The Length of Our Days

Avigayil Finkelstein

Autumn had arrived late and disappeared early.

The leaves had already fallen, and the branches were bare on the roadside; everything was bleak and brown and blustery. It was only November, and the air already smelled of winter.

Everything ends, the landscape seemed to say. Everything has already ended, he reminded it. And everything has just begun. 

Eli had learned to travel light. He’d switched exclusively to e-books the year he’d traveled the world as a digital nomad (a term his sister assured him was exceptionally pretentious). The slim, slightly battered volume in his backpack was an exception. It was stamped crookedly with a name that was not his own. Between the cover and the title page lay a note scrawled on a scrap of looseleaf paper, in a handwriting that was also not his own.

God owns the world and all within it. In the possession of Yitzy Segal.

The spine was torn in one corner, and he could not recall if he had received it like that or if the damage had happened in his own possession.

**

The book in question had only resurfaced because his parents were downsizing and needed him to clear out his childhood bedroom.

Just throw it all away, he’d been tempted to tell them. There’s nothing I need there anymore. But it wouldn’t have been fair to leave the labor of it to them, so he showed up with a couple of garbage bags and a cardboard box to dismantle the neglected shrine to the boy he had once been.

You would think he had been about twelve the last time he lived here, but in truth he simply hadn’t cared enough about the room’s décor to replace the basketball-themed lamps or the David Wright bobbleheads.

There wasn’t much to sort through: old report cards in a box under his bed, tatty sneakers in the closet, dog-eared science fiction books he’d quickly consigned (though not without a pang of nostalgia) to the donation pile, bare shelves that once housed the sefarim he’d handed over years ago to his brother.

But as he reached up to scoop an armful of books and toss them into the donation box, he saw—between the shabby paperback covers and split spines—taller and slimmer than the other volumes, its cover embossed faux leather stamped with Hebrew letters—something that was not his to donate.

It had waited patiently for eight years between some truly awful Star Wars novel and a virtually shredded copy of I, Robot until the day that it would be returned to its rightful owner.

**

Yitzy pulled the book from the middle of a stack lying on the table.

“I was thinking about your question the other day. He has something interesting to say about it; I bookmarked it for you. Get it back to me whenever.”

“I’m leaving for the summer tomorrow.”

“Okay, then you can return it to me during the Fall semester.”

**

He would not have chosen Yitzy as a chavrusa himself. He’d switched into the shiur mid-year, and everyone was already paired up. He didn’t mind learning solo—sometimes he preferred it—and he would have been content to wait it out had Rabbi Lowenstein not gotten involved. He did not usually involve himself in chavrusa pairings, so when he encouraged Eli to learn with Yitzy, with his seemingly pseudo-yeshivish habits, turns of phrase, and mode of dress, he couldn’t help wondering if there was a reason for it, if the rabbi sensed something in Eli, some less-than-perfect devotion, and was trying to set him back on the straight and narrow path.

Because, the truth of it was, he had been drifting since he returned from yeshiva in Israel. He would be sitting in the study hall, just at the edge of a breakthrough, some Talmudic concept suddenly clear in front of his eyes, he would feel the adrenaline of discovery thrilling through him, and then as it drained something would shift, and he would wonder why he was sitting there dissecting the arguments of sixth century rabbis. Or he would be standing after silent prayer, and everything was quiet and still, and he could hear but the barest whispering and the see just the slightest swaying, and he would see, in some people’s faces, something private and sacred, something that wasn’t usually there, and their devotion was suddenly foreign to him.

He was quiet, clean-cut and disciplined; he even enjoyed learning. He had some unorthodox opinions, he had some questions, but who didn’t? And it was nothing pressing; there was nothing in particular that shook his faith. But still he couldn’t shake this sense he had of looking at familiar practices, and finding them suddenly strange in his eyes.

He did not know, at the time, about Yitzy’s own strange and twisting path to Rabbi Lowenstein’s shiur. It did not occur to him, at the time, that the institution that to him heralded the most vanilla of centrism could represent borderline heresy to others, and he did not realize that Rabbi Lowenstein had paired the two of them not because he could sense some inner rot in Eli, but because he accepted his outward facade of stability and normalcy.

So at the time, the suggestion had spooked him, and then he’d written that decidedly uncharitable piece about Rabbi Lowenstein in the student newspaper. That should have closed off his relationship with the rabbi forever, but instead it kickstarted it.

Yitzy turned out to be a surprisingly well-matched chavrusa, and it was through him that he developed a grudging respect for Rabbi Lowenstein, though he had been determined (he still could not entirely say why) to be unimpressed with the man.

**

Eli liked public transit.

 He’d tried explaining, more than once, how public transit reflected the soul of a city, how he delighted in the instincts he’d developed from travel, like the way you could tell which direction the train was coming from based on the direction people faced on the platform.

He’d enjoyed exploring the transportation options in every city in every country he had traveled to. Some of his best pieces had been born of discussions and observations from train rides in Europe and overnight buses in Thailand.

He had yet to meet anyone who was impressed with his excitement, but, suburban boy that he was, he embraced public transit with an immigrant’s enthusiasm.

So he was content to sit and wait for his stop, watching idly out the window even in these semi-familiar roads, observing the landscape and reading text off the side of passing trucks.

The bus approaching from the opposite direction belonged to the same bus company as the one he was on. As it approached, he realized, with a slight jolt, that it was the same number bus as well. There was something slightly surreal about it, like viewing an alternate version of his own bus, and he half-expected to see a version of himself through the dirty windows as the other bus lumbered past, wheels spraying water droplets, but instead it was — unexpectedly — empty.

**

Eli had a complicated relationship with his past, which he wore, in turns, as a mark of shame and a badge of honor. In truth, there were two pasts he had to contend with: the one he had experienced and the one that people invented for him, woven from a patchwork of a dozen newspaper articles, films, and memoirs—the past that made him an exotic curiosity and a lightning rod for prying questions, but which had been, above all, ordinary.

It was true that there had been no greasy diner meals, no beers in the backs of trucks, no awkward prom photos or Friday night football games. Instead there had been canned beans for the road, Hebrew prayers from a pocket-sized prayer book… and little league and basketball practice, robotics club and APs, proficiency in Aramaic and Hebrew and a pre-law degree that he didn’t use. He’d lasted one year in Rabbi Lowenstein’s shiur before transferring colleges and telling himself he’d leave that world behind forever.

He’d had a few names, too, cycling back and forth between EE-lie and EH-lee as he remade himself anew as a different person, sometimes trying to pretend he had always been normal, at other times his whole identity hinging on the yeshiva boy he had once been.

Back when he was in yeshiva in Israel, there had been a guy in his year who could be found, during mealtimes, with a book of Bialik’s poetry. It was a paperback volume with a cracked spine, the cover reattached with tape, that he had either read to death or picked up second-hand. He said it gave him insight into the Volozhin experience.

Eli had asked him once: What did Bialik have to tell him about the yeshiva experience? Wasn’t he living it?

“Perspective,” he’d said with a grin. “And nostalgia. You can’t be nostalgic for something you’re still experiencing.”

The first semester after he’d transferred, Eli had picked up a volume of Bialik’s poetry, but it hadn’t really spoken to him.

**

Eli stood in front of Rabbi Lowenstein’s door. The last time he had been there he’d come to apologize. He’d never actually intended to ask the rabbi’s advice. He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask him—every time he thought too hard about it all his specific questions flew out of his mind and left behind just a vague sense of uneasiness. But when he was around people who cared about it all, who really believed in it all, then he did, too—or he wanted to tear his hair out at their willful blindness. It was what made being Yitzy’s chavrusa both infuriating and elating.

He knocked, and the rabbi beckoned him inside. He was sitting at his desk, an open book in front of him, making small marks in the margins and jotting down notes on a piece of paper. When Eli walked in he smiled.

“It was an unexpected privilege for us all that you joined us for Shabbos.”

“That’s why I came, actually. I… uh… wanted to thank Rebbe for his answer Friday night. It was… helpful.”

“I’m glad.”

“Actually.” He paused. “A follow-up…” He could think of nothing. “Why does it… why does it matter? All of it?” He spread his hands wide, gesturing at the rabbi’s shelves, full to bursting with codes of Jewish law and compendia of Jewish thought. “Everything we do, can it really all matter?”

The rabbi looked surprised, like it wasn’t the question he expected. He leaned forward. “It matters because… if all this…” he waved his hands towards the same shelves. “If all this is truly the will of God… then there is nothing—there can be nothing—that is more important. Maybe nothing that could matter at all.”

He kept speaking, and Eli could not help but think that he had not been entirely wrong in that newspaper article. Perhaps “archaic” had been the wrong word. No, the rabbi was a modern man. His education, ironically, had been more or less the same as Eli’s, though a fair few decades apart. But there was something… ancient in him—some strange fire that burned behind his eyes, hiding behind the sleekness of his glasses and the trimness of his beard, behind a self-deprecating smile and a tendency to reference classic Russian literature. Beneath that careful, controlled intellectualism was some restrained form of the delirious Hasidic spiritualism that was supposed to be so alien to the rabbi. Eli wondered if that flame reflected in his own eyes.

For a while it had been enough, that reflected flame, enough to keep him warm, to fuel his religious devotion for another year, but it had not been enough to kindle a flame of his own. People asked him why he left, and they always expected a moment of revelation, or anti-revelation, but instead there had been just a slow, sad unraveling.

**

In the last week of his partnership with Yitzy, they had been discussing the theoretical underpinnings of despair and its relationship with lost objects.

When does an item truly pass out of your possession? When you despair of finding it. But what if you give up on it and then discover it’s been in your house all along? Alternatively, can you still own an item that’s lost in the depths of the sea, so long as you have every confidence in its return?

In other words, when did an item go from being simply misplaced to truly lost?

“I saw an interesting comment about that recently.” Yitzy tapped his fingers against the tabletop. “I’m not entirely sure where. I’ll check a few sefarim over the weekend and bring it over.”

**

It was dark when he stepped off the bus.

Yitzy’s apartment door was adorned with a welcome mat, a potted plant, an artsy-looking mezuzah, and a wooden plaque that said “Segal Family” in Hebrew.

Eli knocked firmly, unexpected anticipation pooling in his gut as the door opened, first a crack, and then wider, the light from behind doing little to illuminate the familiar face that appeared in front of him.

Yitzy did not look surprised. This was not a surprise visit, though an unexpected knock on the door would have been much more dramatic.

He hadn’t thought that people changed much in appearance at their age, but eight years will show on anyone’s face when it appears on it all at once. Yitzy had also grown a beard, and there was a child clinging to his leg, trailing a blanket and a ragged-looking stuffed toy. Eli had missed Yitzy’s wedding, though his parents had received an invitation on his behalf.

A smile split his face. “Eli! Wow, come in, it’s great to see you after all this time.”

I didn’t give up on you after all this time is what Eli heard, so to forestall any wrong assumptions, he blurted out, “I’m not a ba’al teshuvah.”

I’m not here to repent; I just stopped by to return a book.

Yitzy paused, as if considering his words. But he just said, “I know. I read your articles.” He beckoned him over to a table and poured two glasses of water. “I liked the one about self-publishing. I thought about sending you an email about it but, well, you know, I didn’t.”

Eli knew why. Because it was weird to reach out after so long. Because Eli had left their world and hadn’t looked back. Or maybe he’d been looking back all along, walking awkwardly through life with his neck craned over his shoulder.

Even now, they left all their unsaid questions between them. Why did you leave, Yitzy did not ask. And why bother to show up now?

And Eli did not ask, Do you find meaning in this life? Could I have?

Instead he spoke about his travels and his writing and asked about Yitzy’s children. There were two of them, and he was obviously very proud of them despite trying not to be overly effusive. They even reminisced a little about their old yeshiva days, carefully dancing around Eli’s abrupt departure.

“You know,” Yitzy said. “You’re still the best chavrusa I ever had.”

Eli snorted. “I dread to think what your others have been like.”

He checked his watch surreptitiously. Time had passed surprisingly quickly. If he didn’t head out soon, he would miss the last bus out.

“Actually, the real reason I came was to return this.” He handed the book to Yitzy. “I’m sorry I didn’t return it earlier. It was at my parents’ house all this time.”

Yitzy’s eyebrows rose. He spun the book around on the table, sliding it back towards Eli.

“It’s not mine.”

Eli flipped the front cover open. “It has your name on it. You lent it to me eight years ago, remember? We were learning ye’ush at the time.”

Yitzy nodded. “It was mine, eight years ago. But I gave up on it. It became yours ages ago. Keep it.”

“What for? It’s been gathering dust at my parents’ all these years.”

Yitzy shrugged. “You can donate it… throw it out if you must. But it’s not mine anymore.”

**

Eli waited underneath the bus stop’s dripping overhang, pacing for warmth, watching the headlights streaming past. His bus was delayed, and his phone battery was running low, so he couldn’t use it to read. He reached into his backpack, laughing quietly to himself, and cracked open the slim Hebrew book, slowly parsing paragraphs by the dim glow of the streetlamps. It was not as if he had anything better to do.