Devotion (15 page)

After the surgery—the clean bill of health (
You dodged a bullet, my dear
, the breast surgeon had said)—the rest of the notebook
became filled with lists. That fluttering in my stomach, that sick feeling of dread upon awakening each morning during those weeks, mercifully gone. It had been frightening, but in the end, everything was okay. It was a scare, nothing more. Time marched on, while I got back to the stuff of life:

The lists continued, the handwriting neat and orderly, as if perfect penmanship might hold it all together. Packing lists for book tour:
earplugs, computer, power cord, iPhone, charger
. Lists that had to do with my life at home:
pick up sourdough bread, check on FedEx delivery, order party invitations
. Reminders about the school bake sale, camp applications. Notes for speeches, ideas for stories. Random phrases: why had I jotted down
Melbourne
? I had no idea.

“Let’s sit for a while.” Sylvia’s voice pulled me back to the present. The notebook open on my lap, my mind lost in the past. It was time to practice
metta
. The phrases I had learned from Sylvia, the ones I had been using in my meditation practice at home, had been stripped down to their essence over the course of the retreat:
May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be strong, may I live with ease
. I found it easier to sink into the phrases in their pared-down version, with no fancy words, no poetry to get in the way.
Safe
. To be aware of the blessing of physical safety, right here, at this moment—no
other.
Happy
. Everything fine, exactly the way it is.
Strong
. Physical fortitude to handle whatever comes.
Live with ease.
Just for now, just for now, just for now.

I was having lunch with an editor who worked at a travel magazine to talk about possible writing assignments. I was a little nervous about the lunch. I didn’t have any great ideas for her, and didn’t want her to feel like she had wasted her time. I doubted that the magazine—which featured luxury travel—would go for a piece about meditation retreats with scratchy bedding and shared bathrooms. Still, I tried. What about a personal essay on meditating for a week? Or a silent retreat? I worried that it might seem like I was pitching an idea about as interesting as watching water boil.

But then it turned out that the editor herself was a yogi. Quickly—both of us excited to have this common ground—we began talking about the merits of different schools of yoga. She was a devotee of Iyengar; I practiced Anusara. We discussed classes in New York, retreats in Costa Rica, Tuscany, Tulum. As we nibbled on our Turkish food in midtown Manhattan, the world seemed, for a brief moment, to be made up of a small web of people who went into caves and onto mountaintops in search of inner peace.

“India,” the editor suddenly exclaimed. “Why don’t we send you to India!”

India.
My heart sank. How could I tell the travel editor that my interests lay a little closer to home? Say, within a three-hour drive?
She smiled at me from across the table, her eyes twinkling. She knew (and she knew that I knew, and she knew that I knew that she knew) that offering to send a writer to India was a dream assignment. One that most writers would kill for. But not this writer.

India.

For a split second, I wondered: Was this a sign? I hadn’t figured out whether or not I believed in signs, though I was working on it. After all, I had followed the trail of breadcrumbs leading me to Steve Cope, to Sylvia Boorstein, to Burt Visotzky. Every experience I’d had was valuable. Some had been transformative. Should I take this moment in the Turkish restaurant as a sign? Get on a plane to New Delhi? Practice yoga and meditation at its birth-place—and get paid for it?

“I can’t go to India,” I said.

The editor looked surprised.

“Why not?”

“I have a young son,” I began, then stopped. It would have been a cop-out to say that it was Jacob who kept me from leaping at the chance to take an all-expenses-paid trip halfway around the world by myself. He was a part of it, sure—a piece of every choice and every decision I made. But motherhood wasn’t the whole reason. The truth was that I was tucked into my life, deep into the heart of it. The lessons I needed to learn were all around me. In front of me. Not on the other side of the globe. At least not right now. Did that make my life—my ambitions, my choices—smaller? Or larger?

I imagined myself on the shores of Kerala, in a beautifully embroidered sari, at the feet of my new guru. It should be mentioned that, in this fantasy, I had a pretty good tan. I would gather shining jewels of wisdom from my guru—truths that could be
found in no other way—and carry them home in my pocket. But then the fantasy shattered. I saw those jewels falling out of my pocket, one by one. By the time I got back home, back to my life on top of the hill—to my husband, son, dogs, piles upon piles of mail/laundry/manuscripts—I would have left a glittering mess behind me. No longer available. No longer of use. Once again, I was reminded: truths found
out there
don’t travel well.

“I think I need to stay close to home,” I told the puzzled editor. “My life is here.”

I needed to figure out how we could live as Jews in Connecticut, in a part of the state known for its white village churches and horse farms and winding stone walls. We had left the city—along with its hundreds of shuls and kosher delis and more Jewish people on every square block than in most counties across America—and settled in a culture that would have been completely alien to my grandparents, even my parents.

My aunt Shirley recently asked me how Jacob was enjoying school.

“He loves it,” I told her. And then tacked on, almost reflexively: “There aren’t many Jewish kids there, though.”

This was an understatement. Quite possibly, there were no Jewish kids at all.

My aunt looked concerned. “Tell me—is Jacob comfortable with non-Jewish children?”

The question struck me as strange, and underscored the profound difference between Shirley’s life and mine. Occasionally, at a school assembly, Michael and I would listen to the surnames of kids called up to the stage for sports or academic awards. Not a single Jewish family. I knew this made both of us a little uneasy. But was Jacob comfortable? You bet he was. He didn’t differentiate between Jewish or non-Jewish people. Nor did I really want him to…except. Except that we were such a minority.

We were invited to—and participated in—Easter egg hunts, painted, pastel-colored eggs and foil-wrapped candy scattered across lawns. The lone Jews at Christmas dinners, we came bearing gifts to place beneath beautiful trees decorated with twinkling white lights and heirloom ornaments. When Jacob was three, shortly after we had moved, he developed a fascination with churches. They combined several things he loved: bells, clocks, and towers. Often, we stopped on the side of the road if church bells were ringing.

“We’re a little bit Christian and a little bit Jewish, right?” he asked hopefully.

“No, honey. We’re all Jewish.”

“A little bit Christian,” he said, as if the subject was closed.

Now, as he slowly—it had happened so fast!—approached the age where if he didn’t start Hebrew school, it would become a problem when his bar mitzvah rolled around, we were classic wandering Jews. We had no home, no rabbi, no spiritual institution to call our own.

Half-heartedly, I had done some research over the years. About a thirty-minute drive from our house, off the I-84 corridor, a huge, modern white temple with stained-glass windows
overlooked a road lined with antiques stores. It was a Reform congregation, which was very different from the way I had been raised, but did that matter? My religious training hadn’t exactly stuck.

“So—what do you think?” I raised the topic of Jacob’s religious education with Michael.

He sighed, as if this was a subject he knew had been coming. “I don’t know. I really hated Sunday school. I remember being in second grade, and thinking:
Burning bush?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Really? You thought
fucking kidding me
in second grade?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Everybody hates Sunday school,” I said. I was going on hearsay, of course, since my childhood had been spent in a yeshiva, rendering the whole idea of additional religious training moot.

“So why do it?”

“I want him to know he’s Jewish.”

“He’ll know he’s Jewish. His parents are Jewish. His grandparents are Jewish.”

“He’s not going to get it through osmosis. The kid barely knows what a seder is. And he thinks Hanukkah is about the presents.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Come on—this is important.”

“Okay,” Michael said—as I knew he would. It wasn’t even really a discussion as much as a ritual dance we had to perform. “Okay.”

From the time of our twelve-week sonogram, we knew we were having a boy. Along with the immense, surprising relief I felt flooding me in the doctor’s office—there would be no possible repeating of my own history with my mother!—another realization quickly emerged: having a boy meant having a bris.

There never seemed to be any choice in the matter. Certainly I knew that circumcision was a hot-button issue. Was it the healthful thing to do—or a barbaric act? If it should be performed at all, should it be done in a hospital by a trained doctor using anesthetic, or in an unsanitary living room by a religiously ordained mohel? This was not a discussion Michael and I had. We were having a boy. We quickly settled on the name Jacob. And eight days after his birth, a bris would take place, in our living room, complete with catered bagels and lox from Barney Greengrass.

On the morning of Jacob’s bris, as our apartment bustled with activity—the food delivery, the flowers, the furniture pushed to the side in anticipation of a crowd—I holed myself up in my bedroom with my baby. Inside his bassinet, his skinny legs stretched out, eyes closed, fingers curling and uncurling, he was perfect. How was it possible that in less than an hour, we would be voluntarily allowing a bearded stranger (I assumed he would be bearded, and he was certainly a stranger) to slice off the skin around the tip of his penis?

Every few minutes, Michael poked his head in to make sure
we were okay. His parents had arrived. A few friends. He was in entertaining mode. I caught a whiff of smoked fish and scallion cream cheese each time he opened the door. I told Michael that we were fine, but if there had been a secret exit, even a fire escape, I might have climbed out my bedroom window and down to the street below. My brand-new mother lion instincts had kicked in, and they didn’t involve letting sharp instruments near my eight-day-old infant. I lifted Jacob from his bassinet, then sank in a rocking chair in the corner and nursed him. I couldn’t bear the idea that he didn’t know what was about to hit him.

As I rocked, I thought about the mohel. We had found him through word of mouth. He was the go-to mohel. Every Jew we knew within a thirty-mile radius had used this guy. The last four digits of his cell phone spelled out B-R-I-S, and when I first called, the outgoing voicemail message announced: “Mazel tov! It’s a boy!” He also had a Web site that offered the following options:

I tried not to hold it against the mohel that he knew how to market himself. I mean, why not? He was supposed to be the best. But I couldn’t help hating him before I had even met him, as if all this was his fault.

The doorbell kept ringing. I stayed in my bedroom with Jacob, figuring they would come get us when they needed us. It seemed to me that the apartment was filled with too many people and their germs. How could it be a good idea to have so many people around a newborn baby? A few friends knocked and tiptoed in—mostly Jewish moms of boys. I could see the sympathy in their eyes; that they knew exactly how I was feeling. They had been here too.

But why?
I wanted to wail.
Why do we do this thing? Because our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers did? When is it time to stand down?
I wished my father was alive. If he had been out there in the living room, eating bagels and lox with Michael’s parents, at least I would have known why I was doing this—for him. I would have been doing it for him. He would have wrapped his tallit around his big square shoulders and held his firstborn grandson in his arms. He would have worn a royal blue velvet yarmulke, shot through with silver embroidery. He would have said the
bracha
, blessing Jacob as the mohel performed the bris.

Michael opened the bedroom door. Behind him, a tall, bearded man who could only be the mohel. “Don’t worry, I haven’t lost one yet,” the mohel said. Great—a comedian. I carried Jacob, wrapped in a soft blue cotton blanket, into the living room, to a chorus of oohs and aahs, then handed him to my father-in-law. Dozens of people stood holding plates of food. I moved all the way to the back of the room, where I wouldn’t be able to see what was happening. Michael stood right next to his father, who sat in a chair and placed Jacob on a pillow.

As the mohel began davening, I closed my eyes and concentrated on my own father, as if the Hebrew words could summon
him here. He would have been such a wonderful grandfather: warm and kind and bursting with pride. His absence in the room was palpable.
This is what we do, Dad. Right? We can question it, we can doubt it, we can rail against it—but still, this is what we do.
I wondered if my father ever had questions of his own. Was his acceptance absolute? Was it blind? Did it comfort him—or did it choke him? I would never know. One single piercing cry from Jacob, and it was over. I rushed to the front of the room and bundled him up once again in his soft blue blanket. Back into the bedroom, back to the rocking chair. Through the closed door, I heard the clink of glasses, the scrape of chairs. The sounds of people leaving.

As I held Jacob and kissed away the salty streaks on his cheeks, his wet eyelashes, I felt time move in every direction, expanding outward. We were at the center of something much larger than ourselves. Worlds past and present spun around us. My son, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather: links on a chain that connected a dusty Eastern European shtetl to a modern apartment on the Upper West Side.

Was this ancient tradition outmoded? Quite possibly. The mohel had a long, curved pinkie nail (what for?) and used a scalpel that had been his father’s. Barbaric? Maybe. Hard to take? Most definitely. But as the guests left and our little family reentered the sleep-deprived weeks of early parenthood, I tried to imagine how it would have been if we
hadn’t
had a bris. It wasn’t guilt that made me do it. Nor shame, nor even obligation. No. It was simply this: I wanted to stay connected. I didn’t want to be the one to break that chain.