But The Ones Beneath Are Alive
We lie awake on the synagogue floor all night whispering about our wedding.
“Let’s get married here,” I say. Daniel has already suggested this twice so he just offers a patient nod of agreement. We have the well-worn latency of a couple who knows they have a lifetime to catch up with one another. We get engaged back in March, in Israel, and we convince a friend to fly my ring across the globe in his pocket, a friend who has only recently forgiven us the anxiety he carried along with that valuable cargo. (“It’ll be fine!” we say.) Then in June, we take rabbinic internships together at a synagogue in San Diego, a merger between my childhood congregation and another community that jointly re-home themselves in the heart of Downtown. The iconic building at the corner of 4th and Laurel is declared a historic landmark and they fund a stunning restoration that highlights the earthy exterior and refurbishes the stately sanctuary and stained glass.
When Shabbat comes around, we haul an air mattress up to a plain room in the corner of the second floor. It becomes our outpost, a hideaway. There are those who hint at the absurdity of our weekend sleepover: most members will drive to synagogue the next morning, which is why we hadn’t found a nearby host home. We counter with a tone of certainty. “It’s fine. We do this kind of thing all the time,” we reassure the custodian, and the office manager, and then the rabbi, just for good measure.
(Once, on Rosh Hashanah early in our relationship, we leave my future mother-in-law in tears when we insist on walking over three and a half miles in the rain to a Yom Tov dinner without an umbrella. “Please — you’ll soak.” “It’s fine,” we say.)
Friday night after services, we hear the building creaking and groaning, and the dark hallways seem absolutely a little bit haunted. I love it. I would be content to let the sounds of the building settling beneath us lull me to sleep except that I cannot stop thinking about The Bathroom.
We thought we’d considered everything. Preparing a synagogue building for overnight guests who refrain from using electricity on Shabbat takes an enormous lot of foresight and we do our best to anticipate our own needs. We set Shabbat alarms and put lights on timers and lay out everything we might need before sundown Saturday. This particular Shabbat is deep in summertime so we find ourselves ready to brush teeth and retire late. We arrive at The Bathroom and realize that we’ve considered nothing about that space. Every feature is electronic, or motorized, or automated. The door is set to stay stretched wide open for accessibility purposes. Toilets flush automatically. Soap dispenses with a wave of a hand, and the same goes for water, and also for paper towels. There is no entering or leaving that bathroom without inducing some kind of electrically-wired process. And there is no going without using a restroom for 25 hours. And even though I know that, empirically, every Shabbat is the same length, summertime Shabbatot have this way of stretching torturously. We kiddingly dub this the P’sik Reisha bathroom after the rabbinic principle that it’s not possible to do even one basic movement in the place without risking a violation of Shabbat. It helps if you remember, for the purposes of this story, that we fell in love over Torah and rabbinics.
We crab-walk our way out of the bathroom like stunt doubles on the set of Mission Impossible and make our way back to the second floor. Six months later we will stand cheek to cheek in the same spot where we once put an air mattress as the space becomes our yichud room, the place where we escape for 10 minutes of solitude after our chuppah and where we are supposed to get a pre-meal snack from the caterer but the food never shows up. In those few minutes I give Daniel his wedding ring, and as we have our first dance in private, our newly bedecked digits click gently in our palms. But back on that warm summer night, we are in the thick and dizzy fog of wedding plans and the room is just a room.
And because wedding-talk makes us anxious and Torah soothes our souls, we talk late into the night about the eventuality of technological creep into our world of observance. There will come a day, we know, when it will no longer be possible to avoid getting through a Shabbat without substantial use of technology. What will the tipping point be? A year later, in May 2012, I will sit quietly against the wall of a basement room at the Jewish Theological Seminary as members of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards debate a rabbinic response paper concerning the use of electronics on Shabbat. They will discuss the conversion of most hotels to electronic key card systems, a novelty back then, and the concern that there might a written record initiated by each entry to a hotel room on Shabbat. And I will listen and think back to the bathroom in the synagogue in Downtown San Diego and I will wonder, “Is this the tipping point?”
August 2020. This is the second time in months that I find myself needing to use the restroom at Temple Beth Am on Shabbat. The first time, back in June, I glance at my feet just as I’m about to the leave the stall and I’m feeling very sorry for a poor little roach who seems to have met a sad fate on the drain pipe when I realize that the bug is still very much alive and not lonely at all and squeeze is an insufficient word to describe what my entire body is doing as I’m singing two panicked happy birthdays and desperately scrubbing my hands. The restrooms have since been debugged and sanitized — though I check thoroughly before entering — and now I notice something different. I go to grab a paper towel for a clean door-handle grab, and notice for the first time that the new dispensers are touch-less. Fully automated. I freeze, hands dripping.
Is this the tipping point?
We lose things, in this pandemic. Plans, and patience. Favorite restaurants, connections with neighbors whom we used to see often and now only think about on the rare occasion when we need a favor and then I’m too guilty to reach out (and that, too, is its own tipping point). We lose weight. I drop thirty, maybe forty pounds over the many months and Daniel loses double that. One rare night we manage to get the two kids in the bathtub at a time when we’re both available to wrangle cranky, wet messes. I’m down in the suds and Daniel is helicoptering when he grabs at his left hand and cries out in surprise that his ring is missing. As I’m feeling frantically along the ribbed edges of the tub I hear myself saying, “Even if it’s gone, it’s fine, it’ll be okay,” but when I see him pull the ring out of the water I’m awash with a relief that belies the truth which is that the ring is, indeed, precious. And I didn’t want it to be gone.
Once, over Shavuot, my grandmother is very sick and my phone rings four times in a row and the fourth time I check to see that it’s my parents. I pick up the phone, heart racing. I think to myself, “Even if she’s gone, it’s going to be okay.” I feign calm with a simple, “Hi, is everything alright?” My family had forgotten there was a second day of Yom Tov; they were simply calling to say hello. Tears well up and then spring off my face with the cathartic laughter of relief because I didn’t want her to be gone.
I also hadn’t wanted to pick up the phone but the knowing — the cracking through Shabbat just to know everything was alright — was more precious than the unwitting perfection of a day untouched.
I learn the art of Shabbat in yeshiva and, later, the science of it at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The six years there in seminary, in New York, are exactly what you think they might be: a cross between Hogwart’s and movies of east coast universities in the 1960’s. The whole of 3080 Broadway smells like a legacy institution. Our professors point with reverence at ancient chalkboards and swear that this is the very spot where they, too, learned to parse a piece of Babylonian Talmud and just two doors over they once smoked a cigarette with The Chancellor while watching the sukkah under construction in the drab soil of the trapezoidal courtyard. Rabbis in the field deliver the perfect half-smiled cocktail insult that they, too, once only ate cold dairy out at restaurants and refused to drive on Shabbat in their first three pulpits. “You’re doing fine,” they say. “You’re exactly in the phase you should be.” We reject the notion that they might have us figured out or, worse, that they were us, once upon a time. Occasionally we walk the length of Manhattan on Simchat Torah because we have no kids (yet) and our legs are strong(er) and we could spend days debating the interesting halakhic potentiality of riding the Subway on a Yom Tov but, oh my, actually doing it?
We take pride in the beads of sweat produced by the calculus it takes to operate in the narrow band of gender-egalitarian ortho-praxis. Our honeymoon in Ireland is a pre-packaged counter-clockwise excursion around a country that is entirely comprised of grass and sheep and salt air with the occasional relief of a Guinness. On day four or thereabouts we make it to Galway and we’ve gone through three days of kosher meals that we bought, frozen, at the start of the trip in Dublin. There’s a storefront with a small sidewalk easel proclaiming “All-Day Vegetarian Stew Within” and Daniel volunteers to ask no fewer than 16 questions and we decide, in a fit of leniency, to partake of this wildly transgressive stew. It is delicious, tasting like guilt and beer broth and we’re not going to go back and ask any more questions but it just tastes right, and very wrong, and it’s perfectly Irish.
When I am 12 years old I decide, in the middle of a family party, that I no longer eat meat and I share with fanfare to my parents that I plan to be vegetarian. I have no idea what this means to them at the time. Or to me. I don’t even recall the impetus, except that perhaps being vegetarian seems more interesting than not being vegetarian, and I stay exactly that way until Passover of my senior year in high school. For the first time I’m allowed to drive myself as far north as Los Angeles to visit a boy whom I’ve met through a friend, and The Boy happens to be Jewish which is a rare thing in my circle and it’s both Easter and Passover and we’re going to a Dodgers game that day because their neighbors gift us tickets. The Boy’s family keeps kosher, generally and also specifically for Passover, and there is nothing for a vegetarian to eat unless I am willing to satisfy myself on braised leeks and chopped romaine for a few days. They offer to grill me a kosher sausage, and because of The Boy and the circumstances and, I will decide much later, a heavy dose of fate I say, Yes, please, and for the first time in five years I put ground meat in my body.
And all I can think is, “I can’t say I’m a vegetarian anymore.”
It’s as though a long, ugly crack travels like a vein down through my personal vanity and my identity is temporarily shattered. The very idea that I now have to explain the way I eat with a paragraph rather than a word — “Actually I do eat some meat, kosher only, but I was vegetarian for quite a few years,” which is exactly how I talked about food for more than a decade after I had no longer been vegetarian — this idea eats a hole in the center of my self-image and I ache for the binary of youthful certitude.
I leapfrog from the dogmatic lily pad of vegetarianism to kosher eating by the time I meet Daniel and this, too, is fate because some of our most romantic date nights that first year in Jerusalem were spent languishing in the dining halls of churrasqueirias. South African waitstaff mill about with glistening rotisseries that drip elegantly onto passed platters. The effortlessness of meat-eating in Israel is intoxicating. We pepper the server with questions about the origins of each recipe, mostly to draw out the dining experience and buy our digestive systems some time to process this feast and it is, truly, a feast.
When he proposes, there’s no ring yet, and it doesn’t matter at all except that every time we share the news with someone in person their eyes travel down to my bare hand and eventually I think, perhaps I should wear something there. To announce to my status. To explain it for me. We walk to a Michal Negrin shop in the posh new Mamilla Mall and explore a collection of charms. We settle on a sparkling white mounted rose, the cost of a few meat dinners, and as Daniel is slipping it on my hand the sales person asks me why my head is covered. Incongruity. We are young, getting engaged. He wears a kippah. I wrap my head gently in a scarf. Because once, at a Burger Bar in the German Colony, I dare to wear a kippah and the secular line cook starts shaking his spatula from behind three counters and shouting at me things I would never dare repeat and I drop my fries on the floor and this, this is the last time I wear a kippah in public in Jerusalem. After that, hats and scarves and, of course, these tell a story that is not mine: the story that I am married, which I am not. That when I am married, I will cover my head with a hat or a scarf, which I do not.
When we begin to plan the wedding we search for joy there, but that process is mostly spreadsheets and headaches and very uncomfortable phone calls about money and guest lists. Cake-tasting is, by far, the blue ribbon winner of the whole process. Planning with our caterer takes second prize and I sip on the sweet nostalgia of conversations with the very same caterer who managed my bat mitzvah luncheon, and who has since passed from this earth. Jeff is leaning over his table and managing to look like he is paying attention exactly half the time as we’re explaining that, though we love ourselves some meat and we swear this is not about price-point, and after all this is kosher catering, in any case, we are going for a vegetarian menu. He squints at us.
It’s the cake, we say. The cake is so damn good, and it’s dairy, and it’s this chocolatey mousse that’s irresistible, and we cannot be convinced to shove pareve cardboard down our throats to celebrate our nuptials when this mountain of lava goodness exists and we’re sorry, Jeff, but let’s talk salmon. And he says, Oh, so not vegetarian. Salmon isn’t vegetarian.
When I am in eighth grade, my parents tell me that it’s now my responsibility to give them a list of proteins I’ll eat, since I’m a vegetarian. Three days out of five something with peanut butter makes it into my lunch box, and cream cheese also lands high on the list. Another regular, though, is this plastic and cardboard Bumblebee tuna pack with crackers. It comes with a can, pre-mixed mayonnaise and relish, and I’m sure it smells terrible. The kids who sit with me at lunch tell me so. Why don’t you eat something more normal for lunch? they ask. I’m vegetarian, I say. But tuna is fish; that isn’t vegetarian. Is it?
I learn to eat better fish as my palate and pocketbook mature with age. In the determined and undistracted years before moving to Los Angeles, eating only cold vegetarian meals out of the house means that sushi appreciation is a life skill. Daniel and I graduate from avocado rolls to sashimi and fatty tuna, and we learn the difference between decent sushi places and the best. When I’m pregnant with our first child, I follow the wisdom of a thousand cruel Google searches and an unhelpfully skeptical obstetrician that I should simply go sushi-free for the ten months. Next to the question, What are you having? — answer, A baby. — the second most frequent question I got was, Are you eating sushi? There were two responses to my own answer, which was, No, but there will be a salmon roll inside my mouth in approximately 58 days and counting). Other parents, older parents, would deliver the perfect half-smiled cocktail insult that they, too, avoided sushi during their first pregnancy. Everyone else categorized me, immediately, as one-of-those. If she doesn’t eat sushi, then. Then. Then she probably plans to use cloth diapers (No). And nurse her own kid (I tried). And co-sleep (Get out of my room).
At our daughter’s one-year-old checkup we ask her pediatrician when she can try sushi. Now, actually, says the doctor. I have a break in my schedule that day and we waste no minutes, driving to a sushi bar in Westwood that has a short lunchtime wait when UCLA is out for the quarter. We go with an avocado roll and a Philadephia roll, all of which when broken down to their ingredient parts are totally familiar to her except for the raw salmon. She crushes the Philly roll in her fist, like a maniac, and fishes out the bright orange. She considers it, shoves it in her mouth, and pounds the bar with glee. We’re flanking her high chair so we have to lean in for the high five.
The sushi place is pretty empty but twenty or thirty feet down the bar there’s a guy having a solo lunch and he turns to us, eyebrows raised, and says, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I have time to turn over four or five snarky responses in my head about my parenting being my own business before he continues playfully: I have two sons in their twenties, and I started feeding them sushi as toddlers, and it’s the most expensive habit they’ve got.
She brings sushi to school for lunch now, our daughter. She’s five. And, yes, it’s an expensive habit. At some point we discover that eating sushi gives her the “red itchies” and we assume that it’s some kind of an allergic reaction to soy sauce. We take her to an allergist in the Valley where she asks no fewer than twelve times on the interminable drive if there are going to be any shots and we say, we don’t know, because we don’t. The doctor thinks it’s a sulfate allergy, one she’ll grow out of and she can use some kind of an alternative soy sauce in the meantime. I sigh, annoyed at the prospect of reminding my kid not to use regular soy sauce and hauling some kind of alternative dip to sushi joints and explaining the whole thing again and again.
To our kid, though, this is the epitome of positive diagnoses. She has been given A Story. Diagnosed with Complexity. This makes her Interesting. There are no shots but, honestly, I don’t think she would have minded.
The third year of seminary is back in New York City and we rent an apartment in Washington Heights because we cannot afford to live near school anymore. There are hills everywhere (the name is apt) and this, this is when I decided to take on the goal of running a 5K. I start small, jogging for 20 or 30 minute intervals every other day. My muscles ache, and frankly they would have, anyway, because we live on a fifth-floor walkup and that alone kills me at the end of every run.
At lunch one day I’m moaning about my ankles and someone asks why I’m so achy and I explain that I’ve committed to a 5K in July, and to being fit for my wedding in January. Oh, so you’re a runner now? I pause. No, I’m definitely not a runner. But you run, almost every day at this point? I think about this for a minute, and it’s true. And I don’t answer them. Instead I think about this conversation for the next eight years every time a student tells me they’re not a reader, or a congregant tells me they’re not a synagogue-goer even though I see them every week. The day I show up to my first 10K race, there’s an announcement for all runners to line up at the start and as I take my place, I think:
Is this the tipping point?
We set our seder table this year without a chair at the head so that we would have enough room to roll a sturdy metal-topped wooden cart into that spot. The kids are dressed in fancy clothing, and so are we, and this is about the time when we’d free ourselves from from any interaction with electronics. Instead we are logging in to a Zoom seder, one that unites both sides of our families, and while the meeting begins before Yom Tov at some point the holiday simply happens and the computer is still there, beaming us the faces of those we love. And with the tunes of Dayyeinu and Had Gadya swirling, my mind and my heart hover in the meta, knowing that without these screens and keystrokes and 0s and 1s we would be so profoundly isolated from the ones we miss. And they sip and we sip and I say amen to their blessings and I think —
Is this the tipping point?
There is a story taught in the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma 85) about the collapse of a building and what should be done about those trapped beneath the rubble, both the dead and the survivors.
תנו רבנן עד היכן הוא בודק עד חוטמו ויש אומרים עד לבו בדק ומצא עליונים מתים לא יאמר כבר מתו התחתונים מעשה היה ומצאו עליונים מתים ותחתונים חיים
The Rabbis taught: If a person is buried under a collapsed building, until what point does one check to clarify whether the victim is still alive? Until what point is he allowed to continue clearing the debris? They said: One clears until the victim’s nose. If there is no sign of life, i.e., if he is not breathing, he is certainly dead. And some say: One clears until the victim’s heart to check for a heartbeat. If several people are buried and one checked and found the upper ones under the debris dead, he should not say: The lower ones are likely also already dead, and there is no point in continuing to search. There was an incident where they found the upper ones dead and the lower ones alive.
ומצאו עליונים מתים ותחתונים חיים: The upper ones were dead but the lower ones were alive.
There is a computer on my seder table, but the vibrant core of my Pesah observance is alive and rich and complicated. I try to imagine explaining to my past self, even the version of myself one year ago, what I would do to get through a Shabbat, how we would manage our way through a high holy day season and I know that I am unrecognizable on my surface and I cannot explain myself in a sentence and it takes paragraphs and paragraphs and it actually is okay. In those paragraphs, I have found life, despite quarantine. Life, despite the virus. Life, despite limits. The upper parts are temporarily out of order but the lower ones are powering the dig towards daylight every next morning and then the next and the next.
We lose things in this pandemic. We lose them at the surface and we grieve them but the rest of us, the rest of us is still alive and breathing and richly complicated, awaiting rescue beneath the rubble.
The last thing I do for myself before lockdown, though I can’t possibly know at the time that it’s my last act of self-care, is to get my eyebrows done. I wear a ball-cap into the appointment and it’s a purposefully sporty look, secular camouflage to let me pass for just another young mom trying to take care of myself on a Sunday morning. When I climb into the chair at the salon my stylist asks me to remove my hat and, also, my — head covering, if that’s what that is? And my cheeks burn a little as I forget, again, that beneath my baseball hat is always my little knit kippah, my takhtonim, like an undergarment that I subconsciously append to my head even before I finish getting out of bed. So I wind up explaining it, and that yes I’m a rabbi, and for the next twenty minutes she goes on to talk deeply and intently about her decision to move in with her grandparents and how that’s changed her life. And as I’m leaving she thanks me for the intimate talk and wonders aloud why she shared so candidly. As she talks, she does something no stylist has ever cared or even offered to do: she tenderly pins my kippah back into place. I walk out, hat in hand.
In July, we drive to Big Bear Lake to escape the city for a week. We rent a cabin, the four of us, bringing along all our supplies and planning to hike and fish for days. The sun bakes us on miles of wooded trails that take us further from humanity than we have been in months. Each early afternoon, we find a small stretch of empty beach where our towels can rest while we wade, mask-free, into the quiet lapping waters. I am sunbathing, face-down, when Daniel calls out that his ring is missing. The kids continue to play carefree by the shore as I stumble and rush to his side, telling him not to move from the spot. I’m raised on lake-swimming and summertime at the YMCA so I fearlessly dive again and then again into the murky green shallows. I think I spot something shiny and I say so breathlessly before going beneath again, and again, but it’s not the ring. A nearby group offer to help but we are all maskless, and vulnerable, and we graciously and shakily decline as I palm the craggy, slime-covered bottom. It’s there, but we cannot find it.
It’s not fine, but it will be.
We lie awake all night whispering about the ring, and how strange it is to find that hand free of any adornment. That ring, so much a part of his hand he hadn’t removed it once since we put it on in the yichud room eight years ago, his tefillin wrapped around it, hand-washing poured over it, a part of his limb.
There was an incident where they found the upper ones dead and the lower ones alive.
The ring is gone. In its place — wait for it — there’s quite a story.
