The Book of Trees (4 page)

I’d signed up for a school trip to Massada and for a night hike, the way Aviva had suggested, but I really wanted to walk alone down the hill and be surrounded by all that space. I’d never seen a landscape without buildings or trees. I imagined the desert as a vast nothingness, yet I knew it would be different up close. The landscape would flatten and change as I walked. There’d be hills and gullies and wild cacti. From here, the land seemed beautiful, endless and terrifying.

Prayers. I was supposed to be doing my prayers. I turned my back on the desert and forced myself to look at my book. I’d never felt the need to pray until after that summer up at Don’s cottage. At the end of August Sheila, Flip and I went back to Toronto, to work and school and, I’d assumed, the band. Then Flip decided to drop out of university to join the army.

My mom went ballistic. “Don’t you know,” she yelled, “I sheltered draft dodgers during the Vietnam War?” Of course we knew. Sheila had hidden Don in a barn near Peterborough for months.

Suddenly I had no band, no brother and no boyfriend either. When the Neon DayGlos folded, Matt disappeared. He never returned my messages, and when I went by his apartment, his roommate said he was out. The worst part was I didn’t actually miss him; I missed the band.

My life became very lonely. I hadn’t joined the school band or the track team because of rehearsing with the Neon DayGlos, so I had few school friends. I tried hanging out at the bars I used to play at. I drank beer and danced with guys with greased-back hair and tattoos. I slept with one of them because I thought it would be fun, except it wasn’t. Sex with a stranger was awkward and messy. Then one of the bars got a new bouncer, who confiscated my fake id, and suddenly I had nowhere to go.

All that fall I kept waiting for Don to come back. By November I realized he was going to live at the cottage year-round. I couldn’t understand why he would want to live alone in a shack in the woods, why he didn’t want to be with us.

I spent the winter in my room, playing old Carter Family songs: “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken
.
” I listened to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and my father’s old Stanley Brothers records.

I started going for long walks in the frigid night. I’d go down to the boardwalk at the Beaches and let the wind whip snow against my face. I wanted it to sting me out of my lethargy. “Something has to be different,” I’d say aloud. Yet nothing changed. My words made my scarf damp, which chapped my chin.

Then one Saturday morning I woke up and the light coming through my curtains had a softer, more translucent quality. I sat up in bed and peered out the window. Thick ice coated the window, the sidewalk, and every house and tree. The maple on our front lawn jingled like wind chimes as the branches moved in the breeze.

The radio said it was minus twenty-five and the roads were like glaciers, but I couldn’t wait to get outside. I wanted to skate right down our road and look at the trees dressed up in their shiny winter coats.

After layering on long underwear and snow pants, I crawled down our front stairs. The glare of the sun off the ice made me squint. I inhaled the icy air, drawing the bitterness into my lungs, and watched my breath steam out in smokers’ clouds. My exposed cheeks felt stiff in the frigid air. I slid on my bum down our sloped sidewalk to the park at the end of the street. A muffled quiet hugged my ears. No people or traffic, just the sound of the branches tinkling in the wind, and the occasional loud crack as limbs snapped under the weight of the ice.

My boots made a satisfying crunch as they sank through the top layer of brittle snow covering the park. I lay on the end of the kids’ slide, looking up at the bright blue sky wisped with clouds. It made me think of the afternoon I lay in the clearing with Don. Today the trees looked like silver lace. The branches sounded like thousands of crystal wineglasses being tapped by silver spoons. If only the world was always this frozen, I thought, and I could stay looking at the trees forever.

I’d come a long way since that miserable winter. Now I had God, the yeshiva girls and the desert to get to know. With them, I’d never be lonely. I quickly finished the last prayer and headed down to meet Michelle for class.

Although my yeshiva courses were different than I expected, I was gradually adapting. I’d started to appreciate the textual analysis. Each word in the Torah was open to scrutiny. What did it mean and how was it used? How had it been interpreted through the centuries? I liked the prayer and biblical Hebrew classes best. Each new word I learned unlocked part of the puzzle. I quickly memorized new vocabulary so I could feel the tiny thrill of recognizing a word as I chanted it aloud.

The only class I couldn’t get into was the
halacha
, the law class. We’d moved on to a discussion of whether meat and milk could touch in a refrigerator. We’d had the same discussion yesterday. And, I swear, the day before that. The answer was yes, because they were cold. But if they were hot, well, that was a different story. I couldn’t believe we were discussing this. Who cared? The previous week we’d studied how many hours you had to wait between eating meat and milk. The other students seemed riveted by the geographical differences: most Europeans waited six hours, except for the Dutch, who only waited one. As the week progressed, my frustration with the class intensified. Why, oh why, couldn’t we discuss
why
God said not to eat meat and milk together? Was it human rights? Animal rights? Indigestion?

I sighed and rested my head on my notebook. Maybe I could sign up for a class more focused on God, or on how to bring more spirituality into the world.

After
halacha
class all the students piled through the double doors of the
beit midrash
, the main study hall, and found places for the midday prayers. It was a short service, mostly prayed individually. At the end, we all sang the closing prayer together
.
I felt a glow of satisfaction within me. Voices rose around me, true in their devotion. Each girl loved
Hashem
and wanted to make His world a better place. I nodded to myself. I just needed everything I did at B’nos Sarah to feel like this.

When prayers were finished, I headed down to Rochel’s office and sat in the hard-backed chair in front of her desk. “I’m wondering if I can take another class instead of
halacha
.”

Rochel peered at me over her reading glasses. I looked back at her as earnestly as I could. She pulled out my student card and glanced at my courses. “No, not at your level. You have to have the building blocks, a foundation of the laws, first, and of course a higher level of Hebrew.”

“Oh.” I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Are there any courses on why we should be Jewish?”

Rochel furrowed her brow. “Why we should be Jewish?”

“You know.” I knit my fingers together behind my back. “Spiritual discussions of why we keep kosher, or about God.”

Rochel looked confused. I imagined her thinking, It’s always these
ba’al teshuvah,
these newly religious girls, who ask these things. She shook her head. “You should attend our Shabbos retreats. They discuss more personal matters.” She pulled out a flyer. “There’s one this weekend. It’s sponsored by the Cohen Foundation and it’s very reasonably priced. I think you’d enjoy the guest speaker.”

I thanked her and took the flyer. On the cover was a picture of a hotel in a grove of trees under the words
Join us for a spiritual retreat.
Most of the sessions had hokey titles like
God and You, forging a bond,
but it also looked restful. I had some spending money left over from a waitressing job and from my grad present from my mom’s mother, Bubbie Bess. Maybe Aviva and I could go together.

After class I took the bus to the Old City. Most afternoons I volunteered at the craft center or explored the city. I’d tried to find someone to explore Jerusalem with, but most of the other girls had signed up for a full-day program. So I went back on my own to the Hurva Synagogue and the Roman ruins of the Cardo. I wandered through the Jewish quarter’s restored alleys and expensive shops. In the Armenian quarter I sat in the beautiful cathedral Aviva had wrinkled her nose at. Outside the Old City I walked through different neighborhoods, explored museums and hung out in Liberty Bell Park, with its grove of olive trees. I felt so proud to be a Jew, to explore my beautiful country and know that it had all been built in less than fifty years.

Each time I went to the Old City, I visited the
Kotel
. I decided I had to develop a connection with the wall. I hadn’t grown up thinking it was special, so how could I form an instant bond?

And so I stood at the wall and let my head rest against the hot stones. I’d wait for a tour group to squeeze their notes into the wall’s crevices, and then I’d chant from my prayer book as fast as I could, so the women waiting behind me could have their turn. I felt empty, like a prayer machine. The
Kotel
was too crowded for God. If God was anywhere, He was in that vast desert space surrounding the city.

At the school library I’d read up on the
Kotel’s
history. The high priests had made their offerings and spoken with God there. Centuries of exiled Jews dreamed of it from Russian
shtetls
and Moroccan
mellahs
. But when I stood with my body pressed to those warm stones I thought, What if it’s just a stone wall, or worse, what if all the rabbis were wrong and it’s just a retaining wall pilgrims used to piss on? This is an important Jewish symbol, I reminded myself, a spiritual holy place. The word
icon
lingered in my mind. I had learned a story about honoring false gods and praying before idols. What was the difference between praying to God in front of the wall or on your own? Was the wall really, truly holy or was it holy because people decided it was? Was there a difference?

I gave the
Kotel
a parting tap and sighed. I’d wanted to let Israel fill me up. It was, but slowly. What if I’d gone to Ireland, where Don’s ancestors were from, and decided the coastal towns were my spiritual homeland? Could I have as easily become a Catholic as a Jew?

I climbed the stairs to the balcony overlooking the Temple Mount. The Dome glimmered like a gold-wrapped chocolate in a forbidden box. All the other times I came, the complex had been empty, but today people were lined up in neat rows. Could I go in too? I’d never imagined it was open to tourists. A shiver ran down my spine. I could be near those colors—heavenly blue and glimmering gold. I trotted down the stairs and back across the plaza toward an exit near the men’s side. After studying my guidebook, I made a few wrong turns through dark alleys until I came to a tunnel with a metal gate and a guard. On the other side, a corridor of trees led toward the Dome. Green. I stared at the row of trees, the color a relief to my eyes. Forget the Dome. I wanted to go and sit under those trees.

The guard eyed me warily.

“Can I go in?”

He shook his head and pointed to a sign on the wall listing the hours of operation. “Now it’s prayers.”

I studied the sign. I’d have to come another day.

From the Old City I wandered up to Ben Yehuda Street, a pedestrian road lined with shops and cafés. Tourists perused jewelry, T-shirts, menorahs and candlesticks. Israelis drinking strong coffee filled the cafés. At the foot of the street, soldiers with M16s hung out at Zion Square. They looked even younger than me.

Before I left for Israel, Sheila had given me two envelopes of money. “This one is for you and this one is for helping others. Just don’t give the money to some cult that thinks they’re going to bring the Messiah.”

That was so my mom. Sheila worked with at-risk teens and she was also a peace activist. I had attended rallies and helped her canvass until I was thirteen. After that I was more interested in learning to play Don’s instruments, especially the banjo.

Sheila had also given me two envelopes of money when I went to visit my cousin Emily in New York the year before. I bought loaves of bread, cheese, carrots and juice boxes and made thirty-five lunches. I distributed them in Penn Station in half an hour. People took my lunches; a few older people said, “Bless you, child.”