About four years ago, while I was visiting Israel, my sister asked me to come to her house, saying that she really needs to talk to me. I used to like going there: her family used to live in an agricultural place where cows and chickens were running in the backyard. I used to play with her kids: mini basketball with her son, 4 in a row with her oldest daughter.
In the years before that meeting, my sister converted her lifestyle and turned to practice orthodox Judaism. It didn’t surprise me a bit that she took to such an extreme. She was always extreme: she wouldn’t eat an onion even when she was promised to become a queen for a week, and when she didn’t get enough attention from my parents when she was in boarding school she basically rotted her teeth by eating tons of chocolate. She went after every step in her life (welfare officer in the Israeli army, psychologist, head of an organization to trace abused kids in school, family, religious) with the same burning fire in her eyes.
When I came to that meeting I wasn’t playing basketball nor 4 in a row. I sat alone with her and in so many words she explained to me that I have to make a decision: either I break my relationships with my non-Jewish girlfriend or we severe our relationships. I remembered that I rose up, telling her that it seems to me that she already made a decision and that I will never severe contact with a person based on his/her religion. I remember that my mind was storming, that I told her that this is what the Nazis used to do. I remember that before I left I told her husband that I wish he could explain all of this to the kids. I remember igniting the rented car and seeing her eldest daughter looking at me from across the street, begging me with with her mother’s burning eyes not to leave. I sped away. We saw each other once since. She didn’t attend my wedding, never saw my daughter. I saw her kids once on an arranged meeting, like divorced parents do.
I am telling this story because a few Fridays ago I went with my wife to Obi. I love Obi. It is a store where its employees are not ashamed to show unwilling they are to help the customers. We were looking for stoppers, these things you put underneath bookcases so they won’t tilt on babies. We asked a worker where we can find them and he sent us to aisle 23, where, naturally, there was nothing resembling a stopper.
But there was an orthodox Jew on aisle 23, so we asked him if he knew where can we find them. He led us to the right aisle and left before we could even thank him. Later, at the register, we saw him behind us. We turned to pay and then turned again to thank him and wish him good Shabbat, but he was gone again. My wife felt weird about it. “Can you please go look for him?” she asked me before we left the store. I went back, crisscrossed the store but couldn’t trace him. “Like a guardian angel”, she told me when I exited.
Since then this figure comes up sometimes in my dream. He is carrying onions in one hand and chocolate bars in the other. He is faceless other than two eyes that keep burning portion after portion of my childhood memories.
Shabbat Shalom
