Tell Me What Is Forbidden
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The Song of the Bow by Bee Sacks
We watched the men outside.
We watched them from our table in the coffee shop. My leg over yours, your chin on my shoulder, we drank precisely engineered cold brews and watched them, the two orthodox Jewish men—Haredim, you called them—in animated conversation on the other side of the avenue, the Jewish side. Two men dressed for an 18th-century Polish winter in the Brooklyn summer heat, all that trapped sunlight and no mature trees on our block.
What could they be talking about?
You and I both lived along the boundary between worlds. The subway ran above the street here. A generation ago, it divided the Jewish neighborhood from the Puerto Rican neighborhood, but now I guess you could say it divided the ungentrified from the gentrified. Sitting in the cafe on our side of the street, the block was almost like an aquarium. We watched the men in their peyos and knee socks, young girls in long skirts pushing baby strollers, women with cellphones tucked into their hair coverings, plastic bags blowing everywhere. So much plastic. For me, Jews like this had always been part of the scenery, like fruit carts or window cages or payday loan places or storefront churches. But to you, the lives of these Haredim were intelligible. I guess I mean, they were real to you.
“They are obsessed with separation,” you had explained. Now you had a new name and a growing mustache, but as a child you had learned Hebrew and worn long dresses that covered your knees and collarbones. Such a past life was part of your magic—who you were before you remade yourself completely.
We were in the unsustainable, obsessive stage of love. All night and into the day, our bodies found each other. Weekends were a kind of prison, the exhaustion of our desire, always needing to begin again, to touch you again, to feel you inside me again, to come again. We would sleep and wake and come together again as the subways rumbled above and below us. In between, we lay in the dark whispering about how hard we had tried to be girls. You’d gone to seminary; I’d been in a sorority. Now we were boys.
We’d come to this cafe to stop having sex long enough to check our work emails. Tomorrow was Monday. Now, two Orthodox men stood on the corner outside a greengrocer. Or, I’d seen them as men. But the longer I watched, the younger they looked. The taller one had a wiry, patchy beard; the slighter one was fresh-faced with pink cheeks. They were hardly more than teenagers, I realized. What were they talking about so animatedly? The pink-cheeked one was laughing with a hand over his mouth; the bearded one looked away, maybe shyly.
Behind us, a chic girl in unblemished workwear was ordering a coffee.
“Do you think they’ve ever been on the internet?” I asked.
“No.” Your newly sprouted beard rubbed on my bare shoulder. You were changing from the inside out. God, I loved you. I loved watching when you took your T shot right to your belly. I loved that you were braver than I was, ready to change completely. When I visited my parents, I wore my old clothes and used my old name. They paid my rent.
“What was it like to live like that?” I asked. “So set apart?”
“My family isn’t that religious,” you said with a touch of annoyance. “We were modern Orthodox.”
You had told me that in your family, men and women do not touch anyone from the opposite sex who was not a spouse or an immediate blood relative. You told me on the sabbath they would not so much as flip a light switch. You told me everyone married young. It did not sound very modern to me, but I conceded. “No, I know you weren’t like that, but I’m just thinking about living in a world with so many rules, what that feels like.”
Could your girl-cousins touch you as you were now? As you had become? Or was that forbidden?
The two Jews in their black suits moved to the side to allow a pregnant woman to get by with her stroller. Her wig glimmered plastically. “Okay but does the shorter one have chaotic twink energy to you?” I asked. There really was something boyish and mischievous radiating off him. He held out his hand to the taller boy who hesitated. “Look! Look at that! Is that flirting?”
They shook hands.
“I heard about this one Chassidish rabbi who made a strange ruling,” you said. You were ignoring my comments but I still loved the way your voice curled into my ear. “He forbid the men in his yeshiva from shaking hands with each other.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“For sure. I mean, men and women who aren’t related never touch, but men to men? It’s totally bizarre to forbid this.”
Outside, the men had not broken their grip. A long handshake, no? The pink-cheeked boy looked up at the taller one. I wished I could hear what he was saying.
You continued. “It’s like by creating the boundary, suddenly this totally normal act, just shaking hands with a friend, becomes like, illicit. Erotic even.”
“Are those two allowed to shake?” I asked.
I watched as they broke apart, the two Jewish men, turning to walk opposite directions. Why did that make me sad?
“Yeah for sure,” you said. “That ruling was totally fringe.”
I turned to you, twisting around in my seat. “Are we allowed?” I put out my hand. “Or will we get in trouble?”
You took my hand.
“Imagine this being forbidden.”
You rubbed a thumb over my knuckles.
I remembered that place between below your ear that nearly sent you into convulsions of pleasure when I bit there softly.
We fall back into your bed. After kissing and coming and kissing and coming we lay in damp sheets, feverish. There was a faint acridity in the air—your cat’s litter needed to be changed. The day was slipping away, had slipped away, was almost gone. Soon, it would be Monday. I needed something to hold on to. “How did they meet?” I asked, turning my head to face you.
“How did who meet?” The hairs on your chin were longer than anywhere else on your face. They say it takes five years on T to grow a real beard.
“The Orthodox men, the ones who shook hands.”
You laughed. “Right, the yeshiva boys.” Tracing my eyebrows now: “Let’s say they met in gan. You know what it is?”
“No.”
“Nursery school, actually it literally means ‘garden.’”
“They met in the garden.”
“Licking honey off Hebrew letters.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s part of how the boys learn to love Torah.” When you said the word torah your voice twanged into an unexpected diphthong. Toy-rah. It sounded Yiddish. Our fingers were entwined. “May learning be sweet in your mouth.”
“Did you do that?”
“I told you, we weren’t Orthodox like that,” you said.
“Sorry.” Pause. “What are their names?”
You brought our fingers to your lips. “Imagine this being forbidden.”
Imagine. “What are their names?” I asked again.
“You choose.”
“Jonathan and David.”
You sounded a little too surprised when you laughed. “You know about King David?”
“You think just because I’m not Jewish I’ve never read the Bible?” I said it incredulously, but what did I really remember from church? Drooping pantyhose, the wafer becoming gummy in my mouth.
“So you know about Jonathan and David.”
“Yeah, I took a class in college on queering biblical narratives.”
You paused. Our past lives were foreign countries.
“Jonathan and David,” I repeated.
“Okay, Yonatan and David.” The way you said the name David it sounded exotic. Davíd. “They met in gan.”
“In the garden.”
“Licking honey.”
Our mouths drew closer and closer. Torah sweet like honey.
Obviously, we weren’t monogamous. It was the same for every one we knew except those few assimilated lesbian couples who cared about marriage equality. You and I had regular conversations about our respective needs and our capacities. It was almost empirical, the way we measured ourselves out. “Do you have the bandwidth to talk about some feelings of jealousy that are coming up for me?” You had a boyfriend who had a husband. For a while, I’d been sleeping with a cute trans dyke, but by that summer anyone who was not you felt like an attempt to distract myself from you. What do I mean? Maybe that my desires began to whittle down almost monotheistically to you.
Every time you were on your phone, I tried not to think about who you were texting, what plans you were making. You were not mine. I had to remind myself again and again. I was not yours. Maybe I didn’t know how to belong to myself.
“Tell me a story.” You were on your phone in my bed.
“Hm?” Not looking up.
“About the boys.”
Another Friday after work. When the sun set it would be Shabbat, I had learned. But it was mid-June, and the sun was hours from setting.
I tried again, “David and Jonathan. What are they learning in school?”
You put down your phone. “How old are they?”
“Nine.”
“By nine, they’re learning how to tell time.”
“Time? In third grade?”
“Well yes, but—”
“Is this a joke about literacy rates?”
You rolled your eyes. “Will you just listen?”
I waited.
“For us, there was secular time and then there was religious time.”
“Religious time,” I repeated.
“Right, it sets the times to pray and stuff. Zmanim, the hours.”
“Zmanim.” I wasn’t sure if I was saying it right.
“There is no clock for zmanim.” You rolled onto your back, looking up at the ceiling. “The times aren’t fixed. They’re proportions of the day in sunlight.”
“Is that how Muslims do it?” I had never imagined the day except in hours.
“I don’t know,” you admitted.
“But you learned how to set prayer times?”
“No, girls don’t learn that. I just prayed when they told me to.”
A whole other clock, a whole other calendar—the days and years divided into divine undertakings, set by the moon and sun. You had left that world, left Los Angeles, which apparently has Orthodox Jews, who knew. You left behind your old name in that world of plastic tablecloths and long-sleeved shirts worn under dresses and never ever, ever, singing in the presence of men. You left your old pronouns out west. You came east, lost time, found work. Now, we both had jobs that were remote and involved a lot of team messaging.
You left so much behind. But did you take the clocks with you? The internal clocks that correlate the day to God. Did you still think in the secret names I would eventually google? Shacharit, Mincha, Maariv.
“Wait which one is which?” I asked. “One of them had evil twink energy.” Ruddy cheeks, boyish, fey. “Remember?”
I watched your mouth when you laughed. “Amazing, okay, that’s David.”
“So the tall one is Jonathan.”
“Right.”
“And they are learning to tell the zmanim.”
“Good memory.”
“It’s only been a week.” A week since you were last in my bed. I put my chin on your shoulder, looking at you while you looked at the ceiling.
“Okay, so they are nine years old and their moreh is quizzing them.”
“A moreh is a teacher?”
“Yeah, he quizzes them, ‘From what time is it possible to recite the Shema? Dovi?’ That’s how he calls David. And David doesn’t know the answer because his parents are baal tshuvah.”
“Are what?”
“Like, born again maybe you’d say? Jews who weren’t raised Orthodox but became observant as adults. Often they end up being like, the most religious people of all but the way I’m imagining it, David hasn’t learned from his father about the zmanim yet. So he’s not sure how to answer the moreh’s question about how early you can pray.”
I did not grasp any of the specifics, but I got that the boys were being quizzed about religious time. “David doesn’t know the answer.”
“Right. David is fidgeting. And Jonathan is noticing how much smaller David is, his delicacy.”
“Oh, I like this.”
“Well the moreh doesn’t. He’s annoyed, ‘Nu? Dovi?’ He’s a thin man in his twenties who feels this position is beneath him. David is so unsure when he guesses, ‘Maybe six?’”
As far as I knew that might be correct.
“Which is like, an answer so wrong it shows that David didn’t even understand the moreh’s question, so the moreh is like, ‘Six? What are you? A goy? Or just a hole in my head?’ Everyone always laughed when our teachers used Yiddish. That meant they were really pissed. Anyway, everyone is laughing, whispering, not just about the moreh but about David and his parents and why he doesn’t know the zmanim. Their moreh slams his ruler down on his desk. The laughter stops.”
Were you imagining one of the boys as me and one as you? Or were they both you? That was probably it. They were both you: Jonathan and David, Yonathan and Dovi, versions of you if you’d been born a boy, I mean, a boy in a way that your family could recognize. Born a son. Would you have stayed? Would you be one of those yeshiva boys on the sidewalk, shaking hands in the sticky summer heat.
They were both you: Jonathan and David, Yonathan and Dovi, versions of you if you’d been born a boy, I mean, a boy in a way that your family could recognize. Born a son.
“Of all the boys, only Yonatan did not laugh at Dovi. Now the moreh turns to him. ‘Yoni? From when?’ Obviously Yonatan’s father showed him this part of Berakhot. He knows the answer: from the pre-dawn light in which it’s possible to recognize an acquaintance (or, some say, to differentiate the colors of the sky), until the end of the first fourth of the day.”
“Did your dad teach you that?”
“What?” You looked startled. Maybe you’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, no, mostly I learned about modesty. Modesty and Shabbat.”
I felt bad that I’d broken the spell of your story. “But Jonathan’s father has taught him.”
“Yes, a father teaches his son.”
“Does he answer the teacher’s question?”
We were back in the boys’ classroom together. Cramped desks, posters of sages and martyrs hanging around the classroom. A serious little boy is hesitating to answer the question his teacher has asked. Jonathan knows that he is being used to ridicule David: when he gives the answer, it will confirm that David is stupid. David, whose face is tight with the effort of not crying.
“I forget,” Jonathan whispers.
David looks at him in shock. Their eyes meet. An invisible thread is knotting between them as they hold out their hands for the moreh’s punitive ruler-smack.
“Is this a love story?” I whispered. I hoped I sounded playful, careless.
“Let’s find out,” you said as you rolled on top of me.
I think we both knew that when the obsession faded, I’d be the one left in love. A familiar pattern: the more I wanted, the more you’d pull away, the harder I’d try, the farther you’d go, until we weren’t talking by winter. All of it happened and all of it was anticipatable. But for now it was summer, and we wanted to keep fucking.
David and Jonathan. Dovi and Yoni. One slight and smooth cheeked, one taller and more masc. Me and you or you and me or you and you.
When you were on dates with your partner and his husband—apparently sometimes you all went together—I forced myself not to text you. The three of you went away for the July Fourth weekend. “Boys Trip!” you called it, when you posted the beach photos online.
I was trying to live differently than my parents. I did not want to conflate love with possession; I wanted, in the parlance of the polyamory workbooks, to “cultivate abundance,” which we understood as having romance, love, and commitment beyond the nuclear family model. We were idealistic. Even back then I wondered if I was different than you in some fundamental way. For you, love was a community garden: a scrappy, anti-capitalist collective effort, yielding sweetness and green to be shared. What was love for me? A burning house. A sailor throwing his body against the jagged shoreline. What was love but that drive to lose yourself? Lose the self? An annihilation.
When will I see you again? I typed out as if to text you. I couldn’t send that. Too needy. I erased it, letter by letter. I typed, How was the fourth? No, too clingy. Erased. I tried again. Do the other boys tease David because his parents are—I paused to Google the spelling—baal tshevuah? My phone kept trying to correct “baal tshevuah” to “baby t-shirt.” Sent.
You didn’t reply immediately. I spent that day feeling insane. Checking my phone, promising myself I would not check it, then checking it again only to throw it across the room when everyone in the fucking world had texted me except you. I fell asleep anxiously in my rumpled bed, my phone under my pillow in case it buzzed with a text message from you, which eventually it did.
Yeah, the other boys tease David because of his parents. Not Yoni, ofc. Yoni doesn’t tease David but also like doesn’t intervene when the other boys do.
I could have wept from relief. You were there. You had not abandoned me, no, you were texting me back. Are they still in third grade?
No, now they are in middle school and there is this little shit named Shmuly, and he’s like, My dad says baalat tshuvah girls are for practice, not marriage.
I could see them. Yoni and Dovi, Jonathan and David. They were maybe eleven, eating chips from a kosher bodega after school. The other boy saying what he says to the group of boys but really, and everyone knows this, he is saying it to David. It is a provocation: Your mom doesn’t count.
Shmuly’s such a little shit, I responded. What does David do?
He doesn’t show that he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t give away his power. I read the words and felt almost indicted. When I had every held on to my power? There were more dots as you kept writing. He says, Your father should know better than to talk like that.
Damn.
Right? You were typing more so I waited. Yoni’s like whoa bc it’s something an adult would say.
Impressive. I could imagine the moment. This slight boy, short for his age and natural outsider, delivering a censure more powerful than any retaliatory insult. Yoni is watching. Is he thinking it? He must be: David and Goliath.
Walking home from the train through the August heat, I felt great pity at the sight of harried Jewish women with their strollers. Pity for the life of diapers and kids, never learning math, heavy polyester clothes all summer. Pity for them, pity for you, what you had to survive. All of those rules, all of those boundaries, all of that restriction built around the empty grave of God. This is all made up! I wanted to shout when I saw them pouring out of services. I suppose I thought I was free.
“We should get up and do something,” I said.
We lay in your rumpled bed, fan pointed directly at us, reality TV streaming from a laptop. Outside was bright as midday, but it was already 5pm on a Saturday. Were you like this with your other lovers? Slipping so quickly into something almost domestic? By late summer, you and I had begun to watch a lot more TV, dating shows mostly. In this one, contestants were kept apart for the first few episodes, separated by a wall, no touching, no seeing, just talking. “I feel like I already know you,” a woman said to a man, both of them lying on couches, invisible to each other. You watched them and I watched you. Somewhere else, your parents were praying or eating blessed food or even making love, which you told me was especially sacred on Shabbat. Once, this had been the jewel in your week—the day when the world to come was lived on earth. Everything special, everything separate. But for us, the day was fading unremarkably.
“Do you think they’re Zionists?” I asked. The man was telling the woman about his parents’ divorce, they were both crying, touching the wall that hid them from each other.
You glanced at me. “I mean probably? Isn’t everyone on this show like evangelical?” It was you who’d explained to me about the millions of Christian Zionists and their eschatological fantasies.
“No, no, David and Yoni.”
“Mm.” You understood now. I liked watching you think. “Yeah, but not in the way you’re imagining it.”
“How am I imagining it?”
“As a political stance, like having an opinion on abortion or unions.” The woman was telling the camera she was in love with the unseen man.
“Okay, so how do they think about it?”
You hit space bar to pause the show. “They don’t think about it at all. It’s a belief so fundamental they don’t think of it as a belief.” You hesitated, looking for a word.
“An axiom?” I offered.
“An axiom, yes.” You looked from my eyes to my lips and back. I could see a filament of desire move through you. You liked words. “And that axiom is that the world is a series of divisions. Jewish and gentile, day and night, Shabbat and the rest of the week, Israel and the rest of the world.”
“I want them to be alone together, the boys. Could that happen?”
“Sure, they could study Talmud together. Do you—
“—I know what the Talmud is.” I’d googled it.
“Okay, well let’s say they’re fourteen, paired together to study the halakha, the rules of observing Chanukah.”
“At yeshiva?”
You laughed. “Very good, yeah, at yeshiva.” You closed your laptop. Gently, with your finger, you drew a line up my belly, over my sternum, stopping at the fragile center of my throat. My eyes fluttered closed. When your attention was on me, I felt like the only person in the world.
“Yoni and David lean over open volumes in a low-ceilinged room with long tables and fluorescent lighting. All around them are other boys studying in pairs, whispering with their foreheads resting on their hands, and all the pages rustling. It’s winter, the room is cold.” Your finger gently circled the folds of my ear, sending tingles deep into my shoulders. I gasped. “They’re studying the Rambam, Sefer Z’manim.” I tried to hold on to the words. “The Book of Times,” you clarified, your fingertips following the sensation as it ran back down my body. You’d cut off your tits but I still had mine, which meant I felt everything as you ran your hand over the nub of my nipple. It felt so good I almost hated it. “Pay attention,” you whispered, “or I’ll stop.”
I nodded vigorously. We both liked when you had power.
“What book are they reading?” you asked, your voice teasing as you took your hand away from my body.
“The Times!” I exclaimed.
I loved hearing the smile in your voice. “Close enough.” You traced down my stomach so, so slowly.
“The mitzvah requires one lamp be kindled in each and every house,” you said. “Yoni is sight-translating this sentence. ‘That is the minimum,’ he says, glancing over at David who nods.” Instead of dipping below my bellybutton, your fingers made their way back up my ribcage in slow swirls, like you were telling a story with your hands. “‘One who beautifies the mitzvah will light a lamp according to the number of people of the house’—but David interrupts to ask, ‘What’s that about a minyan?’” Your fingers were traveling down again. You are Yoni. You are Yoni and I am David.
Yoni pauses, looking up at Dovi in confusion. “What minyan?” Maybe he has jumped ahead in the text?
Dovi is embarrassed. He knows he is misunderstanding something, but not sure what. “ce-minyan habiyt,” he reads from the page in Hebrew. “So aren’t they talking about a minyan?”
The clouds clear from Yoni’s understanding. “Ohh,” he says, “no, no, ‘ceminyan’ means relating to the number of.”
You whispered in my ear, your fingers pausing at my hip bones in a way that made me thrust involuntarily. “Not one menorah for the whole household, but one menorah for each person. Does that make sense, David?”
I nodded.
“So ‘ceminyan’ here means something like, ‘for every’: one lamp for every person in the house,” Yoni continues. Dovi does not look up at him. Yoni fears he has been too harsh, or too condescending. He adds, “I understand why you thought that, about it meaning the men were being counted for a minyan.”
“So it means like, the same number of,” Dovi says.
Their classmate Shmuly walks by their table, tougher and less kind every year. Yoni waits until he has passed to say, “Yes, one menorah for each person in the house, the way we do it now,” Yoni says. Softly, patiently. He likes the feeling of helping David. “Look,” he points to the next line. “We know it’s not a minyan because Rambam says right here, Whether they are men or whether they are women, and obviously we don’t count women for a minyan.”
“You’re so good at this,” Dovi says.
Yoni feels a light flicker inside him. “Really?”
“So good,” Dovi repeats. “I learn a lot from you.”
The light in Yoni is growing, glowing through his skin as if he himself were a Chanukah lamp.
I levitated under your hands as we become two boys.
Baby.
Yeah?
I want them to be alone.
Hm?
David and Jonathan. I want them to be alone.
You want the two yeshiva boys all alone?
Yes please.
Okay, how about they study Talmud somewhere, just the two of them.
Yes, like a cafe?
That’s impossible. But maybe at Yoni’s, in his father’s study.
With the door closed.
Okay, with the door closed.
Can they study something sexy? Is the Talmud sexy?
Weirdly, it’s very sexy in certain places. These really charged interludes. Not stuff David and Yoni would study at school.
So what they are reading is forbidden?
Not exactly forbidden, no. It’s more like, there are parts of the Talmud that their teachers would emphasize—stuff about Jewish law. When is a meat dish rendered unkosher, what constitutes a violation of Shabbat, how to resolve a dispute involving property lines. More important than these contingencies themselves is the hermeneutic framework they develop.
I like the way that sounds, hermeneutic framework. But when does it get sexy?
Stop exoticizing them for one second and listen to me.
Fine, fine.
The Talmud is a conversation with many parts, all happening concurrently across time. And there are these stories woven in. Strange stuff. Burning mansions, walking trees, demons, ruins, ghosts, heretics, sleepwalkers. All of this, their teachers skip over.
Because the stories are forbidden?
No, just less important. When they are alone, Yoni and David study texts that are neither encouraged nor forbidden.
Sitting side by side.
Yes, in Yoni’s father’s study, surrounded by brown leather volumes embossed in gold. My father has a room like that.
The door is closed.
Yes, and they are reading from Bava Metzia—
—Baba what?
Just one of the volumes, but they are learning about a sage who was famous for being incredibly hot.
Very funny.
I’m being serious. Rabbi Yochanan. The descriptions of him are ecstatic, like, You want to know the beauty of Rabbi Yochanan? Well listen up. He is a silver chalice overflowing with pomegranate seeds and rose petals, set in partial shade. A man without a beard. Beautiful. So beautiful that once he was bathing in the River Jordan, a bandit jumped in after him.
Does it really say this? In a religious text?
Yeah, your queering the bible class could never. But listen to what he says. So this highway robber type guy jumps in, one day the two of them will be study partners but this is all before. The bandit jumps in and says, You are as beautiful as any woman.
This is so gay.
The two men approach each other, wading through the River Jordan with coiled, tentative power.
David is touching Yoni’s wrist as he reads, excitedly, from the Talmud.
One clothed, one naked.
Yoni is staring at David’s hand where it is gripping his wrist.
One hardened, the other smooth and unblemished as a girl. But better than a girl. Cleaner.
Yoni is noticing how soft David’s hands are, how hairless the knuckles.
The two men approach each other, wading through the River Jordan with coiled, tentative power.
The study door opens suddenly.
What? No! It was just getting good.
The door opens and it’s Yoni’s mother, asking pointedly, Do you boys need anything? She’s taking in their bodies, their relative positions. Yoni sees her seeing how close he is sitting to David. Behind her, two sisters, watching.
Is it forbidden?
Almost, but not yet.
September was hotter than August that summer. I had air conditioning, which meant you came over to work from my place almost every day, even if you left in the evening to see someone else. Many nights when we each finished work—each signing off the app that tracked our productivity—we melted into my couch to watch the dating show with the wall between contestants.
As the show progressed, the wall came down, and the paired-off contestants lived together to test compatibility. Every couple, every couple without exception, was nostalgic for the period of their romance before they had seen each other. “I want it to be how it was back then,” a bewildered man in sales said. “Back behind the wall.” They missed being separate. It was that boundary that created the erotic.
When we first started imagining Yoni and David, I had pitied them. Now I wasn’t sure. Now I wondered if they wouldn’t pity me, my life without God, my world without boundaries, which is to say without meaning. Did you miss how clearly defined the world was in your old life? There is no meaning without definition, there is no definition without a boundary, there is no boundary without a wall. The word itself to define coming from the Latin for a boundary. What? Did you think you were the only one who knew dead languages? Not that you ever asked about where I came from, no matter how much I asked about you. We never spoke of my parents’ suburb, the Latin tutor and the horseback riding lessons. But what I wanted to know was this: When you live in a world defined by boundaries—between holy and the secular, between your people and all other people, between men and women, between men and men—is the potential for erotic everywhere? Is the world buzzing with terrible, consequential possibilities? Is that how it felt for Yoni and David, when their knees touched under the yeshiva table? What in my life would ever feel that profound?
I wondered what Yoni and David were doing while we watched reality TV. They were studying Talmud, of course. They are seventeen. This year, the other boys in their class have begun to talk about what they’ll do when they graduate. Some will stay in Brooklyn to study, others will go to yeshiva in Jerusalem. Jocks like Shmuly might even go to an Orthodox mechina in the West Bank to study while serving in the IDF—guns under the yeshiva benches, praying in the ruins of ancient synagogues before beating Palestinian shepherds half to death. But not Yoni and David, no, they are lost in the secret life of letters, studying a Rabbinic commentary that imagines the alphabet itself speaking to God.
Twelve years ago, Yoni and Dovi were licking honey off of Hebrew letters. Now, Dovi is sight-translating a midrash on Genesis. Yoni feels something like pride to see how capable Dovi has become.
Dovi translates, “Then it says, ‘For twenty-six generations, the letter alif complained before the throne of the Holy One.’” Looking up. “Wait, where do you think her mouth is?”
Yoni frowns. “Whose mouth?” Just those words together make him embarrassed.
Dovi’s eyes are mischievous. “The letter alif! Where is her mouth that she can speak to hashem?”
Yoni rolls his eyes. “Keep reading.”
“This is what she says,” Dovi says, suddenly shifting into a high and plaintive whine, “Master of the Universe, I am the first letter of the alphabet.” Softly, breathily, Dovi is voicing her complaint. “Why not begin Torah with me? Why that little slut, bes?”
Dovi looks up at Yoni, clearly expecting him to laugh, but Yoni is frozen. Something is contracting deep, deep in his stomach at the sound of Dovi’s whine.
How did I know this? You hadn’t told me about this text. We hadn’t imagined it together. It was nothing I had found online. But at some point, I could see them, Yoni and David. I could see them poring over a shared leather-bound volume, knees almost but not quite touching in a room with a door now left open—a new rule in Yoni’s house. Imagine this being forbidden.
Yoni’s father’s study. Just before nightfall.
Dovi: Hold up your hand.
Yoni: My hand is so much bigger.
Dovi: Yes.
Yoni: Like you’re a girl.
Dovi: Yes.
When Yoni’s palm brushes against Dovi’s palm, Yoni feels his nerves dance. He tries not to breathe too fast. Any second, his father might walk by or walk in.
Fall came to our city, and with it that wind that says, Everything has been over for a long, long time.
On the holiest day of the Jewish year, we ate bagel breakfast sandwiches while across the country, your family fasted and prayed. “Do you want to hear what they are reading?” you asked me.
“Reading where?”
“In synagogue.”
“David and Yoni?”
“My parents.”
“Of course.” We sat on my living room floor to stay closer to the cool air.
You intoned, “It is an abomination. To lie with your sister, to sacrifice your own children, to lie with a barn animal. It is an abomination. To lie with a man as you would a woman.”
“That’s what you read on Yom Kippur?”
“In the afternoon, yeah.” You paused. Sometimes, you seemed so far away—remembering something that would take too long to explain.
“What are you thinking about?” I hoped I wasn’t annoying you.
“How everyone watches in a neighborhood like that. Everyone sees.”
In shul, the silver pointer travels overs the sacred scroll. Letters no man has ever touched by hand. So holy that it’s impure. Yoni is now seventeen, his body filled with impulses and secret currents. His eyes are closed. He sees David’s body as a text, silver yad across that narrow chest, no. It is an abomination. No. Yoni rests his forehead in his palm, aware of the women behind him who watch from the balcony, watch as the men pray. Rabbi of the World, Yoni says in his heart. Please tell me you did not make me like that, an abomination.
You were talking about moving in with your partner—the cis-man married to another cis-man.
“Why with them?” I asked. Feeling stupid but needing to know why it wasn’t me.
“We all get along so well,” you said, not really looking at me. “And also it just feels so good, like, that these gay guys see me as a guy.”
“I see you as a guy.”
“Right, but I mean…”
But it didn’t count, not like the approval of men.
I felt fate pressing down on me. Would it have been different had our love faced profound obstacles? When you get what you want, it dilutes, it ebbs away. When you can’t, it’s perfect forever. I began to feel envy for those men whom we imagined, men who could never be together because of watchful sisters, stern fathers, rigid communities, sacred clocks, lives oriented not toward pleasure but toward God. Maybe I wanted someone to strong-arm me through life—tell me what to wear and eat, tell me who to love. Then at least I could have someone other than myself to blame for my unhappiness.
After Sukkot, the boys go back to yeshiva for senior year. Yoni’s father speaks to him on a quiet Shabbat afternoon.
“You and David are close,” he says. Not a question. It’s just the two of them at the dining room table, reading after shul.
“We study together, yes,” Yoni replies. We touch hands in your study. We put words in each other’s mouths.
Yoni’s father does not look up from his book. “Study at school.”
It happened so quickly: a conversation at that same stupid cafe. You told me in the measured, practiced way of people who live like us that you didn’t have “capacity” for another “partnership” at the moment, but you were here to “hold space” for my feelings.
Over your shoulder, I watched the kosher greengrocer folding boxes. Like at the beginning, only now it was winter and nearly dark. Imagine this being forbidden.
Then, I answered you in turn, that I “appreciated” you being “transparent” with me about your “bandwidth” even if I was disappointed that our “needs” did not “align.” This was the language of people who lived like us, no less claustrophobic than the secret language you’d left behind. We do what our words tell us to do.
Yoni explains about his father on the walk from school. “He needs his study during the day,” Yoni lies. For months, they have been walking this way together after school—walking to Yoni’s to study.
Dovi looks up at him, cheeks appling. “Should we study at your dining-room table?”
Yoni hesitates. “No I—” he looks away. “No, we can’t.”
Dovi nods slowly. “Oh.”
Now, here they are, standing on a street corner in dying light. They must part ways at the greengrocer’s, each to the home of his parents. They must, but they linger.
“Did you hear about the rabbi in Bnei Brak who forbids the bechorim from shaking hands?” David asks. His voice is teasing, but Yoni knows him well enough to detect a sadness.
Yoni plays along. “Forbids them from shaking whose hands?” He is not sure if this is a joke. Obviously, nobody shakes hands with women.
“Men,” Dovi says. “He forbids men from shaking hands with other men.” When he speaks, puffs of vapor hang in the air.
They part to allow a girl pushing a stroller to pass, the infant in his heavy jacket sprawled out in his sleeping. Across the street is the secular coffee shop that they all know not to look at. A treyf place filled with treyf people and a Black Lives Matter flag.
When the girl is out of earshot, Dovi speaks again. “The bechorim, they cannot shake hands with one another in this yeshiva.”
“Can that be true?” How could that be true? Men forbidden from touching other men. Dangerous possibilities moved beneath the surface of that prohibition. He thinks of his father: Study at school. He didn’t say why.
Dovi’s smooth cheeks are flushed. Yoni can smell the salt of him on the cold air. Dovi holds out his right hand. “Imagine this being forbidden.”
Yoni hesitates. Neither of them wear gloves. He thinks of Rav Leikesh jumping into the river to wade toward Rabbi Yochanan. He thinks of Dovi voicing the letter alif with a plaintive lisp. He thinks of mother’s eyes traveling between their two bodies. Then, Yoni takes Dovi’s hand. They shake. Yoni’s hands are bigger. He savors the feeling of encasing Dovi, as if he knows himself better in this moment than in anyone before, but all he says is, “Your hands are cold.”
For a moment, just for a moment, Yoni is watching himself from the cafe across the street. He is in that other world, living by his animalistic urges, living without purpose, living without time—not real time—watching two men in black suits shake hands as the greengrocer comes out with folded produce boxes, not looking up at Yoni and David because what is there to see? Just two bechorim shaking hands.
It happens so quickly. A first date in the popular hotel lobby, drinking iced water while the girl’s thick-ankled aunt sits nearby to chaperone, then a second date on a walk with all of their parents, and then they are engaged—Yoni and a painfully thin girl. Painfully thin, with bony hands and skin dry around the knuckles.
It happens so quickly.
Now, here is Yoni, feeling like a boy, playing the part of the groom on Purim.
“Today, you will become whole,” his father tells him.
His bride—how is this possible? how is this word, bride, possible?—his bride is elsewhere, praying psalms. Yoni is flanked by his father and her father. They are holding him up or are they holding him down or are they dragging him toward the chuppah, singing of the world and the world to come.
Here she is, here is Yoni’s bride in her ill-fitting dress, a mother on either side, her face covered by the veil as thick as a polyester napkin.
Yoni is dazed as she circles him. Flanked by older women, she circles him faceless. Where is Dovi? Not in the crowd. Where is Dovi?
Had you stayed, this would have been you. You would have been the bride being offered. Here you are. Held up by your mother and his mother, gripping your arm to hold you up, to drag you in circles around Yoni who is me, who is waiting for you, who is shaking and praying.
You circle Yoni like the hills circle Jerusalem. This is what will make him a man. Your body will make him a man.
And me, what am I doing here? I do not belong here—fantasizing an alternate version of your life.
I do not belong here, but here I am, crossing the street that divides my world from theirs. Walking past bakeries and toy stores, past packs of girls in dark swishing skirts and puffy black coats, past what I assume are synagogues but I don’t know everything with Hebrew writing on it looks like a synagogue to me. Walking with my cold hands balled in my pockets. Walking as if I knew where I was going.
Here I am. I am the sickly bride and I am the absent lover and I am the helpless groom. That’s how dreams work, is it not? Everyone is an aspect of the dreamer. What I want more than love is a boundary that keeps love at arm’s length from me forever, so that I never have to lose anyone ever again, so that I can live in the moment before the veil is lifted, praying, Let it be Dovi. Just for a moment, just for one moment, please, let it be Dovi waiting under the veil with flushed cheeks. Before the cloth is lifted. Before all the possibilities narrow down to one. Before it’s too late. Let it be him.
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