Tovi isn’t done. “And besides, when you wake up from the anesthesia, you feel horrific,” she says. “And sometimes you can’t stop throwing up. Chaya Lea told me. After she had her appendix out, she wouldn’t have anyone with her but her mother. What if I’m in horrific pain in the middle of the night and I want to scream, but I feel like I can’t, because of that… that person you want to send with me! Gitty had an operation to fix her lazy eye, and she said it felt like knives were digging into her eye muscles for two days. It hurt so much, she was crying, and they had to give her morphine!”

Gedalya grimaces. “Why couldn’t your friends save their horror stories until after you’ve come back safe and sound?”

“When I come back safe and sound, I’ll tell them horror stories about my experience. But Ima, please tell me you won’t send me with some old aunt. Please, please, pleeea-se!”

“Ima can’t go with you. Stop being such a baby.” Chaimke is in the doorway now, poking his face in behind Tovi. “Instead of davening for Ima, and doing whatever you can to help her feel better, you’re making everybody miserable. Go with whoever’s willing to travel with you, and be thankful.”

“Excuse me?” Tovi turns on her brother indignantly. “Nobody in this house is doing more than I am to help Ima. For the last two months I’ve been helping here in the house nonstop!”

“If you have to fight, would you mind doing it somewhere else?” Shifra asks wearily.

“Okay, but swear to me that you won’t send me with Aunt Ita!”

“It’s assur to swear,” Gedalya says. “But don’t worry. Aunt Ita hasn’t offered to come. You’ll travel only with someone you feel comfortable with. And I’ll be traveling with you in any case,” he adds.

“Oh, good!”

“We’ve already changed Ima’s ticket and put it on my name.” And another ticket, if someone else has to come along, is going to cost another $1,300 that we don’t have. And that’s on top of the 15,000 shekels I borrowed from Tzvi, out of his own pocket. And the loan I took for the advance payment, which is taking a big chunk out of our income every month.

He feels lightheaded all of a sudden. Tonight is Yom Tov. It’s a mitzvah to be b’simchah, he tells himself. He searches within himself for a big smile. He finds it.

“Gut yuntiff,” he says. “Chag sameiach, Shifra. Chag sameiach, my sweet kinderlach. Chaim’ke, do you have your clothing ready? We have to leave. Goodbye, everyone. We should be zocheh to see the Geulah with our own eyes.”

• ••

The Bernfeld boys are blessed with sweet voices. They’re singing “Yam l’Yabashah Nehefchu Metzulim,” and Shua is leading them with his own strong voice. The tune is familiar and beloved, but Gedalya isn’t singing along. His thoughts are spinning out of control.

“I can go with you,” Dudi had offered a few hours ago. He’d called while Gedalya was en route to Yerushalayim. “I have a visa. My English is very good….”

Oh, what arguments they’d had about his learning English! And now he was waving his proficiency in front of Gedalya like a skewer he was about to plunge into his heart. See, you can’t be your daughter’s liaison with the medical staff, and I can. Not to mention that I’m the one who raised the funding for her procedure.

“And…” Here Dudi’s confident tone wavered a bit. “I mean, of course, only if it works for you. And for Tovi. I could rent a car there, too, and drive you wherever you need to go. And help you with… arranging things. Whatever you need.”

Using your pasul devices to accomplish all these things?

Gedalya had managed to be polite. He’d thanked Dudi nicely for the generous offer and said he’d consider it. Even though he wasn’t going to consider it.

“But Gedalya, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Tovi would love it,” Shifra had said in their last-minute conversation just before Yom Tov arrived, bringing with it the salty water of the Yam Suf up to their necks.

“Of course Tovi would love it. I know she feels very comfortable with him.”

On Chol Hamoed Dudi had sat on Ima’s sofa, with that flat kippah on his head, eating stolen chremslach and telling the children about the particle accelerators at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Two days later they were still asking questions about particles, and imagining them flying around in a long, round tunnel between Switzerland and France. Electrical fields accelerating them more and more, until they reached almost infinite speed. Two opposing streams of particles, colliding. The discovery of a new subatomic particle, the Higgs boson.

“That’s exactly why it’s out of the question.”

Or is it because you don’t feel comfortable with him, scoffed a voice in his head.

“I don’t love Dudi’s jokes, either,” Shifra whispered into the phone, “or his whole style… but still….”

He waited patiently for her to go on.

“Maybe Tovi’s a bit different from us. Maybe she needs a little more flexibility. Even when it comes to the whole issue of… of laughing about her condition. You know. That brand of humor that we find so distasteful. If we can’t give her that, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to let Dudi fill that need. Maybe it’s even min haShamayim.” Four maybes. “Of course, it would all be under your supervision. You wouldn’t be leaving her alone with him,” she hastened to add.

“We’ll think about it,” Gedalya had told her.

Once more, he’d wished her a gut yuntiff, after verifying that her sister had arrived, the food was all ready and organized, and the children were calm.

But Gedalya, it’s not like you think, Dudi had tried to explain. He claimed that he saw angels in all that physics of his, in every particle, in every movement.

“The maidservant saw what she saw and remained a maidservant,” Gedalya had responded dismissively, quoting the mussar seforim. “What good does it do to see Divinity everywhere if we remain slaves to our desires, slaves to all the changing whims of the outside world?”

“L’mi zos nirshemes,” the Bernfeld choir sings.

“Haker na devar emes,” sings his own Chaim’ke, his voice rising above all the others.

Gedalya gets up from the table and goes to the kitchen, looking for something he can do to help Nechami. She’s quickly washing the soup plates, putting them on the drying rack. Then she piles warm schnitzels on a platter and cuts kugel into straight, even slices. She offers Gedalya a bowl to fill with zucchini and peppers.

“How are things going, Gedalya?” she asks.

In her little kitchen, they stand next to the ivy plant that hangs from the wall. In the main room, the others are singing.

With her, he feels very comfortable. If only she could come with them to America. But Nechami’s English is only elementary, and her Beri’s bar mitzvah is a week after Tovi’s procedure. And besides, you can’t ask for such a favor, even from a sibling.

“Dudi wants to come with us to Los Angeles,” he says, watching her quick hands.

“That’s amazing,” she says. “It’s so nice of him to offer.”

“Is it?” He looks skeptical.

“Yes. To be willing to leave his family, his job, and his studies for a week to help a brother and a niece he loves — that’s a very nice gesture.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to show me he was right to learn all those secular studies, and to get a driver’s license.”

Nechami laughs. She can’t help it. “Oy, Gedalya, what’s going to be with you? I know you’ve been through a rough time lately, with Shifra and everything, but really! You’ve got to stop being such a….”

“Such a what?”

“Such a mevaker,” she says, accenting the second syllable. “It’s like you’ve got your red pen out, and you’re looking for something wrong with a simple, authentic offer from your brother.”

“V’shuv sheinis l’kadshah, v’al tosif l’garshah…” The song surges in the air, hovers tentatively over brother and sister, slips into the space between them, touches and doesn’t.

•••

That night the sea will split into twelve pathways. They’ll all walk through, each on his own path, toward the Promised Land. And then they’ll sing a song of praise.

Splash.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 899)