I don’t remember the ceremony they had
on the day I got my name
but I remember every utterance of it after.
How I learned to write its letters
in a shaky hand
that still didn’t know its right from left.
How my Moras said it with a formality
no one ever blessed my English name with.
How the same Hebrew sounds that felt warm in my Rebbetzin’s mouth
tumbled over my tongue
in a slapdash of pronunciation.
She always said it differently from everyone else.
It always sounded better.
I stood before my people and they declared me
not just my name
but the daughter of my mother
and wore that label of my lineage with pride.
My Hebrew name had the weight of the mothers before me
packed into every crack and cranny.
When an unexperienced tongue gave up on forming the sounds with accuracy
I patched up the new crevice with the paste holding my generations together.
The rich tones of tradition seeped out of the walls of my shul’s sanctuary.
I used to think it looked like light through the stained-glass windows
but it felt like the warmth of what family is supposed to mean.
On Saturday mornings my father would stand in services
Hebrew sitting unfamiliarly on his tongue
to be the tenth man they needed
to let me hear the holy scroll.
I would sit next to him
eyes fixed on a Torah
I wished I could touch.
“After your bat-mitzvah
you can’t sit in the men’s section
anymore.”
The disappointment in his voice
matched the sinking in my heart.
Even so
in a moment of childhood
they declared me a woman
before my body and my mind knew to catch up.
Dress down to my ankles
shoes pinching my toes
arms still stinging from the day before
when they ripped every hair from them.
“You’ll want to look pretty,” my mother told me
but I saw no reason for beauty to have any say
in the matter of my tolerance for pain.
“She’s a ham,” they said after I stepped down from the bema
waiting to be pelted with soft candies and hugs.
Again, I wore that label with pride.
In a moment too early in childhood they declared me a woman.
They didn’t wait for me to the learn English words
that held as much difficult importance
as the Hebrew in my name.
“You looked so much prettier with your hair.
You chopped your beauty away.”
Beauty is the pain of smooth arms
and the heat of a blanket of hair.
Beauty pushes on my chest
and shakes me as I fall asleep.
Beauty tells me to pray to Hashem that I’ll wake up
belonging in a minyan.
That He’ll grant me the normalcy
to sit beside my father
after their false declaration of womanhood.
In a button up shirt too big for my waist
and too small for my hips
I sit crying in a Rabbi’s office
that feels too big to be from home.
In the months before they declared me a woman
I sat with mine in his closet of a study
books messily arranged on every surface.
This office has a secretary
a Keurig
some pamphlets.
“I just want to be a man here,” I say
shaking.
“I want to go back to services,
but I need to be a man here.”
Their tunes feel wrong,
their microphones,
their instruments.
But they let me wear a kippa
And they don’t question my name.
“They play guitar during Shabbos,”
I tell my mother on the phone.
Her “oh” is in a tight voice.
“I don’t like it either.”
If Orthodox synagogues ran like Catholic churches,
I’d confess to the hurt in my heart
and beg for salvation.
But my Rabbi does not grant salvation
for he sins as I do
as Hashem intended.
Once, I sat in a row of four Jews in High Holiday services, and
in keeping with tradition,
we whispered to each other as the Cantor chanted.
The stained-glass windows cast a familiar light
but I felt the warmth in our whispers.
I do not ask my Rabbi of salvation.
I ask my people for warmth.
2087
janainaart
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
