by Tova Mirvis
This year, my grandparents are away for the holiday, in Florida at an all-inclusive kosher-for-Passover hotel, a rare late-life luxury, so if there is to be mayonnaise on the seder table, it’s up to us to make it.
“What will you do for the last days of Pesach?” my mother asks about the restricted days on which the kids will be with Aaron and we (they) don’t write, don’t drive, don’t turn on lights.
On the Passover CD that is blaring from the living room, freedom is sung and extolled. Freedom, freedom, freedom—a word usually greeted with suspicion in this world. On the stove in front of me, the matzo balls have been boiling and are now ready. Though I’m not supposed to—eating any form of matzo before the seder itself is forbidden, likened by the Talmud to a man who sleeps with his bride on the night before the wedding—I filch a matzo ball and devour it whole.
“I want you to be able to tell me things,” my mother says. “I feel you holding back.”
“I’m not going to observe those days,” I say. “You know that when I’m not with the kids, I don’t do Shabbat. I drive, I bike, I hike, I write.” I keep going, each word a tiny key unlocking one more tiny door. I had once thought that others could unlock these doors for you, but over this year, I’ve come to realize that no one can offer freedom to you. It’s yours to choose and to claim.
“It’s no longer my world. I feel like I’ve started to live somewhere else,” I say.
She knows this, of course, yet to openly name it is to allow the differences between us to become cemented in place. I still feel her discomfort with what I’m saying, yet she is listening to me, her face as gentle as it always is, and open and loving and kind—not approval but the beginning of acceptance. It is among the hardest of concepts to wrap your mind around—that this child who once took shape inside your body is now a separate being, with her own mind, her own beliefs. My mother and I meet each other’s eyes and I feel her creating room inside herself for this new version of me as well.
In the backyard, where the kids and I go to take a break from the preparations, we once again pile into the hammock. It’s early April, and the azalea bushes are in bloom, along with the lacy white dogwood trees. Spring is the prettiest time of the year to be in Memphis, when the blazing summer days still seem like misremembered exaggerations.
The school year is winding down, and each of the kids is on the cusp of change. In another few weeks, Layla will finish the small nursery school she has loved. In the fall, she will start kindergarten at the school the boys have attended, though next year, they won’t be there.
Noam will graduate from this school and plans to go to a pluralist Jewish high school instead of the all-Orthodox high school where, until a few years ago, we had assumed he would go. But the pluralism of his elementary school has become part of his Orthodoxy. He observes the rules, but he doesn’t feel that his is the only way. He doesn’t want to impose his beliefs on others. For him to choose this high school is to know that he will navigate these religious differences at home and at school, always having to think about how to hold on to what he believes while at the same time make room for what others believe.
Josh too is on the verge of something new—his unhappiness at school has made it clear that he won’t go back there next year. Aaron and I aren’t yet sure where he’ll go instead, whether to public school or another local Jewish school. For the past few months there has been a fragile peace between Aaron and me, but this conversation, or anything to do with religion, has the power to rupture that. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails but mostly we avoid any potentially difficult discussion. I’m not sure yet what I think is best, still sad that Josh won’t remain in a school I have loved. I know it isn’t just a question about where Josh will go to school next year, but a larger one that goes to the heart of what it means to be a parent. How to differentiate between something you love and something your child loves. How to find the balance between teaching your children what you want for them and helping your children discover who they are and what they want. How to separate who you are from who they are going to become.
I look at my three kids, snuggling in next to me, then jockeying for better spaces, threatening to knock one another out of the hammock, which sways and tilts at all this shifting weight. But before any of us are thrown overboard, there is a quick reshuffling and rearranging so that we all still fit inside. One change, I know now, leads to so many other changes—with no overarching system or set of rules to which we all belong, we are always shifting into new spaces. All of this is now part of their stories as well, stories that come with bends and turns, areas of fracturing and inconsistencies. In place of the complete protection I once so badly wanted to give them, I can instead offer them my honesty—a more complex vision of the world as I see it. When they were babies, and I read all the right books and tried to follow all the rules, I also bought the expert-recommended black-and-white toys that I displayed on any surface their eyes might pass over. Then, black and white were supposed to be the only colors they could see, but now I trust that my kids can understand a world that comes in a multitude of shades, dizzying and beautiful at once.
Despite the worry and the rush, we are ready. The seder will take place in the living room, on the sectional sofa, which has been taken apart and reconfigured to make a circle. Wineglasses are set on TV trays, the seder plate placed on the coffee table. We dress in colorful robes from the costume bag my siblings and I played with as children.
“It’s time,” my mother says.
“Do I have to come?” Josh asks me when I call the kids to the table.
I look at his face—he is afraid I’m going to force him.
“What if you come to the first part of the seder, then you can leave when you need a break?” I suggest and gratefully he agrees.
The three kids are here and ready to begin. My parents are here and so am I. On the table in front of us is the seder plate with its sprigs of parsley, its shank bone, and hard-boiled egg. Next to it, scarves my mother will use as props for the Bibliodrama she has planned. On the table too are the various Haggadahs my parents have collected over the years, the most basic version with the script for this night written in Hebrew on one side of the page, the English translation on the other. Volumes as well with rabbinic commentaries both classical and modern. There are newer, nontraditional ones too: a feminist seder and an experiential seder and even a vegetarian seder. Some of them hew closely to the original text, while others take those words as the starting point and use them to create something new.
Alongside these books is the volume my father has assembled. For the past few weeks, he has looked for Passover essays and articles that are personally meaningful to him; he seeks out voices of moderation, voices that are not excessively rule-based, that espouse openness and that pull from art and literature and science. He has printed out multiple copies, and from these he has assembled binders labeled Mirvis Family Seder, one for each of us, companions to the official booklets. Inside these binders is the version of Orthodoxy in which he believes.
We sing the order of the night, a tune which reminds me of being a little girl in a new dress that, because of the season, came with an Easter bonnet, which I wore as well. It reminds me of being so studious that I took to heart my teachers’ promise that for each word of the seder we recited, we would receive divine credit for a separate good deed. Now, for me, there is no counting up good deeds, no worrying about ingesting every crumb of required matzo. It’s not the same seder I used to attend but an alternate one being written in the margins. There is room for the pleasure of being here with my family, telling the story we have been imparting for generations. I am still part of this story, and the story remains part of me as well—its language, its rhythms, its customs all have shaped who I am. To the rabbi who once issued the warning about partaking but not enjoying, and to the wayward yeshiva student who tried to go, I want to offer my own ending: When participation no longer feels like it might be mistaken for capitulation, when t
here is acceptance of who you have chosen to become—then it’s possible to return and enjoy parts of what you’ve left. Not every leave-taking had to be absolute and entire. Orthodoxy can remain my childhood home, a place I visit but where I no longer live.
We turn the pages. We dip parsley into salt water. We break the middle matzo. We arrive at the Four Questions, where we encourage our children to ask what is different about this night. We reach the passage describing the four sons, among them the wise one who asks a question that includes himself as part of the story, the evil one who looks at it and dares to state that this tradition no longer belongs to him.
“If you were a slave in Egypt, what job would you have?” my mother asks.
We would be bricklayers, laundresses, cooks. We would build pyramids, lay roads.
“Can you name a time,” my mother asks, “when you felt enslaved? Can you tell us about a time when you felt free?”
We act out the story, run wildly around the house. Josh joins in, grabbing a robe that he tosses over his head and chasing after Noam.
“Let my people go,” my father proclaims, our makeshift Moses.
“No, no, no, I will not let them go,” bellows Layla, our Pharaoh, in a clear, strong voice that is emerging more all the time now.
But the people stand up to Pharaoh regardless. They are ready to set out on this journey—even though once they are in the desert, they will lament how it was better for them in Egypt. They couldn’t make the transformation from slavery to freedom. When we learned about this in school, the desert Jews were depicted as a foolish, ungrateful lot—how could they bemoan such a painful past? Back then, I had yet to understand that leave-takings are slow and painful and carry their own losses, that you can miss even what you needed to leave.
The seder moves forward, and now we are up to the ever-popular Ten Plagues. We pull out the plague bag, a burlap sack containing small rubber frogs, black plastic lice, a cow who keels over when a button is pressed. All this so Pharaoh will say, “Yes, I will set you free.” All this so that we could set out on the slow journey toward something new. Leaving has always been a part of the story. So has passing through the uncertain spaces between fixed realms.
It’s getting late—we’re hours still from matzo balls and gefilte fish and the equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner my mother has prepared, even further from the moment when my father will search for the piece of matzo the kids have stolen and hidden and for which he will offer presents in order to assure its safe return. On this night, we are supposed to feel as though we too left Egypt, to see our own journeys as part of this story—not a closed, fixed tale but one that expands to include each of us.
On this night I too am reminded of my own moment of leave-taking. Almost a year has passed since I stood waiting before that panel of rabbis, my hands cupped in front of me.
The ceremony took place once Aaron and I were no longer living in the same house. I was busy getting the house ready to be put on the market. We had divided the time with the kids, divided the furniture, begun the task of dividing any assets—all these tasks necessary to separate our lives. In my inbox one morning, along with missives from the lawyers and updates from the real estate agent and ongoing exchanges with the therapists, there was a poem called “The Journey,” by Mary Oliver, sent to me by the editor who, a few weeks earlier, had bought my novel, which I’d finally completed.
There would come a time when you had to set out, the poem reminded me, even when it was difficult and uncertain. Eventually, you began to find your own path. After reading the poem once, I read it every day, sometimes multiple times, until I knew it by heart, until I could sing it to myself like a soothing lullaby or else follow it like the only kind of instruction manual that could guide me through. Soon there was an offer on the house. I found a place nearby to rent. I packed with the urgency of someone who was fleeing. I started with the books, which were the easiest for me and Aaron to divide up. I turned to the toys and sorted into piles what would go to his house and what to mine, then I went through the kitchen, the linens, the pictures on the walls, disassembling in a few weeks what had taken sixteen years to put together. I packed up our bedroom where our two twin beds were pushed permanently apart, like the beds of innocent children. I collected the hats I still wore to synagogue and added them to the give-away pile. I heaped letters and photos into boxes that I knew I wouldn’t look at for a long time. I cried as I packed, burned through with guilt. But there would eventually be another way to live, the poem reminded me as I recited it again to myself. In the now almost empty bedroom, I left a copy of this poem on our dresser, hoping Aaron would read it. Where I’d failed to make myself understood, I hoped the poet’s words might make it clear.
I’d driven to the meeting with the rabbis as raw and as brittle as I’d ever been. “Bring a friend,” the rabbi of my synagogue advised me when he called to ascertain my identity. “You should have someone with you for moral support,” said an acquaintance who’d received a get the prior year and had found the ceremony to be impersonal and demeaning. I thought about asking Ariel to come with me or about having my mother fly up to Boston to stand with me. She and my father had walked me down the white-sheathed aisle at my wedding. Then, I had been accompanied by every approving message that this was what I was supposed to do. But I didn’t want to rely on anyone else for my strength. The divorce was a decision I had arrived at on my own. This aisle, I needed to walk alone.
I stood in front of the rabbis, awaiting the piece of paper. The colloquial word for it was a get, but the biblical term for this document was sefer kritut—a book of termination, a book of rending, a book of separation. Here, on the piece of parchment before me, the words were meticulously parsed, legislated, and scripted, but despite any protestation to the contrary, there was always another story, a longer and more complicated version waiting to be written.
With a sharp, deliberate movement, the rabbi dropped the folded paper into my hands. I played the role as I’d been directed. I clasped the document tightly between my hands and brought it to my chest, demonstrating that I was taking full possession. With the rabbis watching, I ceremoniously turned and walked from the room. As the door closed behind me, the divorce took effect.
On the other side of the door, alone, I took a deep breath. I was free now to craft another story for myself, one that I could eventually take hold of in my cupped and waiting hands.
I was summoned back inside. One of the rabbis took the piece of parchment from me and drew an X over it and tore it up—another legalistic move so that no one could ever examine the document and find an error, which could be used to declare that we were in fact still married. Then I was apprised of my new status in Jewish law as a divorcée and informed of all the new laws that went along with this—as far as the rabbis knew, I would remain Orthodox. I was told that I couldn’t be alone in a room with my former husband. I wasn’t allowed to drive alone in a car with him between cities or live in the same apartment building. I wasn’t allowed to remarry for ninety days. When I was allowed to remarry, I was not permitted to marry a man of the ancient priestly caste.
I listened politely but looked at the rabbis differently now, not as men who stood in authority over me, but as people I once knew. Now on the other side of it, I regarded this room of rabbis with something like nostalgia, something like the feeling that comes from looking back at a receding shoreline once you’ve finally set sail.
I was about to leave when the head of the rabbinical court looked me in the eye. I steeled myself for judgment and rebuke. Instead, he told me a story.
The Temple altar, the Talmud says, weeps when a man divorces his wife. When a revered rabbi got divorced, his students came to him and asked: “How can this be? Does our tradition not teach that the altar weeps over a divorce?”
The rabbi looked at his students. “Better the altar should weep than should I.”
Now the head of the court told me, kindly, “It’s a new beginning. Don’t loo
k back. Go forth, become the person you need to be.”
I was surprised and moved by the sympathy in his voice. All these rigid rules, all these minute and unyielding laws. Yet here too was the recognition of human pain; here too was an acceptance of human experience. It was this wisdom from my tradition that I wanted to hold on to, even as I was leaving so much behind.
Before I left, as they did at the end of my wedding, as they did at the conclusion of divorce ceremonies hundreds of years ago, the rabbis wished me a mazel tov.
Shelter in Place
We are safe at home when we hear the news. Noam finds out first, from a text message from a friend, and he comes into the living room to tell us that the Boston Marathon has been bombed.
Every year, on Patriots’ Day—the third Monday in April—the marathon passes a mile from our house, and every year we stand along the sidewalks, marveling at the scores of runners, the ones who seem to glide effortlessly, the ones who by this point along Heartbreak Hill look beaten and worn. Now, horrified, we are glued to the TV.
“There was an explosion at the finish line,” I explain to Josh and Layla, feeling the protective urge to make it sound as innocuous as possible, yet I watch their faces cloud as they come to recognize the magnitude of what has happened.
For the past few weeks leading up to the marathon, the carriage road along Commonwealth Avenue and the path beside the Charles River have been crowded with runners. As spring makes its cautious approach, I have tried to be outside whenever possible—walking downtown near Trinity Church, a famous landmark whose arches and towers seem to belong more in a fairy tale of castles and witch houses than in the middle of a modern busy city; along the Esplanade, where, in the summertime, kayaks and sailboats will pass by; or closer to home, sitting by Crystal Lake and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, where runners make their laps. Somehow, somewhere, in the past few months, Boston has become the place where I feel most at home—not the rooted feeling that my grandmother expressed, that where you live is where you must live, but the happenstance feeling of a transplant who knows that things change, that people move on and away. It is a city that reminds me we don’t always arrive where we once intended to go.