The doctor puts down her bag and summons up all her patience and professionalism. “Giveret Silver, you don’t understand. The risk is to you — not to anyone else. I understand that your daughter’s surgery is very important to you. You want her to have an ear. But it’s more important that she should have a mother. If you get on a plane and travel for 16 hours in your condition, there’s a strong risk that she’ll be left without a mother, chas v’chalilah. She’ll have two beautiful ears, but no mother.”

Shifra won’t let go. They can’t send Tovi for an operation without her mother, or with a father who can’t even read the word “ear.”

“What if we do a stopover on the way?” she asks insistently. “There are flights with stopovers in Europe, or in New York.”

“Wonderful,” says the doctor, picking up her bag. “Two takeoffs and two landings, instead of one. Twice the air pressure.”

Gedalya tries again. “Please, doctor, try to understand our situation. We’re really in dire straits.” His words sound trite, even to him. The doctor is like an iceberg.

“I understand your straits,” she says. “But there is really no way your wife can fly. No airline will allow her to board, no doctor will give her permission, and no insurance company will insure her in the condition she’s in. I’m sorry.”

She turns out the light and walks out.

Shifra and Gedalya are left in the empty room, staring at each other.

“I’ll try to get hold of somebody higher up,” says Gedalya, taking out his phone. He searches his contacts and presses “call.”

“Giveret Malik? Gedalya Silver here. I’ve got an emergency situation here. I need a senior doctor — a professor — to examine my wife. We’re at the Kupat Cholim urgent care center.… So we should go there now, to the ER?” He nods. “B’seder. And who should we call there?”

In the backseat of the taxi, after mobilizing the whole marketing department, he’s fuming. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he says. “I can’t stand people who use protektziya to bypass protocol and get special treatment, and now look at me.”

Shifra keeps quiet.

She keeps quiet in the emergency room, too, when a bespectacled professor from the gynecology department comes to them specially. He’s much more pleasant than the doctor in the urgent care center, but his opinion is the same, if a little more lenient.

“You can go out for short, easy errands,” he says, “like taking a child to gan, or picking up a few light groceries. With the emphasis on light.”

“And what about flying? I’d be sitting the whole time….”

“No.”

“So who’s going to take my daughter to America, then?”

Shifra looks at the doctor as if he’s just said something ludicrous. Who’s going to pack the blue suitcase, and make sure the passports are safe but handy? Who’s going to make sure they take enough American cash, an international credit card, and their list of contacts in the local Jewish community? Who will hold Tovi’s hand, and keep her distracted all those hours in the plane?

“I don’t know, Giveret Silver,” he says gently. “But it definitely shouldn’t be you.”

“My daughter needs me,” Shifra tries to explain. “She’s only 12 years old. And it’s a long, complicated procedure.”

“I don’t know, Giveret Silver,” the professor repeats. “I can only tell you that all the signs point to one thing, and the scans confirm it: You cannot travel by plane. I’m sorry, but it would be a real danger to you, and to the fetus too.”

He sends them off with a printed list of guidelines. Dumbly, numbly, they accept them. For all his powers to edit, change, and tweak, Gedalya is utterly powerless now.

“What about the kids, how will they get home?” Gedalya suddenly remembers to ask as they walk out.

“The big ones took a bus home. And Dudi took the two little ones in the car,” she tells him. “They’re all waiting for us at home.”

•••

“I have mezalach,” Yossi informs anyone willing to listen — including the electrical poles they pass on the way, a gray cat, and a street bench.

The chremslach, the last batch her mother fried before they left, are still hot in the disposable pan. Everyone is full and satisfied, and Nechami really doesn’t know who’s going to eat them. Maybe she’ll warm them up tomorrow for lunch.

“Lonodami hikahu,” says a voice out of the darkness. A dim figure is sitting on the steps leading up to their apartment. “Lonodami.”

“You scared us,” Nechami admonishes her. “Ruti, don’t surprise people in the dark like that. You could frighten them.”

“Lonodami,” Ruti says to her, as if talking to the air.

“She’s talking about the eglah arufah,” Bentzi says quietly, tugging at his mother’s sleeve. “I think she’s saying lo noda mi hikahu. About the chalal, the man found dead in the field, and they don’t know who killed him.”

Nechami turns to Ruti. “Lo noda mi hikahu?” The children go inside. One by one, they sprawl on the couches, with no intentions of going to bed.

“Yes,” Ruti declaims. “He wanted them to find him. Before the lonodami found him.”

“And they didn’t find him?” Nechami tries to follow the flow of Ruti’s deranged thoughts.

“No. When he knocked, they told the children to ask who is it. And they waved their finger back and forth, so he wouldn’t hear, to tell the children not to open the door.” Her eyes look crazed. I’d signal to my kids not to open the door to you, too, she thinks.

“And then the lonodami knocked him dead,” Ruti pronounced.

“That’s not how we read the pasuk,” Nechami corrects her. “It’s ‘Lo noda mi hikahu’ — meaning no one knows who struck him down.”

“They know who struck him down. It was the lonodami. The no one. And that’s the fundamental question in ontology: What exists? We study nonexistence.”

“Would you like a nice, warm chremsel?” Nechami asks, realizing it’s no use trying to go with the flow. She opens the bag, proffers the comforting pancakes. “It’s a kind of pancake, just with potatoes. The world can’t be all that bad after all, as long as it has hot pancakes in it, don’t you think?”

Ruti takes two chremslach. She chews in silence. And then, from down the street, Nechami hears someone calling Ruti’s name. Someone’s looking for her.

“I’ll walk you home,” Nechami offers.

She wants to say, it’s not that people shut their doors to you. They were just very busy, with their own children and their own lives and their own work. Who has time for other people amid that struggle for survival?

Ruti’s mother is waiting for them outside. Nechami studies her. She looks like any 60-year-old woman from Mekor Baruch. Someone might have yelled at her today in the grocery store because of a perceived infraction, not knowing they were treading on holy ground. On ground where someone lay slain, and no one knew who struck her down.

“I hope it’s okay that I gave her something to eat,” Nechami tells the neighbor. I didn’t open the door to her, but sometimes even the stairs are a place to be. “And she… she was talking about the mitzvah of eglah arufah, I think — about the man found dead outside the town. And also something about existence and nonexistence.”

“What is being?” asks Ruti. “Is there one being to all beings?”

“Our Ruti loves science and philosophy,” the mother says quietly. And she means it seriously, Nechami realizes. Beneath those broken shards, there is something whole.

“Mental illness doesn’t spare the gifted,” the woman whispers, as they walk the short distance between their two buildings.

So why was she working in a day care center? Nechami doesn’t ask. And why was she living in a far-off housing project?

Because to live you need money, no one answers. And to have a place to live, too.

“Who does it spare?” Nechami asks. Her breath is quavering.

“No one’s immune,” the neighbor replies. “There are no guarantees in This World.”

At home, Nechami finds a battlefield. Somehow, six tired kids, aged two to fifteen, have managed to fight like street cats during her short absence. She starts running the water in the bathtub, peels dirty clothes off the small children, and sticks them in the water. She fires commands and rebukes at the big ones.

And then she’s covered with water. Yossi’s doing his best dolphin imitation. And her phone is singing, as if it weren’t 11 p.m. on a Chol Hamoed night, with six kids still wide awake.

Shua is calling. He’s stepped out of Milkov for a moment, because there’s no mobile reception in the beis medrash.

“Do you want me to come home?” he asks.

Splash.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 898)