Some people are born into love.
Some people are born into nothing and everything.
Me; I think I was born alone.
Back in the early 2000’s, it was a different world, a different life - and yet somehow the exact same time as now; it was normal for Jewish kids to get married before they had a house, a degree, a job, acne free skin; it was how it was, and how it was is how it always will be. With that same mentality, it was normal to have me two years later. But the thing is: no one was ready.
And so, that’s how life started out for me: alone with two twenty-two year olds - too exhausted from trying to build their own lives to build a complete stranger’s - even if that stranger spent nine months and two weeks in gestation as a byproduct of their combined chromosomes.
Spending time with me was a luxury - something my parents didn’t get to do very often. That’s why I learned how to read when I was four years old - so that on those long shabbat days, the day of rest and worship turned into the day of loneliness and silence, when there was no one to talk to, no one to play Candyland with - I wouldn’t be too alone. I’d have the imaginary friends that were alright to have because they were the kind that lonely, sad people had - not the crazy ones. But, really - what’s the difference?
Maybe that’s why I came to rely so heavily on books, on writing - like a junky with nowhere else to turn and no one else to love her I cracked the spines and inhaled the fumes of the decaying pages, hoping that I would find someone that - maybe they wouldn’t talk to me - but they would talk to each other and I would feel like part of the conversation. That’s why I read books like Less, because they allow me to redirect all of my empty, plum coloured thoughts into those of a fifty year old gay man who feels just as alone as I do, even if it’s for very different reasons.
After a decade or so, things finally stabilized - a log was found to hold onto in the current - I found my person. The one. Not the one but, all the same, the one. Her name is Sara.
Speaking and thinking in these terms always leads me to believe that I was in love with her; it makes me think of all those confused people in the world who just don’t know what to make of any of it. People like Arthur Less, who spent his entire life either in a relationship or sleeping around, there was a distinction between the two until there wasn’t: until he met this guy. “What do you call a guy who you're sleeping with --Let's say you do that for nine years, you make breakfast and have birthday parties and arguments and wear what he tells you to wear, for nine years, and you're nice to his friends, and he's always at your place, but you know all the time it can't go anywhere, he's going to find someone, it won't be you, that's agreed on from the start, he's going to find someone and marry him -- what do you call that guy?” What do you call a person who you never felt comfortable hugging, who had no pores on her nose, whose house you called your own, who you spent every waking moment with, and who you sobbed about in the bathroom so loudly that your mother heard you when she said her final goodbye?
She was my best friend and I knew that she would be from the first orchestrated playdate in grade four when she still wore her dirty blonde hair in long scraggly tendrils and wore those trademark purple glasses that accentuated the largeness of her forehead.
Her mother told her that the sad, quiet girl would be coming over one day during winter break for a six hour playdate.
“Six hours?” she said with disbelief and dripping dread. I really do applaud her for not locking herself in her room and insisting I go straight home. Now that I think of it, though, she couldn’t. Her room didn’t have a lock.
And then I came. I didn’t know she didn’t want me to be there, to spend six hours alone with her in her house when she could be watching movies with her sister or her father or her mother, or really anyone else but me.
And then she asked what I wanted to do and somehow we ended up outside.
I said, “Let’s make a snowman,” because I was a stupid kid who didn’t know how else to occupy time with a person my own age in the middle of winter. Too many movies of fake children spending fake time together. Like the good hostess she was, even at nine years old, she acquiesced and we sat in our stiff snow pants and oversized gloves and started on the foundationary ball - the butt.
Half an hour goes by and I end up on the swing, delirious from the cold, singing an opera I picked up from the singing frog on The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show the other day. And she’s still sitting there, in the snow, her legs spread out on either side of the butt, laughing and begging me to please, save her ears and her neighbors ears, maybe the whole neighborhood’s ears, and please, shut up.
The snow-butt never got made into a man. Hot chocolate and an overbearing mother I would grow to fear awaited us in the den with a movie we never got to finish because we hadn't realized that six hours had gone by. The final ding on the egg timer. And, just like that - eight years went by and not for one second (well, maybe one here and there), was I alone.
But, like getting married before you figure out how to grow proper facial hair, the Jewish tradition always comes back to bite you in the ass like a wedgie you just can’t get rid of - no matter how many times you covertly yank it out.
She left for seminary, only I didn’t leave with her. This time, I wasn’t used to the loneliness; I grew accustomed to always having someone - to having a person. The person who forced me to stop reading on shabbat and have playdates and then hangouts with them and the rest of our people. It’s important to remember, however, that she’s my person and that doesn’t mean that I’m going to let this relationship run cold quite so soon. You don’t give up your person, no matter what gets in the way, even if what gets in the way is yourselves.
But why did it happen? Because of Judaism, because, while everyone else from my class got swept up in the way that things were supposed to go, I pulled myself over to the side and let the water run over my feet. The thing is, though, I was in that water just as long as they were - just as long as she was. I was just as wet but I didn’t choose to stay beneath the current until it swept me all the way across the globe to a year in Israel - I grabbed the towel off the rack and and padded my way over to a public cegep - a place so unlike the current I’d come from before - with wet footprints showing, still showing, on the dry pavement.
Can you imagine what it is, to be in the same bubble since you were three years old, and finally pop it? To leave a sheen of moisture on the ground where it once hovered over and just walk away? It is to feel freedom. But it doesn’t last.
Why? Why can we not just hold on to this freedom, this glorious, glorious, freedom? Because, unfortunately, even if you hate the bubble, even if you despise its glistening border and clean casing, it doesn’t change the fact that you grew up in the bubble, that you learned how to look at the world through a soapy ridge, constantly glaring at your own reflection. You question whether you should leave it behind entirely, even though it’s everything you’ve ever wanted to do, the thing you’ve been waiting for since you were old enough to realize that religion was a farce and the ones who enforced it were just modestly dressed tyrants. That might be melodramatic but in the thick of the religion, when it was fed to you and home and then shoved down your throat at school, it got to be a little oppressive.
All the same, you don’t want to be one of those people who go off the derech (“derech” is Hebrew for “path”). You don’t want to become those people who you scorned as a child for not keeping kosher or keeping shabbat or even purim. And you know that even if some part of you, some really big unignorable part of you wants to leave it all behind, to wipe the soap off your brow in finality and leave Judaism altogether, you’ll know that you never will. Like Talia Lavin says,“The allure of freedom and choice and secular knowledge and the ability to pursue whatever your aspirations might be . . . maybe those who leave don’t realize that the freedom to make those choices and to pursue those things comes with a price, and the price is aloneness.”
And you’ll be especially alone because now that she’s in Israel, that she’s been in the holy land for all of nine months, the time it takes for an entire human to be made, she’s wrapped the bubble, the torah, the gemara, the religion, so tightly around herself that she can’t take it off without risking taking off her skin, of becoming completely unmade.
And what does that mean for you? I mean, you started off strong, calling everyday, staying your same old selves, cracking your same old jokes, and being the same old people. But, after a while, not even a full month in, she stopped calling. After three months, you stopped trying. And now you never talk. You never even text. Maybe it’s time to break it off, to cut the leg before the infection gets into the heart. But you can’t, and you’ll never believe that that’s the right thing to do because you’re just like Arthur Less, a fifty year old gay man who just figured out how to be young, hearing that the two people he thought would be endgame were ending it because that’s just how things go, and still being able to believe it, not even after being told in the most logical of ways: “It’s true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”
In Judaism, when a couple gets divorced, the husband has to give his wife a get , a religious document which according to Jewish law is the only way for the woman to be free of the marriage. However, since for some antiquated reason the decision of divorce is left in the hands of the men, they technically have the right to withhold the get, making the wife an agunah: a chained woman. The most common question that gets asked in this situation by non-Jews is: “Why doesn’t the woman just leave if she gets divorced in a court of law? Wouldn’t they still be just as divorced even without the get?” The answer is that yes, technically and legally they would be divorced but they wouldn’t be religiously, and to Orthodox Jews that’s a serious problem because it would go against our laws, our beliefs, the very foundation of our life, and if we looked away when this type of situation comes up and we do what everyone says we should do, everything else, everything that hold our life in place would become completely and utterly devoid of meaning.
This is why it’s so hard to walk away; to leave religion behind in the dust and not look in the rear-view mirror - because without it I wouldn’t know how to live, I wouldn’t know how to make sense of the world and the slight bit of surety that resides somewhere in my chest would be punctured and deflate with a sick-sounding wheeze. Losing my religion would be like living without lungs and even if keeping it makes me feel like accidentally snorting in a bit of water when I’m in my bubble, then I’ll take it.
And I don’t want to be like those miserable men who pitifully try to hold on to their wives by chaining them into marriage by way of religious obligation. I don’t want to be the patriarchy in the Jewish practice that domineers the lives of its women through biblical laws that shouldn’t have even applied when Moses walked down that mountain with God’s commandments. So I won’t be like them: I’ll let Sara go if she wants to be let go. I won’t force something that was always meant to end. But I will always love her like I did when she wore those ugly purple glasses and didn’t know to appreciate operatic genius when it was belting at her from a snow-covered swing set.
Work Cited
Chesler, Caren. ‘Unchain Your Wife’: the Orthodox Women shining a light on ‘get’ refusal/ The Guardian. June 4, 2021.
Greer, Andrew Sean. Less. May 22 2018.
Lavin, Talia. Off the Path of Orthodoxy/ The New Yorker. July 31 2015.
