Hubris and Hemlock

Chapter 8: Naamah

So now she would be Naamah everywhere and to everyone.

"Change your name, change your Mazal" they said.  Actually not so different from her Cherokee ancestors habit of changing names.

Heck, even my African-American great grandfather had multiple names.

Now it was time to put that saying to the test. She was going to get off of her jumpy little touchas and work on making this name change start changing her luck. Right now. But being Naamah didn't have to mean being only sweet, comforting and syrupy to everyone. No welcome mats on her back anymore.

But who was Naamah, anyway? "Ve achot Tuval-cain, Naamah." So her namesake was apparently the sister of the guy who invented musical instruments? The first guy to play music, in that case. Supposedly the wife of Noah, also a comforter, at least in theory. Still, as identities go, that didn't give her much to go on.

How does one go about figuring who she is? How to be really Jewish? Put a tichle on her head and wear long skirts? Learn Yiddish? At least that might make Mike's family happier with her, maybe. But the over-covering would certainly not go over well. Popping out grandkids on the other hand would probably be received pretty well, though she was still not ready to perpetrate that act of treason on the world.

Which reminded her that she had not been to the mikveh since the day before her wedding. Even that had been a superfluity to Mike, but his mother had insisted on it. It was a tradition that had to be observed, and without admitting it, Naamah had also been glad to go to the mikveh. The only other time she had been to the ritual bathhouse was for her conversion ceremony. She did not like the feeling of being a phony, having only gone to the place where married women went every month, just to become part of the group when others got to go for more legitimate reasons, or at least so it felt to Naamah.

She understood somewhere in a logical part of her mind that this feeling of not belonging had nothing to do with the mikveh, yet the feeling refused to go away. She grimaced, trying to brush aside the thought that Mike may have been right regarding his mother. Naamah's feeling of not being accepted probably was just her imagination. Maybe learning Yiddish would bring her closer to the family. Someone said that there was a new class starting up at the Glen Avenue shul, being taught by a lady Torah teacher, on the Bereshit commentaries of Nechamah Leibowitz. Apparently Leibowitz was popular with women in the Baal Tshuvah. Naamah decided it was time to start her life as a Baalat Teshuvah, returning to the principles she had agreed to accept, this time more completely and studiously. If a person not born Jewish could return to being Jewish, that was.  She would see.

-Chag Sameach.

She tried the usual Hebrew holiday greeting, wondering how it would be taken by the man whose long curls were still dancing from side to side, so suddenly had he stopped when he saw her. This was the shul closest to her house, rather than Glen Avenue, which was a long walk when you'd been up studying all night. She also wanted to satisfy her curiousity about the frum shul that she had never been to, just around the corner from her house.

-Gut Yon Tif.

The look of concerned suspicion from the man in the doorway was mitigated by his smile when she returned his Yiddish greeting with her own "Good Yom Tov" in a mixture of English and Yiddish that showed her understanding, but non origin. She wondered if his insistence on Yiddish was merely cultural habit, or also mild hostility toward the adoption of Israeli Hebrew by the Reform movement and some Conservative Movement Jews.

Given his attentive searching of her face, he might also have assumed that she was Sephardic, but have been too polite to ask.

A new melody, rising and falling, sounded from the closed doors: "ushemo echad."