Her gift is one of Noah’s favorites, and one of mine, too. “Ezra’s Big Shabbat Question.” Noah reads the title of the book once he’s torn off the wrapping paper. The book isn’t that large, but my name leaps out at me immediately, of course. There’s a brown boy on the cover wearing a yarmulke. I go completely still and don’t think I’m even breathing. What a book like this would have meant to me thirty years ago when no one at my synagogue resembled me. A book like this would have reflected me when the only place I saw myself was in a mirror. That she found this book and shared it with my son?
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