• ••

“You look excited,” says Dudi. No detective work needed for that.

“I am,” Yaffa’le admits. “I’m happy they called me. It makes me feel… appreciated. Like they realize I have something to offer, and they respect my knowledge.”

Suddenly, she’s crying.

She plops down on the couch they bought at a bargain price, secondhand, and cries.

Dudi frantically flips through the mental guidebook he carries in his brain, straight to the chapter on “Why Women Cry.” But there’s such a long list of possible reasons! What now?

“I came to the engagement party so happy,” she sniffs.

“You mean Chaya’s?”

“No. Ours.”

What’s he supposed to do next? He flips through the virtual pages rapidly. Under “What to Do When She Dredges up Old Memories,” he finds simple instructions: “Listen. Nod understandingly. Validate her.”

He listens. He nods.

“I knew your family was super-frum,” she’s saying, “but I made a resolution that morning, when we decided to get engaged, that I’d go all out to show them respect. To be part of the family — a different sort of part, maybe, but… but I wanted to belong.”

He nods. “I know. You were really trying.”

He sees her point of view. He sees theirs, too. It turned out that his mother and Yaffa’le had very different definitions of “showing respect.” Ima felt that Yaffa’le was showing total disregard for her. What did she mean by dressing that way? Her look, her style. Those big buckles, and that odd, shiny yellow handbag.

“I came with so much goodwill,” Yaffa’le sniffs. “And they just treated me like I was inferior the whole time. Even Nechami. She’s the kindest, sweetest neshamah of them all — but even she made me feel like I was her chesed project, like she was trying to be mekareiv me.”

Dudi nods, giving that nod all he’s got. He listens. And he truly understands. After years of rejection, Gedalya suddenly calls her; he wants to consult her about her field of expertise. She extends an invitation, despite fearing a rebuff. Maybe she’ll offer them drinks in glasses that weren’t toiveled properly; maybe the bottled water isn’t kosher enough for them.

And still they say they’ll come.

He’s swept up into her tension. He scans the living room through Gedalya’s eyes. Then he changes his mind.

“Listen, Yaffa’le. We can’t play-act for them. We are who we are.”

“You’re right. I was thinking the same.”

“So we won’t. We just won’t have any papers or magazines here that Shifra wouldn’t have in her house” — which meant just about everything in their magazine holder — “and I guess we’ll put the computer screen in the bedroom, too. It’s movable.”

They work silently, tidying, removing the offending items. Avital is busy with her crayons. On the windowsill, a sleek glass menorah waits. Soon the sky will darken, and Dudi will kindle the wicks, lift the light to them.

Once, he muses, people didn’t know what light was. Did a beam of light consist of waves or particles? Those beams of light seemed out to confuse them. They’d exhibit different properties from one time to the next.

Newton described them as miniscule particles, emitted by the sun and scattered in space. Robert Hooke thought light was a wave — long, continuous, and fluid, like ripples in water. But most everyone was confused.

• ••

“The truth is, it’s insulting,” Yaffa’le says, after snapping the requisite pictures of Avital by the menorah alight. “It’s like, when they need me, they suddenly remember I’m a member of the family.”

“If you’re feeling insulted, I’ll call Gedalya and cancel,” Dudi says firmly.

With all due respect to Tovi and her ear, and all his desire to help his brother, Yaffa’le’s feelings come first. And he won’t let anyone hurt her.

“Well, I do feel insulted,” she says, “but I’m also happy to offer my help. And I don’t want them to come, but I don’t want you to cancel.”

They both sit quietly for a minute, gazing at the beautiful menorah they bought together at an artists’ fair. It’s Chanukah, it’s a time of joy.

“I bet you’re thinking, ‘How can I possibly understand these women — they’re so full of contradictions,’ ” she says.

He smiles. “Actually, I was thinking about something in physics,” he says.

“Oh, no! Anything but that! Bore me with politics, Dudi — even that’s better than all those long theories and equations!”

But Dudi keeps thinking about light, and how it posed as two different things at the same time. Theories came and went, quantum physics became the order of the day, and physicists continually argued, determined to settle the debate once and for all: Was light a wave or a particle?

Until one day Niels Bohr came up with a new idea — duality: Light is both a wave and a particle. Some people see everything in terms of black and white. But light isn’t like that. It can be a wave and, at the same time, a collection of particles. The world is more complex than it seems to us, and that is precisely why the facts can be stated so simply: It’s complicated, and there’s no contradiction, none at all. Light is a dual entity.

• ••

In the evening, Nechami goes downstairs to her office, leaving the small children sleeping and the older ones to their own devices. She’s dividing her work hours between her regular flow of projects for Gunter and the booklets she’s designing for Dudi. Dudi pays well and in cash — he’s getting a generous stipend — and she needs ready cash now to pay for Beri’s tefillin. She checks the instructions he left for her:

Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment. Make a 3-D image of two walls, one with a pair of vertical slits, and a beam of light passing through them. The light scatters, proving that light is a wave. The next illustration will show that light is composed of particles.

As she already knows, it’s both.

Way back when Sari was a baby (such a demanding one — she doesn’t know what genetic flaw makes all her babies such terrors, but they make up for it later by growing into the finest of youngsters)… when Sari was a baby, Sternblich took a trip to Lakewood. That was a pivotal event, because Sternblich was Shua’s chavrusa on Monday and Wednesday nights from 10 p.m. and on.

“I have some free hours now on Monday and Wednesday evenings,” Shua said to her at the time.

She wanted him to spend that time at home, and she also wanted him to stay in the beis medrash with another chavrusa. She knew it was better to learn with a chavrusa.

And how those two desires wrestled within her!

He came home at ten that Wednesday night, home to the wildly messy living room. He tidied it up in five minutes and swept. She felt so many things at once. She wanted his help and she didn’t want it. Then they talked a bit. She wanted to hear what he was learning.

Choshen Mishpat, Chazon Ish, and Maseches Succah were all open on the table in front of him. And one mug of coffee, so there would be somebody to draw a brown circle on the crystal-clear acrylic table protector.

He told her about Reuven, who built a succah on Shimon’s property. Shimon chased Reuven away and appropriated the succah for his own use. Could he fulfill the mitzvah with that stolen succah?

It wasn’t Succos then, or Chanukah either. It was just an ordinary weekday, and she sat on the sofa, her eyes slowly closing. Sari started to cry, and Nechami brought her to the living room, soft and warm, to sit in Abba’s arms and learn with him.

So he told a story: Once, he said, there was an am ha’aretz who got upset with his daughter and told her the shadchanim weren’t interested in her because she wasn’t a bas talmid chacham. It wasn’t clear if he was telling this story to Sari, who was dozing off, or to Nechami, who was also dozing off.

“I hope you’ll be a bas talmid chacham,” he said to Sari, and she opened her big eyes to the page of Gemara and smiled.

People are also dual, Nechami thinks as she works on Dudi’s models. Just like light.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 871)