It was the exhilaration in his eyes, in his voice, his arms, that captured my imagination, as he groped for words to describe the sensation. “I couldn’t walk if I wanted to,” he repeated when I poked my head in to see what all the laughter was about. “I was going wherever they were going, for better or for worse.” Hundreds of thousands converge every year upon Meron for Lag Ba’omer, and suddenly, the lazy little mountain town near Tzfas is transformed, alive with a fervor that can sweep someone off of his feet. Literally, in the case of my husband’s chavrusa. I had been cooking for Shabbos in the kitchen and my husband had been learning at the dining room table when shouts of laughter took my attention away from stuffing acorn squash with wild rice. “What do you mean?” My husband was asking, wiping at his eyes. “You just…hung there?” “They walked, I walked,” my husband’s chavrusa said. “They stopped, I stopped. My feet didn’t touch the ground.” “Sounds scary!” I interjected. He thought for a second, the echo of mirth still etched on his face. “Yeah, I guess it was,” he said. “I suppose it was kind of scary.” But he didn’t look scared. He looked exhilarated. My husband’s chavrusa, a skinny Australian Breslover named Alex, owns a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a four-inch suspension lift and a ten-thousand-pound winch, and he drives it so fast around turns on barely-there dirt roads that my husband closes his eyes and holds on for dear life when he is in the passenger seat.
He is definitely the kind of person who has had some wild experiences in his life—some shared, some understood—so that could be the reason, probably was the reason, for the joy on his face. Because it is pretty crazy, being suspended off the ground by the press of hundreds of thousands of bodies, being forced to dance when they danced. It is pretty wild to be so totally out of your own control and instead under the power of something bigger, something stronger, something outside of yourself. I know that feeling and it is scary. And it is exhilarating. When my husband’s chavrusa leaves and my husband wanders into the kitchen to altruistically ensure that the minischnitzels that I am frying are edible (it takes a few shnitzels to reach a point of absolute certainty) I share that idea with him. But my husband knows that feeling better than anyone. “Are you really a baal teshuvah?” people ask him. “You’re not really a baal teshuvah,” they dismiss. The image that they have of someone who discovered Yiddishkeit later in life is of someone who doesn’t quite fit in to our communities in subtle ways that the observer is unable to even verbalize. My husband is not like that—he fits in, in those tiny indescribable ways, even better than I do—and that puzzles people. There is one thing that is not visible on the outside but is etched into his personality and soul that differentiates him from the FFBs that surround him and that is his many hobbies that involve the great outdoors. He is an avid fisherman and equally ardent snowboarder. He loves mountain biking and camping out under the stars.
He owns a chainsaw and is a member of the NRA. Most of my friends get their husbands tie trees or desktop valets as gifts; I got my husband the Outdoorsman lithium flashlight. It’s very American, the lone Outdoorsman braving the elements. It’s a very basic tenet of Western faith, the one against the many, the one gunman who stands up against the evil sheriff and his men, and then, after he has fought (bravely) and won, he rides off into the sunset all alone. The individual is idealized, is beloved. And that is very comfortable, especially for someone raised on the gospel of Western ideals, to stand alone from the crowd. My husband and I moved to Israel for a year, ten years ago. While I struggled to learn the difference between a spatula and a broom handle, my husband, the lone Outdoorsman, went to brave the wilds of the Mir. He came back the first day and described lunchtime. He had a slightly dazed look on his face. “It was…there were a lot of them,” he said. “And then there was the schnitzel. They all wanted the schnitzel. And they poured down the steps towards the schnitzel and it was like Niagara Falls except with elbows and knees and shoulders.” “Did you fall?” I asked. My husband gestured towards his broad shoulders. He grinned. “I got into the swing of things.” He loved it. We stayed.
He only told me later how scary it was to be nameless and faceless and matching everyone, to be without an identity, to feel so small. He only told me that when he concluded with how exhilarating it was to be nameless and faceless and matching everyone, to be without an identity, to feel so small. “The Mir,” he would say, awe on his face. “There is no place in the world like it.” We stayed in Eretz Yisrael after that first year because during that first year my husband was swept off his feet. “Is Alex going back to Meron this year?” I asked my husband. I covered the pan of schnitzel with both of my hands. He reached for a knife and cut a wedge of chocolate cake and shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably.” “Should we go?” I got excited at the thought. The fires on the ground, the fire in everyone’s eyes as they held each other’s hands and danced…the little boys with yarmulkes pinned onto their curls and a phone number taped to their backs, sitting on their fathers’ shoulders, their eyes wide with equal parts fear and joy…Jews of all stripes, all types, all garbs and all skin colors dancing, swept up in something larger than themselves that all at once makes them unimportant and at the same time, the most important persons in the world. “With the kids?” my husband looked skeptical. “It’s hot and crowded—well, that’s an understatement.
You heard Alex’s story. I don’t know.” We didn’t go to Meron; we went to the local bonfire in the neighborhood. It was four stories tall, the culmination of weeks of arduous laboring and schlepping and petty thievery on the part of every boy in the neighborhood between the ages of five and fifteen. I see them all, their bright eyes glinting in the light of the flames. They hold hands, the men, the boys, and for a brief moment I want to hold hands and dance and sing too, not hold the baby and let the girls cling to my skirt. I’ve been too busy in the kitchen with schnitzel and acorn squash and chocolate cake. I hadn’t sung on stage in my own spotlight for a long time. But it wasn’t about me, the fire, Lag Ba’omer, the feeling in the air of pure unbridled joy mixed with some healthy fear; it was about something so big that it cannot be contained in a single voice, a single song, a single name. And I hug my girls closer to me as I am swept off my feet.