Ari walked down the gravel road. He had to hurry, as the party would soon begin. His train from Novosibirsk ran late, though he suspected he would have found another reason regardless. Ari was too tired at this point; it had been a long week. He still was upset that his professor did not count a family dinner as a valid excuse to miss a differential equations class. Truly, Ari was just upset that he was missing class. At least the weather was nice; this was something he must savor. All the long days in class and long nights in the libraries meant he never got to truly go outside. The setting sun of dusk was now lightly masked by a silk blanket of clouds. It was perfectly balanced; neither motion nor stillness could make someone uncomfortable in the rare temperate months of Siberia.

Ari’s mind began to wander to a day in what now felt like the distant past. It was a Saturday, years ago, when his father took him to the shop. He was thirteen at the time, but it was his first time going behind the front desk. The shop was his father’s place, the way Ari’s bedroom was Ari’s place, and the boundary between the two had always been understood without being stated.

The shop was small and smelled of pressed wool and machine oil. A single window faced the alley and let in a column of pale morning light. His father moved through the space with a precision that Ari recognized, the same economy of motion he used when setting the Shabbat table or folding a map. Nothing wasted.

“Come here,” his father said, not looking up.

Ari stood next to him at the cutting table. His father laid a length of dark fabric across the surface and smoothed it with his palms, working from the center outward. He did this three times until the fabric was perfectly flat.

“You see this?” His father ran a finger along the grain of the cloth. “If you cut against it, the whole thing falls apart eventually. Doesn’t matter how good the stitching is.”

Ari nodded. He understood the principle immediately. He almost explained the tensile strength that the fibers have when oriented along different axes, but he stopped himself.

“You have to understand what something is before you can work with it,” his father continued. He picked up his shears and cut a long clean line without measuring, without hesitating. “I’ve been doing this long enough that I know by feel.”

“How long until you know by feel?” Ari asked.

His father looked at him then, with an expression Ari couldn’t fully read. It wasn’t quite pride and it wasn’t quite sadness, but it lived somewhere in between. “For this?” He gestured at the fabric. “Ten years. It takes longer for other things.”

Ari didn’t have an answer to that. They worked in silence for the next hour, with neither Ari nor his father giving any offers or requests. Ari watched his father’s hands move across seams and collar pieces, watched him hold finished sections up to the window light to check for irregularities invisible to Ari’s eye. His father hummed occasionally.

On the walk home his father bought them a small pastry from the corner vendor, full of apricot jam that Ari’s mother never made anymore because it was expensive. They ate while walking, without talking, and his father put his hand briefly on the back of Ari’s neck the way he did when Ari was much younger.

Ari had not thought about that Saturday in years. He thought about it now, standing at the door of his old apartment, taking a deep breath. He stood there longer than necessary. The door was the same; the same brass knocker his father had installed the year they moved in, slightly crooked because his father had done it himself on a Sunday without help.

Soon, a flood of his relatives and friends surrounded him, talking about his long hair, old clothes, and his supposedly different height. The apartment was too small for this many people, and after wading through the crowds, he found his mother, Katya.

“Well what now, Ari? We had to start the service but couldn’t start without you. This is not the way to start a new year.”

“It’s good to see you too, Mom,” Ari responded. Since the end of his junior year, there was a distance between them. They had no real way to frequently communicate other than on occasional visits, so when Ari sent his first letter all year to his mom announcing he would stay at school for the summer, his mom was not happy. She visited him twice since, but it seemed that both of their lives had swerved away from each other. The last time Ari had been home was the last High Holy Days. “I’m going to find Papa,” Ari said.

As he stepped away, a booming voice from the corner of the room told everyone to sit. As the bodies descended to their seats, Ari saw his father standing next to his childhood Torah: “Time for prayer!”

Soon, all of the commotion stopped, and everyone’s eyes turned to the cantor. Ari’s father began with Unetanneh Tokef. Ari still knew every word, which bothered him. The cantor’s

voice filled the small room like water fills a vessel. It pushed against every wall and filled each crevice.

Kedushat hayom—The holiness of this day—Ari had heard these lines before. Soon, Ari was somewhere else, half in the room and half in his dormitory hallway, scribbling chalk on a blackboard. He brought himself back. His father’s voice boomed across the room, but Ari didn’t want to listen. He focused on his lips, creating sound from simple wave functions. Sound is just pressure, just air disturbing air, nothing sacred about it. Ki anu amecha—For we are your people and you are our God—he saw his aunt Bella put her handkerchief to her eyes. There were memories here for everyone.

He watched the candle on the table, one of eight spread out on the green linen. It was simply a rapid oxidation reaction. When the hydrocarbons broke apart, heat was released. The glow across his mother’s face was simply photons. The flame was dark orange, its translucence mixed with the dark backdrop of the house’s maroon wall, making it appear darker than its wavelengths truly were. He estimated that they were somewhere around 600 nanometers. The wax was dripping slowly down the candle’s side. Ari hated when people said it burned. Wax doesn’t burn, it vaporizes. The vapor burns.

Mi yishaket umi yitoref—Who shall be at peace and who shall be troubled—Ari saw his father take a glance in his direction, immediately looking at his hands in his lap. His father had always told him they were his hands. In Novosibirsk, Ari used them to solve equations with renowned professors. His father used them to cut fabric, tie a knot, press seams flat with an iron, burning hot. Ari had never thought of this as a sacrifice. It was simply their life story, the life he had always known. Maybe this was the only way, or maybe it was the way his father chose.

Mi yanuach umi yanu’a—Who shall rest and who shall wander—he continued to wander. He did not think of the letter. The acceptance letter that arrived on a Tuesday in April; his mother had yearned for it longer than him. He did not think of opening it with his father and slowly reading those simple yet sweet words. He did not think of walking through the brass gates on his first day. The campus was beautiful but barren, in the shape of a compressed pentagon with a golden sphere shining above. He did not think about making his first friend who could truly intellectually challenge him. Neither did he think of the second, or the third.

Mi ba’esh umi bamayim, mi b’kitzo umi lo b’kitzo—Who by fire and who by water, who at his predestined time and who before his time—he did not want to think of Petrov, the boy from his school who each day would have an hour-long walk to the orphanage. When asked, he said it was all because of war. Petrov would now be grown, Ari thought, but almost certainly not in college.

Atah zocheir—You open the books of records, and from it, all shall be read. He did not want to think of what happened later that first day. Professor Volkov paused during attendance. It lasted just enough for the action to be distinctly discernible. It was precise and clearly had a reason. Ari knew names had weight. The simple classification of any specific element or phenomenon holds thousands of connotations. The word anomaly for instance. In physics it simply meant a deviation from the expected. But in a classroom it meant something was wrong; something didn’t belong. Ari would rarely get a process wrong in class, but if he misunderstood a name and its implications, he would be on the wrong track. In a way, Professor Volkov was doing the same thing. Except he didn’t want to understand. He didn’t want to know that the name Ari Feldman held the same value as that of Peter Orlov, or Vlad Borodyansky, or any of the other classmates’ names. He didn’t want to remove his biases from a simple surname. He didn’t understand that each name can either be thought of as a complicated truth or a simple lie.

He did not think of Yom Kippur last year, when he told his parents he would not go home. He prayed that evening for forgiveness, but deep down he knew that he didn’t fully atone. He did not think of the scholarship form he had to resubmit three times before being admitted. He did not think of his responses. He was so precise in each and every one, calculating the most acceptable and efficient way to respond. He did not think of the exhaustion in only trusting facts.

Ut’shuvah ut’filah utzedakah—But repentance, prayer, and righteous acts can avert the severity of the decree. Could he trust this line? He didn’t know whether this hope would abandon him. This was a trust he had somehow lost in the long nights and early mornings. The trust in his family, faith, and culture. Fact always comforted him. He was sure that he could find the air resistance on a jet darting through an evening sky, but not sure how to best honor those before him. Maybe he was scared of being wrong; Ari did not like to be wrong.

***

Then Avinu Malkeinu began, and the room shifted like the Siberian weather in early fall. Ari’s father’s voice rose in recitation. Avinu Malkeinu, shma koleinu, Avinu Malkeinu, chatanu lefanecha—Our father our king, hear our voice, our father our king, we have sinned before you—and Ari finally allowed himself to think. He thought back to a day twelve years ago, when a polished and profound college education was a mere fever dream. He was sitting at their dining table with his math textbook laid open. It was winter, and snow painted the walls outside. The furnace was sputtering, and he could hear the faint sound of arguing on the floor below. His father had just arrived from work, and was now sharing the kitchen table with Ari, eating what they had left in their cupboard. His father always ate with him, but they would rarely talk. That day was different though. His father picked up his textbook and closely examined the page. Ari had winced; it felt like his father was taking away the thing that made him himself, like he was being attacked. How would he spend his time now? His father put on his reading glasses and inspected it. Ari knew he couldn’t understand the meaning of the symbols and was confused as to what his father was even doing. Maybe his father was confused too. And then, his father sighed, closed the book, and gave Ari a pat on the back. Nothing was said and nothing was done.

Avinu Malkeinu, Avinu Malkeinu, Avinu Malkeinu—the prayer went on around Ari. He glanced at his father, who was now immersed in the Torah as Ari was immersed in textbooks. Maybe they were not so different. Ari looked around the table, at his family, childhood friends, and distant acquaintances.

Ari’s father moved into his final prayer: Hineni—here I am. Ari watched his father’s misshapen brown jacket rise and fall after each line. His mother’s hands were resting in her lap, her ring shining in the candlelight. Aunt Bella was quieting down Ari’s baby cousin in the back. Ari didn’t know the man next to him. He smelled of cigarettes and was mouthing the words. Hineni. Ari’s lips now moved. His father’s voice was now his voice. It was now the most valuable thing in the world. It was the answer. He mouthed the words without permission, and he didn’t feel it in his brain but in his chest. In fact, the words had always been there. He turned his eyes to his father, who had watched Ari neglect his faith and culture for so long. His father, who paid for his textbooks with his last paycheck. His father, who looked at Ari’s studies as if they were a foreign language. His father, who never once questioned his own decision, who never once questioned Ari’s dedication. As the prayer finished, Ari uttered a brief word in the void of silence—Hineni—here, after everything, here.

 

Ben Foltz is a student at The Bush School in Seattle. He is the Editor-In-Chief of The Rambler newspaper and has years of experience in journalism and writing. In his free time, he is often moving, loving all physical activity, especially golf and running. He also loves his pug, Leo.