by Leah Lax
The men drink vodka and sing. There are speeches and blessings. The women pass trays of food and visit with one another, listen politely, and jump up and down to help in the kitchen. They pass plates and trays of chicken, kugel, salads and cakes. Someone sets out a tray of shots of sweet liqueur for the women, veiber mashka, in place of straight vodka reserved for men.
Ironically, two of the speeches touch on free choice, insisting that we choose freely to live within the Law. It must be that way, they say, so that when you make the right choice, God’s reward can be greatest. I think, And how free am I, when speaking my true self will get my family ostracized and hurt my children?
Levi looks free. He downs a shot of vodka in spite of the chemo. Effusive, pale face and bald head going red, he stands and blesses the young couple with long life in Torah and many children.
A young woman I know who is back in town visiting family gets up to help serve. She brought her roommate along for this visit—I saw the two of them the other day in the grocery store and did a double take. The two young women stood so close, heads inclining toward each other, that no one else could hear their quiet talk. They were holding the same loaf of bread, hands almost touching. Through a lens of stifled desire, I saw intimacy. Shared domesticity. Comfort and love. I knew my view was skewed, and laughed at myself. But could it be? I quickly pushed my cart down another aisle.
I tell myself yet again, They were only buying bread, but still I watch the girl set her platter down, turn, and go back to the kitchen. My head starts to swim. Ridiculous, I think. I hardly know her.
I want to be the witch giving her blessing/curse to the new couple at the head of this table of slightly drunk, self-satisfied people. I want to stand, raise a cup like one of the men, and speak out in my audaciously female voice: Beware the blinding kind of peace and safety religious life offers, because what is that peace and safety if your inevitable striving is never recognized? What kind of life is it if you are constantly told there are no problems that can’t be solved by the religion, no questions that can’t be answered, when life is growth and growth is struggle? Who are you if nothing inside you that pulls you to the edge of religion’s path is ever recognized?
Contradictions are human—without them, there’s no room for you. Torah offers a perfect world, but a perfect world chokes people. Beware this artificial, contrived life!
But then the girl I was watching comes over to me. She has untied her reddish ringlet hair, flashes her toothy smile. The girl is known in the community for her vigorous Torah study. She gives classes and studies with individuals. We’ve studied together before, in this community where Torah study is recreation. “Stay a bit after the others leave, and let’s read a Hasidic essay?” she says. I say sure, why not, as if nothing is stirring in me.
The meal concludes with a group song of thanks ending in “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and the Lord will trust in him.” The women chat, clear the table, clean up. People pair back up and depart. Levi leaves with the boys, assured I won’t be long. I think, I shouldn’t stay. Then, But I can if I choose to. I tell myself, Nothing to worry about, with her bright smile and cascading hair. They were only buying bread.
We settle on a short sofa in the library after the party clears out. We share the one book, half on my lap, half on hers, four skirted legs lined up against one another. When she looks down at the print, her ringlet hair makes a lush, parted curtain around her face, and when she turns, her breath is a soft whoosh on my ear. “Since the destruction of the temple,” she reads out loud in Hebrew, “all that God has is the spiritual sanctuary that a man builds for himself within the Law, through his self-sacrifice.”
Since the ancient altar of gold is no more, I am all that God has.
“We are to imagine ourselves as that man,” she says. “God depends on us now, and the place we make for ourselves within the Law is His sanctuary, replacing the ancient temple where God once dwelled in the world. Now He dwells in us.
“Do you understand?” the girl says. “I mean, what is self-sacrifice for the Law, really?” She continues in a quick and breathless way, as if pelting herself toward an altar of sacrifice.
Her voice is a song in the still air; her leg presses against mine. The tiny hairs on the back of her wrist … Then I’m swimming in her voice, which, strangely, drowns in its own sound. She continues reading and talking, unaware, her finger stroking the page, stroking, the page.
As if dreaming, I lean in and start to cover her hand with mine.
Stop. The man in the book we share, the Man Within the Law who builds a sanctuary of a life within God’s Law, is pointing at me. He is pointing at me, saying, “You are all God has.”
I am not you, I try to answer him. I can’t give over my heart to God’s Law anymore. I can’t be the willing sacrifice.
The girl taps my arm to emphasize a point, then touches my hand for a second with her cool palm. She is devoted, sincere, utterly focused on the text. I close my eyes, trying to think clearly, but sensation engulfs thought. This is insane. Words go liquid in my brain. In a waking dream, I am turning back bedcovers to find her waiting for me.
And then, here are the neighbors who own this house, a kind husband and wife looking in on us. I jump up, but surely they can’t see my tingling arms, the flush in my face, the way the clock has frozen in place. “Goodness,” I say. “I’ve got to get home.” Levi. The kids. It is almost midnight. But this light-headedness makes even the thought of walking difficult.
Outside the bay window, a truck lumbers past, spraying a wide mist of insecticide against Houston mosquitoes. The air is hazy, it will sting eyes and throat, and yet everyone insists on walking me home because it is so late and unsafe in our changing neighborhood. And so we go, a nice processional. I don’t quite know my feet as I walk or where this stranger, my body, is taking me with these trembling knees. I make exaggerated polite conversation like a stoned teenager trying to pass. Then, at home in bed in my modest gown, the dark filled with even breath of sleep from one room to the next, I close my eyes in weak surrender to visions spinning off the last hour. The overwhelming orgasm that follows is a scream of release, a bursting out that will remain the most intense in memory. Then I sleep, deep, long, and dreamless.
I wake the next morning, blink, and the day’s list jumps into place. Kids to school. Levi’s appointment at the hospital. Then I remember last night and fall back into bed. All of my years trying to muster ecstasy for God, and nothing has ever made me feel as alive and genuine as those few moments giving in to spontaneous lust that caught me unawares, like spontaneous combustion. Nothing has ever before shouted out, so utterly convincing, This is who you are.
The l-word no longer hovers on the periphery, creeping into dreams. It’s not academic or up for discussion or in any way a matter of choice or control. My being has loomed up, grabbed me by the shoulders, and shaken hard.
I sing in the kitchen. I sing as I line up lunch bags and zip sandwiches into baggies. Shalom wanders in, still in pajamas, and I wrap him in my arms, dance with him, laugh out loud.
Later, in the car, I roll down all the windows. Everything is a different color than yesterday: the sky more blue, trees more green. In the grocery, a single glance at a woman in halter top and midriff tee over cutoff shorts, and a tingling wave goes through me. I think, I should be embarrassed. I feel like an adolescent male with an overactive penis. But I’m alive!
On Saturday, wondering how it will feel now, I go to the synagogue after a long absence and sit in the back behind my old friend Shterna. We used to chat late at night while cleaning for Passover; twice I held her hand as she gave birth. And there’s my old mikveh friend Mira at the end of the first row, and Dinah, looking proud yet vulnerable in her luxurious wig, next to Mrs. Frumen in her seat of honor. In a way, I think, even though we women in the group don’t confide in one another, even though we hide our secret selves, we’ve been family. We have welcomed each other’s children into our homes, rus
hed to help one another through illness, deaths, births, and celebrations. But if you really knew me, I doubt your love would hold. I embody the world outside Torah. I am exactly what you shield your children from—what the Torah calls an “abomination.”
But my joy and discovery and sense of being alive is no abomination.
I look at the backs of their wigs and see fear, anger, even hatred aimed at me and others like me, all of it as fierce as a mother defending her children.
Just as I imagined speaking up last night, I want to stand on one of these chairs and fill the synagogue with my forbidden woman’s voice, interrupt the service, take the lead. Do you deny God created me? Do you deny God’s will? I would tell these God-fearing people. I do exist!
Today is my bar mitzvah. Today I am a woman—the person my mother birthed, and not some artificially molded and silenced shadow standing behind the men. I am me: a lesbian. I walk out of the synagogue and do not return.
AT HOME IN THE KITCHEN, I’m emptying the dishwasher. Another cycle is complete. Each day this is part of the rhythm, a beloved rhythm, one piece of trying to maintain an unchanging bubble for our children and ourselves. The plates are clean. I stack them, then lift the glasses one at a time and line them in a neat row on the shelf.
After nine months of pumping caustic chemicals into Levi’s system, the chemo is over. He is impossibly thin, but the vital part of him remains. They say he is clean, that the cancer is gone. I think of the pope apologizing for the church’s treatment of Jews, women, minorities. He wore a purple vestment of mourning that day and insisted on struggling out of his wheelchair on his own and lowering himself to his knees to pray. Sadly, that apology, that confession, didn’t gain him cleansing, not in the eyes of those who inherited the suffering. Instead, to me, his sad apology made the sins over centuries even more senseless.
Levi’s recovery makes the cancer seem more senseless. God’s misstep. A mistake, no purpose in it. He was no embattled, righteous soldier. The cancer was no worthwhile, ennobling ordeal, not a hidden gift from God or a challenge to be strong. It was just cancer. A weird mistake in his cells. And Levi doesn’t feel clean. He feels scarred. Every few months from now on, he will go through their scanning machines wondering if he will live or die. His life will always be tenuous now.
Or will it? I put another glass neatly on the shelf with the others. Levi is different from me, probably always has been. His faith carried him through. He believes his survival proves the effectiveness of the prayers so many offered on his behalf and affirms that his soul will live forever. Which means that, at least in the next world, Levi has achieved a kind of permanence.
These plates, dishes, cups—keeping them clean and ordered—has been for me what his prayers are for him: a way to daily create and sustain something worthwhile, something that will last. For me, permanence has been this home as haven for our family.
I wanted Levi to change, but I’m the one who’s changed. It is clear now that my clean dishes, the daily cycles, the permanent home I tried to make to keep my kids safe from a threatening world, will all one day lie broken under the earth. Cancer pulled away the scrim, made me see our faithful pretense of permanence. But everyone dies. Plates break. Glasses shatter and lie in the dirt. Even writing dies; paper shreds and melts into earth. Love can also die.
I have no certainty anymore that anything I do will create something that lasts. Not reciting ancient words to God, separating milk from meat, quieting myself beneath swaths of cloth, dipping myself into a mikvah, or taking a leap beyond logic to believe in a God who doesn’t die and who offers me a piece of the same eternity. Not even by emptying the dishwasher and putting everything in proper order.
Cancer left my life, rather than Levi’s, short and fragile. But still I put the silverware into the drawer, forks with forks, spoons with spoons, knives with knives. Now I know how little we know, but still I stack the smaller plates next to the larger ones. Cancer showed me that I’ve been living on hope, not faith, that what I once called “faith” was just a collection of promises I once made to myself when I didn’t want to look at reality.
But I can still hope. I open both cabinet doors wide to the sparkling dishes and glassware, all in hopeful order, and decide, yes, even being honest to the very end point in my cells, I can dare to hope. I will hold this illogical joy that hope feeds, that keeps me open for opportunities—a hope that beyond my kitchen in the realm of the unknowable lies some kind of salvation.
Twenty-Two
If mine were a different life, this book would end here with lost faith and new convictions, ready to walk into the world. But mine is a mother’s life and a covered life—I look at the kids and the inscrutable world and set out instead on a course of small steps. I go to a hairstylist for the first time as an adult and get my hair cut. I gingerly explore unkosher food and, delighted, declare shrimp kosher. I learn to figure tax and tip in a restaurant. Through mutual friends, I meet Jane and her partner (Jewish lesbians!). I go to their home, take off my scarf, and chat over tea, then tell them that I, too, am a lesbian. I tell the same to Janice, who isn’t surprised.
All along, out there I remain like a country mouse in the city, ogling at it all.
At home I move to a separate bedroom and wake the first morning astonished to find I slept all night without a problem. I stop going to the mikvah. Levi can no longer touch me.
He waits to see if all of this is temporary.
In Los Angeles with Janice for an interview for The Mikvah Project, I go off on my own and visit a gay and lesbian synagogue, where I find myself in a gay crowd for the very first time. Around me, men or women greet one another with spontaneous affection, openly embracing, even kissing, and it is all so easy, uncensored, and real. I am gobsmacked by how uncoiled, how natural, I feel in this group. Before the service, I scan the seated congregation and laugh out loud at the automatic division between sexes here in this liberal synagogue. They’ve rejected the traditional partition, then separated by sex for exactly the opposite reason than the Law intended—because those attracted to one another want to be together and not apart as they pray.
The rabbi and her partner invite me to their home, and I stay the night. In the morning, I find Tracy brushing her teeth in the bathroom while Lisa leans against a nearby wall, holding an oversize mug of coffee, talking to her partner in intimate morning tones—just two women in pajamas tops in domestic simplicity, peace, intimacy, just coffee and brushing teeth.
In their home I pick up an essay about the mikvah by Rachel Adler, one of the Jewish feminist writers whose work I once saw on a table long ago at the First Texas Conference on Feminism and Judaism. Adler’s scholarly, thoughtful writing has enormous passion. In the essay she writes, “I tear open the words of Torah until they bleed as I do.”
Rabbi Lisa introduces me to Adler, a small, middle-aged woman with a great smile—they are friends and neighbors—and the next day, before rejoining Janice for another interview, I find myself Rachel Adler’s guest at her synagogue—another liberal congregation with no partition. Rachel wraps herself in a large Hasidic-style prayer shawl, cream wool with black stripes hanging to her calves. The sight is startling. To me, this garment is reserved for men, and so her putting on the talit prayer shawl seems a rather pleasing act of rebellion. But then, it is anachronous to me that so many Jewish women now assert themselves by appropriating this male attire. Why not do something uniquely feminine?
Then Rachel takes off the shawl and puts it around my shoulders in friendship, in welcome—you are a woman with a voice here. Intuitively, as I have seen men perform for years through the lattice screen, I pull the front edge of the shawl forward over my head and face, forming a tent. I cross my draped arms in front of my chest and whisper the talit blessing, the same one I taught my boys to say each day when they put on their tzitzis strings. I am astonished to find myself inside this quiet, cloth chamber of my people. Light filters through, diffused. Vague swaying shadows, the sound of my brea
th. Time slows. The sound of chanting is muted through hanging cloth. This cloth cathedral is resonant with generations of human entreaty.
Then I understand. It’s not that Jewish women want to appropriate male attire; it’s that gender shouldn’t have anything to do with expressing human need.
I drape the cloth over the back of my shoulders, and sit down next to Rachel. Although they use the Orthodox Hebrew liturgy, there’s no backdrop of male song for whispered female prayers; around us, men and women sit together, sing together. One by one, both men and women are called up, seven for the Sabbath, as the reader chants each succeeding section of the Torah portion from the open scroll. It is enough for me to get to see, for the first time, women being called to the Torah, taking their part. But then the hazan prayer leader calls out my name.
I am so startled. I rise, slightly panicked, not even wondering where he got my name. I ask Rachel to come with me because I need an anchor, and so we walk up together to the broad bimah podium covered in dark green velvet, where we stand before the huge old scroll opened wide. Here is where I put my forbidden woman’s hands on the Torah’s wooden handles and grasp them for the first time, a grasp I instantly understand as an ancient act of ownership. In that instant of touch, I am a creature of touch, sensual and real, power and resonance in my palms. I stand uncovered before the Torah, not naked but revealed.
I have ascended to a new Torah. I think, however imperfect it now seems, the Torah is mine. My inheritance. To love, or not. To believe and follow, or not. True or not, there my people have found shards of truth. We have rallied around it, holy or not. We have argued with this text, giving it shape and depth. We have made it holy.
Then I sing out the blessing. I follow spontaneously with the shecheheyanu statement of gratitude for having arrived at this place and time, and the congregation roars “amen.” The reader then indicates the place in the scroll from which he will read. I touch the place with the fringes of Rachel’s shawl and then kiss them. Then I look again into the scroll, and realize the portion he is about to read is about the daughters of Zelophchad—women who asserted to Moses their right of inheritance.
