A year ago tomorrow, my hubby tucked a skullcap in his pocket and loaded our son in the car. The monsterling was sick, but we gambled he'd make it through the evening. We didn't get many nights out and I'd made a promise. My soul, if I had one, was at stake, or something similarly dire.
The trip was short, just a few blocks. The house was like any other on the block, save for the mezuzah (a narrow box containing a Hebrew scroll) on the door. A teenaged boy in a black suit and skullcap answered the door and motioned us inside.
Plosh and I stood there in awkward silence, not knowing anybody, not knowing whether introductions were forthcoming, and wondering if there was still time to escape. I recognized the Rabbi from his photo in the newspaper and from a parade I'd happened upon a few weeks earlier.
Mrs. Rabbi finally rescued us. She introduced herself and all eight of her kids, whose names would take another eight or nine months for me to memorize. I looked at a sea of curious blue eyes and guardedly neutral expressions, and knew they were sizing me up but not in any snobby or holier-than-thou way. Just checking us out.
The living room had been taken over by a banquet table covered with white linen and set with an array of silver candlesticks and a candelabra. I remember thinking it was an awful lot of Shabbat candles -- I only lit two, when I even remembered -- except these weren't candles, but glass votives perched precariously atop. The arrangement would fascinate me the rest of the evening, though I never asked about it. Too nervous.
It was Christmas eve, but it was just another Sabbath to these people, and they were providing a handy excuse not to attend a Christmas party at our neighbor's (which we're attending this year, as it turns out).
The other people around the table included an Orthodox business traveler and Mrs. Rabbi's much younger sister and her husband, also a Rabbi, with the thickest blond beard I've ever seen on someone who wasn't playing a werewolf. Our Rabbi introduced him as a pre-eminent scholar at an important website and a chaplain at UC-Santa Cruz.
His wife dandled a toddler only a little younger than Minitaur, whose blond locks had yet to be cut -- I remembered in a flash that Chasidim don't cut their boys' hair until their third birthday.
These two men -- our Rabbi and the twenty-something scholar -- would work a little Chasidic magic over me that evening, which may be why it's taken so long to write about it. Maybe I had to let so much wisdom sink in, or I worried at some level the effect might wear off, or that I'd go back to my cynical self, despairing that there'd ever be another door that opened to me in this way.
The evening started off with the usual blessings. I remembered the words when I went to ceremonially wash my hands, but didn't know you were supposed to keep quiet afterwards and felt foolish when politely rebuked by my hostess.
I then had to tell Plosh the same thing when he began chatting to the silent group, and he reddened and clamped his mouth shut. Minitaur wouldn't stay in his seat, so Plosh and I took turns holding him as his fever gradually peaked. So far, so bad.
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