The Celestial Gate by Avital Dicker (red white royal blue txt) 📗

At first, Mom laughed. She didn’t believe in any religion, but she figured it was another one of Dad’s experiments because he’s an artist and therefore a little crazy to begin with. Mom was sure the phase would pass, like the time Dad decided he was a Buddhist and wasn’t allowed to talk.

However, as it turned out, it wasn’t a passing phase. When Dad asked Mom to separate between milk and meat dishes and wanted Yam to leave his school and instead attend a yeshiva high school, Mom got mad and said, “Enough already!” Nobody was going to tell her what to do or what to think, and her son wasn’t going to be sent someplace where they’d brainwash him with superstitions.

Dad got mad too and screamed that life had to have some meaning and it was, therefore, necessary to believe in something, but Mom answered that if he wanted to believe in something, he could just be a good person. There was no need to use his mid-life crisis to become ultra-religious and turn the entire household upside-down. And then they fought, which had become the new normal.

But what really did it for Mom was that Dad took Yam to a religious Zionist political party rally. They started to talk about the Greater Land of Israel and all sorts of secret actions that had to be taken.

When Mom heard about that, she completely lost it. After a few days of non-stop screaming, Dad moved into an apartment in a religious neighborhood.

Yam remembered that one time, a few years ago, his father had told him about the Mayans who lived in South America. Thousands of years ago, they’d known how to track the stars and had built enormous pyramids. Nobody could figure out how they’d done it. Then, one day, they simply disappeared. According to the legend, his dad said, they hadn’t really disappeared, but because their civilization was so spiritually advanced, they’d found the gate to heaven and climbed up the stairs to another world.

Dad said that, long ago, there had been such a gate in Jerusalem too, and it was holy to all three religions – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity – but then the Jews, Muslims, and Christians started to fight among themselves, each saying his religion was the right one, making God so mad he closed the gate. It was ironic because now Dad had become a super-religious Jew. All this made zero sense to Yam.

Yesterday, when Dad came to pick him up, he and Mom started fighting again.

Mom screamed that Dad’s wonderful religion had broken up their family and that only over her dead body would Yam go to a yeshiva where they taught the kids to hate Arabs or attend a synagogue where men and women had to sit separately. And then she screamed that Yoav always found another excuse to leave every time things got a little tough. Back then it was because of his career, and now it was because of his religion. If he really understood anything about love and responsibility, he’d behave differently.

They kept screaming at one another until Yam couldn’t take it anymore and ran out of the house. He was sick of their fighting. No part of it made sense and anything was better than hearing them shouting. This was precisely the reason he liked computers better than people: computers made sense.

Yam wasn’t a huge fan of words. He preferred to spend time with his computer to hanging out with people. He could hole up in his room with his laptop for days on end, and his hacking skills were pretty sweet. One time, he’d even been able to break into the Defense Ministry’s super-secure site. It had been so easy! It was only software. In any case, he had no intention of getting called to the Torah or celebrating his bar mitzvah or believing in anything. His parents could just forget about it.

Anise

Yesterday, during school recess, Eleanor screamed at her that she was a stinking Muslim Arab who only wanted to kill Jews and that she should quit being so stuck up just because she had blonde hair. Anise skipped school in the middle of the day and headed straight for home.

She knew her mom was Arab. So what? In her class, there were Christian kids and Filipino kids. She’d grown up with them, with all of them, and nobody made any trouble for them. She was the only one who got picked on, all the time.

It hadn’t been like that at first. As little kids, everyone played with everyone else and nobody cared where anyone was from. But, lately, the whole issue had become more and more problematic and the fact that, this past year, Eleanor had gotten fat and broken out in acne didn’t help. Besides, her mom wasn’t into religion. She was an atheist. And Mor, who was like a brother to her, was Christian on his mom’s side and Jewish on his dad’s.

But that didn’t seem to matter, because all her friends were now keeping their distance. It really hurt. Everything around her had changed. It was as if she’d stopped being a person and had become an enemy, as if by being a Muslim she was personally responsible for everything that happened.

Anise opened the door to the house. It was relatively early, so no one was home yet. Sual was still at university and Mor wasn’t back from school. Anise kicked her shoes off and went into the kitchen to make herself a Nutella sandwich. Chocolate always made her feel better.

She turned on the TV. Channel 2 was broadcasting live coverage of a terrorist attack that had taken place somewhere in the south of the country. Four people had been killed, and the newscaster added that ISIS had assumed responsibility. Anise’s spirits sank further. Great, she thought, now I’ll get harassed even more in school and Eleanor will use this to make life a living hell.

It was three in