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for many people, Jewish liturgy could be
one long, keening lamentation, especially during
the Days of Awe. It’s when Jews, as a people and
as individuals, express their deepest sorrows,
regrets, and mortal fears; the ritual can bring
even the most secular, assimilated Jew to tears.
The Unetaneh Tokef prayer stands out as one of
the darkest prayers in the holiday liturgy: “On
Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it
is sealed, how many will pass from the earth and
how many will be created; who will live and who
will die; who will die at his appointed time and
who before his time; who by water and who by
fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine,
who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague,
who by strangulation, and who by stoning.” And
so on.
But for Nurit, the sound of Hebrew, the sight
of its letters dancing on the page like barefoot
children, invariably evoked sweet memories.
Hebrew was the cooing voice of bedtime, of her
parents tucking her in and reading her stories.
Hebrew made her laugh and sing and showed her
God’s gentleness.
The prospect of losing Alex weighed heavily on
me (who by cancer, I added to the mournful litany),
and Nurit, probing her heavens filled with light,
helped me to bear it.from nurit, I learned the difference between
theoretical and applied physics—and, by exten-
sion, theoretical and applied anything, from faith
to farming to photography—and the distinct
personality types that gravitate to each type
of field. Theoretical physicists, she said, were
misty-eyed dreamers and poets, luftmenschen who
live in the airy realm of the imaginary, of what
might be possible, whereas applied physicists were
earthbound “engineering types,” limited by what’s
already known and proven, pragmatists utterly
lacking in romantic qualities.
Needless to say, Nurit landed squarely in the
“dreamer” camp. At the time we met, she was
developing potential models of conditions at the
farthest edges of our solar system, where at that
time no space probe had ever reached. To me
her work, entirely theoretical, was the stuff of
poetry—“piercing a hole,” she said, “in the curtain
that separates us from the rest of the galaxy.”when people ask me why I converted to
Judaism, I often find myself, like the priests I
grew up with, drawing a cross in the air. I use it
to explain how I think of religion. On the vertical
axis, there’s the notion of a divine and powerful
being “up there,” and on the horizontal axis,
human beings living and working together “down
here.” The horizontal axis interests me most. It’s
where, I believe, the presence of God or God-ness
or goodness is manifested through human compas-
sion, intention, discipline, and action.
As a Catholic boy who came to embrace Quaker
ideals and practices, Alex was always fully commit-
ted to this horizontal dimension. Even as he faced
his own mortality, he seemed able to shrug off the
vertical, with no expectation of an afterlife. I have
no need to set my soul straight, he wrote in his journal
late in his illness. I don’t think I anticipate the existence
of a heaven or hell, nor some superior being to determine
which I am suited for. Perhaps my spirit, or some form of
my consciousness, will live on. I hope so. But not in the
way that there’s a place for the good ones to go, and then
another of punishment for the undeserving.
In October, Alex had a second operation, this one
planned. The goal was to turn my brother back into
a normal boy by reversing the colostomy, recon-
necting the intestine, and restoring normal bowel
function. But on opening up his anesthetized body,
the surgeon discovered rampant tumor growth, not
only in the colon but in the liver, too. The opera-
tion was quickly aborted, and my brother was sewn
back up. We learned that Alex had only weeks to
live, and a new reality to live with: a permanent
intravenous line in his left forearm delivering Total
Parenteral Nutrition, or TPN, a vitamin-fortified
sugar and salt solution, a baby bottle poured into
a vein. It’s how they feed comatose patients and
premature babies and others who cannot eat and
digest normally. Until then, the one thing Alex
could do—and relished—was feed himself from
his own bountiful harvest. Cutting this farmer off
from his food was cancer’s ultimate insult.
I sometimes picture the scene very differently.
My brother is not lying down in the surgical
theater; he is standing. Ever helpful and eager
to learn, he’s holding up the flaps of his own
abdomen for scientific inspection, as in one of
those seventeenth-century anatomical drawings.
He is not a terminally ill patient but a collaboratorUNDER THE STARS | SYLVIA SUKOP