Free Beyond Belief by Cami Ostman Page A

musical instruments on the Sabbath, Ana spread out her bedroll on the floor and sat on it cross-legged to play her guitar. She picked at the strings quietly, singing to herself. Behind our closed door, I reasoned, we weren’t exactly singing in public, so I sang with her. We became a little bolder, raised our voices, harmonized.
    Then, a knock on the door. Ana’s hand fell flat on the strings. We eyed one another.
    But there were no Sabbath police at the door. It was just a girl about my age who introduced herself as Janice—small-boned, her brunette hair fine and straight. She had come from Fort Worth with her mother for this event, knocked because she had heard us singing.
    I welcomed her, and once I closed the door, we had our voices again. Janice’s singing was clear and fine. We sat and sang in three-part harmony, all of us cross-legged on an open bedroll. Ana led on guitar with me leaning toward her, our eyes locking in the tune.
    T HE NEXT MORNING I woke early but skipped the morning services. Ana was still sleeping. Near the coffee urn I met Seema, the Hassidic woman with the blonde wig I’d noticed at the prayer services. “What’s your name?” she asked. She sounded like an official greeter.
    “Lisa,” I said.
    “And what’s your Hebrew name?”
    I had recently asked my mother that question, because it was a blank to be filled out on the registration form for this weekend program. My mother had rolled her eyes. “We’re Americans,” she said, with all the vehemence of a first-generation American. It seemed Hebrew names from the Old Country didn’t fit that view. But I managed to get the story out of her: how for social reasons she had wanted my name announced from the pulpit at the temple after I was born, how she’d been told by the temple secretary that, in order to do that, I had to have a Hebrew name. “So the rabbi just gave you one,” she said. “We were never going to use it, anyway, so it didn’t matter what it was.”
    “And?”
    “It’s Leah.” She said the name with obvious distaste.
    “Lay-ah?” I said.
    “That’s how the rabbi pronounced it.”
    “It’s Leah,” I told Seema, proud that I knew the pronunciation. “Why?”
    “That,” Seema said, “is the name of your Jewish soul.” She turned then to the table next to the coffee urn, put a blueberry Danish on a paper plate, and offered it to me, touching my shoulder with the other hand, an intimate gesture, as if she’d known me for years. “Have something to eat?” she said.
    I accepted the plate as if it were an invitation into an elite society, an exclusive club. How could I not step in? I had a moment of guilt about my non-Jewish friends, how they would be excluded here without a Hebrew name and Jewish pedigree to give them entry, but still I nibbled the sweet dough, and before we parted I had accepted Seema’s offer to teach me more. She would call, and I could come to her home to spend a Sabbath.
    It was like this: Seema smiled at me, touched my shoulder. Said I belonged. In that moment, with the touch of her warm hand, my few conscious objections seemed to fade into irrelevance, as if her warmth, her smile, her touch dream-launched me into weightless flight that would float me right into Hassidic arms.

Seducing God
    Joshunda Victoria Sanders

    M y mother’s devotion to her faith had taught me to chase after God—from the small Catholic churches in Philadelphia, where I was born, to the cathedrals of New York City. We lived in many places when I was a kid: shelters for homeless families and battered women and the homes of distant relatives or friends, not landing in our own apartment until I was thirteen. But no matter where we lived, Mom made sure we were always within walking distance of a Catholic church.
    Maggie, the mother of five children (of which I was the last), was a black and Cherokee Indian woman with high cheekbones and reddish-brown skin. She had been raised in a traditional Southern family as