in between her eyes

oh she is TRAVELING

I’ve slept in a few different beds over the past week, a sentence that sounds way more sexually provocative than I truly intend it to be (although a little provocative *is* usually my style). What I really mean is: I’ve been traveling. It started with visa issues leading me next door to Jordan, then a COVID (not her again!) forced rescheduling of a Negev overnight trip; as I write this, I am on the plane from Ben Gurion Airport to London Luton, sandwiched between two armrest takers, kicking off 10 days of Chanukah break travel. How lucky am I!

There is nothing quite like extended airport time to make you feel so in flux, so transitive, impermanent. The airport is, at its core, a liminal space. And there is certainly nothing like relocating across the world to make you hyper-aware of your rootedness, belonging— mostly, your lack of it.

Living abroad, I am constantly conscious of being in places I do not belong. I may be welcomed— as I often am— but I am an other. I can downplay my Americanness, work on my Israeli accent, and memorize the bus routes with determined purposefulness but it will never be sufficient.  Certain barriers will always remain; I will never surmount them. I am not the first person to acknowledge this: to be clear! Writers loveeee to be expats and then write about their placelessness. But there is a particular humility about this uprooted experience that happens when you’re actually the one experiencing it, something that I, the ever-reflective writer, can appreciate, a certain modesty that is easy to neglect when everything is so easy, so natural.

Part of the whole living abroad thing includes meeting loads of new people, some who have become friends. They learn about this little writing project of mine and want to know what it is About. I am often flustered. Uh… I mostly write my very imperfect reflections about twenty-somethingness and growing up and mental health and vulnerability and friendship and Jewishness and I sort of think I’m kind of funny but you might not justsoyouknow and it all maybe of fits in this genre of creative nonfiction writing but also it’s a much less edited and tailored than the stuff that I spend a lot longer working on and will probably never publish ….

I do think there is something inherent to this ~life stage~ that is always unrooted. There are a lot of obvious positives. I can travel when I want. I am not tied down. I can leave my life behind for a year. It’s also a time of mistakes (I make plenty), asking questions (I ask too many), and figuring some of the big stuff out (I hope). It is a lot of “Who am I?”s and “Is this what I really want?”s and “What do I stand for?”s. *gestures hand wildly*

Part of being in yeshiva is taking constant inventory of my individual religious practice, hyper vigilantly so, interrogating my relationship to ritual which is admittedly inconsistent in some regards. I have no doubts that a religious Jewish life is for me, that part remains constant. But do I want to pray three times a day? Ritually wash my hands always before eating bread? Wrap tefillin every morning?

Tefillin, particularly, is a mitzvah I’ve taken on in my time here (for more information about tefillin for the uninitiated, click here), worthy of note largely because I resisted it for so long. I never had a pair (a practical deterrent) but I also was resistant, I think, to be *that* kind of Jewish feminist (this itself is worthy of some personal investigative journalism— maybe for another time). But ultimately, my beliefs in egalitarianism, obligation, and traditional ritual won out, getting to the point that I couldn’t justify not wearing them any longer, and I got a pair a month and a half ago.

My father bought me my set when he came to town because 1) tefillin are prohibitively expensive and 2) he is a man and tefillin sellers expect (prefer? require?) men to wear tefillin, as has been the dominate practice for over a thousand years. I am grateful for this. Thanks, Dad.

I wish I could say wrapping tefillin, this new biblical commandment I have taken on has been the most wonderful! meaningful! poignant! Jewish experience. It has not. Wrapping feels awkward and clumsy. I feel so acutely how the tefillin are not made for my body; it is hard to fit in seven equally spaced wrappings on my small forearms. The arm straps are too long, disguising the name of God that I wrap onto my hand when I bundle up the excess. The head strap makes it basically impossible to wear a headband, my head covering of choice. The whole thing feels unnatural and weird, not unlike how I feel more generally living abroad, living in an overall stadium of the bizarre, unsure if I am the spectacle or the spectator.

The Torah’s source text for tefillin tells us to wrap the words of God (the Shema) on our hand (hand tefillin) and between our eyes (head tefillin). In order to make sure that the box of the tefillin is *really* in between your eyes, my fancy set has a handy dandy mirror included. I doubt they had those a thousand years ago! How innovative.

Yet, when I last looked in that mirror it wasn’t the black box laying on my forehead that called to me. It was my hair, frizzy and unkept. I thought, ugh my hair looks so bad right now instead of yup, right in between those eyes.

An essential question in my Jewish practice that centers, celebrates, and strives for gender equity is: what does an ideal egalitarianism look like? Is it doing exactly what men do? Is it about taking the structure and law of the ritual and making it our own, feminizing it? I tend to favor the second approach; I wear fashionable headbands as kippot. My tallit looks like a delicate scarf. Tefillin, its laws and limits, to not lead to this approach.

I wear them anyway, but my question as of late is: how much? In theory, I believe in the obligation to wear them daily. In practice… I have not been doing so. So amidst all this traveling I’ve been doing, the packing, unpacking, I have had to ask: are the tefillin coming with me?

I am drawn to religious life, to Halacha and obligation, because I revel in the structure and certainty it provides. Life is not structured or certain. I value the tradition and continuity, the ways I feel connected to my ancestors. I like how it is not always the easy way— often the contrary— but I continue to choose it anyway. I see the potential in tefillin. I see how it can be a constant, something fixed and invariable. I think I might get there. They are in my luggage.

As human beings, we move, immigrate, and relocate. Sometimes we have agency over these movings; sometimes we do not. Things, feelings, rituals transfer us life stage to life stage, serving us, reminding us, and centering us. What do we bring with us when we travel? What gets transported from one location to another? What do we hold, schlep, and carry and what do we leave behind?

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