In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World

11. Prayer

11 Prayer There is no mediator between God’s children and God. —Talmud J Berakoth, : God requires no synagogue—except in the heart. —Hasidic saying I remember the men chanting. I hear them. I see them rocking back and forth, gently striking their breasts. I see the children run around them, the little ones between their legs. The davening goes on, the children are noticed, but not admonished. They run out of the storefront shul, press their bodies to the glass, grab a mother’s hem, laugh and chase each other on this High Holy Day. I do not run and play with the little ones; I am older, almost twelve. I remain, still, off to the side, staring with my ears. The noise rises. I listen for the harmony, for the unified song of prayer. I listen. And I hear singsong gabble; the sounds are not clear. I strain to hear these men robed in blue-threaded talaysim. I focus on two men bobbing side by side and in my cone of vision, I concentrate on their lips, expecting to see them speak in unison, expecting to make sense of the Hebrew melody. The lips speak, they move, and the words that issue forth are distinct,   Growing Up Hearing different in each mouth. Each man prays alone, each man prays in community; they chant their common chorus of prayer. My mother catches my eye with her hands as she walks in the door. Her hands, struck by sunlight, say, “Why you stand with open mouth in front of all men who pray? Enough to watch, come outside.” I am fifty feet from her language. I pretend not to see. She signs again, “Come soon, we go home, eat lunch.” I avert my eyes and this time I do not strain. I allow the melody to pour into my heart and ask, “God, is this the language you speak; is this the sound that created the world, that made me?” The chanting stops. An old graybeard catches my lips and asks in English, “You pray?” Embarrassed, I answer, “I have to eat lunch now.” The men, no longer bent in rapt prayer, talk to one another. Their eyes follow me out the door. The women and children gather in clusters on the sidewalk, in groups of three and six and ten, blocking my mother from view. I do not see her. I cannot call out to her; she cannot hear me. I think, Momma, if God can hear me, why can’t you? And I know in that instant that she does hear me. It is a different hearing. We speak and hear another sacred language. With our eyes. The language I heard in the windowpaned shul, sharing its walls with a grocer on one side and a tailor on the other, remains a deep and mysterious memory. Hebrew. It was Hebrew. So powerful did I believe language to be that I willed myself to absorb God’s original voice. I sensed the haunting melody of prayer, unsynchronized, chanted in the separate voice of every man bent over the Book. I sensed that it was a language apart, holy, not in daily use. I asked myself how could I learn a language I did not hear every day, I did not see every day? Written Hebrew, with its rounded forms and strange black letters , written from right to left and read from back to front, was another form of sign, an ancient calligraphy. I believed if I rubbed my fingers over the letters I would learn; learn the same way I learned the language of sign, deep and mysterious too, in its fingered nuance. I needed a teacher. I needed practice, repetition, explanation. Afraid to ask, I kept this longing hidden, this need to learn God’s voice, close to my chest, where I kept my other unrequited longings. “Momma?” I asked, in very small signs, when the High Holy Days were over, “I want study Hebrew. I want go to Hebrew school.” “What for? Not important girls learn Hebrew, it is for boys. Your brother Fred will go, you not necessary go.” Shut down by her casual reply, I slipped into stillness. I asked my father the question the next morning before he left for work. He saw my longing and answered, “You go to Hebrew school, around corner, ask rabbi-teacher how much...