What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

Three years. For three years I woke in Jerusalem, inhaling sand and the scent of baking barrekas, and walked to the industrial section of Talpiot. I would pass flocks of Israeli children skipping to school, Chasidim rushing to minyan, and Palestinian workers grouped on street corners, waiting for rides to various job sites. My destination was Pardes, where I regularly prayed the morning service at sunrise with a small group of egalitarian Jews forcing gender-equality into the traditional script, the act revolutionary, evolutionary. The routine was steady, and the praying for me was more an exercise in discipline than the fulfillment of any spiritual need. I could just as easily have been running or working out with free weights. It was practice, a daily rhythm. Though admittedly there were moments when I would breathe deeply, close my eyes, and try speaking with the Divine, pretending She existed.

There is a section in the Hebrew weekday prayers, recited three times daily, called the Amidah – literally the Standing – in which the community rises and silently cycles through nineteen prayers that move from praising God to humble requests. Among these requests is a catch-all entreaty:

Most mornings, upon reaching You are a God who hears our prayers and supplications, I would insert a personal appeal, asking God to protect Jamie from harm, from the dangers of this place. During the hour-long session, it was perhaps the only moment each morning I consistently dropped my cynicism and blathered from the heart, hoping that Something on the other end was cupping a palm and receiving the words. Hoping there was a receptacle.

I come from a long line of God-haters. My maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, the grandfather I never met having lost his first wife and family to the ovens while himself escaping, then finding a new wife, my grandmother, who had also escaped. Together they fled Europe to Jacksonville, Florida, where the Holocaust and the camps were never mentioned around my mother. The one exception being at the Passover Seder, when my grandfather, full of wine, would sometimes begin to talk.

My mother hates God, has always been existentially angry, her parents dead long before their time, the stress of life having stolen decades from them. Her uncles, aunts, and cousins all murdered a lifetime ago. She’s never exactly said, “I hate God,” and the word “hate” may be too harsh, but the silent anger she’s carried all these years is unmistakable. It’s an anger I’d always understood and sympathized with, but hadn’t necessarily felt.

Growing up – forced to attend Hebrew school by parents who didn’t seem enthusiastic to embrace the religious observances being taught by ruler-wielding Israelis in suburban Atlanta – I had to blame someone for the hours of boredom and dogma. God seemed appropriate enough. And so after my bar-mitzvah, I walked out of Congregation Etz Chaim on Roswell Road and washed my hands of the Divine. I had escaped, and turned to roaming the city’s basketball courts during my free afternoons. Hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings became my sacred spaces where, for hours a day, I would practice jump shots and crossover dribbles, honing physical skills that filled the void. I was focused on making Pope High School’s basketball team, focused on joining a new congregation full of kids who spat, swore, and slapped each other on the ass. Standing five-foot-three, full of hustle and grit, I made the team, and traded the pew for the bench.

It wasn’t until college, as I suffered through journalism school and mild depression at the University of Georgia, that I realized my subconscious desire for a spiritual existence. It happened by chance one Friday afternoon while heading home on a campus bus, thinking about how to pass the lonely weekend, when a bearded, dreadlocked fellow I vaguely recognized sat down in a nearby seat. Spotting me, he leaned over, grinned, and asked, “Dave, right?”

“Yep. I’m sorry,” I said, tentatively extending a hand, “Remind me your – ”

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked.

There must have been a desperation in my eyes at the prospect of answering, for he said without a word, “We’re going hiking in North Carolina. You should come.”

After listening to my protestations of not wanting to impose on a group of people I did not know, he insisted, and two days later, I found myself sitting on an outcropping on the summit of Standing Indian in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A group of intellectual hippies flanked me on adjacent rocks as I watched a thick morning fog move through us, obscuring our vision and creating the illusion of flight. For an hour, we stared blindly into a fog that slowly dissipated, revealing in stages the most spectacular view, a view that, moments before, had been an aspiration. The silhouettes of distant mountains appeared, gently sloping statesmen standing in the early light, followed by muted reds and greens that played hide-and-seek as the haze broke. Then, as if the god of mountain vistas had decided to whisk away what remained, a southern autumn appeared, full of rustic red and earthy orange bouquets shimmering in the slanting light.

It was a spark, perhaps the first, and it kindled a desire in me to be consumed by the power of wilderness.

For the next three years, trekking through the mountains became a steady weekend routine, and my poetic sense, my Wordsworthian consciousness, was awakened by eastern bluebirds and mountain streams. Enfolded by the embrace of Appalachia, I sensed there was more, wanted more, a longing which propelled me to seek a semester abroad in Israel.

Only a few months after landing in Israel, I found myself praying in limestone caves with Hasidic masters, touching the stone walls of Tzfat’s narrow alleys, and thinking, God is in this place. I dove in head first and was taken by the undertow of irrational faith, giddy as Hebrew filled my lungs. But I also recognized how fast it was happening – this awakening – and the speed scared me, made me skeptical, a skepticism that over time led to the development of an off-and-on-again relationship with the Divine. I’d get close, fall in love, and then reflexively push God away, always believing just enough to be both hopeful and bitter, seeing images of Palestinian children being beaten at checkpoints or reading of terror attacks in Tel Aviv and thinking, What the fuck, Dude?

It continued like this for years – the breaking up, the getting back together. But after the prayers I mouthed daily in Jerusalem – Please protect Jamie from harm – and God’s answer when the bomb went off – Nope – I quietly began to hate God as a lover might a former flame. As my emotions ran dry, as I became numb in the hospital, seeing Jamie shaking, I grabbed my stuff from God’s apartment and walked out. Slammed the door. Wanted nothing more to do with Her.