In
many synagogues in America, especially large congregations like the one
my family and I attend, children receive a date for their bar or bat
mitzvah years in advance. This is the day that a child stands in front
of the congregation and assumes the responsibilities of an adult,
reading from the Torah and offering a commentary on the week’s teaching.
It is a time of enormous celebration; it requires months of
preparation.
So we knew, already in
early 2019, that our daughter Orli would become a bat mitzvah on Jan.
15, 2022. It seemed auspicious: It would be the week of her 13th
birthday; it was Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, a time of national
introspection; and the portion of the Torah assigned to that week was
resonant. In it the Jews cross the Red Sea, fleeing slavery, and enter
the wilderness.
In the intervening
years, our family began to better understand wandering in the
wilderness, not only from the endless drag of the pandemic but also
because some months after Orli received her bat mitzvah date, a CT scan
revealed her liver was laden with tumors. Through two years of
surgeries, chemotherapy and extended hospital stays, we held on to the
idea that she might still stand in front of the congregation.
In
families like ours, joy has a specific urgency. It cannot be delayed.
We refused to move the date, even when Covid and Omicron changed our
ability to invite everyone we wanted to see. Facing morphing
uncertainties and vulnerability, we adapted. We did not have to reach
deep to say the prayer of thanks for allowing us to reach this moment.
In
congregations like my own, we do not use our phones on Shabbat, so we
were unaware that around the time Orli began to recite from the Torah,
1,300 miles away, at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, a
man had taken the rabbi and congregants hostage. Later that night, when
we learned what was still unfolding, my partner and I whispered to each
other, hoping to shield Orli and her sister, Hana, a moment longer, to
delay the inevitable question we knew we’d be asked: “Will it happen to
us?” Orli had asked me
the same question the week after Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue
was attacked in October 2018. She worried that we could be bombed. In
other words: Are we safe at synagogue?
To
these questions, I can offer no concrete answer. I do not want to lie,
though I am tempted to simply insist we will be fine. I tell them: Our
synagogue is well fortified. But my uncertainty in a time of hate and
violence, not unlike my uncertainty in the face of illness, destabilizes
me. It is unsettling to allow your children to know, early on, just how
very little control you really have. Vulnerability is always jarring;
it is somehow more terrible when you are meant to be a comforting
presence. Plus, I have no good models for these queries.
When
I was a child, I had little to challenge my belief in my parents’
ability to keep us healthy. Conversations about fear were largely
retrospective. We grew up with our Holocaust refugee relatives who had
fled destitution and destruction to deliverance in an American promised
land. The past was terrible, but we were in the present.
My
children, meanwhile, are familiar with mediports, home fluids and daily
pill regimens. The girls intimately know the difference between minor
surgeries and major ones. They have grown accustomed to our synagogue’s
metal detectors, bag checks and security guards; they know by name the
permanent security officer at the door. Indeed, the officer knows Orli’s
story well. When he saw us arrive on that Saturday morning for the bat
mitzvah, he and my partner, Ian, embraced. They both cried.
In
“Beshalach” (“When He Let Go”), the Torah portion read on Jan. 15, the
Israelites celebrate their freedom, then panic in the face of
uncertainty. They bitterly complain to Moses, who has led them out of
Egypt, that they fear death by thirst or starvation awaits them in the
wilderness. The portion ends with a battle with the Amalekites, a
conflict, the Torah tells us, that continues from generation to
generation. The Amalekites become a stand-in for a mythical eternal
enemy, a symbol of any evil that subsequently arises against the Jewish
community.
As
the months of Orli’s illness turned into years, and even when her scans
were finally clear this past summer, uncertainty remained. In her
sermon, Orli pushed back against the idea of an omnipresent God, or a
God that favored Jews, or even God at all. She told the congregation she
understood what it meant to feel alone, even abandoned. No deity had
shown up in her hospital room, she said. Perhaps, she said, divinity was
in being present for each other. When one of our rabbis offered Orli a
blessing, she did not say that our daughter’s life would face no further
hardship, but rather that hardships would be faced with the support of
her community.
Illness has, at various
points in these last two odd years, displaced my kids from their home,
their sense of surety in what tomorrow will bring and in their belief
that we can protect them. Security breaches have shifted their sense of
safety. And yet, both experiences have shown us the capacity of our
hearts not just to break, but also to stubbornly repair. We are far from
the only community to feel insecure; we are not the only family to have
experienced trauma. We have seen this country reckon with violence, and
we recognize now it was a privilege to think we were protected. We have
all felt alone in these last two illness-bounded years. Instead, we
might see ourselves as together, but in a different, uncharted way,
bound up in an effort to protect one another.
Orli’s
middle name is Chaim, for my grandfather who fled Nazi-occupied Vienna
at age 26. He was known for his knack for reinvention and unmitigated
joy, even in the face of unimaginable loss. Upon my bat mitzvah, some 30
odd years before Orli’s, he sent me a letter: Now that I was coming of
age in the Jewish community, he offered the words Moses says to Joshua
as he assumes the mantle of leadership. They are words meant to gird
oneself in the face of challenge and responsibility, of obstacles and
uncertainty. It is a command not to back down but to forge ahead. And so
he did not write mazel tov, or congratulations,but hazak v’ematz, have strength and be courageous: The expression is not an endpoint, but a beginning.
Sarah
Wildman is a staff editor and writer in Opinion. She is the author of
“Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind.”
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