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<\/a><\/p>\nMy son\u2019s first grade teacher pulls me aside to tell me she\u2019s concerned about Noah and the Ghost People.<\/p>\n
\u201cGhost People?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d she says. She is cheerful, though I suspect the main ingredient of her cheer is dread. Something she probably picked up from childhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you encourage Noah to stop bringing them to school?\u201d She is whispering, and she is smiling. She is a close talker, and occasionally calls me \u201cgirl\u201d which embarrasses me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know these Ghost People.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe makes them out of the woodchips he finds on the playground. They\u2019re distracting him. He isn\u2019t finishing his sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cGhost People,\u201d I say. She smiles wide. One of her front teeth looks more alive than it should be.\u00a0<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
As a toddler, Noah always had a superhero in one hand and a superhero in the other.<\/p>\n
Like the world was a tightrope and the men were his balance beam. Now he makes his own men. Out of pipe cleaners and twigs and paper and Q-Tips and string and Band Aids, but mostly woodchips. I eavesdrop. With Noah there, the Ghost People seem to speak a mix of cloud and wind. They are rowdy and kind. They comfort him. If Adam looked like anything in the beginning, I suspect it would be these woodchips, the color of dry earth. He, too, would be speaking in a language from a place that doesn\u2019t quite exist.<\/p>\n
But now Noah is in the second grade. And as he gets older, I am certain the world will make it even more difficult for him to carry these People around.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor godssake,\u201d says my mother, \u201clet him carry the freaking Ghost People around. Who is he hurting?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe himself?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy himself?\u201d she asks, \u201cHow himself?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re distracting him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom what?\u201d asks my mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom his sentences,\u201d I explain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho the hell cares,\u201d says my mother.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
In Carlo Collodi\u2019s Pinocchio<\/em>, the first thing Pinocchio does once his mouth is carved is laugh at Geppetto. And the first thing he does once his hands are finished is snatch Geppetto\u2019s yellow wig off his head. And the first thing he does once his feet are done is kick Geppetto in the nose, leaving him to feel \u201cmore wretched and miserable than he felt in all his life.\u201d If what he is making hurts him, why does Geppetto keep carving? Maybe it\u2019s because before he even began carving he knew he would call his wooden son Pinocchio. Maybe because Geppetto understands that sometimes the things we create to protect us, to give us good fortune, need first to thin us into a vulnerability where the only thing that can save us are those things that almost erased us. Where the only thing that can bring us back to ourselves is what brought us to the edge of our being in the first place. Or maybe it\u2019s just that Geppetto is lonely.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat did you do today at school?\u201d \u201cNothing,\u201d says Noah. When I empty his lunch bag I find three Ghost People inside.<\/p>\n In the world of fairy tales, Geppetto is the mother of all mothers. After jail, beatings, poverty, hunger, and crying, all brought on by his spoiled, lying, wooden boy, he still\u2014heartsick\u2014looks for his boy everywhere. They finally unite in the belly of a shark. Pinocchio walks and walks toward a \u201cglow\u201d until he reaches Geppetto lit by the flame of his last candlestick, sitting at a small dining table eating live minnows. He is now little and old and so white he \u201cmight have been made of snow or whipped cream.\u201d Promising to never leave him again, Pinocchio (only a meter tall) swims out of the shark\u2019s mouth, toward the moonlight and the starry sky, with Geppetto on his back. If an old man and a wooden boy ever shared a single birth, it would probably look something like this.<\/p>\n Eli, my five year old, doesn\u2019t make Ghost People, but his pockets are always filled with sticks and leaves. If I were to keep everything my boys have ever found and brought home, I could easily have enough for a whole tree. Maybe even a small forest. When the shooting happened at Tree of Life, all I could think about at first was the name of the synagogue. All I could think about was the Tree. I shut the news off fast. \u201cWhat happened to the Tree of Life?\u201d asks Noah. \u201cNothing,\u201d I say. \u201cI think a branch fell,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t yet read my boys Pinocchio<\/em>, the story of a boy carved from a tree, and I don\u2019t tell them about the shooting at Tree of Life, either. I get an email from our synagogue: \u201cJoin Us for Coffee and an Informal Discussion About How We Can Help Our Children Cope With Frightening Situations As Well As Anti-Semitism.\u201d I go to the meeting. I say I\u2019ve told my boys nothing. Some congregants say I\u2019m keeping my sons in a \u201cbubble.\u201d One maps out the Active Shooter Plan she\u2019s drawn up with the help of her five- and eight-year olds. Another congregant, feeling protective of me, interrupts with the word \u201ccocoon.\u201d \u201cCocoon is more like it,\u201d she explains. What she means, I think, is that bubble implies a lack of air. Whereas cocoon implies transformation. \u201cHer boys might not be ready,\u201d says another congregant. Who is ready? I wonder. At forty-three I\u2019m not ready. Ready to know we can be burst into smithereens at any moment? Ready to be hated since forever? An Israeli congregant explains he keeps nothing from his children. He uses the word \u201cinoculation.\u201d Like if you inject little pieces of horror into your children they won\u2019t shatter when the horror comes. I get his point. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth because I can\u2019t shove the entire room into my mouth.\u00a0 Because I can\u2019t shove all the windows, and chairs, and all the parents, and all their fears, and all their children, too.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to save anybody.<\/p>\n When I pick Noah up from Sunday school, later that morning, an enormous paper hamsa<\/em> dangles around his neck by a soft strand of red yarn. The hamsa<\/em> is brightly colored, and beautiful, and heartbreaking. \u201cIt\u2019s for protection,\u201d says Noah. I watch the other Jewish children spill from the classroom wearing paper hands on their chests, too. \u201cIt\u2019s the paper hand of God,\u201d says Noah. He swings the yarn around so now the hamsa<\/em> is against his back. He is so small, suddenly. He is wearing rain boots, but I don\u2019t remember it raining that day.<\/p>\n \u201cMy child,\u201d I want to say at the meeting at the synagogue, \u201ccarries Ghost People around so we\u2019ll be fine.\u201d I want to say, \u201cI haven\u2019t even read my sons Pinocchio<\/em> yet.\u201d I want to say, \u201cHow many minutes of all our children\u2019s childhoods are left?\u201d Instead, I say, \u201cMy children ask me if their black father was ever a slave. They ask me if Trump will ever turn them into slaves. They asked me if I would ever be turned into a slave for being their mother. As black, Jewish boys my children will never be in a bubble. But if there was a bubble big enough, I\u2019d move there in a second.\u201d Everyone gets very quiet. \u201cTell me where the bubble is. Where\u2019s the bubble?\u201d<\/p>\n I opt out of the next meeting, an improv workshop on \u201cdealing with Christmas, violence, anti-Semitism, shootings, the armed guard now at our synagogue, and more.\u201d<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n In the late sixteenth\u00a0century in Prague, when the waves of hatred rose against the Jews again, a story started brewing about a Rabbi Loew who made a golem out of prayers and clay, a golem whose job it was to guard the Jews from harm. There are two versions of how the rabbi brought the golem to life: the first is that Rabbi Loew inserted the shem<\/em>, a parchment with God\u2019s name, into the golem\u2019s mouth; the second is that he inscribed the word\u00a0emet<\/em> or truth<\/em> on the golem\u2019s forehead. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn\u2019t speak. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn\u2019t lie. But he can hear and he can understand.<\/p>\n In a painting by Leonora Carrington entitled \u201cThe Bath of Rabbi Loew<\/a>,\u201d Rabbi Loew is in his bathtub dreaming up the golem. The rabbi glows white, not unlike Geppetto in the belly of the shark. In the doorway, carrying a water jug, is most likely the golem in a nightgown. A figure wearing a hat shaped like a gigantic teardrop or a black light bulb stands behind the rabbi holding a towel. Surrounding the bath are what look like the letters of an unknown alphabet or the footprints of Noah\u2019s Ghost People. It\u2019s hard to tell.<\/p>\n When the slander about the Jews using the blood of Christian babies in their rituals begins to quiet, the rabbi decides the golem is no longer needed. In one story, the name of God is removed from the golem\u2019s mouth and he dies. But in another stranger and more beautiful story, a little girl rubs the aleph off his forehead, and turns amet <\/em>to met<\/em>: truth<\/em> into death<\/em>. Because in Hebrew the only thing standing between truth and death is an aleph<\/em>. In the Sefer Yetzirah<\/em>, the oldest and most mysterious of all the kabbalistic texts, the aleph<\/em>\u00a0is represented by silence, and its \u201cvalue designation\u201d is \u201cmother.\u201d I wonder what would\u2019ve happened had Geppetto given Pinocchio an aleph<\/em>. A small one. Carved onto the bridge of his nose. Because, ultimately, isn\u2019t silence and truth what Pinocchio is always missing?<\/p>\n Originally, Pinocchio <\/em>was only fifteen chapters long. And in the last chapter, Pinocchio is hanged. It was only at the behest of a pleading editor that Collodi saved the boy. At the end of the expanded Pinocchio<\/em>, the old wooden puppet sits on a chair with its arms dangling, its head bent, and the real boy Pinocchio barely regards it. He does not go to the puppet. Or fix its head. Or knock on its wood for good luck. He doesn\u2019t even have the kindness to speak to it. \u201cHow funny I was,\u201d he says, \u201cwhen I was a puppet \u2026 and how happy I am now that I am a proper little boy.\u201d<\/p>\n Noah has begun making paper clothes for his Ghost People. It\u2019s winter, after all. I watch him cut out a tiny scarf and realize that I\u2019ve never taught him to pray. I\u2019ve taught him the prayers over the wine and the challah and the candles, but I\u2019ve never taught him to pray. Or maybe praying isn\u2019t taught. Or this is praying. Or praying is keeping the Ghost People warm. The mouthless, earless Ghost People. Faith in Hebrew is emunah.\u00a0<\/em>It appears in the Bible as \u201cto hold steady,\u201d but also as eman <\/em>which means \u201ca nursing father.\u201d \u201cThis one,\u201d says Noah, \u201chas a fever.\u201d I feel the Ghost Person\u2019s head. \u201cIs it a fever?\u201d he asks. \u201cIt is,\u201d I say. He makes for it a paper bed. With a paper blanket. And a crumpled pillow, too. When there is a shooting, and then there is another shooting, and another shooting, all the politicians\u2019 \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d are with the families of the victims. \u201cWe don\u2019t want your thoughts and prayers,\u201d we say. We say this, of course, because it\u2019s the thoughts and prayers of men and women we suspect have (like Pinocchio) an aleph<\/em> missing. We say this because after each shooting it\u2019s already too late. The bubble has popped and the Ghost People are already being buried.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n