CREATIVE NONFICTION 61the Pacific Northwest, and on Memorial Day
weekend, he had been rushed into surgery straight
from the E.R. to remove a tumor that blocked his
intestine, leaving him with a colostomy in his lean
young abdomen. The emergency over, he went
back to live and work on the farm in remarkably
good health and spirits through the summer. I
had been flying in and out of Spokane from L.A.,
savoring every moment in a parallel universe, off
the grid and close to the land with my brother.
Several months before Alex’s diagnosis, Beth
Chayim Chadashim’s Rabbi Lisa Edwards had
introduced me to one of the morning prayers, the
Asher Yatzar, giving me a photocopy with three
versions of the text (English, Hebrew, and Hebrew
transliteration). Like most rabbis, Lisa didn’t
proselytize, and she waited until I’d asked for it.
For me, becoming Jewish had been a six-year
endeavor that included a practicum. I had taken
classes, read books, found a rabbi; I joined the
temple even before I’d completed my conversion.
But it was only in the final year of my studies that
I felt ready to begin saying daily prayers.
One of the first prayers of the day, the Asher
Yatzar is traditionally recited after going to the
bathroom. In this seemingly unholy moment,
the prayer begins by praising God for the
miracle of the human body, for the creation of
its “openings and vessels.” It continues, “If one
of these passageways be open when it should be
closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one
could not stay alive or stand before you.” The
prayer concludes by acknowledging that God
gave each of us a pure soul, breathed it into us
and someday will take it from us—“restoring it
to everlasting life.”
This prayer, I later realized, spoke with eerie
precision to the possibility of a blocked intestine
and how it could lead to death. It encapsulated
the entire experience I would soon go through
with Alex.
Though I was already well along on my path
to becoming Jewish when we met, Nurit imbued
that endeavor with a verve and coziness—a
heymish-ness—I hadn’t felt before. Because she
was only nine when she moved from Israel to
Brazil, Hebrew for her was permanently hon-
eyed, filtered through the wide-eyed wonder and
open-heartedness of early childhood.
That September, Nurit and I sat together in the
sanctuary during Jewish New Year services led
by Rabbi Edwards—Rosh Hashanah, the first of
the Ten Days of Awe. I was entranced by Nurit’s
small fingers moving across the pages of the
prayer book, whose Hebrew letters, as impen-
etrable to me as Braille, she read fleetly. Leaning
into me, she would share her special take on one
phrase or another.
In the Mi Chamocha prayer, for example, she
reveled in the notion of God as superhero, a
biblical Captain Marvel. Who else is like you, oh
Lord, among the gods? the prayer goes. Who else
performs such miracles?
“No one!” Nurit squeaked gleefully into my ear.judaism, a faith of outsiders, seems funda-
mentally concerned with loneliness—anticipat-
ing, preventing, and assuaging it. Jews mourn not
in isolation but in a minyan, a group of at least
ten. A book of scripture is never left lying open
in an empty room, for there should always be
someone there to read and interpret it. During
the traditional Sabbath blessing over candles,
wine, and finally bread, a cover is placed over
the bread until its turn comes, lest it should feel
left out. In many Hebrew blessings, the plural is
favored over the singular. L’chayim, for example,
often translated as “To life,” literally means “To
lives”—because one life by itself would be no
blessing at all. The formation of lasting couples,
families, and communities remains one of
Judaism’s most cherished values.
Nurit’s understanding of astronomy and physics
recognized a similar tendency toward something
like communal bonding. Standing in pajamas in
my kitchen one morning, while I prepared cereal
and coffee, she explained that planets and stars
occur in clusters—cosmic shtetls—from the time
they are born to the time they die. The same is
true for miniscule forms of matter—electrons
faithfully orbiting the nucleus, for example, and
neutrinos, tinier still and nearly impossible to
detect, eternally emanating from Sun to Earth.
“They want to be together,” Nurit said
earnestly, giving herself a hug, modeling the
concept that everything in the universe clings to,
huddles with, something else. “They don’t want
to be lonely.”