Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  No one can hide. Female humility before a rabbi grows huge.

  “Anyone who so much as imagines for a moment that the Rebbe cannot and will not stand up out of his hospital bed on his own when he chooses, pull the tubes out of his body with his own hands, and lead us as the Messiah to Jerusalem is chaser emunah!”

  We have been accused with a nasty epithet for someone lacking faith. We have been shamed. The shame is palpable in the room, choking.

  And finally, I’m furious. I just almost jump up, dare to open my woman’s mouth in public, and call out, The Rebbe is an old, sick man who has lived out his years. How do you know he would do such a thing? You are no prophet. Only God knows the future. But I don’t. No one moves. We women don’t move, save sideways glances. I wait, like the other women, clap, like the others, leave politely, like the others. I walk out invisible in the crowd, sick with myself.

  I can’t yet see the leaps in logic in the Rebbe’s talks that kept us willing to submit ourselves, but when I leave Crown Heights, after hugging Leibl and bidding him goodbye, I leave behind the Rebbe as larger-than-life scholar and miracle worker and take with me only the picture of him as an old but very real man—blue eyes he once trained on me as a girl, white plastic reading glasses low on his nose, overdue for a haircut, his well-known habits of abundant cups of tea and too much salt on his food. Brilliant, a scholar, but just a man. Soon, I think, he will die. So will we all.

  ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 12, 1994, the third day of Tammuz, the children bathed and in their pajamas, the year of mourning for my father ends. At the soul candle I’ve kept burning through this past year, I take a used plate from the sink and cover the glass cylinder. The flame chokes and shrinks down to an orange ember, then slowly flicks out. I lift the plate, and a gray line ribbons upward from the dead ember. Memories of my father have caught me at the oddest times through the year. It’s a relief to move on. “Now we can have music!” I announce, and soon lively klezmer fills the house. Itzik and Shalom and Avrami dance on the blue carpet-sea to laughing clarinets, and I dance with them while Mendel and Sarah watch and chatter and laugh. Shalom breaks loose, runs in circles, jumps on the coach.

  Late that night, as I sleep a rare deep sleep, the Rebbe dies. All of the men of our community fly to New York, so that many overlapping accounts will filter back through our community. Levi meets Leibl on the street in Crown Heights, and they join the black-coated mourners, ten thousand strong, walking behind the hearse down Eastern Parkway, performing the final kindness of accompanying the Rebbe’s dead body to the grave. Wives and sisters and young children look down from brownstone windows as a vast field of black hats blocks Eastern Parkway for miles.

  And yet many whole families walk in the crowd, women and children as well. They plod on together, heads down, solemn. Men openly cry, tears glistening in beards and falling on their coats. But Levi and Leibl also pass clusters of followers in frantic celebratory song and dance, arms on shoulders, around and around. They have brought musical instruments to announce the Rebbe’s resurrection. The Messiah is here! They sing and play. Long live the Rebbe, the king! He died for our sins. Long live our master, our teacher, our rebbe, King Messiah forever! He will rise again! The music glitters over the flowing, somber crowd as aloof policemen watch from the sidelines.

  The yartzeit anniversary of my father’s death bleeds into the Rebbe’s. Now they are both gone and the dancing Hasidim sicken me.

  I CONTINUE MY FEVERED nighttime writing, but I’m beginning to notice that religious voice implanted in me long ago. Late one night, I stop and print out what I’ve written, then read it out loud in the dim light. Levi moans a sleepy protest and turns over in his bed. The writing sounds polemical, insincere. I crumple the pages and pitch them into the trash. “The real truth is,” I write Rosellen the next day, “I rage silently at the boring details that use my every minute and keep me from what I really want to do. I rage at housework and shopping and standing in lines. Then I swing to the opposite and submerge myself in family and home, where I find daily sameness peaceful and reassuring—for a while. Until a niggling nervousness takes hold again.”

  Admitting discontent is enormous new territory. “All those Hasidic women who feel important to God because they are bringing order to their families—I’d like to be like them, but I can’t. Order is holiness, they teach us. But I need to form my own image and not just find it reflected in their eyes.”

  I have written real unresolved conflict into a character that feels true for the first time. I print out the letter and put it in the mail.

  ANOTHER YEAR PASSES, AND TALL, now-bearded Leibl transfers to yeshiva in Tzfat, Israel, ancient town of mystics. Libby is settled in a Chicago yeshiva, and now Mendel is going away. Itzik, Shalom, Avrami, and Sarah come to the airport, and we watch the plane pull back from the terminal. There’s Mendel’s soft face at one of the windows, in contrast with the masculine thrusting power of revving motors, that inexorable mechanical drive. The Jetway separates and folds in on itself like a discarded umbilical cord.

  At the window, Avrami puts a hand on Shalom’s shoulder. Each in turn is getting to be the oldest at home. Sarah is impatient to leave. She’s satisfied to see her active, contentious brother depart, but I can’t stop watching Mendel’s childhood pulling away before it’s over. The plane turns and heads down the tarmac. We stay until it is a speck in the sky.

  At night, as my diminishing family sleeps, I wander into the den. I know Mendel won’t become a Talmud scholar—that’s not him—but I tell myself that he can plunge into a rowdy group there and at least still get to be a teen. There will be forays to the dorm rooftop at night for secret cigarettes, raiding the kitchen, fringes and yarmulkas flying in pickup basketball games, and, in a couple of years, secret stashes of beer in the dorm, even clandestine calls to the kinds of girls who speak to boys. So why do I worry that this life robs my children of their adolescence?

  Because he’s not officially allowed to question. They won’t foster questioning or train him to formulate questions. And those he comes up with on his own, he’ll get to pose only to someone he respects, and only if he is seeking clarification of the Law, not if he questions the Law itself.

  Maybe we are all frozen in preadolescence. Most of us never learned how to rebel or explore. Look at us, like children young enough to think their parents, the Law and the Rebbe, omnipotent. But I want to form questions. I want to argue and sift, choose what I want and leave the rest, like I once planned to do when I was a teen. Now I have to watch my children equally robbed.

  I write Rosellen and describe the God I first met at Rabbi Rakovsky’s Sabbath table—as multifaceted as the human spirit, embedded in all things, nurturing and all-gendered, including the shechinah, the gentle, ever-present mother. It is this God, not the Law’s stern authority, who fed my young dreams. So why is this very Jewish, mystical God barely present in our masculine world of the Law? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  And yet something is setting me more squarely in the present:

  Dear Rosellen,

  Itzik’s biggest wish for his seventh birthday was a new bicycle and a turkey dinner. I located a refurbished all-but-new bike while he was still in school, drove out to the bike shop after I got the turkey in the oven, and spent an hour in the crowded shop while they lowered the seat and handlebars, changed out the wheels for pedal brakes, put on better tires, and added a kickstand. You’re not charging me more for this, are you? I dashed home with the little red bike in the back of the mom van. Just as the kids turned up the walk from school, I pulled up, and they came running.

  Why did it take until the sixth child to be able to see this? It’s the joy, pure and simple—no preaching, nothing sublime. Just a new red bike and the house filled with the smell of turkey dinner, Levi home early to share it with us. You had to see Itzik dance. Three siblings to dance around him, ooh over the turkey, and take turns racing on the bike. Itzik throwing his arms around me again and again. Avrami, S
arah, and Itzik in helmets and coats racing ahead on their bikes after dinner, helmets bobbing in the dark, the children glowing under the streetlamp where they stop to chatter and wait for me at each corner while I catch up on foot with little Shalom’s sweet hand in mine. I’ve been moved all week by how simple it all is.

  If I could, my birthday gift would be for Itzik to keep his joy in little things, and, if that’s not possible, to someday have a child like him to give him joy like I have.

  Love,

  Leah der Oysher (the Rich One)

  But I lied. Levi didn’t come home for dinner.

  LEIBL CALLS FROM A pay phone in Tzfat, where he’s been in yeshiva for nearly six weeks. He talks about hiking the valley beneath his dorm with friends and about their trip south to the Dead Sea. Somehow he has made the transition to modern Hebrew, so very different from ancient texts—he laughs about a radio program and reports a conversation he overheard on a bus. But there’s a loudspeaker and raucous singing in the background, some noisy march. Long live our rebbe, King Messiah forever. “What is that?” I say.

  “Guys get together and march around here,” he says.

  “Do they, like, carry posters?”

  “Yeah, and there are bumper stickers and billboards around town.” Pictures of the Rebbe’s face next to THE KING SHALL LIVE! on sides of buildings, shop windows, car windows, telephone poles, in entries to buildings and private homes, and held high in impromptu parades by those shouting young men. “I’m getting sick of that song,” Leibl says. The noise only grows as the marchers pass. Our master lives forever!

  NOVEMBER 4, 1995. For weeks, the Israeli right has been demonstrating against the peace accord that Prime Minister Rabin signed at Oslo. They were spurred on after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Recently, a right-wing organization called Eyal disseminated an image of Rabin in a Nazi uniform: Rabin’s troubled eyes, his lined Jewish face and bushy gray hair, with a swastika on his chest. The posters appeared mysteriously across the country, then around the world. This is the climate in which Yitzhak Rabin arrives at Kings of Israel Plaza in largely secular Tel Aviv to give a speech at a peace rally. When he’s done, amid applause and cheers, he descends the steps with his security detail toward a waiting car. A young bearded man in a yarmulka steps up and guns him down.

  That night, in Tzfat, Leibl’s dorm mates, study partners, hiking buddies, friends, with whom he floated in the Dead Sea and laughingly smeared mud on one another, gather and march in wild celebration. My son watches from the window of his dorm room. The boys march over the cobbled streets under street lamps, under the stars, mountains as a backdrop, singing, shouting, passing bottles of vodka. A single, huge, moving shadow follows them, and then on to the yeshiva, where they force open the door to the study hall. Inside, they pass more bottles, jump on tables, and dance. The Nazi is dead! they cry. He slept with our enemies! The Messiah is coming! The Rebbe is coming back to us. Long live the Rebbe!

  The heavy door opens. In walks the Rosh Yeshiva rabbi director, with his grave, long beard, black coat, deep voice. “Get down,” he says. “Leave. Now.”

  The next day, all is decorum again in the study hall. The boys are grouped around a long table over open books, quiet, some a little hungover, the rabbi holding forth. Leibl is among them. The murderer, Yigal Amir, member of Eyal, is in jail. His trial will be quick and superfluous, but that is irrelevant; time is stopped here. In the study hall, there is no Rabin, no politics, no world. God’s Word is justice. The rabbi unravels the Talmudic logic one thread at a time. One of the boys rubs the back of his neck. Another twiddles his ritual strings. Brows furrow. The low buzz of a lazy fly. Three policemen enter.

  One of them announces the name of the boy sitting next to Leibl. The boy stands slowly on shaking legs. He is sixteen. “You made the poster,” the policeman says.

  “Do you have a warrant?” the rabbi says. “Proof?”

  The policeman speaks to the boy. “We have your father. We’ll release him when you give yourself up.”

  “You think this is a democracy?” Leibl shouts into the phone to me the next day. “You can get picked up for what you think here. They’re arresting religious Jews all over the country.”

  “Had that boy’s father done anything?” I say.

  “Nothing,” he says. “They took him without a warrant, then used him as a trap.”

  “Those boys were wrong, celebrating like that,” I say.

  That morning the yeshiva director had found his car vandalized. “The kids here are not who I am,” Leibl says. “Get me out of here!”

  NOW IT’S A YEAR and a half later, April 1997, on the last day of Passover, near sunset. The sky is streaked, flocks of northern birds pausing for the night on their migration back home. Leibl dropped out of rabbinical training and transferred to a yeshiva in New York that actually grants an accredited high school diploma. He reads secular books and follows politics and wants to leave yeshiva. In Houston, our neighborhood has also changed. Dollar stores have replaced boutique shops. The nearby shopping center is strewn with trash, and sullen teens loiter around signs that warn against shoplifting. The same tense Hasidic/black schism I once saw in Crown Heights is evolving here.

  I’ve also changed, mostly through reading and writing to Rosellen, who has moved away to Chicago. I hold on for the kids, in spite of the long, slow-growing split in me.

  In the synagogue, nothing has changed, and today Avrami is exultant. Today is the last day of Passover, and this is his thirteenth birthday. We’ll make a feast next Sabbath to celebrate his bar mitzvah, but today in the open hall we’ve set out tables laden with piles of handmade matzohs—uneven rounds with acrid, burnt edges, and bottles of kosher wine, nothing more. This is the meal of the Messiah. We flew Leibl, Libby, and Mendel home for this and for the bar mitzvah—Avrami sits with his father and brothers. The men of the community gather and take seats at the tables, with Rabbi Frumen presiding. Levi presented Avrami with his first black hat in honor of this arrival into manhood. It is new and big for his boy face.

  I sit behind a partition with Levi’s mother, Libby, and Sarah, the only females here—Mrs. Frumen and all the other women are busy at home with Passover work. Besides, the community views this special, final Passover gathering as a ritual for men.

  At a signal from Rabbi Frumen, the men begin a series of seven nigun wordless songs. Each is another rung on a ladder to heaven. Rabbis, professionals, laborers, doctors, young, old—the songs rise in rich minor key. Community, family, and God form a kind of silent harmony. Avrami closes his eyes, grips the front of his chair, and rocks as he sings. A cup of wine, a bite of matzoh, another song, another cup. The group is lost in the winding heart of the melody, bodies and hearts open, heads back in song. Rabbi Frumen gestures to our son.

  Quiet. Eyes open, Avrami begins reciting the impossibly complex bar mitzvah discourse, from memory, in a singsong. “Isa bemedrash tilim,” he chants in his boy voice.

  Usually when a bar mitzvah boy recites this difficult discourse, the group soon interrupts with cries of “mazel tov” to give the boy a break, but Avrami continues without pause. For twenty-five minutes there’s no other sound in the room, his young voice a new note in harmony with their lingering song. When he finishes, he is breathless with triumph. Then come the cries of “mazel tov,” and a new jubilant tune. Praise God that He chose us as His alone! The men laugh and clop the table to the dancing rhythm. Amid that, Avrami suddenly launches out of his seat, runs over behind the partition to us, and throws his arms around his grandmother and then around me. In my arms, he says in my ear, “This is my real bar mitzvah.” Just wine, rough, handmade matzoh burnt on the edges, song, and arrival.

  “WE WILL STAND BY LEIBL,” I say to Levi, “or lose him.” I have just stopped my husband in the living room and demanded he listen.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Leibl is not staying in yeshiva. He’s not becoming a rabbi. He says he’s going to college.”

 
Leibl purchased books and studied on his own for months, then took the SAT and achievement tests and did very well.

  Levi says little, but he acquiesces.

  In May, Leibl is accepted to Rice University in Houston. After years away, our glorious new rebel is coming home. Another day, after he’s moved back in, I find Leibl and his father deep in conversation in the den, Levi reminiscing about his happy years studying math and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Levi is nostalgic, his face open. Leibl leans forward, eager to hear.

  Avrami, too, leaves for yeshiva in Chicago. I keep thinking I will round a corner in the house and find him—on his stomach, head propped on his fists, playing a board game with Itzik, flashing his smile and the dimples that embarrass him. Tearing down the street on his too-small bicycle. Cracking one of his wry jokes at the Sabbath table.

  Although only the three youngest are at home now, it is still easy to stay caught up in kids’ growth and drama, easy to avoid the mirror, easy to pour myself into writing at night to avoid quite existing during the day. I could let more years pass this way. Then one day Mendel calls from a pay phone and mentions the latest gossip: a teenage boy at the Lubavitcher yeshiva in Manchester, England, committed suicide by jumping off his dorm roof. There is no official word, but the gossip has spread through the web of boys in Lubavitcher yeshivas. They say the boy was gay. He killed himself because he was gay.

  I hang up and double over. Can’t breathe. I feel his overwhelming despair at a world that rejects what he is. I see him going up those lonely stairs and walking out on the roof; I squeeze my eyes shut but can’t shut out the image.