My father holds out a spoon heaped with sautéed mushrooms—cremini, portobello, and shiitake—which will serve as the filling for the phyllo-dough turnovers he is making.
“More seasoning?” he asks as I take a bite.
“Delicious,” I pronounce. I assemble my own less gourmet dish of stuffed zucchini, mixing unmeasured amounts of bread crumbs, mushrooms, spices, and the zucchini innards that I’ve scooped out.
In my parents’ kitchen in Memphis, where the kids and I have come for Sukkot—the next, after Yom Kippur, in the long list of autumn holidays—cast-iron sauté pans sizzle on the stovetop. The room bursts with color. The walls of the kitchen are buttery yellow. Blue frosted-glass light fixtures dangle from the burnt-sienna ceiling. Bottles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, sprigs of rosemary clipped from the garden, cloves of garlic and shallots with their papery husks scattered around, are arrayed on the countertops. The table holds bags from the latest outing to the grocery store—we’ve made several trips to collect all the necessary ingredients.
As I stir and sample, my father chops and seasons to make tuna tartare. For my father, cooking is not obligation but art. He is a cardiologist by day, a chef by night. Everywhere else, my father is quiet, but bent over a cutting board, stirring at the stove, he comes to life, talking eagerly of whisks and garlic presses, of new recipes and combinations of flavor.
My mother bustles around as sous-chef, cleaning up rinds, cores, and peels. She’s grown her thick, wavy hair long in recent years and it has slowly turned from streaked to mostly gray. She wears bright colors and loose flowing skirts, beaded jewelry and comfortable shoes. She takes tai chi classes; she is a storyteller; she adheres to various self-help philosophies, none of which conflict with her strict religious observance. For her, cooking is utilitarian. Her art forms are the Jewish folktales she tells and her paintings, which hang on the walls around us, portraits of my grandmother, my kids, my siblings, and me. My sister’s bedroom has been turned into my mother’s studio; small tubes of paint cover the desk. She’s in love, she says, with color.
“Are the kids excited for Sukkot?” my mother asks.
“I think so,” I say. It’s an innocent question, but I hear what lurks below.
“How does it work with the kids?” she wants to know, and we are off, into the perilous double helix of divorce and religion. It’s hard to remember what we used to talk about. Now the questions abound—not only how the kids’ time will be divided but who shall retain possession of their beliefs.
“You know I’m not really Orthodox anymore,” I remind her, as I have several times already, although without detailing what exactly this means. Each time, I detect a flicker of disbelief on her face, as though I’m describing an impossibility. But I can hardly blame her—I’m still surprised myself.
“I respect your own choices, but with the kids, don’t you think . . .” My mother trails off.
“You can leave as long as you’re willing to leave alone? You can quietly stray as long as the kids remain?” I finish the sentence for her.
“I just think—” she starts to say.
“Am I supposed to pretend?” I interrupt, lowering my voice so that the kids playing in the next room don’t hear. Even as I argue with her, I worry she’s right—how many changes can the kids face in one year? How can they comfortably navigate their different worlds—their father’s and mine? I’m cagey with the kids about no longer being Orthodox. They have seen me break some of the prohibitions, but I have yet to say, The rules with which we have raised you, I no longer observe; the truths I have instilled in you, I no longer believe. I’m not sure which is the greater betrayal: to change course at this late date, or to continue to raise them in a system in which I don’t believe.
My mother doesn’t answer. There will be no stark rejection, no hard-sell coercion—though Orthodox, my parents are too open and accepting for the outright shunning that often happens in more stringently Orthodox families when the parts of a family cease to match one another. Parents stop speaking to children, children stop speaking to parents, all in the name of God. With every sentence I say, though, I am afraid of becoming unrecognizable, no longer the good daughter I am supposed to be. I worry that I will lose the sense that I belong here in this house, the only place that still feels like home.
Once the dishes are put in the oven—my zucchini lined up in the pan like a fleet of green canoes—I leave the kitchen to go check on the kids, who are playing happily. I study them as though searching for symptoms of a dreaded fever, worried that the divorce fills their minds as persistently as it does mine, that they too cannot stop noting that this is the first Sukkot of the divorce, that during this year, everything is a first. When I was their age, divorce existed only in books or the occasional after-school TV special, part of the swath of problems that affected other people. A broken home, it was always called, and I’d imagined a house cut in half, suffering the kind of wreckage we saw on the news after a tornado had touched down nearby.
In the den, the boys are plugged into a variety of screens, and Layla is playing with the bins of toys saved from my childhood—the wood blocks and the oversize red metal fire truck, the small Fisher-Price people I had once named Bayla and Faygie, and the milk crate of naked Barbies who, in earlier days, were dressed in sparkling gowns and bore names like Tiffany and Chrissy. “Those are good names for nice Jewish dolls,” my mother once quipped and I was taken aback. I hadn’t realized that the Barbies were automatically Jewish because they were mine.
There are few aspects of my family not imbued with Jewishness; it is braided through every memory, part of nearly every conversation and every relationship. On every wall of this house, there is contemporary Israeli art. Books overflow onto every free surface—this is a house made not only of bricks but of books. On my parents’ shelves, novels and volumes of poetry mingle with Jewish texts and books of Jewish folktales, books about Israel and Jewish spirituality and philosophical works by Modern Orthodox rabbis who advocate integrating secular ideas with religious ones. At least on these shelves, there is an easy commingling of disparate ideas.
In large frames displayed around the house, there are family photos of my siblings and me. My younger sister, Dahlia, who has long dark blond curls and striking green eyes, is unmarried at the age of thirty-seven. She is a therapist and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one among the many Orthodox singles who live close to one another, awaiting marriage. In a picture of my older brother, Akiva, at his wedding—which took place the same summer as mine—he is clean-shaven, the white-knit yarmulke of the Modern Orthodox on his head. His wife, in sequins and tulle, leans against him playfully. In a more recent photo, Akiva has a full beard and long ringlet side-curls and wears a black ceremonial coat and a round fur-trimmed hat like those once worn by Russian and Polish nobility. His wife’s hair is entirely covered with a gold turban, and their children are dressed in black and white, their hair cut short except for the side-curls that frame the boys’ faces. Now adherents to ultra-Orthodox Chasidism—a mystical movement started in the eighteenth century advocating for a greater emphasis on forging a spiritual connection to God—they live in the Israeli city of Tzfat; they are not allowed secular studies, not allowed exposure to art, to literature, to the outside world.
All these photos are not just family memories but photographic evidence of the presumed threats to Modern Orthodoxy, which views itself as being under siege from the right, from the left, and from inside. There is the problem of kids rejecting the so-called pick-and-choose laxness of Modern Orthodoxy and becoming right-wing Orthodox. There is the problem of kids falling through the holes created by the relative openness and becoming nonobservant. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s the problem of singles who don’t get married at the conventional time and who linger for years, feeling that the community has no place for them.
Now my siblings and I represent all of these. My parents, I imagine, must sometimes feel like they have whiplash from the varying paths we have taken. But even so, they have maintained this middle ground. They believe that you can remain strictly Orthodox without being a separatist. You can grapple with modern ideas, engage in art and science, believe in a limited feminism if you must, although not so much that it pulls you away. Teach your children to span two worlds and trust that they can navigate between them. But here lay the dilemma. If you allowed yourself to be a critical thinker, was religion exempt from this examination? If you raised children to think for themselves, what did you do if they thought in ways that were foreign to you? If you believed in free choice, what did you do if your children chose something else?
“Do you know what it feels like to live something you don’t believe?” I ask my parents when I come back into the kitchen. Each time I say this outright, I leave a little more. To leave a marriage, to leave a religion, you never go just once. You have to leave again and again.
It’s quiet in here and in the den, too, where the kids have probably made use of their special sonar that can detect when something of interest is being discussed by the adults. I look from my mother to my father. She is passionate, creative, and free-spirited, deeply engaged with religious ritual and spirituality. He makes fewer outward displays of religiosity but is in possession of an intellectual curiosity, an abiding commitment, and a quiet integrity. For both of them, there have been times when they have not fit neatly inside the Orthodox community, yet it remains the place where they belong.
“What would you do if you felt this way?” I persist. The few moments in which they are silent tick painfully past.
“You’re in a tough position,” my father says.
“It’s confusing for the kids,” my mother says.
I seek refuge in my childhood bedroom, the past intact on shelves and in the walk-in closet, where I once liked to curl up on Shabbat in a nest of pillows and read. On Shabbat, when traveling by car was forbidden, books were a permissible mode of escape. They released me from the trapped feeling I had each Friday at sundown, when the rules went into effect and it felt like we were being stranded on a desert island.
In the books I read, siblings lived parentless in boxcars; children embarked on forest adventures; a girl encountered a family who would live forever. I read of witches and ghosts, of teenage twins—one good, one bad—who went to football games and proms. No one I met in books lived as we did, but in real life, almost everyone I knew was Orthodox.
My maternal grandmother grew up in Memphis in a secular Zionist household; her father was a native Memphian and her mother an immigrant from Grodno, a city on the Poland-Russia border. My grandmother became Orthodox on her own, as a teenager. Before that, she sometimes went to the wealthier Reform temple in downtown Memphis, where she felt like an outsider. One day, searching for something more, she decided to attend the less affluent Orthodox synagogue, made up mostly of Eastern European immigrants. She was the first one to arrive at the youth service. The second to arrive was my grandfather, then a blond-haired, blue-eyed young Orthodox man, the American-born son of Polish immigrants.
My grandmother’s transformation to Orthodoxy was conveyed in storied tones, the religious equivalent of a fairy tale about a princess returned to her rightful home. If a rift was created between her and her parents, if she was regarded as rejecting their secular beliefs, I never knew about it, though I was aware that sometimes her father drove to our house on Shabbat but parked a few blocks away so that we wouldn’t actually see him desecrate the day. The gesture was appreciated, but still, family members quietly discussed whether we were allowed to have him over in the first place. By inviting him to a place that he had to drive to, we were causing him to sin—the equivalent, our rabbis explained, of placing a stumbling block before a blind man. All Jews, we were told, were responsible for one another. Our concern about the sins of non-Orthodox Jews was often held up as an example of our kindness and compassion, but even so, I used to wonder how my great-grandfather would have felt had he known he was our equivalent of a blind man.
My grandmother sent her children to the Memphis Hebrew Academy, which she helped found, the centerpiece of a now burgeoning Orthodox community; she dressed her daughters for the Children’s Ball, when mixed dancing was still allowed, and organized the school’s float in the Cotton Carnival Parade. Eventually, she sent a son to a right-wing Orthodox yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey, and a daughter to a women’s seminary in New York. Only my mother went to college, to the women’s branch of the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University, which prided itself on integrating secular and religious studies.
Though fully Orthodox, we were considered the least religious branch of my mother’s family. Modern Orthodoxy was often regarded with suspicion, seen as an intellectual way of rationalizing a laxness about the laws. To my mother’s brother’s wedding, my father wore one of right-wing Orthodoxy’s trademark black fedoras (a concession and an act of falseness that he sometimes marvels at now and says he wouldn’t repeat), and my mother covered her hair with a short curly wig that later joined our collection of dress-up clothes. My siblings and I studied the pictures of our parents dressed to fit into this alternate world. Though I was aware, from a young age, of the differences between Modern Orthodoxy and right-wing Orthodoxy, the stricter proscriptions cast an ever-present shadow. “Pants aren’t modest,” one of my cousins informed me about my jeans, and I’d been annoyed at what she said but at the same time felt I had reason to be ashamed.
There were always reasons to feel this coil of anger and shame. In fourth grade, we learned that Eve had caused Adam to sin with her unwillingness to follow God’s directions. As a punishment, God told her that her desire will be for her husband, and va timshol ba—“he will rule over her”—the text said. For homework, I needed to translate this verse, among others, and at the small white desk in my bedroom, I felt a low rumbling of anger, the same slow burn I felt in school when the boys screamed out the morning blessing designated for them, thanking God for not making them women. Without being told, we, the girls in the class, knew to use small sweet voices when we recited our counterpart version thanking God for making us “according to Thy will.” You don’t have to feel that way, we were told if we complained to our teachers about this blessing or any other perceived slight to us as girls and women. You’re too sensitive. You’ve been corrupted by the outside. You’re looking at it the wrong way. You don’t realize that these supposed denigrations are actually the opposite, because you, girls and women, don’t need all the rituals that men require. Because you are special, more spiritual, naturally close to God. My mother came into my room and I pointed to the offending words about Eve being ruled over by Adam.
“How can the Torah say that?” I asked.
The book that I had been taught to revere, seemingly turned against me.
Her eyes filled with sympathy but also conviction. “You can’t take it that way. It doesn’t mean it like that,” she explained, but I could see that she understood the problem. She considered herself an Orthodox feminist even before that term became widespread and vilified. Anywhere but in the religious arena, she would have argued against the notion of male domination. But the Torah was protected land—the words were sacred. It might have sounded confusing but she believed that, however imperfectly, feminism could coexist with Orthodoxy. A contradiction like this didn’t have the power to undo her belief. The text couldn’t be wrong; the rabbis couldn’t be wrong. If sexism was wrong, the text couldn’t be sexist. You were either reading it wrong or feeling it wrong. The laws couldn’t change, the words couldn’t change—nothing, in fact, could change—yet you could turn the words, reframe them, and reshape them, do anything so that you could still fit inside.
I continued to feel that burn of anger but tried to allow my mother’s words to spread over me, like a calm hand cooling a feverish forehead. I didn’t want to fall outside her comfort, didn’t want to walk across a dividing line as familial as it was religious. There was one truth I knew without having to be told, not just in my family but in my community, among everyone that I knew: to observe was to be good, and to be good was to be loved.
Searching for a way out of the problem the text presented, my mother and I read a biblical commentary that explained that this supposedly offending phrase referred to the fact that the man shall rule over the woman in the sexual act. It wasn’t exactly clear to me how this explanation made the words any better, but I was too embarrassed to ask my mother and find out. I may not have understood what the commentator meant by the sexual act, but I did know that it had to do with a part of the world that needed to remain hidden.
When I was in ninth grade, my friends and I went to the Mall of Memphis, where we tried on prom dresses that we’d never be allowed to wear, for a prom we’d never be allowed to have. From the outside, no one could tell we were Orthodox—unlike the boys, we didn’t to have to wear yarmulkes everywhere we went—which was a relief. But even so, there was no forgetting. Usually when I browsed through racks of clothing, I automatically separated out what was allowed, what was not. At home, my parents let me wear pants—this was one of the so-called laxities of Modern Orthodoxy—but I did so with the awareness that it wasn’t really permitted. It seemed like maybe the rabbis were right—I did feel different in jeans, strangely powerful and strong. But at school, the rules were stricter. Could you see my collarbone? Could you see my knees? Was this skirt too short, this shirt too sheer, too tight, too sexy? My friends and I folded dresses over our arms and hurried into the changing rooms. In the three-sided mirrors, I surveyed myself in a strapless satin gown, marveling at the bare shoulders and arms, the beginning of cleavage. This was an impossible version of myself; it was as though these were fun-house mirrors distorting who I really was. I was used to all the ways my body needed to be covered but less accustomed to what could be revealed. My friends and I laughed at our reflections and quickly took off the gowns, worried that the salespeople surveying us could tell that we didn’t belong inside these dresses, that they’d suspect us not of shoplifting, but of impersonating teens we would never become.
“If you’re going to be a role model, you need to wear skirts,” one of my youth-group leaders told me when I was in tenth grade. This was just before we went on a weekend retreat. Every few months we would go on one of these conventions for teenagers from observant and nonobservant homes. We traveled to cities with large Jewish populations, like St. Louis, and small ones, like Omaha and Wichita, to instill in Jewish teens a love of Orthodox Judaism. Influence them. Convince them. Sway them, we were urged regarding those who weren’t Orthodox—runaway bunnies or little lost lambs who could be gently coaxed home. I listened to my adviser’s admonition against wearing pants because, more than my freedom, I cared about his approval.
After a long overnight bus ride to our intended destination, we would arrive a few hours before Shabbat.
“You are the next link in the chain,” we were told as we sang and danced in separate circles, boys and girls.
“You are the bright light in the darkness.”
“How do we know it’s true?” my friends and I asked a rabbi on Shabbat afternoon at one of these conventions. In class we usually raised questions about the existence of God only to waste time, but here I really wanted to know. I still lay awake at night tormented by the what-ifs, but now many of them were of the religious sort. All around me, I heard the drumbeat of supposed truth. Without God, there is no meaning. Without the Torah, there is no goodness. But what if there emerged some irrefutable proof that the Torah wasn’t true? I wasn’t sure if I was dreading this or hoping for it; I didn’t know how it would feel to watch everything that I had been taught was true crumble, just as I didn’t know exactly what form such a revelation might take—I doubted that a refutation of the Torah would be announced from heaven. But the practical questions notwithstanding, what if it was proven, beyond any doubt, that the Torah was not the word of God? Would I want to know, I interrogated myself, or would I prefer to cover my eyes and carry on unchanged? On the one hand, the forbidden world would spring free—all of a sudden we would be able to watch TV on Shabbat and eat at the restaurants whose commercials we watched and that tempted us to compile lists of which we’d try first if we could. (Taco Bell, then KFC, but not Red Lobster, which seemed disgusting.) But after the excitement faded, surely the earth would sway dangerously. It would be the same as discovering you weren’t part of your own family, like learning that your parents didn’t actually love you.
At a prior convention, this rabbi had come upon me huddling close to a cute boy in the basement of the synagogue, and he had pointedly put a pillow between us. According to the Torah, it was forbidden to touch boys; wrong to kiss, wrong even to hold hands. Because I was one of the good girls, the rabbi had looked at me with surprise. He was right to react in this way. I had never kissed a boy; barely touched one, for that matter. Though I cringed at the thought of disappointing anyone, I studied the so-called bad girls in my class, the ones who wore short skirts and, it was rumored, at one of these conventions, had snuck out of their houses at night to hang out with, and possibly kiss, boys. Didn’t they feel that their every action was watched, judged? Didn’t they feel communal eyes burning marks of shame onto their skin? It was something I had always known: you existed only as you were created in the eyes of others.
This boy and I sat close, our arms brushing against each other’s. We’d pretended not to notice, though with the lights off and no one else around, the tickle of his skin against mine was the only sensation that existed—the rest of my body came to a standstill in the face of this discovery. I’d been taught about how sinful and soul-damaging it was to have any physical contact with boys, but no one had talked about the feeling that more of your body could come to life.
Here at this convention, though, as my friends and I asked questions about God, the rabbi wasn’t police officer but teacher. He didn’t have to offer me a disappointed shake of the head and a reminder that I was someone from whom he expected more. He described his own crisis of faith, when he decided he couldn’t live on the fence. Though it was clear what he’d chosen—one look at his beard and black hat dispelled any questions—I still wanted to hear him speak of the existence of these doubts. It was easy to fall for the illusion that there was only contentment, only righteousness, but I was hungry for someone to expose the underworld of dissenting feelings—even to admit it existed at all. We all believe, I heard again and again, but was it possible that there were outliers who didn’t always believe exactly as they were required to? Was there some hidden place where people admitted what they really thought—maybe inside a small box that locked with a mini-key like the one that closed my diary or in some subterranean room where, in the dark of night, they laid bare their confessions? Only in fleeting moments was there ever a hint that this alternate world existed—scandals that ripped a jagged fissure in the way the community was supposed to look, discussed by the adults at the Shabbat table, the topic abruptly changed when the children wandered back in for dessert. Each overheard story offered a small piece of understanding that I was only starting to assemble. People weren’t necessarily who they appeared to be. Good and bad weren’t always so neatly divided.
With my friends and I sitting around him, the rabbi told us that according to the Torah, animals needed to have split hoofs and chew their cuds in order to be considered kosher. However, a certain number of animals had one of these traits but not the other.
“The proof that the Torah was written by God,” he said, “was that the text states the exact number of animals in this ambiguous category.”
If a human being wrote the Torah, how would he know how many animals had one trait and not the other? Why would he risk specifying the number of animals, a fact that could easily be disproven when new lands were discovered and our knowledge of the earth expanded?
“To this day”—he paused dramatically—“that number holds.”
The hair on the back of my neck bristled. Here was proof. The Torah, the laws, the rabbis were true after all.
“Remember the certainty you feel in this moment,” he said. “You won’t be able to hold on to it, but you can remember that right here, right now, you did feel it.”
When Shabbat was over, we sat on the floor of the synagogue social hall. With the lights dimmed and the band playing softly, we swayed back and forth. A pure heart God created in me, we sang in Hebrew as a candle was passed from person to person. This was the high point of the weekend, why we had traveled all these miles. We would name how we had grown. We would inspire our peers to grow as well.
“I came feeling like I had no friends, but now I belong,” said a girl who cried as she held the candle, her face flickering in and out of view.
“I’m going to tell my parents I want to go to yeshiva instead of public school,” said a lanky teenage boy with spiked hair.
The candle came to me. “I hope I never lose the certainty I felt over this Shabbat,” I said. But already that bristling sensation at the back of my neck—the feeling that I was being shown indisputable facts—was fading.
But don’t give in to doubt. Don’t be influenced by the pull of the outside. Keep the flame of tradition burning. Bear the torch, be a light unto the nations. So many Jews had died, we were told, without the freedom we possessed. With the lights still dimmed, one of the rabbis told a story about a man who died and went to heaven. With God watching, the angels piled the man’s good deeds on one side of a scale and his bad deeds on the other. The scale teetered back and forth and then, lo and behold, it came out exactly even.
“Go back to earth,” the angels advised this soul. “Bring three good deeds to sway the Holy One, blessed be He, so that you may be admitted to heaven.”
The soul flew to earth and found a Jew performing one of God’s commandments. He scooped up the good deed and carried it to the waiting angels. But it wasn’t enough—“We need two more,” said the angels—so the soul flew back to earth and found a second good deed, which he brought to heaven.
But it wasn’t enough. One more. So the soul flew across the ocean, across the years. To Russia. To a small village. The czar and a band of Cossacks were riding horses through the street. Atrocities and suffering the likes of which you’ve never seen, the rabbi told us, his voice rising and falling dramatically. A Jewish girl, thirteen years old, tied to a horse by her long hair. Dragged through the streets. A crowd of jeering onlookers.
“A last request,” the girl begged.
The czar was intrigued, amused. Who was this girl who dared to ask such a thing?
“Quiet,” he commanded. “Let us hear her wish.”
“Two straight pins,” she pleaded.
The crowd scoffed as she was handed the pins. But this didn’t deter her.
She took the pins and stuck one through each side of her skirt, plunging them into her flesh so that her skirt wouldn’t ride up, so that her modesty would be preserved.
I was still with anticipation as I imagined this girl who would do anything to remain covered. The only thing stopping me from being covered was the impediment of my own flawed self.
To heaven the soul flew, clasping a bloody pin. Upon presenting it to the jury of angels, to God Himself, he was admitted to heaven.
At the Yeshiva of the South, where I was one of eighteen girls in the entire high school, safety pins were kept in the office to fasten shut a low-cut blouse or a skirt with an offending slit. Mothers had to be called if a new skirt needed to be procured; a spare skirt was kept in the office for those times when a mother wasn’t reachable. Modesty mattered above all. Singing was immodest (though not being allowed to sing didn’t bother me as much as the other laws—I had a terrible voice and steadfastly refused to sing in front of anyone). Our bodies too were immodest—to see a woman’s thigh was to see her nakedness. Pants showed the forbidden form of legs. Knees were equally problematic. So was any writing on our shirts that would draw men’s eyes to our chests. We might have been distractions, temptations, but modesty cleansed us of any potential sin. Modesty prevented us from tempting the weak men, who were less spiritual than we were. Modesty was for our own benefit, so that we remembered we were holy. After all, the glory of the king’s daughter is within—so said the psalm that was produced to snuff out any disgruntlement. We might have been the king’s daughters, but God, the rabbis, and all the men were the kings.
We were taught, we were told, we were watched. The rabbis existed not just in the classroom but inside my head, small disapproving figures monitoring both what I did and what I thought. They spoke not as individuals but in a collective voice. In the face of this, my own voice seemed weak and uncertain. The only available subversions were small. I mastered the art of adjusting my skirts, rolling them up or pulling them down on my hips depending on who was around. Shame and defiance wound themselves together. The male teachers reported any immodesty to the female teachers, which made us quietly ask one another, “Well, why were they looking?” But everyone was looking; this was a given. Our knees, elbows, and hair were discussed in black-scripted rabbinic texts, featured prominently in the school rules, in notes sent home reporting infractions. We were always subject to inspection, our bodies divided and measured and mapped.
The days, too, were divided, secular subjects in the morning, Judaic studies in the afternoon. We were taught to believe in reward and punishment and the world to come. We were supposed to believe the laws were eternal and unchanging. We talked of God as though we could understand His every move. “Think of life as a board game,” a teacher told us. “Would the inventors of Monopoly have created the game and neglected to give you the rules?” The Torah was a rule book as authoritative as the instruction pamphlet in a fresh set of Monopoly, the money rainbow-arrayed and all the properties organized by color. Everything happened for a reason, we were told, yet when a teenager from our community was killed in an accident, when a young woman died unexpectedly, there was no denying that events didn’t always make sense. Only then were we grudgingly forced to encounter a God whose ways we couldn’t understand.
In between prepping vocabulary words for the SATs and practicing lines for a Shakespeare play, we learned that we were not to talk to any of the three forlorn boys who made up the entirety of a separate and equally restless boys’ high school that was housed in a different wing of the building—here, at least, there was room for mystery. These three lone boys wore basketball jackets (though there weren’t enough of them for an actual team) donated by a crusading member of the community in exchange for their agreement to wear dress jackets for morning prayers, a sign of religious devotion. We weren’t supposed to talk to them—since we started high school, they had become off-limits, creatures we glimpsed out the window of our classrooms as they played two-on-one basketball on the playground or when we happened to walk past them in the school hallway as they went in one door and we went out another.
As forbidden as these boys were to us now, the same boys, or their equivalents, would become permissible when it was time to get married, which we would all do, preferably within a few years of our high-school graduations. On a school trip to North Carolina—for which we brought coolers full of kosher food—our teachers created a game in which we identified the qualities we valued most in a potential husband. An illusory feeling of love was hardly reason enough to get married. Instead, you needed shared religious values, an agreed-upon path to walk together. We rolled our eyes at the activity—we were far more interested in locating some real-life boys—but played along nonetheless. There were slips of paper and we were to select the ones naming the traits we desired: Someone who studied Torah all day. Someone who would make a good father. Someone who was handsome. Someone who was lenient enough to watch TV. I selected the qualities I thought I wanted—yes to TV, no to learning Torah all day—but since I had yet to have a boyfriend, it was hard to be sure of exactly what I was looking for in a husband.
In a class on the books of Prophets, we learned about King David, who spied the beautiful Bathsheva bathing upon a rooftop and desired her and took her for his wife. I was sitting at my small wooden desk, sticking the sharp tip of my pencil into the hem of my almost-to-the-knee-if-you-looked-at-it-from-just-the-right-angle faded denim skirt—my most ardent goal was to fringe my way around the entire skirt before the end of the school year. I stared at the clock, whose faint ticking was audible if you listened closely, willing not just the hours to pass but the years.
“‘King David gave word that her husband, Uriah, was to be sent to the front lines of the battle so that he would be killed,’” we translated from the Hebrew.
When we were in elementary school, our teachers had skipped over the juicy portions of the Torah. Only when there was no other choice would they reluctantly acknowledge that the Patriarchs and Matriarchs weren’t always perfect. At the story of Bathsheva and David, I stirred to attention. This was starting to sound a little like Days of Our Lives, which I watched during summer vacations and was allowed to tape once a week. Every Friday afternoon, I rushed home to Bo and Hope, even though my mother pointed out that we didn’t share their values.
It bore some resemblance too to the novels that existed on the other side of the line drawn between the secular and religious. In English class that year, I’d fallen in love with The Scarlet Letter. Here, in the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was blustery New England; here were other people’s rules, so strict that they made my own seem almost lax in comparison. And here, in no uncertain terms, was the punishment for sin. When Hester wears the embroidered A on her chest, “every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact . . . expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere.” And yet, that letter allows her to see people more fully. “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts . . . the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s.” Seeing my love of books, my English teacher—a non-Jewish poet who smoked a pipe and had a renegade spirit that was gloriously out of place in the school—encouraged me to talk to him about what I was reading. “You’re going to love college. You can explore anything you’re interested in,” he told me.
“King David didn’t sin,” my Jewish studies teacher insisted, trying to tamp down our curious looks.
She showed us a rabbinic commentator’s explanation for why King David’s act of sleeping with another man’s wife wasn’t wrong: Every man issued a get to his wife before he went to war so that, in the event that he didn’t return, the wife wouldn’t be rendered an agunah, a chained woman whose husband was unable or unwilling to issue a divorce and who thus could not remarry. As soon as Uriah was killed, the divorce retroactively went into effect, so when King David slept with Bathsheva, she retroactively was not married and was thus permissible to him.
I stared back in confusion—this explanation for why King David hadn’t sinned sounded a little contorted, the sort of excuse I wouldn’t dare offer for breaking a rule. Questions of desire and power seemed so apparent in the actual text but not in the version we were given. I said nothing, because to outwardly challenge a teacher would have been worse than not doing your homework or talking out of turn. I sunk lower in my seat and focused on the hem of my skirt. Be good, said this teacher. Be good, the community said. Be good, my name reminded me. But could the inside of your mind be made to conform as readily as your body could—your thoughts covered with the equivalent of a long skirt? I knew without needing to be told that an indispensable part of being good was a willingness to hide what you really thought. There was one way to be good and there were infinite ways to be bad.
The teacher drew a diagram on the chalkboard, as though a little clarification was all that was needed.
“It’s hard to understand,” she conceded. “But he didn’t sin.”
There was always an underlayer, I was realizing. Even the rules contained secret passageways, trapdoors, and hiding spots that could be accessed when necessary. But this I didn’t say. I parroted the teacher’s explanation on the test and received an A.
As much as I admired my English teacher, I imagined myself becoming like my religious teachers. I would get married young; I would be a good Jewish wife, sheltered inside the promise of contentment as far as the eye could see. Only sometimes did I allow myself to spin out other possible stories, imagining a version of myself in college—sophisticated and worldly and no longer religious—but that was as far as the story could go. I didn’t know what other kinds of lives might look like.
It was my senior year of high school and I was trying to decide what to do next. I was applying to college and also to gap-year Orthodox schools in Israel, which was the customary path for Modern Orthodox teenagers like myself—spend one year immersed in religious study, a last-chance inoculation against the dangers of secular college. At the same time, there was also the danger of kids being so inspired by their years in Israel that they became too religious and refused to come back home. Above all, the parents’ central wish: Be as religious as we are, no more and no less. I’d grown up hearing the nervous talk about a distant cousin who had gone to secular college and not returned. She’s not religious anymore—words so shocking they needed to be mouthed rather than said aloud. Though I barely knew her, this cousin was the bellwether of what could happen if you ventured too close to the edge—she Icarus, Barnard the sun. How would I answer the challenge of someone schooled in evolutionary science? What if a nonreligious roommate invited me to a party where there would be the temptations of sex and drinking? The college campus was formed not of the green lawns and brick walkways pictured on the glossy brochures but of slippery slopes down which we Orthodox students would slide, dark forests that could consume us if we dared to stray from the path. To survive these perils, we needed not courage but obedience.
Sufficiently warned, I decided to go to Israel for the year. I was interested in attending a women’s yeshiva that was on the liberal side of Orthodoxy, regarded as groundbreaking for teaching women how to engage in serious Talmud study. This school was where my parents wanted me to go—my father in particular had reservations about a youth-group adviser’s efforts to steer me rightward, toward a seminary that would offer heaping doses of inspiration and moral instruction. Girls would study only those texts that applied directly to women. The students who returned for a second year were set up on dates and married off. Among its detractors, the school had a reputation for brainwashing, but apparently this wasn’t a problem; “If our brains are being washed,” the students reportedly (probably apocryphally) said, “it’s only because they need washing.” Two of my classmates were intent on going there, and they had recently started wearing long flared skirts and prim sweaters, pantyhose and flats. They hadn’t yet been accepted to this seminary, but already they looked like they belonged.
Though I hadn’t completed an application, I decided at the last minute to have an interview with the head of the seminary when he came to visit our school. Not having planned to meet with him in advance, I was wearing an oversize gray Princeton sweatshirt, my jean skirt, and a pair of leggings, a yeshiva-girl version of teenage grunge.
He was a round, pleasant-faced man with a black yarmulke large enough to cover his nearly bald head. When he asked me why I wanted to go to his school, I knew I was supposed to say that I wanted to strengthen my belief and grow spiritually. But my teeth clenched and my stomach seized with that slow burn of anger that I was starting to recognize as resistance.
“Do girls learn Talmud?” I asked, but already knew the answer.
He raised his eyebrows as though I’d asked if I’d be allowed to use the boys’ bathroom. He gave the answer that I’d known he would—that Talmud study was for men, whereas women, who were already more spiritual, needed to study only the practical areas of Jewish law that would enable them to be good wives and mothers.
“She has a bad attitude. We would have to spend the first half of the year just breaking that down,” he later told my youth-group adviser, and I had been half ashamed, half proud.
I decided to attend the more liberal school in Israel and study Talmud. A few weeks later I was accepted to Columbia. My adviser sat stonily when I informed him of my plans. “It would almost be better for you not to go to Israel at all,” he said and I felt as though I’d failed him, or he’d failed me.
That summer, as a counselor at an Orthodox sleep-away camp outside of Memphis, I had my first boyfriend. He too was Orthodox but he wore tank tops and lifted weights, like someone who’d stepped out of one of the teen novels I devoured. I’d been shocked when I realized he liked me.
By day, I shepherded my campers to morning prayers, then to swimming and kickball. At night, my boyfriend and I walked out to the fields, flashlights in hand. We were supposed to be on patrol for wayward campers, but instead we sat next to each other in the grass. The heat was viscous during the day, the air thick and muggy, but at night, it was cooler. Thrilled and scared, I let him put his arm around me. He smelled of Drakkar and Deep Woods Off. He leaned toward me and put his lips to mine. My heart beating fast, more from fear than desire, I kissed him back, afraid my inexperience was apparent. I looked around, even more afraid that the camp director or the other counselors would stumble upon us, flashlights beaming on our faces. Desire, I knew, was just another word for bad. I imagined my teachers watching, scolding. We thought she was a good girl, they’d say from the guard post inside my head—eventually those voices start coming from not just around you but inside you. There was no need for security cameras installed on walls or in the shrubbery because they were embedded in my skin, expertly camouflaged inside the lens of my eye, like some new technology decades away from invention.
With his arms around me, I leaned back into the grass, which was unexpectedly cool against my legs. I pulled him toward me, surprised that my body knew how to do this. Having been warned about all the ways this was wrong, I hadn’t realized that desire would feel like a different kind of curiosity, a rising urge to know.
We were still kissing when I thought I heard voices coming toward us. I pushed him off me and sat up quickly. I didn’t see anyone, but still, I scooted away from him, trying to clear my face of any hint of what I’d discovered. Here was shame and danger, yet in a small spot that remained protected, here also was the entry to a forbidden realm that felt lush and pink and blooming.
Soon I would be leaving for Israel for the year. After spending months immersed in Jewish books, I would surely repent for this sin and for the other sins I hoped to amass in the next few weeks. My goodness would be retroactively restored. But until then, I was free to kiss him again. This was my final chance. Sin, because repentance was near.
“Let’s go outside,” I say to my kids, who have spread out around my parents’ house. They follow me out into the backyard, where my parents’ sukkah is. We’re commanded to sit in these huts for seven days, temporary homes like the ones the Jews built when they left Egypt and traveled in the desert. This is also the holiday of the harvest. In elementary school, we occasionally colored in mimeographed pages containing a few stalks of wheat in honor of the holiday, but other than that, there had been little talk of nature. We studied primarily the rules for how tall each wall of the sukkah needed to be, who was required to sit inside it and who was not.
My parents’ sukkah is made from wooden doors hung from a wood frame that my father built. My mother is in charge of the art, and on each of the doors she has painted a biblical figure: King David with red curly hair, playing a harp; Moses’s sister, Miriam, holding a tambourine that she used to lead the women in dancing and singing after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea.
If my children’s participation in the holiday is lackluster, it will be attributed to my bad influence, so I try to rouse my kids’ interest in making sukkah decorations. My leaving still feels so tenuous, so fragile, that any nice memory seems like a potential threat—each ritual, however nice it may be, bears the looming shadow of the larger system. Still, I can’t help but think about how much I have always loved this holiday, so much so that in the divorce negotiations, I offered Aaron every Rosh Hashanah with the kids so that I could always have this holiday with them. It’s not the rules of required dimensions and allowable building materials that I love but the story, the themes, and, most of all, the opportunity for art projects. I tell the kids how, when I was a child, my siblings and I strung frozen cranberries onto thread, making long strands that we hung across the length of the sukkah. I tell them how my father woke us early on the Sunday preceding the holiday and my siblings and I climbed a ladder, which my father held steady, and stepped onto the gently sloped roof of our ranch house, where we assisted in laying out the bamboo poles that went across the top of the sukkah.
“Can we go on the roof?” Noam asks.
“We can make paper chains,” I offer lamely after I tell the kids that they can’t go on the roof, and not just because the bamboo mats, purchased online at Sukkah.com, no longer require three little helpers. I can’t imagine that I could hold the ladder as steady as my father did. It’s too easy to envision them falling.
I expect protests, but any disappointment is short-lived. Just beyond the sukkah is my parents’ hammock—my favorite spot at home, and maybe anywhere—and I make a run for it.
The kids pile on me with giddy energy, and though there isn’t really room for all four of us, we squeeze together. Holding them close rouses my longing for their baby selves, yet every memory feels painful. Are those early days more lost to me now than they would have been? Divorce fractures the story; it draws an ever-present divide between then and now. Every memory is either preamble or postscript—every memory feels like it took place not just long ago but across enemy lines, and there is no way to sneak safely back across. I was endangering myself if I flipped through the photo albums that I made for each of the kids, filled with their baby pictures and birthday parties and trips to Cape Cod.
“We should live here,” Josh decides.
“I call Mommy’s old bedroom!” Layla says.
Out here, there are few signs of autumn, though it’s early October and the scorching Memphis summer has finally abated. A few trees will tentatively change color but nothing like the reds and yellows that already adorn my neighborhood in Newton.
“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” my grandmother once said to me in her Southern drawl as she sat in the house she’d lived in for more than forty years. Memphis wasn’t just the place we happened to live but where we had been rooted for five generations. To be from a place—for a Southerner, this was the crucial thing. It was not just your address but some core element of who you were. In Memphis, the years could unravel, all experiences peel from me, and, even more so now, this is the place that would still explain me to myself. In Newton, where we now live, any sense of belonging has been shattered. Newton, a small city that is really more like an idyllic town, has a beautiful library and playgrounds busy with kids in their Little League gear, but for Aaron and me, what had mattered most was the Orthodox community—the synagogues and the kosher bagel store and the kosher ice cream store and the scores of people who lived as we did.
As I am no longer part of this community, the idea of home feels tenuous, irreparably broken. I stumble over the word home every time I say it, not sure that I can still lay claim to its comforts. I wish, impossibly, that the kids and I could stay in Memphis—that I could give in to a leftover childhood urge to be folded up, taken in. Time will turn back, and I will become once again the teenager who lived here, the kids present by some magical doing not my own. They will feel rooted here, the next generation in this long-standing lineage.
“The new house feels like a hotel,” Josh says now, as though he can read my mind, and Layla, who is lying on top of me, her hair fluffing in my face, nods in agreement.
“I miss the old house,” she says.
Noam, who is being trampled by his younger siblings, shuffles for a better spot on the hammock. His silence worries me, though I’m not sure of the way inside. It’s not just the old house they’re all missing—it’s easier to speak of the loss of the house, harder to say that it was where we all lived together.
“It won’t always feel like this,” I answer, and I tell them how when my parents moved to this ranch house when I was six, it seemed like a mansion, the large living room a movie theater, the sunken bathtub a swimming pool. All these years later, this house feels far too permanent to ever be taken apart. I try to say more, about the idea of home and change and loss, but the exact lesson I’m attempting to impart is lost even on me.
“I feel the same way,” I admit but don’t say that it’s not just the new house but life itself that feels like a temporary locale. Nor do I speak of how I go out of my way to avoid passing our old street, dreading the sight of the Cape house where I used to have nightmares of growing frightfully large, my head protruding from the chimney, my arms from the windows, wearing the house like a too-short dress.
The need to sell the house was one of the few things Aaron and I could agree on in our divorce negotiations. We wouldn’t have been able to come to a decision about who would keep it, and neither of us could have afforded it in any case. Until a permanent plan was put in place, we had taken turns being in the house—nesting, as this was known in the divorce lexicon. To potential buyers, no mention was made of the fact that the house was being sold due to divorce; it was as though a grisly murder had taken place there. I cleared away anything that could reveal what was transpiring—no lawyers’ papers left lying around—but, then, what did unhappiness look like? Could it be recognized in a bowl slightly out of place, a mirror hung askew? In preparation for showing the house, we had a few small repairs done, but there was nothing we could do about the larger issues—the roof needing to be reshingled, the exterior needing to be painted—that we had allowed to go untended.
The day after our first open house, there were three offers, one of them made by a young Jewish couple who, having seen the telltale signs of religious observance in our house—the Shabbat candelabra on the breakfront, the calligraphed Jewish marriage contract still on our wall—thought they knew how to sway us to choose them.
We imagine that we will be as happy in this house as you were. We will raise our family here and fill our Shabbat table with as much love and joy as you did, said the note that the real estate agent read to Aaron and me as we sat stonily in her office.
We sold the house to a Chinese couple who offered no letter, nothing but a bid higher than all others and a no-mortgage clause.
Back inside my parents’ house, with the holiday preparations almost done, I’m again staring at the display of photos, my wedding photo in particular. In my own house now, all such pictures are stashed in the basement, in a still-unpacked box. But faced with this picture, I can’t look away. The photo feels like an impossibility, someone else dressed to appear as me. My eyes might be shining, my cheek pressed close to Aaron’s, but I believe, in my raw state, that any happiness must be discredited. If I could perform some sort of emotional forensics exam on this photo, surely my smile would reveal my uncertainty. Doubt would flicker in my eyes.
My mother comes up behind me and puts her arm around me, and we pull back from the argument that looms.
“Don’t you think it’s time to take this picture down?” I whisper.
“Maybe it’s good for the kids to see it?” she murmurs.
“I’m not sure what’s good for them anymore,” I say.
“I’m not trying to judge,” my mother says. “I just want to understand what you want for the kids and for yourself.”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, a paltry answer when people all around me seem to have answers in abundance.
“I realize it’s hard,” my mother says.
“It’s hard for you too.”
“It takes away,” she admits.
“I’m allowed to believe something different,” I say, but it’s late, so late, to be having this conversation. I feel like I’ve arrived at a delayed-onset adolescence, like I’m becoming the rebellious teenager I never was. Back in this house, it comes over me; a part of me had ceased to grow up. I was still in need of permission. By staying inside even when I chafed, I learned to hide what I thought. By getting married so young, I didn’t arrive earlier at adulthood but later.
As we stand here, I think about my mother’s struggle to separate from her own mother. Growing up, I heard stories of how my grandmother used to scrub clean my mother’s knees, how she had her lie down on the counter and washed her hair over the sink, then cracked eggs over her hair to make it shine. My grandmother wanted desperately for my mother to be regarded as sweet and pretty and kind. “It’s going to end with me,” my mother had once valiantly proclaimed when she was seventeen during a fight with her mother about this insistence on maintaining appearances, caring so much about what others thought. It’s a story I’ve always loved for its rebellious sentiment, even though it turned out not to be true and here we are, debating one of its variants. Did you have to match the person your mother intended you to be? Could you be who you really were and still be loved?
It seems like such a simple proposition—that you can love someone yet see the world so differently from that person. As nice as this sounds, I know that when you change, you risk losing the people closest to you. After a divorce, every relationship has to be remade, and it’s as true of the religious sort of divorce as it is of the marital sort. Religion is not just one facet of my family but its central core—part of every story told, every promise offered. Orthodoxy was more than what we believed—it was the enclosing walls of this house, its sheltering roof, its steadfast foundation.
And this, I understand anew, is why it’s so hard to leave. Leaving isn’t just about engaging in a set of once-forbidden actions. It’s about changing the family story. Orthodoxy has always been my home, and to leave it is to leave home as well.
At sundown, when the Sukkot holiday officially begins, it’s drizzling, but we do as required and go outside, where my father holds a silver cup filled with wine and recites the Kiddush blessing over it. As we are about to move inside for the rest of the meal, the rain stops, and we can eat in the sukkah after all.
We sit together, as my family has for decades. When I was little, we used to hear singing coming from other families’ sukkahs down the street. All over this neighborhood, all over neighborhoods like ours, people were sitting in the same small huts, under the same bamboo and branch roofs through which we could see the stars. We weren’t alone out here, not alone in our lives. As a little girl, staring up at the sky, I used to imagine that from outer space, all our sukkahs were visible—small dots of light in an otherwise dark night.
It’s cool out, and the kids are bundled up next to me. The navy-blue fleece I’ve borrowed from my father is large enough that Layla pulls it over herself too. At night, she’s still sleeping in my bed, and I lie awake watching her. Sensing my wakefulness, she will shift, rotate, and murmur, “Hug me,” and I will, the two of us cocooned inside our blankets. When she was a baby, I lamented each passing week, wanting to remain indefinitely inside the hazy early days when I never had to be apart from her. When she was older, she, like her brothers, cried when I dropped her off at nursery school. In the throes of separation anxiety, she wrapped her arms around my leg in protest, unable to fathom that I could go and still return.
Now, a separation comes earlier than it otherwise would. There is the need, according to our team of therapists and the stack of divorce books I’ve checked out from the library, to remind the kids that even though their parents don’t love each other as they once did, their love for their children remains permanent and unchanged. But despite every reassurance that I can offer, I cannot shelter them or any of us from the pain. There are areas of their lives to which I have little access, as though when they’re not with me, they cease to be mine. Suffering now from my own form of separation anxiety, I have the urge to cling to them as they sometimes do to me.
In the sukkah, this temporary hut that is half sheltered, half exposed, we are supposed to feel the impermanence of our lives. We leave our secure houses and go outside, where we dwell more vulnerably in God’s hands. The God part, I’m no longer sure about, but this year I need no reenactment of impermanence, no reminder that everything seemingly fixed can topple.