Rise Up My Love By Philip Graubart
A rabbi prepares her skeptical daughter for bat mitzvah while helping a devout terminally ill woman convert to Judaism.
"Rabbi Judith. I just... I think I might be dying."
Kristine spoke in a clear, bell-like voice. I might even say healthy voice - not the kind of voice that's struggling to choke out her last words. Still, the sentiment didn't shock me. She was, in fact, dying. Just, from what I could tell listening to her breathe, speak, argue, sing, not right now, two in the morning, on the phone with her rabbi. Now sounded more like insomnia than the rare auto-immune disorder that we both knew would one day take her life.
"Do you feel like this often?" I asked. "I mean that you're dying, in the middle of the night?"
"Every night," she said. "This is just the first time I called you. I've run out of friends who'll listen to a lunatic complain about dying. I figure now that I'm Jewish, I'm allowed at least three middle-of-the-night calls."
"Take as many as you want," I said. She chuckled - a lovely laugh, as lovely as her light skinned face. I furiously combed my brain for strategies to get her off the phone.
I met Kristine a year before. She was part of a young group from the local college who suddenly showed up every Saturday for services. Since those five kids lowered the average age of the congregants by some thirty years, I was anxious to meet them - and so were all of our age 60 and up regulars. But, as if acutely aware of what a valuable commodity youth is in today's Jewish world, they fled before the end of Adon Olam, our final hymn, so no one was able to talk to them. Until one Shabbat, when all five stayed until the end of the last song and formed a kind of arrow with Kristine - long blond hair, skinny, the brightest smile I'd ever seen - at the tip. She limped slowly toward me, clearly disabled in some way. I attributed her pale face to nervousness at meeting the rabbi, though I later learned that was just her color. But she was anxious. Her bell-like voice shook slightly, and I had to lean in close to hear what she was asking. "...Come see you?" was all I could catch at first. "Of course," I answered instinctively. A college student wants to meet with me? I didn't need to know why. I didn't even need to know when. Whenever is convenient. But she was still struggling to finish her thought. She looked back at her friends. The short young man directly behind her nodded and mouthed some word.
"Conversion," she said. Then, finally, she grinned, triumphantly, as if she'd just won a gold medal. "I'm Kristine."
For our first conversion conversation she brought me a cake. Fay, my assistant, buzzed her in and I went out to the hallway to greet her. She limped slowly, carefully, her thin legs struggling to maintain a straight line. But what stuck out most about her wasn't her infirmity. It was the tall blue and white cake she carried. Jewish-themed decorations - menorahs, Jewish stars, Israeli flags - decorated the three-layered tower, and pushed the monster cake well past her head.
Her hands shook slightly, but she successfully placed the Jewish cake on my coffee table and, without waiting to be asked, dropped herself on the couch. She breathed hard for a few seconds, then brushed a few long blond hairs out of her eyes. She smiled at me. "I'm taking a pastry cooking and decoration class," she said. She nodded at the cake. "Homework. It's for you."
I thought about paper plates, plastic forks. Maybe some grape juice. But she shoved the cake to the corner of the table, as if it were some petty distraction. "I need to convert fairly soon," she said.
"Getting married?" I asked. In my professional experience, it was by far the most common reason for conversion.
"Oh no," she said, laughing and coughing at the same time, a sound I'd get used to. "Not marriage. Dying."
My next appointment after Kristine was my 12-year-old daughter Hannah. She looked almost as nervous as Kristine, but for a different reason. Hannah wasn't prepared. I'd given her two short verses from her bat mitzvah haftarah to learn, and she couldn't pronounce a single word correctly, even those with one syllable. Compassion, I yelled to myself silently, as she sung with whispery indifference. Patience! Her parents are getting divorced. She's been diagnosed with several learning disorders (though somehow she manages to get all As in her non-Jewish subjects at school). Scolding her only makes it worse. You're her loving mother.
Despite these admonitions to self, I couldn't withhold a sigh. And that's all it took. She looked up from her bat mitzvah handbook and her eyes filled with tears. "I've been busy," she snapped.
"Busy." Soccer, I thought. Once a week, two hours. Homework. Maybe half an hour a day, most of it completed during school study hall. Friends. And...?
"You don't believe me!"
I was astonished - though I shouldn't have been - how she could read my mind when I'd only said one word. But of course she was right. Lately, I didn't believe much of what Hannah told me.
"Forget it," she said. She grabbed her papers, hopped off the couch and fled, slamming the door. A typical bat mitzvah lesson.
I was tutoring Hannah for her bat mitzvah because Peter got himself a girlfriend. Why else? The connection was clear in my mind. Every rabbinic colleague with the relevant experience warned me against a mother tutoring her child. If you were a surgeon, you wouldn't remove your own daughter's appendix, would you? If Hannah needed psychological help and you were a therapist, you wouldn't take on the job. They were right, of course. Like many disasters, the chain of causality leading to that catastrophic decision wasn't immediately obvious. But it started with the girlfriend. Peter and I had been separated for nearly six months, and estranged for years, so it wasn't the fact of the (much younger) lover. Anyway, it irked me more than it provoked any authentic jealousy. Not because he'd told Hannah before he'd informed me, or that Hannah had already spent hours with the two of them - at the zoo, the mall (of course), the movie Wicked, the soccer field. It was his new girl's off-handed comment - reported by Peter - that he seemed to spend so much more time with Hannah than I.
"How the fuck does she know..."
"Shhh. Calm down," he said. "It's just her impression. She doesn't know our arrangements."
"I'm tutoring Hannah for her bat mitzvah," I said, deciding on the spot.
Peter fondled his scraggly brown beard - more chin, I thought, than beard. "Okay," he said slowly.
He knew it was a bad idea. And so, of course, did I. But Peter's new girlfriend? It was Elana, the synagogue youth director. And our main bat mitzvah tutor.
I wasn't surprised that the first thing Kristine said at our second meeting while limping through the door was "Why do good people suffer?" She brought a pie this time, a big one, but not a monster cake. Boysenberry, she told me. "And kosher. I should have said that sooner! Of course. Everything I make is kosher. From my kosher kitchen." She touched a spot just below her Adam's apple every time she spoke. I couldn't tell at first if it was a nervous habit or a biological necessity. Turned out it was the latter. She eased herself next to me on the couch and widened her eyes, her lips turned down into a sad frown. "Or anyone," she said. "Why does anyone have to suffer?"
I looked at the pie. I thought again of paper plates, plastic forks. Milk? So much of my professional life involved food and disposable utensils. Was I supposed to serve these offerings? Kristine was so thin. But she shoved the golden-brown pie aside, just like she'd moved over the cake. They were for me, I decided, in the same way the ancient Israelites burnt cows for God. Food that God would never eat. "Suffering," I said. "I assume you're referring to your... uh..." I turned my hand palm-side up and pointed to her as if she was exhibit one in my presentation.
"My Blochcaschardia?" She touched her Adam's apple.
Later, when I learned to pronounce that dreaded word, and mentioned it to friends who were doctors, they would either glare at me in abject horror, or shrug with blessed ignorance.
"I think you're really wondering why God is making you suffer. With your... that disease."
She tilted her head at me with a puzzled look, as if reevaluating her previous positive attitude. "Your sermons are really good," she said. For a beat, I let the compliment sit. I was about to thank her when she spoke in a fuller voice, deeper, more professor than student. "I'm not the one who's suffering," she said. "I'm fine. It's my parents, my brother. My uncle and aunt. My friends. Why do they have to suffer? They're worried all the time. The fact that I could die, that I'm going to die - it kills my mom. She doesn't deserve this."
I nodded. Was she really that selfless? I was willing to wager that she was.
"Okay," I said. "You're talking about theodicy. The problem of evil."
"I guess?"
It happened to be a topic that also fascinated me, but, I suspected, for different reasons. "You see there are these three statements. We call them 'The Irreconcilable Truths.' They can't all exist in the same logical universe. 'God is all powerful.' That's the first one. 'God is benevolent - all loving.' That's the second..."
"Wait. Wait. Do you love God? I mean really love God?"
"Uh, well, yeah," I said. I looked at the pie. It was the best answer I could come up with.
"I love God," Kristine said, not with the voice of religious testimony, but a young woman with something more than a crush. "Really love God. With, just, a passion. You know?"
I didn't. I nodded. "Maybe," I said. "Maybe we should just start at the beginning."
She grinned and touched her throat. "That would be wonderful."
We met once a week. After the second month, I had to implore her to stop with the offerings. Not even our youth group could make a dent in the cookies and the pies. Hannah could eat no more than half a cake before it went stale. I was trying to lose weight before the bat mitzvah. No more high-calorie homework projects, I insisted. She brought them anyway,
After three months she begged me to go up to two sessions a week. "I just have so many questions. And you're my Hillel. You're so patient with me. I feel so much strength from you. You're Deborah. You're Miriam."
After four months I told her she was ready to convert. It was true. At a purely intellectual level, she was the best student I ever taught. Still a full-time undergraduate, she could recite with genuine clarity and depth, the entire Jewish calendar and then, with equal subtlety, the Jewish lifecycle, and the Jewish philosophical tradition. But beyond learning, memorizing and knowing, she loved God. The Jewish God, she felt the need to clarify. Not the broken man on the cross. Adonai. The God of Abraham.
"Oh?" I challenged her. "The God of Abraham told him to kill his son. You love that?"
"He had his reasons," she answered, with a googly-eyed expression, and a clear bell voice - the affect of someone in love.
But, she told me, she wasn't ready to take the plunge into the ritual conversion bath after just four months. At the beginning of our lessons, I told her it typically took eight months - two semesters - or six months, if there was some reasons to rush. But Kristine was such a fine, motivated student. Why not skip ahead, I asked. What usually went unmentioned - because I was uncomfortable mentioning it - was that time was an issue for Kristine. Eternity was the issue. Life. Death. But I followed her lead. Six months, she told me, then the plunge. I quickly agreed.
Tutoring Hannah was not all tension, tears, and anxiety. Often, we ended up cuddling next to each other on my office couch, chanting together. On rare occasions, Hannah gave in to an actual yearning to sing. And she somehow became shockingly curious about her portion from the prophet Jeremiah.
"No one listened to him?" she asked, the first time we went through it in English. I nodded. "Well," she said. "I know what that's like." She pushed her gangly body at me, digging her head into my underarm. "I think I might be a prophet," she said, and then struggled through the two lines I assigned. She shrugged. She'd done the best she could. I smiled and squeezed her upper arm.
Still, the threat of melt downs lingered whenever she encountered a tongue twisty word or simply had not prepared the material. At first, I'd correct her softly, to keep her chanting in a flow. Sometimes it worked, but other times she'd stop and yell "I can't HEAR you." So I switched to a fuller voice, but then, on her not so few bad days, she'd respond "You don't have to SCREAM!" On Peter's weekends she'd often show up Sundays at four with hair unwashed, dreary eyed, in last night's sweat clothes or pajamas, as if she'd been up all night. One afternoon, about a month after Kristine limped into my life, Hannah stumbled through an excruciatingly unprepared section. At the end she eyed me warily, waiting for the rebuke or the corrections, wondering what voice I'd use. But I only took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Hannah - correctly - took the gesture as a sign of genuine disapproval, and threw her pen on the coffee table. "I don't even care about this stuff, you know," she said. "I don't believe in God. It's all a joke. I would never want to be a rabbi."
I removed my hand slowly from my eyes, as if hoping for a surprise gift. "You know," I said, "I'm tutoring someone who's love for God is keeping her alive. She's sick, Hannah, she's dying. But she's so brave and committed..."
Hannah leapt off of the couch. I recalled just a few days earlier Kristine awkwardly dropping her ailing body down into the same seat, holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies with M&M's. "She can have my bat mitzvah!" Hannah yelled. She grabbed her backpack and headed for the door. Before slamming it, she turned back to me. "I don't want you as my tutor anymore. I want Elana." Elana, of course, being our main tutor. And Peter's new girlfriend.
The next day Kristine showed up her usual fifteen minutes early, this time bearing lemon squares (I ended up eating most of them). She told me she'd just finished the tenth book I'd assigned - Shai Held's new book about love. "I literally wept at the end of every chapter. I mean he got Judaism exactly right. It's all about love. Different kinds of love. Loving the stranger. Loving your parents. Loving God. Loving yourself. He's so wise. So, so wise." She stopped for a second, as if to rethink, and smiled at me. "I mean, like you Rabbi Judith. Wise like you. I'm so lucky." She touched her Adam's apple.
"Kristine," I said. "You don't have to..."
But she'd already looked away. Her gaze found my beat up twenty-five-year-old Taylor acoustic guitar leaning against my desk. "You play?" she asked, delighted. She picked up the instrument. I couldn't imagine those skeletal fingers creating any music, but she plucked out a decent blues scale. Then handed the guitar to me.
"I only know the three minor chords you need for Jewish songs," I said.
She clapped her hands, like a preschooler, drunk on joy. Our early childhood center produced the biggest fans for my three-chord concerts, every Friday. But now here was Kristine. "This is a song I'm working on the with the third graders." I played and sang the first stanza of "Rise Up My Love," by Debbie Friedman - her interpretation of verses from Song of Songs. I was about to move into the chorus when I saw the tears cascading down Kristine's pale cheeks. I lay the guitar down on the couch. "I'm sorry, Kristine. I didn't know."
"No, no," she insisted, her voice still clear and musical through the waterfall from her eyes. "Play more."
I shrugged and fingered the easy A minor chord. Kristine closed her eyes, while I sang. Rise up my love, my fair one. And come away. For lo, the winter is here and the rain has come.
It is a pretty melody, I thought. Then Kristine astonished me by leaping effortlessly to her feet and then dancing. She lifted her feet like a ballerina, then jerked her arms and elbows, like a mosh pit regular. Her face suggested the upper reaches of ecstasy. I kept playing but only for another minute or so. It wasn't a very long song.
"It's what I've been telling you," she said. "What you've been teaching me. It's all about love." She closed her eyes again and hummed. And come away. She sang like an angel. And come away. I convinced her to come with me to the mikvah the next day. It was time.
The conversion was quick, and by the book. Kristine shivered as she dipped her thin body into the ritual bath. Two of her undergrad synagogue buddies witnessed her trembling immersion. After the blessings we all ate healthy slices of Jewish monster cake.
My next appointment was with Hannah. Dirty stringy hair. In pajamas. Eyes half shut. Was she hung over? Were Peter and Elana taking her pub crawling through downtown Laguna Beach? I knew the strung-out look meant a whiny, wary, hostile Hannah. I sat on my hands and steeled myself for an ungodly butchering of her Torah portion, followed by an adolescent tantrum.
It was worse than I expected. She turned two syllable words into five syllables - none of them with any relationship to the Hebrew on the page. She skipped over parts that she'd chanted perfectly a week before. She sneezed directly into her pamphlet as if it was a tissue. The sigh was out of my mouth before I could hold back. She picked up her prayer book and threw it at me. It grazed my cheek. She covered her mouth, finally shocked at her own behavior. "Sorry?" she said.
I clenched my fists, enough to stop the trembling anger. I'm her fucking mother, I told myself. Be the adult. My eye caught my guitar leaning against the couch. "Hannah," I said quietly. "Can I play you this song?" I closed my eyes and sang, my fingers never missing the right chords. Rise up my love my fair one. And come away.
I opened my eyes. Hannah glared. "It's stupid," she said.
"Pardon me?"
"I know what you think it's about. Loving God. It's not about loving God. It's two teenagers screwing in the fields. Elana told me. You guys just lie to yourselves with your stupid interpretations."
"Hannah."
"It's bullshit. It's all bullshit."
"Please leave, Hannah."
"Mom, it's just..."
"Leave. Please, just go. Right now."
Kristine died that night. That was the night she called me. She'd told me she was dying. I dismissed her. She died. If I'd responded, called 911?
"She was dying," Peter said the next morning, in our kitchen waiting for Hannah to show up. He allowed me to cry on his shoulder for fifteen minutes. I only stopped because I saw Hannah at the bottom of the stairs, staring at me.
For the first time in my career, I couldn't get through the eulogy. It wasn't even a particularly strong talk. I didn't really know Kristine all that well. And what could I say to comfort that mother with the angry scowl on her face, or the father, utterly defeated, or her four synagogue pals, probably introduced to Death for the first time. I made it through the seven words "Rise up my love my fair one." And my voice stuck. I couldn't do it. I could barely breathe.
Kristine's uncle, her father's brother, recognized my dilemma. He rose quietly and announced that he had a few words to share. I nodded gratefully and motioned him to the podium. He smiled at me, a comforting grin that stabbed my heart, since it was Kristina's most charming look.
"I'm sorry friends," he said, "but this is a story I have to tell you. Only Kristine, myself, and her parents know it. When beautiful Kristine was thirteen - bat mitzvah age, now that I think about it - she suffered through her worst health crisis. Now, Kristine had suffered her whole life up to then. Six surgeries when she was two years old. Five more the following year. She didn't learn to walk until she was seven. Breathing tubes shoved down her throat, almost once a week when she was eight.
"But age thirteen - that was the big one. She couldn't breathe without the machine. She'd need more surgeries, maybe six? Seven? No guarantee of success. She was in the hospital. Her parents went to the hallway to decide on the next steps. Bill and Rena went through the various operations, procedures, recovery times, medications, therapies. And God help me, I interrupted. I said, someone's got to talk with Kristine. She hears us. She understands. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe she's ready to give up. Maybe she doesn't want another frickin knife down her throat, in her lungs. I turned to my brother. 'You have to ask her.'
"The three of us went back to the hospital room. It was the only time we were alone together in that awful space. No nurses, techs, orderlies, doctors. Just us. Maybe God arranged it that way. Bill goes up to his little blond girl. Remember, she can't talk. But we'd worked out a signal. When you wanted to ask her something simple, you held out your hand, and she would take it. You asked the question. One squeeze meant no. Two squeezes meant yes.
"Bill asked her the question. 'Honey,' he said. 'You need more surgeries to stay alive. And sweetheart, we don't even know if they'll work. I'm so sorry,' he said, 'but I have to ask you. Do you want to keep trying? She stared at him. No tears in her eyes. That brave girl. We all stared at her hand. We all saw it. One squeeze. Then, a beat. An instant. Time passed. We stared at the hand. Then, oh Lord. A second squeeze. She said yes. Yes. And God gave us twelve more years with Kristine."
After the service, I was weeping in my office when I heard the knock on the door. I held my breath, trying to stifle any sound, hoping whoever it was would give up and go away. But I heard the squeak of the door. It was Hannah. She sat down next to me and held my hand. After five minutes with no words, she saw the guitar, still leaning against the couch. "Hey," she said. "I learned something Jewish. Let me play it for you." She reached for the guitar and cradled in on her lap.
"Hannah," I said. "You don't have to..."
"Shhh," she said. She looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the chords. Then she played.
It was "Rise Up My Love," by Debbie Friedman. Kristine's song. I stared at my daughter, struggling to move from C to Am, but singing like an angel. When she finished she carefully leaned the instrument back against the couch. I took her hand. I squeezed it once.
And then again.
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Kristine spoke in a clear, bell-like voice. I might even say healthy voice - not the kind of voice that's struggling to choke out her last words. Still, the sentiment didn't shock me. She was, in fact, dying. Just, from what I could tell listening to her breathe, speak, argue, sing, not right now, two in the morning, on the phone with her rabbi. Now sounded more like insomnia than the rare auto-immune disorder that we both knew would one day take her life.
"Do you feel like this often?" I asked. "I mean that you're dying, in the middle of the night?"
"Every night," she said. "This is just the first time I called you. I've run out of friends who'll listen to a lunatic complain about dying. I figure now that I'm Jewish, I'm allowed at least three middle-of-the-night calls."
"Take as many as you want," I said. She chuckled - a lovely laugh, as lovely as her light skinned face. I furiously combed my brain for strategies to get her off the phone.
I met Kristine a year before. She was part of a young group from the local college who suddenly showed up every Saturday for services. Since those five kids lowered the average age of the congregants by some thirty years, I was anxious to meet them - and so were all of our age 60 and up regulars. But, as if acutely aware of what a valuable commodity youth is in today's Jewish world, they fled before the end of Adon Olam, our final hymn, so no one was able to talk to them. Until one Shabbat, when all five stayed until the end of the last song and formed a kind of arrow with Kristine - long blond hair, skinny, the brightest smile I'd ever seen - at the tip. She limped slowly toward me, clearly disabled in some way. I attributed her pale face to nervousness at meeting the rabbi, though I later learned that was just her color. But she was anxious. Her bell-like voice shook slightly, and I had to lean in close to hear what she was asking. "...Come see you?" was all I could catch at first. "Of course," I answered instinctively. A college student wants to meet with me? I didn't need to know why. I didn't even need to know when. Whenever is convenient. But she was still struggling to finish her thought. She looked back at her friends. The short young man directly behind her nodded and mouthed some word.
"Conversion," she said. Then, finally, she grinned, triumphantly, as if she'd just won a gold medal. "I'm Kristine."
For our first conversion conversation she brought me a cake. Fay, my assistant, buzzed her in and I went out to the hallway to greet her. She limped slowly, carefully, her thin legs struggling to maintain a straight line. But what stuck out most about her wasn't her infirmity. It was the tall blue and white cake she carried. Jewish-themed decorations - menorahs, Jewish stars, Israeli flags - decorated the three-layered tower, and pushed the monster cake well past her head.
Her hands shook slightly, but she successfully placed the Jewish cake on my coffee table and, without waiting to be asked, dropped herself on the couch. She breathed hard for a few seconds, then brushed a few long blond hairs out of her eyes. She smiled at me. "I'm taking a pastry cooking and decoration class," she said. She nodded at the cake. "Homework. It's for you."
I thought about paper plates, plastic forks. Maybe some grape juice. But she shoved the cake to the corner of the table, as if it were some petty distraction. "I need to convert fairly soon," she said.
"Getting married?" I asked. In my professional experience, it was by far the most common reason for conversion.
"Oh no," she said, laughing and coughing at the same time, a sound I'd get used to. "Not marriage. Dying."
My next appointment after Kristine was my 12-year-old daughter Hannah. She looked almost as nervous as Kristine, but for a different reason. Hannah wasn't prepared. I'd given her two short verses from her bat mitzvah haftarah to learn, and she couldn't pronounce a single word correctly, even those with one syllable. Compassion, I yelled to myself silently, as she sung with whispery indifference. Patience! Her parents are getting divorced. She's been diagnosed with several learning disorders (though somehow she manages to get all As in her non-Jewish subjects at school). Scolding her only makes it worse. You're her loving mother.
Despite these admonitions to self, I couldn't withhold a sigh. And that's all it took. She looked up from her bat mitzvah handbook and her eyes filled with tears. "I've been busy," she snapped.
"Busy." Soccer, I thought. Once a week, two hours. Homework. Maybe half an hour a day, most of it completed during school study hall. Friends. And...?
"You don't believe me!"
I was astonished - though I shouldn't have been - how she could read my mind when I'd only said one word. But of course she was right. Lately, I didn't believe much of what Hannah told me.
"Forget it," she said. She grabbed her papers, hopped off the couch and fled, slamming the door. A typical bat mitzvah lesson.
I was tutoring Hannah for her bat mitzvah because Peter got himself a girlfriend. Why else? The connection was clear in my mind. Every rabbinic colleague with the relevant experience warned me against a mother tutoring her child. If you were a surgeon, you wouldn't remove your own daughter's appendix, would you? If Hannah needed psychological help and you were a therapist, you wouldn't take on the job. They were right, of course. Like many disasters, the chain of causality leading to that catastrophic decision wasn't immediately obvious. But it started with the girlfriend. Peter and I had been separated for nearly six months, and estranged for years, so it wasn't the fact of the (much younger) lover. Anyway, it irked me more than it provoked any authentic jealousy. Not because he'd told Hannah before he'd informed me, or that Hannah had already spent hours with the two of them - at the zoo, the mall (of course), the movie Wicked, the soccer field. It was his new girl's off-handed comment - reported by Peter - that he seemed to spend so much more time with Hannah than I.
"How the fuck does she know..."
"Shhh. Calm down," he said. "It's just her impression. She doesn't know our arrangements."
"I'm tutoring Hannah for her bat mitzvah," I said, deciding on the spot.
Peter fondled his scraggly brown beard - more chin, I thought, than beard. "Okay," he said slowly.
He knew it was a bad idea. And so, of course, did I. But Peter's new girlfriend? It was Elana, the synagogue youth director. And our main bat mitzvah tutor.
I wasn't surprised that the first thing Kristine said at our second meeting while limping through the door was "Why do good people suffer?" She brought a pie this time, a big one, but not a monster cake. Boysenberry, she told me. "And kosher. I should have said that sooner! Of course. Everything I make is kosher. From my kosher kitchen." She touched a spot just below her Adam's apple every time she spoke. I couldn't tell at first if it was a nervous habit or a biological necessity. Turned out it was the latter. She eased herself next to me on the couch and widened her eyes, her lips turned down into a sad frown. "Or anyone," she said. "Why does anyone have to suffer?"
I looked at the pie. I thought again of paper plates, plastic forks. Milk? So much of my professional life involved food and disposable utensils. Was I supposed to serve these offerings? Kristine was so thin. But she shoved the golden-brown pie aside, just like she'd moved over the cake. They were for me, I decided, in the same way the ancient Israelites burnt cows for God. Food that God would never eat. "Suffering," I said. "I assume you're referring to your... uh..." I turned my hand palm-side up and pointed to her as if she was exhibit one in my presentation.
"My Blochcaschardia?" She touched her Adam's apple.
Later, when I learned to pronounce that dreaded word, and mentioned it to friends who were doctors, they would either glare at me in abject horror, or shrug with blessed ignorance.
"I think you're really wondering why God is making you suffer. With your... that disease."
She tilted her head at me with a puzzled look, as if reevaluating her previous positive attitude. "Your sermons are really good," she said. For a beat, I let the compliment sit. I was about to thank her when she spoke in a fuller voice, deeper, more professor than student. "I'm not the one who's suffering," she said. "I'm fine. It's my parents, my brother. My uncle and aunt. My friends. Why do they have to suffer? They're worried all the time. The fact that I could die, that I'm going to die - it kills my mom. She doesn't deserve this."
I nodded. Was she really that selfless? I was willing to wager that she was.
"Okay," I said. "You're talking about theodicy. The problem of evil."
"I guess?"
It happened to be a topic that also fascinated me, but, I suspected, for different reasons. "You see there are these three statements. We call them 'The Irreconcilable Truths.' They can't all exist in the same logical universe. 'God is all powerful.' That's the first one. 'God is benevolent - all loving.' That's the second..."
"Wait. Wait. Do you love God? I mean really love God?"
"Uh, well, yeah," I said. I looked at the pie. It was the best answer I could come up with.
"I love God," Kristine said, not with the voice of religious testimony, but a young woman with something more than a crush. "Really love God. With, just, a passion. You know?"
I didn't. I nodded. "Maybe," I said. "Maybe we should just start at the beginning."
She grinned and touched her throat. "That would be wonderful."
We met once a week. After the second month, I had to implore her to stop with the offerings. Not even our youth group could make a dent in the cookies and the pies. Hannah could eat no more than half a cake before it went stale. I was trying to lose weight before the bat mitzvah. No more high-calorie homework projects, I insisted. She brought them anyway,
After three months she begged me to go up to two sessions a week. "I just have so many questions. And you're my Hillel. You're so patient with me. I feel so much strength from you. You're Deborah. You're Miriam."
After four months I told her she was ready to convert. It was true. At a purely intellectual level, she was the best student I ever taught. Still a full-time undergraduate, she could recite with genuine clarity and depth, the entire Jewish calendar and then, with equal subtlety, the Jewish lifecycle, and the Jewish philosophical tradition. But beyond learning, memorizing and knowing, she loved God. The Jewish God, she felt the need to clarify. Not the broken man on the cross. Adonai. The God of Abraham.
"Oh?" I challenged her. "The God of Abraham told him to kill his son. You love that?"
"He had his reasons," she answered, with a googly-eyed expression, and a clear bell voice - the affect of someone in love.
But, she told me, she wasn't ready to take the plunge into the ritual conversion bath after just four months. At the beginning of our lessons, I told her it typically took eight months - two semesters - or six months, if there was some reasons to rush. But Kristine was such a fine, motivated student. Why not skip ahead, I asked. What usually went unmentioned - because I was uncomfortable mentioning it - was that time was an issue for Kristine. Eternity was the issue. Life. Death. But I followed her lead. Six months, she told me, then the plunge. I quickly agreed.
Tutoring Hannah was not all tension, tears, and anxiety. Often, we ended up cuddling next to each other on my office couch, chanting together. On rare occasions, Hannah gave in to an actual yearning to sing. And she somehow became shockingly curious about her portion from the prophet Jeremiah.
"No one listened to him?" she asked, the first time we went through it in English. I nodded. "Well," she said. "I know what that's like." She pushed her gangly body at me, digging her head into my underarm. "I think I might be a prophet," she said, and then struggled through the two lines I assigned. She shrugged. She'd done the best she could. I smiled and squeezed her upper arm.
Still, the threat of melt downs lingered whenever she encountered a tongue twisty word or simply had not prepared the material. At first, I'd correct her softly, to keep her chanting in a flow. Sometimes it worked, but other times she'd stop and yell "I can't HEAR you." So I switched to a fuller voice, but then, on her not so few bad days, she'd respond "You don't have to SCREAM!" On Peter's weekends she'd often show up Sundays at four with hair unwashed, dreary eyed, in last night's sweat clothes or pajamas, as if she'd been up all night. One afternoon, about a month after Kristine limped into my life, Hannah stumbled through an excruciatingly unprepared section. At the end she eyed me warily, waiting for the rebuke or the corrections, wondering what voice I'd use. But I only took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Hannah - correctly - took the gesture as a sign of genuine disapproval, and threw her pen on the coffee table. "I don't even care about this stuff, you know," she said. "I don't believe in God. It's all a joke. I would never want to be a rabbi."
I removed my hand slowly from my eyes, as if hoping for a surprise gift. "You know," I said, "I'm tutoring someone who's love for God is keeping her alive. She's sick, Hannah, she's dying. But she's so brave and committed..."
Hannah leapt off of the couch. I recalled just a few days earlier Kristine awkwardly dropping her ailing body down into the same seat, holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies with M&M's. "She can have my bat mitzvah!" Hannah yelled. She grabbed her backpack and headed for the door. Before slamming it, she turned back to me. "I don't want you as my tutor anymore. I want Elana." Elana, of course, being our main tutor. And Peter's new girlfriend.
The next day Kristine showed up her usual fifteen minutes early, this time bearing lemon squares (I ended up eating most of them). She told me she'd just finished the tenth book I'd assigned - Shai Held's new book about love. "I literally wept at the end of every chapter. I mean he got Judaism exactly right. It's all about love. Different kinds of love. Loving the stranger. Loving your parents. Loving God. Loving yourself. He's so wise. So, so wise." She stopped for a second, as if to rethink, and smiled at me. "I mean, like you Rabbi Judith. Wise like you. I'm so lucky." She touched her Adam's apple.
"Kristine," I said. "You don't have to..."
But she'd already looked away. Her gaze found my beat up twenty-five-year-old Taylor acoustic guitar leaning against my desk. "You play?" she asked, delighted. She picked up the instrument. I couldn't imagine those skeletal fingers creating any music, but she plucked out a decent blues scale. Then handed the guitar to me.
"I only know the three minor chords you need for Jewish songs," I said.
She clapped her hands, like a preschooler, drunk on joy. Our early childhood center produced the biggest fans for my three-chord concerts, every Friday. But now here was Kristine. "This is a song I'm working on the with the third graders." I played and sang the first stanza of "Rise Up My Love," by Debbie Friedman - her interpretation of verses from Song of Songs. I was about to move into the chorus when I saw the tears cascading down Kristine's pale cheeks. I lay the guitar down on the couch. "I'm sorry, Kristine. I didn't know."
"No, no," she insisted, her voice still clear and musical through the waterfall from her eyes. "Play more."
I shrugged and fingered the easy A minor chord. Kristine closed her eyes, while I sang. Rise up my love, my fair one. And come away. For lo, the winter is here and the rain has come.
It is a pretty melody, I thought. Then Kristine astonished me by leaping effortlessly to her feet and then dancing. She lifted her feet like a ballerina, then jerked her arms and elbows, like a mosh pit regular. Her face suggested the upper reaches of ecstasy. I kept playing but only for another minute or so. It wasn't a very long song.
"It's what I've been telling you," she said. "What you've been teaching me. It's all about love." She closed her eyes again and hummed. And come away. She sang like an angel. And come away. I convinced her to come with me to the mikvah the next day. It was time.
The conversion was quick, and by the book. Kristine shivered as she dipped her thin body into the ritual bath. Two of her undergrad synagogue buddies witnessed her trembling immersion. After the blessings we all ate healthy slices of Jewish monster cake.
My next appointment was with Hannah. Dirty stringy hair. In pajamas. Eyes half shut. Was she hung over? Were Peter and Elana taking her pub crawling through downtown Laguna Beach? I knew the strung-out look meant a whiny, wary, hostile Hannah. I sat on my hands and steeled myself for an ungodly butchering of her Torah portion, followed by an adolescent tantrum.
It was worse than I expected. She turned two syllable words into five syllables - none of them with any relationship to the Hebrew on the page. She skipped over parts that she'd chanted perfectly a week before. She sneezed directly into her pamphlet as if it was a tissue. The sigh was out of my mouth before I could hold back. She picked up her prayer book and threw it at me. It grazed my cheek. She covered her mouth, finally shocked at her own behavior. "Sorry?" she said.
I clenched my fists, enough to stop the trembling anger. I'm her fucking mother, I told myself. Be the adult. My eye caught my guitar leaning against the couch. "Hannah," I said quietly. "Can I play you this song?" I closed my eyes and sang, my fingers never missing the right chords. Rise up my love my fair one. And come away.
I opened my eyes. Hannah glared. "It's stupid," she said.
"Pardon me?"
"I know what you think it's about. Loving God. It's not about loving God. It's two teenagers screwing in the fields. Elana told me. You guys just lie to yourselves with your stupid interpretations."
"Hannah."
"It's bullshit. It's all bullshit."
"Please leave, Hannah."
"Mom, it's just..."
"Leave. Please, just go. Right now."
Kristine died that night. That was the night she called me. She'd told me she was dying. I dismissed her. She died. If I'd responded, called 911?
"She was dying," Peter said the next morning, in our kitchen waiting for Hannah to show up. He allowed me to cry on his shoulder for fifteen minutes. I only stopped because I saw Hannah at the bottom of the stairs, staring at me.
For the first time in my career, I couldn't get through the eulogy. It wasn't even a particularly strong talk. I didn't really know Kristine all that well. And what could I say to comfort that mother with the angry scowl on her face, or the father, utterly defeated, or her four synagogue pals, probably introduced to Death for the first time. I made it through the seven words "Rise up my love my fair one." And my voice stuck. I couldn't do it. I could barely breathe.
Kristine's uncle, her father's brother, recognized my dilemma. He rose quietly and announced that he had a few words to share. I nodded gratefully and motioned him to the podium. He smiled at me, a comforting grin that stabbed my heart, since it was Kristina's most charming look.
"I'm sorry friends," he said, "but this is a story I have to tell you. Only Kristine, myself, and her parents know it. When beautiful Kristine was thirteen - bat mitzvah age, now that I think about it - she suffered through her worst health crisis. Now, Kristine had suffered her whole life up to then. Six surgeries when she was two years old. Five more the following year. She didn't learn to walk until she was seven. Breathing tubes shoved down her throat, almost once a week when she was eight.
"But age thirteen - that was the big one. She couldn't breathe without the machine. She'd need more surgeries, maybe six? Seven? No guarantee of success. She was in the hospital. Her parents went to the hallway to decide on the next steps. Bill and Rena went through the various operations, procedures, recovery times, medications, therapies. And God help me, I interrupted. I said, someone's got to talk with Kristine. She hears us. She understands. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe she's ready to give up. Maybe she doesn't want another frickin knife down her throat, in her lungs. I turned to my brother. 'You have to ask her.'
"The three of us went back to the hospital room. It was the only time we were alone together in that awful space. No nurses, techs, orderlies, doctors. Just us. Maybe God arranged it that way. Bill goes up to his little blond girl. Remember, she can't talk. But we'd worked out a signal. When you wanted to ask her something simple, you held out your hand, and she would take it. You asked the question. One squeeze meant no. Two squeezes meant yes.
"Bill asked her the question. 'Honey,' he said. 'You need more surgeries to stay alive. And sweetheart, we don't even know if they'll work. I'm so sorry,' he said, 'but I have to ask you. Do you want to keep trying? She stared at him. No tears in her eyes. That brave girl. We all stared at her hand. We all saw it. One squeeze. Then, a beat. An instant. Time passed. We stared at the hand. Then, oh Lord. A second squeeze. She said yes. Yes. And God gave us twelve more years with Kristine."
After the service, I was weeping in my office when I heard the knock on the door. I held my breath, trying to stifle any sound, hoping whoever it was would give up and go away. But I heard the squeak of the door. It was Hannah. She sat down next to me and held my hand. After five minutes with no words, she saw the guitar, still leaning against the couch. "Hey," she said. "I learned something Jewish. Let me play it for you." She reached for the guitar and cradled in on her lap.
"Hannah," I said. "You don't have to..."
"Shhh," she said. She looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the chords. Then she played.
It was "Rise Up My Love," by Debbie Friedman. Kristine's song. I stared at my daughter, struggling to move from C to Am, but singing like an angel. When she finished she carefully leaned the instrument back against the couch. I took her hand. I squeezed it once.
And then again.
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