The Sacrifice of Tamar (42 page)

Oddly, it was Josh who didn’t give up on the idea.

He seemed sadder when he returned. He was still the
Prussian officer, straight-backed and meticulous in word and deed, but there was a certain softening in his staunch pose. Often Tamar would find him on his favorite chair Friday night, the open Talmud in his lap, his eyes gazing unseeingly toward some far corner of the room. The wasting of time, the nemesis of every yeshiva boy and man, the enemy that blocked the narrow mountain passes upward toward the vast, high peaks of Torah greatness, was winning the battle more and more often in recent combat. Josh’s piercing, intelligent eyes seemed to be losing some of their determined, hard shine, becoming soft and dreamy and gently apathetic.

He missed Aaron. He missed his son.

Ever since he had been old enough to read, and even before, Aaron had been his learning partner. Sitting side by side in the living room on winter evenings and long Sabbath afternoons, they had bounced questions off each other, sharpening their wits. He missed his son’s quick cleverness, the physical presence of his young man’s fine strong body, his face, his voice…

He also missed Israel, the brief but heady joy of participating in the workings of a yeshiva of Lonovitch’s standing, the interaction with hundreds of bright students, hearing the lessons of venerable old
admorim
. . . His own yeshiva seemed puny and lifeless and somehow artificial, as if they were playing some strange game in the hostile, foreign streets of Brooklyn.

The letters and phone calls from Israel were the only bright spots in his week. He read them over and over again, chuckling at one of Aaron’s droll descriptions: how a burly Jewish truck driver stopped on the road to tell a mother her child had thrown his bottle out of the baby carriage; how a group of rabbis in the Galilee had performed the kabalistic prayer for rain amid the laughter of scoffing newsmen, and how the rain had soaked the TV cameras. He read again and again the passages in which Aaron described the gist of lectures given by venerable scholars who crowded the narrow, modest streets of Jerusalem and B’nai Brak.
There was so much he still wanted to learn, so much! And so few to teach it to him. And the challenge of meeting the standards of a place like Lonovitch…

As always, he sought the answer in the
halacha
. What was the law? Was it a mitzvah to live in Israel, a religious obligation? He took out volume after volume, probing the issues, finding obscure commentaries from famous
poskim
from the Middle Ages onward who addressed the issue, until finally he came to a clear conclusion that, once reached, could be ignored only at the peril of his own soul.

His life was the
halacha
. Nothing he did, from the way he tied his shoelaces to the way he had married and loved a woman, was outside its noble steel embrace. And the law to him at once seemed clear.

“And you shall inherit the land and live in it.” Numbers 33:53. Ramban even numbered living in Israel as one of the sacred 613 basic commandments of the Torah. There were only four reasons a Jew was allowed to live outside of
Eretz Yisroel:
if he endangered his life by embarking on the trip there; if he could not assure his children a religious education there; if he could find no way to support himself and would become a charity case there; or if he was the sole caretaker of elderly parents who refused to move there with him.

Certainly the trip there was no longer dangerous. A pleasant flight, a few hours of bad food and silly movies. He could more than amply assure the continuation of his children’s religious education. His parents were well and self-supporting. Besides, his sister and brothers would be left behind to care for them. As for earning a living… it might be harder, but he would not starve. Perhaps, through his connections, he might even be offered a position at Lonovitch’s…

But still, he hesitated. How could he abandon his congregants, his community, his students? He was keeping his little ship
afloat in the vast sea of assimilation. In the last twenty years, half the Jewish people in America had already jumped or been swept overboard. Half! And now there were Jews for Jesus, made up of the spiritually undernourished children of assimilated Jews, denied by their ignorant and foolish parents their own faith, come to proselytize in another’s…

Could he abandon ship and swim to shore? Or should he stay on and keep rowing, keeping as many people afloat as he could?

Tamar, in the meantime, found herself happier than she had ever been in the last twenty years. At home with her daughters, she found herself humming all day, much as she remembered her own mother doing when she was a little girl. From all accounts, Aaron seemed very happy with his Gitta Chana. Not that he would ever have the audacity to say so directly! But his letters were lively and happy, full of interesting stories, the letters of a man with peace of mind and security. She’d been right to go along with the
shidduch
, she congratulated herself.

She thought about her son often but did not really miss him. She had done her job, her mother’s work. He was grown with a woman of his own to cook his chulent and bleach his tallis and tzitzis white. In a way she did not like to admit to herself very often, it was almost a relief to have him living so far away, safe and happy, leaving her with her two blond daughters and the rest of her life to live in tranquillity.

And then the letter came that secretly they had all been waiting for: Gitta Chana was, G-d willing, expecting.

Josh took it as a sign from heaven. “Tamar,” he told her solemnly, “it is time to pack.”

To her unending shock and amazement, he meant it.

“We will be there in time for the birth. Our first grandchild, born in
Eretz Hakodesh
. It is a great
zchus
.”

“You can’t mean it, Josh!”

“But it was your idea! Don’t you remember? And you were right. Women are always intuitively closer to G-d. Remember how Sarah wanted to get Ishmael and Hagar to leave because they were corrupting Isaac, and Abraham didn’t want to listen to her? G-d tells him: Do exactly as your wife says. I should have listened to you when we were in Israel and never come back! But it isn’t too late. I’ve written to my friend Reb Asher Lehman, and to Reb Kleinman. There is a job. In Lonovitch.”

“But the girls…”

“They’ll make new friends.

They will be better off there.”

“The Arabs?”

“Where is a man safe? We are always in G-d’s hands.”

Jenny’s words. The echo resounded in her ears, a thump, a slap. Her own words, just a few short months back! And now, perversely, she felt stubbornly opposed. All my friends, all the women who know and respect me… all my familiar landscapes, the places that feel like home… She mourned. And Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Loehmann’s! And designer towels and sheets half price with the labels cut out! Bargains!

And hard stringy Israeli beef, and pale Israeli chickens not properly plucked…

Things were so comfortable in America.

“And what if I refuse?”

“My dear Tamar, this was your idea! It’s so hard to keep up with you!” He sighed, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “The
halacha
requires a husband to move to Israel if his wife wishes it, and a wife to move to Israel if her husband wishes it. Neither is allowed to prevent the other from performing the mitzvah…”

She saw in his face a sudden rigidness, the look she feared. He would move. With her. Or without her. It was the
halacha
.

“We will find a nice, big apartment and take all of our furniture. We will be near our son and his wife and the baby,
please G-d!” he said soothingly, putting his arms around her shoulders.

The warmth and intimacy of the sudden gesture startled and moved her. She always felt so distant from him these days. She leaned her head against his broad shoulder and closed her eyes. In the distance, she heard a siren wail. But whether it was a police van rounding up criminals, an ambulance saving a life, or simply some malfunctioning car alarm, she couldn’t tell.

Chapter twenty-eight

“Put that in the bedroom,” she told the movers in halting Hebrew and then English. They stared at her, their eyes puzzled, uncomprehending. What language did they understand? she wondered, looking on in resignation as they set the chest of drawers in the middle of the living room. But no matter. The entire bedroom set would never fit into the bedroom anyway. The rooms were so much smaller than those in Orchard Park. And instead of closets, there were boxy cupboards built up against the walls, with five or six doors that gave little hanging space and lots of shelf space. It would mean ironing and folding almost everything.

But she liked the apartment. It had a clean, airy feel to it, washed with sunlight and sweet breezes. Outside her window, she could see the heavy green branches of Aleppo pines, laurels and silk oaks, their forest smell mingling with the tantalizing scent of orange blossoms in nearby orchards. She had wanted to be in Jerusalem, but the yeshiva was in B’nai Brak, just outside of Tel Aviv, and Josh felt commuting would take too much time. The truth was, of course, he wanted to be near Aaron.

Not that she didn’t, she assured herself. It was just such a tricky relationship with a married child. Slight distance was not such a terrible idea. At least until they got settled and stopped feeling threatened by any suggestion you made, stopped reading criticism into every twitch of your eyebrows… She sighed. Gitta Chana was very, very touchy. But at least this way, she thought, her grandchild would always be just around the corner. With any luck, she’d be able to prove her generosity and goodwill over time, earning her right to live nearby.

Gitta Chana was enormous, poor thing, suffering from swollen ankles and a weight gain that was nearing thirty-five pounds. She bore it all stoically, although just recently she had begun replacing her habitual
Baruch Hashem
’s, when asked about her health, with complete, exhaustive details of the cataclysmic upheavals taking place in her gastrointestinal tract.

“Can I go outside to play?” Malka asked breathlessly, excited. Tamar looked at her slim, pretty young daughter, soothed by the sight of her silky hair, flat stomach, and slim ankles. That was the age, she remembered. Twelve years old. It was all fire and joy, all discovery, all passionate friendships, your body a fresh new instrument you hugged to yourself in secret joy. Why did little girls rush to grow up and get married and have babies? She thought of the girl who had called off the
shidduch
because she felt too young. Smart girl. What, after all, was the rush?

“Go. But don’t get lost,” she said, planting a soft kiss on the child’s shiny, moist forehead. To be young and carefree and happy! She turned her attention to her older daughter. “You go, too, Saraleh. You’ve been cooped up all morning.”

“But I want to help you,
Ima!
Besides, I’m too old to play silly games.” She frowned, creasing the bridge between her eyebrows like an old lady.

“Don’t do that to yourself. You’ll get wrinkles by the time you’re fifteen!” She rubbed her knuckles softly across her daughter’s
smooth forehead. She had the face of a goyisha icon, Tamar thought. One of those medieval pictures at the Metropolitan Museum. Light blond with little wisps of platinum low on the forehead. Eyes as blue as peacock feathers. Oh, in a few years—oh, how the phone would ring and ring with
shadchens
, with
shidduchim!
Oh, the mothers-in-law who would crowd the living room with orthopedic shoes and ready smiles. Beautiful, modest, intelligent, pious Sara Finegold! the matchmakers would sing to the finest young yeshiva men in the country. The lovely sister of Aaron Finegold, the brilliant scholar married to the mashgiach of Lonovitch’s daughter. The gentle, good-hearted daughter of Rabbi Finegold himself, a rebbe at Lonovitch!

She clutched her hands together in joy. She had achieved the dream of every
haredi
mother: both her daughters were princesses, assured by their illustrious family achievements and reputation of the best matches available and thus the brightest futures imaginable within their narrow, charmed circle.

It was Josh’s doing, of course. The credit all went to him. He had gone on ahead, arranging things, beginning his work in the yeshiva. It had not taken the yeshiva long to recognize Josh’s outstanding abilities, she thought proudly, as well as his true piety. There was no pinnacle he would not be able to reach, including, she thought secretly,
rosh yeshiva
of Lonovitch. The highest prize in the yeshiva world.

Invitations had been piling up like cans on a supermarket shelf. They’d been to lunch at all the top
rabbaim’s
homes, been invited to spend time with the families of several
admorim
. Her spirit soared.

There was another knock on the door: “Rebbetzin Finegold, welcome, welcome.” It was yet another kind neighbor, one of an endless stream of bright-cheeked matrons bearing cloth-covered delicacies. Cakes, pies, casseroles, roast chickens, salads. She would not have to cook for a month.

Tamar wiped her hands and took the offering. It was a potato kugel, fresh, crisp, and hot with the most tantalizing smell!

“I know how it is to move. So you shouldn’t have to cook for Shabbos.” The woman smiled, adjusting the kerchief wound around her bare scalp and looking curiously around the room. Tamar smiled her thanks. The neighbors were friendly and unbelievably nosy, she thought without rancor. But they all meant well. And the respect in which they said her name was a balm to her spirit.

“Tzchi le mitzvos,”
Tamar said, the familiar way to acknowledge any kind deed. May you have the merit to do more kind deeds. There was never any end. And virtue was its own reward. If only the woman did not stare so, cataloging with hungry interest every single scrap of their personal belongings. If only she would look up admiringly and walk out deferentially… But she stayed, despite the fact that she was obviously in the way.