by Leah Lax
My mother’s mouth fell open, her face red. She looked as if she’d been slapped. Debbie was gone, Amy and I both in revolt, both poised to escape.
I wished I had never told her about the Sabbath Experience or about Seema. I was helpless that way, always spilling everything, hoping this time she’d treasure what I shared. “Orthodoxy is mind control,” she had retorted. “Orthodoxy,” I had shot back, “means mothers who are mothers and fathers who are fathers.” She had looked so stricken then that I wanted to fall at her feet. “Oh,” I added instead, “it also means clean houses.”
Mom swiveled to Amy and then me, then Amy, each turn more frantic. Amy was clutching her purse. Eyes glistening, Mom raised her arms as if fending something off and gave a cry, then sank to the floor, where she folded herself up and crouched on her haunches. She began to howl. The sound was piercing. Primal.
Amy dropped her purse. Dropped her jaw. She looked to me, baby fear in her eyes, but I couldn’t give her direction; I couldn’t give her anything. “Help. Her,” my father said, but he meant my mother. There was a trickle of spit on his chin.
I crouched next to Mom, her folded body, her messy sobs. I wanted to say, Okay. You win. You’ve trumped us with your drama, but I couldn’t. You are leaving, her body said. She rocked and cried. I have failed. You have failed me.
“Mama?” Amy said, tiny and unbelieving.
Then I caught my mother’s sly sideways glance. Or did I? Those cries. Around a swirl of need and suspicion and fear I said, “Mom—try to calm down.” I wanted to gather her in my arms. I wanted to shove her and run. She rocked and moaned like a wounded animal. “Daddy,” I said. “Get Dr. Black’s number.”
My father returned like an obedient child with the telephone directory. I got the night operator for my mother’s psychiatrist against the backdrop of her sobbing and howls. But the operator said, “What should I say is the problem?”
Before me were Daddy, his jaw slack; Amy, clutching the purse and looking to the door; Mom sobbing on the floor. And there was the girl holding the phone, me, her unformed self, her inarticulate longings. Guilt was an iron web connecting us all. “Just … have him call,” I said.
When Dr. Black did call, my mother opened her palm for a second and I slipped the receiver in so she could clutch it white-knuckled as she crouched and rocked and sobbed.
If leaving her meant failing her, I would fail her. In the kitchen, I stole the keys from her purse and slipped out of the house.
“OHMYGOD. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” That was me. I came back that same night. It wasn’t the first time I’d walked out the door only to sneak back in later. I kept trying to leave and kept coming back—the relentless pull of home I didn’t understand. This time I returned to find Amy in her room, holding a razor blade over her upturned wrist. There was the glint of the blade in the darkened room, her face and form in dull greens and grays. “What do you want,” she said, flat, without looking up.
I took a careful step in, and another, afraid of saying one wrong word. “Don’t do it,” I said. Then, a gray wash of guilt. I couldn’t manage to say, “Sister, I get it.” We’re in this together. I couldn’t say “we.” It was as if I needed to keep myself in a different category, not a we but apart from her, in order to keep her despair from seeping into me, as if I needed to save strength for some menace that was coming. Her hair hung over her face like a closed curtain.
Helpless quiet. I had to do something. “I’ll … be right back,” I said. There was only one place to go. I ran to Mom. She lay in bed, an empty pill bottle on its side on the bedside table. It was as if she was buried under a mountain of shifting sand that I would need to scoop away with my hands, but surely the sand would fall back into every dent I made. I shook the bed, pulled at her arm.
She was in there somewhere. She had to be. “Get up!” I said. “Amy wants to cut her wrist!”
She groaned, waved a weak hand that flopped back down.
“Mom. Please!”
“Uh huh,” she mumbled.
Around us, the room, the house, silent. Her hair was flat in back, black and white curls at odd angles, her blanket wafting a warm smell, soft and stale. “Mom,” I said. “Mom.” Across the room, her dresser was piled a foot high and more with purses, scarves, and layers of blouses and dresses and skirts that I couldn’t remember her ever having worn. There was a line of makeup bottles and tubes snaking across the front, standing at attention, with a dulled, dusty glow. Her keys were where she had dropped them like an invitation. But I couldn’t imagine where else to go to get help. Our mother was the world.
The next morning, I woke to responsibility for Amy like a brick in my throat. I found her in the bathroom, getting ready for school, in a short skirt and chunky-heeled shoes, leaning in close to the mirror over the counter and putting on eyeliner. “Hey,” she said in a brisk tone, a quick glance to my face above hers in the mirror.
“Late?” I said.
“Almost,” she said. Her wrists were smooth and clean. No blood.
AT THE LATE, heavy Sabbath meal with Ana at Seema’s home later that week, the room barely contained the enormous dining table. We were packed around it, Ana and I and the Rakovsky family—Seema, the rabbi, and their four children in their Sabbath finery. We had arrived to pre-Sabbath bustle, daughter Rina putting candles into the intricate candelabra now before us, Seema pulling pans of kugels out of the oven, Luba tying Shimmy’s shoes, Rabbi Rakovsky racing down the stairs, still tying his tie. Now the candles were burning down, their slow flicker making dancing shadows, the air still and warm. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, holy leader of their movement, seemed to be casting his benevolent gaze upon us from an oversized photograph. There was the late hour, the endless food. My eyes were heavy. Among the wavering forms were the tired children: Rina; Luba; Nachum, with his pinched face, glasses sliding down his nose; and sleepy, three-year-old Shimmy in his pajamas. Rabbi Rakovsky sat at the head of the table in his black coat, Seema beside me in an elegant dress, wig, and heels. She had taken off the apron.
Ana took a deep breath. “You know,” she said, an edge in her voice, “my boyfriend Richard converted at Temple EmanuEl. He is a Jew now.”
“Temple EmanuEl?” the rabbi said. “That’s a Reform place. They don’t follow the Law. His conversion is worthless.”
In that moment the world divided into Us and Them. Ana and I had only happened to land on the right side of the line by accident of birth. Ana looked down. Shook her head.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I woke to Shimmy whimpering in the hallway. I got up. “Shhh,” I whispered to him. “Your mommy and daddy are sleeping. Tell me what you need.”
He padded to the bathroom. After he peed, I followed his lisping directions to pour water from a two-handled cup over first his right hand, then his left, and listened to his morning modeh ani. In his bedroom, I helped him put on a cotton square with a hole in it, tassels of long white strings at each corner. I thought, It’s like a little prayer shawl he always wears; then I buttoned his dress shirt over it. Shimmy took one of the tassels and wrapped it around his index finger. He recited a Hebrew blessing and kissed the strings.
We ate cereal and milk together, then took a morning walk past manicured lawns, blooming dogwood, and new pansies ringing young trees. Shimmy’s protected innocence, and the feel of his little hand in mine, begged gentle handling. I thought him a precious example of Hasidic life. Purity personified.
Later, Ana and I went with the family to the synagogue. It felt strange to wear my best clothes unwashed, but there was beginning to be more to this—a family held together by the Law’s steady structure and authority, the settling rhythm in their scripted days stamped with God’s approval. Ana hated not washing up, but I had begun to understand how our objections and our comfort are small and irrelevant before the vast, ancient Law.
There were no sidewalks, so we walked on the street. “Nice morning,” I said to Seema.
“Baruch hashem,” she said. “Thank God.”
“Baruch hashem,” I repeated. “So … God gets the credit?”
“Exactly,” she said.
Nachum saluted and marched, pretending to be a soldier. Shimmy tripped along, trying to copy him. “Watch him,” Seema warned Nachum, nodding at passing cars.
“You’re a soldier for God,” I said to Nachum. That made him grin.
That afternoon, Ana pulled me aside. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “What is it with these people about not brushing your teeth?” She ran her tongue over her front teeth and made a face. “I need a shower.” She threw her things into her overnight bag, hoisted it onto her shoulder.
I followed her down the carpeted stairs. “But, Ana,” I said.
“No way,” she said. “I’m outta here.” Then she paused. There was a small smile. “Call me later,” she said.
I stood a long minute with my hand on the knob in the thick Sabbath quiet.
I found the Rakovsky children lying around in the den, Shimmy on his stomach on the carpet, chin on palms, watching a card game between Nachum and Luba. Rina was on the sofa, reading a book about Orthodox Jewish girls. There was something a little too good, too old, too still, about these children. Besides no television, there were no newspapers or secular books in sight. “It’s Saturday afternoon,” I said. “Any friends coming over? Can you go out?”
They eyed one another. Shook their heads.
“Ohhh,” I said. Then, to Rina: “Aren’t there other Orthodox kids in the Jewish school?”
“Sort of,” she said. “We have a few friends at school, but …”
“Can you eat in their homes?”
“No.”
“Not kosher enough, huh?”
They nodded.
“And they watch television and maybe even listen to rock music, right?”
“Yeah.” She and her sister looked at each other and shifted on the carpet.
More kosher, less kosher. I was learning there were degrees of holiness, that holiness could be weighed and measured. I figured somewhere, probably Brooklyn, there must be schools filled with Hasidic kids whose families were holy enough, where everyone was the same, as they had to be for these children to have playmates who wouldn’t veer them off their path and worry their parents—girls’ schools filled with long-skirted girls jumping rope, boys’ schools with boys in yarmulkas and sidelocks climbing jungle gyms at recess. But not here in Dallas.
In my high school, Dallas had just ended racial segregation. We were newly thrust together with our differences and no guidance, trying to learn how to get along. Through my high school years there had been school riots, days when policemen lined the halls. But to my family, integration meant opportunity. Everyone should be able to move into the world and adapt, work and be rewarded, and be grateful for that. If others were restricted, we could be next. But here were the Rakovskys, choosing segregation and doing it to themselves, separating themselves even from their own community. Their kids were so segregated, they had only siblings as peers.
But it was peaceful in that house. My mother’s television was on through every evening; out there, everyone was fighting or threatening to fight about their differences: my family, blacks and whites at school and in the news, students and police on college campuses, British and Irish, Catholics and Protestants, Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Israelis. The North Vietnamese had just crossed the DMZ. In that Sabbath bubble without television, the world was held at bay.
“Who are your real friends?” I asked the Rakovsky children. They laughed and pointed at one another. To them, out there was a large, non-Jewish place that was impure and suspect. But we were safe, here on our tiny Sabbath island.
NOT LONG AFTER, I found Rabbi Rakovsky reading in Hebrew at the dining table. “Where’s Ana?” he said.
“She had to leave,” I said. “Would you read that to me?”
“It’s not proper for me to study with a woman,” he said.
“I’m sixteen,” I said. “Couldn’t you think of me as one of your children?”
He considered that, a long gaze, pursed lips. “Maybe,” he said. He turned a few pages, took a drink, sighed, and began. “Basi l’gani. I have come into my garden,” he read. He read another line, then translated and continued in the same manner, back and forth between languages in his lisping singsong and Yiddish accent. I didn’t understand much. There were quotes in Hebrew and Aramaic dropped into the Yiddish lines. But the fact that those languages were so old made me think they must carry something of an Original Truth, going back to the beginning of our people. We flow from the Source. He used words like “emanation,” “kingdom,” and “crown” to label qualities of God I didn’t understand, and it all sounded as if he were drawing a puzzle without offering the key. There were worlds of imminent being called Creation, Formation, Action. There was sovev, God Who Surrounds All the Worlds; memaleh, God Who Infuses the Worlds; shechina, hovering motherly presence. Four worlds? Three Gods? “What is this?” I said.
“I’ll start again,” he said. This time, he summarized and slowly explained terms. He listened to my questions, responding by laying out strange and challenging abstractions and then sweeping each idea into its own vivid image: the garden of intimacy with God, light of Emanation at His right, darkness at His left, yearning nearness of God retreating in successive stages in the face of sin. Above it all was the Crown—pure, blinding, obliterating, Godly light that we cannot help but crave, a level impossible to attain and still live. Slowly an airborne structure of spirit worlds began to hover, one Rabbi Rakovsky insisted had always been there.
He strayed from the text then and began to pull together biblical images, God forming man from mud, Aaron’s walking staff bursting with almond blossoms and ripened fruit, the ass that spoke, chastising Balaam. He said that while all of these really happened, each also contained points about the esoteric and taught us how to reveal mystical light in the world.
I pulled up for air then. Really happened? Did I have to accept Bible stories? He wouldn’t lie, I thought. But here was a paradox: naiveté at the root of deeply intellectual assertions about the sublime. To me, biblical stories were children’s line drawings—of lions and lambs, elephants and giraffes waiting to enter the ark with robed Noah and his smiling family, Moses holding his staff above his head as the Red Sea swirled before him—drawings I once colored with broken crayons at Sunday school. They were magic stories, a child’s stories. But here was wise Rabbi Rakovsky, master of ancient languages, man of books, deftly teasing meaning from a web of deep abstractions and cryptic phrases, saying, These stories really happened. And he was a kind father—I had seen how he took Yossi’s hand when they left for synagogue. I should trust him, believe him. But … “How can you believe those things?” I said, even with my face still glowing from the light of his spirit worlds.
“Simple. If God is omnipotent, He can make a flood or split a sea,” he said.
I wrinkled my brow, struggling between faith and logic. “Let’s … try again,” I said, like someone embarrassed yet in love.
I don’t know when it was that I came to the moment of arrival. Perhaps it was when he talked about Adam, who heard the nearness of God retreating in the garden, God wisping away into a distant concept with Adam left yearning for Him. “If we can transform our physical selves, darkness will be turned into light,” Rabbi Rakovsky said, and then the garden of our most intimate selves will be filled with Godliness.
I wanted to believe I could transform my body and its odd desires. Besides, by then I had stretched so to grasp his metaphors and images that now I wanted to assert in my heart all I’d finally managed to grasp in my mind—a different kind of leap past my awkward self.
As the afternoon passed, miracle stories and naive assertions became just ways to explain God’s desire to find place for His infinity in a finite world. Gradually, it happened: enthralling spirit worlds emanated from the book, spreading out before us over the crumbs on the dining table. Here I found David’s harp
with a scale of eight, instead of seven, and the God-soaked Hebrew letters and their origin in mystical fire, with power to create the world. There were angels, and glowing vessels of supernal light, sparks of God in exile waiting for me to redeem them. There were the things God created at First Twilight: Noah’s rainbow, Moses’s magic staff, the dark mouth of the earth that swallows rebels.
By insisting on what can’t be proven, the Rabbi had made proof irrelevant.
Rabbi Rakovsky said earthly life was just a false screen that hides the real, spiritual world. My mother on the bed by her empty pill bottles, my father shuffling, Amy with her razor blade—they were that false screen. The spiritual behind all of that is what is real, created for my sake. I felt Rabbi Rakovsky was a conduit for Godly wisdom that stemmed back to the beginning of time. He was so certain, so fluent, his hoarse voice leading me to a place where my every action redeemed the dirty world. I wasn’t helpless—my every Godly act moved mountains. I could make my mark in the highest realm.
If a equals b and b equals c: “God and His will are One,” he said, “and the Law is His will. Therefore, God and the Law are one. The Law becomes God. Give yourself to the Law, and the soul merges with God.”
When I left the Rakovsky home that evening after the braided havdalah candle was extinguished in a saucer of red wine, I went back to my plans and friends. I went back to my home and my father, who was an empty, retching shell, but I carried with me the image of Rabbi Rakovsky, teacher-father, wise and kind. I thought of their home as an inviolable, found safe place. I knew I’d be back.
That evening, in my cave of a bedroom, door locked to keep out the ghost of my father, I unzipped my cello, pulled out the endpin, rosined the bow. Unsung tunes were bursting in me, in minor keys and hollow harmonies. Rabbi Rakovsky said that one of the songs he sang at the Sabbath table was about the journey of a soul into the world. He said the soul is forced away from the bliss of being with God to be birthed into this coarse world of hidden Godliness and left with clueless parents. He said the soul longs to escape. To return to God. But if this world was a veil and the commandments the only reality, what was left to discover? I picked out the mournful tune until I felt certain of it, then applied the bow with full draw.
