“Abba, this is the best chinuch for me,” I said in my sweetest, most pleading voice. “When I read the faxes for the children’s section and then I read them again and see what you fixed, I know what I have to be careful about and what’s not good hashkafah.”

I held out my hand. I didn’t get the pages back.

“No, Tovi. These aren’t for you.”

“And I… So now I can’t show my friends the latest chapter of ‘In the Footsteps of the Anusim’?”

I’d invited Etty Davidowitz to come tomorrow. She loves that story. Just yesterday, we had debated whether the parents did the right thing by not telling Miguel anything about being Jewish. I thought it was a mistake. I thought a 15-year-old boy is old enough to know the truth. Etty thought they were right not to tell him. If he shared the secret with a friend, or let it slip out somehow, the Inquisition would arrest the whole family.

“To your friends, certainly not,” said Abba. He was firm as a rock. “I’m surprised at myself that I never thought of that — that you might show the faxes to your friends. How can we take that responsibility, to show other people material that hasn’t been approved by the Vaadah Ruchanit?”

“So maybe you can check it tonight, and then after it’s corrected I can show it to Etty?”

Abba wouldn’t give an inch.

“Tovi,” he said, “the smallest scratch on the soul can be like a puncture in the lung. Just a tiny hole, but imagine what can happen if some tiny bacteria get through! I don’t want you seeing things that aren’t suitable for your chinuch, even if they’re going to be corrected with a red pen one second later. I don’t want you to be exposed to germs… do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded. There are lots of things my Abba doesn’t let me do, much more than my friends’ fathers. But I know he really cares. A lot.

“Your neshamah is a treasure, Tovi,” Abba said quietly. “A treasure you need to protect. From now on, I don’t want you touching the faxes from the office at all. Can I rely on you, or will I have to put them in a locked cabinet?”

“I can’t touch them at all? Not even the story about the Anusim?” I looked at him sadly.

“None of them.”

After that, something really serious happened. If it happened in a story in Abba’s paper, he would cross it out with his red pen. But I’m not a story in HaMehadhed. I’m a real girl who got a little too curious. A girl who went to her father’s desk while he was out, to look for the rest of that chapter that she hadn’t gotten a chance to read.

The chapter wasn’t there.

There was a lot of marketing stuff in the drawer, all about new health clinics that were opening up to serve the chareidi community. Boring.

There were columns for Hed Kevodah, the women’s section. Not interesting.

And there was a letter. From our Kupat Cholim. Request for Funding, Surgery Abroad: Denied. We regret to inform you that we are unable to provide funding…. Reasons: There is enough experience in this field here in Isr—.

I shut my eyes tightly. I put the papers back in the drawer and left the room. I felt horribly guilty, and inside me, a big balloon of worry was inflating. It wasn’t true, what the letter said. The doctors here in Israel aren’t familiar with the procedure Dr. Barclay does — they don’t know how to form an almost-natural ear from Medpor and open up the hearing canal all in one operation. They do other things. They fix split earlobes, and do plastic surgery for microtia in the less severe cases, when the outer ear is just a bit too small. They do cartilage implants. But that’s different from what I need.

Abba was fighting that decision, I was sure. But I couldn’t even ask him how it was going.

That was what I got for looking at things I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. As I lay in bed that night, trying hard not to cry, I had to admit it was a fitting punishment.

• ••

At night, Dudi and Yaffa’le go walking on the long avenue that runs between the various neighborhoods of Ramat Beit Shemesh.

“I’ve been chattering enough,” says Yaffa’le. “Your turn now. Tell me about something that happened before I knew you.”

There’s a pause, and then Dudi plunges in, starting from the middle. “My mother didn’t know what I was doing, exactly. When I enrolled in the school, I gave the office a friend’s address, so no official mail was coming to the house. But she still sensed I was doing something wrong, something she wouldn’t approve of — even though she didn’t know what I was up to.”

“The less you know, the less it can hurt you,” Yaffa’le murmured. “It makes sense.”

“I was so… I don’t know… there was a big void inside me,” Dudi continued. “And meanwhile, on the outside, I was getting yelled at and preached at on a daily basis. It didn’t even go in one ear and out the other — it didn’t go in at all. She was attacking, explaining, begging, pleading, ranting, quoting pesukim at me… to this day I don’t know what she was saying most of the time.”

“I feel sorry for her.” Yaffa’le nods her head in empathy for her mother-in-law, the woman who scowled at her the first moment they met.

Silently, they turn left onto Nachal Kishon. To their right is darkness, concealing the rubble from a construction site, shrubbery, roads, and disputed lands. Dudi doesn’t seem to notice their surroundings at all.

“It was like a snake was eating away at my insides,” he says. “I didn’t want to live anymore. Nothing seemed worthwhile. I’d lost everything I had, and the outside world had no other meaning to offer me. But I kept going to school… because I’d already registered and started the courses, and math and physics gave me a place to be, instead of the place I once had, which was in ruins.”

“We’ve never talked about this before,” Yaffa’le says, stealing a glance at her husband as he stares into the darkness. She can’t even imagine how it feels. She just believes him. Always.

“It’s time we did,” he says softly.

They both look toward the Beit Jamal monastery, its light blinking on the horizon.

“Until one day in Iyar. I was walking down the street, feeling suffocated, like I couldn’t take another breath. But my lungs were stronger than my spirit, I guess. I went into the classroom. It was a lesson on electromagnetism. Some of the material was part of the curriculum — we needed to know it for the matriculation tests. But the lecturer expanded his lesson, way past what we technically had to know. He started talking about the basic forces of nature and summarizing the strength and range of each one.”

Yaffa’le doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But this time she doesn’t protest.

“There are four basic forces that hold the universe together at every moment, he said. He expanded on Maxwell’s theory… about these forces that keep all the particles together, that prevent molecules from falling apart. All of them are different forms of one fundamental force. One Power. I sat there gaping and suddenly I understood, Yaffa’le. Suddenly it was all clear.”

“What was clear?” She’s confused.

“I can’t even explain it. I just saw it. Like a blind person who suddenly sees. Everything around me was one force. The desks, the whiteboard, the seats, and me — millions and trillions of molecules, and the light, the electromagnetic force, and everything… one supreme Power was holding it all there, giving us all life and existence and sustaining us.”

He swallows, then goes on. “The lesson ended, and I got up and took the bus home, and all the way home I still felt it. The sidewalk, the streets, the buildings, the bus stops, the bus, the people. It was all particles that the One Power was holding together. Giving them life. I knew that if that Power let go of them for even one moment, they would fall apart, just cease to be. I knew that without this Power, there would be no world.

“I wasn’t just some lonely, unwanted, yelled-at guy anymore.

“I was embraced. I was cradled. On the bus, all around me, were a lot of people. Chareidim. They all knew that there’s a G-d, but I could feel Him. His left hand was under my head, and His right hand was hugging me. I got off the bus. I could still see it all. And the light was so bright, at that moment I was ready to do anything He’d tell me. But He didn’t tell me anything, He just held me.

“Ima had a fit that day — that was the day a letter from school showed up at my home address instead of the address I’d given them, so she found out where I’d been going. But even her screaming couldn’t break through the wall of happiness I felt all around me. I’d rediscovered what I’d lost.”

“Wow.” Yaffa’le is almost jealous. “I’ve never felt anything like that.”

“Sometimes, you have to lose something so you can find it.”

“Yes, but not everyone finds it,” Yaffa’le says sadly. “And some people lose themselves in the process.” His sister Chaya pops into her mind. Her wide-eyed fascination with that marketing event. Her questions, her flailing attempts to touch the big world out there. And his little niece, Tovi… so inquisitive.

“The next morning when I woke up, it was gone,” Dudi says in a near-whisper. “The walls were walls, the bed was a bed. I put on tefillin. I was putting on tefillin every day before that, too, but not always my own pair. Often, I’d borrow a pair at Minchah, put them on and mumble a few pesukim. That morning, I put on my own. I didn’t see that fundamental force anymore, but I knew it was there. And when I said, ‘V’eirastich li l’olam,’ I meant… that. And from then on, to this day, I never lost it again.”

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 858)