Disobedience

by Naomi Alderman

I think that’s what most of us want, really, isn’t it? A challenge that’s just hard enough that we can accomplish it, but it’ll take everything we’ve got. So that there’s no room left in us for the doubt, the worry, the internal crises.

I stayed late at work, trying to make up for the things I hadn’t got done during the day, but of course that never happens because you get more and more tired as the evening goes on, and the amount of time the work’s going to take gets longer and longer.

You need a window into another world to work out what you think of your own.

but I didn’t want to listen to her answers masquerading as questions. Not then, anyway.

“He’s obedient. That’s the kind of guy Dovid is: he’s quiet, soft-spoken, does what he’s told.

the natural British reticence interact.

That world of silence, where Jews must remain more quiet than non-Jews, and women more silent than men.

Because I did feel it. Shame.

Every Shabbat is different from the Shabbat before; nonetheless every Shabbat is Shabbat.

Each day brings evening and morning, yet no day will ever be repeated.

And sometimes it may seem that in all our traveling we have returned to the place where we began. But although the view may be similar, it will never be identical; we should remember that there is no return.

They make you believe it, until it seems obvious that people come in matched pairs and you don’t think to look underneath and you give up wondering because it all seems just so neat.

“Yes. I’m married. But that is a thing between me and Dovid, do you see? And whatever harm you might do to it has been done already. There is nothing more. And whatever pain I may give him, I have caused already. I know that. And whatever God may think of me, He thinks already.”

Marriage, in this community, isn’t just a religious act or a legal binding, it isn’t even a thing you do because you like someone and want to be with them; it’s a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Those who never do it never grow up. To say that I had never married was tantamount to saying that I had never become a full human being.

It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.

Silence is the means by which the weak remain weak and the strong remain strong. Silence is a method of oppression.

For the subconscious, everything is happening right now. Trauma that happened when you were four still feels exactly as threatening now as it did then.

Dovid thought, this is only pain. All that this can possibly be is pain. It cannot do anything significant. He said, “I don’t want you to stay if you want to go.”

She was the aching, absent heart at the middle of our lives and the words could never be spoken.

My mother’s silver candlesticks, which my father had given to Esti in case I should want them.

All things, when measured in spans of years, seem simple. But human lives do not occur in years but slowly, day by day. A year may be easy, but its days are hard indeed.

She’s come to recognize that there is a tiny, tenuous area where good sense intersects with fundamentalist religion. She’s trying out how it feels to live in that area, at least some of the time.

I can’t be an Orthodox Jew. I don’t have it in me and I never did. But I can’t not be one either.