The Underworld

The day looms. Another Day of Judgment. In one week, on December 20, the divorce will be entered. Ninety days from now it shall be sealed.

In the school parking lot, where I’m sitting in my car waiting, chronically early to pick up the boys, I talk on my cell phone to my lawyer. I’m glad that none of the mothers who are also talking on their phones in their parked cars—all of us an armored fleet—can hear what I’m saying. They know, of course, about the divorce, but the details of how exactly one becomes divorced seem mortifying, like something bloody that ought to remain out of sight.

Even when I get off the phone, I feel exhausted from constantly thinking about the divorce. There has been fighting, far too much of it, for the most part done via text and e-mail. We trade recriminations. The commodity most plentiful is anger. How, I wonder, had anyone gotten divorced before the advent of electronic communication? Did people write letters? Actually speak on the phone?

There is a knock on my car window, and I startle. It’s another mother, a woman about my age, not someone I know well. Until now, we’ve had only a few passing conversations as we’re picking up or dropping off kids.

“Can I talk to you?” she asks tentatively.

Even before she says anything more, I know what this will be about. The grocery-store shunnings are something to which I’ve become accustomed, but there are also women who seek me out. These are fellow mothers whom I know from the kids’ schools or activities. On the outside, they give little away, but quietly, they bear their own unhappiness. For them, divorce is not an unfathomable choice but one they can imagine all too well. I now hear about marriages that are closed off or shut down, about fights and standoffs and means of escape. We are the undercover agents who live among the happily married.

It’s freezing out, so we sit bundled in coats in my car. She tells me how she and her husband have struggled for years; she had been afraid to act but realized that she had been thinking about divorce for more than half of her marriage.

“I’ve lived for a long time with the knowledge that I don’t love him anymore. I haven’t told anyone else,” she says. “I can barely bring myself to say the words.”

Until now, other people’s marriages have always been the great mystery, a sealed kingdom that few outsiders can enter. It was possible to gather a few clues here and there, but everyone was afraid to say too much. Because what if you revealed more than people really wanted to hear? It was okay to gripe about a husband who didn’t know how to bathe the kids or dress them, but it was not okay to confide a deeper sadness—what if you said that in your marriage, you felt lonely, and then the others retreated to safer ground? Your admission might dangle alone.

But in divorce, the gates are thrown open. There is no more illusion left to uphold.

“How long did you feel this way?” she asks. “When did you first realize how unhappy you were?”

Though she also wants to know about practical matters such as child support and parenting plans, what she wants more is to hear someone say, I felt that way too.

“There was no one moment—it was a slow erosion. I didn’t want to know for a very long time, not until I felt like I was erupting,” I tell her, and even now, it’s a relief to say this out loud. I have become warier, more self-protective over these past few months. From each non-hello, I’m reminded that in certain quarters, my story is incomprehensible.

“And then it was all I felt. I couldn’t do anything else. I couldn’t let myself stop, because I was afraid I would be talked into staying. I was afraid I would get scared and turn back.”

As I tell her more, relief becomes visible on her face. I’ve hardly offered her a map for how to leave—I’m still finding my own way out, and even if I knew the path to the other side, each leaving requires its own map. The trail disappears behind you. But still, this is the starting point—to name what is messy and painful and true. To hear someone else admit the truth you might suspect but that stays buried nonetheless—that you’re not the only one, that the outer versions are just that and beneath are stories you can only begin to imagine. With someone else’s admission, a door cracks open, and there it is: the entryway to an underworld.

 

 

Busy was the best place to hide. We had a son now and I divided the days between taking care of Noam and writing. Aaron was working long hours at his law firm, but this, we told ourselves, was temporary.

My first novel came out when Noam was a baby. Just before the book was published, someone in Memphis got an advance copy and told people that it was not flattering to the community. This copy was apparently passed around, with all the “not nice” passages underlined. I was surprised by the angry reaction, though I shouldn’t have been. I had known that to speak too honestly was to walk a dangerous line. My parents, who were entirely supportive of my book, had previously been viewed as troublemakers for disregarding the need to speak only good of the community and its institutions—this was a trait that apparently ran in the family. Though we were in possession of the right number of generations, to be truly inside required a willingness to subsume any errant idea or opinion.

“I read your book,” said a member of the community, too genteel to go on to say what she thought of it, but I knew how to decipher the meaning of her tight smile.

“Who do you think you are?” asked a more forthright community member I ran into in the kosher frozen-yogurt store.

As a daughter of the community, you should give thanks, not offer criticism, read an indignant, chastising letter I received from a high-school classmate.

Despite the negative reaction, I knew this was still my world. There was more space within Orthodoxy, I was sure. It didn’t have to be so narrow and unyielding. If I were a critic, it would be from the inside. During the question-and-answer period at the end of a book talk, I was always asked: “Are you still Orthodox?” Always that word still, and always my same response. “I’m a liberal, feminist, pluralist Modern Orthodox Jew—whatever that means,” I said, playing it for laughs instead of giving the longer, more complicated answer: I was Orthodox, even though I sometimes doubted. I was Orthodox, even though I sometimes chafed. It seemed less a statement of what I believed than a truth of who I was—its language, its rhythms, its customs, all part of me. Its weaknesses, its battlegrounds, its shortcomings, part of me as well. If I had attempted a longer answer, I would have said that I was willing to live with the contradictions and the tensions. I would have said that I didn’t think I would ever leave this tenuous, unresolved position. I would have said: My parents and my siblings and my husband and my son are all inside. I would have said: This is my only version of home.

Now that I had a child, there was also less time to question what I believed. My son was my devotion. When he was born, we were going to a synagogue that met once a week in the basement of a youth hostel and fell on the liberal edge of Orthodoxy. Women were carefully given more roles in the service so long as these changes could be justified within an interpretation of Jewish law. The people who attended, mostly graduate students and young professionals, were interested in creating a religiously observant but left-leaning community. It was a break from the more established, organized structures of Orthodox life, but as Noam got older, we decided we needed some of that—at least some other kids and a play group. We started to attend one of the large Orthodox synagogues in our Manhattan neighborhood, where I sat in the women’s balcony, looking down at the men in dark suits and yarmulkes, the view I had when, as a teenager, I had visited the U.S. Senate and peered down at the lawmakers from the gallery above. I still sometimes felt that low burn of resistance but I tried not to think about it. I had been taught that children needed to know exactly who they were. By becoming a mother, maybe I had to surrender the part of myself that questioned. I clipped on Noam’s yarmulke. I didn’t want to raise a child who wouldn’t belong in his own world.

When Josh was born, four years later, I was finishing a second book, about two Orthodox families whose children marry. In my work, I continued to explore the boundaries of Orthodoxy, but in my life, I had come up with a way to stay inside. I would try not to focus on those parts of Orthodoxy that I disagreed with. I would craft a smaller segment in which I could live, one remaining sliver while a larger swath was washed away. Compartmentalizing was a way to remain within. Disengagement, I was realizing, could be a comfortable place to rest. I would keep kosher, observe Shabbat, go to the mikvah, follow all the laws about which there could be no discussion. I didn’t need to be moved by these rituals so long as I continued to do them. I no longer made a point of regularly studying Jewish texts as I once had. I stopped praying every morning—not a deliberate decision but a practice that slowly fell away. I didn’t go to synagogue every week, not because I was making any kind of statement but because I was staying home with my children. In Jewish newspapers, I read increasingly of intramural squabbles in the Orthodox community over women’s roles and gay rights and the dangerous influence of the outside world, the battle lines drawn, rabbis more stringently patrolling the borders lest any outliers try to pass themselves off as Orthodox. I didn’t agree with the positions espoused by many of the Orthodox rabbis, nor with the angry tones that they employed to enforce their views. These were presumably the leaders of my world, but they didn’t have to speak for me.

Underneath this disengagement, lurking quietly, was a larger question: Did I believe in it? I had no clear-cut answer, but Orthodoxy, I was told, was not about belief but about actions. It didn’t matter what I believed as long as I continued to observe and belong. If the threads of belief began to fray, community was the net that kept you from falling. God was the prerequisite, presumably, for the religion, but sometimes He seemed like an embarrassing parent of whom it was better not to speak too often. Actual belief seemed like a small line in the fine print of the membership forms. How hard is it, the man selling the grand all-inclusive package seems to say, to leave those questions unasked and bask in the rest of what we have to offer?

 

“Are you coming home?” I asked Aaron over the phone late one night, long after I had put both boys to bed.

“Soon,” he said with an air of having been beaten down by the taskmaster partners at his law firm. He was doing the best he could, he told me; there was nothing he could do differently.

I fell asleep, then woke at two in the morning to discover that he hadn’t come home yet.

“Are you still there?” I said over the phone in a groggy haze.

“It won’t always be like this,” he promised. I had been with the boys all day, not a moment to myself, yet I felt alone. But all I needed to do was try harder—to do everything for the kids and our home, to allow him to work as long and as late as he needed. Try, try, try—the word that kept me wound, in constant motion.

 

“Could you see yourself living in Boston?” Aaron asked me one night as walked together down Broadway.

It was a Saturday night after Shabbat had ended, and we had gotten a babysitter so we could actually talk to each other. We walked with no particular destination in mind, one of our favorite things to do in the city—just walk, taking in the people, the stores, the lights coming from the apartment buildings, as beautiful to me as any constellation of stars. I felt the urgency to enjoy the city while we still could—with a small apartment and two kids, I knew that sooner or later, we would have to move away.

At his question, I stopped walking. The expression on his face was plaintive. No matter how much we both loved New York, Boston was his home.

“I know we’re going to eventually move,” I said to him as we continued downtown, “but I don’t know if I’m ready yet.”

I tried to imagine piloting my children not in a stroller but a minivan. In the city, I could hold out a little longer against what I knew lay in wait. Memphis still felt like home, the place I would always be from, but New York had become the place I most wanted to be. Every day, with the boys in the stroller, I walked down Broadway feeling the pleasure that something unexpected could always happen. More important, here I could be Orthodox but feel anonymous. It was the opposite of Memphis, where the eyes of the community were always upon you. For this reason, I didn’t want to move to a suburban Orthodox community like most everyone we knew had done and go to the same synagogue everyone else did and send our kids to the same schools and then to the same camps. Aaron and I had looked at a map and, with one broad gesture (unfairly, we knew), ruled out all of New Jersey, all of Long Island, all of Westchester—not the cities and towns themselves but the Orthodox communities, which were all we saw on a map anyway. Not wanting to be pioneers, we could go to only a handful of places, only to the discovered Orthodox world.

“I don’t want to if you don’t want to,” he said. “It was just an idea.”

I softened. “Would you have better hours in Boston?” I asked.

“Definitely,” he promised, and I heard the desperation at how much he hated his job.

We went out to dinner for his birthday. It was our favorite restaurant, a gourmet kosher steakhouse where the best compliment you could give was that you’d never know it was kosher. After we ate, I handed Aaron a small box.

Inside was a silver-and-blue mezuzah to hang in the house we would live in in Boston. I couldn’t wrap the whole of Boston for him as I wished I could, but I hoped that Boston would be, if not a cure-all, then at least a chance to fix what I had started to worry was in danger of cracking. I felt an unease below the surface, an anxious echo to my sentences, a slivered crescent of something lurking behind. I no longer believed that the parchment inside the mezuzah would actually protect us, but it could serve as a symbol of my attempt to make Boston our home.

On our last day in New York, I went back inside our empty apartment for one final look. At the sight of the bare rooms, I started to sob. I didn’t want to move. But it was too late to feel this way. This was what we needed to do. I splashed cold water on my face and went outside.

We strapped the kids into the back of a Volvo station wagon, our first car, and we drove to our new home, a blue-shuttered white Cape house that was in the Orthodox community in Newton, Massachusetts. Housing prices there were astronomical, Jewish day-school tuitions equally so, but if you were Modern Orthodox, this was what you did. We joined one of the Orthodox synagogues and went every week. We sent Noam to the Orthodox day school where Aaron had gone. We didn’t have to ask ourselves where we would fit in. A place was already carved out for us, our social life entirely intertwined with our religious one. I invited members of our synagogue over for elaborate Shabbat meals—a huge amount of work, but this was both the price to pay for belonging and its reward. All so that our children could grow up encased inside a community. All so that we wouldn’t be alone.

 

We’d been living in Boston for almost a year when my agent called to warn me that an essay criticizing a group of authors who’d written about Orthodoxy was slated to appear in the New York Times Book Review the following weekend. It was about a year after the publication of my second novel, and in the essay, a newly Orthodox writer called out me and a few other authors for being critical of Orthodoxy—and even worse, for presumably pretending to be Orthodox in the first place. She described her own recent transformation to Orthodoxy and her recognition that this way of life was good and beautiful. To be inside, she said, was to see it this way. If you didn’t see it this way, you were really not Orthodox. I was accused of being negative, of writing characters who’d wrestled, doubted, and strayed, whereas real Orthodox Jews, this writer claimed, did not engage in such activities. In my novel, I had depicted a religious young man who, caught between desire and loyalty to the law, tentatively hugged his fiancée, but according to this essayist, everyone knew a man like this would never succumb to desire—he would probably not feel it in the first place.

How dare you say I’m not Orthodox? I e-mailed the author of the piece angrily (one of those moments when I should have been made to take ten deep breaths before pressing Send). I listed my credentials for her: I had spent my entire life inside this world. I kept strictly kosher. I went to the mikvah every month. I attended synagogue every week. My husband and sons wore yarmulkes wherever they went. That would show her! If observance was what Orthodoxy required of me, I had dutifully complied. I imagined the Times would now be forced to issue a retraction—after a careful investigation into my closet, my kitchen, and my bedroom, the editors turned religious judges would certify that I was, in fact, Orthodox, as claimed.

The week after the essay came out, I stood on the women’s side of our synagogue in Newton, where I still felt like a newcomer, and sensed the question marks in people’s eyes—as though under my camouflaging hat there lurked an impostor. I picked up Noam from school, and as he came out, in a yarmulke and tzitzit—the required ritual white fringes, which hung outside his sweatpants—I felt exposed. Unlike my son, I was clearly questionable. I read a piece a rabbi published in a Jewish newspaper attacking me for an essay I’d written in response to the Times critique; it was as though one of the small figures that had lived in my head all these years had come to life and taken up pen and paper. As I cooked for Shabbat, I read blog posts that parsed just how Orthodox I really was. I read an angry missive from a woman who demanded that I label my novels as fictional representations that bore no relationship to anything that actually happened in Orthodoxy.

You must have just had a bad experience, said one of the e-mails I received—a common trope, I’d come to realize, to explain anyone who didn’t see the world as you did.

Most people would discuss their questions with a rabbi. You decided to write a book, read an angry e-mail from a woman who identified herself as a friend of my cousin.

I understood, and often felt, the anxiety about how we appeared to those on the outside—the sense that no one could really understand what it meant to live in this way—but I had believed that there was room for portrayals that showed the varieties of experience within Orthodoxy. I had wanted to reckon with the ways people lived not only within the sanctioned positions of the law but inside all the human possibilities between. I had wanted to write about the small transgressions and religious compromises people make and yet remain inside—that wily inner sphere that surely existed here as it did everywhere. But apparently, here there was no doubting, no desiring, no wandering, no wondering. Just a single shelf of sanctioned stories—stories of compliance and cohesion. Orthodox Jews went to synagogue. Orthodox Jews had Shabbat dinner with their families. Orthodox Jews were good and content. There was no other story.

 

Each month, I tallied the days of my period. I checked my underwear for any signs of blood. With small white cloths, I inspected myself for staining and counted out the days that I was clean. Then I went to the mikvah in Brighton, a fifteen-minute drive from my house. We had been in Boston for a few years by now, but it was still hard for me to drive in what felt like an unfamiliar city. Despite the hope we’d both felt when we left New York, Aaron continued to work long hours, and I had given up believing that the underlayer of unease might lessen. All I could do, I decided, was try to accept that this was how it would always be. I longed to be back in New York, where I had walked everywhere, my eyes ravenously taking in the buildings around me and the bustle of people. After barely driving for all the years I’d lived in Manhattan, the car was now my primary means of transportation. Though I’d driven on the highway as a teenager, I’d let too much time go by without doing so, and now I was afraid. I limited the places I went, plotting out routes carefully, avoiding those areas where it felt too hard to drive. I told few people about my fear, making up excuses for why I couldn’t go certain places. More than anything else I did, driving was how I knew I wasn’t from here. Bostonian drivers were a different breed than the deferential Memphian ones; in Memphis, the only time you honked was when you were passing a friend and wanted to say hello. Though I’d always had a terrible sense of direction, I’d foolishly decided not to buy a GPS, preferring to study the maps, trying to take hold of the city in my mind, to grasp its turns before I got in the car and had to navigate this place that I was sure would never feel like home.

With the mikvah, I had no choice about going. There was an appointed night and an appointed time and I went as I was required to. I studied the map and nervously set out. One night, I drove there as I had every month, but traffic was heavier than usual. My cheeks burned and I gripped the steering wheel tightly. I didn’t want to always be this way. Though it was hard to envision how my fear might ever lift, I promised myself that I would get over this by the time I turned forty. I was thirty-four then, so it felt far enough in the future as to seem unimaginable.

It wasn’t only driving there that I didn’t like. That night, and every time I went, all I wanted to do was get in and out as quickly as I could. I soaked in the tub, showered, pumice-stoned my heels, trimmed my nails, and reminded myself that this ritual was beautiful. In the mikvah, there was no safe spot of disengagement. The laws were written across my body. Out of the shower, I started to work on my hair, which had grown past my shoulders, and tried to convince myself that this act lay at the heart of what it meant to be a Jewish woman. It was dangerous to admit that I didn’t necessarily think this was true—even one’s own self couldn’t be trusted with such treachery.

Once I completed the list of required preparations, I called to let the mikvah lady know I was ready, and in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, I came out of the room. I loosened the robe and she checked my back for any stray hairs that would constitute a separation between my body and the water. Once my back had passed inspection, she motioned for me to hold out my hands so that she could examine them for any hangnails or remnants of nail polish. She checked my toenails, making sure they too had been clipped and scrubbed.

The privacy of this place was essential but when she checked my body, it wasn’t just her eyes on me but the eyes of the community, the eyes of the rabbis, the eyes of God. Everywhere you were supposed to be covered, yet as an Orthodox woman, you were always subject to inspection. When we still lived in New York, I had occasional spotting between periods, so sometimes I had to put off going to the mikvah (you couldn’t go until you had had no bleeding for a certain number of days). I was trying to get pregnant at the time, and since you couldn’t have sex with your husband until after you’d been to the mikvah, I grew concerned that we were missing the time when I was ovulating. Some Orthodox women, I knew, struggled with this for years, unable to get pregnant because the laws prevented them from having sex when they were most fertile. Ask a rabbi; this was what I had been taught. I called our synagogue and talked to the assistant rabbi, who told me to bring over the stained cloths with which I’d checked myself. I went to his office in the synagogue, where I stood hesitantly in the doorway, not sure just how embarrassed to be. He appeared uncomfortable as well—he probably wanted to look at those smeared cloths as little as I wanted to show them—but in the alleyway outside, he held them to the sunlight and squinted at the stains as though he were a doctor making a diagnosis. Finally he decided that I was indeed permissible.

“Can you comb your hair a little better?” the mikvah lady in Boston asked me, taking my curls in her hand and shaking her head in dismay.

I was surprised—she’d never before said much to me, only picked a few hairs off my back or motioned to a hangnail I needed to snip. Long ago, I’d been taught that each time I immersed myself, I would be like some incarnation of an innocent bride once again. Maybe that was what it was supposed to feel like, but at her request to comb my hair better, all I wanted to do was put my clothes back on and get in my car and head in the opposite direction of Newton, into the lights of the city of Boston, where I was also afraid to drive.

Not knowing what else to do, I went back into the small bathroom, held the comb to my hair, and looked in the mirror.

Do you believe in it? I asked myself.

Orthodoxy wasn’t about belief, it was about observance, I fought back.

Do you believe God cares about you combing your hair?

It was part of a system; it wasn’t about just this one rule but all of them.

But do you believe in it?

You didn’t have to believe; you just had to observe.

But do you?

It was a question I thought I had buried sufficiently, and it was alarming to hear—a once-mischievous old friend now returning to make serious trouble.

I looked at my hair. My quiet unease broke open. It didn’t matter what she’d asked. I wasn’t going to comb it again.

“I can’t,” I told the attendant when I emerged from the room a second time.

She raised her eyebrows in confusion, as though what I’d said made no sense.

“I can’t,” I said again. Nothing in my life felt as certain as this one sentence.

She gave a small, perturbed shake of her head and quickly inspected the rest of me without pointing out any other area where I had fallen short of the rules. Maybe she saw the resoluteness in my eyes. Maybe she was calculating that the sin would be on my ledger, not hers. Maybe I would be inspected more thoroughly in the future, the mikvah equivalent of a no-fly list.

With resigned approval, she stood watch as I walked down the steps into the mikvah. I went under the water, my fists loosely clenched, my eyes lightly closed. I came up and crossed my arms over my chest as I made the blessing praising God, King of the Universe, who commanded us to immerse. The water might have been there to cleanse me, or purify me, or maybe it was supposed to remind me that life could flow freely like a river or a stream, but as I dunked twice more, I was sure of one thing: It wasn’t possible to change my life. I might have been young, but it was far too late. I was pinned in place like the bugs in the collection I’d had to amass for my sixth-grade science class. I’d caught spiders and beetles and moths in a glass jar and placed a cotton ball soaked with nail-polish remover inside. I’d watched, horrified and fascinated, as they flittered and scurried then slowed, their legs no longer moving, their wings no longer flapping. When they were dead, I carefully emptied them onto a Styrofoam board and stuck a pin through each hard body.

The water washed over me. I would continue trying, as I always did, but even so, I hoped that one small part of me was shielded, one spot of tangled hair, perhaps, where the water couldn’t penetrate.

“Kosher,” the mikvah attendant pronounced. “Kosher.”

 

A year later, I gave birth to my daughter. For a girl, there is no equivalent to a Shalom Zachor, the traditional celebration welcoming a son on the first Friday night after his birth; no ceremony on the eighth day as there is for a boy, his circumcision marking God’s covenant with the Jewish people—or at least, His covenant with Jewish men. I was glad I didn’t have to witness another circumcision. At the ceremony for each boy, I’d waited, in horror, for the deed to be over. This was what countless Jewish mothers before me had done, and only fleeting in my mind was the question, Is there a choice?

I wanted to do something, though, to mark the birth of our daughter. A week after she was born, we had a Simchat Bat, a celebration for the birth of a daughter, a tradition that had become increasingly popular in the Modern Orthodox community. At the ceremony, I talked about how Layla was named for my father’s mother, who had died unexpectedly when I was fifteen. In the weeks after, my grandfather had come to stay with us in Memphis and sat in the backyard staring out at nothing, tears silently rolling down his cheeks. That he had loved her deeply was something I hadn’t needed to be told—it was evident to me, even as a child, in the way he helped her make dinner, cutting the vegetables for their meals; in the way, when she was older and it was hard for her to bend over, he painted her toenails for her. Before any of this, she had been a Phi Beta Kappa from Duke; she didn’t get married until her early thirties, when she returned to Hampton, Virginia, where she worked in her parents’ store and met the new young single rabbi in her hometown synagogue. Like my maternal grandmother, she became Orthodox when she got married. In naming Layla after her great-grandmother, we were tying her to tradition, our own version of the blessing we would bestow upon her every Friday night: May God make you like Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah.

As my daughter nursed, I ran my hands over her tiny legs and silken cheeks, marveling at the mystery of such a small creature, the fact that inside her head, a world was awakening. Looking at her blue-green eyes and fuzz-dusting of blond hair was like waiting for a picture to come more fully into focus. So far, little had been imprinted on her but each moment, even right now, was shaping who she would become. It felt too late for me, but was I going to offer her words that would stick in my mouth as I tried to say them? Orthodoxy, or at least our small corner of it, had continued to evolve, changes forged by women I admired. Maybe my daughter wouldn’t have to feel the inequalities and the constraints as viscerally as I did. But even then, would I have to teach her the tactics I used to remain inside? Don’t say what you really think. Don’t name what you really feel. It’s not what it sounds like. It’s not what it really means. I didn’t want her to feel that she had to tuck away any dissenting part of herself. I didn’t want her to feel that the only choice was to live with an endless sense of obligation and contradiction. Try not to be bothered by things that make you seethe. Try not to feel exhausted from walking against an ever-present tide, the current pulling your body, the sand slipping away beneath your feet.

I touched the indentation under her nose—the legend I’d been taught was that a baby in the womb is taught the entire Torah, then, before birth, an angel slaps the baby’s face, causing the infant to forget what he or she has learned and leaving this mark. Was it already determined who my daughter would become, this world encoded inside her, its rules a submerged memory, a hazy blueprint?

My daughter slept and she woke and she continued to nurse. “Be happy,” I whispered in her small soft ear. “Be free.”

 

 

My phone rings as I’m sitting in my car in the school parking lot, early again, waiting to pick up the kids. This time it’s my sister Dahlia calling.

“I’m getting engaged,” she tells me.

“Mazel tov,” I say, thrilled for her.

Her voice is filled with excitement, but at the age of thirty-seven, after so many years of being on her own, she finds it hard to take this step without some nervousness as well. It occurs to me that we won’t both be married at the same time. At my wedding, when she was newly returned from her second year of studying in Israel, I would never have imagined she would be so long unmarried, but then, I couldn’t have imagined how any of this would turn out.

Over the next few weeks, Dahlia and I discuss arrangements for her wedding—she and her fiancé have decided to get married in Israel in May. We also discuss my divorce, so our conversations veer from wedding menus and invitations to parenting plans and lawyers’ fees.

“Does my divorce scare you?” I ask her.

“Of course it does,” she says. “There’s no way to know for sure.”

To someone newly engaged, am I the best person or the worst to give marital advice?

“I remember how nervous you were when you got engaged,” she tells me, recounting how, in the weeks leading up to my wedding, I had cried to her on the phone, worried about the constant fighting between Aaron and me, but neither she nor I had known what to do. It seemed like a fixed rule: I was a bride, therefore I was happy. There was no way to make the reality conform to what we both believed to be true, and both of us were too young and unpracticed to know what to do with any apparent contradiction.

“I was twenty-two. I’d barely had a boyfriend before that. I was scared out of my mind—but I was even more afraid that if I didn’t get married then, I’d end up single forever. I thought that was the worst thing that could happen. I had no idea how to be alone.”

“Of course I feel nervous,” she says. “But I know that this is what I want. This is what I’m choosing.”

In her voice, there is confidence and a sense of calm. She sounds happier than I’ve ever heard her. I think back to the different people she dated and the pain she suffered when a relationship didn’t work. I think back to her descriptions of what it felt like to have the word single emblazoned on you, as though it were a deformity. All those times when I stood in my married-couple’s house and listened to her, I’d let myself believe that not getting married was the worst possible outcome in life. But she had a strength that I hadn’t possessed—she hadn’t allowed others to convince her to do something she knew wasn’t right for her, nor had she tried to convince herself. I am filled with happiness for her now. Despite the pain of relationships that didn’t work out, despite the years of pressure and uncertainty, she waited—not just until she found the right person, but until she became the person she most wanted to be.

 

 

“Do you want to do something a little crazy?” my friend Dena asked me when Layla was almost two years old. Our lives mirrored each other’s; we went to the same synagogue, had the same observances and patterns of the week. We invited each other for Shabbat meals, sat next to each other in synagogue, traded recipes and details of our lives.

To my surprise, she wanted me to go with her to Crystal Lake late one night and be the equivalent of the mikvah attendant as she immersed. She said she couldn’t bring herself to go to the Brighton mikvah where she usually went.

Going to the lake did sound a little crazy, but in a good way. Immersing oneself in a natural body of water was hardly a trespass against religious laws—I had been raised on countless stories of the devout women who walked on the most frigid of nights across the harshest landscapes of Russia to immerse themselves in the icy Black Sea. On vacation once with no mikvah nearby, I had no choice but to immerse myself in the Atlantic Ocean. I went to the beach early in the morning—though you were supposed to go to the mikvah only at night, I had made this compromise because the thought of being naked in the ocean at night seemed too scary. Aaron stood on the beach watching me as I swam out, removed my bathing suit, and quickly dunked under the water, hoping no one else would see what I was doing. But these outdoor mikvahs were regarded as options of last resort. In suburban Newton, with an established mikvah nearby, this excursion to Crystal Lake would surely have raised a few eyebrows. I understood, though, why Dena wanted to go to the lake. Since the time I hadn’t combed my hair well enough to please the mikvah attendant, I too no longer wanted to go to that mikvah and instead had started to go to a new nondenominational mikvah in Newton whose mission was to reinvent this ancient ritual and make it relevant and accessible to all Jews. It described itself as a place to mark not just the end of one’s period but any rite of passage. Instead of inspecting me, the mikvah guide dimmed the lights and asked me how she could help make my experience more meaningful. The first time I heard this question, it caught me by surprise; so focused on fulfilling my obligation, I had given little thought to what I wanted this to mean. I went there each month for several years, even after an e-mail was sent to members of our congregation saying it didn’t meet the standards of the Orthodox community. Even by complying with the rules, you could be rebelling. One more small transgression, one more air hole I was punching in the top of this box.

Once it was dark, Dena and I drove in her minivan to the lake, which had once been called Baptist Pond and used by a local church. She had brought a flashlight, and tripping, clutching each other’s hands, and laughing, we walked to the edge of the water. We wondered what anyone who saw us would imagine we were up to. Swimming in the lake was prohibited by local ordinance, but there were rumors of swimmers who defied the rules and swam the length of the lake at night. Perhaps anyone who caught sight of us would mistake us for one of these stealthy night swimmers.

Standing on the shore, Dena and I talked about our marriages, one admission allowing for another. Neither of us was in any rush to get home. Out here, not under the eyes of inspection, not inside the official organized structures, it was easier to speak honestly. I told her about the novel I had been working on for a few years now, set in New York City, which I still longed for, about husbands and wives who were increasingly estranged. I hadn’t set out to write about this but somehow had found myself in this fictional terrain and it scared me. Even though I always assured Aaron that of course I wasn’t writing about us, I had come to understand that it was more complicated than just that. I told Dena how I constantly tried not to be bothered by the issues between Aaron and me—issues that included the division of responsibilities, religious differences, family, and the difficulty of creating emotional intimacy. We couldn’t talk openly about the problems, so the only way around them was to act as if they weren’t there, though this only exacerbated that underlayer of unease that I’d long felt. I’d started to think about the two of us going to couples therapy and I had collected a few names, but I hadn’t done anything else about it. “I’m done,” I sometimes told Aaron when the issues erupted into a fight, but the words vanished as soon as they hit the air, as though I’d never uttered them at all. When I talked to my mother on the phone, I confided in her about my marriage, but later told her I had just been upset and didn’t mean what I said. Sometimes I cried to Dahlia, who was a therapist and therefore, I reasoned, wouldn’t mind if I stopped pretending that everything was fine.

“What are you going to do about it?” Dahlia asked me.

“Do? I was planning to ruminate about it for the rest of my life,” I said, only partially joking.

“People who are unable to make small changes sometimes end up making big changes,” she warned me. I was intrigued by the possibility that change might one day happen to me but couldn’t imagine it was something I would ever bring about. I was hardly the kind of person who would upend her life—I didn’t know what that kind of person looked like, but I was sure she didn’t look like me.

Across the lake, a train rumbled by. A few late-night walkers strode past us, in pairs or with dogs. Somewhere nearby there was the laughter of teenagers. Dena stripped down to her bathing suit and handed me her glasses and wedding ring. We looked at each other and laughed again. “Local Mothers Arrested for Skinny-Dipping in Crystal Lake,” I imagined the headlines of the Newton TAB. “Orthodox Women Cited for Naked Water Ritual.” I could barely see her as she walked out and crouched down so that the water covered her shoulders, then she wriggled out of her bathing suit and went under.

In a few months, this summer would end, and once again, there would be the start of the new Jewish year. No matter what feeble protests I launched, I knew that I would once again stand in my in-laws’ synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and pull my hat over my face to try to cover what I felt.

Dena emerged from the lake and wrapped a towel around herself. After she dried off and put her clothes on, we got back in her minivan and she dropped me off at home. I had put the kids to bed before I left, and Aaron was at the dining-room table, working and trying not to fall asleep. Words played loudly in my head—my marriage didn’t fill me, it wasn’t enough—but they needed to be hidden at all costs, concealed weapons that endangered us all. Upstairs, I checked on my three sleeping children. If the word divorce ever dared to crest in my mind, the sight of the three of them sleeping unsuspectingly was enough to push it away.

I went to our bedroom, where I lay awake in one of the two twin beds that were pushed together or not according to the prescriptions of the law. It was hard to fall asleep, but when I lay awake, dangerous thoughts unfurled. If I thought about my marriage, I felt the spread of sadness. If I thought about religion, I felt a burn of frustration. Fantasy was the only escape. It could be enough, couldn’t it, to live inside your mind? I spooled backward in time to the time before we got engaged and constructed different versions of my life. What if I weren’t Orthodox? What if I hadn’t gotten married so young? I could try to blame Orthodoxy for my choices, but really, I knew I had only myself to blame. I hadn’t listened to that voice inside me that doubted whether marrying Aaron was the right choice. I had wanted to keep my eyes closed and force the reality to match the story I held in my head.

The next month, when it was time for me to go to the mikvah, I went to the lake. With Dena standing watch by the edge of the water, I waded out. The water was still cold, even though it was the end of summer. I slipped off my bathing suit and went completely under. Dena could hardly see I was here, let alone know whether my hair had been sufficiently combed. Alone in the water, my body made ripples that floated across the still surface. I lay on my back, took in the moon, which was low and full, and the sky lit with stars, a consolation for the loneliness lurking inside me. I felt more at ease being naked out here than I had in any of the indoor mikvahs I’d used. I didn’t think of myself as someone who would be moved by a lake, by a night sky, yet for the first time, I felt some softness and easing amid all those callused places. If there was any sliver of meaning, any sense of God’s presence, it lay in the feeling of being away from the rules, away from the official eyes.

 

Almost a year later, I was invited to participate in the Orthodox Forum, a group of approximately one hundred rabbis and Jewish communal leaders selected annually to discuss an issue of relevance to Modern Orthodoxy. In past years, they had debated personal autonomy and rabbinic authority, and relationships between traditional and nontraditional Jews. This year the topic was Orthodoxy and Culture, and I, along with several other Orthodox artists, was asked to describe how my religious and artistic lives meshed.

Sitting at my desk in the alcove office off our living room, which I considered my small refuge, I answered the questions that had been sent to me, a welcome break from working on my long-unfinished third novel—no longer a book but a maze in which I was endlessly wandering. The more I wrote about marital unhappiness, the more stuck I became. I couldn’t finish the book because I was afraid of the ending I might discover.

Behind me were all the books I loved, the novels and memoirs and volumes of poetry—these books were my refuge as well, as though the pages were green fields or night skies. On the other side of the wide entryway, in the living room, were the shelves of religious books, the volumes of Talmud and the Bibles, the works of biblical commentaries, books detailing the laws of the holidays.

Did I consider myself an Orthodox writer?

How did my Orthodoxy affect my work?

Did I think there was a conflict between being an artist and being Orthodox?

I was happy to take part in this interview—it seemed remarkable enough that these rabbis were engaging with the role of culture in religious life. Trying to sound reassuring, I said that I used Jewish sources in my writing, that our tradition encouraged questioning. Art didn’t seek to threaten Orthodoxy. There was no reason for the rabbis to be afraid—art meant no harm; it came in peace.

I wrote this even though the words allowed and forbidden, appropriate and inappropriate, nice and not nice continued to battle inside me. I had wanted to believe that I would live my small quiet life but allow my mind to roam. You didn’t have to live boldly as long as you could write this way. But could you write of doubt that gnawed through you; could you write of loneliness; could you talk of wanting to escape and still go to synagogue each week and act as though you knew nothing of such feelings? Could you write of other people’s urges to break free but keep your own always concealed?

A few months after I turned in my response, I was sent a copy of my answers along with all the others, which, like mine, downplayed the potential conflicts between being an artist and being Orthodox. I reread my initial responses and hated myself for the falseness. I e-mailed the interviewer to say I wanted to revise my answers. I couldn’t be one more person who covered the truth in order to belong, couldn’t be one more person who pretended so that others had to pretend as well.

I sat down at my desk. The words rushed out of me. There was a conflict, a terrible one. To write required freedom, but I didn’t think you could create freely with the admonitions of Orthodoxy looking over your shoulder. Did you have to show your rabbi any potentially controversial scene and ask whether it was permissible—here, too, were you subject to inspection? What did it mean to write knowing you’d be viewed suspiciously by your community if you pushed past the comfort zone? What about stories that didn’t confirm the official public version of Orthodoxy—what about stories that wanted to challenge or subvert? Even though what I’d written didn’t overtly cross any line—there was no attack against Orthodox doctrine, no open disavowal of the rules—I knew that I had become willing to walk closer to the edge.

“I know what I’m supposed to say, but I hate writing something I don’t believe,” I told Aaron. I showed him my new responses as I debated whether to send them. By now, the uncertainty I used to see in his eyes had started to look like fear—not just of what I was saying but of who I was becoming. By growing into a stronger version of myself, I was endangering us.

“I don’t know if I can stay inside much longer,” I said softly to Aaron. I still carried the residual sense that I was bad to feel this way, but I was exhausted from cloaking what I really thought, for fear of being too much of myself. Now when I confided in my mother, the words I’m done erupted out of me, but I couldn’t possibly mean anything by it. “I’m done,” I still said to Aaron when we fought, but I told myself I didn’t mean that either. I had stood in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah the prior year and pulled my hat low over my face so I could continue to hide, felt like I was shrinking myself into smaller and smaller boxes, felt as if my head, my whole body, was being compressed. All this, yet I did nothing. Nothing could change, not me, not him, not the laws around us, not the feeling between us. The story we had once told about how we, so young and so innocent, had fallen in love now felt like a cautionary tale.

“I know, but I want to be Orthodox anyway,” Aaron said pleadingly.

I hit Send on my e-mail before I could stop myself.

Would you be willing to speak at the conference? one of the organizers asked me in an e-mail a few weeks after I’d sent in my revised responses. He was appreciative of my willingness to be so honest and I agreed to come—I didn’t want to feel that the only way to remain inside was to hide what I thought. There were Orthodox writers, of course, who didn’t feel the conflict as I did, but I could no longer say what I didn’t believe. If I was going to stand before this group, I was going to say what I really thought—even to do this seemed a transgression. And yet it seemed so clear to me, so true and necessary, to say out loud that here and everywhere, people lived and loved and doubted and despaired; people strayed and people wandered and people believed and people did not. All protestations of contentment to the contrary, this lay inside Orthodoxy as well. This was my personal truth, but this was also one of the truths of this world.

The conference was held at Yeshiva University in New York City, in a hall that happened to be housing the student art show. Behind the speaker’s podium, a large banner proclaimed THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. Waiting for my turn, I observed the other women in the room, the minority by far. I looked around—I was the only woman not covering her hair. Out of respect, I had worn a skirt, but I couldn’t make myself put on a hat.

I’d given so many book talks that I could usually speak before a crowd without trepidation, but this time I was nervous. It was too late to turn back—the rabbis had my responses in front of them, so I summarized what I’d written. I quoted Cynthia Ozick that to be a novelist was “to seize unrestraint and freedom, even demonic freedom, imagination with its reins cut loose.” By the time I finished speaking, the mood in the room had tightened. A slew of hands awaited me. In a closed world, the borders had to be protected, but sometimes the invaders came from within.

Was I saying rabbinic authority did not apply to me?

Was I saying I didn’t believe that fiction needed to fall within the acceptable norms of Orthodoxy?

Was I denying that every art form came with its own limitations? Was I saying that there could be no boundaries at all?

Should we not concede that, based on what I was saying, all was lost—there was no possibility of art and religion coexisting, and we should all just go home?

I looked out at them, rabbis from synagogues in which I had prayed, from schools that I had attended. These men were the deciders and enforcers of the law, and they were right to be bothered by what I was saying. I didn’t believe in their ultimate power. I wouldn’t submit my artistic freedom to their rules.

I find what Tova Mirvis is saying to be incredible, one rabbi said.

Praise! I thought. Acceptance!

Then he continued on. A doctor has to ask a rabbi. A lawyer has to ask a rabbi. An accountant has to ask a rabbi. But not Tova Mirvis. If you wanted to run a brothel just because you had a talent for it, would that be okay as well?

There was a chuckle and a small gasp of surprise. I grew calmer. As though I’d rehearsed this moment, I spoke in a voice long in coming with words that had slowly collected. I spoke, at last, with what felt like all of myself.

What about the messy reality of people’s lives that differed from the mandated story? What about stories that claimed that people didn’t always know, didn’t always believe, didn’t always observe; stories about people who weren’t always content, about marriages that weren’t always happy, about children who didn’t always follow the path?

What about art that wasn’t interested in making people see the beauty of Orthodoxy?

What about art that could unsettle you, change you, unleash you?

I knew that in a highly codified world, the inner life posed a threat. I knew that these rabbis’ mission was to keep people inside the bounds of the laws. They didn’t believe there were other good or true ways to live, didn’t want their children or their students or their congregants to think that there was a legitimate choice to be made. I understood it, of course—I too had lived it. There was openness, up to a point. A measure of freedom, until you arrived at the border. There could be questions, as long as you accepted the answers given. There could be some sort of journey as long as you returned safely home in the end. There could be art, as long as it didn’t pry open too many doors. There could be stories, as long as they didn’t offer a viable other way.

“You can’t create freely if you’re always aware of where the borders of permissibility lie,” I said.

“We can’t tell our kids ‘Think outside the box’ as a slogan but not really mean it,” I said, gesturing to the words on the royal-blue felt banner behind me. Pad the box, decorate it, disguise it, enlarge it—but no matter how small it felt, bend arm over leg over neck to remain squarely within it.

This moment, standing in front of this room of rabbis, was the last time that I considered myself still inside. No, every part of me knew. No, I didn’t believe in the same God whose will they invoked with such certainty and no, I wasn’t willing to write in accordance with their rules, and no, I didn’t believe, really believe, their rules contained the ultimate truth, and no, I didn’t want to create the same kind of enclosures, and no, their limits weren’t ones I was willing to accept, and no, I didn’t want to teach my children to heed these lines, and no, it wasn’t just about writing honestly and freely, it was about living honestly and freely, and no, I couldn’t keep trying to tuck away this feeling, and no, I was no longer willing to follow without believing, and no, I was no longer willing to pretend in order to belong.

 

The next Shabbat, we finished dinner; the blue-and-white china dishes waited to be cleared, the remnants of soup and roasted vegetables needed to be parceled into containers and put into the fridge where the light was taped shut so it didn’t turn on when I opened the door. The candles burned low and flickered before sizzling softly and leaving a trace smell of burn. When I’d lit them a few hours before, I thought, as I always did, about my mother and grandmothers, who had also done this every week. I had no idea if any of them ever felt the way I did, only that they had lived and raised their families as part of this world. If I were to leave, would I be ceding my connection to them as well; would they have ceased to claim me as their own?

All through dinner, Aaron had looked worried; he knew something was wrong but didn’t ask what it was. I’d told him about the Orthodox Forum, but we’d both assumed that I would back down, as I always did. I might be upset, but it was impossible that I would ever act on those feelings. This was one of the truths of our marriage. I don’t think either of us thought I would ever do anything about what I felt. We both believed that I was too afraid. But the feeling of standing before all those rabbis at the Orthodox Forum replayed continuously in my head. There, I hadn’t hidden what I thought, and now it felt hard to do so anywhere. I couldn’t sit at the Shabbat table, not this night, not any night, if I had to pretend.

I went upstairs to the bathroom, my phone smuggled in the pocket of my sweatshirt. Even with the door closed, I could hear the kids talking and running around, the bedtime routine waiting to be done, all of them in need of me to keep the night in motion. Somewhere buried in the basement was a one-time favorite toy of the kids, a set of plastic gears on a magnetized board, all of them needing to be in contact with the middle gear, the sole one turned by battery power. Watching the kids assemble the gears so that each of them was connected to that center gear, I’d always felt a sense of kinship: that one gear couldn’t stop moving without the rest of them coming to a stop as well.

In a few minutes, I would go back downstairs, but right now, I made sure the bathroom door was locked. I stared at my phone. Could I actually break a rule of Shabbat, or would the forces of taboo and guilt, if not actual belief, hold me back? And if that failed, maybe the entwined loyalty to my marriage would keep me inside.

But no, I knew even more strongly now. No, I would no longer pretend. No, I could no longer hide myself away.

I turned on my phone—my first official desecration of Shabbat.

One sentence played in my mind, and this time I wasn’t as afraid.

I do not believe it is true.

For the first time, I could face those words without flinching.

I can no longer live a life I don’t believe in.

One sentence set free another sentence.

My marriage works only if I am willing to hide away the truest parts of myself.

My marriage works only as long as I agree not to grow.

I sat quietly with these words and allowed them to fill me with a sadness so large I felt like I could walk around inside it. Everything I was supposed to believe was cracking, a world I had wanted to think was vast and true suddenly small and breakable, a glass-domed object I held in my dangerous hands. My marriage and my Orthodoxy had been intertwined from the start. Leaving one would make it possible to leave the other.

It was terrible to think this, and it would be even more terrible to act on it, but I had arrived nonetheless at this moment of knowing. Until now, those words I’m done had been one more fantasy I didn’t have to act on. They hadn’t moved me toward action but consoled me and kept me inside. Nothing can change, my mantra of so many years. Nothing can change. All this time, I saw it as a prison, a curse, but I hadn’t realized that it was also a crutch, an excuse, a prayer. Change felt as alarming as anything I might have done—so afraid of falling, so afraid of finding myself severed from all that was secure. All this time, I’d preferred to stay unhappy rather than take a chance on what was unknown.

I flushed the toilet to cover any sound that might escape the pink-tiled walls of the bathroom. I checked my e-mail, went on Facebook, read the New York Times. This might have seemed like an insignificant trespass, but if you were stitched inside by so many small rules, maybe you needed to undo them one at a time. I knew that leaving didn’t happen with a single transgression, but if nothing else, it was a declaration to myself.

I felt oddly calm. This doubt had been here for so many years and now it emerged with a force that surprised me—this, the price to be paid for all those years lying in wait. I sat a while longer, flushed the toilet again to cover my prolonged absence, leaned my forehead against the cool tile of the wall. In the years in which I’d lain awake plotting escapes, I’d imagined some dramatic moment of departure. But sometimes leaving happens more quietly, not with any grand proclamations but with a single, still action.

 

 

“Do you believe the marriage to be irreparable?” the harried, black-robed judge asks as Aaron and I stand before her and our marriage is officially brought to an end.

It’s a little late for this question and the ones that perfunctorily follow.

“Is there any reasonable chance of reconciliation?”

“Have you entered this agreement of your own free will?”

Yes. No. Yes. A few more questions, a cursory glance at the agreement, and it’s over. There is still a ninety-day waiting period before we will be officially divorced, but that’s only a formality. We walk out of the courtroom, Aaron and me and our group of lawyers, to the mezzanine, where we awkwardly confer over how we will transfer the outstanding credit card debts.

It’s over and it feels like it will never be over. You can leave a marriage but you can never leave a divorce.

For one quick moment before we both depart from the courthouse, Aaron and I look at each other. All I want to do is avert my eyes but all I can do is keep staring. Here finally is the sadness I had long feared, but after all these months, it’s a little easier to face. There is no choice, anyway—the sorrow stands in my path, no passage granted until I can cross through it to the other side. The anger has been a fire that raged and burned; it was a fuel pack strapped to my back, propelling me out. The sadness was the smoke that hovered afterward. After all the fighting and all the accusations and all the terrible anger, the sadness coats the barest of facts. It surrounds the truest of sentences. Once we were married, and now we are not.