boston?” Aaron asked me one night as walked together down Broadway.
It was a Saturday night after Shabbat had ended, and we had gotten a babysitter so we could actually talk to each other. We walked with no particular destination in mind, one of our favorite things to do in the city—just walk, taking in the people, the stores, the lights coming from the apartment buildings, as beautiful to me as any constellation of stars. I felt the urgency to enjoy the city while we still could—with a small apartment and two kids, I knew that sooner or later, we would have to move away.
At his question, I stopped walking. The expression on his face was plaintive. No matter how much we both loved New York, Boston was his home.
“I know we’re going to eventually move,” I said to him as we continued downtown, “but I don’t know if I’m ready yet.”
I tried to imagine piloting my children not in a stroller but a minivan. In the city, I could hold out a little longer against what I knew lay in wait. Memphis still felt like home, the place I would always be from, but New York had become the place I most wanted to be. Every day, with the boys in the stroller, I walked down Broadway feeling the pleasure that something unexpected could always happen. More important, here I could be Orthodox but feel anonymous. It was the opposite of Memphis, where the eyes of the community were always upon you. For this reason, I didn’t want to move to a suburban Orthodox community like most everyone we knew had done and go to the same synagogue everyone else did and send our kids to the same schools and then to the same camps. Aaron and I had looked at a map and, with one broad gesture (unfairly, we knew), ruled out all of New Jersey, all of Long Island, all of Westchester—not the cities and towns themselves but the Orthodox communities, which were all we saw on a map anyway. Not wanting to be pioneers, we could go to only a handful of places, only to the discovered Orthodox world.
“I don’t want to if you don’t want to,” he said. “It was just an idea.”
I softened. “Would you have better hours in Boston?” I asked.
“Definitely,” he promised, and I heard the desperation at how much he hated his job.
We went out to dinner for his birthday. It was our favorite restaurant, a gourmet kosher steakhouse where the best compliment you could give was that you’d never know it was kosher. After we ate, I handed Aaron a small box.
Inside was a silver-and-blue mezuzah to hang in the house we would live in in Boston. I couldn’t wrap the whole of Boston for him as I wished I could, but I hoped that Boston would be, if not a cure-all, then at least a chance to fix what I had started to worry was in danger of cracking. I felt an unease below the surface, an anxious echo to my sentences, a slivered crescent of something lurking behind. I no longer believed that the parchment inside the mezuzah would actually protect us, but it could serve as a symbol of my attempt to make Boston our home.
On our last day in New York, I went back inside our empty apartment for one final look. At the sight of the bare rooms, I started to sob. I didn’t want to move. But it was too late to feel this way. This was what we needed to do. I splashed cold water on my face and went outside.
We strapped the kids into the back of a Volvo station wagon, our first car, and we drove to our new home, a blue-shuttered white Cape house that was in the Orthodox community in Newton, Massachusetts. Housing prices there were astronomical, Jewish day-school tuitions equally so, but if you were Modern Orthodox, this was what you did. We joined one of the Orthodox synagogues and went every week. We sent Noam to the Orthodox day school where Aaron had gone. We didn’t have to ask ourselves where we would fit in. A place was already carved out for us, our social life entirely intertwined with our religious one. I invited members of our synagogue over for elaborate Shabbat meals—a huge amount of work, but this was both the price to pay for belonging and its reward. All so that our children could grow up encased inside a community. All so that we wouldn’t be alone.
We’d been living in Boston for almost a year when my agent called to warn me that an essay criticizing a group of authors who’d written about Orthodoxy was slated to appear in the New York Times Book Review the following weekend. It was about a year after the publication of my second novel, and in the essay, a newly Orthodox writer called out me and a few other authors for being critical of Orthodoxy—and even worse, for presumably pretending to be Orthodox in the first place. She described her own recent transformation to Orthodoxy and her recognition that this way of life was good and beautiful. To be inside, she said, was to see it this way. If you didn’t see it this way, you were really not Orthodox. I was accused of being negative, of writing characters who’d wrestled, doubted, and strayed, whereas real Orthodox Jews, this writer claimed, did not engage in such activities. In my novel, I had depicted a religious young man who, caught between desire and loyalty to the law, tentatively hugged his fiancée, but according to this essayist, everyone knew a man like this would never succumb to desire—he would probably not feel it in the first place.
How dare you say I’m not Orthodox? I e-mailed the author of the
piece angrily (one of those moments when I should have been made to take ten deep breaths before pressing Send). I listed my credentials for her: I had spent my entire life inside this world. I kept strictly kosher. I went to the mikvah every month. I attended synagogue every week. My husband and sons wore yarmulkes wherever they went. That would show her! If observance was what Orthodoxy required of me, I had dutifully complied. I imagined the Times would now be forced to issue a retraction—after a careful investigation into my closet, my kitchen, and my bedroom, the editors turned religious judges would certify that I was, in fact, Orthodox, as claimed.
The week after the essay came out, I stood on the women’s side of our synagogue in Newton, where I still felt like a newcomer, and sensed the question marks in people’s eyes—as though under my camouflaging hat there lurked an impostor. I picked up Noam from school, and as he came out, in a yarmulke and tzitzit—the required ritual white fringes, which hung outside his sweatpants—I felt exposed. Unlike my son, I was clearly questionable. I read a piece a rabbi published in a Jewish newspaper attacking me for an essay I’d written in response to the Times critique; it was as though one of the small figures that had lived in my head all these years had come to life and taken up pen and paper. As I cooked for Shabbat, I read blog posts that parsed just how Orthodox I really was. I read an angry missive from a woman who demanded that I label my novels as fictional representations that bore no relationship to anything that actually happened in Orthodoxy.
You must have just had a bad experience, said one of the e-mails I received—a common trope, I’d come to realize, to explain anyone who didn’t see the world as you did.
Most people would discuss their questions with a rabbi. You decided to write a book, read an angry e-mail from a woman who identified herself as a friend of my cousin.
I understood, and often felt, the anxiety about how we appeared to those on the outside—the sense that no one could really understand what it meant to live in this way—but I had believed that there was room for portrayals that showed the varieties of experience within Orthodoxy. I had wanted to reckon with the ways people lived not only within the sanctioned positions of the law but inside all the human possibilities between. I had wanted to write about the small transgressions and religious compromises people make and yet remain inside—that wily inner sphere that surely existed here as it did everywhere. But apparently, here there was no doubting, no desiring, no wandering, no wondering. Just a single shelf of sanctioned stories—stories of compliance and cohesion. Orthodox Jews went to synagogue. Orthodox Jews had Shabbat dinner with their families. Orthodox Jews were good and content. There was no other story.
Each month, I tallied the days of my period. I checked my underwear for any signs of blood. With small white cloths, I inspected myself for staining and counted out the days that I was clean. Then I went to the mikvah in Brighton, a fifteen-minute drive from my house. We had been in Boston for a few years by now, but it was still hard for me to drive in what felt like an unfamiliar city. Despite the hope we’d both felt when we left New York, Aaron continued to work long hours, and I had given up believing that the underlayer of unease might lessen. All I could do, I decided, was try to accept that this was how it would always be. I longed to be back in New York, where I had walked everywhere, my eyes ravenously taking in the buildings around me and the bustle of people. After barely driving for all the years I’d lived in Manhattan, the car was now my primary means of transportation. Though I’d driven on the highway as a teenager, I’d let too much time go by without doing so, and now I was afraid. I limited the places I went, plotting out routes carefully, avoiding those areas where it felt too hard to drive. I told few people about my fear, making up excuses for why I couldn’t go certain places. More than anything else I did, driving was how I knew I wasn’t from here. Bostonian drivers were a different breed than the deferential Memphian ones; in Memphis, the only time you honked was when you were passing a friend and wanted to say hello. Though I’d always had a terrible sense of direction, I’d foolishly decided not to buy a GPS, preferring to study the maps, trying to take hold of the city in my mind, to grasp its turns before I got in the car and had to navigate this place that I was sure would never feel like home.
With the mikvah, I had no choice about going. There was an appointed night and an appointed time and I went as I was required to. I studied the map and nervously set out. One night, I drove there as I had every month, but traffic was heavier than usual. My cheeks burned and I gripped the steering wheel tightly. I didn’t want to always be this way. Though it was hard to envision how my fear might ever lift, I promised myself that I would get over this by the time I turned forty. I was thirty-four then, so it felt far enough in the future as to seem unimaginable.
It wasn’t only driving there that I didn’t like. That night, and every time I went, all I wanted to do was get in and out as quickly as I could. I soaked in the tub, showered, pumice-stoned my heels, trimmed my nails, and reminded myself that this ritual was beautiful. In the mikvah, there was no safe spot of disengagement. The laws were written across my body. Out of the shower, I started to work on my hair, which had grown past my shoulders, and tried to convince myself that this act lay at the heart of what it meant to be a Jewish woman. It was dangerous to admit that I didn’t necessarily think this was true—even one’s own self couldn’t be trusted with such treachery.
Once I completed the list of required preparations, I called to let the mikvah lady know I was ready, and in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, I came out of the room. I loosened the robe and she checked my back for any stray hairs that would constitute a separation between my body and the water. Once my back had passed inspection, she motioned for me to hold out my hands so that she could examine them for any hangnails or remnants of nail polish. She checked my toenails, making sure they too had been clipped and scrubbed.
The privacy of this place was essential but when she checked my body, it wasn’t just her eyes on me but the eyes of the community, the eyes of the rabbis, the eyes of God. Everywhere you were supposed to be covered, yet as an Orthodox woman, you were always subject to inspection. When we still lived in New York, I had occasional spotting between periods, so sometimes I had to put off going to the mikvah (you couldn’t go until you had had no bleeding for a certain number of days). I was trying to get pregnant at the time, and since you couldn’t have sex with your husband until after you’d been to the mikvah, I grew concerned that we were missing the time when I was ovulating. Some Orthodox women, I knew, struggled with this for years, unable to get pregnant because the laws prevented them from having sex when they were most fertile. Ask a rabbi; this was what I had been taught. I called our synagogue and talked to the assistant rabbi, who told me to bring over the stained cloths with which I’d checked myself. I went to his office in the synagogue, where I stood hesitantly in the doorway, not sure just how embarrassed to be. He appeared uncomfortable as well—he probably wanted to look at those smeared cloths as little as I wanted to show them—but in the alleyway outside, he held them to the sunlight and squinted at the stains as though he were a doctor making a diagnosis. Finally he decided that I was indeed permissible.
“Can you comb your hair a little better?” the mikvah lady in Boston asked me, taking my curls in her hand and shaking her head in dismay.
I was surprised—she’d never before said much to me, only picked a few hairs off my back or motioned to a hangnail I needed to snip. Long ago, I’d been taught that each time I immersed myself, I would be like some incarnation of an innocent bride once again. Maybe that was what it was supposed to feel like, but at her request to comb my hair better, all I wanted to do was put my clothes back on and get in my car and head in the opposite direction of Newton, into the lights of the city of Boston, where I was also afraid to drive.
Not knowing what else to do, I went back into the small bathroom, held the comb to my hair, and looked in the mirror.
Do you believe in it? I asked
myself.
Orthodoxy wasn’t about belief, it was about observance, I fought back.
Do you believe God cares about you combing your hair?
It was part of a system; it wasn’t about just this one rule but all of them.
But do you believe in it?
You didn’t have to believe; you just had to observe.
But do you?
It was a question I thought I had buried sufficiently, and it was alarming to hear—a once-mischievous old friend now returning to make serious trouble.
I looked at my hair. My quiet unease broke open. It didn’t matter what she’d asked. I wasn’t going to comb it again.
“I can’t,” I told the attendant when I emerged from the room a second time.
She raised her eyebrows in confusion, as though what I’d said made no sense.
“I can’t,” I said again. Nothing in my life felt as certain as this one sentence.
She gave a small, perturbed shake of her head and quickly inspected the rest of me without pointing out any other area where I had fallen short of the rules. Maybe she saw the resoluteness in my eyes. Maybe she was calculating that the sin would be on my ledger, not hers. Maybe I would be inspected more thoroughly in the future, the mikvah equivalent of a no-fly list.
With resigned approval, she stood watch as I walked down the steps into the mikvah. I went under the water, my fists loosely clenched, my eyes lightly closed. I came up and crossed my arms over my chest as I made the blessing praising God, King of the Universe, who commanded us to immerse. The water might have been there to cleanse me, or purify me, or maybe it was supposed to remind me that life could flow freely like a river or a stream, but as I dunked twice more, I was sure of one thing: It wasn’t possible to change my life. I might have been young, but it was far too late. I was pinned in place like the bugs in the collection I’d had to amass for my sixth-grade science class. I’d caught spiders and beetles and moths in a glass jar and placed a cotton ball soaked with nail-polish remover inside. I’d watched, horrified and fascinated, as they flittered and scurried then slowed, their legs no longer moving, their wings no longer flapping. When they were dead, I carefully emptied them onto a Styrofoam board and stuck a pin through each hard body.