A Different Holy Path

JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: INTRODUCING BASYA SCHECHTER

“When I was really little, my original family of five lived on a dead end street overlooking a train yard. I had the most romantic feeling about those trains and dreamed of all the adventures I could have as a stowaway.

My parents married twice and divorced twice. Somehow my two brothers and I made it through the crossfire. When they split for the second and final time, my brothers stayed with our mom and I went to my father’s.

He married again and his new wife had eight kids from her first marriage. So there were three kids from him, eight from her, and then together they had seven more. (Kayn ahora, ptui ptui ptui.)

I grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in an ultra-Orthodox world, and there was a lot of beauty in it. I went to Beis Yakov, which is an international school for Jewish girls, and there I learned a lot of Torah and Midrash. Everything in that life contributes to this texture of holiness and devotion and connection to a divine truth. And all that fills the lifestyle with light.

It was our custom that on Shabbos, in the morning, my father and I would always walk the four long avenues to shul. We would go to houses that were gutted by fires and just walk around and imagine who might have lived there and what their lives were like. My father loved music and had once wanted to be a musician, though he devoted only 6 months of his life to this dream. He had this self-imposed deadline: if he didn’t make it in the music business within six months, he would give up and do something else. And six months is nothing at all, so of course it was a doomed pursuit.

Anyway, we would sing together, harmonize. And in the winter, I would tuck my hand into his outside coat pocket for warmth. I loved the feeling on those mornings, which were full of warmth and coziness, Shabbos beauty and music.

Then one morning, when I was seven years old, my father told me that I was now at an age where it was inappropriate to put my hand inside the pocket of his coat.”

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Basya Schechter's JEWS OF THE UNIVERSE profile is up at JUDITH! Read the rest here.

Shabbat shalom!

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