The Sacrifice of Tamar (41 page)

“I’ve got to go.” Impulsively Tamar took out a piece of paper and wrote down the date, time and place of Aaron’s wedding. She handed it to Jenny. “Please come with your husband.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Chapter twenty-six

The girls came out of the terminal first, their blond heads bobbing like dandelions in the wind.

“
Ima!
” They ran to her, throwing their arms around her.

“My little
shefelehs
, my dear treasures! How I’ve missed you both.” Tamar knelt, gathering them into her arms, their warm cheeks pressing against hers. Flesh of my flesh, I would give my
neshamah
to keep anything bad from touching them, she thought with odd, misplaced ferocity. “Where’s
Aba?
”

“Oh, he’s waiting for the suitcases…”

She bit her lip, wondering if he would get through the Green Line safely or if they would make him open the suitcases and boxes. If he brought only half the electrical appliances, towels and sheets she’d told him to…!She wondered how her dignified, scholarly husband would react to being caught by customs!

But a moment later he was by her side with two filled carts.

“No trouble?” She smiled.

“I told them the truth.” He shrugged. “They have Jewish hearts.”

She was happy to see him. They didn’t touch—no physical contact was allowed in public between religious couples scrupulously concerned with modest behavior—but his eyes caressed hers.

“How is our son and his
beshert?
” he asked.

“May the
Abeisha
give us
nachas
from them both.” She sighed. “You’ll like your daughter-in-law very much. Come, let’s find a taxi.”

Of course, Josh liked Gitta Chana very, very much. More important, he liked Gitta Chana’s father very much. The two men had an immediate rapport that surprised even Tamar in its unending enthusiasm. Josh spent the days before the wedding learning with Reb Kleinman in Lonovitch, exploring the classrooms, the dormitories, listening to lectures in the big study halls by distinguished, elderly scholars who had earned the lofty honorific of “Admor,” an acronym from the Hebrew words meaning: Our Master, Our Teacher, Our Rabbi.

Busy though she was with wedding arrangements, Tamar nevertheless could not help but notice the profound change that was coming over her husband. He was suddenly as excited and happy as a young boy, the somber dignity of his appearance altering subtly. He lost his strained respectability, his body relaxing, the lines of his forehead and around his eyes melting away.

“Do you feel lighter? Like you’ve lost weight or something?” he asked her, shocking her with his odd tone of strange gaiety. She was not used to having such lightheaded conversations with Josh.

She thought about it. “It’s not being light as much as it is not being weighted down. Not struggling. In America, I always feel as if I’m walking against this terrific wind which is trying to push me in another direction. And here, the wind is simply gone.”

“That’s a perfect way to put it! Like a wind. Only now I
feel as if the wind is at my back, pushing me forward to where I’ve always wanted to go. Our sages tell us living in the land of Israel is equal to doing all the six hundred thirteen mitzvos in the Torah.”

“Josh, would you consider it? Moving here?”

He rubbed his hands together and looked down at his shoes, thinking. “I’m not sure. I’ve never given the idea much thought. Until now. I mean the first time I was here, it was just for a few days, and all I saw was the cemetery…”

“I don’t want to go back to Orchard Park! In fact, I never want to see Brooklyn again as long as I live!” she blurted out shockingly.

“What!?”

“Uhm… I don’t… I’m not… it’s… I just like it here so much,” she said weakly, frightened.

“I do, too.” He shrugged. “But to say you never want to see your home again…”

“No, not that I don’t want to see the family, friends… just, it’s gotten so dangerous, and there’s no way to really protect yourself,” she said carefully. “Every day you read about the worst tragedies. Why, just last month, just before I came… that poor, poor girl!” Her eyes welled.

A beautiful young religious woman in her early twenties, eight months pregnant with her first child, had been attacked on her way home from a bargain clothing factory in a Brooklyn apartment building. The rapist had murdered her and stuffed her body into a garbage can.

“I just keep thinking of her parents. Such fine religious people, waiting for their first grandchild. Instead they went to a funeral. I just keep thinking about our own daughters, Saraleh, Malkaleh!”

“Shhh. Don’t even say such a thing! How can you?”

“I think about it all the time. I mean, sure, bad things
happen in Israel. Arab maniacs stab innocent old ladies standing at bus stops. Small girls are abused by their fathers. Young women are molested. But that kind of thing—Josh, she was so pregnant and so young! And why did he have to leave her that way… in a garbage can? It’s just so savage. I mean, it could only have been done by someone who grew up without any normal human feelings. It could only have happened in a big, cruel place that somehow manages to squeeze out the last drop of goodness from a person. I don’t know! Josh, those things just don’t happen in Israel! Not those things. It’s a more human place, somehow. If you fall down, five people help to pick you up. I just feel safer here.”

“This is the first I’ve heard about you not feeling safe,” he said, his brows arching.

“Well, it’s true. I have my certain places that I can go. I never wander off into side streets, or even take the subway into Manhattan anymore. And even so, I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Josh, all the time, that…” She stopped, not trusting herself to say another word.

“Would you really be prepared to live here? To leave your sister behind, the graves of your parents?”

“Rivkie and I have never been that close,” she admitted. “As for my parents, I carry them with me.”

“Well, you’ll have to go back to pack.” He smiled, suddenly finding her enthusiasm amusing.

“Not even for that.” She shook her head. “A moving company can do that without me.”

“You know, our sages tell us that the day of the Ingathering of the Exiles will be as great as the day heaven and earth were created.” He grinned. “They also say it will come about with just as much difficulty and that G-d himself will have to grasp each Jew personally by the hand. It won’t be so easy for you to leave. You’ll see!”

“You have no idea how easy it will be,” she said grimly.

He gave her a strange look but said nothing.

On the wedding day, Tamar woke up late with a weird queasiness that was somehow strangely familiar. It was, she finally understood, the same feeling she’d had on the day her daughters were born: a feeling of anxious excitement, happiness, fear, regret and joy. A feeling of glad anticipation, fright and impatience; a desire for it to be over already.

As she dressed for Aaron’s wedding, she looked at her matronly body, searching for some physical remnant of the young woman she had been, pregnant with her first child, a child now grown who was getting married. It was unbelievable. Her little boy, her little Aaron of the small, soft knees and shiny dark hair, a man! Getting married! Another woman would cook his food, iron his shirts. Another woman, younger and more beautiful, would love him, and he would return that love. And his mother would be irrelevant to his life.

On the other hand, she cheered herself, it would be the good ending. The very ending you prayed for at the very beginning when they were only eight days old about to enter the covenant through circumcision. “May we live to raise him to Torah, to the marriage canopy, and to good deeds!” The time had come for her to give up her place in his life, which, she now realized, had only been temporary. Oh, she would always be his mother. But an adult didn’t really need a mother. She’d be like some old-fashioned piece of porcelain that everyone was careful with and respectful of, but no one really had much use for.

She felt resigned.

The girls looked beautiful, she thought. Thirteen-year-old Sara, slim and fine in a lovely blue satin dress with silk bows and lace that made her blue eyes sparkle like a clear lake; and eleven-year-old Malka,
zaftig
and charming in a lighter shade of
sapphire that turned her gray-green eyes into little jades. And Aaron, tall and darkly handsome in his fine new suit of black wool with tiny gray pinstripes. He was pale with fasting, his hair still wet from the immersion in the men’s mikvah in which he had purified himself for the holy union he was about to enter.

The wedding hall was crowded, noisy, and charged with a heady excitement, rollicking with happy voices. The whole yeshiva had turned out to dance to their mashgiach’s good fortune in finding such a fine
talmid chachom
for a son-in-law. A long procession of distinguished
admorim
dropped by, their elbows supported by young grandsons as they made their slow, painful progress to pay their respects to the two fathers and the groom. The most respected Talmud teachers and scholars of B’nai Brak and Jerusalem, the elite of the yeshiva world of Orchard Park and Lakewood, brushed elbows and shoulders, jockeying for a better view of the pale, sweating bridegroom.

In a completely separate women’s hall, the bride, her relatives, the wives and daughters of the important
roshei yeshivot
, and the wives of yeshiva
kollel
students stood around chattering like a flock of colorful birds, their head coverings like exotic plumage. The more important rebbetzins wore the turbanlike
shvis
(the higher the turban, the more important the rebbetzin, at least in her own eyes), while more modern women had doll-like human hair wigs or elaborate new hats that covered all their hair. Unmarried girls of marriageable age, their uncovered hair smoothed back and shiny, looked joyously at the bride, their eyes filled with delicious anticipation. They chattered like happy little sparrows, smiling and talking innocently, catching up on each other’s lives.

Tamar, in a lovely new wig, stood in a place of honor beside the bride’s elaborately decorated chair. She felt her head swim, as if she were in some kind of trance. It was almost a nightmare, she thought, with no reason she could point to. There, everyone
was so happy, so happy! Why should she feel it was a nightmare?

With relief she spied Jenny and waved to her. She was by her side a moment later, bringing with her a strange sense of serenity.

“A beautiful mitzvah. G-d’s will,” she said.

Or a terrible mistake. Man’s will, Tamar thought, shocking herself. How could you tell?

The bride, in a dress of heavy, opaque satin borrowed from a fund for religious girls, a dress that had to be returned in the morning and cost almost nothing, smiled smugly. Her figure was small and shapely in the pretty folds, her hands long and delicate. Only her eyes seemed hard to Tamar. Like a determined businesswoman’s rather than a delicate, quivering bride’s.

The groom-to-be, slender and pale, sat at the long table with the important rabbis and his father and father-in-law, looking as if he would prefer to remain that way, expounding on a problem of Talmudical interpretation rather than joining the bride in the next room. But, finally, the singing began.

“Ay ya ya ya, yaya, yaya ya,” the room resounded, all voices raised. And Aaron rose, supported by his father and father-in-law, both carrying candles to light his way to joy. Closing his eyes, he silently mouthed psalms, allowing himself to be ushered to his waiting bride. Before him, dozens of yeshiva boys danced wildly, waving their arms and kicking, sending their round black hats flying. Tamar watched Aaron and Josh approach the bridal chair.

My son, my husband.

My son, his father.

She felt the tears of happiness and gratitude choke her.

The fear was weak now, the happiness and optimism strong. If ever two men were father and son, it was these two. How close they were in mind and spirit. They believed in the same things, loved the same things. They had the same values. They even walked the same way, she thought, smiling, that loping gait of
great decision. Only now, each walked with identical, deliberate slowness, solemnly.

The yeshiva boys moved to the sides, leaving the way open for the groom to approach the bride. Aaron opened his eyes, looking down at the bride, smiling into her face. Only then did he grasp the ends of Gitta Chana’s thick veil, bringing it down to cover her face, a Jewish custom ever since the patriarch Jacob married a heavily veiled bride only to find the next morning he’d been tricked into taking the wrong sister—Leah instead of his beloved Rachel.

Tamar took up her candle and looped her arm through the arm of the young woman who would become part of her family, the mother of her grandchildren. Flesh of her flesh. The time was past for regret. It was time to love, she considered. She would love Gitta Chana, her son’s soon-to-be wife. Or, at least, she would do her no harm. Leading the girl down the aisle with careful, measured steps, she brought her to Aaron.

Chapter twenty-seven

Of course, she went back to live in Brooklyn after the wedding. Was there ever any doubt that she wouldn’t? she thought. The idea of great changes, monumental upheavals, life-altering choices, at their age was silly. Josh was settled, the revered head of Yeshiva Mesifta Kavod ha-Makom in Orchard Park. The girls were in Bais Yaakov of Williamsburg. They had their friends. She had her neighbors, her respectful congregants, her butcher, her take-out food place. She knew where to buy gifts and linens and wigs. To move across continents, to a place where you would have to replace your butcher and your wig maker, this seemed so impossible. It was no wonder that most human beings lived and died within twenty-five miles of where they were born. Ingathering of the Exiles. Josh was right. G-d was certainly going to have to reach out and grab each Jew to get them to leave America, England, Brazil, Australia… to get them to pull up stakes and move to the Land of the Jews.