by Leah Lax
Now I’m wrapped in a towel by the pool, Mira behind me. The mikvah is filled with sauna-hot water and lined with blue tiles. The pump that filters and chlorinates the water during the day is off for mikvah time, but the air is scented with chlorine—a modern American mikvah. Everything echoes in here: dripping water, the drag of Mira’s shoe on the marble floor, our low voices, the fervor from all the women, past, present, and future, who have brought or will bring their hopes here. I turn and let the towel drop down in back to my waist so Mira can inspect my back and shoulders for stray hairs. The water must be able to kiss every inch of skin. “Stand still,” she says, and brushes my shoulders with her warm palm. There’s still my sense of exposure at the mikvah, the involuntary flinch from her soft touch. I will never inure myself to this. Keeping my back to her, I descend the first step and hand the towel and my glasses over my shoulder to Mira. Let her think my modesty is before God.
Mira disappears above and behind.
Warm water to my chest, I close my eyes. I am stripped of everything here, everyone, distant Levi, intense little Leibl, shy Libby, active Mendel, sweet baby Avrami. I am also stripped of pretense, here and only here exposed to the truth of myself. I open my eyes and step down to the lower level, where I have to bounce on tiptoes to keep my chin above the surface. Ripples of water flow away from me in undulating gray lines. Mikvah has changed for me. It’s not about Levi anymore, or about the sex that will come. No matter what we’re taught, I’m no longer purifying myself for him here, like an offering. This naked immersion in warm water has become my most personal prayer. A body prayer. Just me and God.
Hands out in front. Don’t rush. Not like so many quick, obligatory immersions before this, which were weighted with exhaustion and shortsightedness. I lift my feet and slip my head beneath the water. Under the surface, I stretch out and reach for something I can’t identify. Submerged, nude, weightless, I am held. At last. The water is a mute caress. But then I lower a foot to the ocean floor and raise my head to find a surface world still waiting for me. I emerge then like a birth, still standing in the water. Mira’s whispered “kosher” floats down from the railing through the damp air. But what is it, who is it, that is kosher? Am I kosher, after all? And my children? I recite the blessing in a voice strained with hope. Most of that is hope to better their precious lives. Behind me, Mira confirms with an “amen.” I slip my head under again, again raise my feet to sink beneath the surface. I die here. I become a single drop in the greater pool of women, of history, of God. Under the water, I am surrounded by floating female figures from my people’s past, praying, drifting, hoping. I am at the vortex of a vast funnel; I see I’m not alone. I do this five more times, seven in all, die and again die, until the airless, timeless moments all swirl together. Standing now, sleek wet hair molded to my head, I face the tiled wall in an intimate contract with God, handing Him my secret self. Here, I whisper. Take this.
Thirteen
January 28, 1986. I walk into Levi’s hospital room pushing our fifth baby in her stroller, one-month-old Sarah, with seven-year-old Leibl helping me push. After years of holding himself upright in the Law, Levi has just had back surgery. We come to a stop with the stroller just inside the room. The image is a strange one: Levi is watching television. The Rebbe forbids television, and we don’t have one. Although I let Leibl watch on occasion in neighbors’ homes, he has rarely if ever seen his father do so. Levi doesn’t turn or greet us with his wan smile. He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. The volume is turned up. The announcer speaks in intimate tones as if he were a neighbor or a friend.
We’ve seen recent news in Levi’s Houston Chronicle, and Leibl’s first-grade English teacher has been talking to the children about Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher who is going up on a NASA spaceship carrying letters from schoolchildren. McAuliffe has been planning to broadcast lessons from space, calling it “the ultimate field trip.” NASA is right here in Houston, and the children have been excited. There are seven others on the mission, including Judith Resnik, a Jewish woman who’s been in space before, but it’s McAuliffe, the first nonastronaut to go up, who seems to have caught the national imagination. Yesterday, there was a NASA color portrait of the crew of eight in full gear on the front page.
For weeks, Leibl’s play has been full of rockets and space travel.
Levi doesn’t look at us. On the television, there is an eerie puff, a dense, contained cloud of smoke high in a blue sky. “What is that?” I say.
“It’s the Challenger,” Levi says.
I put a quick hand on Leibl’s shoulder. The announcer’s voice has an ominous, sad calm, as if he were an elder gently leading a single, vulnerable person through his tragedy. Under that patronal voice, I’m suddenly aware that the whole country stopped to watch the Challenger take off, businesses on hold, schoolchildren gathered in front of screens. The strange image replays, that puff in the sky, the silent watching crowd that just moments ago was whooping and cheering at the launch. The wind whipping a flag. We see it from the beginning this time, thrilling takeoff into some infinite possibility, seventy-three seconds of grinning schoolchildren and cheering crowds, then silence. That puff in the sky. Solemn faces. Placards and waving hands frozen, fallen, mouths hang open, eyes trained upward. Together with the crowds, Levi, Leibl, and I watch the smoke slowly dissipate. We have the same slack shoulders, the same unblinking faces. The announcer leaves long, grave pauses between his sentences while the image of takeoff and explosion plays again and again, each time ending with an empty sky as we stand in vigil before this alien box.
In these few minutes, Levi, Leibl, and I have been plucked out of our Hasidic glass box, lifted over its wall, and dropped right into American society. The camera scans the crowds, and there we are among them. As the puff plays yet again, we merge helpless into a national pool of feeling.
Leibl whimpers, his eyes wide and filling. He’s not at all inured to the strange world of television images. I put a second mother hand on his other shoulder and think, This news alone would have done this to him, but to see … I make a move to cover his eyes, but stop myself.
We’ve failed him. I thought the glass box would keep the world and its tragedies away from my children, thought ours a community protected from all that, and now I’ve gone out of my way to bring my son here to see inconceivable destruction. Worse, we have taught him that there are no accidents. We’ve taught him that everything happens by God’s loving plan. Again that puff in the sky. “Levi,” I say, pointing to Leibl. “Turn it off!”
“MOMMY, WHY?” Leibl says in a plaintive voice from the backseat of the car. I know he can’t imagine there could be no explanation—the Torah is supposed to answer everything. But I am inept, no answers. It’s not that our Judaism doesn’t offer answers but that there are none that I know of that I can feel honest about giving him right now. I admit that to myself.
As if a good enough explanation would take away the loss. Leibl’s guileless shock pierces me as I drive. I was supposed to be the mother buffer shielding the children from contradictions, accidents, loss. I’ve hurt him, given him no protection from the inevitable world. “Why?” he says again, and again.
I wish I were free to tell Leibl that there is so much out there that defies the notion of a Godly, benevolent Plan. I want him to be confident and happy even out there in that distressing, contradictory world he saw on television, but to do that, he’ll have to know that world.
Leibl’s questioning persists for days.
AFTER PERHAPS A MONTH in our new home, I sit in my new, expansive kitchen with its ruddy Mexican tiles, drinking tea and savoring the early quiet before the morning rush. The renovation, Levi’s surgery, and the move are finally behind us, and I’m enormously pleased with the decision to delay my return to teaching after Sarah’s birth. The new house is a fresh opportunity to make our peaceful refuge. Sarah is asleep in her bouncy seat at my feet, and Gladys, our new housekeeper, is getting kids up and strip
ping beds in the back. Through the bay window, a late-February sky is low and gray, a mockingbird chirping on a lower limb of the still-naked elm. Our redwood deck forms a bridge over a fishpond with koi undulating beneath. The Mexican tiles, double sinks, and double appliances, one each for meat and for milk, all gleam. The mockingbird darts from elm to bridge rail, perches there, and turns its head to watch the fish. Sarah is fed and calm. There’s the incredible stillness of infant sleep.
I have lowered the glass wall between Us and Them a notch. Gladys has moved in with us. I invited her to move in even though, as a refugee from El Salvador, one of the masses of desperate people streaming over the Texas border, she brings the world and its problems into our home. “Speak only Spanish to the children,” I told her, and they are learning quickly. After the Challenger exploded, I decided if I could get the children better accustomed to fate, maybe as adults they wouldn’t feel their faith betrayed by illogical dangerous events. Maybe Gladys can help them be less suspicious of people who are different from us. Besides, even though the housework requires both of us, Gladys’s presence is giving me time to heal from Sarah’s birth. Time to have a cup of tea.
Avrami calls, “Mommy!” from his crib, then stops; Gladys must have taken him out. And here’s Levi in a suit and tie, rushing through the kitchen to the back door, still moving as if his newly fixed back can break, his velvet zipper bag that holds his prayer shawl and tfilin under his arm. I frown, put my finger to my lips, and point to the sleeping baby. “Late. Gotta go,” Levi says, like the White Rabbit, and doesn’t say goodbye. Slams the door.
The household morning tumult will soon begin, but for Levi, the early synagogue service is about to start. I’m a little jealous. I picture the men of our community scattered across the sanctuary at the synagogue, shaking out prayer shawls under the high ceiling, the muted light, then wrapping black tfilin straps around their arms, yawning, each surrounded by rustling, shawl-clad holiness. One by one they begin to pray, sinking into the words, forgetting for now their job, the car in need of repair, the problem child, the unmown lawn, the needy friend, the tired wife, until the room fills with gathered hope in raw morning light. I remember the quiet moments between Avram Ayor’s words as I watched him pray, that special kind of stillness. Levi gets to be immersed in that every morning, surrounded by God.
But in his synagogue God has a thundering male voice and I am on the women’s side of the divide. Then I think, well, maybe Levi is also jealous—jealous of what must look like my early-morning ease when he has to run out every morning to the synagogue, regardless of how he feels. I picture Levi among the others. He drapes the shawl over his shoulders, tfilin box on his forehead, says the daily blessings that include thanking God “that you did not make me a woman.” Long ago I decided that the men are commanded to recite this thanks as a daily discipline to keep them from getting jealous of the women, who don’t have their burden of daily ritual and prayers. I think, That prayer just can’t be the obnoxious gloating outsiders think it is. It’s not a sentiment about women. It’s about the obligations of being a man. We are all enjoined to thank God for our burdens.
Libby comes padding into the kitchen, sleepy and small, Mendel behind her. I get up. Libby raises her arms, and I lift her to my hip. I think, She’s getting too big for this. I say, with a surge of warmth, “Boobah, did you say modeh ani?” Last night, I left a little washbasin by her bed with a two-handled cup of water in it so she could wake in the morning, crouch down, and pour the ritual water over her hands. She must have spilled some of it as she carried the basin into the bathroom like a big girl, because the hem of her nightgown is wet. She puts her head on my shoulder in a still-sleepy snuggle, and I listen to her lisp the one-line modeh ani morning thanks to God. Training them in ritual and faith has defined my motherhood. “You have to get breakfast and get ready for school,” I say. Libby nods against my shoulder.
But then there’s Mendel, who wants breakfast, too, and Leibl is up, and Avrami, whom Gladys brings in, and I’m whisking out bowls of Cheerios and milk and glasses of juice and urging the children to say the blessing before food—eat up, gotta go—while Gladys makes up the sack lunches. Even two-year-old Avrami goes to school. It’s more tuition to pay, but the Frumens insist on school beginning at age two. I pack backpacks, tuck in shirts, slide on tennis shoes. And yet, and yet, I think, as if the feel of touching each child is still on my hands, it’s this holding and nurturing, this teaching them God, that is my morning prayer.
Teaching, nurturing and ordering their lives, peppered with blindsiding moments of love, to me is the whispering shechinah, the female side of God. I have to wonder: For those men in our community who, unlike Levi, do share the work of home and children (and there are many), do they also have moments with their children that feel like prayer?
An hour later, after the kids leave for school, I’m back at the kitchen table with fresh tea, Sarah kicking her feet in my arms. The new house seems to be holding its breath waiting for the children to pile back in later with exclamations and backpacks and hunger, but for now there’s respite, a grateful luxury. I sip my tea. But there’s the day’s list, the plans, the meals. Rabbi Frumen says that every diaper changed, every dish washed, every time a woman holds a child is its own ritual for God. He says, for a woman, each such act has the same spiritual power as a man’s formal ritual. But … how could Levi imagine that my life is full of ease and freedom just because I don’t have to perform his rituals, study, and prayers? He couldn’t be jealous of me. Ease? When I get up before dawn, my mind racing with things that never get done? Ease? When, no matter what, one of the kids will be disappointed today because there is not enough of me for each of them? Ease? When Levi and I don’t help each other in our separate responsibilities or even so much as talk about them? If everything I do for home and children is its own ritual, I have a much bigger set of rituals than Levi ever will.
Sarah whimpers. I lift my blouse and give her my breast. Baby in arms, I move to the recliner in the den and settle there. There is her weight against my stomach, the hypnotic pull, pull, of her suck, warm, pulsing breath on tender skin. As she nurses, she fingers the cloth of my blouse. Her eyes begin to close. I lean back, then reach to a side table for one of the frayed prayer books left in easy reach everywhere around the house and turn to the same blessings that begin Levi’s day. As Sarah nurses and dozes, I whisper the same words that Levi says in the synagogue, but I read them in a mother’s language. “God frees the captive, raises those who are bowed down, heals the sick.” I read them as promises that my burdens will be eased and that I am not alone in them. And I can’t even imagine speaking them aloud.
But the day’s list intrudes. I begin to speed through, swift and mindless, another item to check off, until I get to “Bless You, God, that You did not make me a woman.” Here I automatically substitute what we women always substitute: “Thank you, God, that you made me according to your will.” We accept God’s unfortunate choices. I’m not a man and I don’t belong on Levi’s side of the universe. But I wonder, why does the women’s blessing say only that I accept God’s will, and not that I’m a woman? That’s who I am. Why doesn’t it say, “Thank you, God, that you made me a woman”?
But really, I tell myself. Levi also goes through daily prayers with the same emptied submission that I muster every day, before the same Hasidic God.
But what if I could toggle-switch between the warm squeeze of morning children and the vast, shared awesomeness of our ancient, formal God in the synagogue at sunup? Have it all? And what if Levi could have the same varied richness, the same balance, the freedom to taste both kinds of prayer? What if we shared that? If I weren’t always alone on my female side of the Law, would I be less lonely, less overwhelmed? Would it help if we didn’t speak two completely different languages about God?
I get up with sleeping Sarah in my arms and glide to the room she shares with Libby, the same room where Gladys now unfolds her cot each night. I unlatch the
baby and lower her, still sleeping, still faintly sucking, into the crib. I pause and watch, my hand on her back steadying her into sleep. But the Sabbath is coming. I have to get to the grocery store.
FRIDAY NIGHT, THE SUN SETTING. I’ve nursed the baby, shopped, nursed, cooked, straightened the house, nursed, polished the silver, nursed, bathed and dressed, answered the phone, answered a hundred questions from children, nursed, broken up three fights, dried tears, and more. The cooking is done, house is clean, silver polished, everything in its place. The children are washed and dressed or almost dressed in Sabbath clothes, tucked and tied, hair combed festive. The dining table is spread with a white tablecloth. Libby and I are about to light the Sabbath candles.
Now is that moment when the Sabbath’s “extra measure of soul” is supposed to enter our own, the moment when we join with legions of women through time with a strike of a match, a worldwide chorus of scratch and sizzle that, like God, creates a day. But my day has been so full, how do I switch gears to the profound at the strike of a match? The idea of our creating this holy time by lighting Sabbath candles is simply not as real to me as a house or a child.
I no longer think of vast mysteries; am no longer mesmerized at the thought of God hovering between the lines of holy text. But the spiritual desire that drove me into this life has left its imprint like a background murmur. Or a bruise. What I have now is simple obedience. I try to please God by doing what I am told He wants, as if I can then look up like a child and see approval in His eyes.
But it’s Libby looking up at me. I cover my eyes with my hands to say the Sabbath blessing, and indicate for her to do the same. It’s good, I think, that my children were born into this life and won’t be split at the root, like me. I kiss Libby’s forehead. “Good Shabbos!” we say to each other. This I give to you.
