Right to choose, New York, 2011
“I need to talk to you,” I said to my girls. We sat on Daughter #1’s unmade bed. Magazine cutouts of shoes, purses, and clothes littered the floor in her 6 x 6-foot room. “Abba was supposed to join us but can’t.” The kids called their father אבא in Hebrew even though he’s French. I refrained from saying that Mari agreed to this discussion but pretended to forget.
My teen and tween eyed me. They knew we weren’t having more babies, their big brother was enlisting in the Israeli army, and we were uprooting to Israel at summer’s end. Only four and two when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area, our shared birthplace, they consider Westchester home.
“Well, we’ve been talking a lot about the move,” I said. “And how different life will be there. Mostly, our Jewish life.”
For the past 20 years, I’d yielded to Mari’s desire to create a united observant Jewish front for our children. We abstained from using the car, computer, oven, stove, light switches, television, telephone, and everything else electric and modern from Friday to Saturday sundown. We observed the laws of the Sabbath, sent the kids to Modern Orthodox Jewish schools, and joined a Modern Orthodox synagogue in California, New York, and again during our yearlong adventure in Israel. While we were both Jewish, I identified as an assimilated non-believer. For the past 20 years, I played a role that made me feel out of place in my family unit, in our family home.
"אבא and I have agreed that you’re old enough to choose how you want to spend Shabbat, for example.”
Daughter #2 bounced on the bed. Newly 12, she still had mushy cheeks and marble-round questioning eyes.
“I’ve been doing it אבא ’s way for a long time. Since we’re moving back to Raanana, I’ll live less his way and more mine. Sometimes I might go to a museum exhibit or a yoga workshop on Saturday. Get it?”
“So, like if we want to go to a friend’s house on Friday night, you’ll drive us?” the 14-year-old asked. Barely five feet small, Daughter #1 stood with her hands on her straight hips and acted as the mouthpiece for her little sister.
I explained Friday night meant family dinner together, a sacred Israeli tradition. And we would see about Saturdays: if I wanted to go to a matinee, if they wanted to go to the beach, and if we would or wouldn’t eat lunch together.
“What about our cousins?” Daughter #2 asked.
All 12 first cousins, six on my sibling’s and six on Mari’s side, lived in Israel and strictly observed the rules around our inherited religion. But they also had another dozen second cousins—fiercely Zionist (supportive of Israel), wholly secular (detached from Shabbat and kashrut). It was complicated.
Daughter #1 giggled. “Wow, I thought we were going to get the Sex Talk. But instead, we got the God Talk.”
I kissed them, relieved to have found the right words. Still, I was anxious about moving back to the country which oftentimes rattled my nerves and triggered crying jags, and we hadn’t even left White Plains yet.
ROOT CHAKRA
“Okay guys, this is it,” said the teacher, clapping his hands. Dressed in a tank top and shorts, he looked more like a pool lifeguard than a small business owner. “Let’s start in Tadasana, Mountain pose.”
Suddenly, the 50-odd men and women on all sides of me stood erect like a military regiment at roll call. I imitated even though the tallest part of me was my married name, Lang, which means long in German.
Before class, everyone was whispering, asking if Rod was back from retreat. Rod as in Rodney Yee, as in nationally famous yoga instructor, as in the man who guided my body upside down and filled my mind with sagacious words; retreat as in rubbed-me-wrong and sounded cultic.
“Okay, so we’re going to work our way up the chakra system today. There are seven. Ready?”
More whispering. Some fidgeting. Since my initial class at Piedmont Yoga Studio a few years ago, I’d come every Wednesday morning barring sick kids or Jewish holidays. But I wouldn’t be able to name any poses or chakras.
“Stand with your feet inner hip-width apart and press them into the floor beneath you. At the same time, reach up through the crown of your head,” he said as if it were simple. “Ask yourselves: do I feel grounded, bolstered?”
The idea of rooting made me tremble. I gazed at my extremities and tried to spread my toes, imagining myself a mile up the road in my childhood bedroom. As this strapping instructor swaggered around the studio, his long ponytail swung side to side like a pendulum.
“Cool! You guys look really rooted. This is good for opening your first chakra at the base of the spine and connecting to earth energy. When your root chakra’s balanced, you’ll feel confident and centered, but when it’s blocked or out of balance, you feel needy, insecure.”
I dug my feet into the California hardwood floor, so different from the icy Israeli tiles in our apartment in Haifa, where Mari and I spent our first five years, desperate to feel the studio’s warmth and weight.
YEAR 1: 2011-12
Balagan
Two months after the God Talk with the girls, the day after we land in Israel, we step inside the windswept gray front door of our house in Raanana. I gasp. The late August heat suffocates me like a tight wool turtleneck.
“Alors?” Mari asks.
What do I think of a place I’d seen once, eight months earlier, in the country for my nephew’s wedding, when a realtor and I stood in the foyer and my shoulders softened, saying: “You don’t know our story, but I don’t want to move here, yet can picture living within these walls.”
She had no clue that we’d recently spent what I dubbed The Year of Living Differently in this city, to stretch our children’s Weltanschauung beyond the redwhite-and-blue flag. She had no idea that we’d arrived whole and left divided; Mari and Son aching to stay, Daughters and I eager to go. She had no inkling that I’d agreed to return for ten years—from the eldest entering the army to the youngest exiting the army.
Call it payback to my husband for living in my homeland for 15 years.
Call it shalom bayit or peace in the house.
Call it compromise… call it one of my biggest marital struggles.
“You really want to know?” I ask Mari.
My thoughts are vicious and biting like a rattlesnake.
The girls race from room to room, shouting to each other, their voices bouncing off the stone walls, reiterating what I already know: it’s a mess.
We’ve arrived in time for the Jewish New Year but long before the house is livable. Construction workers roam every room. Hefty tools litter the tiled floors. The kitchen countertop is MIA. New appliances stand forlorn in the barren space. Layers of grime cover every surface. Outlets malfunction. Paint splotches spot windows and walls.
He puppy-dog eyes me.
“Aze balagan!”
Mari and I speak a linguistic hodgepodge—French, English, Franglais, Hebrew, Hebrish—depending on mood.
“You might want to sleep on an air mattress, but the kids and I will stay elsewhere.”
I morph from upbeat into kvetch as I emigrate from New York to Israel.
Mari drops it. He neither confronts nor cajoles in his usual way. Living in America was never his fantasy, returning to Israel, never mine. My surrender came with conditions. At the top of my list: let me be.
ZIM
Days later, a mammoth truck carrying our red clay colored container reverses into our driveway, its seven stars and three letters recognizable from afar. Six weeks earlier, it decamped from the Port of New York, heaving with our material possessions, leaving me to stare at our stripped century-old New York Tudor, the only one that ever felt like home in the 21 years of our mobile marriage, and sob.
Here, halfway around the world from my American girl-reference point, the movers taunt us with ready-or-not-here-we-come. We’re far from ready. Inside is awreck, but outside, the sun broils me. Mari and I watch them unload. A boy vrooms on his skateboard. A high-hanging date tree provides insufficient shade. A couple emerges from the house next door.
I await the ordinary onslaught of questions: Where are you from? Do you have kids? What do you do? After trading names and professions, the salt-and-pepper-haired veterinarian with an unmistakable Israeli accent says they raised kids on Long Island.
“I can’t believe you came here when we dream of living there,” he says.
I cackle to cover my desire to cry.
Mari and I exchange a long-married-couple look: save me.
A mover asks where to put our dining room chairs. Mari directs the swarm of stocky men, air-traffic control style. I dash inside to indicate what goes where:
yoga studio--down
kitchen/dining/living room--here
bedrooms/office--up
Our sofa, mattresses, desks, nightstands, and flatscreen TV are encased in bubble wrap like King Tut. Cardboard boxes of books and photo albums along with Container Store bins of Legos and American Girl dolls stand tower.
As movers schlep in and out, I recall my children’s favorite bedtime story, a Yiddish folk tale called It Could Always Be Worse. The tale of a man who lived with his mother, wife, and six children in a one-room hut. Miserable, he ran to the rabbi, who instructed him to take in the chickens then the goat, and lastly the cow until the chaos became unbearable, and his rabbi then told him to free the animals one at a time at which point the family slept peacefully and the man relished the relative quiet.
While these burly men heave and ho, I think about the civil war raging in Syria—a mere 500 miles north—realizing how fortunate we are: immigrants by choice, completely intact.
Warrior I Pose
While the girls attend school and Mari shadows the workers, I sweat on my mat at Omyoga.
The instructor, Shani, sticks closely to the 41 poses in the primary Ashtanga series, leading us from pose to pose, her words calculated and crisp, her delivery, worldly and wise. The sun penetrates through wide open windows. No fan, no AC, pure desert heat. Her burnt umber skin glows.
I detect active verbs like lilchotz, leharim, leharchiv, making my hippocampus work intensely to recall words from Hebrew immersion class over two decades ago. My tank top clings to my torso. Buckets of perspiration drip down my sides.
Eight years earlier, during my teaching training in New York, we studied the battle between two sides of a family—the Pandavas and the Kauravas—in The Bhagavad Gita. Warrior I isn’t about the physical warrior but the spiritual one, facing the universal enemy of self-ignorance, the ultimate source of suffering. Am Iwarrior enough to live here? If terrorism resurges or war ensues, am I strong enough to soldier through it? If my children grow up and leave the country, is our marriage sturdy enough to anchor me?
As I listen to 20-something-year-old Shani, everything compresses: the gray matter, the white matter, the water.
