That wasn’t real either. None of the versions I dreamed were real, because I hadn’t been anywhere near the temple when it burned. No one had been except the rabbi and a man he’d been counseling after the death of the man’s wife. They’d met in the rabbi’s office after the daily minyan ended, despite the fact that there had been arson attempts at several local synagogues in recent weeks. My mom had been at the minyan, as she had been every night since my grandfather died six months before the fire, nearly two years ago now. She’d left the temple less than half an hour before the fire started.
The rabbi and the man he was counseling would ultimately be fine; they’d suffered mostly from smoke inhalation. But the temple itself needed a tremendous amount of repair. I’d seen pictures of the scorched sanctuary and the sooty classrooms in the newspaper. I knew it could have been worse, but all I could think about was how my mother had been there only moments before some awful man, someone they’d never caught, had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the stained-glass window that spanned the back wall of the sanctuary. She could have died. The thought of it left me breathless and sent my brain into nightmare-creation overdrive. My therapist said my subconscious had taken the images I saw and combined them with everything I was afraid of to make dreams that were worse than reality, and I was sure she was right, but that knowledge was insufficient to make the dreams stop.
The funny thing—to the extent you could call anything surrounding these events funny—was that until the fire I’d had what I would call a complicated relationship with Judaism. Sure, I’d gone to Hebrew school for years, had a bat mitzvah and all that. But I’d never believed in the idea of God, and it struck me that lots of the world’s problems were grounded in religion. I respected that my ethnicity was Jewish, that my culture was Jewish, but religion? I wanted no part of it. I’d started complaining about going to services, even though my parents felt strongly that Shabbat was family time and insisted we all sit down for dinner on Friday nights and then go to shul together. “It’s not up for debate,” my mother would say, and though I’d look to my father for backup—many Israeli Jews, like my father, are more secular than people realize—he’d always get behind her.
But now, in a world where synagogues were the sites of mass shootings and arson, where torch-wielding men shouted “Jews will not replace us!” and the government did nothing, I felt more Jewish than I ever had, in good ways and bad. I didn’t complain about going to services anymore, in part because we now had to go to a different temple, one that had reinforced its windows with bulletproof glass and hired full-time security guards, and there was something intensely comforting about hearing the familiar prayers every week after our usual family dinner. I realized it didn’t matter whether I believed in a higher power but not for the reasons I’d thought; the people who wanted me dead didn’t care about the complexity of my belief system. They wouldn’t be checking to see whether I’d really prayed during the silent Amidah or whether I’d let my mind wander. Judaism was my birthright, and that didn’t mean a free trip to Israel; it meant there were people who hated me just for my existence, and there was nothing I could do about it.
That’s when my obsession started. I’d always believed knowledge was power, so I set about empowering myself, thinking knowing more would comfort me. At first I was just reading about anti-Semitism in the world, about the Holocaust, the rise of the Third Reich, and I tried to move forward and study how Germany had come back from its dark past and reinvented itself as a more humane country. But I couldn’t help but look even further back as well, at empires and what had caused them to collapse. There was so much going on in the world, and in the United States in particular, that resembled events that had happened before, and those civilizations hadn’t always survived. I thought about how often I’d been taught that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, and I wondered whether we were in danger of becoming yet another failed democratic experiment. It was all I could think about, all I could talk about, all I could write about. I scribbled so hard in my journal my pen often ripped through the pages.
My obsession was frustrating for everyone around me. One by one my friends backed away, some so subtly I barely noticed, others with a little more fanfare, reminding me I wasn’t the only person the temple fire had affected, but you didn’t see anyone else becoming a full-blown conspiracy theorist, did you? I didn’t think that’s where I was headed, but it didn’t matter. Friends were a distraction. There was so much I needed to know, and without them I had more time for my reading, more time to write in my journal.
“Amina, honey, this isn’t healthy,” my mother would say, after I’d yet again woken her with my nighttime screaming.
“You’re frightening your sister,” my father would say, when it was his turn, hoping the thought of my impact on Shana would make a difference.
Nothing helped with the nightmares—not therapy, not drugs—but what my parents and friends and therapist and psychiatrist didn’t seem to understand was that I was okay. Maybe I wasn’t happy, but who could be happy with everything going on in the world? I was home and I was as safe as I was going to be and I had my research to do and that was really all I wanted right now. I wasn’t the one who needed to change; the country needed to change. I just needed to try to figure out how.
My family didn’t agree. The fire had taken place while I was in eighth grade, and my parents had hoped that my obsession with history would burn out over the summer and I’d be distracted by starting high school. No such luck. My English class was reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, I’d signed up for World History so I could study World War II, and I’d expanded my daily reading to include so many political websites I got headaches and eventually had to start wearing glasses.
“She can’t go on like this,” I heard the rebbetzen tell my parents at services one night. The new temple we’d joined had welcomed our whole congregation, even allowing our rabbi and cantor to participate in services so we felt like we were a part of things while the renovations continued. “You need to get her out of there. There’s a Jewish high school in Brookline—I can help you get her admitted.”
I didn’t hear what my parents said in response, but they’d apparently decided the rebbetzen was right about getting me out of Brooksby but wrong about sending me to an all-Jewish school, where there was a good chance my obsessions would be shared by much of the student body. Before I knew it they’d filled out all the paperwork to get me into Gardner, a school there was no way they could have afforded without the scholarship I ultimately received.
“You can’t do this,” I told them. “I don’t want to leave.”
“You can’t live like this,” Mom said. “The nightmares alone . . .”
“We can’t live like this,” Dad said. “And Shana can’t either.”
Even my sister was against me? It was too much. “I’ll miss you,” she had said. “But I don’t want you to be so sad.”
“I’m not sad!” I wasn’t sad; I was furious. All the time. It felt kind of nice to have something tangible to be angry at, and so I spent the rest of my time in Brooksby raging at my parents for sending me away, even as I tried to rein in my obsessiveness, just to show them I could. I’d resolved to hate this place, to try to get home as quickly as possible, but even my few hours at Game Night had made me wonder whether maybe I should give Gardner a shot. Maybe there was more for me to learn here than there was at home.