Free Beyond Belief by Cami Ostman

I was small and my father was well, he sang it to me in a one-note monotone, sitting on my bed before I slept. Something about those quiet moments in low light would start him talking about his immigrant parents and their old Jewish ways, the songs and habits they had brought from Russia. My grandparents had both died, both gone. In a way, so had my father. But he told me on those long-ago nights of how his mother had polished the silver wine goblet and candlesticks every Friday and set out the challah under a white cloth, preserving a steadiness and order that had been lost in our family before it got to us. Then he would stretch out beside me and sing old show tunes. You say potato. I say potahto. Let’s fall in love.
    I lifted my chin and sang the kiddush along with the rabbi.
    We were served an enormous meal. I was long past full, sleepy, lulled.
    After the meal, a quiet moment. Rabbi Geller then sang a moving meditative and wordless Hassidic song in a melodic minor key. He had a rich tenor/baritone voice that made me think of a cello, and he sang with his eyes closed, Na nana na.
    Gradually, others leaned back into their chairs and joined him, even hung their heads back as they sang. Some closed their eyes. Ana did the same. The tune wandered, lingered, sad and searching. Laced with Ana’s soprano, the voices slowly rose and filled the room, ebbed and swelled, rolled over us in waves. The song became a separate place of great feeling.
    I, too, closed my eyes and sang. As I did, the tension I normally carried rolled out of my fingertips. I relaxed into the waves, let myself be carried. Communal song wrapped me in warmth and security like a human prayer shawl.
    Suddenly, the rabbi came to a halt. Everyone grew quiet. I opened my eyes in the dead silence to find he had put up his palm like a stop sign. “A woman’s voice is a precious jewel,” the rabbi announced in a slow and careful voice. “Of course a jewel shouldn’t be flashed around. A jewel should be kept in a safe and treasured place. That is why women are not to sing in public.”
    I woke up then, to find myself just a woman, and deeply embarrassed for projecting my voice. Ana shook her head. But, I reasoned, we were being honored with this enforced silence. It was supposed to be an honor. Still, I looked down at my hands.
    When Rabbi Geller began again, only the men joined him. The singing grew, and grew, until the rabbi raised his arms, urging them to get out of their uptight secular selves, and the men all rose, full of righteous spiritual energy, willing and eager now to let themselves go. For God. They danced as one, a roomful of singing men, stomping feet and dancing rhythm.
    We stood at the side of their exuberant closed circle dance as they jumped and sang, hands on shoulders and backs. Faster and faster; the whole place filling with zeal. Shirttails came out. Ties were pulled off. How they danced! Some of the Hassidic men took off their long black coats, tossed them aside, and rejoined the fray, white strings flying at their hips. Mouths open, singing, singing, voices going hoarse. Faces red and beaded with joyous sweat. The whole room reverberating in deafening song.
    Ana’s face was lit, absorbing the electricity, and I forgot about being silenced. I tapped her arm and gestured at the dancing men, nodding at them with my chin and smiling, smiling at the scene and the fervor, carried away by the irresistible Hassidic confidence in their own rightness and goodness, this demonstration of Godly joy. In my mind, I was in the middle of those dancing men, my hand on a sweating back, feet swept up in the beat, singing out loud, all of us bound together by a single pulsing rhythm of faith in exclusive and holy intimacy. This was where I belonged. Yes—I was one of them, among them, not a woman on the sidelines. I had escaped everything. It’s true, I thought, exultant. You can lose yourself in God.
    L ATE THAT NIGHT , in spite of the rules that forbade