Buchdahl opens the chapter recalling a childhood memory. When she was 10 and her sister, Gina, was seven, their mother, Yi Sulja, announced that the family would be hiking Mount Rainier. Mountains carried deep significance for Sulja, whose spirituality blended Korean shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and animism—a worldview in which every element of the natural world is interconnected. Their father, Fred Warnick, a lanky, gentle man, reassured the girls that they would begin at Paradise, the visitor center near the summit, not at the base.

There, Sulja insisted on a full Korean barbecue, complete with a portable charcoal grill, dismissing Buchdahl’s plea for sandwiches. On the morning of the hike, the family loaded up their new maroon Buick. On the drive, Fred detoured past Puget Sound Manufacturing, the family millwork business founded by Buchdahl’s great-grandfather in 1919, which brought their Jewish ancestors from Romania and Ukraine to Washington. Fred himself worked as construction coordinator for the Tacoma Dome, then the world’s largest wooden-domed arena, and once brought the girls to sign a rafter before it was hoisted into place.

On the mountain, after a tiring ascent into glaciers and snow, Sulja instructed everyone to sit quietly and feel like they were part of the landscape. Buchdahl resisted the idea but then slowly experienced the wind in her hair, the rock beneath her, and the realization that anyone looking at the mountain would also be looking at her. The moment connected her to the Jewish Shema prayer’s declaration that “God is One” (13)—which she now understands as an affirmation of wholeness and interdependence. Afterward, the family ate grilled bulgogi on the mountainside. Lacking a Buddhist temple in Tacoma, Sulja made the mountain her place of worship.

The chapter’s d’var Torah is anchored by the Hebrew word Echad (“oneness”). Buchdahl shifts to a deathbed scene in Manhattan, where she led a dying patriarch and his family in the viddui confessional and the Shema. She recounted the rabbinic legend in which Jacob’s sons recite the Shema to assure their dying father that his faith will endure; Jacob whispers the prayer’s second line in reply. Buchdahl concludes by saying that the Shema at death can frame a moment of loss as a return to oneness—a comfort available to the dying and the mourners.

Buchdahl identifies her mother, Sulja, as her first teacher of risk and reinvention. Sulja was born in Japan in 1942 because Japanese colonizers had forcibly relocated her family—including her mother, Gae-ran, then five years old—from Korea as part of an occupation that began in the 1920s. In Japan, Gae-ran ran a boardinghouse near Osaka, where she met and married Yi Sam-dal, a Korean resistance fighter from the educated yangban class, who was secretly carrying messages between independence activists. The match united a pragmatic businesswoman with an idealistic dreamer. Together, they had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Sam-dal insisted that the family return to Korea over Gae-ran’s objections. He became the village storyteller, his literacy drawing neighbors who paid with soju and rice. However, the Korean War soon forced the family to flee again, this time to a refugee camp near Busan. Sam-dal died when Sulja was 11, leaving Gae-ran to raise seven children by running a bookstore. Sulja assisted at the shop from a young age, reading voraciously.

At 20, Sulja entered a Buddhist temple for six months to prepare for the Suneung, South Korea’s rigorous national college exam. She earned top marks, won a full scholarship, and went on to graduate study at two of the country’s most prestigious universities—the only sibling among seven to attempt the exam. Buchdahl describes her mother’s parenting as strict and deliberate, guided by the belief that children must be shaped while young, though she grew more permissive once her daughters were teenagers. This strictness included using a switch, a traditional Korean punishment called the “cane of love” (22), on rare occasions.

In the d’var Torah, centered on Gesher (“bridge”), Buchdahl examines the beloved song “Gesher Tzar Me’od.” Originally composed by Rabbi Baruch Chait for soldiers during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the song uses words from the 18th-century rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Buchdahl discovered that Chait adjusted Nachman’s original phrase “have no fear” (24), instead writing not to bring fear upon oneself; Buchdahl understood this to mean that fear is partly a choice. Citing the sage Ben Sira’s counsel against anxious anticipation of the future, Buchdahl connects these teachings to her mother’s ability to stay focused.

Buchdahl returns to her mother’s story. Sulja rejected an arranged marriage to a Korean doctor, unwilling to accept the domestic confinement that Korean marriage entailed in the 1960s. When Fred Warnick, a recent Stanford graduate serving in the US Army, gave a talk at Daegu’s Pine Tree Club on American college life, Sulja and her English literature friends attended. Fred began weekly English conversation sessions with the group; one by one, the others dropped away until only Sulja remained.

Buchdahl describes Fred’s background in detail. Born in 1940 in Tacoma, he was a third-generation Jewish American whose family built a prosperous millwork business. His father, Robert, was a showman of the postwar boom. The family’s Reform synagogue was the center of their social identity. Fred diverged from his brothers, Alan and Jack, by studying architecture at Stanford. In his absence, the business collapsed under his father’s resistance to modernization; his parents divorced after 40 years. The Tacoma Jewish community intervened with a communal loan to revive the company under the brothers, on the condition that their father stay away.

After enrolling in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, Fred was stationed in Korea—an ocean away from his unraveling family. As his relationship with Sulja deepened, his family summoned him home without warning. He left without saying goodbye and remained in Tacoma for two years. When he finally returned to Korea in 1967, Sulja was wounded but chose to focus on the fact that he came back. Fred met her skeptical mother, Gae-ran, promising to preserve Sulja’s Korean heritage for their future children—a vow he honored until Gae-ran died.

Buchdahl reflects that her parents shared values that cut across their vast cultural distance, including reverence for family and learning and rootedness in a larger cultural story. Still, Korea viewed Korean women who married American men with contempt. The children of such unions faced severe discrimination. Buchdahl’s own early years in Korea were sheltered within a warm extended family, but when Gae-ran died—releasing Fred from his promise—Sulja chose to leave before her daughters faced school-age prejudice. The family arrived in Tacoma in 1977. While Fred reintegrated easily, Sulja endured dislocation and depression. Despite the strain, their marriage lasted through trust and unconditional acceptance.

The d’var Torah on V’Ahavta (“and you shall love”) examines the Levitical command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Buchdahl argues that the command calls for specific acts like visiting the sick, listening to the unfamiliar, and upholding others’ dignity. She locates the obligation to love others in the notion of oneness and holds that we can only love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves.

Buchdahl details her family’s early life in Tacoma. The family’s first American home sat directly across from Temple Beth El, the synagogue where four generations of Warnicks had bar mitzvahs. Buchdahl enrolled in its nursery school in 1977. Her parents chose Judaism for her and her sister, Gina, as a bridge to Fred’s extended family and to American life; she saw it as a practical path, not a rejection of Buddhism. Fred often told Buchdahl that she was 100% Jewish, Korean, and American.

The synagogue became the heartbeat of Buchdahl’s family’s community life. While Sulja participated actively, she never converted. Buchdahl understands this partly as her mother’s own cultural reasoning but also as a response to the community’s subtle limits: Sulja was always welcomed but never fully claimed, fitting the Talmudic category of ger toshav, a permanent resident who remains just outside full membership. This dynamic taught Buchdahl early that Jewish communities could keep strangers at a careful distance.

Meanwhile, Sulja became a one-woman immigration bureau, helping four siblings and their families relocate to Tacoma. The family’s small house expanded significantly: At one point, 10 people shared 1,700 square feet, with Sulja and Fred surrendering their bedroom to guests and sleeping on a floor mattress. Three more cousins arrived later: the three children of an aunt nicknamed “Restaurant Emo.” Sulja became their legal guardian while they attended American schools.

Among those cousins, Buchdahl’s closest was Joon Uk (or “Uki”), a joyful, gadget-obsessed young man who excelled in school and took a job at Best Buy while studying computer science. At 22, Uki was shot dead during a robbery. Sulja identified his body by the watch on his wrist; his face was unrecognizable. Buchdahl received the news while living alone in Scarsdale and was devastated. For the first time, she turned to the Psalms to give her grief a language, grateful for texts that permitted rage at God. Sulja later confided that her own first impulse after hearing of Uki’s death was to cry out to Elohim, a Hebrew name for God—and that Uki’s death brought her closest to converting to Judaism. She ultimately didn’t, unable to feel that she could belong to a people she wasn’t born into.

Buchdahl reflects further on her mother’s experiences during this time. Sulja channeled her experience of displacement into decades of service. She co-founded the Korean Women’s Association, which grew into Washington State’s second-largest social-service organization, eventually operating an $80 million budget across 14 counties. She secured funding for senior housing, established a domestic-violence shelter and a Korean library, taught English as a Second Language for 30 years, and created the first Korean-language program in American public schools in 1996. Buchdahl concludes that her mother’s hospitality was a form of spiritual practice—an ongoing act of belonging achieved through welcoming others.

The d’var Torah on Hachnasat Orchim (“welcoming”) grounds this practice in the Torah. Days after his circumcision, Abraham stands eagerly at his tent door despite oppressive heat to search for passing travelers. When three strangers appear, he runs to them, bows, prepares a feast, and washes their feet. Buchdahl argues that this act transforms Abraham: He ceases to be a mere stranger and becomes the host. The same dynamic, she observes, plays out in synagogue greeters and converts, whose sense of ownership over a community solidifies the moment they begin welcoming others into it. She closes with the Talmudic teaching that hospitality toward guests surpasses even receiving the divine presence.

Buchdahl reflects on her childhood attachment to her faith. At age eight, she began leading nightly prayer services in the attic bedroom she shared with Gina. The two sisters had divided the room with masking tape, a negotiated treaty governing territorial crossings at a price of five cents per violation, though warmth returned between them each night when the lights went out.

Buchdahl holds that her impulse toward religious practice was self-reinforcing: When her Sunday school teacher, Ms. Tovah, offered sticker-chart rewards for Shabbat observances, Buchdahl began policing her family’s rituals, substituting rice for unavailable challah but insisting on the blessings. A children’s book about a girl named Rachel who recites the Shema before bed prompted Buchdahl to introduce the prayer into their nightly routine. In third grade, she found a “Bedtime Prayer for Children” in the temple telephone directory and added it to the service. Finally, she incorporated unscripted personal prayers, asking God to protect her sister, parents, grandmother, and friends; to help her with her piano and academics; and to create world peace.

The sisters closed each nightly prayer by harmonizing an “amen” modeled on the temple choir. The ritual persisted through high school and beyond; as adults living on opposite coasts, they still recite it together when they reunite. Buchdahl describes Gina—naturally athletic and deeply tender, an instinctive consoler who became a musician—as the subject of her most earnest early prayers and someone whose gentleness she still envies.

Buchdahl argues that children carry a natural inclination toward faith that society tends to erode. She claims that recovering one’s belief later in life can feel like recognition of a true self. In turn, Buchdahl recounts the Talmudic legend of Lailah, the Angel of Conception, who shows each soul its entire life in the womb and then, at birth, silences that knowledge with a touch to the infant’s upper lip—leaving the small indentation known as the philtrum. Life, the legend implies, is the gradual recovery of wisdom we always held.

Buchdahl and her husband, Jacob, have carried the Shema into the next generation, reciting it nightly over their son Gabriel and blessing all three children with hands held over their heads each Friday.

The d’var Torah on Emunah (“trust”) distinguishes trust from faith: Faith is something one either has or lacks, while trust is a deliberate action. The distinction surfaces in Genesis when a doubting Abraham is told to go outside and count the stars. The act of looking up and counting becomes a kind of prayer that renews his resolve. Buchdahl connects this to Judaism’s broader emphasis on deed before understanding, captured in the Israelites’ declaration at Sinai: “We will do, and then we will understand” (62). Her own 40-year prayer practice rests on her trust that giving voice to her hopes orients her heart toward manifesting them.