From Morning Sickness to Enlightenment
Things I Learned Keeping the Books for the Dead
This past Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, I wanted to do more than reflect, so I set down a personal story about people who changed my life.
When I was 29, and pregnant with my son, my husband and I lived in Boston, and I worked for Apple on State Street. That Apple. Nothing fantastic or smart or geeky. Just showing people business model computers in the Apple offices on the somethingeth floor in a highrise. Basically, I was a poor person’s Vanna White. No “Apple stores” back then, of course, but we did have those grammatically incongruous “Think different.” propaganda posters in our hallways, including one with snails with Intel Pentium II chips on their backs because Apple hadn’t started putting Pentium chips *in* their machines yet, and wanted to explain that the chips in their G3s were “twice as fast.”
Even the slender demands of that job were too much for me and my mislabeled “morning” sickness, so I gave my notice and signed up with a temp agency, looking for something where they didn’t mind non-stop vomiting, a.k.a. “something less corporate.”
The temp agency called me immediately and sent me to a job in Brookline, MA. For those who don’t know the Boston area, Brookline is known for having a large Jewish population, including a large number of Orthodox Jews and this job was at the home of an Orthodox family. I loved them immediately. Henry was the husband, and Mimi was the wife. Theirs was the first house I’d ever been in that kept kosher — two sinks, two refrigerators, etc., in order to keep meat and dairy separate. Mimi made homemade challah every Friday that you cannot imagine, and the family turned off everything, not just the TV, but the electricity, at sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday. When I would feel pukey, Mimi would make me drink peppermint tea. It’s supposed to soothe nausea. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it made me even sicker. It may as well have been Ipecac. But honestly, I couldn’t have worked anywhere kinder in those final months.
So, with such great people, why was the temp position I filled open? Because I was keeping the books for the Chevra. The Chevra Kadisha (pronounced “Hevra Kadeesha”) is the group that tends to the dead to make sure that the bodies are not desecrated before burial. It’s pretty intense and you can read up on your own if interested, but the main point is that it’s done as a service that can’t be repaid. What I learned and developed so much respect for in those months before I had my son was the absolute silence around charity in their community. If someone was in need, whatever they needed just appeared on their doorstep. No note. The recipient didn’t owe anyone a favor. They didn’t have to feel humbled or disadvantaged. It was stunning to me, growing up around what is often the loudness of Christian charity. (Almost) all charity is good, but this had so much care and dignity to it. I’ll never forget them, from the way they took me into their home and cared about me and fed me challah, to the sincerity of the reverence they had for this solemn part of their faith.
The beauty of that quiet charity is still with me. When I do something for someone else, it’s a guiding, concrete example of the aphorism that love is not boastful. I’m also reminded that cultures we may feel are cloistered and exclusive may not solicit our membership, but we may find that they welcome our participation, and they invariably come with lessons that we would never learn by staying in our own lane.
