Part Two: Change
Prologue: Michelle: Summer, 1995
These are the moments… yes, the very moments, when things begin to change.
I had arisen early on my fifth day in Israel. Well… early for my own standards, at least. My aunt was preparing food in the kitchen. My uncle was on the porch. I could hear his voice, wafting through my bedroom window. It sounded… different than usual. He was singing, but not really doing so. It was too natural to be singing, and too genuine to be calculated, as if the strange Hebrew words came from his very soul.
Careful of maintaining my own modesty in his household, I arose, and wrapped myself in my robe. Once out into the main part of the house, it was easy to slip silently past my aunt, as she focused on her hands buried in the dough that she was kneading. As the sounds of her housewifery, my uncle’s prayer became louder, and more pronounced.
The wind was blowing through the thick trees of the Upper Galilee, and my uncle was swaying along with it. His worn prayer book open in his hand, his eyes were shut as he davened the morning service. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of his arm and forehead. He’d wrapped leather straps on himself, which stood out starkly against his tanned skin. Affixed to them he had two small, black boxes, strong and sturdy, and I couldn’t help but wonder at their feel, as they so obviously pressed hard into his skin.
“Miki?” my name was whispered from behind me.
I spared one last look at my uncle, locked in this alien ritual, which was intriguing me. I couldn’t explain it. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I’m sure, Doran had taken me around the country—to places of religious and secular importance—and I had heard the passion in his voice. He reminded me of my aunt, Deborah, standing atop the Masada as we did the day before at sunset, just… preaching. Like Deborah might attempt with feminist issues, my uncle Doran wanted me to feel a connection to the land, and made no bones about showing it.
But this… this was different. Here, Doran wasn’t trying. Here, he wasn’t proselytizing, desperately maximizing his the positive aspects of his lifestyle for my benefit. Here, he was just… being. Doing what to him was natural and routine and comforting. Standing there on the porch and watching my uncle pray, I thought I’d discovered the real him. And that was from where sprung my intrigue. It is not like I wanted to become more religious. It is not like, somehow, my aunt and uncle had “won.” But… something had opened in me, something powerful, natural and mysterious. And I felt like I was witnessing reality—pure reality, with no stipulations, for the very first time.
Inside of the kitchen, I took the mixing bowl from my aunt’s hand, grinding the spatula into the batter.
“What are those leather straps he wore?” I asked.
Reina paused for the briefest of moments. “They are called tefillin,” she answered. “Men wrap them around themselves while they pray, so as to show their devotion to G-d. Did you see the boxes, Miki, on his left arm and forehead? They contain words from the Torah, our holy words.”
I halted my movements, furrowing my brow. “Why do you not wear them, then?”
She glanced at me, her shoulders stiffening slightly. ‘Men and women show their devotion in different ways,” she said.
“But you have not even tried it?” I persisted, my ears still more attuned to his voice outside than her speech. “Are you not curious to know what it feels like? As he does?”
Reina chuckled, turning away. “You’ve been spending too much time with your Aunt Deborah,” she said in reply.
I stared at her back, her shoulders loosening as they worked on fashioning the religious bread. I had actually been thinking of my mother, my mother with her insistence upon asking questions. One of the ironies of Donna Davidson, however, was that she only allowed for that sort of behavior in a controlled, academic setting.
And I began to realize, watching as my aunt kneaded the challah, that this action was exactly like listening to my uncle pray. Her fingers in the challah dough were as natural to her as his voice singing the Hebrew prayers must have been for him. She glowed with her pregnancy; I had ascertained that even as I stepped into Ben Gurion airport for the first time two days prior. But it wasn’t as though she were holding a child, so much as… regressing into one herself. Kathleen Davidson turned Reina Hadar had always looked for someone to take care of her. Just as my other aunt had always looked for a battle to fight, or my mother, a secret buried within the reactions of chemicals with which to understand the mysteries of the world. And to feel in control of them.
The world was still locked to me, but the three Davidson sisters were suddenly open, that morning in my aunt’s kitchen in Israel. I had discovered the patterns of their lives, and in time, I would wave them together, with all of their individual struggles, with their varied relationships to my grandmother, Gerdie, and ultimately, their willing or unwilling ties to the Jewish people.
Outside, my uncle had stopped singing.
