Devotion (13 page)

A small group of people gathers together at my friend Abby’s Manhattan apartment once a month to study Torah with Burt Visotzky, a respected and gifted rabbi. When she first invited me to join the group, I felt conflicted. I had spent my childhood confused by Torah—learning by rote, understanding nothing. But I went anyway, and now I look forward to these Tuesday evenings—in part because of the feeling that each person in that room is engaged in a personal struggle with faith. Before we begin discussing the Torah portion, we go around in a circle and everyone says a few words about how they’re doing. This never fails to make me a little nervous. It reminds me of AA, except that most of us are drinking wine.

Last week, I was fresh from my second visit to Kripalu—another yoga and meditation retreat—when I went to Torah study. When it came my turn to speak, I was raw, vulnerable. I had just spent several days with a heightened awareness of what was going
on in my mind, and it wasn’t pretty. I talked about how hard I was finding it to meditate. In almost every meditation instruction, the phrase
begin again
emerges as a theme. Your mind is wandering? Begin again. Clouded over with thoughts? Begin again. A twinge in your knee? Don’t judge it, or beat yourself up about it. Let it go. Return to the breath. Begin again.

Well, I was having a hard time beginning again, and I was judging myself for it. Instead of gently, with compassion, returning to the breath, I was caught in a cycle of self-recrimination. What was going on inside my head was so stupid! So shallow and ridiculous! My mind was consumed either with the past or the future. I became lost in conversations that hadn’t happened and probably never would. I had been practicing yoga for many years, had developed this meditation practice, had begun to explore my Jewish roots with a semi-open mind—but still, there was all this internal chatter. I couldn’t seem to quiet it. Why couldn’t I remain in the present for longer than, oh, say, three seconds? I had a new understanding of the word
scatterbrained
.

The people in the group were nodding and looked sympathetic, but when I finished speaking I felt even worse. Why had I even talked about my struggles with meditation in this Torah study group? One thing had nothing to do with the other. As we turned to the text, I felt exposed by the hours and hours of looking inward. What was the point of any of this? How did it all connect—if it connected at all? The yoga, meditation, reading, Torah study—it felt futile. The words swam together. I sank into my chair and tried to disappear.

I wasn’t the only frustrated person in the room that night. Burt read aloud from Genesis 30, in which two sisters, Rachel and Leah, use surrogate handmaidens to compete for the status of having produced the most children for Jacob. This prompted one woman in the group to ask why we read these stories. What are we supposed to get out of them? I had often wondered the same thing. “I mean,” she said, “these people do terrible things to each other.” Burt smiled in agreement. It was true—there was no question, really—that these biblical characters were not exactly exemplars of ethical behavior. But there was something more. I had become friends with Burt over these many months, and could feel the intensity of what he was about to say before he even said it. “Because they’re ours to grapple with. Their human frailties allow us to see our own. We doubt and question them, generation after generation. It’s our text.”

On the long ride back to Connecticut, Michael driving, I kept thinking about the whole idea of human frailty, and how—paradoxically—the recognition of frailty contained within it a kind of strength. What Burt had said had struck a nerve: the questioning was the true work of engagement. To question, to doubt, to rail against, even to reject—these were our prerogative. As a child, I had been taught not to question. But as Paul Tillich once wrote, doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it’s an element of faith. If only I could hold close to that idea. If only I could gently, simply—like a child learning to walk—begin again, and again, and again, whether returning to the Torah, to the meditation cushion, or simply to myself.

As we sped along the highway, I checked my e-mail. There was a message from Burt:
I want to quote you a Mishnah text from tractate
Berakhot about prayer: “The early pious ones used to meditate for an hour before praying.” I know it feels to you like you are starting over each time, but really all you are doing is bringing your footsteps back to our well-trod path. That’s not starting over. It’s picking up the thread.

Michael and I were out to dinner with another couple—very good friends of ours. The husband was someone I’ve known since seventh grade. With my parents gone and few relatives left, these ties to my past have become increasingly important to me. This guy was at my bat mitzvah! He saw me wearing that dorky peach corduroy suit and my first pair of heels! I knew him when he was a shrimpy, late-blooming adolescent, as opposed to the well-known actor he later became. We were familiar with each other’s high school crushes and embarrassments.

Dinner was at a Manhattan restaurant, a hushed place with artfully arranged food and flattering lighting. We were grown-ups now—there was no doubt about that. At least we looked like grown-ups, had grown-up lives. Maybe even acted like grown-ups. He had two young children, I had one. We’d both been a bit beaten up by life but were, at the moment, weathering things pretty well. The four of us were talking about our kids when the subject turned to memory. Why do we remember the particular things we do? Great pain certainly carves its own neurological path. But why random, ordinary moments?

“I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, watching my
mother boil me an egg,” my friend said. He looked puzzled, reaching back. “She must have made me eggs hundreds of times. But I remember that one particular time.”

I knew what all of us were thinking. What would our children remember? The oldest among them—Jacob—was nine. What ordinary moments had imprinted themselves on him at this point? And what painful ones? Michael and I rarely fought, but there had been a fight or two over the years that Jacob had witnessed. Would that be what he took away from our peaceful, happy family life? His parents red-faced and screaming at each other? I hoped not. God, I hoped not. But who knew?

I tried to create a daily sense of constancy and ritual: family dinners, holiday traditions. On Hanukkah, we lit the menorah each year with Jacob’s best friends. We ordered bagels and lox from Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side for Yom Kippur, and had a crowd to break the fast. On our kitchen table, I kept a book of Buddhist wisdom, open to a different page each day. Most days, we remembered to read the little snippet of wisdom and look at the accompanying photograph. The black-necked cranes of Bhutan. The monk meditating in the hidden valley, his face rapt and peaceful. Had any of it seeped in? Would Jacob be sitting in a restaurant with friends some day when he was old enough to need bifocals to study the wine list, and remember some random thing from his childhood?

My mother yelled at me because I couldn’t find my socks.

My dad made me bacon.

Who the hell knew? It was all in there, conscious or unconscious. What rose to the surface—and why?

“I feel no connection to the kid I was,” Michael suddenly said.
I had never heard him say anything like this before. “I’m a completely different person.”

“Me too,” said our friend.

I understood feeling like a completely different person. I had been a late bloomer too, and when I thought back to my teenage self, my twenty-something self, I had a hard time understanding how I had gotten from
there
to
here
. But no connection? I looked at my friend across the table. I could still see the seventh grader I had once known, alive inside him. Could he see that in me? Was there—surely there must be—a through line connecting the disparate parts of ourselves? I had very few memories of my childhood, and my adolescence is a blur. My life came into focus for me around the time my father died. But still, I knew that each part of me—the lost adolescent girl, the rebellious, miserable young woman, the confused, grief-stricken daughter, the grown woman still trying to sort it all out—is linked one to the next, like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

Nope, no connection. Completely different person.
I could see that it would be desirable, maybe even preferable, to disavow pieces of the past—all the uncomfortable, unexplainable, embarrassing bits. But I knew better. I had experienced my own memory as a living thing, a palpable presence in my body. I had felt my past unfurl inside me as if it had a mind of its own. These layers of ourselves are always there, waiting for the right moment to emerge. The cooking of an egg. An overheard argument. A walk in the woods. The black-necked cranes of Bhutan. A jumble, perhaps, but nothing is ever missing. Just hidden from view.

I kept coming across the term
householder.
In Buddhist readings and teachings, it cropped up again and again.
Householder
. Loosely translated from the Pali, it meant “layperson.” That was me. I was a layperson. I had a home and a family, and was very attached to both. I had no intention of renouncing home life. With any luck, I would never become a wandering ascetic. So what did this mean, to be a householder? Was it possible to do anything more than skim the surface? And if not, was skimming the surface better than nothing at all?

Householder was defined narrowly as a wealthy and prestigious family patriarch: a guild foreman, banker, or merchant. But Buddha had specific advice for women householders as well:

Be capable at one’s work.

Work with diligence and skill.

Manage domestic help skillfully (if relevant) and treat them fairly.

Perform household duties efficiently.

Be hospitable to one’s husband’s parents and friends.

Be faithful to one’s husband; protect and invest family earnings.

Discharge responsibilities lovingly and conscientiously.

Accomplish faith.

Practice generosity.

Cultivate wisdom.

Accomplish faith
. There was a time in my life I would have scoffed at the notion, but now it seemed to me that faith really is an accomplishment. If accomplishment is, in part, defined as something requiring effort, certainly I was learning that faith required enormous effort.

My various rituals—the yoga, meditation, thinking, reading, Torah study—these were disciplines. They had become, to some degree, habit. But it was in the space around these rituals that faith resided. It was in the emptiness, the pause between actions, the stillness when one thing was finished but the next had not yet begun. Paradoxically, this was where effort came in, because it was so hard to be empty. To pause. To be still—not leaning forward, not falling back. Steady in the present—not even waiting. Just being. Could I just drive the car? Just cook dinner? Just walk the dogs in the front meadow and take in the rustling trees, the chirping critters in the distance? Why was it so difficult? So scary? Why did something that should be effortless require so much effort?

Every once in a while I would touch upon this state of emptiness. I would feel it for a second or two, perhaps three. And then I would quickly pull myself back, as if from an abyss. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once asked an audience whether it’s possible to stop—let ourselves be a little emptier, a little more silent, more in touch with the spaces between words. The key word was
between
. When I allowed myself to fearlessly enter that between-place even for a few seconds, I accomplished faith.

Life was very different in Connecticut. Though we were only a two-hour drive from the city, it might as well have been a five-hour flight. Friends occasionally came to visit, and I could practically see the thought bubbles escaping from their heads as they walked from their car to our front porch.
Do they have neighbors? Does Jacob have anyone to play with? Where do they buy food?
It wasn’t nearly as isolated as that, though in fact we didn’t know the people on our street. I saw them nearly every day through the windshield of my car, but this was the country, not the suburbs. No one greeted us with a homemade apple pie when we moved in. People tended to keep to themselves. I did have nicknames for my neighbors: the lady jogging; the couple walking; the one who doesn’t wave. In lieu of facts, I invented stories. The lady jogging was a recent widow who dealt with her grief by running; the couple walking was doing so on doctor’s orders for the sake of the husband’s health; the one who doesn’t wave was the grown daughter of a war criminal.

Jacob began preschool when we settled in, at a small school about fifteen minutes from our house. Each morning I drove past grazing cows, along a rutted dirt road, then pulled into the parking lot. I held Jacob’s hand as we walked through the glass doors into school, hugged him good-bye at his classroom door like every
other parent in the place. Once he was settled in his classroom, I tried—this is the only word for it—I tried to escape.

Unlike many of the other moms, I didn’t want to hang out at Jacob’s school. I didn’t want to avail myself of the volunteering opportunities: the book fair, the auction. You couldn’t have paid me to stay for the Tuesday-morning Pilates class in the gymnasium downstairs. I was confused by my own response to the school community. Didn’t I want to be part of a community? Didn’t I love my child and want the best for him? Of course I did—so why was I making the quick dash back to my car, keeping my head down, avoiding eye contact? As I ducked past the other moms congregated in small groups, I felt isolated, though of course I was responsible for my own isolation.

Certainly I was still shivering in the shadow of Jacob’s illness. It was so rare, there were so few good outcomes—I had trouble trusting that it was really over. I had read stories on the Internet about relapses. I held my breath, waiting, girding myself, preparing for the worst, always thinking
what if
.

What if he has a seizure?

What if I let my guard down?

What if something goes wrong?

We had left New York, yes—but we had brought the past with us. Motherhood was still new for me—and I had barely known it without stomach-lurching fear. As I surreptitiously watched the moms, I envied their innocence. One of them told me that she had given birth to her youngest in the local hospital, and it was exactly like a hotel. “They bring you a smoothie afterward,” she said. But that hospital doesn’t even have a NICU, I thought. What if there had been an emergency?

I had begun to feel—and it was a bitter feeling—that the world could be divided into two kinds of people: those with an awareness of life’s inherent fragility and randomness, and those who believed they were exempt. Parenthood had created an even wider gulf between these two categories. I was firmly on the shore of fragility and randomness, and I could barely make out the exempt people dancing across the way. They seemed like a different species to me. Honestly, I resented them. They were having such a good time.

I didn’t know that there was a third way of being. Life was unpredictable, yes. A speeding car, a slip on the ice, a ringing phone, and suddenly everything changes forever. To deny that is to deny life—but to be consumed by it is also to deny life. The third way—inaccessible to me as I slunk down the halls—had to do with holding this paradox lightly in one’s own hands. To think: It is true, the speeding car, the slip on the ice, the ringing phone. It is true, and yet here I am listening to my boy sing as we walk down the corridor. Here I am giving him a hug. Here we are—together in this, our only moment.