By Yocheved Friedman
I imagine nights in the desert are yellow, inscribed and inflected by the yellow sun that trolls on the yellow sand.
I never thought of the dry heat of those desolate lands as my home.
But every morning, I am directed to face eastwards towards the deserts, towards the site of the ancient temples when I am praying.
Snow pitching forward on restless people is the most memorable thing about New York City.
I cannot imagine that I come from lands without winters.
I like to think that I come from traveling people, not wanderers.
The days that I get the urge to move on, wandering through the swallows of earth like an aimless stranger, like the people I am from.
I believe that we are the people grown from fragments of dust littered throughout the pockmarks of every country we have wandered through. We carry what we find like nomads until it becomes us.
I imagine that I am the pieces made from the odds and ends of unanswered questions, baggage dragged through many strange lands on the backs of my great grandparents.
I am the thing caught between the lines in the sand, am the grey of the do’s and don’ts of our laws. Why is something that I can’t understand considered a sin?
When I ask this question, when I test the waters of her religion, my mother rolls her eyes.
I know I will always be a seeker. I know that it is not a sin to ask a thousand questions. It is a sin to leave them purposefully unanswered.
Once upon a time, there was a Jewish king who lived during the times of the second temple. He was an evil ruler who did not follow the ways of God. It was only as death drew nearer, that he began to repent.
So great were his crimes though, that God could not find a way, could not find a place within his heavens to forgive him.
They say that God finally cut a hole beneath his own throne to find a place in his heavens that would accept the repentance of the dying king.
I heard this story as a child. It was one of the only times that I’d felt so close to being godly.
If God finds a place for the lowest sinners in his heavens….
I’d like to know that I come from that truth.
And from that forgiveness, fashioned from the very pieces of God’s resting place.
Does God come from the rolling dunes of sand? The place of the temples that has forgotten winter?
I am a New Yorker at best, the kind that has grown to respect this city despite its faults. I haven’t seen past the drifting snow to the pale sun that beats on the foreign lands of my home. I think of it only as the New York sun.
Every new year, we are inscribed in the book of the righteous or the book of sinners.
But there are some people, maybe most people, who are written into the middle man’s book.
The people that are caught between the lines in the sand.
What book has inscribed my name?
My name amongst the sinners. My name amongst the commoners. My name written in the grey fog of the do’s and don’ts.
Jewish wanderers become the restless soul within me. And all this time, I have made my way slowly, chiseling at the crusty layers of myself that surround it. To know if it is still there.
If I could learn to love the place I am from, will I be written into another book?
