Israel

A few days after Thanksgiving, my brother’s daughter—the lone girl among seven sons—is becoming a bat mitzvah, and I’m going to Israel for four days for the celebration.

Even when my parents generously offered to buy me a plane ticket, I wasn’t sure I’d go, afraid of seeing my brother and his family, afraid of my relatives in Israel, all of whom are strictly religious. They know, of course, about the divorce; in my extended family, as far back as I can trace, I count only one other divorce. But my religious leave-taking makes me even more suspect—it feels like an almost impossible proposition, to be different yet still belong. It’s easier to become the marginal relative seen rarely at family gatherings, whispered and wondered about. As tempting as that feels right now, it’s all the more reason why I need to go. I don’t want to preemptively cede my place in my family out of fear of how I will be viewed.

Packing requires pulling out old clothes, searching for skirts that approximate knee-length, cardigans that provide the necessary sleeve length. It’s an undercover mission back into a former land. Every skirt of mine seems too short, every ordinary shirt plunges too low. Assembling what I will bring makes me aware, more than any other time, of my body. Collarbones, knees, and elbows become landmarks that demarcate your position in contested territory. It still hasn’t sunk in that I can now wear whatever I want. This past summer, when I first wore something sleeveless (the most forbidden dress-code infraction of them all), I loved the feeling of my arms bare and unencumbered, but even so, I made sure to have a cardigan handy, not in case I got cold but in case I ran into someone Orthodox.

As I wait to board the flight to Tel Aviv, a group of Orthodox men sitting at the gate gathers to recite the afternoon prayers. There are nine of them but they need one more for the required quorum of ten men that constitutes communal prayer. They scan the crowd looking for another man—their eyes pass over the women without seeing them. They rouse a bearded, yarmulked man from his preoccupation with charging his iPhone to ask if he will join them. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know one another—in this extended community, there are no strangers.

The man admits that he hasn’t yet fulfilled his obligation to pray but nonetheless he declines to participate. Is he too trying to shed the person he outwardly appears to be? I am overexcited at the prospect that he might be pretending as well. When informed that he is the much-needed tenth man, he grimaces but joins. He stands back from the other men, but they all face the same way—eastward, the required direction for prayer—as the designated leader softly mumbles the words they all know by heart.

Watching them too are the other passengers waiting for the flight to Tel Aviv. Many of them can’t be unfamiliar with this sight, yet they still seem mildly annoyed. One passenger who notices me watching gives me a knowing smile. In jeans, which I’ll wear until I change into a skirt in the Israeli airport bathroom (there should be kiosks there for those like me—leave your forbidden clothing at the airport, reclaim them upon your departure), I’m taken for someone who is not Orthodox. I still feel like a spy, though I’m not sure for which side.

 

When I arrive in Jerusalem, my family is on a day trip to the city of Hebron, visiting the tombs of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and I set off in search of falafel. Walking around Ben Yehuda Street, I spot the American girls on their post-high-school year in Israel. Some of the girls wear ankle-length denim skirts and have an angelic air; others are dressed in knee-high boots and tight skirts, albeit regulation length, and look styled and hardened, able to pass the modesty requirements but only technically.

A few decades earlier, I was one of the girls in a long baggy jean skirt with an earnest, serious expression. During the year I spent in Israel, between high school and college, I studied Talmud all morning, then Bible and Jewish law in the afternoon. Unlike high school, where feminism was a bad word and women’s places were limited and defined, this school encouraged us to wrestle with the texts in accordance with the belief that women’s roles within Orthodoxy could slowly evolve.

On our first Shabbat at school, we ate dinner at long tables in the book-lined study hall, and one of the female teachers made the Kiddush blessings over the wine, though there were men present. As she recited the words I’d heard every week, I stared at her. My curiosity was aroused as some of the girls around me—many of whom would be attending Barnard or Penn or Columbia—traded glances warily: Just how feminist was this place? I shared their uncertainty. “She’s trampling upon the very laws she claims to be observing,” my former teachers and rabbis would have said, reminding us that though society around us might change, the laws of God and the rabbis did not.

After the blessings over the braided challahs, also recited by a woman, the teacher took out photocopied pages of Jewish texts and taught us why, according to a more liberal interpretation of the law, it was permissible for a woman to recite these blessings, even on behalf of men. Women couldn’t lead prayers or read from the Torah scrolls in front of men, but the laws for making Kiddush could be reinterpreted so as to allow women to do it.

In my high school, girls weren’t permitted to study Talmud, so I lacked the necessary skills to understand these pages of Aramaic words, to wrestle sentences to uncover their hidden meanings, to hold each interpretation of what a word meant and then the various interpretations of each of those interpretations. Much of my life was based on these texts but they were incomprehensible to me. I stared blankly at my study partner, who was only slightly more knowledgeable than I was. The oversize folio pages of the Talmud—the cryptic unpunctuated lines of Aramaic, the tiny Hebrew letters of the rabbinic commentaries— were like unintelligible maps, leaving me to wander, lost, inside the tangle of streets.

It surprised me how badly I wanted to find my way. When I didn’t have to shape myself into a form that felt too tight, I liked what I was learning—essentially a legal tract detailing the rules of returning property, the financial obligations of ownership, like a book of torts that bore the invisible hand of God. It wasn’t spiritual or theological concepts being debated, just the minute details of the law. One word necessitated an explanatory sentence. A paragraph required an extended commentary. Each interpretation inspired two subsequent interpretations. I pushed my mind as hard as I ever had, teasing out which rabbi agreed with which position and for which reasons. How could their disparate opinions be brought into agreement? How could a countertext refute an opposing viewpoint?

I put in long hours in the study hall, consumed with the desire to hand myself over entirely to these religious texts. During Yom Kippur, I prayed fervently for forgiveness for my fringed too-short high-school denim skirt, for having wanted to ask too many questions of my teachers, and most of all for having kissed my camp boyfriend. This was the worst sin I could come up with, or at least the most tangible one—something concrete on which to pin the feeling that I used to be a little bit bad but now I was becoming entirely good.

During the holiday of Sukkot, I spent time with my brother, Akiva, who was a year older than me and was studying in an Israeli yeshiva. That I was so serious and focused during this year of religious study came as a surprise to me, but there had never been any doubt that Akiva would love his time in Israel. “That one is going to be a rabbi,” predicted a friend of my mother once when, years before, she’d come over and heard Akiva belting out the prayers. When he was little, he used to keep a suitcase packed under his bed so that he’d be prepared if the Messiah arrived—as centuries of Jews had prayed for—and we were quickly gathered in from our long exile. It sounded nice enough as a theoretical prayer, but as a teenager, I wouldn’t have minded if the Messiah tarried a little longer. I worried that if God finally made good on that age-old promise, I would have to stop caring about clothes and boys and soap operas and move to Israel, where we would have to live in the throes of religious devotion; Temple sacrifices in lieu of Days of Our Lives.

Akiva and I went, on Sukkot, to one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem where, every night, the various sects of Chasidim held celebrations. On the main floor, Akiva joined the bearded, hatted, frock-coated men who danced in ecstatic circles while I went upstairs to sit with the women who peered down from the balcony, faces pressed to the metal grating for a glimpse. Did being relegated up here bother them? Did they ever wonder what lay beyond this barrier, or had they gleaned some secret to contentment that my Modern Orthodox friends and I had failed to understand? I searched their expressions for clues. Did any of them, maybe once in a while, ever want something else? Akiva could blend into the dancing circles of men, but the differences between me and these women seemed so vast as to make us barely part of the same religion. I preferred to watch the men, who displayed spiritual passion of the sort I’d never experienced. For me, religious devotion lived far more quietly: a dedicated spouse who made no grand displays of love, offered no flashy gifts, but day after day dutifully packed a lunch, prepared a dinner, rubbed a sore back.

 

Weeks passed, then a few months. I sat in front of my Talmudic tracts and pushed my way in. Slowly, slowly, I reached the beginning of comprehension, so that the letters organized themselves into recognizable locales, their black lines now like roads onto which I could venture. A word sharpened into meaning. I knew that one. And then another, and another. A word became a question, which led to another question. One word turned a sentence back on itself, offering a refutation.

For the first time, I understood how the laws progressed from a biblical phrase to a Talmudic explication to a rabbinic dictate. I was part of this chain—not just a subject of the laws but part of their transmission. The texts belonged to me as well. I adopted a theology of obedience to God’s will in which it was good to question but necessary to obey. The loftiest of inquiries about belief weren’t what mattered—instead, it was each small moment, every specific act. I could debate the exact nature of a divine being as long as I prayed to Him three times a day at the proper moments, reciting each word not necessarily with passion but with precision. I could question various understandings of commandments as long as I accepted my obligation to say the right blessings before and after I ate. I would not pick and choose which laws I would observe. Each rule was a load-bearing wall in the overarching structure. I would study Jewish texts every day. I would not touch boys, not even a casual hug, because this was forbidden. I would stop wearing jeans. I didn’t necessarily believe they were immodest but I wanted to align myself with the group to which I now fully belonged.

Here—at last—was the promise of goodness. All I had to do was be steadfast in my observance. Here—at last—was the pleasure of belief: to feel certainty about who I already was.

There wasn’t enough time left—the months were passing too quickly, and there was so much I didn’t know. As my time there came to an end, I toyed with the idea of returning for a second year but was swayed by the Columbia sweatshirt I’d worn for months and the college-course catalog with its seemingly endless choices. Before I left Israel, I went to a Jewish bookstore—not to one in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, where banners admonished women to dress modestly and where booksellers refused to sell many religious texts to girls, but to a Modern Orthodox one in the Old City of Jerusalem, where every book was permitted to me. I browsed the floor-to-ceiling shelves: commentaries on the Bible, explications of various aspects of Jewish law, philosophical treatises on God and the commandments. Each of them seemed crucial—it was impossible not to know their entire contents. I lingered for hours, wishing I could pour each of these books inside me. I carried home my heavy bags filled with the volumes I’d selected, solid reminders of the path I was now on.

In the last week of school, I sat on the bed in my dorm and took out my notebook, which I’d used to write letters to family and friends, and this time I wrote myself a letter: Do not change back. Do not go to college and be swayed. Do not return to believing tepidly, to observing nominally. I described the new person I was trying to be, a young woman firm in her convictions, learned and strong, who didn’t waver or bend. She was still engaged in the outside world, but the truth lay fortressed inside her. I could see her so clearly—all I needed to do was press the edges of my old self against this new image so that we formed a single figure.

When I came back from my year in Israel, Akiva was home as well, though in a few weeks he would be going back again to Israel, where he’d decided to attend college. A few days after we both returned, we were in his room talking. There was a pause in the conversation, and Akiva looked at me awkwardly, like he wanted to tell me something but wasn’t sure how.

“According to the Shulchan Aruch, it’s impermissible for a brother to hug his sister,” he said.

At first the words were theoretical—a theoretical brother, an imaginary sister, a hypothetical touch. I knew he wasn’t trying to make me feel bad. It was nothing personal, we were just discussing the rules in which we both believed and that we agreed could never be compromised. But I also knew that when we were both in Israel that year, I had hugged him every time I saw him. Now I felt as though I’d done something wrong. I didn’t know what to say, because how could you argue with the truth? The book he was quoting was one I’d studied as well, but now it was turning against me.

Shame touched down on my face, my arms, my legs. It didn’t matter that I’d changed. My body itself was the problem, as though it had stood too close, hugged too long, as though the rabbis warning him back were the same rabbis in high school who had noticed my too-short skirt.

Akiva returned to Israel and I started college, where I requested an all-female floor in the first-year dorm and an Orthodox roommate so that we would be each other’s buttresses against the outside. I was one of “the skirts,” the strictly Orthodox girls in the large and active Columbia Jewish community. Our wearing only skirts was the means by which we were judged and categorized—not a private religious decision but a public manifesto. I ate with the other Orthodox Jews in the kosher area of the dining hall, and in between our classes, we studied Jewish texts in the small study hall lined with books. I woke at seven, a few hours before my first class, and I hurried to morning prayers across the nearly empty campus—only the athletes and the Orthodox Jews were awake at this hour. There were a few months during my first year when I briefly returned to wearing pants, but then I stopped, not only because I was worried about how God would regard such a slippage, but, more practically, because I cared immensely about what the Orthodox boys at Columbia would think. “He probably wouldn’t date someone who wears pants,” my roommate said of a boy I was interested in. At her words, I folded up my jeans and placed them once again out of reach. This time, I promised myself, I was putting them away for good.

There was a clear expectation that if you went into the outside world, you would limit what you took in. I’d heard too many warnings: the yeshiva boy who studied philosophy and left the path; the English major who enrolled in a biblical criticism class and never recovered. I studied in Butler Library, where Plato and Aristotle and Voltaire were memorialized on the grand marble façade, but the cautionary stories of the students who left Orthodoxy were the ones carved into my psyche. Other people might have viewed college as a chance to figure out who they were; I wasn’t here to discover who I wanted to be but to remain who I already was.

It was easier if I closed myself off. I made few friends who weren’t Orthodox. It was too hard to have to explain myself all the time, as my Orthodox roommate and I had done with our first-year suitemates (one Korean, one Mormon), asking them to please leave the bathroom light on from Friday night to Saturday night because we couldn’t touch the switch. There were far too many rules to explain all of them, but the one about the light switch in the bathroom seemed important for them to know.

“So are these rules just for this weekend or every weekend?” someone on our floor asked when she heard about our request, then she tried to act like our explanation about the light switch falling into one of the thirty-nine categories of work that were forbidden on Shabbat made perfect sense to her. Until we started putting a piece of tape across the switch as a reminder, we grew accustomed to going to the bathroom in the dark.

In a poetry seminar, where the lights in the classroom were kept off to enhance the mood, I sat among those with hair dyed and noses pierced. The college they attended was complete with raucous parties and smoky bars and lots of sex—it might as well have been miles away from the one my Orthodox circle of friends and I attended, intent on remaining safe at all costs. Every day before class, I had to remind myself of what one of my favorite writers, Eudora Welty, had written: “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” Only when the professor read aloud the poems we had written did I feel that I belonged in the room.

In a required literature course, we studied the Bible alongside The Iliad and The Odyssey—this was as close as I would come to biblical criticism. The reading load was lighter for me during the week we studied Genesis—those stories were as familiar to me as those from my own childhood. When I wrote papers or participated in the class discussion, I had to remind myself to use the English names—Rivka was called Rebecca, Yosef was known as Joseph, as though they too were adopting disguises to live more comfortably in the outside world.

In a class discussion of the week’s reading, a fellow student raised her hand.

“I can’t believe people base their whole lives on the Bible. It’s like living your life according to The Iliad!” she exclaimed.

My entire life dismissed so cavalierly, yet I didn’t know what to say in its defense. I didn’t want to raise my hand and put forth the belief that a blind poet had written The Iliad but an all-seeing God had written the Bible. If challenged, I’d have had no idea how to respond.

While I was in college, Akiva and I talked less, ostensibly because we were both busy and far away from each other. When I called him, I hoped to be reminded of the person I’d decided to be. More than anything, I was afraid of losing the certainty I’d gained during my year in Israel. In Israel, he became a rabbi, but in his late twenties, he switched from the Modern Orthodox knit yarmulke that my father wore to a black velvet one, from a small cropped beard to a longer one, from khakis and button-down shirts to the ultra-Orthodox uniform of black and white. He joined one of the more mystical Chasidic sects that emphasized the need to cultivate a joyous connection to God and reject the outside world. He said that he had decided to grow his beard and side-curls when he looked in the mirror and the clean-shaven face wasn’t who he expected to see. Each of these changes, Akiva told me at the time, felt small, his whole life leading him, step by step, down this path. My parents were concerned about his transformation, worried that he was discarding the moderation with which we’d been raised. But despite any misgivings, my parents accepted who he wanted to be. They understood that he wanted to live in accordance with his beliefs. Roots to grow and wings to soar, my parents had written on birthday and graduation cards so frequently that the saying had become something of a family joke. I don’t think any of us realized yet how often our family would wrestle with what happened when these roots and wings pulled in opposing directions.

 

 

On Shabbat morning, we walk in a procession to the Western Wall, along the streets of the modern city of Jerusalem, with its contemporary stone hotels and storefronts, almost all of which are closed on Shabbat. My father has stayed behind in the hotel to rest, and Akiva leads the way—me, my mother, my sister, Dahlia, and Akiva’s children following behind. Akiva wears a gold caftan special for Shabbat and a crownlike shtreimel, the fur-trimmed hat that many Chasidic men wear. From the back, my brother looks like any ultra-Orthodox man. Only when I look past the hat and beard do I recognize him.

As we enter the walled Old City, with its narrow cobblestoned alleyways opening into wide stone-lined plazas, we pass similarly garbed men, the subtle differences in hats or coats delineating their precise affiliations within ultra-Orthodoxy. Those who adhere to a particular sect dress the same as their fellow believers, as though God were the sort of parent who liked to put His children in matching attire.

We walk down the steps toward the Western Wall—once an outer wall to the Holy Temple that stood here and the only part to remain when it was destroyed by the Romans. As we approach the spot that is regarded as one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world, we split up, men and women. On the women’s side, women in long skirts, hats, and wigs gather close to the front, weeping and whispering into the stones. Folded notes intended for God are wedged into the cracks, innumerable crinkled pleas, praises, and requests, a codex of human pain.

From the cart at the entrance to the women’s section, Dahlia and I take prayer books creased and worn from use. Nearby, a uniformed woman is handing out scarves to cover those deemed immodestly dressed—cloaks of shame, I used to call them. We are safe, though. My skirt is long enough to pass, and Dahlia is dressed in long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt, taken from her back-closet selection of what she’s dubbed her Israel clothes. Dahlia spent a year at the same women’s yeshiva in Israel I did, but she stayed a second year, returning home more ardently religious than I had, deciding to go to the same Orthodox college my mother attended instead of to Columbia as planned. If she’d gotten married younger, perhaps she would have remained as devoutly religious, but during the years of being single, she has slowly evolved, nearer now to the Modern Orthodoxy of my parents.

Dahlia and I move as close to the wall as we can, slipping between praying women for a place at the front. In this spot, where I once felt the thrill of being at the epicenter of belief, I open the prayer book to the Shabbat-morning service. Pray, I was taught, even when you’re not in the mood, and you will come to be in the mood. Though I rarely felt the passion visible in some of the women around me, who are swaying back and forth, their faces contorted with emotion as though beseeching a being who stood directly in front of them, I had once prayed dutifully. My lips moved, as was required, as I said every word. My knees bent at the appointed times. Often I had the sense of checking an obligation off a list over and over, the same words recited quickly every day, but sometimes, sometimes, I had been filled by a quiet, steadfast fervor—the words were not just written on a page but opened and admitted me inside.

Now I try to say those prayers; my eyes roll over them but to move my lips feels too false a display. Still, I try to feel something, anything. I think about those folded notes, prayers penned onto every free surface of paper and crammed into every space of this wall. I remind myself of the immense history of this space and try to be swayed by that, at least.

I try, I still try, but the gates of prayer remain firmly closed. It is the feeling of being locked out of a place that once felt like home. I hold the prayer book open in front of me but don’t recite another word.

“Smell,” urges an old woman who approaches Dahlia and me clasping bunches of mint and oregano. She holds the leaves to our faces and instructs us to make the blessing praising God who has created the varieties of spices.

Her face is pinched and grizzled. She is wearing a black dowager dress, her head covered in a scarf from which a few gray, wiry strands emerge. Her ankles, peeking out from the bottom of her dress, are swollen, trunks planted into the black leather ground of her shoes. If it weren’t Shabbat, on which the use of money is prohibited, there would be a legion of similar women, palms upturned, asking for charity.

We do as she says, and the sprigs are surprisingly fragrant. Smiling, she looks us over and offers my sister (whose uncovered hair is a sign that she’s not married) a blessing that she should find her bashert—the soulmate whom God has intended for her.

“She gave me a knowing look. I think she can tell I have a boyfriend,” Dahlia whispers to me and we laugh. Even when so many other relationships feel strained and uncertain, this is one that remains close and steadfast.

“Are we ascribing supernatural powers to spice-bearing women?” I whisper back, but I wonder why the woman didn’t offer me a blessing as well. With my uncovered hair, I appear equally single. Maybe she is in possession of some magical power that enables her to see that I’m hardly a good beneficiary for her sort of blessing.

“You never know,” Dahlia says.

In our hotel room, we’ve lain awake jet-lagged, talking about boyfriends, hers and mine, as though we were still the young sisters we once were, whispering late into the night. I talk of the excitement I feel about William, how when I’m with him, I have the constant sense of encountering someone strong and alive. And I tell her about my worry that we will prove too different. She talks about how it feels now, after all this time, to be regarded with eager expectancy, dangling on the brink of engagement to someone she met through a dating website that is (actually) called Saw You at Sinai, set up by one of the volunteer matchmakers who pair like with like. Since she graduated from college fifteen years ago, she has lived in apartments with various roommates, going out on blind dates set up by her friends and then, later, using the Orthodox dating sites where you classified yourself by your religious observance. Do you plan to cover your hair? Do you wear pants? Would you date a woman who won’t cover her hair? Would you send your future kids to co-ed schools? Would you let them watch TV? Orthodox dating was like that kids’ game of Concentration: flip over the squares until you found two that were identical.

Until this year, I’d played the role of older married sister, taking care of my kids and cooking dinner while talking to Dahlia on the phone about the exciting trips she was planning, six weeks exploring India and another trip backpacking in the Rocky Mountains. When we talked about the men she was dating, I felt an underlayer of anxiety to our conversation, concern that it would become even harder for her to find the right person as she got older and the pool of eligible Orthodox men supposedly shrunk. Inside the Orthodox community, she constantly heard the message that to be single was the worst possible fate that could befall a girl, and though I tried not to let it show, I too worried that she might end up alone.

Why had it seemed so easy for me? I’d sometimes wondered as she described what didn’t feel right about each relationship. “Do you think maybe you’re just nervous?” I found myself asking her when she talked about the boyfriends who wished to marry her. I wanted her to find the right person, but a part of me wondered if she should just put aside her misgivings about these men and grab hold of any certainty while she could. I had barely dated anyone before meeting Aaron. I was twenty-two when we got engaged, twelve weeks after we started dating. I tried to feel lucky that in getting married so young, I didn’t have to spend years in this uncertain state. I told myself I had escaped this need to reckon and wrestle. When I felt worried about my marriage, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I too could have ended up alone.

The spice-bearing woman is still hovering, and when she sees me looking at her, she finally offers me the same blessing—that I should find my bashert, my soulmate, speedily in our days. I know I’m supposed to thank her for the blessing but all I can do is smile tightly, wanting to ask her about the logical challenges my divorce poses to the concept of bashert. But most of all, I wonder what this weathered woman—half bubby, half witch—would say to this ending: You will find someone who is just like you, you will get engaged and follow the path, but you will be unhappy. You will fantasize of, and then pursue, escape. In the eyes of this blessing-bestowing woman, William would hardly qualify as a bashert. William, in Boston, has probably spent his Saturday biking or running or catching up on work. We’ve texted back and forth while I’ve been here, but it feels impossible to explain where I am. For him, this trip would have been a cultural experience, one that had little to do with who he is. It’s hard to imagine him in Israel with my family—it feels like trying to drop an oversize figurine into a meticulously constructed diorama.

Before we meet my brother at the back of the courtyard, where we’ll make the blessings over the wine he has brought along and eat the jelly doughnuts that are ubiquitous in Israel in these weeks leading up to Chanukah, I turn back to the spice-bearing woman.

I ask her in my Americanized Hebrew why she does this, gesturing to her bundle of spices. Standing right next to her now, I see that her eyes are watery and eerily pink, pools of pain.

So you will make a blessing, she tells me.

Yes, I say, I know. But why do you do it?

She holds out her hands, gestures up toward the stone wall that has seen civilizations come and go, yet has remained standing. “Le-shem shamayim,” she says. This, everything, is for the sake of heaven.

 

 

In my senior year of college, Aaron and I were set up by two friends. “You’re perfect for each other—you’re exactly the same,” my friend Elizabeth promised me when she and her boyfriend, who was Aaron’s close friend, came up with the idea.

We were standing in the kitchen of my suite, which I shared with four other Orthodox women in a dorm called East Campus, dubbed “the Lower East Campus” for its hordes of Orthodox students who clustered on the low floors in order to minimize the flights of stairs we needed to walk up on Shabbat, when elevators were prohibited. I had made Shabbat dinner for a group of friends, as I did most weeks, and Elizabeth was helping me serve the chicken and kugels, our standard fare. She was wearing a long red velvet dress that hugged her body—even when she dressed modestly, she managed to look seductive. Elizabeth had converted to Orthodox Judaism when she was seventeen, becoming a devout member of the Orthodox community, though the first time I saw her, at afternoon prayers, I noticed the overly deliberate way she bowed at the required places. Even before I saw the small tattoo on her ankle, I knew she hadn’t grown up Orthodox.

“She has a story,” said one of my Orthodox friends, her eyebrows raised with suspicion.

The rest of us were presumed to be without any such story—a preordained straight line rather than a shape with turns and bends. I knew a few people who’d left Orthodoxy once they started college, and my curiosity about them was fueled by fear. How did they stop being who they already were? I didn’t want to imagine myself ever ending up as they surely were, solitary figures who would now wander alone. I listened to the explanations offered about people like them; there was always a ready explanation. It wasn’t that they had examined their belief and found it lacking. It wasn’t that they wanted to choose their lives for themselves. Our belief was too absolute, too foolproof, for us to admit that someone else might see a few holes. People left because they had been led astray by temptation, lured by false ideas. People left only because they were depressed or because they came from abusive families or because their parents were divorced; they were unstable or defective or damaged in some way.

There were their opposites as well, those who started joining Shabbat dinners and wearing yarmulkes or long skirts until they had transformed themselves into one of us. I was curious about them as well: What made them want what we had? There were quiet whispers about possible problems these people were trying to leave behind, but that wasn’t a sufficient explanation. Unlike those who left, people who became Orthodox had seen the truth—they came of sound mind and pure heart. They were proof of the meaninglessness of secular culture. They served as reassuring confirmations that we indeed held the truth.

“I felt God,” Elizabeth declared when I broached the subject of how she knew she wanted to become Orthodox.

Though I nodded in agreement, I mostly felt envy that she seemed to possess such unwavering belief, envy that was followed by a wave of relief. If someone as sophisticated and smart as she chose this, then it had to be true, though she eventually grew disillusioned with Judaism and became an Evangelical Christian. By the time I met her, at the start of my senior year, I knew I wanted to be a writer. She too loved to write, and sometimes we shared our writing with each other, though she had far more experience than I did to draw on. “Write about Memphis,” she advised me. “Write about what it was like to grow up in such a tight-knit world.”

For our first blind date, Aaron and I met at the 116th Street gates of Columbia. He was sweet and gentle and soft-spoken, and I immediately felt I’d known him far longer than I actually had. The lines of connection were already in place. Two of my closest friends had gone to high school with him. Our fathers had gone to the same medical school. Our mothers had overlapped at an Orthodox women’s college. (“I think we were at his bris,” my mother recalled when I told her his name.)

Before Aaron, I’d had no real relationships, just that one camp boyfriend, a few set-up dates with boys from Yeshiva University uptown, and a couple of flirtatious entanglements with Orthodox boys at Columbia, always under the guise of being just friends. We lived next door to one another, hung out in each other’s rooms, sat on each other’s beds, ignoring the way the air in the room sometimes became thicker and expectant. Follow every rule, I continued to admonish myself, even ones that sometimes became more challenging by the minute. I assumed I was the only one to feel this pull of attraction—surely all the good Orthodox boys had conquered their evil inclinations. But if this was so, then why did we sit closer and closer, why did we allow only a sliver of air between us? Only occasionally did we succumb to a few illicit kisses, which caused soul-searching and guilt-ridden promises to each other that we would never allow such an infraction of the rules to happen again. It confirmed what we had arrived knowing: You always had to be on guard. No matter how tightly you were secured, you were always in danger of falling.

Before Aaron, I was drawn to boys who were dark and stormy, who had poetic souls and moody dispositions. These aspects of myself made me nervous, but even so, I was pulled to the pleasure of uncovering the layers, down to the darkest, most complicated parts. But with Aaron, there were no hard edges; there was no wrestling, no fighting. We went out three times that week and three times the next week as well, to dinner, to play mini-golf, to a Shakespeare play in the Village. My roommates, well versed in the rules of Orthodox dating, had advised me that you were supposed to discuss, by the third date, where a relationship was going—as though there were various options for where this train might be headed, an Amtrak board of changing destinations, when really the only possible endpoint was marriage.

As we sat in the common area of my dorm one night, Aaron and I marveled at how similar we were—though both Orthodox, we weren’t as rigid and dogmatic as some of our friends. If I felt sometimes that I was still a little unformed, he seemed the same way to me. Neither of us was especially forceful; we were both gentle and yielding and eager to please. We stayed up all night talking, and from the row of windows in the common area of our suite, we watched the sun rise over the East Side of Manhattan—pink and orange streaks in a blue-gray sky.

The next day, he came back to my dorm and handed me a rose that he’d concealed inside his winter coat.

“I really like you,” he said.

“I really like you too,” I said.

“You’re going to marry him,” Elizabeth predicted. I was twenty-two and the fact that I’d never before had a serious boyfriend didn’t seem particularly problematic. As far as I could tell, there was little difference between a boyfriend and a husband. Never having been in love, I was overcome with exhilaration. I walked across campus and looked at the people I passed. Did they too know this feeling? Didn’t everyone in love feel ready to burst from euphoria?

Every night, Aaron and I stayed up late talking in my dorm room, sitting next to each other on my bed but never touching. We were shomer negiah—literally, “guardians of the touch”—adhering to the prohibition against any physical contact until marriage. Outside the resident adviser’s room a few doors down, a manila envelope offered condoms free for the taking, but in our room, the door was cracked open slightly so that we weren’t technically in violation of another prohibition, this one against being alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex.

Follow every rule, I still told myself, but what about this spreading, bursting feeling that would not be contained—the part of life that did not want to stay within the confines of the law? Conquer it, subdue it, resist it, I had been taught, even though now, my body tingled with the feeling of proximity.

“Should we?” Aaron and I asked each other as we sat ever closer, a Zeno’s paradox of desire. How close can you lean and not touch? For how long can one arm graze another and both of you pretend it hadn’t happened?

“We shouldn’t,” we whispered, “we definitely shouldn’t,” yet his hand was tentatively on my face. We shouldn’t, yet we kissed and then pulled guiltily away.

“Do you think badly of me now?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said, though we both worried that we weren’t who we aspired to be. I still carried a small scolding rabbi in my head, but I was growing accustomed to the idea that you could divide yourself as you did the rest of life, a line between allowed and forbidden, a separation between holy and profane. In one of my English literature classes, I’d read, in an Emily Dickinson poem, Ourself behind ourself, concealed— / Should startle most, and I’d felt like I was coming upon confirmation of a truth that I’d quietly known all along. Where every part of life was legislated—where even a gentle brush of arms, this sweet rousing of desire, was deemed bad—it was sometimes necessary to carve secret places inside yourself. You needed to harbor a private, second self.

A month later, during winter vacation, the dorm was mostly empty, just a few students who had stayed around as I had, trying to figure out what came next. Technically I’d already graduated—I had enough credits by the middle of my senior year and was planning to spend the upcoming semester in Israel, once again studying Jewish texts. I had applied to graduate programs in creative writing for the following year but didn’t yet know if I’d get in. And if I did get in, I didn’t know if my desire to become a writer was an impractical dream.

“You’re going to go to Israel . . .” Aaron said playfully as we sat next to each other on my bed.

“Yes . . .” I said.

“And then you’ll come back . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“And then there’s August . . .” he said.

“August . . .” I repeated hopefully.

“Should we say it?”

Each word dangled. Each word, a path down which we took one more step. We could get engaged now, twelve weeks after our first date. We could get married eight months from now, in August.

It seemed so clear to me that this was the intended story of my life. It didn’t occur to me that this was only one of the possibilities that could exist. Getting engaged so quickly was an essential part of the story, as though the speed itself confirmed that we were meant for each other. I felt the giddiness of love, but also of relief, as though before I were in danger and now I was pinned more securely to my world. Until now, I had worried that I would remain perpetually single, waiting for my life to begin. Orthodox women who didn’t marry were doomed to wait and wait—our own version of a princess hidden in a tower—wait and wait for the husband who would open the doorway to everything else. Wait and wait, and if it didn’t happen, then—the picture in my mind froze. If you didn’t get married, there was nothing but a blank screen.

I told my parents we were planning to get engaged, and though I worried they would think twelve weeks of dating was too fast, they didn’t object. I seemed so happy, so sure. The weekend before we made it official, we took the train to visit Aaron’s parents in Boston. He had been nervous about telling them we were getting engaged and only snuck it in as an anxious aside at the end of a phone conversation. We might have been on the brink of engagement, but I felt like we were children, seeking permission for something we weren’t old enough to do. They protested but then, to our relief, relented; they liked that they knew my parents, that I was by all accounts a good girl.

“You seem like someone who’s always happy,” Aaron said to me as the train neared Boston, and I worried about making a good impression on his family.

I wasn’t sure if this was a wish or an observation but either way, I looked at him in surprise. No one had ever described me this way. Was it possible that he knew me so little? I felt a fleeting urge to press on the brakes and, to an enormous squeal of wheels and track, bring everything to a screeching halt. But I pushed the feeling away. You’re just nervous, I soothed myself. You’re just adjusting to the idea of getting engaged. I had no basis for comparison, but maybe this was how it felt sometimes when you were in love. And maybe he was right. I might have thought of myself as emotional, intense, often moody, but maybe he knew me better than I knew myself.

In Boston, we shopped for an engagement ring, eventually selecting a shining round diamond delicately set in antique platinum.

As we started planning the wedding, we began to fight. “Everyone fights during the engagement,” my engaged and married friends reminded me. Alarmed at how our story of falling in love so quickly had become complicated by the press of family and obligation, I decided not to go to Israel for the semester. I wanted to be with him, I had a wedding to plan, but, most of all, I was worried that it had all happened too quickly—I had the same quiet urge to put all this on pause, maybe postpone the wedding until we got to know each other a little better. But once again I told myself I was just nervous. I grew used to crying every day. The bride with the red-rimmed eyes, I would sometimes think when I looked in the mirror, but I didn’t let myself ask the questions that should have come after such an observation. To do so would have been to admit that the story I so badly wanted to be true was in danger of collapsing.

Instead, I planned the wedding and bought hats at sample sales in Brooklyn. I was planning to cover my hair in accordance with the Orthodox law that a married woman’s hair should be for her husband’s eyes alone. Neither my mother nor my future mother-in-law covered her hair. Laws like observing Shabbat or keeping kosher couldn’t be broken no matter what, but some rules, like hair-covering, were regarded as, if not exactly optional, then still not always done. But in recent years, Orthodoxy had moved rightward, and practices that had previously fallen out of favor had returned. Stringencies, once the domain of ultra-Orthodoxy, had become accepted as the required norm in Modern Orthodoxy as well. Now Modern Orthodox young women like myself routinely covered their hair, especially if they wanted to be regarded as being serious about their observance. I didn’t like the idea of covering another part of my body, but I accepted that I would do what was required of me. You don’t have to feel this way, I reminded myself whenever I felt a surge of doubt. This was not about covering who I was—on the contrary, this was about displaying a sign that I was a married woman. This was a way to wear my belonging proudly on my head.

Of course I saw the conflict between Orthodoxy and feminism—it was hard to miss—but I wanted to be part of this burgeoning movement of Orthodox feminism that was increasingly talked about in the Orthodox community, among my peers, and in articles in the Jewish newspapers, some in favor, some decrying its growing influence. As I’d learned during my year in Israel, some of the laws could be reinterpreted so that women could take on scholarly and ritual roles. I could be one of the women who were pushing the rules as far as they could go. There still remained a gate at the end of the path, sealed shut and guarded, which I tried not to think about. Were these small changes a revolution or an appeasement? I sometimes asked myself but I had no good answer, only the feeling of relief that I could remain traditional while still thinking of myself as something of a radical. Contradictions would persist, but it was possible to live with competing beliefs.

I decided to get a fall—a sort of demi-wig that would clip to the top of my head and cover most of my hair. Because the front of my own hair would be showing, it was regarded as a more liberal approach. I consoled myself that I wasn’t shopping for a wig as my right-wing counterparts might be. I was a feminist who was choosing to wear a fall. The difference between the two may have been a few inches of hair, but at the time, that small amount of space was sufficient to quiet my resistance.

“There’s no way I can get the curls as tight as yours,” warned Esther, the first wig maker I tried, as I sat in in her pink plastic salon chair in Borough Park. I was searching for a fall so curly that it would match my hair exactly.

A friend suggested I try the elusive Clairie, spoken about in reverential tones, renowned for using genuine Belgian hair, which, my friend claimed, was the most desirable for making a wig—sold to her, rumor had it, by Belgian prostitutes in need of cash.

I tracked Clairie down, feeling like I’d made contact with a celebrity, but couldn’t get an appointment; she was too busy scouring the Belgian countryside for the perfect hair. Even if I had been able to meet her, she said she couldn’t help me with a wig as curly as my own hair—apparently, there were no cash-strapped curly-haired prostitutes.

“Look on the bright side,” said Suri, another wig maker in Brooklyn whose salon chair I sat in in a small back room of her house. “You can finally have straight hair. You can be anyone you want—a blonde, a redhead!”

She was decked out in a glamorous wig of long, straight blond hair that made her look part religious wife, part Hollywood starlet. It was tempting—my curls had always seemed too wild and unruly. When I was in high school, I’d tried, twice, to chemically straighten them, to no avail. The curls had reasserted themselves in a matter of days.

At her urging, I tried on a sampling of wigs, surveying the unrecognizable girl in the mirror. Was there a way, I wondered, to observe the laws and still look like myself? I didn’t want to get married and lose myself entirely—I had decided that I wasn’t going to change my last name, and I didn’t want to alter my hair, everything about who I had once been.

I continued my search, trying someone in the theater district in Manhattan who made wigs for Broadway shows. When I walked into the small Midtown office for my appointment, the receptionist treated me with sympathy, assuming I was a cancer patient.

In the stylist’s chair, John the wig maker, a short, balding man with a weathered face and a strong New York accent, took a long look at me. I worried I would have to explain why I, with a full head of hair, was in need of a wig, but this was New York and he already knew why.

“I can’t get it that curly,” John warned me. “But don’t worry, I know what to do. All you Orthodox girls want your wigs to look better than your actual hair.”

As he held small ponytail-like color swatches to my hair, he told me how he’d once had a customer who traveled to rural towns for business where he was nervous about wearing a yarmulke. John had crafted a small circle of dark hair that his client pinned to his own; he alone knew it was there. I gave up on the possibility of the fall being curly enough. All I wanted was for it to be so good that it rendered itself invisible. I had recently been accepted to Columbia’s graduate program in creative writing, and I intended to sit in writing workshops where no one would detect the intricate world I wore on my head. Only those in the know would be able to decipher the coded message I wore, transmitting where I belonged.

At my bridal shower in Memphis, I sat displayed at the front of the room in a pink silk Laura Ashley dress—it wasn’t the kind of dress I’d ever worn before but I’d bought it because it looked appropriately sweet and bridal. Along with the Pyrex sets and the blender and the meat and dairy cutting boards, my mother’s friends gave me their cardinal pieces of marital advice: Don’t go to bed angry, in block letters on a pink index card. Don’t criticize his mother. Don’t keep score, written on light blue ​ ​and yellow cards. These women from the community, whose recipes were compiled in the synagogue sisterhood cookbooks, knew, without a doubt, the best way to make sponge cakes and brisket, and here was the recipe for a good marriage as well. Anger could destroy you. So could asking too much or pushing too hard. If those women had been handed notebooks instead of index cards, given days rather than minutes, and offered free rein and social immunity, I wondered, what might they have written to me and to all the other brides whom they sent off into their married lives armed only with paring knives and Pyrex?

In the dining room of a rabbi’s wife, I, along with a dozen other engaged young women, sat around the plastic-covered dining-room table, learning the laws of Jewish family purity. We were all virgins, presumably, and we learned that after we had sex for the first time, we were in niddah—a state of impurity—and couldn’t touch our husbands for the week or so afterward. Whenever we had our periods and for the seven days following, we couldn’t touch our husbands—no sex, not a hug, not a handshake. Nor were we allowed to undress in front of our husbands at this time, or pass them a dish, or sleep in the same beds with them. For this reason, we needed not one marital bed but two twin beds, which we could push together when we were permitted to each other, separate when we were not. For seven days following our periods, we were to check ourselves for smudges or stains twice each day with small cloths that were sold at the mikvah—along with, for an extra few dollars, a flowered carrying pouch. On the day when we first believed ourselves to be clean, we were to leave the cloths inside us for thirty minutes, just to be sure.

I was supposed to do what with that cloth? The rules had always cloaked me like the long skirts I was supposed to wear, but by getting married, they were poised to enter my body as well.

I looked around the table at the other engaged young women, but no one had any visible reaction; they just continued to copy what the teacher said into their notebooks. You don’t have to feel that way, the words like a long-standing prayer lodged inside me. This is beautiful, I told myself, hoping that if I said it enough times, I would start to believe it. Contrary to how it might appear, this was not an invasion of the most private sphere of my body. This was not an issue of a woman being deemed impure. Shape it and twist it, change it and smooth it—some sort of machine inside my head, skilled at reprocessing and reconfiguring any torn bits into a smooth whole in whose billowing folds I could still seek comfort. Quibble, if necessary, with some of the details, parse the interpretations, summon various rabbinic figures to bolster or support—I would do anything necessary so that inside me there did not form a small silent no.

I tried to focus on the photocopied calendar page that our teacher handed out, to understand the system she was explaining for how to know when sex was prohibited. It was forbidden not only for all the days of our periods and the seven days following, but on the night before we expected our periods; forbidden too on the night that was exactly a month after the date on which we’d last gotten our periods. It could be a little confusing, she conceded, and we shouldn’t be shy about going to a rabbi with a question. Or be embarrassed to bring our stained cloths, or our panties, if need be, to a rabbi to see if we were permitted or prohibited.

For the final class, we met, together with our fiancés, with the rabbi to learn not only what was forbidden but what was allowed. Sex, which until now had been taboo, was ushered into polite company. It lay at the heart of all the rules about counting the days and checking our underwear. All rumors of prudishness to the contrary, it turned out that God wanted us to enjoy sex, as long as we had counted the days of our cycles, as long as we had checked ourselves internally, scrubbed and brushed and immersed ourselves in the mikvah’s purifying waters. It was time to push from our minds all those former messages that desire was wrong. All at once, sex was right and it was wrong and it was good and it was bad. There were rabbinic opinions, we were taught, that prohibited sex in the light, sex during the day, sex anywhere but in the bedroom, sex any way but with the man on top, but it was permissible to rely on the most lenient of rabbinic positions that allowed anything consensual and pleasurable. I listened intently and, ever the good student, took careful notes. Sex = allowed, I wrote in my notebook, where I also had fragments of short stories, ideas for novels.

A few months before the wedding, Aaron and I were still fighting, mostly about family and the wedding, but those details were really stand-ins for larger issues between us. At the rise of any problem, he said he agreed with me, or maybe he didn’t, I couldn’t be sure. I felt muddled about what he really thought, then I felt bad for being upset, so I tried to mask what I felt until I felt muddled about what I really thought. When we were dating, it had felt blissfully uncomplicated. Now we belonged to parents and community, obligation and duty. What had happened to that story of falling in love so sweetly, so swiftly? Those twelve weeks that we’d known each other before getting engaged seemed like nothing now—in that short period, there hadn’t even been time to have a fight.

I stayed focused on the wedding. I browsed the women’s section of the Jewish bookstore, the equivalent of the feminine-hygiene aisle at the drugstore where books about marriage assured me that scrupulously following the laws of mikvah would keep my marriage fresh. Each month, when I went to the mikvah, the cleansing waters would almost restore me to my innocent bridal state, the night that followed like a recurring honeymoon. I picked up a lace-fronted book called Dear Kallah, a book addressed to brides like me that came highly recommended by the teacher of our class. Here in this sweet and well-meaning book was advice for how to create a blissful and tranquil home. We had found the life partners whom God sent to us to complete our souls; now our task was to carry out His work by ensuring that we built houses filled with peace and love and service of God. It all sounded nice enough, so why, as I leafed through the pages, did the easy prescriptions make me feel enraged? When I arrived at a chapter called “Thoughts to Banish,” I wanted to scream. I wasn’t married yet, but already happiness seemed far more complicated than the book’s recipe. It sounded—could I let myself say this?—like a wishful fantasy. More than that—did I dare say what I really thought?—these easy promises sounded like lies.

A month before the wedding, I went to pick up the fall, which was stored on a towering shelf of other wigs, all in cardboard boxes bearing the names of current or former Broadway shows, mine inside one labeled Beauty and the Beast.

“Here’s what you do,” John said as he pulled out what looked like a small brown animal. He showed me how to arrange my hair to cover the seam between real and fake, how to attach the fall using the small clips, called wiggies, sewn to the mesh cap.

I practiced as he showed me. On my first attempt, it looked as though I’d recently undergone brain surgery and a part of my head had been left unsewn. After a few more tries, I managed to cover the gap, but because the fall was nowhere near as curly as my hair, it was immediately apparent which curls were mine. The fall lay atop my own hair, a halfhearted outer layer.

“Don’t worry,” John assured me, “it looks fine. Only you know what’s real and what’s not.”

 

“I feel like I’m in this alone,” I said to Aaron on the phone one night as our fighting grew more intense. It was two weeks before the wedding, and I was home in Memphis, in my childhood bedroom.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said plaintively, making me feel bad for saying it. There was a soft-shelled innocence to him, a wide-eyed child so easily hurt.

I didn’t know I felt that way until I said it, and even then, I didn’t know what I meant; I just knew that when I was with him, the deepest parts remained untouched. I longed to know what he really thought and to be able to say what I really thought; to talk so that we uncovered the pieces of ourselves we didn’t yet know. Yet I came away from our conversations with a feeling of having drilled into a wall only to see the plaster give way and crumble in my hands. This was a problem, I knew, but it still seemed hard to know how big of a problem. I’d heard stories about people who broke off their engagements, but that seemed a terrible fate, rendering you both damaged and alone.

“I’m sorry,” I offered, learning early on that sometimes there was a choice between peace and honesty.

“I’m sorry too,” he said.

When we hung up, I got out of bed and looked at the white lace dress hanging in my closet. I wanted to wear that dress. More than anything, I wanted to be that girl. My eyes were once again red from crying, and I knew from experience that they would be even redder and puffier in the morning. I put two spoons in the freezer, a trick I’d come across recently in the beauty section of a magazine. In the morning I’d place one cold spoon over each eye, a healing balm that I wished could soothe not just my eyes but all the nervous parts.

I counted the days. In the week leading up to the wedding, I checked myself with the small white cloths to ensure that there was no bleeding. A few nights before my wedding, I soaked in the tub, combed out the tangles in my hair, cut my nails, smoothed my calluses.

“Are you excited? Are you nervous?” my mother asked me as we walked into the mikvah, which was in the back of our synagogue, with a separate entrance to ensure privacy.

“Both,” I said.

The only other time I’d been inside the mikvah was a few weeks before, when we’d immersed all the new dishes and wedding gifts in it—like women’s bodies, utensils, pots, and plates had to be immersed before they could be used. This was the mikvah to which my mother went. Once a month, she would go out on an unnamed errand, and when she came home, her hair would be mysteriously wet, as though she alone had been caught in a rainstorm. By the time I was a teenager, I understood where she’d gone, but aware of the privacy that surrounded this ritual, I didn’t say what I knew.

Inside, there was a bathroom with a shower and tub. In an adjacent room, there was the small pool—enough space for one person to stand comfortably with her arms outstretched. Above was a large round opening in the wall for the mikvah lady to watch through, to ensure that every part of the woman was fully under the water. In the bathroom, I showered again and forced a comb once more through my thick hair so that all the curls were disentangled. The comb ripped out strands of my hair but I wanted to follow the law precisely.

“I’m ready,” I told the mikvah attendant, peeking out from the small room.

She looked me over for any dangling cuticles or stray hairs that would constitute a separation between my body and the water.

“Very good,” she said.

I descended the steps. Here was the portal to adult life—once a girl, now a woman. I went under, hoping the water would rinse away any unease and uncertainty. I dunked twice more and said the blessing. Here was purity and here was holiness and here was a way to smooth out all those rough edges.

The next day, in the Peabody Hotel—a historic Southern landmark—a crowd of men danced around the mezzanine en route to the b’dekkin ceremony, always my favorite part of a wedding. Most of the tourists assembled in the lobby—there to watch the hotel’s famed ducks march out of the fountain where they swam all day and get onto the elevator—had little idea about Judaism, let alone why a band of yarmulked men were singing and dancing. In one of the ballrooms, I sat in Venetian lace, flanked by my mother and mother-in-law, by my sister and sisters-in-law, by my row of bridesmaids in matching teal. As Aaron was danced to me by our college friends, approaching under a canopy of arms, all the arguing of the past few months seemed to disappear. A few minutes before, our mothers had stood together, taken a plate wrapped in a napkin, and broken it, the mark of our formal betrothal and a symbol of all that was unalterable in life: once broken, the plate could be glued together but never fully restored. Two male friends had signed the ketubah, the marriage contract, which, I had been taught, was designed to protect women’s rights at a time when this was unheard of; though it might seem archaic to me now, I was supposed to regard this ancient document as groundbreaking. In it, the groom pledged to support, honor, and cherish his bride in accordance with the laws of Moses. The details of the acquisition of the bride were spelled out in Aramaic, along with the specifications for how many zuzzim, an ancient form of money, would need to be paid to me in the event of divorce—not because we would ever, God forbid, need these stipulations, but simply because the laws required this.

May God make you like Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah. May He bless you and keep you. May He shine His light upon you. These were the words my father offered with his hands resting gently on my head. Aaron’s father and both my grandfathers also blessed me, like well-wishers saying goodbye to someone setting out on a journey. They stepped back and Aaron stood before me, his face close to mine, and we whispered that we loved each other, we were ready to get married, ready for whatever came next. He took a long look at me, symbolically checking, in the tradition of the biblical Jacob, who had been tricked into marrying the wrong sister, that he had the correct girl. We would make no such mistake. Certain that I was indeed the right one, he lowered the pearl-studded tulle veil over my face.

In accordance with the tradition that all brides are to be unadorned, equal in the eyes of God, I took off my engagement ring and gave it to my sister to hold, gave my pearl earrings and necklace to my friends, talismans that they would get married soon. I walked down the aisle on the arms of my parents, the veil casting the room in an ethereal white haze. Under the wedding canopy, which was supposed to symbolize the home we would build together, I circled Aaron seven times. My mother and mother-in-law held the train of my gown as, with my body, I symbolically built the walls of our house, as I affirmed that he would be at the center of my life. We stood beside each other and I swayed with quiet fervor. All that was good, and all that was true, and all that would happen to us, please let us remain protected and tightly held. After all the fighting and all the worry, please let this have been the right choice. Please let us be happy.

In accordance with Jewish law, I didn’t say a word as I held out my hand and Aaron placed the ring on my finger, my silence my consent. Technically, he was acquiring me, but not really. We weren’t bound by that literal meaning of these words; we would keep the laws, yet create a marriage in which we were equals. With his foot, he broke the glass—really a lightbulb that would shatter easily—wrapped in the caterer’s thick white napkin so no one would be harmed by the slivers. A broken glass, because even in a time of joy, we remembered the destruction of the Holy Temple. A broken glass to remind us that both life and marriage were fragile.

The ceremony ended in a crush of hugs and mazel tovs. We were swept into the dancing circles, men with men, women with women. It was a celebration not only of our marriage but of everything we believed. I was handed a maypole and together Aaron and I stood on a chair in the center of the circle. With their arms outstretched toward us, our friends held on to pink and purple satin ribbons and danced around us. We were marrying not just each other but the community as well. I had never felt so loved, so securely within.

Near the end of the wedding, the men gathered on one side, the women on the other, and as the groom did at every wedding we attended, Aaron sang the Aishet Chayil—a traditional song praising the ideal Jewish woman.

A woman of valor who can find? Her price is far above rubies. Her husband’s heart trusts in her and he shall lack no fortune.

Our families came together and stood beside me. Our friends swayed back and forth in rows, singing along with the words that we all knew by heart.

She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. Grace is false and beauty is vanity. A woman who fears God should be praised above all.

I was written into these verses, one of these women now. There would be no great adventure, but in this story, there was no need to journey to the places where you could get lost. I had followed the rules, had done what was expected of me—gone to Israel, then to college, and had fallen in love with someone like myself. I’d ventured outside but hadn’t let it change who I was. At the end of the wedding, as our guests started to leave, we set off into the promised land of married life. I was in love with him. I was in love with the story.

 

 

The highlight of my niece’s bat mitzvah party is an amen ceremony, a ritual that has become newly popular in Israel. At predominantly female gatherings, varieties of food are passed around and each woman makes the required blessing, followed by a chorus of amens. The goal is to make as many blessings as possible, then to add as many amens as possible, because every blessing, they say, opens the heavens; every amen rouses God.

Before the ceremony begins, the guests are asked to write down the Hebrew names of the people for whom we will pray. Some of these people are hoping for children, some for financial well-being, and some for a soulmate. The list of those in need of a soulmate is the longest.

“Are you adding your name too?” I ask Dahlia, who is writing down her friends’ names on the page of those who are single.

“Of course,” she says.

“Don’t add mine,” I say, and afraid that someone in this room already has, I check the list and am relieved to see that I’m not on there.

“Why not—you’re a divorcée,” she jokes.

“A divorcée,” I repeat in an exaggerated tone, trying to imbue it with a scandalous feel. “Now you’re more acceptable than I am,” I tell her.

“No,” she says softly. “At least you have kids. Being single is always worse. You don’t know what it’s like. Even now, you’re not alone.”

“It’s true,” I agree. “But there are different kinds of alone.”

The room is filled with women, many of whom I’ve known my whole life. These women around me seem like the embodiment of goodness, the models for valorous wives who were selfless in their devotion to family and God. Women who, if they struggled, kept it hidden. Don’t you want to be as we are, their siren song of certainty calls to me, don’t you want our happy homes, our beautiful families; don’t you want our sense of purpose and most of all our faith that we are cradled in God’s all-powerful hands? I feel stained, sour, riddled. I make strained conversation, deflecting any question about me with a rush of information about the kids, the safest subject behind which to hide. As far as I know, none of these women are aware that I’m no longer Orthodox, but my divorce is bad enough. I am now someone who needs to be fixed up on dates so that a suitable husband can be found, order to the kingdom restored. When I was getting dressed, I’d debated whether to wear a cardigan over my short-sleeved shirt and had brought it with me in case. Now I put it on.

When it’s time for the ceremony to begin, small plates of food are passed around.

Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the tree, a woman says in Hebrew as she holds up an apple slice, and the women say amen.

Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the varieties of grains, says one woman clutching a cracker, her face shaded by an enormous hat.

“Amen,” the women say, resoundingly.

With their words, God no longer exists in the far-off plains of heaven. With each amen, He is here among them, capable of being swayed.

I feel lost, I text Ariel in between amens, hiding my phone in my purse. For her, seven hours earlier, it’s technically still Shabbat, but because she isn’t Orthodox, using the phone on this day isn’t an issue for her.

Hold on to who you are, she writes back, and I study her words on the screen of my phone as though they can help locate me.

“Amen,” I say along with everyone else but my voice sounds like it’s coming from a place not inside me but beyond me. I wish I could believe the gentle assurances that you can sway God with your prayers, that you can influence Him with your observance. To me, this feels like a magical proposition, an enchanted tale. I wish I could give myself over to the belief that there is a being who is watching our every move, a parent who will always come when we call. But I also know that wishing, wanting, doesn’t make something true. The world offers its own refutations, which I hear loudest of all. Each time I hear a profession of certainty, the whisper Not true grows louder in my head.

Now it’s my turn to make the blessing. A piece of apple is handed to me, and though I feel nervous—the words of this blessing, which I know by heart, might abandon me just when I need them—I hold it up like the women before me have done.

Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the tree, I say in Hebrew.

A chorus of amens in response to this blessing I have offered. I want to feel something, a small last stirring, a faint but still-present heartbeat of belief. But there is none. No rousing openness, no glimmer of possibility, nothing but a hard, unyielding silence.

This is an answer on its own.

You leave and you leave.

Cardigan on or off, it doesn’t matter. I can’t feel the belief that fills the people I love. It doesn’t matter anymore what others believe. Outwardly you can try to match those around you, but you believe or not on your own.

 

The next day, at Mini Israel, a tourist-attraction model of the country, my brother and I walk together. “I need to talk to you,” I’d told him on the phone before I arrived, but now I don’t know what to say. All weekend, Akiva has purposefully met my eye, but it’s been hard to look back with the same forthrightness.

“I’m not Orthodox anymore,” I say and I finally meet his gaze. We take the winding pathway that leads tourists to replicas of famous Israel landmarks—the Bahai Hanging Gardens and the Jerusalem soccer stadium and the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv. The country, already small, is now traversable in a matter of minutes. His children tread like giants, one in Tiberias, another in Eilat.

He’s not surprised. In his eyes, the path I’ve taken—from attending secular college and graduate school to becoming a novelist—has led me here. I am confirmation of the ultra-Orthodox belief that the outside world is indeed dangerous, that exposure to foreign ideas can harm you, that Orthodox feminism only paves the way out. It is for these reasons that he has chosen this cloistered life. Once, years ago, he posed this question: If you knew that half the wells in your neighborhood were polluted but didn’t know which half, would you allow your children to drink from any of them?

“Don’t think you can so easily walk away. A Jew can’t divorce faith. It’s not possible to do so. A Jew and faith are inextricably linked. When you don’t feel it, that’s when you cry out to God, that’s when you scream,” he says.

“I want to know what you believe,” I say—not because I want to be swayed but to hear what it sounds like to live what you believe.

There is God, he tells me, and there is Torah. And there are mitzvot—the commandments—which we are required to do. There is no greater joy he has ever experienced, he says, than to live in service of God.

“And what if you don’t believe that?” I ask.

He pauses in rabbinic fashion, looking at me kindly from behind his small round glasses of the John Lennon variety.

“I can’t prove it to you. I don’t want to convince you. But to do mitzvot—this is the point. Be mechalel Shabbat—desecrate the Sabbath—or don’t. But the reframing, the New Age interpretations of Judaism, this is sheker, this is falsehood.”

“But what if you don’t believe that?” I say again, feeling like a child who persists in asking a series of whys.

“To do an averah—a sin—it creates a pgam, a stain on the soul,” he says. “Maybe you can no longer be the best judge of how you should live because of all the pgam on your soul.” I feel like I’m at the doctor’s, faced with an image of my internal organs riddled with disease.

I swallow hard at his words but welcome the honesty. From many in the Modern Orthodox world, I hear little talk of actual belief—instead, community is sanctified and extolled. I know this is important for him too, but it’s a relief to hear someone speak of a belief that is unflinching.

In the distance, we can hear his kids yelling across this miniature model country that we have walked through several times during our conversation. His kids range in age from one to fourteen, the younger ones full of energy, the older ones growing into early adulthood, and I wonder if all of them will follow the path laid out for them. Surely for them, as for all of us, life will sometimes prove to be confusing.

“You can make yourself keep Shabbat and kosher, but you can’t make yourself believe. I’ve tried, and it’s soul-deadening. You close up, you harden. You don’t end up in the same place where you began—you’re farther away for having tried to do it without belief,” I say.

“Even then,” he says, “you seek God.”

You can believe and stay, or not believe and stay. In the end, the only choice is to stay.

“But—” I start.

“You’re stuck,” he observes, “you can’t go left or right. The answer is to look up—toward God. Absence from God, the answer is God. Absence from belief, the answer is belief. Doubting God, ask God.”

There’s no secret panel to press on to release me. Outside of belief, he sees nothing but a black hole, but I am starting to see something else, a clearing, an open space. I know as never before: This is his story, the belief he has built his life on. It is not mine.

It’s almost time for me to go to the airport and then back home to my kids, who are in a world that, from here, feels like a distant planet. He and his family will remain inside the life he has chosen.

However ironically, our conversation releases me. You can change your life and the lives of your children. You can live according to what you believe.