25
ELY
As with most things, the timing could not possibly be worse. I’m less than a week out from my mini-relapse when I get an email back from Nechama Rubenstein, the rebbetzin of the Chabad House in Astoria. I’m in desperate need of more content for my capstone, so I can’t exactly blow her off.
I scoped her and the rabbi out carefully before writing them and asking if I could photograph one of their events. Chabad is big but also, like, not really. I had to make sure they didn’t know my family. Which meant—with a young couple like Moshe and Nechama Rubenstein—I had to make sure their family didn’t know my family. Because otherwise I could imagine how things would go: me, the Cohen girl with drug problems, lurking around Chabad House events as if she didn’t run off and break her mother’s heart. It would have been a bad look.
But neither Moshe nor Nechama is from Crown Heights originally. They’re both children of shlichus families—that is, their parents led their own Chabad Houses in other cities, little outposts of Orthodoxy reaching out to Jews who didn’t know how to light a Shabbos candle or pronounce a Hebrew prayer.
So I’m pretty sure it’s safe.
“Is this a leech thing to do?” I ask Wyatt over the phone as I walk from Thirtieth toward Broadway. A part of me wanted to ask if he could come with me, but that felt childish, as if I were a little girl afraid to go to camp on her own. But that hadn’t stopped me from calling him as soon as I left my apartment. “Like…isn’t it a little parasitic of me to impose on them like this and use them for my project, and the whole time I’m just, like…masquerading as this random secular Jew who doesn’t know anything about being Orthodox?”
“You are a random secular Jew,” Wyatt says. “You aren’t practicing now, are you?”
I chew my lower lip and sidestep a pile of dog shit that someone considerately left right in the middle of the sidewalk. “I mean…I guess not. Not really. I don’t know that I’d say I’m secular, though.”
I still don’t know how I feel about G-d. I’m pretty sure he exists. But I thought I was done with all this. I was done with it before I went to Shabbos with Michal and felt that magic lighting up inside my chest.
I used to believe in Hashem the way everyone else did. Somewhere along the way I lost that. I wish I could have it back. I don’t want to be one of those people who say things like “G-d is chaos” or “G-d is a universal constant” or a “cultural legacy.” Those are all perfectly fine things to believe. A lot of Jews believe them. But those beliefs don’t fill my cup the way religion used to.
I want the feeling of arms wrapped around me, holding me tight. I want the structure of halacha and mitzvot, the rules and commandments all Jews are bound to follow as part of our covenant with Hashem—even the silly ones.
I want to believe in G-d, but I gave all that up. I threw it away.
I don’t know what I believe now.
“You’ll be fine,” Wyatt tells me. The sound of his voice is low and soft, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine him murmuring those words in my ear, the two of us in a dark, quiet place. Alone.
In that universe, I imagine him saying that would immediately relax me. I’d uncoil to bask in the warmth of it. Instead I hover at the edge of the sidewalk, craning my neck to watch for oncoming traffic, waiting for a break between the cars long enough to let me dart across the street. Tension is a live wire strung down my back. And Wyatt’s words don’t do much.
“I hope you’re right,” I say. “Otherwise this is going to be really embarrassing.”
Maybe I should have just asked him to come. The asking would have sucked, but the having him here would have made it worth it. Oh well.
The Astoria Chabad House is located near Thirty-sixth Avenue. It’s brand-new; Astoria didn’t have much of a Jewish community until recently. I mean, you can’t even find a decent Jewish deli in this neighborhood to save your life. I once saw someone ask on the Astoria subreddit where to find good challah, and everyone told them to just suck it up and take the train into Manhattan.
But I guess enough new people have been moving in lately that the demographics have changed, or else someone in charge decided that if they had the money to fund Chabad Houses in Wyoming, then they had the money to fund one in northwestern Queens. I ring the bell and take a step back, my hands laced behind my back and fingers twisting together, sweaty and awkward as fuck. My camera bag suddenly seems too heavy, the straps digging into my shoulders. I feel a lot like a wayward middle school student waiting to be let in for her piano lesson.
The woman who opens the door is short, with a long brown sheitel and a modest navy-blue dress. She smiles the second she lays eyes on me, a bright smile that shows teeth and crinkles the corners of her eyes. I can hear the chaos of raucous children somewhere behind her, all screeching voices and thunderous footsteps.
“You must be Ely,” she says. “Please, come in!”
She steps aside to let me move into the entryway. I toe off my shoes next to the collection gathered by the door, my dusty floral Doc Martens taking their place amid the neat line of sensible flats and sneakers. The pair of men’s dress shoes is identical to the ones my father used to wear, to the point that I almost wonder if Moshe shops at the same shoe store.
“I’m so glad we were able to make this work. So sorry about the mess, by the way. The kids have been going crazy all summer. Maybe I feed them too much sugar.” Nechama touches the back of my elbow, guiding me deeper into the house, chattering away the whole time. “They’re very excited to meet you. My daughter Menuchah especially. She loves taking pictures. I’m sure she’ll want to hear all about your studies at Parker.”
I wonder if Menuchah is like I was, lurking at bus stops and snapping photos of the ladies with baby carriages as they pass by, trying to get the shutter speed just right so that the traffic is a blur behind them. If she wastes her allotted computer time developing new presets in Lightroom and could spend hours in the photography exhibits at MoMA.
Or maybe that’s egotistical of me. Maybe we’re nothing alike at all.
Nechama leads me back into the kitchen, which is large considering this is New York. She even has an island, already laden with dry-goods canisters and a carton of eggs. My mother would be so jealous.
“Have you made challah before?” Nechama asks, so unassumingly I kind of want to die because here it is: my first lie by omission.
“A few times,” I say. “But it’s been years. I don’t remember much.”
I remember some, though. I remember the sensation of warm dough pillowing up between my spread fingers, the way flour clouded the air as my mother dusted it over the countertop. But I don’t remember how many eggs to use or how to form the intricate braids that my mother always accomplished so easily.
I used to imagine my future standing in a kitchen of my own, braiding challah with my small horde of offspring running around underfoot. I can’t admit it to anyone I know now, because they’d think I was bananas, but I still like the idea. Or maybe I just miss the version of myself who craved that future more than anything.
“It’s easy enough once you get the hang of it,” Nechama says, just as an army of children races into the kitchen. There are six of them, all dark haired and barefoot and sharp elbowed. One flings both arms around Nechama’s thighs and she laughs, patting his head. “I had a feeling we wouldn’t make it long without company. This is DovBer, Menuchah, Chaya Mushka, Batsheva Tikvah, Bentzion, and the little one is Yehuda Simcha.”
“Hi,” I say, waving at them, already certain there’s no way in hell I’m gonna remember all those names. Dvora was just as bad as I am. She used to jokingly call every little girl Chaya Mushka and every boy Menachem Mendel. And since pretty much every Chabad family we knew named a kid after the Lubavitcher Rebbe or his wife, odds were that she was at least part right at least 20 percent of the time.
I’ve met a hundred Chaya Mushkas in my life, but hearing the name still makes me flinch.
“Hi,” says one of the girls. “You’re here to take photos of us?”
“Well, not specifically…but, yeah, I’m here to take some pictures—and to braid challah with your ima,” I say. “Are you going to help us?”
She nods fiercely. “I always help Ima make challot. Can I try your camera?”
I’m abruptly very glad I brought both my DSLR and my film camera, because the thought of trying to figure out how to politely inform a ten-year-old that no, they can’t waste my precious film makes me want to punch myself in the nose because it’s so obviously an asshole thing to say. “Sure,” I tell her, and set my camera bag down on the nearest stool to dig out the DSLR and a lens. “You must be Menuchah, right?”
She nods and takes the camera when I pass it to her, turning it on and peering through the viewfinder with the practiced ease of someone who has done it a hundred times before. “Is this the D850?”
“Good eye.”
“I have a D3500,” she says, almost morosely, swiveling the focusing ring and snapping a photo of her mother.
“That’s still a really good camera. Especially for beginners.”
She makes a face and takes another picture, then pulls back to stare down at the screen, examining it. “It’s okay. I’ve had it for like two years, though.”
You’re like ten years old, I want to tell her, but having been ten years old myself once, I know about how well that’d go over.
“Give Ely her camera back, Minni,” Nechama says. “I have no idea how much it would cost to fix that if you broke it, and I don’t want to find out.”
Menuchah hands me the camera reluctantly, and I pack it away again, getting out my SLR instead. It’s a hell of a lot lighter in my grip than the bulky D850 and didn’t cost nearly as much—and thank god for that, because after buying my digital I had to spend the rest of my precious money on developing if I was gonna shoot analog.
And of course I was gonna shoot analog. For all the photos I can take on digital, scrolling through a million shots of the same scene to find the one that’s exactly right, nothing will ever beat the magic of film. Of having to trust yourself to find the perfect shot, the perfect frame, and the perfect focus.
“What is that?” Menuchah asks.
“It’s a range finder,” I say. “For shooting on film.”
Menuchah has that hungry look in her eyes, but I can’t trust a ten-year-old not to use up all my film on art shots of her kitchen island, so this time I don’t hand it to her.
Nechama disperses the children, or at least the male ones. The girls get to stay, to become part of this tradition that is supposed to carry them into their adult lives as wives and mothers. I find myself thinking about that second universe again, the one where I’m in Nechama’s position, baking challah with my daughters. I wonder who this fantasy version of me would have married. Where I would have met him—because it would, of course, be a him.
That version of me might still shoot photos, but only as a hobby. If she had a career, it would have to be something that paid more consistently, especially if she’d married a scholar whose time was to be spent reading Torah instead of toiling behind a counter somewhere.
Nechama assembles the ingredients we need and I draw back, making room for her daughters to join her at the counter, some of them kneeling on chairs to reach. I do my best to be discreet with my photos—especially with film, I don’t want to waste any shots on a scene that is too overtly influenced by my presence. Things can change when people know they’re being observed—something I luckily learned early while I was shooting exclusively on digital. I have had to throw out far too many shots of rictus smiles and taut shoulders.
Maybe it’s the children’s presence, but Nechama doesn’t seem afflicted by the same problem. When I take a photo of her hands—just her hands, deftly weaving together the long strands of challah dough—I can almost imagine they belong to my mother. I can almost be there, all those years ago, standing at our own kitchen counter and weaving my own small loaf.
My phone buzzes midway through the challah making. When I check, it’s Wyatt’s name that has popped up on the lock screen.
Wyatt: hope it’s going well. I’m eating bread and thinking about you.
I type back: does your bread have a six-stranded braid or is it boring
Wyatt: how would you categorize limp whole grain that’s still plastic-wrapped from the grocery store?
“Do you want to try?” Nechama says, and I jerk my head upright a bit guiltily, like I’m betraying her by spending time texting instead of just betraying my own project.
“Oh…. Sure,” I say. “Why not? Like I told you, though, it’s been a really…really long time.”
“It’s okay if your bread is ugly,” one of Nechama’s daughters pipes up. “Ima says Hashem didn’t command us to bake pretty challah.”
I laugh. “I suppose that’s true.”
“It’s a mitzvah,” Nechama says, as if I still need the encouragement. “A good deed. I’ll help you. Come on.”
She helps me roll out six long strands of dough. And as much as I claimed not to remember, it turns out braiding challah is all muscle memory. I know on some ingrained level how to weave the ropes together into their tapestry. Nechama doesn’t even have to help, in the end. And when we’re sliding the loaves into the oven, our two adult challot surrounded by their smaller fellows, it’s impossible to tell which one was mine and which was hers.
“I grew up in Chabad,” I confess while we wait for the bread to bake. “In Crown Heights, actually.”
I’m not sure if I should take her clear surprise as a compliment or not. But Nechama schools her expression into submission with remarkable alacrity and says, “Really? You should have said! I wouldn’t have done nearly so much lecturing on Judaism 101.”
I should probably drop it. This is such a nice note to end on—oh, look, we have something in common; how nice, la la la—but as usual my traitorous mouth doesn’t know when to stop talking.
“I left the community when I was eighteen. Well. I guess you could say I was kicked out. Everyone decided it was better for me to be off the derech than on it.” I fiddle with the corner of the still-damp washcloth. “It was my fault, really. I had a drug problem. I hurt a lot of people.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nechama says softly. “That must have been so difficult for you.”
I force a laugh. “It was a long time ago. I’m sure they’re happy to be rid of me. They probably never want to see me again.”
But Nechama’s hand finds my wrist, curling lightly around my arm and squeezing once. “I’m sure they miss you very much. Ely…you must know the doors of our community are never closed forever. Even if you caused a great deal of pain…there is still a place for you here, with us. If you want it.”
I’m not so sure Dvora agrees. But when I meet Nechama’s kind brown gaze, I can tell she really means it, down to the word.
I want to say she’s being naïve. I broke my family’s trust in me. I broke everyone’s trust. My family are Kohens, descended from a long tradition of rabbis and scholars going all the way back to the actual town of Lubavitch that Chabad Lubavitch is named for. That yichus, that lineage, is half the reason why I’m not welcome back. Maybe other sects would shun you for life if you went off the derech, but Nechama’s right—not Chabad. I knew so many kids when I was growing up who had an aunt or a cousin who lived in Boston and didn’t believe in G-d anymore. They’d still come back for Seder every year. They knew they still had homes to return to, if they ever changed their minds.
But they probably didn’t steal thousands of dollars from their parents’ credit cards before leaving.
“You don’t have to let your past define you,” Nechama goes on, her hand still rubbing a gentle pattern against my wrist. “There is nothing you could ever do that would erase Hashem’s love for you. Or the community’s. If you don’t think there is a place for you with us anymore, that’s your decision. I won’t tell you how to live your life. But it isn’t because Judaism doesn’t want you anymore. Your seat at our table is always open.”
I duck my head but not quickly enough to hide the way tears suddenly prickle at my eyes. Nechama doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what I’ve done. But even so, hearing her say this…it means everything.
The door isn’t open, but it isn’t shut anymore either.
Maybe Wyatt was right.
There’s always a way back.