by Tova Mirvis
The days after the bombing pass in a state of anxiety and sadness. At the end of the week, early in the morning, my phone buzzes with news that school is canceled—that all of Boston is canceled. Shelter in place, we are told, as though this is just an odd sort of snow day. But nothing feels remotely normal. There has been a shooting and a carjacking and a gunfight with the police, and one of the suspected bombers has been killed and one is still on the loose in the town where Noam and Josh go to school.
I’m at William’s, the kids are with Aaron, and all I want to do is go scoop the kids up, bring them home, and cook for them and feed them and hold them. Instead, Noam and I text back and forth, trading tidbits of information. At Aaron’s house, they are doing the same thing that William and I are doing, that everyone I know is doing: watching the news.
It’s Friday, and so just before sundown, when we have waited all day with a sense of imminent expectation, I leave William’s apartment and drive home. The streets are empty of cars, as though the Shabbat prohibitions soon to descend apply temporarily to everyone. Because it’s my weekend with the kids, Aaron and I agree that he will bring the kids to me before sundown or it will be too late for him to drive.
When the kids come home, I hug them tightly. I want to huddle with the three of them inside this house that, after nearly a year, is now cluttered with books and toys and pictures of the kids that make it feel like home.
I start the Shabbat preparations, assembling a meal of pasta and vegetables from what we have. As pots boil on the stove, as dishes are cooking in the oven, I remember something else I need to do.
“The light in the refrigerator,” Noam had said to me two weeks before, at the end of the last Shabbat we were all here. “Do you think you can unscrew it for next Shabbat?”
By opening the door to the fridge, he was causing the light to go on. It was a prohibition that I’d become haphazard about—one of the many small acts of observance that once were givens and now need to be purposefully recalled.
“I’m glad you told me,” I said.
“Do you mind doing it?” he asked.
“Of course not. You can always tell me. You know that, right?” I say.
I reach my hand to the back of the fridge and feel around for the bulb. It’s hard to get hold of and too hot to touch, but I’m determined to unscrew it. I’m doing this, and other actions like it, to help Noam be part of this world that he is choosing. And doing so comes not only in the broad strokes and large proclamations about love and respect but in each of the minute actions—not just God, not just sin, lay in the details, but love lived there too. This is one of the lessons of my former world, one I want to hold on to as well.
The bulb remains stuck, and finally, in fear of burning my fingers, I grab a dishtowel and cover my hand with it as I pull—too hard, though, breaking the bulb in the process. The base of the lightbulb remains inside but the glass cracks and breaks.
“Good news and bad news,” I tell Noam as I’m cleaning up the slivers of glass and he is passing through the kitchen on the way to his room, preparing to turn off his devices and enter into his stricter version of Shabbat. “The bulb is out, except I shattered it trying to do it.”
“That’s one way to handle it,” he says.
He’s laughing but his gratitude is written on his face. I’ve never admired my son more than I do right now as I watch him navigate the contradictory, compromise-filled landscape that’s hard for many people much older than him.
It’s the kind of moment that will recur in many guises in our family. Even when we’re tired of it, we will revisit the conversation about how best to live with different beliefs and practices, all in the same house, as part of the same family. For me, moments like this are a reminder that when I feel that rise of difference—with children, with family, with all those whom I love—the best answer is to look at the person on the other side more fully, listen more openly. Rather than placing a wedge, these conversations can pull you closer—they let you see, really see, who someone else is.
There are still a few minutes to go before candle lighting, and we are gathered around the TV. Finally, there is news. Just as it’s time to light candles, we hear of the arrest and the fact that it’s over.
William arrives and watches as I gather the kids and light the Shabbat candles, waving the light toward me, covering my eyes, silently reciting my own words of gratitude for my children and their safety. I don’t know if I can still think of this as a prayer, but I close my eyes, and this wish, this hope, whatever it is, overflows from me. That line of connection, with my mother and grandmothers, and the women before them too, can still be mine to claim if I want it. It wasn’t monolithic to begin with, never a line of sameness as far as the eye could see. Both my grandmothers had changed course from what had come before, had set out in search of something else. Each of us was always a new and diverging link.
At the table, I sing “Shalom Aleichem,” welcoming the proverbial Shabbat angels into our house. One at a time, from oldest to youngest, I place my hands lightly on each kid’s head and bless them as I was blessed each week. I fill a cup with grape juice and recite the blessings. Without the sense of obligation and restriction, there is room for me to consider what I want these blessings to mean. Still in the state of no-longer-being, I’m not yet sure. This is something I will begin to build anew, but for now, these acts form a connection between then and now. William sits quietly as I make the prayers, as I pass around the grape juice and slices of challah. I know the words are foreign to him and will remain so, but he sits beside me as I hold on to rituals and reminders that will remain mine.
It’s not a Shabbat like the one in which I was raised, not a Shabbat that is without its painful complications, but we’ve become more accustomed to the uncertainty that remains when you cease to follow a rule book; no one way but lots of ways, each with its benefits and losses. I still miss being part of a community—the one to which I no longer belong is a place inside me that I sometimes peer in at, all the houses lined up in rows, candles lit in the windows. Inside this freedom, there is still a loneliness. There are other kinds of communities, I know, that I can eventually build for myself—smaller maybe, less all-encompassing, ones in which I won’t have to cede my independence in order to belong.
But now, I have this day with the people I love. As I look at the Shabbat candles, I think, as I still do sometimes, of the angels who are supposedly peering in my window. I can’t erase them entirely, but I can exchange them for another pair who come not as inspectors or outside arbiters of whether our night is good or bad. These angels are gentle and forgiving and care only that this is a house of love.
After dinner, William goes home and Noam goes to sleep—newly arriving at the age when going to bed early has become a treat. I kiss him good night, and Josh gets into my bed, along with Layla, who is still there every night. I know that by now I should be making an attempt to move her back into her own bed, but she sees through my halfhearted efforts, able to sense that I’m as unready as she is.
“What if we were near the finish line?” Josh asks as we all huddle together.
“I would have grabbed you and run,” I say, imagining myself a maternal version of Wonder Woman who is fast and strong enough to carry them in her arms for miles—forever, if need be.
To this, I wish I could add that they will always be among the ones who are spared and saved. But there is no longer trading any kind of observance for the promise of safety, no illusion that goodness can grant protection, no assurance that everything happens for a reason. This too is one of the losses of this past year, yet there is another kind of comfort to be had from saying things that I actually believe. I have no clear-cut answers to hand them, no theological treatises to offer, but I also don’t have to frantically stitch together an unraveling explanation in my hands—faster, faster, in order to keep the threads from coming apart.
“Why did a little boy die?” Josh asks.
“Why?” Lay
la joins in, and they are looking at me, both of them awaiting an answer. When they were younger, what they needed most was for me to feed them, bathe them, carry them, dress them. Then, what I’d wanted most was a second set of hands. Now what they increasingly need from me is this kind of conversation.
“We don’t know, we can’t understand it,” I begin and continue the best I can. How to be helpers. How to live purposefully. How to be compassionate. These questions belonged to us all. The answers weren’t the sole possession of any one religion.
As they both drift off to sleep, I hold them close—these children whom I know so well yet am constantly discovering anew.
“I love you,” I say, one of the few sentences I know to be certain and true.
The acts of putting a child to bed—smoothing her hair, caressing his cheek, pulling up the blankets, tucking them in—are small rituals, tiny acts of devotion. Holding them on this night comes closest to locating some part of the goodness I want. After the divorce, I’d let myself believe that there was only one kind of home and that ours was irreparably broken. But on this night, in this quiet house, home doesn’t need those solid unbreachable walls. It feels more like a small nest you could build for yourself and for those whom you love.
Weddings
My sister’s wedding is in May, in Israel, and I’m taking the kids out of school for a week to travel there. William is meeting us in Israel two days before the wedding. It’s the first time he will be in Israel and the first time he will meet much of my family—the separate parts of my life continuing to merge.
“Are you ready for this?” I ask William.
“Bring it on,” he says.
In Israel, a few hours before Shabbat begins, William emerges from a cab in front of the hotel where we are all staying for a weekend of pre-wedding celebration. I rush outside to hug him and give him a kiss under the displeased eyes of a relative, who looks shocked to see me greet a man in this way.
“And who is this?” she asks when we come into the lobby, and on her face I see the suspicious, surveying look I’d once known all too well. Momentarily, I see him through her eyes. He isn’t wearing a yarmulke—he’s clearly not Orthodox, and unrepentantly so.
At her question, which hangs in the air, I stumble for the right words, all of which feel wrong, here more than anywhere.
“This is William,” I say. There is no better answer I could have given, no truer statement of fact.
William wears a yarmulke on Friday night for services. I watch him sitting in the men’s section with my boys. He is wearing a yarmulke as a sign of respect, but there is no pretense that it stands for something he believes in. He holds his head stiffly, aware of its foreign presence, as though a bird has landed on his head and he is afraid of disturbing its perch. He stands when the other men do, but at the end of Lecha Dodi, the prayer welcoming the Sabbath, he is caught off guard when all the people turn, as required, to the back of the room, bow, then turn back to the front—a dancer unaware of the next move in his chorus line.
“I’m glad it’s all in Hebrew. That way I don’t understand anything they’re saying,” he whispers to me at the end of services.
We gather for dinner and the Kiddush is recited. After we do the ceremonial hand-washing and are prohibited from speaking until the blessing over the challah is made, I whisper to him, “Are you okay?”
William looks at me in surprise. “I’m fine,” he says, and he is fine here, I realize.
For the rest of the night, every time I look up, he is deep in conversation with either my siblings or my parents or one of my other relatives. William is irrepressibly friendly, someone to whom people tell things. A family member I haven’t seen in many years asks him about his kids, and he tells them about his two daughters and about his son, who after his long struggle with anxiety has vastly improved. After spending three months in the Utah wilderness, backpacking and living outside in harsh conditions, he is thriving—independent and calm. More than anything, he has learned that he can rely on his own strength.
Even so, the pain is still present in William’s voice; as a parent, there is no easy return to an unworried state. He has become someone that other parents call and ask for advice when faced with a similar situation. He doesn’t hide how hard it has been. Here, too, to my surprise, this relative whom I’d always thought of as reticent shares a painful situation with her daughter. One person’s honesty paves the way for another’s. William isn’t wondering what others want him to be, isn’t trying to match so as not to offend. He’s at ease with who he is. I knew this about him before, but here, I’m seeing anew the part of him that I love most.
On Shabbat afternoon, there is a game of ultimate Frisbee on the grass behind the hotel. Everyone plays: My children and William, my brother’s children, my sister’s soon-to-be-husband, and his nephews and nieces. The kids and adults are running back and forth, calling out in a mixture of English and Hebrew. The kids have been shy with one another—gaps of language and a world—but now the reserve loosens.
By this point in the afternoon, William’s yarmulke has disappeared. I’m glad he’s taken it off, that he’s not paying homage to something he doesn’t believe. White-fringed tzitzit fly behind my brother’s kids as they run. William calls out directions in English, even though the kids understand little. Trying to prevent mass confusion, Noam translates, using the Hebrew he has learned in school. Noam is wearing his yarmulke; Josh is not. Layla is running and weaving through the players, half in the game, half in a game of her own. The nephews wear the knit yarmulkes of the Modern Orthodox and are dressed in shorts and T-shirts. My brother is in his long black coat and dress clothes, standing on the sidelines watching with me. My parents are sitting in chairs looking out at this view of our family. Raised with one vision, we have all nonetheless forged our own paths. If someone were to take a group picture now and hang it next to all the others in my parents’ house, there would be no simple game of matching up how we all fit together. Yet, despite this, here we are. Not a family whose members are all the same, but a family in which the love for one another matters more.
The game is ending, and all of the players are red-faced and sweaty and thirsty, and it’s impossible to tell which team has won. Or maybe they have forgotten to keep score, because they all seem equally happy as they laugh and trade high-fives.
The wedding is the next day, in a garden overlooking the rocky Judean hills. The air smells like lemon and mint. Flowers bloom from trellises. My sister’s white lace dress is decorated with a sea-green ribbon that ties around her waist and cascades down her back.
The wedding is being live-streamed by the videographer so that my grandparents, too frail to make the trip, can watch it from their house in Memphis. My grandmother, who has long awaited this day, bought a dress years before in the hope of Dahlia getting married, and when I imagine her in front of the computer, I hope she’s wearing the dress, though only my grandfather will see her in it.
Akiva, his wife, and their kids go down the aisle first. Behind them, I walk with my three kids, who are in Israeli wedding–casual, the boys in navy pants and white button-down shirts, Layla in a pale green dress and hot-pink light-up sneakers.
Dahlia walks down the aisle on the arms of my parents, toward her fiancé. He is wearing the groom’s traditional white robe, standing under the white chuppah, waiting for her. The two of them gaze at each other and smile as the wedding benedictions are sung, as she circles him seven times, symbolically building the walls of their home. My brother is the rabbi who marries them, and he stands before them, dressed in his dark suit and hat. The sun is setting behind them, the brown and green landscape now streaked with rays of pink. Still jet-lagged, Layla falls asleep on me as the blessings are recited. Dahlia’s veil is lifted, the wine is sipped, and the happiness on her face is evident.
The ketubah is read aloud and I’m shaken from my peaceful reverie. To me, it’s no longer a mostly incomprehensible document in ancient Aramaic. Even if p
eople pay little attention to the meaning of the words, here it is, in the middle of a wedding ceremony. Amid all the flowers and the bridal tulle, the details of what a groom pays his wife in the event of a divorce. It’s a stark reminder that there are so many ways these stories can turn out. It’s hard for me to see a wedding in the same way, hard not to think of all the ways hopes can go unfulfilled, innocence can go awry. Even as I’m filled with happiness for my sister, my own wedding comes back to me with unexpected force. On this day, it’s hard not to once again be the bride, walking down that aisle.
Even after all these years, I still wish I could go back in time and call to my younger self before her betrothal documents were signed, or catch her eye as she was being reminded about how the bride has a direct line to God; before she sets off down the aisle, a white flower wreath in her hair, her face covered with a pearl-studded veil that makes everything appear blurred and soft. I want to whisper warnings to her—to be the evil fairy who comes uninvited to the festivities, bringing not happy blessings but ugly truths from the future. I want to open her eyes and ask her if she is sure, really sure. Gently remind her that life doesn’t always turn out the way it’s supposed to, tell her she can wait longer, until she is more sure of who she is. Awaken her curiosity about the other choices that will await her if only she could live with the unknown.
And if she won’t listen to these gentle warnings—because of course she won’t—then I will hold back nothing. Be relentless and brutal. Show her the artifacts from the future, her red-rimmed eyes and her arms that she squeezes tightly in order to keep herself intact, and the stunned look on her children’s faces when she pulls aside the covering on their lives. I will tell her she will have to bear the pain on three young faces that she will love more than anything she could yet imagine.