Collateral

                 When I was eight years old, I got sent to a different world. My mom kissed my cheek, told me I was going to be fine and left me in front of the door. This gateway, portal sucked me in with the spoken words, "Shalom Rachel!" And so began what I felt like was a dual life. It didn't matter that this world was across the street from my school or that it physically existed on planet Earth, in Park Slope, Brooklyn NY. I seemed to leave Zoe Fruchter behind whenever i transversed the boundary that seemed to surround PSJC, my other world. The temple (PSJC) made me feel small, the sheer weight of religion and tradition bore down on my eight-year-old shoulders like a yolk. I had a different name, Rachel, a different family, Yonina, Yakov and Leah and different friends and teachers. The food was different, kosher, the customs were different, even the alphabet was different. In my other world I was Zoe Fruchter, daughter of Lev and Jill sister of Ella. In my other world I was smart, in this one I could not read or write. In my other world I had friends, I was outgoing and I prospered like a flower bathed in sun synthesizing all information and experiences, with all of the materials I needed. Here I was minuscule, unimportant, an outsider who nibbled on fake Oreos in the bathroom because there was no one to play with. I was a flower in the winter, isolated, devoid of my societal nessecities bending under the weight of the frost. The two places were so different I distinguished them as separate universes.
                     Religion is odd like that, it makes you unsure of who you are, of why you even exist on this planet. Of whether you even have any power to change who you are the actions you take in your life. Religion makes you question all that you once held certain in your life. Judaism gave me a new name, language and culture. Later I would learn how to integrate these things into pre-existing life, but at eight it felt uncannily like I changed every time I kissed the mezuzah on the arched doorway and entered hebrew school.
                 Hannah, in A Time Of Angels by K. Hesse is weighed down by her religion. Growing up in plague ridden Boston at the time of World War II, Hannah is weighed down enough as it is. She pretends to be a boy as to keep a job as a paper boy (adolescents who hawked news headlines in order to sell periodicals to the public), evading the groping hands of her supervisors and waking up at dawn to provide for her haphazard family consisting of her beloved sisters Libbie, Eve, her Tanta (aunt) Rose and Rose's companion of sorts Vashti. Hannah mothers her sisters in spite of hardworking Rose's insistence that she leave it to Vashti, who Hannah believes to be "like a buzzard" or parasite that sucks the life out of everything that she knows to be good about the narrow world that is all that Hannah knows.
                However, Vashti is not the worst thing out in Hannah's world, influenza is a threat much worse than any one person and when Hannah's cherished Tanta and sisters fall prey to it, Hannah is left alone with Vashti, the one person in there family who is selfless enough to send Hannah away from flu riddled Boston, to the country where the plague cannot touch her no matter how much her blood family pleads for her to stay with them. When you love someone, it is the hardest to let them go. You want them so badly that you cannot send them away, even though it is the very pinnacle of love: letting go.
                  So Hannah is alone, on a train to be entrusted into the care of a strange family, she turns to her faith her religion. The fact that it was so hard for her to do this. She "wrestled with the unknown force, whose magnitude of decision and aftermath seemed of greatest weight and caused the greatest of terrors to a girl who survived only by focusing on the path just in front of her."She is torn because her closest person, her aunt told her to pray to God for deliverance but Hannah is not sure if she can. By choosing to accept religion, you are choosing to accept that you are not in control of your life anymore. Hannah has survived her harsh world purely relying on her own wits and talents, to give up this control is like betting your life on something. You are completely at a loss for jurisdiction concerning yourself, but you have something to blame when things go wrong.
                   Hannah is at a loss for what to do, she wants to respect Tanta Rose's memorie but cannot bring herself to relinquish her firm belief that she can decide her fate. But subconsciously, she transcends into a dream world. She begins to see angels everywhere saying "powers once unknown to me now look like the works of a phantom hand, one that cradled Tanta Rose..." in other words, God. Hannah describes her acceptance of a higher power and joining a new society and seeing a new world. I think that Hannah had to completely let go of what she had known before in order to survive her present. The past was weighing her down. And the idea of religion was weighing her down because it was bonded with the past. Yet be releasing her past as the thing that shaped her essence of self, she could embrace a belief that could lift her away from her loss.
                  So although I am not sure whether I have accepted God I understand what Hannah means when she describes religion being a different world. Its such a controversial and relative thing, the cause of so many conflicts, yet some say it heals. Its something so different from everything else that it becomes, in a sense, a different existence.