A Wealth of Sage (Nonfiction)

a true-to-life allegory about the rote denial of atrocities and the struggle to reckon with misleadership

“And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.”

— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The political analyst’s first visit to my Boston home occurs on a bright day of autumn. When we have transitioned to the dining room, this lunch guest’s gaze is drawn to the east-facing window, an outlook showing him our backyard. A gigantic crab apple sheds its leaves, baring minuscule fruit.

We live on a margin of the city that an octogenarian neighbor liked to remember to us as a pastureland where cows roamed. Once a creek defined the northeastern border of our yard. In our day the concrete cap of a culvert suggests a watery vein. An outsized crab apple bears witness to the steady watering.

And the yews, which respond to the pattern of covert irrigation with a huddle of volunteers near the culvert’s plug. In autumn the yews are fruiting, too. The gelatinous arils remain discreet from the domestic view, nestled in the dense evergreen needles. Our guest fixates on what embeds beneath the trees, a manufactured element, a temporary shed.

He sees a cubic tent. He asks is that a סוכה.

A native speaker of Palestinian Arabic pronounces the Hebrew as I will. This accent evolves over the recent centuries in the area where he lived, in the region where his city was leveled, his family ravaged.

The ancient holiday has passed when a Gazan survivor prepares to lunch in our dining room, and glances out. The festive element persists in his view, a temporary shelter.

#

We do not part promptly from the autumnal holiday scene. My husband will dismantle our סוכה hastily as the first winter storm approaches.

While the political analyst spots our laggard סוכה it will occur to me that I ought to invite him in there. My impression, based on his attitude while questioning me, is that he has never been a guest in a סוכה. His aspect of discovery, the perked demeanor, as of a naturalist espying an elusive life form.

If you like, we can go into the סוכה after lunch, I should have said, perhaps. I didn’t.

I confirmed the analyst’s ID. Yes, a סוכה. I told him that the holiday had passed, we were no longer celebrating. We are just slow to dismantle our סוכה, historically.

I would not invite him into our סוכה. I wanted to and didn’t. My resistance proved stronger.

#

The snow is thick outside when I sit down to write about our first encounter. A pertinent fact of recent history asserts itself only now. Two autumns prior to that lunch with a guest who will recognize and name a Jewish tradition, the relevant holiday culminates with a massacre carried out by zealots and opportunists originating on his home turf, fellow Gazans. I wasn’t thinking about that atrocity when he spotted our סוכה.

In a later moment, our lunch guest will mention the massacre, articulating his revulsion. I didn’t prompt the condemnation. I don’t consider him responsible for the massacre. I consider him the survivor of a genocide, which I will deplore though he does not invite the gesture. And when he returns in winter accompanied by his teen daughter, I will acknowledge the obscene injustice she has suffered.

While facing the teen prior to dinner I express my regret and outrage as ineptly as ever. No words will do. Nevertheless I seem to have gained a bettered fluency in this demanding rite. Temperamentally I’m stepping into a familiar role. I am a mother addressing a child with considerable urgency.

I am asserting a young person’s worth. What has happened to her is an inexcusable wrong.

The child remains silent. Her father mediates, thanking me for her.

A final sequence of sounds from me before I shut up, reining in my emotion. The last thing this girl needs in her immediate space is a worked-up Israeli.

She didn’t strike me as discomfited. She was smiling, mutely.

Every child’s signals differ.

#

While her father gazed at our סוכה in autumn, I foresaw a scene that I would not facilitate. A man who has witnessed his society’s destruction stands in my סוכה when its condition is wretched.

The interior of our סוכה is not at its best when the temporary shelter has been allowed to overstay the weeklong fest. This year I had relied primarily on plant cuttings to swag the ceiling with the requisite charm. The leafy glory can’t last forever.

Plantlife deteriorating overhead is a demoralizing sight, to my taste. The sage in particular becomes pathetic and it is my dominant medium, I have so much of this hardy perennial.

Two sage bushes erupt with new leaves every spring in my garden, where they will prevail into early winter in a gritty bed where no other herb thrives.

When in flower, the sage becomes busy with insects, a traffic of creepers and flyers transforming the system. Bees are a primary subset, a diverse crowd. Our neighborhood is home to bees of amazingly variable size and unalike skins. Their thoraxes and abdomens range from hairy to gemlike to striped.

While the political analyst prepares to sit at our table and spots a סוכה, the ruffly sage flowers have gone to seed. The insect presence is subtler.

The arthropod considering sage leaves edible is rare in my garden. The damage is minimal. As the leafing season concludes, the sage bushes maintain their shape where my lunch guest can’t see them, against the wall affixed with the window allowing him the backyard view.

#

I traversed the grassy territory he is surveying repeatedly while prettying our סוכה. The lifelong girl had come alive with adult clippers in hand. From my shelter to my herb patch, again and again. More sage more sage more sage. The massive bushes aren’t thinned though I trim them with increasing abandon.

I had begun the task listlessly. My spirit falters in appalling days. In the recent seasons I am crippled routinely by despair. The harvesting of sage induces a livelier mode.

The beautifying of a flimsy sanctuary uplifts the soul to modest heights. I transformed the gappy ceiling of a temporary shelter into a thicket of sage. The visuals were good, the scent overwhelming. Never before had I sourced this herb for application outside our kitchen. I was realizing an unprecedented vision.

As if by an irresistible spell I am launched at my sages with a pair of clippers. Next to lop from the forsythia shrubs some purpled branches for dark contrast.

The last brave flowers of anise hyssop add a petaline cheer. Their minty whiff cannot compete with the terpenic musk of the dominant herb, sage, mainly sage. I have so much of this resilient stuff.

Naturally our yearly bumper crop should gain the major presence in a primordial Middle Eastern harvest fest.

#

For years our סוכה interior reflected another aesthetic. I am the sort of mother who will let her baby’s interests cue the סוכה decor, her toddler design it.

My growing boy innovates as he will, and handpicks annually whatever chintz catches his eye at the nearest Judaica shop, whatever makes him happy. I override without qualms my own ornamental tastes, prioritizing the childish joy I associate with this festival. Like the Israeli girl his mother was, the Boston boy will thrill in an autumnal rite of cubic tent-pitching that prefaces a week of outdoor eating.

Our child has matured and fledged. Earlier this autumn he flew in for a visit and sat in our סוכה for a meal before traveling back to his collegiate turf. During the brief homecoming he mentions a guest speaker he heard on campus, a political analyst, a Gazan survivor, a father relocated recently to Massachusetts with his two surviving children. Next I’ll listen to a public radio interview in which he relays some of his story. His slain wife was a writer. I resolve to ask about her work.

In a subsequent week the political analyst prepares to sit down for his lunch and observes our backyard, asking is that a סוכה.

#

His pronunciation of the word is like mine. The look on his face, unmistakable. A boyish gladness in discovery. This guy is the same age as my kid brother.

He is a man about halfway through his forties, whose resting expression communicates shock, a demeanor I recognize. It occurs in my family. I am cognizant of his recent ordeal and devastating losses.

I was so glad to see his vibrant attribute when he responded to our holiday tent. I would not let him into a degraded shelter.

The prolific sage is not robust once it is cut and suspended from an outdoor shelter’s permeable ceiling weeklong and longer. Twice that and still. The gray-green leaves bespeak decay like no other leaf in there. The sage is defeated.

The fact is that the sage while it’s disintegrating looks awful, blighted. It is a disgrace. The once-sculptural leaves have collapsed, their venous intricacies drained of what firms them.

The ashen hue is ghastly. This fungus-colored matter dangles like the flaccid ears of carrion. A wealth of sage has become the picture of death.

#

I felt ungracious. I discerned a scholarly guest’s piqued interest, which I could have satisfied with the natural next gesture. We would go out after lunch and approach the סוכה.

He ducks inside and shelters under masses of dead sage. I would not actualize this scene.

I would not guide into that dismal space a man who bore witness as his home shattered over his family.

This happens two Octobers earlier. He has just crossed the street to speak with a neighbor. In the aftermath of that airstrike, he is the fresh widower of a slain architect and poet. He is a bereaved father, a bereaved uncle.

Soon he will lose his mother in another airstrike. He is unaware of this eventuality as he traverses a disintegrating landscape with his two surviving children, for whom he seeks medical treatment and refuge. Ultimately they make it to New England, where he has just recounted to me and my husband some of their trials.

Privately I pledged that, if the political analyst persists in our area next autumn, I’ll invite him into our סוכה while the holiday is in effect.

Not impossible that he’ll decline the opportunity. I cannot be certain that he would want to take his meal in a סוכה even while the interior is charming. Not every guest enjoys the traditional involvement in the holiday of temporary shelters.

#

Consider the houseguest who establishes in recent years a routine of October overnight stays that introduce this churchgoer to the Jewish sheltering holiday. He does not demand the repeated adventure. Not every son of the Northeast is immune to cold weather.

In his most recent stay, an energetic morning person reports again to our dining room where my husband calls his attention to the rear window, indicating the סוכה.

An atypical mien transforms a gregarious visitor, unreadability. An unusual comment coincides, none. He sits down at the set table.

The morning meal progresses indoors, a pleasure as always. This houseguest is a stimulating conversationalist, searching and insightful, involving, aspirational. It seemed to me that we had made the right call in sparing him the chilly breakfast he layered up for last year. The New England season isn’t what the Levantine ancients originating the fresh-air tradition had in mind.

The nippy Boston morning wasn’t the main factor driving our decision to breakfast indoors. A demanding conversation impended that morning, overdue. A secure domestic space is more conducive to a reckoning as sensitive as this.

We were determined to contend with a grave wrong that involves us all. Our houseguest was not the culprit, nor his hosts. The damage is done by our forebears.

This guest emerges from my husband’s past. Their late mothers were troubled friends.

#

In a time after their only sons have fledged, two Northeastern women click and sustain the bond once one has divorced and the other is widowed. They should have been watching that toddler when he drowned. They should have kept him out of harm’s way, or they ought not to have assumed the caring role.

Toddling around an uncovered backyard pool, a child falls in and cannot be found. A sludge of autumn leaves coats the water’s surface, rendering its depths a dark tea.

We had never talked about this tragedy with our annual houseguest. He and my husband weren’t in touch at the time of the drowning. They were young professionals pursuing their careers in separate states, bonding with life companions. Back in their original home state, their mothers maintained a friendship sparked while their sons were in college.

On a few occasions the undergraduates’ home visits intersected. They enjoyed each other’s company. They would not actively pursue a friendship, until the digital realm reacquainted them in their chapter as fathers to young men.

Through many seasons I know the widow’s son only as a character my husband will reference now and again with evident warmth. One year the man materializes as our annual houseguest. In fact he’s a likable guy.

We assumed that he was painfully aware of the maternal failure. Did he know we knew? And what did he know that we didn’t, and what could we tell him that might fill a gap in his record?

For some years I petitioned my husband for candor. He was too daunted. The remembered horror played a part, and the enduring sorrow, the indissoluble shame.

I persevered. To exclude from mutual remembrance a child lost by the matriarchs connecting us struck me as a sacrilege. Notably I have been post-religious since my preadolescence.

I latch to values that persuade me, for example an engagement with the actual facts of our existence.

To develop an easy rapport with a recurrent houseguest while declining to touch on the abysmal family episode we happen to share felt existentially dangerous to me. I could not ignore my screeching premonitions.

I can restate those in pragmatic terms. The avoidance of a shared reality habituates us in a disorientation we cannot afford. The performance of ignorance derails our native intelligence.

An apparent indifference to our story’s dishonorable moments disrupts the group conscience. And what is conscience, if not the sensible steward whose grip on the present is firmed by honest hindsight and loving forethought.

My husband comes around in the autumn after his mother’s passing.

#

In one way that breakfast conversation went as I expected. Our houseguest considered his mother the only accountable party, not the case. True that the toddler was in her care. Plausible that she was drinking. Similarly, her hostess, likely toking, too.

The tragedy would not have happened in the backyard of a rightminded homeowner. This was a failure of alertness to a vulnerable presence and before that it was a failure of responsible swimming pool maintenance.

While our houseguest recalled the incident, I experienced his mother’s irremediable torment. His reference to that, succinct, was vivid.

I couldn’t find him, she keens.

Because of the foliage sludge.

The intensity of his gaze when we interpose this fact in his account suggests a man revising a conception. He thought she had been drinking. Plausible. Likewise her hostess. Certainly the water was opaque. Is the stymied lifeguard redeemed somewhat? In my opinion, yes.

The responsible party who admits failure is redeemed by comparison to the responsible party who doesn’t. The response we witnessed was denial.

A refusal to engage with the tragedy, an insistence on acting like it had never happened. A perfect resistance to hearing about, invoking, describing, considering and learning from a fateful lapse of judgment. The matter of a child’s death was handled by property insurance. The pool was maintained professionally thereafter. The owner urged us often to jump into the sapphire waters. We wouldn’t. We declined a rite that would habituate us in amnesia.

We would not clear our memories of a drowned child mechanically. The mere suggestion of that exercise made our skins crawl and our throats constrict with nausea. The child’s death was not our doing but our consciences remained stricken. We were unwilling to override that function, evidently.

When we are the parents of a newborn boy, his paternal grandmother will disappear for a time, her response to an ultimatum posed by the new father. My husband demanded that his mother receive treatment for her increasingly destructive relational style. It was her naked competition at the naming ceremony that compelled the sanction.

Her theatrical late entrance delays the stalled ceremony, her campaign for pity aims to reroute the emotion. Her flippant references to our swaddled infant chill us.

She responds to the intervention by threatening us. Initially she assumes the law is on her side and that the child will be delivered to her by some official procedure involving the interstate railroad. Soon she is saying that she has never wanted to be a grandmother.

She sold her property and left New England, relocating to another coast with the eerie lover who would drain her of her house sale proceeds.

She would come back within a year or so and find a cheap rental, reconcile with her son and try to bond with her grandson. Soon she would argue against our supervision and demand that we leave our little boy with her. We could not entertain that notion. Her disconnected attribute remained conspicuous.

#

During the recent autumn holiday my husband and I are fresh empty nesters implementing a new practice. We undertake to superannuate an obscurantist legacy. Our leveling with a guest elicits from him a disclosure as honest and sad. Both sons trace the maternal impairment to their formative years. They share the experience of being forgotten and stranded.

While he sits at our table, our annual guest traces his history of forsakenness even farther back, an outlook he communicates when he pulls out his smartphone. He scrolls through his photos and shows us the sepia image of an ancestor posing for his portrait.

The photographer of another century aimed his lens at a man whose seriousness resembles our houseguest’s. This smartphone owner can tell us something about his forebear that the formal portrait doesn’t. The ankles of this elegant patriarch were circled with ropy scars, keloids remembering a hardware typical of the American slave trade.

It is our houseguest who defines the issue we’re engaging as abandonment, and I think that I’m the one who throws in a term I consider synonymous, in this context, betrayal.

We are talking about what circulates through our synapses like killer weather even as we relocate and attempt to start over in a safer location. We are talking about a condition we hope to resolve. Naturally I’ll pause on the dissociative reflex as it is expressed in the history of Israelis and Palestinians.

Our ancestries survive their chronic shocks by means of an emergency mode subverting the consciousness in pivotal moments. When reality proves unbearable, they swerve to another dimension. The very pattern of engagement that saves them subverts our chance for some stability, and drags down hapless nonparticipants.

So long as our houseguest can sit, we try to metabolize this theme. He is on a tightish schedule, precluding the exhaustive study. We will not attain, on the occasion of this breakfast, the conclusive synthesis and resultant protocol that will free us, at last, from our miscoding.

#

My husband has a clue about the history contributing to his mother’s challenges. As a girl of five or so, she loses her father suddenly when he is admitted to a psych ward. He will resurface. He is the parent she’ll idolize even as he cheats on her mother. Lifelong she’ll opine that her mother deserved the betrayals because she was mean to her husband. After my mother-in-law’s death we are caught up with a family rumor according to which her childhood troubles were compounded by violence. While the daughter of the psychiatric inpatient is sheltering with better-off relatives, she suffers from a cousin an abuse of some category.

Her erratic fathering can be related, in turn, to the father’s childhood misery. He lost his mother to an influenza pandemic. As we understand that episode today, it was how the childish bereavement was handled by elders that programmed into the young brain a pattern of disintegration.

A child of five or so learns that his mother is dead when he is included in an unexplained stroll that stops at a graveyard. That is your mother, the boy is told about an object being lowered into the ground and covered with dirt.

Next, his architect father will vanish indefinitely, returning after a year or so with a new wife who despises the son of her husband’s previous spouse.

#

An annual houseguest drives off after breakfast. Soon his hosts will leave their home too.

A Boston wife and husband embark on a long urban hike, their intent restorative.

The reality of the shared trek proves tougher. Only in retrospect will the couple of advanced middle age recognize that, while walking from one city to another, they had toggled into the conditions of imperiled juveniles.

The American boy parented by shrill adversaries is sluggish and preverbal, slack-faced. He might as well be walking alone through a dreary hallway at the end of which he will be punished by his tense homelife’s lurid collapse.

Or else this boy is just glued to a television screen in an exhausting household. At any rate he has disconnected from his basic social unit and immediate surroundings. Crossing the Boston city line southwestward, he is confused by an Israeli adolescent asking him to pick up the pace. This girl is fleet and hypervigilant.

She is breaking away from a devoutly ritualist household, a transition she feels as an intensified routine of urban locomotion. Her clandestine exit from religion is being expedited by her daily commute through an intercity corridor of the Israeli interior, connecting her to a regional trade school by the Mediterranean coast, where she runs with a new peer pack of vestigially religious girls, a crowd much worldlier than she.

But in some ways they seem to her too reconciled to a bad contract. Her private terrors will be given vent, now and again, by pressured vocalizations articulating an extreme distrust of established communal dynamics.

Suddenly I realize I am navigating a series of sleepy American cities with an open-eyed somnambulist. My companion has succumbed to shock. I entreat him to come to. He approximates reengagement. By the next day I’ve shut down, too. We’re both defeated, for a while.

We did not have the right equipment for that hike. We did not know how to address the deficit. I have to believe that the stubborn reflection will help us.

#

Later that autumn, a genocide survivor will pause in our front room for a cycle of prayer, turning his back to the windows nearest him, which show the streetside view. These days our living room faces a construction site. An elephantine house approaches completion.

A plastic-sided structure of exceptional hugeness replaces the much smaller home of our late octogenarian neighbor, while conserving its texture. The lifelong bachelor persisted in the plastic-sided incarnation of the house where he was born. In the first years of his final decade we become his neighbors while he continues to share his childhood home with his octogenarian sister, a lifelong spinster.

He was a retired teacher, genial and loud. He liked to talk to my son, to whom he would gift an illuminable globe displaying an outdated world map. He held his pants up with a belt distinguished by an NRA buckle. He promoted tough measures against neighborhood speeders. Shoot their tires out. He never actually did that.

His death was witnessed by a hired carer. He was the last surviving resident of a longtime family house torn down recently.

While the neighborhood changes, a lunch guest pauses to pray in our living room, orienting toward our backyard, which he can’t yet see.

We told the political analyst where the sun rises each morning. Soon he will join us at the dining room table where he’ll partake of brothy beans piled with chopped parsley, over which he and his hostess spoon a rich condiment based on sesame paste, whereas the American host applies the same sauce to his vegetable salad.

Our lunch guest seems to savor, too, the pumpkin bake seasoned liberally with onion and sage.

#

It was not a pumpkin bake, exactly. The foundational gourd was butternut squash. I told him pumpkin, a private rhetorical choice, as swift as instinct.

I reached for the English word I was sure he would know. A newcomer cannot go through a Massachusetts autumn without acquiring the English word for pumpkin. Butternut squash might not come up.

I could not endure our meal delayed by an English lesson, I am not an academic type. I want to see my lunchers lunching. Indeed the word I chose resolved his hesitance instantly. Patently this guy likes pumpkin.

And butternut squash, a close cousin. If I recall correctly, he would help himself to seconds of the bake. It came out well if I may say so myself. An improvisational cook does not take her successes for granted.

A language lesson does ensue while he enjoys this stuff. He is the teacher. He says, We call this ejjeh.

I call it pashtida. An ancient rabbinical word reapplied in modern Hebrew, this moniker consolidates a versatile culinary genre recurring among diasporic Jewries, the egg-bound vegetable bake.

The Persian speaker would call it a kuku. The Italianate, frittata, a rendition skewing the balance to favor the eggs. My mother advantaged the vegetable content and called it a kugel.

She perpetuated the associated Yiddish sensibility. I loved her cinnamony version centering a coral-colored tuber, sweet potato. As a little one I valued the dessert-grade mouthful intervening early in a holiday or Sabbath meal. As an adult I’ll revisit that pleasure while revising the flavor profile. A Bostonian cook pleases the palate she developed while growing up in the Middle East.

A political analyst who sits at our table seems to appreciate this take. I go rather heavy on the sage.

~~~~~

by Naama Goldstein

(This essay is the second in a series of literary reflections prompted by the endeavor to bring to English translation the poetry of Heba Al-Madhoun, a Gazan writer, architect, educator and mother killed by an Israeli airstrike in Oct. of ‘23. Partnering in this cross-disciplinary project is Heba’s bereaved husband, Jaser AbuMousa, Middle East Institute Senior Fellow.)