May 2003
Maya opens her eyes in the chilly tent before dawn. She and Jase are in Fahnstock State Park on a Wednesday morning, testing out an overnight retreat program that Jase calls The Wonderful and Wild Weekday Shabbat. She rests her cheek on Jase’s back, sniffs the curls that cascade down his neck, basks in his radiant warmth. So sweet, she thinks. Leave it to Jase to suggest a weeknight camping trip because he dreamt of waking up in a field of morning dew.
Jase reaches for her hand. He is wide awake, beaming his flashlight on the last pages of Heschel’s Man Is Not Alone. Maya wraps her arms around his torso.
“A little awe and wonder before breakfast?”
“It’s always time for awe and wonder.”
Maya smiles. “How could anyone become a rabbi without a little Heschel in his book bag?”
“It’s great stuff. The deepest of the deep.” He closes the book and pulls her close.
“Talk to me,” she says.
“About what?”
“Give me something fun to chew on. A line of poetry. Or make up a she’elah and I’ll answer with a teshuvah. It can be about anything; it can be about sex! I speak the same language as you, Rabbi Jase! Different school, same books, same crazy-holy-weird thing that most of the world won’t ever understand. So give me your best.”
“That I can do.” He cradles her hip.
“With words, sweetie.”
He begins to hum a wordless Hasidic melody.
“I’m not in the mood for a niggun,” she says. “Not when I want to have a conversation. Why on earth did you become a rabbi if you don’t love to talk?”
Maya ruffles Jase’s hair. How did she land the least intellectual rabbi of her generation? They met at a Jewish food conference, flirted over lentil soup and torn chunks of spelt challah, cracked jokes about eating cholent cooked with organically grown meat. After the other guests retired to their rooms, she and Jase strolled the perimeter of a mountain lake, kissed in the faint glow of tea lights scattered around a bench. If her father knew Jase, he would be incredulous; he would have wanted Maya to find a mate who could be a true chavrusa, a co-traveler in the galaxy of texts. A chavrusa like his. A strange man full of surprises. The barefoot man in the apartment. Someone like that. Where had their flights taken them, and why was her Jase so flat, so sweet, so unstrange and so unsurprising?
“We should study together,” she says. “I’ll help you out. When we get back to New York, okay?”
Jase kisses her, rubs his hand down the length of her torso, circles, hovers. Why does she even care that he can’t talk philosophy? What use are all those words anyway? He is so good to her, his touch so perfect: not strange, not surprising, yet always just right.
“You spoil me,” she says.
“I intend to.”
“What time is it? Shit. I’ll miss the Mourner’s Kaddish.”
“We can still make it, Maya. I ran MapQuest and there’s a shul about ten miles from here.”
“Never mind. I can miss it for once.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ll be mourning my mother all my life. And she wouldn’t want me to leave your toasty sleeping bag to find a shul where I could race through the Mourner’s Kaddish, which has nothing to do with her anyway.” Maya laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“My mother wouldn’t have cared if I recited Kaddish.”
“But it matters to you. We can make it in time.”
Maya shakes her head. “I’ll meditate instead. A good sit in the woods to honor her memory.” She smiles.
“So we’re staying.”
“Yes. For now.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He kisses her belly, dives his face between her thighs.
Is this what Rosalie would have wanted for her? Maya wishes she could meet her mother at a nearby diner for breakfast, share a plate of pancakes, tell her how her wilderness rabbi is excellent in bed but she’s just not sure she wants him on the other side of her Shabbat table when she is forty and fifty and sixty, the two of them dissecting the flavors of the latest artisinal kosher cheeses at the farmer’s market.
Be careful, Maya, her mother would have said. Listen to your heart.
She begins to cry.
“Maya?”
“It’s too much for me now. I can’t—”
“But last night—”
“We were stoned last night, Jase. And it was great. With you it’s always great. Unconditionally. I just don’t know—”
“It’s okay.”
Jase turns, clutches his book in his arms as if he is a small boy and Man Is Not Alone is his teddy bear.
“Can we go now?”
“You just said you wanted to stay, meditate in the woods. A gentle, mindful practice will center you—”
“Of course it will, Jase. But I don’t want to get centered or be mindful or get in touch with my feelings or find my soul or travel the holy path to some sustainable future. I just want to go home. I want to check my email and call my brothers and think about my mother and sleep in my own bed.”
Maya looks at Jase and takes in his stubble, his elegant nose, his gracious lips, the way he wants to absorb the words he reads without having to interpret them for himself. So earnest. So sincere. So wrong for her. She just buried her mother and he keeps asking if she can join him in Jerusalem when he begins his year-long fellowship in Jewish leadership. No, she says. Not yet. Maybe one day. Or maybe not.
And Maya doesn’t know. She buried her mother only four months ago, back in Briar Wood, as Rosalie had specified. She stood in the cemetery, right next to her father’s grave, and delivered a eulogy that seemed so flawed and so sketchy, so distant from the way she understood her mother. After the service, a well-preserved Missy Samuels embraced Maya and thanked her for speaking so truthfully. “Your mother was my role model, my inspiration.” Bev leaned on her walker and wept. “The shul was my home,” she said. “Your parents made my life complete.” Maya and her brothers lingered at the graves and the three of them lay pebbles on top of Sol’s and Lenny’s headstones, and she stayed behind for an extra moment and kissed the headstones too.
“It’s okay,” says Jase. “I get it.”
Maya grabs a sweater and pants and rolls up their single sleeping bag.
“Maybe you met me at the wrong time.”
“After my year in Jerusalem we’ll see. Maybe that will be the right time.”
“For what, Jase?”
“We could live together. Or get married.”
“I adore you, sweetie,” she says. “And I don’t want to marry anyone.”
Jase packs up his clothes, his volume of Heschel, the banjo he is teaching himself to play. He takes out the embroidered bag that holds his tallit and tefillin, and steps outside the tent to face east. Maya leans on her elbow and peeks out, watching him drape his rainbow-striped tallit over his shoulders with surgical precision. He wraps the tefillin on his left arm, tight enough to leave indentations that will linger on his skin all morning. She stares at him as she once stared at her father when he davened. Just like Sol, Jase doesn’t need a prayer book because he knows the morning prayers by heart. He glances back at her and smiles, just as her father smiled at her mother. You get me. You get this. We are in this together. Stay with me.
She closes her eyes and imagines the house in Briar Wood when she was small, how her parents lived in separate universes in the big house—her father leaning over the Talmud, her mother whispering into the telephone—and came together at night to listen to their favorite records. Fly me to the moon. Dance me to the end of love. I say a little prayer for you. She would spy them from the doorway and smile at the sight of them, yet her parents seemed to live behind a veil. So much was inaccessible to her, just like she would always be inaccessible to Jase. He would assume that the crazy-holy-weird thing they shared would make them true soul mates, but it would only be an illusion. He would never understand the depths of her imagination, and in time their delicious, organic Shabbat meals would be tinged with sadness. He would sustain her with good sex for a while, and then she would feel alone.
I’m a piece of work, Jase, she thinks. You deserve a sweet rabbi-loving girl, a hippie chick who wants to fuck you in mountain huts and whose brain does not careen into imaginative overdrive. A girl who will sit beside you at Jewish food conferences and laugh at your cholent jokes. A girl who won’t mind that you never talk about books, that you can’t play the she’elah-teshuvah game. Not a woman who wants to create something bigger than a rabbinate, more encompassing than a single marriage—whatever that might look like. It sounds like a recipe for being a lost soul, her mother would have said. Better you should stay with the sweet rabbi who pleases you in some way, at least for a while.
They drive home in silence, listening to NPR and old Dylan CDs. When they pull up in front of her building, Maya hesitates.
“I’ll call you,” she says. “Promise.”
She lets herself into the apartment, hops into bed, and falls into a long dreamless sleep. When she wakes up the next afternoon she feels as if she has been hibernating for a year. She brushes her teeth and plays her messages: three from Jase and one from Madeline in San Miguel, insisting she come down to visit. All her life Maya had imagined Madeline as a tiny British elf who lived inside a telephone wire, accessible only to her mother. And now.
Just for a few days, pussycat. Tell me when you’re free and I’ll book the flight. My treat.