Work Text:
I broke free on a Saturday morning
I put the pedal to the floor
Headed north on Mills Avenue
And listened to the engine roar
My broken house behind me and good things ahead
There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me
-The Mountain Goats, This Year
Monty has been dating Charles and Edwin for a couple of months when he decides he wants to learn more about the place where he came from. The place that he tried so hard to connect to on his own, in what scant time he had outside of his mother's wishes and whims.
But with a mother who refused to take him to the synagogue, who did not care about letting him attend services-
Now in his twenties, only a year out from under her roof, Monty's siddur is worn in, but his mouth has forgotten what Hebrew he once tried to learn. His prayers do not feel natural from his own lips.
But he comes from a people that fist fought angels and called out HaShem, and he will not let his fucking mother get in the way of him getting to connect with that.
So with Charles and Edwin’s encouragement, he screws his courage to the sticking place and goes to the local synagogue, and he asks.
Most people wouldn't expect a woman like Crystal Palace to become a rabbi. Ready to debate and challenge HaShem and marry a woman and admit her mistakes and flaws and try to become better.
But that's what makes her great at this.
Rabbis are spiritual leaders, yes, but they are teachers first. And the best teachers are those who know their stuff, but who are willing to question what they learn.
And when Crystal talks about her being the latest in a long line of women who taught, who debated, who learned, who questioned-
Monty wants to know so much. He wants to connect. Wants to be able to find a piece of himself that his mother denied herself- and thus him- for so long.
And Rabbi Palace, who knows a thing or two about questioning, who knows a thing or two about falling away from practice and fighting your way back, tooth and nail, to the place where you belong, the community of your ancestors- she knows what that is like.
Monty doesn't know if he would do as well with someone who was perfect all along. Someone who has always been the picture of perfect practice.
But he wants to learn. He wants a community.
And he has this dream. This ache, denied to him for so long by a mother who did not care, of a bar mitzvah, of getting to earn his place back, of getting to become a man- not just out in the world, the casual legal gifts that turning eighteen or twenty one gives someone, but something more than that. Something deeper than that.
And he wants to be able to invite Charles and Edwin when he finally has learned enough.
When he can be a member of his community. When he can be someone who understands his world enough to be able to answer his own questions, and to ask so many more.
When he can read Hebrew.
When he can read the Torah and be called on for the aliyah.
To read the Torah in front of the group. To lay tefillin. To be a man, in his own community, and to have it overseen by a queer woman who has had to find her own way, has had to answer her own questions, and find herself and HaShem alike at the end of the road.
To be able to share a seudat mitzvah. To be able to celebrate with his community and his rabbi and the people that he loves, as small as that group of people might be.
To eat matzah ball soup and challah and everything he missed out on.
To know.
To be known.
Monty wants to find the pieces of himself that he lost so long ago that he cannot remember what it was like to have them.
And so his nights are filled with study and his Saturdays with services and it’s an adjustment, he knows, for his boyfriends to move from the man that they took home from a bar for a fun one-night stand to someone who spends such time focused on something so specific and deep and aching. Someone who fills his time with ghosts of the past and future alike, as he dives into history and language and ethics and law and the like.
But Monty hasn’t changed. He has just…clarified.
All Monty Finch’s life, he’s wanted nothing more than to come home.
And with Charles and Edwin, he has that. He has a home, a shared apartment and dinners where there is more fish and chicken eaten than anything because Charles can’t have beef and Monty can’t have pork and that has led to more than one laughing fit over them scratching their heads over recipe books when they try to figure out how to accommodate for both of their stomachs and religious practices.
But he wants more. He wants not just the present, but the past and the future. He wants to know what it is to be not just Monty Finch, book shop assistant, lover of the stars, lover of his boyfriends, the wayward son of Esther Finch, but who he is in the moments when he is finally off his knees, able to pray instead of to ache.
And Charles and Edwin are here for that. They’re here for the long nights of studying, the repeating of words and conjugations and the like until he’s slurring his words with sleep and they have to remind him that he is not called upon to wreck himself in the pursuit of study but rather to find a way to honor HaShem without compromising your own health. The sick are permitted to abstain from a fast, after all; as important as it is dedicate himself to his efforts, it is important for him to also pay attention to his own health, to get sleep, to allow himself the grace that his mother never did, in all of those years forcing him to follow her every word as law.
Monty allows himself to rest. Allows himself to pace himself, to be bundled into bed by them, to fast when he should, yes, but not to push himself too far. To learn the way to allow himself to be, in all ways.
And in those moments, Monty has to thank the world for giving him them. For giving him this. The chance that one day, he could have all parts of himself lifted in celebration, in community, in home.
Baruch HaShem.