When We're Born We Forget Everything

The Garden of Earthly Delights

My grandfather shortened his last name to sound less Jewish, but really, I should have been born Alicia Jo Rabino­witz. Rabinowitz: son of the rabbi. Somewhere in my past there was an old bearded man, probably more than one, and likely some wise women too. Culture bearers, teachers of the tradition. But that was a long time ago.

There are two ways to look at my story.

You could say I was a white American girl growing up in late twentieth-­century secular suburbia, sensing a mystery pulsing beneath the sameness of number two pencils, plastic hairbrushes, school buses with their green vinyl seats. In this story, I left everything I knew to search for meaning; I found it in an ancient tradition; and then I had to decide how to come back and live with what I’d learned.

Or you could say I was a Jewish girl born in the Diaspora, in the Hebrew year 5737, whose ancestors improbably passed the traditions on from generation to generation for thousands of years until they reached me, so that I carried within myself the barest forms of ritual (a silver cup, grape juice, the Shema prayer), the faintest Hebrew letters, hints of almost-­forgotten languages. In this story, I returned to the faint flame burning inside me.

Either way: God was nowhere in my childhood, but mystery was everywhere.



It was the 1980s. Our dining room was cozy: a wooden hutch, plates with blue and red flowers, walls painted peach pink. Across from my seat at the table hung a reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s ornate painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. I stared at it every night during dinner: a packed dreamscape of bodies and spires, pleasure and torture; a moss-­green and mahogany pano­rama of mortal and Divine.

My father came in the front door from the teaching hospital, where he was a psychiatrist specializing in Alzheimer’s, depression, and dementia. He put down his dark leather briefcase, loosened his bow tie, hung up his jacket, and sat down as my mother called, “Dinnertime!” to me and my two younger sisters.

My mother, her hands in quilted mitts, carried a Pyrex dish of steaming lasagna from the oven. White strands were just beginning to appear in her short black hair. Between bites of buttered peas, we laughed, teased each other, and reported on our days.

My father loved his work, and he would often tell us stories about memory. We knew about Phineas Gage, the railway worker who miraculously survived when a tamping spike blew through his brain and out his head in 1848, but who was left with a greatly changed personality and severe memory loss. (“Gage was no longer Gage,” a friend of his reportedly said.) We knew about H.M., who lost his short-­term memory on an operating table in 1953, when a surgeon removed both of his hippocampi in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. H.M is still alive, my father said, they use his initials to protect his privacy. They study him at MIT. He shook his head. It’s tragic, but it’s also a great service to the medical profession. He doesn’t know whether his parents are alive or dead, but everyone says he’s a very sweet man.

Questions were a currency of love in our house. My sisters and I listened intently to my father’s mini-­lectures; the more insightful our questions, the more delighted he grew. That’s a very good point, he would say. And that’s exactly why every experiment needs a control. His dark eyebrows rose as if pulled by strings, his voice creeping up in volume, louder and louder.

And every time I looked up, The Garden of Earthly Delights pointed me again toward that mystery, that nameless power I sensed just outside the walls of our cozy house. No one had spoken directly of this power, yet I felt it: the cold black river of night; dreamlike bird-­monsters; death, loss, the exquisite terror of knowing everything I loved would end.

I sat back and let the words blur into sounds as my family talked around me. Butter melting on peas, love reverberating in the room, the enigma of the human brain, the way questions could bind us together. We had everything we needed, so why did I feel a hole at the center of it all?

For me, this mystery was a form of loneliness.



Some of my friends’ families said grace before dinner: Jesus, thank you for this food. I found this exotic and uncomfortable, since my family just sat down and ate. But when it came to the holidays, I knew that we were the exotic ones, our family menorah on the mantel a weak substitute for the glowing Christmas tree that filled every other window on the block.

Growing up Jewish in an almost entirely Christian suburb meant that Jesus was palpable, but mysterious—­the ruler of an adjacent, vaguely threatening empire, under whose auspices we lived. God was less foreign, since we heard about Him (always “Him”) the few times a year we went to synagogue. But even God was blurry: a great-­great-­grandfather whose name we couldn’t quite remember, who spoke a language we didn’t understand, probably believed the earth was flat, and wouldn’t approve of the way we lived.

God was indistinct to me, but mystery was clear; it surrounded me on all sides. In the slice removed from H.M.’s brain that cured his seizures but left him unable to form new memories, and in the seventeen-­year cicadas that emerged that spring from their tunnels in the ground, shedding their shrimplike shells across the concrete sidewalks. Mystery lived in our small, sloped backyard, its built-­long-­before-­we-­moved-­here steps of mica and falling-­down stone walls barely visible beneath spreading ivy and pachysandra. The impossible sweetness of coming together in that dining room together night after night, year after year, the peacock-­feather fan hanging from the window frame, the doorbell that rang sympathetically when my dad raised his voice in excitement—­as if there were a ghost in the room.

When I was ten, I made up my own definition for God. God is everything science has not solved yet, I wrote in my notebook. We were not deluded believers in some father figure; we were modern people and we put our faith in science. Yes, I felt mystery acutely, but God and mystery were two different things: so I believed, with the unquestioning faith of a child.

But every childhood ends.

According to tradition, Abraham went forth from the land of his birth to forge a new relationship with the Divine. He smashed the idols of his father, and in the wake of that destruction he began at last to experience God as One. And according to tradition, when Abraham grew up and became a father himself, that same God instructed him to prove his allegiance by binding his own son to be sacrificed on the mountain.

I wonder if Isaac, in that moment, questioned the faith of his father, too. As I hope my children question mine.