The Sound of a Miracle
Sam Resnick
Rachel Rosencrantz, daughter of Sarah Rosencrantz, champion challah braider, and Ruben Rosencrantz, esteemed rabbi, learned one irrefutable fact about herself two hours into her Bat Mitzvah:
She was a bad Jew.
Rachel had long harbored a lingering suspicion, a whisper in her blood, let’s say, that perhaps she was failing in some way in her duties as the faithful and obedient child of the Rosencrantzes of New York, Iowa (not to be mistaken with the uppity Rosencrantzes of New York, New York, nor the garish ones of New York, Florida). But whenever these feelings caught in her throat, she would cough them out like a cold she could recover from, if only she had a few days rest or some medicine.
By all appearances, Rachel was an excellent Jew. Her nose curved towards Israel, like any budding Zionist. Her thick, black hair sprung straight from her skull, towards God. Not that anyone saw her hair, since her mother braided it into two challah loaves every morning so tightly that her hairline, at age seven, began to recede. Much later in life, when Rachel had a daughter of her own, she would tell her that she didn’t know how to braid. She considered this a kindness. Every Saturday morning at nine, Rachel attended Rabbi Moshe’s “Hebrew School for Distinguished Young Women.” There, she chatted in Yiddish with the other Jewish girls of New York, Iowa, of which there were eight, the uvular ch sounds flowing from her throat like honey. She learned to make Gefilte fish, grinding the white flesh into hundreds of small, grey balls that she proudly took home for Shabbat every Friday. And she prayed. She prayed in the morning, while she was brushing her teeth, the toothpaste bubbling out of her mouth she was praying so hard. She prayed in the afternoon, on her way home from school, when the flatlands she wandered felt like desert sands. And at night, softly, from the warmth of her comforter.
But the moment Rachel stepped up to the bimah to read from the ancient script, the most holy of rituals in the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, she knew she was lost. Her mother and father smiled at her from the front section of the synagogue. Behind them sat various Rosencrantzes, relatives Rachel had only ever met on the occasion of her birth and thus only recognized from photos. And behind them, with backs straight, sat the girls from her Hebrew class, all of them paying close attention, for Rachel, the oldest, was the first of them to have a Bat Mitzvah. Rachel stared at all of these people, gathered here, today, for her, and she couldn’t speak. After a couple of minutes, the Rabbi cleared his throat and whispered to her from the side of his mouth.
“Rachel? Are you alright?”
Not even to this simple question could Rachel respond. It wasn’t that she couldn’t read the Hebrew on the scroll. She could. Nor was she frightened of performing. Rachel was a loud child and a louder teenager—she was not scared of having an audience. No, the problem was that Rachel has been struck by a sudden, fervent desire to laugh. She clenched her cheeks so hard that her jaw muscles started to burn, her face collapsing into concavity like a skeleton. She desperately tried to distract herself. She thought of last winter, when she was hospitalized for all eight days of Chanukah with the flu. She missed the party at the Finkel’s, missed the dreidel playing and the sizzling latkes and the gift-giving, the big reveal of who had whom for their annual game of Mysterious Moses.
Still, Rachel could feel the laughter expand more and more in the moist heat of her panicking mouth. It ballooned in her cheeks so that in this very moment, the most important moment in a young Jewish girl’s life (besides her wedding, of course), Rachel Rosencrantz
resembled a chipmunk who had bitten off more than she could chew. The laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep and traitorous within her, an appendix perhaps. Or her coccyx. Somewhere evolution had forgotten until right now, when Rachel’s own body rallied in rebellion.
She tried to raise her hands to cover her mouth, as if she was about to collapse into an attack of coughing, but still, the laughter rose. To the devout in the audience, of which there were many, it looked as if Rachel was trembling at the bimah under the weight of some unseen power, her veins throbbing, her eyes raised towards the heavens. The laughter filled her mouth until the pressure popped her lips open and pushed her hands away, and as it poured out unending, all Rachel could do was watch—horrified and a little bit relieved but above all carried away. In the third row of the audience sat a confused and deaf elderly man, who had wandered into the synagogue thinking it was a church, and upon realizing it wasn’t, decided to stay anyway because the seat was comfortable. In that moment, he decided that the Jews must be the chosen people, the most devout people, if they prayed with the force that this child was praying with, her face red, her pores dripping, her eyes fevered.
The laughter continued, independent of Rachel now, no longer contained even by the synagogue walls. Two miles away, it woke a nest of bats from their diurnal slumber. They dropped to the floor of their nest together, disturbed.
In New York, New York, a man was walking back from the groomer’s when suddenly, his poodle started to whine. Still, the laughter hadn’t stopped.
It grew and it grew, until halfway across the world in the University of Nairobi, a small, porcelain porcupine was knocked off the desk of a student studying an anatomy textbook. The lights started to flicker in his closet as well, and he will use this later as evidence of his
grandmother’s ghost.
And there, in a small synagogue in New York, Iowa, a young Jewish girl prepared to be banished from her cherished community forever, forced to live in disgrace, exiled somewhere far, far away like New York, Florida. The last echoes of laughter had bounced their final bounce off the walls of the synagogue, and they finally quieted down, out of respect. By now, tears were streaming down Rachel’s face—it was too much, too much for this girl—and her mouth had deflated in its emptiness, wet and gasping. A silence settled into the synagogue so profound Rachel could hear the rattling of shaky lungs as everyone sat, breathing but not breaking. Suddenly, a woman in the fifth row—her aunt? Her second cousin?—leapt up from her seat. “Is it a miracle?”
The man next to her repeated: “A miracle?”
And the Rabbi, broken out of his reverie, responded, “Yes! It must be! A miracle!”
He raised his hands in the air, fingers spread and reaching, before turning towards Rachel, who has remained frozen behind the Torah. He wrapped a prayer shawl around her shoulders. He touched her hair, reverent; he muttered in Hebrew, he closed his eyes and he beat his breast. One-by-one, the spectators in the synagogue, enraptured with this turn of events so unexpected amongst the routine of Bat Mitzvah season, began to chatter in excitement. Some started to chant blessings as well; others merely continued to stare. The Rabbi, who appeared to be possessed himself now, kept speaking.
“Moses, Abraham, Adonai—child, you are a miracle! Oh, holy, holy day. You have been chosen.” He bowed to Rachel, who bowed back, reflexively. “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha`olam.”
And with that, Rachel had completed her Bat Mitzvah. She was now bound to follow the commandments. She was now a Jewish woman.
***
Outside of the synagogue sanctuary, there was a mountain of bagels. Ruben Rosencrantz, who was left in charge of the food for this auspicious day, employed all of the bakers of all the delis in New York. Three months before the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, he sent out a survey to the attending parties, asking for their flavor preferences. Now, the results were in: forty-five onion bagels sat in a perfectly stacked tower on a silver Shabbat platter on a creamy tablecloth. Three chocolate chip bagels formed the top layer, and at the apex sat a solitary sesame bagel. To the right were four saucers of cream-cheese, and two plates of smoked salmon, the pink flesh folded
over itself in neat rows.
The sounds of thirty people popping lactaid pills at once filled the reception area as the congregation rushed out, eager to reach the food first, for miracles were hungry work. Rachel quietly slinked away, momentarily forgotten. She looked for her parents, she needed someone solid, someone who could help her understand. But they didn’t appear to be anywhere in the room. Maybe they were in the bathroom? Or in the kitchens, getting more food? It had been five minutes, and the cream cheese was already running low. Briefly, she wondered if that was now her responsibility, but she was quickly distracted by two women talking at the coffee station behind her.
“I don’t believe it,” said the older of the two. Rachel, out of the corner of her eye, could just make out two clips in the shape of butterflies pinned above the woman’s right ear. “I know—the way she shook at the stand. I’ve never seen anything like it, not in all the
Bat Mitzvahs I’ve attended, not even at those reform synagogues down the river,” the other woman responded. She wore a red dress unusually low-cut for a religious ceremony but artfully covered with a sheer shimmery shawl.
“No, really, I don’t believe it.”
The woman in the red dress leaned closer, exposing the top lace of her bra. “You can’t possibly think—”
“Didn’t you hear about that awful Jewish family in the news? They were kicked out of their synagogue because the father paid a gardener to light a tree on fire during his son’s prayer section. Like an off-brand remake of Moses and the burning bush.”
The women tsked and tittered. “You know, that Sarah Rosencrantz, I always thought there were something strange about her. I swear she cheated in the challah contest.” “Bad blood runs in the family, then. One of their ancestors must have been a convert or something,” She sniffed. “There’s no way they’re pure Jews. And I didn’t even recognize the woman who first started shouting miracle. They probably paid her.”
“Well, they have the Rabbi fooled. The poor man, he’s too trusting.”
The women sidled away, towards the bagel line. Rachel exhaled. She knew, she knew what the women said wasn’t true. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sticky and queasy. What exactly had happened in the synagogue?
She started to move towards the bathroom, but again, she was interrupted. This time, by a purposeful-looking woman dragging a young child behind her.
“How did you do it?” She demanded.
“I-I don’t know what you mean,” Rachel said.
“How did you do it? How did you reach Adonai? Tell me,” the woman said, angry now.
“I’ve been taking Ava,” she pushed the child forward, who whined at this interruption to her iPhone game, “—to every Hebrew class, every Torah reader, but still, nothing.”
“It was just a feeling, I wanted to laugh, and it came over me,” Rachel said.
“Why won’t you tell me?” The woman raised her voice.
“I’m sorry, I don’t-I don’t know what to say.”
“You must think you’re so special, some miracle girl. Just you wait until Ava has her Bat Mitzvah.” At the sound of her name, Ava looked up from her phone. “She’s going to make the whole audience laugh.”
Rachel didn’t respond. How could she? Instead, she backed away towards the bagel line. She hated onion bagels, and the chocolate chip and sesame were all gone. Among the bustling and bumbling of Bat Mitzvah planning, it seemed Ruben Rosencrantz forgot to buy his own daughter’s favorite type: plain.
The cream cheese was, by this point, completely gone as well. Rachel looked up from the saucer, disappointed, to see her parents forging a path through the crowd towards her, with a line of relatives behind them like ducklings.
“There’s our beautiful blessing!” Her father’s voice boomed amongst the perfect acoustics of the synagogue, which had been recently renovated thanks to a sympathetic local potato chip company.
He turned towards her mother. “What did I tell you, Sarah? Didn’t I always tell you our girl is special?”
Oh no, Rachel thought. It wasn’t me, I was just laughing. It wasn’t funny. I don’t know what happened— but it wasn’t funny.
Rachel backed away, bumping into the lady behind her.
Maybe it was a miracle, but if that was God, then I don’t understand.
“Rachel, honey?” Her mother stared at her, confused.
“We need more cream cheese,” She responded.
And with that, Rachel was gone. Out of the reception area, down the stairs, and into the kitchen before anyone could stop her. She tried to look purposeful, like she wasn’t running away, but the truth was that Rachel Rosencrantz, for the first time in her life, wanted to be truly, truly alone.
She opened the fridge, hoping there was cream cheese, or anything she could bring back up upstairs. Instead, sitting on a solitary silver tray, was a lump of dough leftover from yesterday’s Shabbat dinner.
Rachel made a decision, then. She took off her prayer shawl and folded it neatly on the counter. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress. Soon, there was flour everywhere—salting her hair, a halo around her face. The particles hung in the air, suspended. Her hands turned ghostly with it as she separated the dough into three long lines that snaked across the counter. This she knew. This was what she was sure of. Over and under, over and under, she wove the endless dough, until her fingers moved on their own, until her fingers became her mother’s fingers, her mother’s mother’s fingers, and it almost—almost—felt like a prayer.
She was a bad Jew.
Rachel had long harbored a lingering suspicion, a whisper in her blood, let’s say, that perhaps she was failing in some way in her duties as the faithful and obedient child of the Rosencrantzes of New York, Iowa (not to be mistaken with the uppity Rosencrantzes of New York, New York, nor the garish ones of New York, Florida). But whenever these feelings caught in her throat, she would cough them out like a cold she could recover from, if only she had a few days rest or some medicine.
By all appearances, Rachel was an excellent Jew. Her nose curved towards Israel, like any budding Zionist. Her thick, black hair sprung straight from her skull, towards God. Not that anyone saw her hair, since her mother braided it into two challah loaves every morning so tightly that her hairline, at age seven, began to recede. Much later in life, when Rachel had a daughter of her own, she would tell her that she didn’t know how to braid. She considered this a kindness. Every Saturday morning at nine, Rachel attended Rabbi Moshe’s “Hebrew School for Distinguished Young Women.” There, she chatted in Yiddish with the other Jewish girls of New York, Iowa, of which there were eight, the uvular ch sounds flowing from her throat like honey. She learned to make Gefilte fish, grinding the white flesh into hundreds of small, grey balls that she proudly took home for Shabbat every Friday. And she prayed. She prayed in the morning, while she was brushing her teeth, the toothpaste bubbling out of her mouth she was praying so hard. She prayed in the afternoon, on her way home from school, when the flatlands she wandered felt like desert sands. And at night, softly, from the warmth of her comforter.
But the moment Rachel stepped up to the bimah to read from the ancient script, the most holy of rituals in the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, she knew she was lost. Her mother and father smiled at her from the front section of the synagogue. Behind them sat various Rosencrantzes, relatives Rachel had only ever met on the occasion of her birth and thus only recognized from photos. And behind them, with backs straight, sat the girls from her Hebrew class, all of them paying close attention, for Rachel, the oldest, was the first of them to have a Bat Mitzvah. Rachel stared at all of these people, gathered here, today, for her, and she couldn’t speak. After a couple of minutes, the Rabbi cleared his throat and whispered to her from the side of his mouth.
“Rachel? Are you alright?”
Not even to this simple question could Rachel respond. It wasn’t that she couldn’t read the Hebrew on the scroll. She could. Nor was she frightened of performing. Rachel was a loud child and a louder teenager—she was not scared of having an audience. No, the problem was that Rachel has been struck by a sudden, fervent desire to laugh. She clenched her cheeks so hard that her jaw muscles started to burn, her face collapsing into concavity like a skeleton. She desperately tried to distract herself. She thought of last winter, when she was hospitalized for all eight days of Chanukah with the flu. She missed the party at the Finkel’s, missed the dreidel playing and the sizzling latkes and the gift-giving, the big reveal of who had whom for their annual game of Mysterious Moses.
Still, Rachel could feel the laughter expand more and more in the moist heat of her panicking mouth. It ballooned in her cheeks so that in this very moment, the most important moment in a young Jewish girl’s life (besides her wedding, of course), Rachel Rosencrantz
resembled a chipmunk who had bitten off more than she could chew. The laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep and traitorous within her, an appendix perhaps. Or her coccyx. Somewhere evolution had forgotten until right now, when Rachel’s own body rallied in rebellion.
She tried to raise her hands to cover her mouth, as if she was about to collapse into an attack of coughing, but still, the laughter rose. To the devout in the audience, of which there were many, it looked as if Rachel was trembling at the bimah under the weight of some unseen power, her veins throbbing, her eyes raised towards the heavens. The laughter filled her mouth until the pressure popped her lips open and pushed her hands away, and as it poured out unending, all Rachel could do was watch—horrified and a little bit relieved but above all carried away. In the third row of the audience sat a confused and deaf elderly man, who had wandered into the synagogue thinking it was a church, and upon realizing it wasn’t, decided to stay anyway because the seat was comfortable. In that moment, he decided that the Jews must be the chosen people, the most devout people, if they prayed with the force that this child was praying with, her face red, her pores dripping, her eyes fevered.
The laughter continued, independent of Rachel now, no longer contained even by the synagogue walls. Two miles away, it woke a nest of bats from their diurnal slumber. They dropped to the floor of their nest together, disturbed.
In New York, New York, a man was walking back from the groomer’s when suddenly, his poodle started to whine. Still, the laughter hadn’t stopped.
It grew and it grew, until halfway across the world in the University of Nairobi, a small, porcelain porcupine was knocked off the desk of a student studying an anatomy textbook. The lights started to flicker in his closet as well, and he will use this later as evidence of his
grandmother’s ghost.
And there, in a small synagogue in New York, Iowa, a young Jewish girl prepared to be banished from her cherished community forever, forced to live in disgrace, exiled somewhere far, far away like New York, Florida. The last echoes of laughter had bounced their final bounce off the walls of the synagogue, and they finally quieted down, out of respect. By now, tears were streaming down Rachel’s face—it was too much, too much for this girl—and her mouth had deflated in its emptiness, wet and gasping. A silence settled into the synagogue so profound Rachel could hear the rattling of shaky lungs as everyone sat, breathing but not breaking. Suddenly, a woman in the fifth row—her aunt? Her second cousin?—leapt up from her seat. “Is it a miracle?”
The man next to her repeated: “A miracle?”
And the Rabbi, broken out of his reverie, responded, “Yes! It must be! A miracle!”
He raised his hands in the air, fingers spread and reaching, before turning towards Rachel, who has remained frozen behind the Torah. He wrapped a prayer shawl around her shoulders. He touched her hair, reverent; he muttered in Hebrew, he closed his eyes and he beat his breast. One-by-one, the spectators in the synagogue, enraptured with this turn of events so unexpected amongst the routine of Bat Mitzvah season, began to chatter in excitement. Some started to chant blessings as well; others merely continued to stare. The Rabbi, who appeared to be possessed himself now, kept speaking.
“Moses, Abraham, Adonai—child, you are a miracle! Oh, holy, holy day. You have been chosen.” He bowed to Rachel, who bowed back, reflexively. “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha`olam.”
And with that, Rachel had completed her Bat Mitzvah. She was now bound to follow the commandments. She was now a Jewish woman.
***
Outside of the synagogue sanctuary, there was a mountain of bagels. Ruben Rosencrantz, who was left in charge of the food for this auspicious day, employed all of the bakers of all the delis in New York. Three months before the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, he sent out a survey to the attending parties, asking for their flavor preferences. Now, the results were in: forty-five onion bagels sat in a perfectly stacked tower on a silver Shabbat platter on a creamy tablecloth. Three chocolate chip bagels formed the top layer, and at the apex sat a solitary sesame bagel. To the right were four saucers of cream-cheese, and two plates of smoked salmon, the pink flesh folded
over itself in neat rows.
The sounds of thirty people popping lactaid pills at once filled the reception area as the congregation rushed out, eager to reach the food first, for miracles were hungry work. Rachel quietly slinked away, momentarily forgotten. She looked for her parents, she needed someone solid, someone who could help her understand. But they didn’t appear to be anywhere in the room. Maybe they were in the bathroom? Or in the kitchens, getting more food? It had been five minutes, and the cream cheese was already running low. Briefly, she wondered if that was now her responsibility, but she was quickly distracted by two women talking at the coffee station behind her.
“I don’t believe it,” said the older of the two. Rachel, out of the corner of her eye, could just make out two clips in the shape of butterflies pinned above the woman’s right ear. “I know—the way she shook at the stand. I’ve never seen anything like it, not in all the
Bat Mitzvahs I’ve attended, not even at those reform synagogues down the river,” the other woman responded. She wore a red dress unusually low-cut for a religious ceremony but artfully covered with a sheer shimmery shawl.
“No, really, I don’t believe it.”
The woman in the red dress leaned closer, exposing the top lace of her bra. “You can’t possibly think—”
“Didn’t you hear about that awful Jewish family in the news? They were kicked out of their synagogue because the father paid a gardener to light a tree on fire during his son’s prayer section. Like an off-brand remake of Moses and the burning bush.”
The women tsked and tittered. “You know, that Sarah Rosencrantz, I always thought there were something strange about her. I swear she cheated in the challah contest.” “Bad blood runs in the family, then. One of their ancestors must have been a convert or something,” She sniffed. “There’s no way they’re pure Jews. And I didn’t even recognize the woman who first started shouting miracle. They probably paid her.”
“Well, they have the Rabbi fooled. The poor man, he’s too trusting.”
The women sidled away, towards the bagel line. Rachel exhaled. She knew, she knew what the women said wasn’t true. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sticky and queasy. What exactly had happened in the synagogue?
She started to move towards the bathroom, but again, she was interrupted. This time, by a purposeful-looking woman dragging a young child behind her.
“How did you do it?” She demanded.
“I-I don’t know what you mean,” Rachel said.
“How did you do it? How did you reach Adonai? Tell me,” the woman said, angry now.
“I’ve been taking Ava,” she pushed the child forward, who whined at this interruption to her iPhone game, “—to every Hebrew class, every Torah reader, but still, nothing.”
“It was just a feeling, I wanted to laugh, and it came over me,” Rachel said.
“Why won’t you tell me?” The woman raised her voice.
“I’m sorry, I don’t-I don’t know what to say.”
“You must think you’re so special, some miracle girl. Just you wait until Ava has her Bat Mitzvah.” At the sound of her name, Ava looked up from her phone. “She’s going to make the whole audience laugh.”
Rachel didn’t respond. How could she? Instead, she backed away towards the bagel line. She hated onion bagels, and the chocolate chip and sesame were all gone. Among the bustling and bumbling of Bat Mitzvah planning, it seemed Ruben Rosencrantz forgot to buy his own daughter’s favorite type: plain.
The cream cheese was, by this point, completely gone as well. Rachel looked up from the saucer, disappointed, to see her parents forging a path through the crowd towards her, with a line of relatives behind them like ducklings.
“There’s our beautiful blessing!” Her father’s voice boomed amongst the perfect acoustics of the synagogue, which had been recently renovated thanks to a sympathetic local potato chip company.
He turned towards her mother. “What did I tell you, Sarah? Didn’t I always tell you our girl is special?”
Oh no, Rachel thought. It wasn’t me, I was just laughing. It wasn’t funny. I don’t know what happened— but it wasn’t funny.
Rachel backed away, bumping into the lady behind her.
Maybe it was a miracle, but if that was God, then I don’t understand.
“Rachel, honey?” Her mother stared at her, confused.
“We need more cream cheese,” She responded.
And with that, Rachel was gone. Out of the reception area, down the stairs, and into the kitchen before anyone could stop her. She tried to look purposeful, like she wasn’t running away, but the truth was that Rachel Rosencrantz, for the first time in her life, wanted to be truly, truly alone.
She opened the fridge, hoping there was cream cheese, or anything she could bring back up upstairs. Instead, sitting on a solitary silver tray, was a lump of dough leftover from yesterday’s Shabbat dinner.
Rachel made a decision, then. She took off her prayer shawl and folded it neatly on the counter. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress. Soon, there was flour everywhere—salting her hair, a halo around her face. The particles hung in the air, suspended. Her hands turned ghostly with it as she separated the dough into three long lines that snaked across the counter. This she knew. This was what she was sure of. Over and under, over and under, she wove the endless dough, until her fingers moved on their own, until her fingers became her mother’s fingers, her mother’s mother’s fingers, and it almost—almost—felt like a prayer.