Devotion (18 page)

So what
is
to be done? It was the question at the core of all the questions I had been asking. Life is suffering. There is no way around it. The human condition—the knowledge of this—drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life’s fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt. What is to be done?

The key word was
doing.
Not thinking, or wishing, or contemplating. Not staring into space. Not succumbing to dismay. Recently I went to see a friend, a psychopharmacologist, because I had begun to wonder if thinking about all this stuff all the
time was making me unwell. “You’re not having a chemical crisis, Dani,” he told me. “You’re having an existential crisis.”

It wasn’t getting easier because it isn’t supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life,” he wrote. “Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie.”

Doing
was what was necessary. Action has magic, grace, and power in it, as Goethe once wrote. Whenever I took an action—yoga or meditation practice, trying a new shul, reading a bit from the Buddhist wisdom book to Jacob in the morning, expressing gratitude at the dinner table—I felt…better. I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love.

I climbed the stairs to the glass front doors of the Jewish Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan, carrying a shopping bag. Inside the bag were several velvet pouches, embroidered with silver and gold thread.

“I have an appointment to see Rabbi Visotzky,” I told the guard. I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—by the
high level of security. My bag and I passed through a metal detector and into the lobby, where I waited for Burt.

A few weeks earlier, he and I had been having coffee when he asked me if I still had my father’s tallit and tefillin. I was certain that they were somewhere in my house; probably boxed up in the basement. I didn’t stop to wonder why Burt was asking. But before we got up to leave the cafe, he circled back around to the subject.

“I say this in full awareness of the responsibility it entails,” he said. His intense dark eyes were even more intense than usual. “If you would like me to teach you to put on your father’s tefillin, I would be honored.”

I felt a kind of slamming inside; doors blew open and closed at once. Put on my father’s tefillin? Heat rose to my face. It was forbidden territory—so off-limits as to seem almost sexual. But on the other hand, here was one of the greatest minds in modern Judaism offering me a profound learning experience. There was no way I was going to say no, though the thought of it undid me. What would my father think? In the 1970s, when women were first allowed to read from the Torah in Conservative synagogues, my father would quietly walk out of the temple when a woman approached the ark. He did this not in protest, but because it wasn’t in line with his beliefs. And though he never said it, I think it offended him. Women were not meant to perform aliyahs, read from the Torah, become rabbis or cantors. Daughters were most certainly not supposed to schlep their father’s tefillin to the Jewish Theological Seminary in a shopping bag on the invitation of a rabbi famous for starting the seminary’s first egalitarian service.

Burt met me in the lobby, then led me upstairs through a labyrinth of halls. He had been at the seminary for his whole adult
life. He walked briskly around corners, opened doors to hidden passageways leading to his book-lined office. All the while, I followed him, feeling frightened but also exhilarated. Back home, at the kitchen table, shaking the dust out of my father’s tallit and carefully wiping the straps of his tefillin with leather cleaner, I had felt the whole of my history brush up against me.

We made no small talk. The mood between us was serious as I unzipped the velvet pouches and laid my father’s tefillin out on Burt’s desk. The straps were brittle and retained their shape from having been wound around the wooden boxes that protected the phylacteries for the past twenty years. The boxes weren’t in the best condition. The Hebrew letters stenciled onto them had faded, though they could still be made out. But inside, the phylacteries themselves were perfectly preserved.

“This is the head tefillin.” Burt held up one of the two boxes. “The Hebrew says
shel rosh
—for the head.” He examined the other box. “And this one is
shel yad
—for the arm.” He looked more closely at the two boxes and the way the straps had been wound. “Was your father a lefty?”

I was surprised to realize that I didn’t remember. This was an awful feeling—this not remembering. How could I not know if my father had been left-handed? It suddenly seemed a critical fact about him that I had been robbed of by his death. One more thing I didn’t know.

“I could call my aunt Shirley and ask,” I said. But then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to explain to Shirley that I was in a rabbi’s office learning to lay tefillin.

“No need,” Burt said. “Do you have the tallit?”

I pulled out my father’s tallit from its pouch. During my wed
ding to Michael, we had used it as our chuppah. If my father would never meet my husband, at least we could be married beneath the tallit he had worn all his life. The embroidery around its border had yellowed, and the fringes I remembered playing with as a little girl were tangled and frayed.

“Do you want to wear a yarmulke?” Burt asked.

Somehow, a yarmulke seemed like overkill. I shook out the tallit’s folds, then pulled it over my head like a hood, crossing it over my face. I closed my eyes and breathed in any little bit of my father that might exist inside his tallit and said my own version of a prayer:
Hope this is okay, Dad.
Then I let it settle around my shoulders. My father had been a large man, and I was enveloped by his tallit. It nearly reached the floor.

“Baruch atah adonai,” I recited with Burt. My father’s voice said the blessing along with us. He faced the windows in our New Jersey den, his Wall Street shoes shiny and ready to go. “Eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hitateif ba tzitzit.”

“Now the tefillin. We start with your left arm.” I awkwardly placed the phylactery over my bicep as Burt led me through the blessing over laying tefillin. I was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and suddenly wished my arms were covered. The worn leather strap against my bare skin looked alien and strange. I wound it from my bicep to my wrist, then held the remaining length of the strap loosely in my hand.

Burt helped me to place
ha-rosh
, the head tefillin, correctly so that the phylactery was at the top of my hairline, and the knot at the bottom of the strap’s loop nestled into the hollow at the base of my skull. His office was dead quiet; the thick walls of the semi
nary blocked out all sounds of traffic from Broadway down below. I felt disembodied. Floating outside myself—my feelings too intense and conflicted. Why was I doing this? Was it wrong? Burt tightened the loop around my head slightly so that it fit. Then he showed me how to wrap the remaining length of the strap in my hand: around the middle finger, twice on the lower joint and once on the middle joint. The rest was then wound around my palm, the lines of the straps crisscrossing, emulating Hebrew letters. The result of this intricate process spelled out one of God’s names:
Shadai.

“The strap wound around your finger symbolizes an act of betrothal to God,” said Burt. With him, I recited the final blessing: “I will betroth you unto Me forever; I will betroth you unto Me in righteousness and in justice and in kindness and in compassion; I will betroth you unto Me in faithfulness.”

But it didn’t feel like God to whom I was betrothing myself. If anything, I felt like my father’s bride. He had bound himself to God; I had bound myself to him. There, in a rabbi’s study above Broadway, I felt the power and intensity of my connection to my father, as I stood wrapped in his tallit and tefillin.

“How does it feel?” asked Burt.

“Very strange,” I answered. “It feels like a costume.”

“It
is
a costume. As far back as Juvenal the Satirist, there is record of pagan women wearing Jewish amulets.
Phylacteries
come from the same root as
prophylactic
,” said Burt. “Something that guards you. They also say that if you wrap yourself in tefillin and have a mezuzah on your door, you’re protected from harm.” He paused. “Would that it were so.”

Would that it were so.
My father had performed this ritual every
weekday morning of his life from the time of his bar mitzvah. It hadn’t kept him from harm. But the tefillin were accoutrements of prayer, and the donning of them, a form of moving meditation. Maybe this simple, repetitive act gave my father courage, each morning, to face the day. Maybe it reminded him of who he was and what was important to him. And maybe, through his example, he taught me a lesson about the importance of a daily connection to that deeper place.

The Sanskrit word for devotion is
bhakta
. It comes from the verbal root
bhaj
, which is defined as: (1) distributed, allotted, assigned; (2) divided; (3) served, worshipped; (4) engaged; (5) attached or devoted to, loyal, faithful; (6) dressed, cooked (as in food); (7) forming a part of, belonging to; (8) loved, liked.

It took several months to clean out my mother’s apartment. She had lived in a converted three-bedroom in a new building on West Eighty-sixth Street. The apartment had a reasonable number of closets, especially by Manhattan standards, but still, my mother had built additional walls of closets in the master bedroom, the kitchen, and her office.

I hardly knew where to begin. The kitchen seemed safest, least personal. Aside from the three sets of china, the good silver, the Danish stainless, the dozens of sets of salt and pepper shakers, my mother had kept every plastic doily and Chinese food container that had ever been delivered to her. She threw away nothing—made no distinction between valuable items and what might have arguably been considered trash. Many of the kitchen cupboards were piled high with cashmere sweaters of every color and weight. Some, folded with tissue paper and laid flat in vinyl bags, were from the 1940s, when she had been a sorority girl. Others had never been worn; some still had Saks Fifth Avenue price tags attached. In the top cupboards, which required a stepladder to reach, there was a collection of hatboxes from midtown milliners who had long since gone out of business: a leopard pillbox, straw boaters, an enormous sable thing.

What to do? What to do with any of it? All that long, hot summer, I kept lists and made piles.
Keep, store, toss.
It was my grieving process, I suppose. I wasn’t so much mourning the loss of my mother as coming face-to-face with the absolute end of our story. The sharp sliver of hope I had always kept with me, despite what I knew, despite what anyone said—that sliver had shattered. I would be finding the embedded shards—
samskaras
—for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, the piles grew.
Keep, store, toss
. I called vintage dealers, consignment stores. I carted garbage bags full of designer clothes to a second-floor shop across town where Jackie Onassis was reputed to have sold her clothes on consignment. I thought my mother would have been pleased at the company she was keeping.

The clothing, after all, was one of the pivotal ways in which
my mother defined herself. She prided herself, quite rightly, on having a good eye. Her bedroom closets were filled from floor to ceiling with six decades’ worth of high fashion. Silk, wool, fine cotton, leather, and suede were neatly arranged according to color and season. Plastic boxes displayed scarves; there must have been close to a thousand of them. Belts of every shape and size hung in a heavy tangle from some sort of contraption. When I tried to remove it, the whole thing crashed to the floor. The closets smelled like my mother: L’Air du Temps, coffee, a faint whiff of camphor.

I felt like a surgeon, cutting closer and closer to something essential as I went along. Who had she been? Why had all the stuff mattered to her so much? Were there clues? As I delved deeper into the closets, I slid a plastic box off a shelf and saw a Post-it stuck on top. Then I noticed that these Post-its were everywhere. Against the custom-made shelving, painted an eggshell white, they fluttered. Stuck to boxes, to the sides of garment bags.

What were these? Packing lists? No, I realized—they were dreams, projections, fantasies of how life was going to be. In her good white pants and navy sweater, her perfect belt and jaunty scarf, my mother was going to be…happy. Content. People would treat her as she
should
be treated: with admiration and even deference.

In her spidery hand, she wrote out these lists, each time hoping it would be different. But it was never different. I would later discover, in her office, the stacks of unopened folders and notebooks purchased each year. If her wardrobe was a reflection of how she put herself together externally, my mother’s office was a museum of unrealized ambition. The projects she was going to embark upon! The articles and books and screenplays she was going to write! As I pulled batches of notebooks still in their plastic wrappers from her office shelves, I imagined her annual trip to Staples, where she bought her supplies in bulk. I pictured my mother striding through the bright aisles purposefully, loading up her shopping cart with new folders and dividers and multicolored pens, a glimmer of an idea, a phrase, a concept, floating through her head like an aria. More Post-its, paper clips. This time—this time, she was really going to do it. She was going to write that book, that screenplay, that op-ed.

I packed up all the brand-new notebooks and folders in a box to give to Goodwill. I would never use them myself. They seemed cursed to me, even though I knew better. As I packed, I thought of the way my mother must have felt as she had placed each notebook carefully on top of those from the previous years: excited, inspired, full of big plans. These must have been some of her most hopeful hours.