This Shabbat morning, I began composing an email to a physicist friend that began with: “We are all electrons and quarks, after all, at least according to your field, unless someone proves that you’re wrong about that.”
I didn’t get to finish because my father and I had to leave for shul. We were attending Shabbat service for the first time together, in years. Just him and me. My husband and I had come briefly to South Texas to see my family, and spent some difficult days in the Rio Grande Valley. There are deep rifts in the older generation of my mother’s family, her generation, that bear resemblance to the rifts on the border on which they’ve lived for years. For the last week I ran around, half-mad, trying to mend those fractures so that we might have a brief moment of togetherness.
I wasn’t successful.
My father kept saying: Hakol beseder.
Everything is fine.
But it’s not.
I love my family.
I love my mother’s family, whom though deeply entrenched in Catholicism, has always cared deeply about my father. I was reminded this week that these rifts between my mother and her siblings had nothing to do with me, or with my father. That he and I could not fix completely something that pre-dated us, that existed long before either of us came along.
I love my family.
My mother is one of the hardest people I know; her name is Esperanza, which means “Hope.” She often jokes it meant a “different kind” of hope. You will not find one person on earth who will silence Esperanza, silence this kind of resilient hope.
She expected, still expects, the same from her daughter.
When I was bullied as a kid, she told me to fight back, but off school grounds so I wouldn’t get suspended. When my hand was slammed in a locker and I was called a Jewish slur, she fought with the principal of my school who refused to punish the group of girls responsible, taking it to the school board. Years later, when I began to lose the feeling on my left side and then my sense of balance, she told me I had to fight the fear that was as strong as my troublesome spine, as the stiffening of my joints, the numbness that still comes and goes.
Of all these fights, I have not been successful.
I’m a poet who tries to explain that her wiring is faulty, that the core of her pain lies deep inside quarreling electrons and quarks.
My mother knows better. About rifts, that is. She knows a lot about pain.
I love my family.
But sometimes I must retreat, seek the quiet, seek something in joined solitude.
Like my father.
My father’s relationship with Judaism is very complicated, as is mine. When he married my mother, even after she converted to Judaism, his family never fully accepted her. I was embraced, for the most part— until I married my husband, who is not Jewish, who has no plans to convert. And there were many a rough time for my parents, financially; one year my father could not pay our temple membership dues, and we were turned away. At the very door of our temple. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
We were turned away by our people.
That left a very bitter taste in my father’s mouth, in my mouth.
These rifts too are very deep.
They dwell in our shared relationship to our language. Which is our people. Which is our language. Where my father and I would like to come home to, but can’t always.
Still I love my faith. I love my people. I love my language.
It’s the toughness my mother tried to instill in me, and often failing to do so, that sustains such a complicated love. If that makes sense.
Love like this is often equal heartbreak, disappointment, hurt.
Love like this is also surprising.
* * *
Upon hearing I was coming to Texas, a temple reached out to invite me and my father. The rabbi read my work, and wanted me to visit, to pray with the congregation. Given what happened in Pittsburgh today, I don’t feel comfortable saying where this temple is now. I enjoyed the service until the very end, when suddenly there was whispering, then more whispering, than an interruption, and my father and I, along with the congregants, learned the news of the shooting, of this despicable terrorist act. The morning was a blur: a woman was suddenly holding me, then another held my hand tightly.
They were strangers, but they weren’t.
The situation itself was strange, but it wasn’t either.
The room was spinning, and I had to sit down.
I thought: this is why my father wears a baseball cap over his kippah.
I thought: these wonderful people are my people, and I just met them, and they are the reason my father is wearing his kippah again.
I thought: human are all electrons and quarks, and we are killing each other anyway.
I thought: I’m not losing my balance again. It’s just my electrons. It’s just my electrons spinning out of control. Hakol beseder.
I thought: I need to get back. I need to get back to my mother and my husband. I need to get back to them.
Hakol beseder.
Everything is fine.
But it’s not.
It hasn’t been for some time.
* * *
I tweeted a version of the following, but I’ll rewrite it here: Our language has and will continue to survive us, all over the world. Jews are bound to each through the many arguments and interpretations of our language. When you enter a temple, you are entering a long, complex and often painful history-language. I have chosen to live my life as a Jew in language, in poetry. I have chosen to marry outside my faith. I have chosen a life outside Jerusalem. I have chosen to support the creation of a Palestinian state, a view which has cost me dear friends. But I never, would never, turn my back on my faith, on my people, even those who cannot accept me because of my mixed background, my marriage, or my views.
The rifts are there.
But so is love.
* * *
In my heart, I know I love language because I am Jewish. I love the holidays and the calendar even if it no longer completely dictates my days and my nights. I love that every Hebrew letter has a number, and that this contains countless mysteries that never stop unfolding a world beyond the very one that our language contains.
Poetry too is such a temple, with a long, complex and often painful history-language, unfolding worlds larger than any language can contain. I know we poets too often fight and argue, and sometimes this is how social media presents us. But there are reasons for those hard conversations, for those arguments.
I think back on the rifts I could not heal as a person in my mother’s family, and those in my father’s heart the day we were turned away from temple doors on Rosh Hashanah.
But if I can’t heal them as a person, I can acknowledge them as a poet. I try to make visible what has happened, so that there is a place, a memory, so that we are most honest with each other about our intra-familial or intra-community conflicts and pain. The pain we cause those we love.
I’m not always successful.
But I still love with all my heart, my wayward heart, that will always visit any temple I’m invited to, but probably never fully belong to, or commit, to a synagogue again. For now, it’s too painful for me. I will never be a member, just an itinerate Jew who prays mostly alone, who wishes to belong the only way she knows how: mostly, in poetry.
The poet and journalist Marwa Helal put it best when she tweet this quote by Rilke: “It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.”
* * *
I’m not afraid to admit I’m very tired, and running out of steam on this Shabbat late afternoon, wanting to catch up on an email that I owe to a certain theoretical physicist who recently admitted poetry might be the best way to ask, rather than solve, the hardest questions. I’m not afraid to admit the rifts I discussed above still exist and probably will for some time, and a single person cannot heal them alone.
I’m not afraid to ask us to come together in times that aren’t so traumative.
We are all quarks and electrons, after all.
That is, unless the physicists got that wrong too.
But like Rilke said, I intend to make the most of my time.
That’s my own translation of Hakol beseder.
It means I’m going to live as hard as I can, while I can, and I’m never giving up on love, on poetry, on language, on all that are electrons and quarks, no matter the rifts.