In Sickness and Insanity

Chapter: The School Girl

I graduated high school in the year 2000, which already sounds like the beginning of a futuristic novel. But my story wasn’t sci-fi; it was Bais Yaakov.

I was not the academic type. I didn’t have the patience for hours bent over notebooks or the discipline for a neat row of perfectly underlined notes. What I did have, however, was a memory like a steel trap. If it had been said in class, I could repeat it back — often word for word. That gift kept me afloat.

The Bais Yaakov I attended was no small-time school. It was Hasidic, rigorous, and widely regarded as one of the highest-level institutions in all of Brooklyn. “Lots and lots and lots of studies,” is how we all summed it up. Piles of homework, endless tests, and a constant weight of responsibility pressing down on our teenage shoulders.

And me? I pretty much failed through most of it. Not for lack of brains — I had them. But because I simply couldn’t sit still long enough to funnel all that information into tidy grades. My memory could save me only so much. Beyond that, I was the girl who fell through the cracks.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t dumb, just different. The system prized discipline and diligence, and I was running on creativity and instinct. Bais Yaakov taught me plenty, but the main lesson was this: I wasn’t cut from the cloth they wanted.

I remember my last day of school as vividly as if it happened yesterday. My friend and I bolted out the double doors of Bais Yaakov like convicts on parole, the Brooklyn June humidity hitting us with a rush of freedom.

Just before stepping off school grounds, I turned back. There it was: the black dome of the security camera glaring down at us like Big Brother. Without hesitation, I raised my hand and flashed the middle finger straight at it.

So long Suckers! See you Never!

Somewhere, I imagined a grainy VHS recording immortalizing that moment — the Hasidic girl giving her final goodbye to twelve years of rules and rigor.

To my surprise, some preschool assistant teachers noticed and burst out laughing. Some even clapped, as if I’d performed a grand finale on behalf of us all. Of course, my classmates paths would be different. Many signed up for seminary, either the full-day grind or the more “liberal” half-day version. Others began quietly taking their tests privately, working toward a bachelor’s degree.

Not me. I knew school and I were finished for good. The idea of more classrooms, more tests, more authority figures barking at me — no thank you. I had no plans to continue my education in the traditional sense. My degree would come from the school of life, and I was perfectly content with that.

At almost 18, I felt free, confident, and absolutely certain I was ready to learn the world on my own terms.

Chapter: The Summer of Dovid

After graduation, I wasted no time looking for my first real job. I spotted an advertisement in the local paper: Assistant needed in a kindergarten at a Sephardic school. It sounded respectable enough.

I asked my older sister Tipper if I could borrow one of her outfits — she was already out of school and had a wardrobe that looked the part. I went down for the interview, and by the end of it, I was signing a contract on the spot. One thousand dollars a month, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., assisting a teacher with a classroom full of snotty five-year-olds. Not exactly a dream job, but for a Hasidic girl fresh out of high school, it was golden.

There was just one problem: summer vacation stretched out in front of me. Ten long weeks until the job began. What on earth was I going to do until then?

The answer came through my sisters friend who mentioned that the Bobov boys’ yeshiva needed a shadow for an eight-year-old autistic boy. I applied, got hired, and suddenly found myself responsible for one of the most challenging children I had ever met.

Dovid

He was gorgeous — green eyes, a mop of blond hair a face you wanted to kiss — but utterly locked in his own world. Nonverbal, impulsive, hyperactive, frustrated. ADHD on top of everything else. My job was simple on paper: keep eyes on him at all times. In reality, it was like being assigned to guard a hummingbird with rocket boosters.

I used to sing to him, over and over: Dovid Melech Yisrael, chai v’kayam… Sometimes it calmed him, sometimes not.

One day, the yeshiva’s day camp went on a trip. We piled onto a school bus, the kind that smelled of vinyl seats and summer sweat. On the way back, the driver pulled into the lot, stopped, opened the door… and Dovid bolted.

Before anyone could react, he darted down the steps and out the door — just as the driver kept maneuvering the bus into its spot. For one terrifying second, I saw him directly in front of the moving wheels. My heart stopped.

He could have been flattened. Dead. Right there.

By some miracle, the driver braked in time. Dovid lived, but I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. The realization hit me like a slap: this boy’s life was literally in my hands.

That night, I lay in bed replaying the scene, his little body darting, the giant wheels turning. I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I’m seventeen. I am not cut out to keep a child from dying under a truck.

It was the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be responsible for another human being. And it terrified me.

Chapter: The Shidduch Years/ My Bashert

When I was nineteen, my sister Tipper, two years my senior got married, which meant that I was suddenly “next in line.” That’s how it works in our world: marriage isn’t just a milestone, it’s a queue. One sister down, the spotlight shifted to me.

Except… nothing really happened.

The years passed quietly. By the time I was almost twenty-four, I had seen only eight boys in total — an average of about one and a half per year. Hardly a booming résumé. But honestly, I didn’t mind. I wasn’t in a rush. My classmates and friends were all getting married, supporting their learning husbands and starting to pop babies. I was never jealous of their lives for a minute. I didn’t want their lives, husbands, kids or crumby, cramped Brooklyn apartments.

Still, something shifted the Rosh Hashanah of 2005 before I got engaged. I didn’t know when, or how, but deep down I felt that my turn was coming. A sense of urgency hit me, and for the first time, I prayed with a real ache: that my soulmate should appear, that the right one should finally find me.

Around this time, my good friend Raylie and I decided to take matters into our own hands — spiritually, at least. Raylie lived at the other end of town, our parents were great friends, and we had shared countless chanukkah parties and childhood memories. She knew my deepest fears, secrets, and traumas. Sometimes she pressed my buttons for sport, but we always laughed about it afterward.

A few days before Rosh Hashanah, inspiration struck: we would recite the entire Tehillim (Psalms) together. Raylie, with her Israeli background, read Hebrew fluently, almost musically. I, on the other hand, had a long-standing struggle with reading unfamiliar words. I wouldn’t call it dyslexia, but let’s just say Hebrew and I were not on speaking terms.

We started strong. Alternating chapters, each reading aloud. By Psalm 12 or 13, Raylie was breezing along while I dragged each syllable out like a dyslexic first grader. At some point, we looked at each other and burst out laughing, our sacred mission derailed by my comic attempts to keep up. Raylie kept going. I retired from Tehillim marathons.

At the time, I was working at The Jewish Press. Every morning I’d ride the train downtown, usually with a pit stop along the way. Sometimes it was the supermarket, where I’d grab lunch, an avocado and purple onion sandwich or a cheese Danish. Other mornings, if I had the luxury of time, I’d meet my mother at Spoons Café for a coffee and fat free muffin before work.

On the train, I said the formal morning prayers from my siddur. But the real praying happened after. By the time I got off at my stop, there was a seven-minute walk through the desolate, industrial stretch of downtown Brooklyn — auto garages, mechanic shops, groups of day laborers waiting on street corners, the occasional drunk sprawled on the sidewalk.

And in that unlikely sanctuary, I poured my heart out. Not with the polished words of the prayer book, but in my own.

“Dear God,” I whispered as I walked, “please allow me to find my zivug. Please let him find me. Please let him grow to be a better person, and let me be worthy of him, and he of me.”

Day after day, I repeated that prayer, my lips moving as I passed strangers — the drunkards, the Mexicans waiting to be picked up for a day’s labor, the men rushing off to construction jobs for seven or eight dollars an hour. None of it mattered. I wasn’t speaking to them. I was speaking to the Infinite, trying to shift the universe, pleading for my beloved, my partner in life, to finally arrive.

And so it went, every morning, from Rosh Hashanah until Pesach. Six months of whispered prayers on the grimy streets of Brooklyn, carrying my longing skyward with the hope that Someone, Somewhere, was listening.

Chapter Purim Power

Purim of 2006 came just weeks before my life would change forever, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know — or rather, what I had been taught and carried with me for years — was that Purim isn’t simply a day of costumes and merrymaking. Beneath the masks and the noise lies the holiest day of the year.

The sages teach that Yom Kippur — Yom Kippurim — is only like Purim. The “k” in Kippurim means almost( or measuring up to). Yom Kippur is almost as great as Purim. On Yom Kippur, we fast and cry, begging forgiveness. On Purim, we laugh, drink, deliver gift baskets, and dress up in ridiculous costumes. Yet mystically, Purim holds a deeper potency. The gates of heaven open wide, but their radiance is hidden behind all the busyness and silliness of the day. Only those willing to look past the noise can take advantage of its power.

That year, I decided I wasn’t going to miss it.

So before dawn, while the neighborhood was still asleep, I tiptoed out of bed and slipped into the vasikin minyan — the early-rising worshippers who pray before sunrise. I joined them in the dim light for their pre-dawn prayers, determined to wring every drop of holiness from the day.

Midway through, my Sanyo flip phone buzzed with my mother’s name flashing across the tiny screen.

“Where are you?!” she demanded, she had found my bed empty and imagined the worst.

“I’m downstairs at the vasikin minyan,” I whispered back. “It’s Purim — the holiest day of the year. I don’t want to miss it.”

There was a pause. Then, “Alright, alright,” she said. “I’ll get dressed and join.”

By the time the sun rose at 7:30, we had already davened Shacharis and listened to Megillas Esther. It was a pure and elevated feeling, standing there while most women were just rising and still fussing over matching costumes and themed mishloach manos.

I walked back into our cherrywood kitchen, the house only just beginning to stir, and made myself a coffee. From a gift basket left on our doorstep by some institution fishing for a generous check from my father, I pulled out some fine chocolates and treated myself.

While the world around me prepared for its carnival of chaos, I sat in quiet contentment, savoring my coffee, my chocolate, and the knowledge that for once, I had started Purim the way it was meant to be — with holiness, not just hilarity.

Chapter: Packing Hirsch

I married Hirsch on July 6, 2006. He was kind, attentive, and everything a bride dreams of in those blissful first hours. Then came July 7th — my official introduction to his world of quirks.

The morning after the wedding, Hirsch wheeled out a ginormous suitcase. This was back in the golden days of transatlantic travel, when airlines allowed two massive pieces of luggage, each tipping the scale at around twenty-five kilos. I looked at him, puzzled. Our return ticket to Zurich wasn’t until July 26th.

“Why are you packing?” I asked, naively assuming suitcases should remain empty until at least the week of a trip.

He looked at me as though I were the eccentric one.

“Well,” he said, “we want to maximize what we can take. To consolidate and make sense of it all, we need to start the process early.”

And with that, he began folding and tucking away underwear, pajamas, socks, shirts — anything within reach — into the suitcase, as if we were leaving that very night. Then came the part that would mark the beginning of our married life together: Hirsch hopping on and off the bathroom scale, suitcase in hand, trying to make sure it weighed under the twenty-three or twenty-five kilo limit.

Since luggage scales were not yet a household item, I was conscripted into service. “Read it!” he’d bark while huffing under the weight, wobbling like a deer on ice. I dutifully squinted at the dial each time, reporting back numbers as though I were a flight attendant running pre-departure checks.

I remember thinking: Well, I knew marriage meant learning to live with another person’s idiosyncrasies, but packing three weeks early? This is… new.

Still, I was smitten. My brand-new husband looked almost endearing, springing on and off the scale like a caffeinated jack-in-the-box. Cute, I told myself. Harmless. Eccentric.

Of course, he continued this ritual almost daily for the next three weeks, until the day we actually flew.

That was my first glimpse of what life with Hirsch would look like: swift, intense, and always three steps ahead of the calendar.