The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  The water washed over me. I would continue trying, as I always did, but even so, I hoped that one small part of me was shielded, one spot of tangled hair, perhaps, where the water couldn’t penetrate.

  “Kosher,” the mikvah attendant pronounced. “Kosher.”

  A year later, I gave birth to my daughter. For a girl, there is no equivalent to a Shalom Zachor, the traditional celebration welcoming a son on the first Friday night after his birth; no ceremony on the eighth day as there is for a boy, his circumcision marking God’s covenant with the Jewish people—or at least, His covenant with Jewish men. I was glad I didn’t have to witness another circumcision. At the ceremony for each boy, I’d waited, in horror, for the deed to be over. This was what countless Jewish mothers before me had done, and only fleeting in my mind was the question, Is there a choice?

  I wanted to do something, though, to mark the birth of our daughter. A week after she was born, we had a Simchat Bat, a celebration for the birth of a daughter, a tradition that had become increasingly popular in the Modern Orthodox community. At the ceremony, I talked about how Layla was named for my father’s mother, who had died unexpectedly when I was fifteen. In the weeks after, my grandfather had come to stay with us in Memphis and sat in the backyard staring out at nothing, tears silently rolling down his cheeks. That he had loved her deeply was something I hadn’t needed to be told—it was evident to me, even as a child, in the way he helped her make dinner, cutting the vegetables for their meals; in the way, when she was older and it was hard for her to bend over, he painted her toenails for her. Before any of this, she had been a Phi Beta Kappa from Duke; she didn’t get married until her early thirties, when she returned to Hampton, Virginia, where she worked in her parents’ store and met the new young single rabbi in her hometown synagogue. Like my maternal grandmother, she became Orthodox when she got married. In naming Layla after her great-grandmother, we were tying her to tradition, our own version of the blessing we would bestow upon her every Friday night: May God make you like Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah.

  As my daughter nursed, I ran my hands over her tiny legs and silken cheeks, marveling at the mystery of such a small creature, the fact that inside her head, a world was awakening. Looking at her blue-green eyes and fuzz-dusting of blond hair was like waiting for a picture to come more fully into focus. So far, little had been imprinted on her but each moment, even right now, was shaping who she would become. It felt too late for me, but was I going to offer her words that would stick in my mouth as I tried to say them? Orthodoxy, or at least our small corner of it, had continued to evolve, changes forged by women I admired. Maybe my daughter wouldn’t have to feel the inequalities and the constraints as viscerally as I did. But even then, would I have to teach her the tactics I used to remain inside? Don’t say what you really think. Don’t name what you really feel. It’s not what it sounds like. It’s not what it really means. I didn’t want her to feel that she had to tuck away any dissenting part of herself. I didn’t want her to feel that the only choice was to live with an endless sense of obligation and contradiction. Try not to be bothered by things that make you seethe. Try not to feel exhausted from walking against an ever-present tide, the current pulling your body, the sand slipping away beneath your feet.

  I touched the indentation under her nose—the legend I’d been taught was that a baby in the womb is taught the entire Torah, then, before birth, an angel slaps the baby’s face, causing the infant to forget what he or she has learned and leaving this mark. Was it already determined who my daughter would become, this world encoded inside her, its rules a submerged memory, a hazy blueprint?

  My daughter slept and she woke and she continued to nurse. “Be happy,” I whispered in her small soft ear. “Be free.”

  My phone rings as I’m sitting in my car in the school parking lot, early again, waiting to pick up the kids. This time it’s my sister Dahlia calling.

  “I’m getting engaged,” she tells me.

  “Mazel tov,” I say, thrilled for her.

  Her voice is filled with excitement, but at the age of thirty-seven, after so many years of being on her own, she finds it hard to take this step without some nervousness as well. It occurs to me that we won’t both be married at the same time. At my wedding, when she was newly returned from her second year of studying in Israel, I would never have imagined she would be so long unmarried, but then, I couldn’t have imagined how any of this would turn out.

  Over the next few weeks, Dahlia and I discuss arrangements for her wedding—she and her fiancé have decided to get married in Israel in May. We also discuss my divorce, so our conversations veer from wedding menus and invitations to parenting plans and lawyers’ fees.

  “Does my divorce scare you?” I ask her.

  “Of course it does,” she says. “There’s no way to know for sure.”

  To someone newly engaged, am I the best person or the worst to give marital advice?

  “I remember how nervous you were when you got engaged,” she tells me, recounting how, in the weeks leading up to my wedding, I had cried to her on the phone, worried about the constant fighting between Aaron and me, but neither she nor I had known what to do. It seemed like a fixed rule: I was a bride, therefore I was happy. There was no way to make the reality conform to what we both believed to be true, and both of us were too young and unpracticed to know what to do with any apparent contradiction.

  “I was twenty-two. I’d barely had a boyfriend before that. I was scared out of my mind—but I was even more afraid that if I didn’t get married then, I’d end up single forever. I thought that was the worst thing that could happen. I had no idea how to be alone.”

  “Of course I feel nervous,” she says. “But I know that this is what I want. This is what I’m choosing.”

  In her voice, there is confidence and a sense of calm. She sounds happier than I’ve ever heard her. I think back to the different people she dated and the pain she suffered when a relationship didn’t work. I think back to her descriptions of what it felt like to have the word single emblazoned on you, as though it were a deformity. All those times when I stood in my married-couple’s house and listened to her, I’d let myself believe that not getting married was the worst possible outcome in life. But she had a strength that I hadn’t possessed—she hadn’t allowed others to convince her to do something she knew wasn’t right for her, nor had she tried to convince herself. I am filled with happiness for her now. Despite the pain of relationships that didn’t work out, despite the years of pressure and uncertainty, she waited—not just until she found the right person, but until she became the person she most wanted to be.

  “Do you want to do something a little crazy?” my friend Dena asked me when Layla was almost two years old. Our lives mirrored each other’s; we went to the same synagogue, had the same observances and patterns of the week. We invited each other for Shabbat meals, sat next to each other in synagogue, traded recipes and details of our lives.

  To my surprise, she wanted me to go with her to Crystal Lake late one night and be the equivalent of the mikvah attendant as she immersed. She said she couldn’t bring herself to go to the Brighton mikvah where she usually went.

  Going to the lake did sound a little crazy, but in a good way. Immersing oneself in a natural body of water was hardly a trespass against religious laws—I had been raised on countless stories of the devout women who walked on the most frigid of nights across the harshest landscapes of Russia to immerse themselves in the icy Black Sea. On vacation once with no mikvah nearby, I had no choice but to immerse myself in the Atlantic Ocean. I went to the beach early in the morning—though you were supposed to go to the mikvah only at night, I had made this compromise because the thought of being naked in the ocean at night seemed too scary. Aaron stood on the beach watching me as I swam out, removed my bathing suit, and quickly dunked under the water, hoping no one else would see what I was doing. But these outdoor mikvahs were regarded as options of last resort. In subur
ban Newton, with an established mikvah nearby, this excursion to Crystal Lake would surely have raised a few eyebrows. I understood, though, why Dena wanted to go to the lake. Since the time I hadn’t combed my hair well enough to please the mikvah attendant, I too no longer wanted to go to that mikvah and instead had started to go to a new nondenominational mikvah in Newton whose mission was to reinvent this ancient ritual and make it relevant and accessible to all Jews. It described itself as a place to mark not just the end of one’s period but any rite of passage. Instead of inspecting me, the mikvah guide dimmed the lights and asked me how she could help make my experience more meaningful. The first time I heard this question, it caught me by surprise; so focused on fulfilling my obligation, I had given little thought to what I wanted this to mean. I went there each month for several years, even after an e-mail was sent to members of our congregation saying it didn’t meet the standards of the Orthodox community. Even by complying with the rules, you could be rebelling. One more small transgression, one more air hole I was punching in the top of this box.

  Once it was dark, Dena and I drove in her minivan to the lake, which had once been called Baptist Pond and used by a local church. She had brought a flashlight, and tripping, clutching each other’s hands, and laughing, we walked to the edge of the water. We wondered what anyone who saw us would imagine we were up to. Swimming in the lake was prohibited by local ordinance, but there were rumors of swimmers who defied the rules and swam the length of the lake at night. Perhaps anyone who caught sight of us would mistake us for one of these stealthy night swimmers.

  Standing on the shore, Dena and I talked about our marriages, one admission allowing for another. Neither of us was in any rush to get home. Out here, not under the eyes of inspection, not inside the official organized structures, it was easier to speak honestly. I told her about the novel I had been working on for a few years now, set in New York City, which I still longed for, about husbands and wives who were increasingly estranged. I hadn’t set out to write about this but somehow had found myself in this fictional terrain and it scared me. Even though I always assured Aaron that of course I wasn’t writing about us, I had come to understand that it was more complicated than just that. I told Dena how I constantly tried not to be bothered by the issues between Aaron and me—issues that included the division of responsibilities, religious differences, family, and the difficulty of creating emotional intimacy. We couldn’t talk openly about the problems, so the only way around them was to act as if they weren’t there, though this only exacerbated that underlayer of unease that I’d long felt. I’d started to think about the two of us going to couples therapy and I had collected a few names, but I hadn’t done anything else about it. “I’m done,” I sometimes told Aaron when the issues erupted into a fight, but the words vanished as soon as they hit the air, as though I’d never uttered them at all. When I talked to my mother on the phone, I confided in her about my marriage, but later told her I had just been upset and didn’t mean what I said. Sometimes I cried to Dahlia, who was a therapist and therefore, I reasoned, wouldn’t mind if I stopped pretending that everything was fine.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Dahlia asked me.

  “Do? I was planning to ruminate about it for the rest of my life,” I said, only partially joking.

  “People who are unable to make small changes sometimes end up making big changes,” she warned me. I was intrigued by the possibility that change might one day happen to me but couldn’t imagine it was something I would ever bring about. I was hardly the kind of person who would upend her life—I didn’t know what that kind of person looked like, but I was sure she didn’t look like me.

  Across the lake, a train rumbled by. A few late-night walkers strode past us, in pairs or with dogs. Somewhere nearby there was the laughter of teenagers. Dena stripped down to her bathing suit and handed me her glasses and wedding ring. We looked at each other and laughed again. “Local Mothers Arrested for Skinny-Dipping in Crystal Lake,” I imagined the headlines of the Newton TAB. “Orthodox Women Cited for Naked Water Ritual.” I could barely see her as she walked out and crouched down so that the water covered her shoulders, then she wriggled out of her bathing suit and went under.

  In a few months, this summer would end, and once again, there would be the start of the new Jewish year. No matter what feeble protests I launched, I knew that I would once again stand in my in-laws’ synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and pull my hat over my face to try to cover what I felt.

  Dena emerged from the lake and wrapped a towel around herself. After she dried off and put her clothes on, we got back in her minivan and she dropped me off at home. I had put the kids to bed before I left, and Aaron was at the dining-room table, working and trying not to fall asleep. Words played loudly in my head—my marriage didn’t fill me, it wasn’t enough—but they needed to be hidden at all costs, concealed weapons that endangered us all. Upstairs, I checked on my three sleeping children. If the word divorce ever dared to crest in my mind, the sight of the three of them sleeping unsuspectingly was enough to push it away.

  I went to our bedroom, where I lay awake in one of the two twin beds that were pushed together or not according to the prescriptions of the law. It was hard to fall asleep, but when I lay awake, dangerous thoughts unfurled. If I thought about my marriage, I felt the spread of sadness. If I thought about religion, I felt a burn of frustration. Fantasy was the only escape. It could be enough, couldn’t it, to live inside your mind? I spooled backward in time to the time before we got engaged and constructed different versions of my life. What if I weren’t Orthodox? What if I hadn’t gotten married so young? I could try to blame Orthodoxy for my choices, but really, I knew I had only myself to blame. I hadn’t listened to that voice inside me that doubted whether marrying Aaron was the right choice. I had wanted to keep my eyes closed and force the reality to match the story I held in my head.

  The next month, when it was time for me to go to the mikvah, I went to the lake. With Dena standing watch by the edge of the water, I waded out. The water was still cold, even though it was the end of summer. I slipped off my bathing suit and went completely under. Dena could hardly see I was here, let alone know whether my hair had been sufficiently combed. Alone in the water, my body made ripples that floated across the still surface. I lay on my back, took in the moon, which was low and full, and the sky lit with stars, a consolation for the loneliness lurking inside me. I felt more at ease being naked out here than I had in any of the indoor mikvahs I’d used. I didn’t think of myself as someone who would be moved by a lake, by a night sky, yet for the first time, I felt some softness and easing amid all those callused places. If there was any sliver of meaning, any sense of God’s presence, it lay in the feeling of being away from the rules, away from the official eyes.

  Almost a year later, I was invited to participate in the Orthodox Forum, a group of approximately one hundred rabbis and Jewish communal leaders selected annually to discuss an issue of relevance to Modern Orthodoxy. In past years, they had debated personal autonomy and rabbinic authority, and relationships between traditional and nontraditional Jews. This year the topic was Orthodoxy and Culture, and I, along with several other Orthodox artists, was asked to describe how my religious and artistic lives meshed.

  Sitting at my desk in the alcove office off our living room, which I considered my small refuge, I answered the questions that had been sent to me, a welcome break from working on my long-unfinished third novel—no longer a book but a maze in which I was endlessly wandering. The more I wrote about marital unhappiness, the more stuck I became. I couldn’t finish the book because I was afraid of the ending I might discover.

  Behind me were all the books I loved, the novels and memoirs and volumes of poetry—these books were my refuge as well, as though the pages were green fields or night skies. On the other side of the wide entryway, in the living room, were the shelves of religious books, the volumes of Talmud and the Bibles, the works of biblical commen
taries, books detailing the laws of the holidays.

  Did I consider myself an Orthodox writer?

  How did my Orthodoxy affect my work?

  Did I think there was a conflict between being an artist and being Orthodox?

  I was happy to take part in this interview—it seemed remarkable enough that these rabbis were engaging with the role of culture in religious life. Trying to sound reassuring, I said that I used Jewish sources in my writing, that our tradition encouraged questioning. Art didn’t seek to threaten Orthodoxy. There was no reason for the rabbis to be afraid—art meant no harm; it came in peace.

  I wrote this even though the words allowed and forbidden, appropriate and inappropriate, nice and not nice continued to battle inside me. I had wanted to believe that I would live my small quiet life but allow my mind to roam. You didn’t have to live boldly as long as you could write this way. But could you write of doubt that gnawed through you; could you write of loneliness; could you talk of wanting to escape and still go to synagogue each week and act as though you knew nothing of such feelings? Could you write of other people’s urges to break free but keep your own always concealed?

  A few months after I turned in my response, I was sent a copy of my answers along with all the others, which, like mine, downplayed the potential conflicts between being an artist and being Orthodox. I reread my initial responses and hated myself for the falseness. I e-mailed the interviewer to say I wanted to revise my answers. I couldn’t be one more person who covered the truth in order to belong, couldn’t be one more person who pretended so that others had to pretend as well.