(Excerpted from Tfutza Publications’ upcoming
book, World in Lockdown by Chaya Sara Ben Shachar)
“Felicidades,
Senora! Es un nino.”
Un nino. A boy!
Mazal tov!
A boy – a bris.
But
My
heart pumped a strange rhythm. A rhythm that hadn’t been present when my
previous children had been born. This was a beat of apprehension, of fear of
the unknown.
What
would my precious new boy’s bris look
like with the entire country under lock and key? People weren’t venturing out
of their homes, either due to fear of the Coronavirus, or fear of the
government’s strict fines and penalties. What would a bris look like under such circumstances?
“Senora
Chaya, the baby is slightly jaundiced. We’re whisking him away to the nursery
for phototherapy.”
I
touched my baby’s son’s nose, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and handed him
over to the nurse so that his first phototherapy session could begin. Jaundice
and the accompanying treatment sessions in a special incubator under a strong
light wasn’t new to me. Two of my older children had been born with jaundice as
well.
What
was new to me was dealing with a brand-new baby in a world that gone awry – and
a baby boy, no less. What would the next week portend? How would we get the bris ready under these circumstances? And
how would we tell Abuelo that he wouldn’t be able to act as sandak for his new grandson?
Weeks
earlier already, Yair and I had told Abuelo that should our new baby be a boy
we’d be most honored to have him act as the sandak.
During the brisim of our previous two
sons, Yair’s father and my father had been sandak.
Now it should have been Abuelo’s turn.
But Abuelo
was over 70 years old. It was dangerous for him to leave the house under the
circumstances.
“Maybe
you can hold the bris at Abuelo’s
house,” my mother suggested gently over the phone after I tearfully told her
about my dilemma. “That way Abuelo won’t have to leave the house and he’ll
still be able to hold the baby and be the sandak.”
A bris at Abuelo’s house?
I
discussed the notion with Yair and we both agreed that we’d have to let it go.
The virus was proving to be too contagious and too deadly for us to be able to
hold the bris in Abuelo’s home in
good conscience. Abuelo was simply too old for us to put at risk in such a
manner.
The bris would have to take place at our
home with our Yael Chana, Yisroel Osher, and Zusha Arye Leib in attendance.
Aside from the mohel they’d be our
only “guests.”
* * *
The days at Hospital Italiano
de Buenos Aires passed by slowly. Due to the baby’s high bilirubin numbers, our
stay there lasted three days instead of two. Family members and friends called
to wish me well, and the conversations were punctured with talk about “What
will be? How are you going to manage to pull a bris together without a hall or a caterer?”
Abuelo was sad to
learn about our choiceless decision not to have him act sandak at our new son’s bris.
“Im yirtzeh Hashem, there will be
more opportunities for me after this one,” Abuelo told me with aplomb over the
phone. But there was no mistaking the sadness in his voice.
The strictly
enforced lockdowns weren’t easy for anyone in
On Thursday
morning the nurses announced that the baby was healthy enough to be released. “His
bilirubin numbers are still slightly elevated,” the nurses reminded me as they
handed me his discharge papers. “Which means that you’ll have to hold him next
to a well-lit window twice a day for 10 minutes. But if you do that he should
be fine.”
It was time to
leave the hospital. My brother Yossi was waiting for me outside in his car. He
waited behind the wheel with obvious discomfort, maintaining a distance of six
feet as I strapped the baby into the car seat. “Holla,” he greeted me. “Mazal tov!”
I smiled and
settled down beside the baby. It was strange to ride along with my brother with
both of our faces covered with masks, but stranger still was the utter
lifelessness in the streets beyond the car window. The Guardia Vieja was almost completely devoid of people.
Yossi rode up to
my building and as I stepped out of the car and entered the elevator I made
sure to keep my arm wrapped protectively around the baby’s face. There was no
telling who’d been in the elevator before us. I needed to keep the baby
shielded from the virus at all costs.
“Mazal tov, Mama!”
“Welcome home,
Chaya!”
“I want to see the
baby!”
“Show me first. Me
first!”
A chorus of
excited voices greeted our arrival, and I settled down on the couch to let the
older children see their new brother.
That strange throb
in my heart again: happiness, contentment, apprehension.
“Children, you all
need to wash your hands with soap first. Then you can see your new brother.”
The sound of
running water. Splashing – and then, “He’s so cute.”
“Right he looks
like me? Right I looked just like that when I was little, Mama?”
The children were
adorable. And I was exhausted. Unlike with my older children, when my relatives
had all come over with many silver-foil-wrapped cakes and meals, I had no idea
what this new baby’s arrival would mean against the gray backdrop of Coronavirus.
I needed to conserve my energy.
After 30 minutes
of extended comparisons among the children (“He doesn’t look like you Yael
Chana, he looks like me; he’s a boy”) I gently tread down the hallway toward my
room. A baby boy. I needed to review the catered menu. Write up a list of
people to invite. I needed to do nothing. This baby boy would add nothing but simcha to our lives. The stress that
often accompanies the planning of an elaborate simcha simply had no place at the moment. This time we were down to
the basics: the mohel and an
exceedingly basic seudas mitzva.
“Mama’s going to
send over empandas and arroz on Sunday for the seudas mitzva,” Yair told me later in
the afternoon after I woke up from a short nap. “And the mohel is coming by soon to check the baby.”
The mohel’s visit was quick and to the
point. “The baby looks healthy and well except for the slightly yellow tinge to
his skin still. Take him to the clinic for a checkup on Sunday, and if the
numbers are fine then the bris will
be on Monday as it should be.”
The visit to the
health clinic passed without incident, baruch
Hashem. Appointments were being strictly adhered to due to the possibility
of contagion in the waiting room, and I and the baby were in and out of the
health center within half an hour. The baby’s bilirubin count was within the
normal range. We had the all-clear to proceed with the bris the next day.
At night, the
night before the bris, our family has
the minhag to have a group of
children recite the Shema and pesukim around the baby’s crib. For the Shema of our previous two sons, we’d had
a minyan of children over. For the Shema
of this son we’d have a virtual minyan of children instead.
“Shema Yisroel Hashem…”
My children’s
sweet voices blended with those of their cousins on the phone beside them. I
wondered if technology had ever displayed its positive side as clearly as it
was doing in my baby’s room. The phone waves were positively alight with kedusha.
There were no
double kisses on the cheeks by a swarm of doting sisters and cousins. The
children’s sweet voices filled my heart instead.
*
* *
Yair and I woke up early the next morning.
As with the births of our previous children, the air was bursting with emotion:
the bris was coming up. Unlike with
the births of our previous children however, there was very little to do in the
way of getting ready.
Children dressed
in their Shabbos clothing? Check. Cakes (loving made and sent over by Mama)
pulled out of the freezer? Check. Wine, ointment, and other assorted bris paraphernalia pulled out of the
drawer? Check.
That’s it. We were
all ready for the event.
“Pictures,” Yair
said suddenly. “We have so many pictures of our other children’s brisim, but we’re not going to have any
pictures of this baby’s bris if we
don’t take them.”
Yair was right. I
quickly gathered the children together and settled down on the couch with them.
The baby yawned as I settled him onto my lap.
One picture. Two.
“Papi,” Yael Chana
said. “Now it’s my turn to take a picture so that you can be in the pictures,
too.”
Yair and I smiled.
Yael Chana was cute, but she was definitely too young to wield a camera. Yair
placed the camera on the table, settled down on the floor in front of it, with
all of us on the couch in the distance, and smiled.
One, two, three.
The picture was taken.
A thunderclap of
rain resounded in the distance. Outside, the sky had opened up and the streets
of
“I’m going into
the kitchen to set up the link that we send out to our family,” Yair said. The
kitchen was the only room in our house that had proper reception.
Yair left the
living room, and the children moved off the couch and toward the window to
watch the rain. Where was the mohel?
As the older
children drew shapes on the mist that had gathered on the window pane, Yair
came in from the kitchen to report on our relatives, who’d joined our Zoom
conference. They were getting impatient. The mohel was late.
The Clicks and
Mama’s chocotorta. As the minutes
ticked by, I watched as my children’s small hands reached for the cake.
At
“I’m sorry for the
delay,” the mohel apologized,
removing his hat and shaking droplets of rain onto the mat outside our home. “It
was unavoidable.”
Yair showed the mohel in and took his coat. I stood up
and lifted the baby from his swing.
“The bris will be in the kitchen,” Yair told
the mohel. “I sent a live link to our
family members, and we don’t have enough reception for them in the dining room.
I hope that’s okay.”
“Sure,” the mohel nodded. He followed Yair, the
children, and me, into the kitchen and put his bag down. “We’re going to need
three chairs,” he said, “one for Eliyahu Hanavi, one for me, and one for you,
Yair, the sandak.”
Yair brought three
upholstered dining chairs into the kitchen. The kids watched, wide-eyed, as
Yair settled down on one of the chairs. I blinked hard as I thought of Abuelo,
davening for us and wishing us well, despite the fact that unimaginable
circumstances had necessitated Yair’s taking over his role.
The mohel settled down on the second chair
leaving the third chair glaringly empty. “Who’s going to sit there?” Yisroel
Osher asked.
“Eliyahu Hanavi,”
Yair explained. “He comes to every bris
even though we can’t see him.”
“So we do have a
guest,” Yael Chana said. “See, Mama. We’re not alone.”
My eyes filled.
The children had touched upon a sore spot.
“It’s time to put
the baby down on his pillow,” the mohel
instructed.
The pillow was
still in the dining room. Yael Chana quickly raced to retrieve it, and I lay my
baby son on it. Dressed completely in white, the baby looked like a little angel.
Did he look like Yael Chana, Yisroel Osher, or Zushe? Or maybe it was actually
Abuelo whom he resembled?
I handed the baby
to the mohel. Who the baby looked
like really didn’t matter much anymore. In just a few minutes he’d receive his
own name, his own identity.
* *
*
Throughout history, Jewish women had gone
through extreme circumstances and faced much adversary, all in the name of
having their sons circumcised according to Jewish law. My own experience was
surely no more trying than the Jewish women who’d had brisim performed in secret, away from the eyes of a hostile secular
government, and yet, to me, it was mesirus
nefesh – mesirus nefesh to perform the mitzva in trying times, without all
of the comforts that I’d dreamed about having for nine months.
“Baruch haba,” Yair began.
I trembled
slightly and lifted a siddur from the
counter. Around me, I could hear my children suck in their breaths. The baby
wailed.
This bris, this blood, please let it be an
atonement for all of am Yisrael.
“Vayikarei shemo b’Yisrael Levi Yitzchak.”
The bris was over. The mohel made the bracha on
the wine and handed it to Yair. Yair drank and then poured some wine over a
cloth and placed it in the baby’s mouth.
L’chaim – to life.
The baby calmed
down slightly. Yair stroked his cheek.
I wanted to hold
the baby and kiss his cheek, but I was also the main hostess at this affair. I
turned quickly toward the dining room and the chocotorta I knew was on the table to cut a piece for the mohel. The cake was nearly gone. Only a
few unappetizing chunks and a trail of crumbs remained. The children had
devoured it all between building with Clicks and tracing pretty patterns on the
window.
My cheeks reddened
slightly. “I’m sorry,” I told the mohel,
the words catching slightly in my throat. “My parents sent over some cake for
the bris which I’d love to offer you
now, but it looks like the children got to it first.”
The mohel smiled. “Nachas from the children. That’s what really counts most these
days, doesn’t it?”
I looked
helplessly at Yair. Yair just shrugged and then wedged the baby into his arm as
he got up and pulled open a kitchen cabinet. A package of colorful wafers
peeked out at us, and Yair plunked it down on the counter. As mezonos, the wafers would just have to
do.
“Mazal tov!” the mohel said, accepting our appetizer and
stroking the baby’s cheek gently.
My phone vibrated:
mi Mama.
“Mazal tov!” my
mother’s warm voice rang through the phone. “Shetizku legadlo leTorah, l’chuppa, ulema’asim tovim.”
My eyes filled.
Instead of two South American-style kisses, one on each cheek, I’d have to do
with a heartfelt phone greeting. It wasn’t easy to accept.
The mohel bentched on his wafers and headed to the door. Yair put the baby in
his swing and reached into his pocket for the envelope that we’d prepared for
the mohel.
I scooped up the
baby and slipped into my room. “Thank you, Mama,” I said.
“One day you will
tell Levi Yitchak about the great sacrifices that went into his bris, and I am sure that will strengthen
his own mesirus nefesh as a Jew.”
Tears spilled from
my eyes. Tears of joy – of loss, too. No matter how much I wanted to focus on
the simcha of the affair, it was hard
not to think about the lost opportunity to hold the bris that I’d envisioned – in a hall with relatives coming over to
kiss me and take the baby afterwards, offering my older children gifts, and
helping to feed them. It wasn’t only about shattered dreams, it was simply
easier. But this was the bris that
Hashem had willed for us. That He had willed for our Levi Yitzchak.
The phone rang
again. It was Abuelo. In a steadier tone of voice, I accepted his good wishes
and then headed back into the dining room for the seudas mitzva.
The seudas mitzva! Didn’t that mean that we
needed to wash? Yair and I had completely forgotten about that in our hastily
filled role as event planners.
“I guess that the
leftover matzos from Pesach will have to do under the circumstances,” Yair said
as we both ruefully took in our bib-clad older children waiting expectantly for
Mama’s empandas and aroz. Outside, the rain was coming down
in sheets, which meant that even if we hadn’t been in the midst of a lockdown,
it would have been very hard to venture out to buy a bag of rolls just then.
“I suppose it
will,” I said. I went over to the breakfront and retrieved the box of matzos
that we’d hastily stored there after packing away all of our Pesach dishes.
The children got
up one by one, and Yair helped them wash.
The seudas mitzva, the bris – all performed in the best possible manner under the
circumstances, in the manner that Hashem had declared most fit.
L’chaim,
Levi
Yitchak!
