I lose my train of thought and have to go back to the top of the outline.
“Really, I want to know,” Bo presses, actually sounding agitated. “How can you defend them?”
“We’ve been through this before,” I explain. “It’s fascinating how you liberal Jews suddenly get conservative when the subject is anti-Semitism.”
“Hurley’s not just any anti-Semite; he diverted public school funds to finance a white supremacist group intent on starting a race war. Would you defend a group of men who come out to demonstrate in favor of legitimizing and encouraging gang rape?”
“Oh, you mean the financial industry…? Look, I would be among the first to organize a counter-protest to shout them down; but, yes, I would defend their right to say it. Who decides what speech is okay and what speech is forbidden? Using your theory, Jews should be banned from demonstrating in favor of Israel because Israel subjugates the Palestinians. That it’s a state instead of a small group of extremists is only a matter of degree. Your mother lived through the Holocaust and even she thinks anti-Semites have the right to express themselves. Maybe you should listen to her once in a while.”
“My mother’s biased. And crazy. She tells everybody you’re a better Jew than I am because you went to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services with her this year. Do you have any idea how difficult you’re making life for me?”
“I like challah bread. Besides, it’s the Day of Judgment and the Final Appeal; there’s nowhere else a lawyer would rather be: the most important cases before the highest court in the universe and lots of desperate clients willing to pay anything to get off. For lawyers, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are like the Olympics, Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, and Stanley Cup all rolled into one.”
Bo muffles the phone and I hear him talking to someone.
“Sorry,” he says, “the crew’s waiting for me in the van. I’ve gotta get going. When are you finishing tonight?”
“Around six.”
“You’re pushing it kind of close with the daycare, don’t you think? Even with two salaries I don’t know how much longer we can afford the five dollar per minute penalty for picking her up late. At some point, they’re going to kick her out and then what will we do?”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll be there on time.”
“Okay. Bye. I love you.”
“Have fun. I love you, too.”
I hang up and look at the photograph on my shelf of Bo and me at his sister, Lisa’s, wedding. He’s wearing a yarmulke and looks so sweet and happy.
I had actually assumed Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, would be a festive and gay celebration, like New Year’s Day, but it turned out to be just the opposite-brooding and ominous, the day God judges the lives we’ve lived during the previous year. The shofar blasts calling the congregation to worship inside the synagogue were terrifying-the voice of God condemning the entire human race-but the liturgy for the day, the Musaf tefillah, had the effect of reaffirming my belief that God and justice are inseparable and one, and that as a lawyer trained in pursuing justice I had an inside track on redemption.
Still gazing at the photograph and recalling the Days of Awe, as the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known, I acknowledge to myself for the first time that I married a Jew for the same reason I had become a lawyer: to be closer to justice. I suppose I had always known this, but I concealed it from myself and from my Irish-Italian Catholic family-who were not particularly pleased with my selection of a mate, but not unbending either. In arguing with them that I loved Bo as a man and that religion shouldn’t matter, I had been less than completely honest; religion did matter-very much so-just not in the way they were thinking. For a Catholic girl raised in a community of fundamentalist Protestants, Bo’s Jewish heritage, with its stories of struggle and heroism and promise of being chosen by God, glittered like an exotic jewel; I found myself attracted to him in the same way I would have found myself attracted to a rock star, an actor, or a professional athlete-because he could give me inner access to a rare and alien world and the status in life I desired. I fell in love with Bo Wolfson for all the normal and best reasons-because he was incredibly handsome, wonderful, sensitive, and caring, a man who made me feel special, loved, and complete, and who even accepted my disability as a charming attribute rather than a cause for fear and revulsion. It’s just that his religion made the package, for me, irresistible. The Catholic Church and Jesus’ teaching of turning the other cheek-which, to me, formed the bedrock of Christianity-made no sense in a world filled with warfare and violence, a world filled with people like Holden Hurley, a world that allowed an eight year old girl to lose her right arm. I thought Moses had it right with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth;” this rule better reflected my personal experience and understanding of the way the things worked. I sometimes thought I was a Jew trapped in a Christian’s body, like one of those poor souls who believes they’re a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice-versa; only in my case I was not a transsexual but rather a “transspiritual.” Marrying Bo enabled me to experiment safely with being a member of the opposite religion without having the theological equivalent of a sex-change operation-a full religious conversion.
I focus now on the yarmulke Bo wears in the photograph- the universal symbol of Judaism, which suddenly recalls for me, as a Gentile, not the blessings of a chosen relationship with God but the horrors of five thousand years of tragedy-and I feel frightened. I think of Bo’s mother, Katerine Schrieberg, at the age of seventeen fleeing through the German woods with her family, wondering whether they would survive the night. I think of Bo’s grandfather, Jared Schrieberg, who died in those woods, and of the heiress, Amina Rabun, whom Bill and I sued for reparations on behalf of the Schriebergs because her family made their fortune by constructing the incinerators at Auschwitz and robbing the Schriebergs of their Dresden home and movie theaters. I think of Holden Hurley and The Eleven, trying to re-ignite the hatred of the Nazis and, perhaps, the incinerators. I imagine how it would feel to be hunted and murdered across the centuries. Am I brave enough to bear that pain? Do I want it for my daughter? And then, I wonder whether my name was sealed in the Book of Life or the Book of Death at nightfall on Yom Kippur.
I go back to my summary judgment brief, working through lunch and stopping only when I realize I have ten minutes to get to the daycare to avoid the dreaded five dollar per minute fine. When I arrive, Sarah is the last child there, gumming a Nilla Wafer into a sticky brown paste on her face and watching a videotape of Barney the Dinosaur. The shame of being the last mother to pick up her child spoils my joy at seeing her. She’s covered with dull red paint stains, all over her little sweatshirt and sweatpants, hands, neck, and face. She toddles toward me as fast as she can, arms outstretched, smiling and cooing. I kneel down. Miss Erin, the day care intern from the college, grins.
“Hi baby girl,” I say to Sarah, sweeping her up into my arm and kissing her face, inhaling the sweetness of her hair. I look up at Miss Erin. “How was she today?”
“Great,” Miss Erin says. “She’s been a very good girl.”
Miss Erin is a junior at the college and has definitely found her calling. She looks like a cartoon come to life with two small black dots for eyes, thin sticks for arms and legs, and freckled cheeks framed by long ropes of braided orange hair; she wears a trademark yellow smock with the sun embroidered on it. She loves little kids, and they love her.