The Sound that Turtles Make

Every morning when Rabbi Gershon Edelman woke and saw the Styrofoam heads covered with the sheitals, the wigs, that his late wife wore, he momentarily forgot that she was no longer among the living. 

Her passing was sudden. A mild stomach ache that didn’t fade alongside a light yellowish tint to her skin. She always hated doctors, and he didn’t push her to see one: over a few months their kitchen filled with the bags of homeopathic medicines the wives of the other rabbis recommended. Finally, there was the emergency room visit where a scan revealed a cancer in full bloom like a hideous flower a year and a half ago. 

Shortly thereafter: the funeral of Rebbetzin Freeda Edelman, of blessed memory. A devoted wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother whose life had been intertwined with the growth of the Orthodox Jewish population of Far Rockaway and Long Island. Through the long course of her life, she witnessed the explosion of the frum velt, the religious world, from a handful of Jewish families clinging to Empire Avenue to street after street of houses adorned with mezuzahs and men in black hats scurrying to shuls for the evening prayers. So many people tried to attend the levaya, the funeral, that they closed the street of the funeral parlor. Her body was flown to Israel for burial in Mount Olives, where Rabbi Edelman already had a plot waiting for him.

Twinned to the belated realization of his wife’s death was another feeling, slow in coming, that in their blissful half-century together, Rabbi Edelman could have treated her better. Of course, Rabbi Edelman, Rosh HaYeshiva, head rabbi of the Derech HaTorah yeshiva, champion of the Jewish people, had fulfilled all that the Torah commanded of a faithful and dutiful husband. He mentally reviewed their lives as if they were a piece of the Talmud he was expounding upon: He provided for her with the salary he received from the yeshiva; they had fulfilled the commandment of pru urvu, being fruitful and multiplying, with the seven children they had together; she lived to see more than a dozen grandchildren and even two great- grandchildren. She had much nachas, pleasure, from them. She had not wanted for anything. Or so he thought.

But still a feeling nagged at him: was there something he did wrong? Could he have been better? 

No, of course not! This was just his mind being idle, he told himself. Since her death, Rabbi Edelman had not been himself: He was not learning as well as he was wont. He often found himself staring at the skylight during his morning learning sessions wondering about the shapes of clouds. Even worse, his mind wandered during the typically razor-sharp Talmudic lecture he delivered to the elite students in the yeshiva. 

This had never happened to Rabbi Edelman since he first began teaching half a century ago. He had always had an ability to learn—a vague term that meant an ability to weave together the Talmud and its associated commentaries into a coherent whole. That ability had propelled him from a humble religious household, a house of poshut, simple Jews, to the upper echelons of the religious Jewish community, the top yeshivas—Mir and Briske, both in Eretz Yisroel—and eventually to his wife, the daughter of the former head of the Derech HaTorah yeshiva.

Some grief was acceptable, of course, even welcomed. Hashem, God, did not create robots, Rabbi Edelman liked to exhort his students. Rabbi Edelman was inconsolable in the four days of shiva after the funeral, not even rising to greet the great rabbis that visited—four days instead of the customary seven since the Jewish holiday of Sukkot coincided with the shiva and, per Jewish law, superseded the mourning period. 

On this morning, Rabbi Edelman looked at the auburn hair that was his wife’s favorite wig, illuminated by the rays of sunlight streaming through their windows. When she first put it on so many years ago, Rabbi Edelman thought the red coloring was immodest, but gradually he admitted to himself that he liked seeing her wear it. Sheker hachain, v’hevel ha’yofi, as he sang—badly and off-tune to her—every week before the Friday night Kiddush in the Aishet Chayil song: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is nothing.” But the verse concluded: ishah yir’at Adonai hi tithalal. “A woman who fears God is to be praised.” In a rare moment of pride he allowed himself, Rabbi Edelman thought his wife possessed all those qualities: charm, beauty and a fear of God.

Like all religious Jewish women, the Rebbetzin covered her hair her entire married life. A woman’s hair was considered a nakedness, and the Talmud was replete with stories of how the sight of a woman’s uncovered hair could drive a man mad with desire. This made it easier when the treatment made her hair fall out. He almost forgot her hair’s original dull brown color until he saw loose strands of it draped on the pillow.

Their marriage was arranged, but not forced. He had been a rising student in her father’s yeshiva, invited frequently to their Shabbat table for meals and given the privileged seat next to the old man. He sang alongside the other yeshiva bochurim, students, at the table. Once his future father-in-law asked him to deliver some divrei Torah, words of Torah, at the table. Eager to impress and terrified of offending, the young Rabbi Edelman avoided eye contact with anyone at the table while he spoke, instead switching his gaze between the fake lilies in the centerpiece and a painted picture of the great rabbi, the Chazon Ish, on the wall. 

Weeks later, he was invited for dinner one night, an uncommon occurrence, and after the plates were cleared, his future wife came out in a dark dress with careful white stitching. The young Rabbi Edelman, with a beard composed of sparse and straggly black hairs, had been surprised. She had asked him the standard questions one was asked on a date: about what he was learning, about his hobbies, books he had read. He could only answer the first question. When he returned to the yeshiva later that night, his fellow yeshiva buchirim congregated around him like he was a celebrity, tittering and chattering like birds.

Later, after they were married, Rabbi Edelman found out that his father-in-law was supposed to talk to him about meeting his daughter beforehand, but—as with so many worldly things—he forgot. Far from a flaw, this was considered a sign of his commitment to Torah and Avodath Hashem, service of God. The story his father-in-law liked to tell was that Rav Alyashiv, the great sage in Israel, was so involved with Klal Yisrael, the Jewish community, that he was rumored to not even know the names of his children. 

In his father-in-law’s case, it wasn’t this involvement that caused him to forget, but early onset Alzheimer’s. This led to Rabbi Edelman taking over the yeshiva early, barely a yungerlich himself. Still the yeshiva prospered, moving from a run-down office building on Mott Avenue to a brand-new building on Broadway paid for by the Sendoff and Rubin families.

But lo! It was morning, there was no time for thoughts like this. Vayehi Ohr, and Hashem said “Let there be light.” That was in the beginning of Beresheit, Genesis. But then in the next few verses, Hashem created light again! This, even children knew. Because God created two types of light, one for the rest of the world and a second kind that he hid away for the tzadikim, the holy men, at the end of time. Perhaps this was why Rabbi Edelman was so unfocused in his learning; he reminisced instead of beginning his day. His children had told him that this grief was natural, but still he chastised himself for it. I should be grateful for what I had, Rabbi Edelman told himself, not sad at what I lost. Besides, he could let his mind roam later in the day when he took his five-minute coffee break. He threw off the down blankets and swung his spindly legs over the side of the bed. His legs had once been thick like tree limbs. He had even played basketball as a teenager. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands, careful not to touch his eyes with his fingertips that might be impure from sleep. He said the benediction of Modeh Ani, the traditional blessing thanking God for returning a person’s soul after sleep. On Rabbi Edelman’s night table was a washing cup and a shallow pan. Since his wife died, Rabbi Edelman needed to remind himself to fill the cup with water each night. It was one of the million things that his wife had done for him, unasked, that now he struggled to do. But last night, he had remembered, and he poured the once-warm-now-cold water over his hands and recited the blessing of Negel Vasser to rid his hands of the ritual impurity that came from sleep.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the washing of the hands, he said in Hebrew. 

He listened to his voice echo in the empty room. How strange it was to hear his voice and not hear her quiet assent and amen. Since Rebbetzin Edelman’s passing, he divided his time between the yeshiva and his empty house; rarely did he speak with anyone at home, aside from the stray phone calls he received from his children and those were usually brief. If someone needed him, he could be found in the yeshiva where he always was. Now that his wife was gone, what emergency could possibly warrant his attention? An unopened iPhone his children bought him sat in a box by his bed.  

He brushed his teeth, spat out the toothpaste, and splashed cold water across his face. His daughters and daughters-in-law had removed nearly everything that belonged to his wife, but her green toothbrush remained in a cup on the sink. That could be the focus of a speech, a dvar Torah, how all that remained of a person once they were gone—well, what physically remained of a person—was nothing, a toothbrush, a wig. But souls endured. His wife’s neshoma was in Gan Eden, heaven, waiting for him. He was sure of it. But he should throw out the toothbrush. Lifting up the toothbrush, Rabbi Edelman held it above the small garbage can near the toilet. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to do that yet, he thought, and placed it back in the cup. He stared at the pink and blue tiles that lined the bathroom floor and shone in the morning light. They reminded him of the meager jewelry he had given his wife over the years, some passed down from his own mother, all of which had been taken by his daughters and daughters-in-law.

A woman’s greatest jewels are the Torah learned by her sons and sons-in-law, he had said more than once—and his Rebbetzin had smiled. Had she smiled? Was he misremembering? Had the lines around her mouth tightened when he said that or when he mentioned something displeasing to her, like when their son was kicked out of the yeshiva? She mentioned once wanting to visit Paris during the summer, instead of their usual trip to a bungalow in the Catskills, where he was surrounded by his students. Next year, he always said smiling, knowing that they would never go. 

He ran a black plastic comb through his long white beard to make sure there wasn’t any food in it. He practiced a smile in front of the mirror. The Tannaim of Beis Shammai said a person’s face was Reshus Harabim, a term for a public place, and one was not allowed to cause damage in a public place so he must smile. 

His daughters and daughters-in-law had been models of efficiency. They had expected him to grieve for the shiva; the shloshim, the thirty-day anniversary of her death; then the yartzeit, the annual anniversary of her death; but otherwise, to move on. Rabbi Edelman always prized the story of the great rabbi who, when he found out his son had died over Passover, a time when mourning was forbidden, refused to let himself cry. But Rabbi Edelman was finding himself to not be that great. Only Rachel, the girl who dated his troubled son Yeruchmiel, seemed to understand. 

While all their other children had floated easily in the religious world they inhabited—their daughters marrying talmudei chachamim, Torah scholars, their sons becoming them—Yeruchmiel struggled. He was thrown out of yeshiva after yeshiva, including the high school attached to Derech HaTorah. How wounded his wife looked when the principal said that Yeruchmiel was no longer welcome in the school; that Rabbi Edelman’s son was caught with a Rolling Stone magazine filled with improperly dressed women; that a teacher caught him smoking marijuana on school grounds. But those struggles were in the past. They sent Yeruchmiel to a special high school for troubled children in Israel and he stayed in the country for several years. He returned, and, while he still wasn’t interested in learning, he wore a yarmulke and sat not far from his father in shul when he visited. Rabbi Edelman was still disappointed: He felt that of all his children, Yeruchmiel had the greatest potential. As a child, his rebbe offered a dollar to any student who memorized a few lines of a Mishna. Yeruchmiel spent the weekend memorizing portion after portion. Can you imagine? Rabbi Edelman was incredulous. A six-year-old, reciting hundreds of lines of Hebrew? Can you imagine that dedication? He heard rumors that Yeruchmiel was no longer frum, no longer religious: that he was off-the-derech.  

Later it was discovered that one of the rabbis in a yeshiva Yeruchmiel attended had done things, unmentionable things, to children in the class. He wasn’t reported to the police, and switched schools. Rabbi Edelman heard he fled to Israel. 

Yeruchmiel even began living with his girlfriend, which initially horrified Rabbi Edelman, but his wife demanded that they be allowed to stay in the same room together when they visited. That was one of their few arguments. While putting on a fresh undershirt—his children had arranged for a housekeeper to come and clean and do the laundry once a week while he was in yeshiva—he recalled one Friday night meal. The table was set and a few of his students and a local family were by the table, all of them eager to hear the divrei Torah, words of Torah, that Rabbi Edelman gave over. Yeruchmiel and Rachel were there as well, though neither seemed to pay much attention to him and instead snuck glances at each other. 

Mid-meal, Rachel went to help his wife take in some dishes and she stooped and whispered something in Yeruchmiel’s ear and they both laughed. When the dishes were brought out and Rachel and Rebbetzin Edelman returned to the table, Rachel whispered something in the Rebbetzin’s ear and she, too, laughed. What had Rachel said to his wife? She didn’t want to tell him, but a week later in the evening as they prepared for bed and he kept on prodding her, she finally spoke. 

“Rachel said when you bobbed your head during the songs, you looked like a turtle with a beard.”

At first, he was outraged. How dare his future daughter-in-law make fun of him! Mocking a great sage was equivalent to      mocking the Torah! But then as his wife smiled, he also began to laugh. Moments later, he glanced at the mirror in their bathroom, and he wondered if he could pull up his black waistcoat, his rekel, over his head and disappear into his shell. He walked out of the bathroom with his waistcoat as high as he could raise it. 

“Meep, meep,” he said to his wife. 

“What?” A perplexed Rebbetzin Edelman asked, covered in her quilted nightgown with her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose.

“I wasn’t sure what sound turtles make.”

How they had laughed until they both sobbed! That was a good night. Toward      the end, there were not many. 

After his undershirt, he put on his tzitzit, the ritual fringes, and then the same white shirt he wore yesterday. “Abba,” his son Avrohom, a rabbi in the yeshiva, asked. “Where are you holding?” Where was he holding? 

Rabbi Edelman took out one of the four identical black suits his wife had bought him off the rack at a Marshalls. He occasionally fondled the pocket and thought about the names of the brands: Bill Blass, Sean John, one suit his wife had delighted to find on sale at Marshalls with the name Hickey Freeman. 

Rachel was the root cause of all this unhealthy thought. Not Chas V’shalom, God forbid, because of anything she did; while she and Yeruchmiel were still not married, Rachel acted like all the other daughters-in-law and cleaned out the house and helped out, cooking meals that sat uneaten in Tupperware containers in the refrigerator. But one day, shortly after the shiva, she gave him several cards. Less than a dozen, perhaps ten. At first, he was perplexed. I found them in the drawer, she explained. Each card was identical: simple pastel white and red flowers on the front flap with the words “May our anniversary be full of loving moments that fill our hearts with lovely memories,” and his name signed under that with a different year of the Hebrew calendar. 

It took him a few moments to understand. Each year, before their anniversary, Rabbi Edelman took off during lunch and asked one of the yeshiva students to drive him to a CVS where he browsed the aisles for a card. He always found a card quickly that said exactly what he wanted; he didn’t realize that each year, they had been the same card. How she smiled when he gave her the card! She said, “You always give me wonderful cards.” And his duty done, he returned to the yeshiva. But what if the smile was fake? What if he looked at the lines around her eyes instead of her mouth? He took a few moments with the cards, his shoulders heaved, and he would have sobbed had he been alone. Rachel placed her hand on his shoulder. Being touched by a woman not directly related to you was not proper, but her hand on his shoulder felt right.

To himself, he admitted: he was not a perfect husband.

He looked in her closet. All her clothing was gone. The long black dresses, the long-sleeved shirts, the ankle-length skirts. This wasn’t unexpected, but the emptiness made him suck in his breath with a gasp. What if, like the smile that wasn’t a smile, the closet had been empty all this time? 

One of their first arguments in decades occurred when her doctor suggested an experimental treatment. It wouldn’t cure the cancer, but could give her a few more months. The doctor said that the chances of success were slim, and it was painful. Rabbi Edelman thought, of course, every chance at life was worth it. When things are difficult, it’s a test from Hashem, he told his students innumerable times. You push through. His wife surprised him then in the nondescript office: “No.” Later as they talked, he said that giving up was a sin. Her face was pained but she was adamant. His wife’s recalcitrance made him wish he could call his own rabbi for advice, but his rabbi was long dead. 

Who was that young boy that one of his sons had at his house the other week? He was a ba’al teshuva, a returnee to the faith, who became religious through Rabbi Edelman’s youth organization Ignite. All of religious Judaism was new to him, but he seemed to take it all in. He gave a dvar Torah at the table. Now, I don’t understand, the boy began, we’re reading the Tanakh and there are miracles happening every single day to the Jewish people when they serve Hashem. But when they serve idols, then bad things happen. So why did they keep on serving idols? 

It was a basic and obvious question. The answer was that the yetzer hora, the evil inclination, was so strong that it made even the most obvious thing opaque. 

“Right, so the evil inclination,” the boy said. He righted his kippah, which was faintly emblazoned with the name of a sports team. “But what does that mean? So I was reading this news article and there’s this kind of fungi called the zombie-ant fungus and scientists observed this fungus in the wild. You have this ant and this ant is totally doing normal ant-like things, like foraging and building and hanging out with the other ants. Until he gets this fungus and then he’s totally different. He wanders away from the nest and attaches himself to a leaf and doesn’t let go even after he starves to death. Then, the fungus sprouts. And I know this isn’t a traditional divrei Torah, but I couldn’t help thinking that worshipping idols must have been something like that. A kind of fungus that infects you. Where you can’t control your actions, and you are suddenly not yourself.” 

Suddenly not yourself. A fungus? That’s what Rabbi Edelman felt this morning. Like he wasn’t in control of himself. Rabbi Edelman wanted something to remind him of his wife, something of hers to say that she had been there. He took the stairs down to the first floor of the house and walked past the kitchen and the dining room, both dusty from underuse. Where was their laundry machine? He had never done the laundry in all their years of marriage. It must be in the basement! He opened the white door and took the carpeted stairs down. Large crickets scurried out of his way. Had they always been there? Had his wife always needed to watch her step? Was this another thing his wife never told him? 

In the dim light of the basement, he saw children’s toys: an old red and yellow cab, a small slide, Legos. The useless debris of their lives. In the corner he made out a white washing machine and dryer. He saw something black under the washing machine. He pulled himself down to the floor and felt it: lacy. It might be a pair of her underwear. He tried pulling on it, but it was stuck. He grasped the bottom of the washing machine and prepared to lift. Like Samson grasping the pillars on the Philistines, he pushed up.

But he was no Samson. The washing machine remained where it was and instead he toppled to the floor. As he collapsed in the basement, his final thoughts were a prayer, not to live more, but for God to whisper to him that the Rebbetzin had been happy, that her smile had not been forced, and that many years ago, when she glanced at him across the dinner table, past the plastic lilies that never wilted, her eyes had seen a future with him and that she accepted him for the loving husband he never could become.

Opening image: Vectonauta on Freepik