Prelude and Fugue

There are men who leave you for another woman, and there are men who leave you for a man. Then there are those who dump you for God.

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim for Tablet Magazine

 

We met during a youth music festival, flirting across the wind section of a large symphony orchestra. If there was an obstacle to our romance, it was not that he was Jewish and I wasn’t; it was that he played the tuba and I played the violin. There’s a reason why there are no duets for these two instruments.

Two years later, on a sweltering afternoon in his mother’s apartment in Holon, we tried to read through Handel sonatas with him playing the basso continuo—an athletic feat for the tuba. Soon he was sweating with exhaustion, and my ears rang as if my head had been stuck inside a church bell. The tuba and violin just weren’t meant to be together without the chaperone of a full orchestra. But that didn’t stop us from moving in together soon after. When he got a position with an orchestra in Jerusalem, and a job I had meant to take up in London fell through at the last minute, I moved to Israel to be with him.

Our religious difference was not an issue—at first. At age 23, he was stridently secular. He despised his Orthodox fellow Israelis for their refusal to serve in the army, their reliance on the state to support their large numbers of children, their attempts to kill any form of fun on a Friday night. Penguins, he called them, in reference to their black and white clothes. Parasites.

Like many young Israelis, he had traveled the globe and was as intrigued by other spiritual traditions as he was repelled by his own. He had been mesmerized by the ritual of a Japanese tea ceremony; meditated in a Zen monastery in San Francisco; joined in the cathartic whirl of Capoeira on an orchestra tour to Brazil.

I, on the other hand, wanted to convert to Judaism. There were Jewish roots on my father’s side, and when I first entered a synagogue in college, I had felt their tug. I wanted to learn the beautiful tunes of Erev Shabbat, the mysterious choreography of the Amidah prayer with its bows, turns, and curtsies. I played with ideas for a new, Hebrew, name.

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