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SEND A PRAYER
As the new Jewish New Year approaches, we are urged to open our hearts in prayer. In light of the pain and loss of the people of Israel, this year it seems our prayers may be more powerful than ever before. Pray for the souls of the victims of terror, and for their families whose lives are forever altered.
WHAT IS THE WESTERN WALL?
The Western Wall, or Kotel, is the only surviving remnant of the Temple that stood in Jerusalem. The Temple served as the closest connecting spot between the Jewish people and God. During the exile that followed the destruction of the Temple, prayer remained as the only means available to maintain a divine connection.
NOTES IN THE WALL
A tradition developed of writing a few lines of prayer on a note to be placed inside the cracks of the soft old stones of the Western Wall. Many send notes, or kvitelach, when they hear of someone making a trip to the Kotel.
MODERN TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS
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FACILITATE THE PROCESS!
Whatever your message, we will place your prayer among the countless others: a testament to the connection between God, Israel, and the Jewish people that refuses to be extinguished. Your prayers will be collected every week and taken down to the Wall by VirtualJerusalem.com staffers.
To send a note to the Western Wall, please log in, fill in the form below, and send:
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Six weeks before our scheduled due date, we still hadn’t come to a decision about whether to circumcise our son. We hadn’t been discussing it much—ixnay on the oreskinfay—but I had gone online and quietly continued my research. I discovered that during the ceremony an empty chair, reserved for the angel Elijah, is placed near the child, for it is said that so important to God is the ancient ritual that when a man circumcises his son, God calls upon the angels and proudly says,—Come and see what my sons are doing in the world, and Elijah descends to the Earth to witness the moment on God’s behalf (Zohar, 1:93). I discovered that even Frasier Crane circumcised his son (season 8, episode 167), and he was married to a non-Jew. And I discovered the SmartKlamp, a clear plastic at-home circumcision device that looks like a corkscrew designed by Philippe Starck. It avoids, according to its website, the problems often associated with circumcision, such as “infection of the circumcised wound…postoperative bleeding…cutting the glans of the penis…part amputation of the penis…” and risk of removal of too much, or not enough, of the foreskin.
Come and see what your sons are doing in the world.
We went for a hike.
—Do you want to do this? I asked Orli.
—I don’t know. Do you?
—I don’t know.
—So the chair’s for Elijah? she asked.
—Apparently.
—I didn’t know that.
—Me neither.
—God can’t watch it for Himself?
—I don’t think that’s the point.
—I thought He could see everything.
—He can.
—So what’s Elijah for?
—Nothing. Pictures. Cake. How the fuck should I know? He brings back a nice piece of cake.
—Is that also in the Zohar? That God loves cake?
—Yes, it is. Twinkies.
—Is that why He made them non-kosher?
—Probably. He’s very selfish.
—Do you want to do this?
—I don’t know. You?
—I don’t know.
And I also discovered VirtualJerusalem.com, where I composed a virtual prayer note for someone to cram into a non-virtual wall to a virtual God who might kill my non-virtual son because I’d eaten bacon with virtually every egg since I was nineteen, or because I drove on Sabbath, or because I wrote things about God that He didn’t approve of. It was worth a shot.
Dear God,
Please don’t kill my son during birth. Also, don’t kill my wife during birth. And don’t kill him after birth. And please make him healthy, and don’t fuck around and make him seem sick just to scare me. I know you’re probably pissed at me, but I’m pissed at You, too, so let’s just keep this between us. Thanks. S.
That was 262 characters, not including spaces. I dropped the bit about God fucking around to try and scare me, and that got me down to 212. I missed the part about letting God know I was wise to His little scare tactics, but at last this version was down to 184 characters without spaces, 225 with. Was the 200-character limit including spaces? It didn’t say, and I didn’t want to risk it. That was just the kind of fast one God would pull—my son would die and I would kill myself and I’d go to heaven and say,—What the fuck? and He’d be like,—E-mail? I didn’t get any e-mail. Must have been over the character limit. And all the asshole angels would laugh.
Dear God,
Please don’t kill my son during birth. And don’t kill my wife during birth. I know You’re probably pissed at me, but I’m pissed at You, too, so let’s just keep this between us. Thanks. S.
It lost a lot of the original, but I was down to 196 characters including spaces. At the last minute I chickened out, and took out the whole “pissed” section.
Dear God,
Please don’t kill my son. Or my wife. Thanks. S.
Dread is the soul of brevity.
There was a problem.
—Shoulder, said the midwife, shaking her head.—Stuck.
—Here we go, I thought.—Here we fucking fucking fucking go.
His head was out, along with his right arm, reaching overhead, dipping his hand into the waters of the world, testing it before diving in.
—Feels cold, Dad.
—It gets colder, kid.
Orli and I had spent the last nine Tuesday nights in birth classes. The first three weeks we learned about every possible complication during labor, and about how each one could kill our baby. The second three weeks were spent learning about every possible medical treatment of the complications discussed during the first three weeks, and during the final three weeks we learned about how every one of the possible medical treatments mentioned in the middle three weeks could kill our baby. Then they gave us a photo album and a diaper.
I held Orli’s hand. Our son’s face was blue. Getting bluer.
—What do you see? she managed between breaths.
—Nothing, I said.
—Moses, I thought.
The tease. The peek. A glimpse. This is how this joke of His works. A blue head, a blue-black arm, Moses’ pre-mortem peek of the Promised Land—he’s got Orli’s lips—an oldie but a goodie, O Lord—he’s so blue—an oldie but a goodie. Orli asks,—What’s going on? I didn’t know. I didn’t know how much time we had to get him out, I didn’t know—he’s blue he’s blue—what the nurses were shouting to one another, I didn’t know what the red light meant, the one—he’s so blue—that had just lit up on the wall beside her bed, I didn’t know what the steel table was for, the one that they had just had rolled in, the one with the clear plastic box on top—do something—and the gray tubes and the yellow cords tied around and clamped together as if the whole thing had just been pulled out of the back of some storage closet most nurses had never even seen because the level of badness of a situation rarely—do something—reached the level where you might need a machine such as this, whatever this machine was, and I didn’t know why—for God’s sake, do something—a nurse was climbing onto the delivery bed, and I didn’t know why she was pressing on Orli’s pelvis with her knee, and then Orli was moaning and the midwife was shaking her head and the nurse was shaking her head and she put her second knee on Orli’s pelvis and I didn’t know what she was doing but, Jesus Christ, she was all out of fucking knees, if knees are some kind of answer, we’re going to need more knees because mine are shaking too hard to be of any use.
—Got him, called the midwife.—Got him, got him, got him, keep pressing, keep pressing, got him, got him.
I wiped the sweat from Orli’s brow and I laughed, and I closed my eyes and rested my head against Orli’s, and I thought about that expression, the one about God giving unto whoever a son, and about how little it felt like that, how much it felt as if we’d stolen a son from Him, ripped it from His hands—that was what that laugh was, the same laugh I had when I walked out of Macy’s with a bag full of clothes—how at best He dangled it over our heads for a while and made us jump for it like a child for candy as He laughed at our ache and struggle. But give? It didn’t feel as if He’d given us anything. It felt as if He’d lost His grip. Like He’d given up. Like He’d let the babies have their baby.
—He’s not breathing, said the midwife.
—I’m sorry, I said to God.—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, holy fucking shit, I’m fucking sorry.
Which isn’t why we circumcised him. Or maybe it was. I don’t know.
—It happens, said the midwife later.
His airways had been blocked. She had suctioned his nose and mouth, ventilated him, and he soon began breathing on his own.
The following day the doctor came in and, after some routine checks on our baby, he asked us if we intended to circumcise him.
—We guess, said Orli.
Thanks for nothing, Google. For every medical reason not to circumcise, there seemed to be a reason to circumcise him. For every psychological reason to circumcise him, there seemed to be a psychological reason not to.
We had the doctor do it. At least there was no God involved.
—Follow me, said the doctor.
Following, leaving, journeying. It still wasn’t over.
And Abraham arose…and he went forth. According to many, this was Abraham’s defining moment: the moment he looked around, saw what the world around him had become, and behold, he did leave, saying,—Fuck this. For this he is considered by the followers of the world’s major religions to be their father, followers who laud his courage and strength of spirit in one breath, and threaten, in the next, any of their flock who might be foolish enough to consider going forth themselves. As I pushed my son’s bassinet down the hall, I wondered if this leaving, this searching for something new, this disillusionment with the choices available, is, for some of us, the essential fucked-up condition of our lives. I wondered if we are all foreskins now. And if Abraham were alive today—in Monsey, or Mecca, or Vatican City—I wondered if he wouldn’t arise in the morning, pack up his camel, and say,—Fuck this, all over again.
—It’s okay, said the doctor as he rolled our son into the exam room.—I did all my own sons.
—We do our own taxes, I said.
—You’re very funny, laughed the doctor.
I pictured him tied to a stake; I pictured pulling up the skin on top of his shiny, bald head and snipping it off. I pictured rolling his skin all the way down his body as he screamed and screamed and begged for mercy, and, once it lay there piled up at his bloody feet, I made Kiddush on a goblet of wine and had a piece of cake.
—Very, very funny, he said.
I pressed my hands to my ears and turned around. My son screamed. I closed my eyes. Synagogues burned. Torahs were torn to shreds. Gods were banished. The moment my son became a Jew was the moment I felt, more than I had ever before in my life, that I was not.
I went home the following afternoon to feed the dogs, get some decent food for Orli, and check my e-mail. In the days since the birth, I began to wonder if maybe God had saved our son. If maybe he was supposed to be born stillborn, but God intervened. If He had answered my prayers. If the note had worked. I logged on to Virtual Jerusalem, and found the Send a Prayer page. This was going to be more of a thank-you than a prayer, but they didn’t have a separate page for that. I filled in my name, typed out my e-mail address, and in the message box below, wrote, simply:
Thank you.
S.
I was about to hit the send button when a flashing yellow text box at the bottom of the page caught my attention.
Due to a system failure, read the note, all notes sent to the Wailing Wall during the past several weeks have been lost. The system is now functioning normally and we apologize for the technical error.
The phone rang. It was my mother. I thought I was delivering good news.
—What’s his name? my mother asked.
—Paix, I said.
—Max?
—Paix.
—What kind of name is Paix?
—Thanks, I said.—We like it, too.
—Max, with an m?
—Paix. With a p. And an i. It means “peace.” Like my name, but without the God bit.
—Why would you name your kid “peace”?
—What?
—Who names their kid “peace”?
—You named your kid “peace.”
—I named my kid “peace”? Who did I name “peace”?
—Me. You named me “peace.”
Soon after my brother Jeffie died, my sister was diagnosed with deafness in one ear. I was born two years later, and so, my mother had explained when I was younger, she had named me Shalom; I was to be their peace.
—I didn’t name you “peace,” she said.
—My name means “peace,” Mom.
—Yeah, but that’s not why we named you it.
Pause.
—Does he have a Hebrew name?
—No.
—Oh.
Pause.
—May I ask if there’ll be a bris?
I thought I was delivering good news.
—Yeah, yeah. We had the doctor do it.
—The doctor?
—In the hospital.
—When?
—Yesterday.
—Yesterday?
—Yes.
—When was he born?
—Two days ago.
—Oh.
And that’s when the meconium really hit the fan.
According to someone, the circumcision needs to happen on the eighth day, and it needs to be performed by a God-fearing, Torah-observant Jew; and the God-fearing, Torah-observant Jew needs to place his lips upon the wound and suck blood from it, and I need to say,—“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to enter him into the Covenant of Abraham our father.”
I felt as if I had gotten the right answer on the final round of Jeopardy! but had forgotten to phrase the answer as a question.
It was the foreskin that broke the camel’s back.