D'yo Ilu Yamey

The Poet and the Gatekeeper (Arachin 11b)

2012-01-23T00:14:00.002+02:00

Today’s daf continues the Talmud’s discussion of the music of the Levites, a combination of vocal and instrumental music that was considered an essential component of sacrificial worship in the Temple. Not all the priests were responsible for Temple music; there seem to have been two categories of Levites. One group, known as the משוררים (poets), was responsible for Temple music. The other group, known as משוערים(gatekeepers), was responsible for locking the doors of the Temple. These categories date back at least to the time of Ezra (2:7), who enumerates the families of poets and gatekeepers in a list that is repeated (with some variations) in Divrei Hayamim (I chapter 9). These two categories had to be kept distinct; a poet could not perform the duties of the gatekeeper, nor vice versa, as cautioned by the following tale from today’s daf:

A story is told of Rabbi Yehoshua bar Hanania who went to help Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada with the closing of the gates. Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada said to him: My son, turn back! For you are one of the poets and not one of the gatekeepers!

Both of the sages who figure in this story were Levites. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania was a poet, though he is more familiar to us as the student of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who helped smuggle his teacher out of Jerusalem on the eve of the Temple’s destruction. He then became the leader of the Yavneh beit midrash, known for its intellectual creativity. It was he who famously asserted, “There can be no beit midrash without novel teaching!” Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada was a gatekeeper, though we also know him as the poor student who was appointed along with Rabbi Elazar Hasma to supervise the students in Rabban Gamliel’s beit midrash. Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgada were friends; according to one story, Rabbi Yehoshua pleaded with the wealthy patriarch Rabban Gamliel to find a job for Rabbi Yohanan, who was so brilliant that he “could count all the drops in the sea,” yet he was utterly destitute (Horayot 10a). In our story from daf yomi, too, Rabbi Yehoshua rushes to the aid of Rabbi Yohanan, this time offering to help his friend lock the doors of the Temple. But Rabbi Yohanan rebukes him, insisting that he must keep to his own job of poet and not rush to the aid of the gatekeepers.

This story inspires a rather stern Talmudic injunction about the division of labor in the Temple, warning about משורר ששיער ומשוער ששורר
This brilliant conjoining of sound and sense—itself a poetic injunction about gatekeeping (or policing) who may do what-- refers to a poet who guards, and a gatekeeper who composes, both of whom are liable for quite a severe punishment:

A poet who engages in his friend’s gatekeeping duties is put to death, as it is written, “Those who were to camp before the Tabernacle in front…were Moses and Aaron and his sons, attending to the duties of the sanctuary. Any stranger who encroached was to be put to death” (Numbers 3:38). What is a stranger? If you mean a non-Levite, well, we have already been told that once already! Rather, it must mean someone who is estranged from that labor [that he is meant to perform].

Anyone who engages in someone else’s designated task is described as being “estranged” from his true labor to the extent that he is considered a זר, a stranger. This is an appropriate message for Masechet Arachin, which deals with the value of every human being. It is also a sentiment I identify with quite strongly on a personal level. For over seven years I have been working as a gatekeeper. As a foreign rights agent, my job is to secure permission for Israeli publishers to translate into Hebrew books originally written in foreign languages. Each day I receive dozens of manuscripts, which I submit to the appropriate Israeli editors. When multiple editors compete for the rights to translate a single work, I decide who gets the right to publish that book. I am, in short, a gatekeeper for literature.

At night, when I lock the gates of my office and return home, I often dream of becoming one of the poets. I make up rhyming songs that I sing to my baby and compose silly limericks about the Talmud, but rarely do I write anything more serious or sustained. I am so estranged from myself that I am convinced I am a gatekeeper, and well I might be. But that does not explain why my spine tingles at the poetic resonance of the Talmud’s tongue-twisting plays of language, nor why I search every day for that novel insight that keeps the beit midrash alive, nor why I am haunted by Rabbi Yohanan’s rebuke. חזור לאחוריך! Turn back! For you are one of the poets and not one of the gatekeepers!

Parshat Vayishlach: Learning to be Shalem

2011-12-21T00:17:00.002+02:00

Here in Jerusalem I live between two languages, yet I try to speak only one at a time. I cringe when I hear other Americans in Jerusalem peppering their English with select words of Hebrew: “We’re doing a total shiputz with an amazing kablan!” I aspire to access the full range of expression in whatever language I am speaking, without smuggling in words from another tongue. And yet sometimes I find myself guilty of the same shoddy linguistic border patrol, like last week, when I kept borrowing a key word from the parsha: “I’m just not shalem with this decision” or “I wish I could agree with shlemut” or “she’s just such a put-together, shalem person.”

In last week’s parshat Vayishlach it is Yaakov who is described as being shalem: “And Yaakov came shalem to Shechem” (33:18). This verse appears after the parsha’s mounting anticipation about the confrontation with Esav and the surprising anticlimax that follows. Yaakov, terrified of the impending confrontation with his estranged twin, attempts to appease Esav by sending messages of peace and bountiful gifs of he-goats, she-goats, ewes, rams, camels, colts, cowls, and bulls: “If I propitiate him with presents in advance and then face him, perhaps he will show me favor” (32:21). Quaking in his boots, Yaakov prays to God to save him from the dreaded clash with his brother: “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; else, I fear, he may come and strike me down, mothers and children alike” (32:13). Worried for the welfare of his wives and children, Yaakov resorts to the desperate measure of dividing his family into two camps in the hope that if Esav were to attack, he would lose only half his numbers.

Although Yaakov is fully prepared—militarily and psychologically—to fight off his brother, Esav surprises him by coming in peace. As David Flatow points out in a d’var Torah on the Drisha Institute website, instead of the expected confrontation with Esav, Yaakov finds himself instead wrestling with a mysterious man who approaches him in the darkness when he waits alone on the far side of the river. Somehow Yaakov succeeds in fighting off this anonymous aggressor, perhaps because he was already prepared for battle (with Esav) at the moment when he met him. Flatow points out that Yaakov is the kind of person who prepares thoroughly for everything that he expects in life, and as a result, when he is confronted by the unexpected, he has the wherewithal and the reserve strength to deal with those challenges as well. According to Flatow, this is the source of the shlemut that we are told about in the first verse after the anticlimactic meeting with Esav: “And Yaakov came shalem to Shechem.” Yaakov, in a state of constant preparedness, had an inner peace and wholeness that enabled him to successfully navigate even those challenges that he least expected.

I aspire to the shlemut of Yaakov even as I recognize how sorely I lack it. I wish to be able to reach that level of ease and inner peace that enables me to confront everyone I meet with a smile and a willingness to take on whatever the situation might require of me. And yet instead I find myself answering the telephone with a sense of dread creeping into my voice: “Who is calling me now, and why are they interrupting me, and what am I going to have to do for them,” instead of “oh how lovely, an opportunity for human encounter!” Yaakov takes the time to put his life in order, and as a result, he is able to deal with anything that comes his way. He accepts that life is not always what you expect, and that sometimes it is the willingness to embrace the unexpected that enables us to glimpse Peniel, the face of God. Moreover, he engages in regular dialogue with God, which instills in him the wholeness and the sense of self-awareness that enables him to be receptive to other human beings. I can learn from this as well; all too often I find myself so caught up in my own turmoil and “issues” that I must unload them on the first person I meet, instead of greeting others with a receptiveness to their needs and concerns. Perhaps if I spent more time emptying myself out to God in prayer, I’d have more room for the needs of the other people in my life.

I still do not have a suitable English translation for shlemut, perhaps because, as David Bellos writes in Is That a Fish in Your Ear, his recently-published book on translation, “It’s an indisputable fact about languages that the sets of words that each possesses divide up the features of the world in slightly and sometimes radically different ways.” Shlemut is a combination of several English phrases: it is the sense of wholeness that allows for the inner peace and that enables us to confront the challenges at hand without being torn apart by whatever we are dreading or anticipating at any given moment. It is also a kind of maturity and a willingness to make room for others, even if we meet them unexpectedly, and even if they surprise us by being pacific rather than aggressive – or vice versa. I am blessed with many models of shlemut in my life: from my husband who never loses his cool regardless of what goes wrong; to my sister-in-law who is so comfortable in her own skin that she is able to devote her entire existence to being there for others; to my baby son who has been lying on our bed content to play with his feet and delay his breakfast for the past twenty minutes so I could type up these thoughts. Perhaps one day I will learn how to put his needs first, but that, I fear, involves a sense of shlemut that I am still working to master.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masekhet Hullin (Perek 1)

2011-11-12T23:23:00.010+02:00

הכל שוחטין
(Perek Aleph)

(2a)
All are permitted to shecht
(So long as they’re part of the sect)
Unless they’re the kind
Who are deaf-mute or blind
Or so short that they can’t reach the neck.

(5a)
Elijah was fed by the crows
Or so the Tanakh’s story goes
But were those crows birds?
What to make of that word?
They were two men named “crow,” we suppose.

(5b)
There are people who act more like beasts
Do we let them bring sacrifice feasts?
Even people who choose
Sin cannot be refused
By the Temple’s officiates, priests.

(6a)
Rabban Gamliel said: Don’t condone
Those Samaritans. Don’t eat their bones.
All they shecht is forbidden
For though it’s kept hidden,
They worship a dove carved in stone.

(6b)
Jewish women should not grind their wheat
With impure commonfolk who might cheat.
Lest the commoner say,
Yum, so tasty today—
You should sample my flour – come eat!

(7a)
If your mother in law can’t be trusted
Then your quantities must be adjusted:
That is, tithes you must take
From whatever she bakes.
She is sly, and won’t ever get busted.

(7a)
Pinchas ben Yair, one fine day,
To redeem captives set on his way.
He said: Stream, you must split!
But the stream had a fit.
Til he threatened, and made it obey.

(7b)
Pinchnas then came to an inn
With his donkey, a beast loath to sin.
They fed oats to the ass
Who refused the repast
“Were your oats tithed?” asked Pinchas, chagrined.

(7b)
Rabi kept most unorthodox pets:
He had white mules (as bad as it gets)
Pinchas knew they kicked hard
Hence he wanted them barred
When invited, he sent his regrets.

(7b)
A woman crawled under the seat
Of Hanina to sweep by his feet
To get dust for dark arts
Said Hanina: Too smart
Is our God. All your charms He’ll defeat.

(9a)
A scholar of Torah must learn
These three subjects, each one in its turn:
How to slaughter, and write,
And to circumcise; quite
A whole lot for a sage to discern.

(12a)
If you chance on a beast that’s been shechted,
Though it looks kosher once you’ve inspected,
You did not watch the slaughter
When blood flowed like water
So don’t eat -- the butcher’s suspected.

(12a)
If you throw a sharp knife towards a wall
And it chances to shecht while mid-fall.
Although not intended
A beast’s life is ended
But not by correct protocol.

(12a)
Does a little kid act with intention
Can he act with full grown-up attention
If he carves out a fruit
To make storage for dirt
Do we render “Tamey” his invention?

(13b)
Goyim abroad don’t know much—
Though idolatrous objects they clutch
It’s more just a fad
For the son acts like dad
Avodah Zara? Well, just a touch.

(13b)
You can shecht in the night or if blind
(Though the right spot might be hard to find.)
You can shecht on a ship,
On a roof (but don’t trip)
Just make sure you have presence of mind.

(16a)
Abraham took up the knife
(Unbeknownst to poor Sarah, his wife)
Must the knife be detached
When the deed is dispatched
Zealous Abe almost took Yitzchak’s life!

(17a)
In the desert the Jews had no rules
They could slaughter whatever they’d choose
When they entered the Land
Matters got out of hand
God said: Do shechita right please, you fools!

(18a)
Bar Hinana said: I can’t trust
This young butcher. I’ll make him go bust.
But the guy must be able
To put food on his table
Please say what I did was unjust!

(19a)
Mugremet is not a good cut
If you shecht that way, you’re in a rut.
Know the right place to slice
For you can’t do it twice
Aim for windpipe, and not for the gut.

(24a)
In five years’ time you learn your trade
After five years you work without aid
If you didn’t quite master
Don’t try working faster
It’s time to give up, I’m afraid.

(24b)
At age 80, Hanina could stand
On one foot, put on shoes with his hand
He was spry for his age
‘Cause his mom at one stage
Used to bathe him in oil. How grand!

(26b)
If yom tov’s on Friday, you asked,
Is havdala said once chag has passed.
To teach: “Now it’s Shabbat
Can you cook? You cannot”--
No havdala. Instead, shofar blast!

Fumbling for the Thumb: Parshat Noach

2011-10-25T00:55:00.003+03:00

In this week’s parsha we read about Noach, though we first learn of his birth at the end of Parshat Breishit. There we are told that his father Lemech calls him Noach because “this one will relieve us (yeNACHamenu) from our work and from the toil (itzavon) of our hands” (5:29). Lemech creates a midrash to explain his son’s name: Noach, whose name means comfort, will provide relief to a humanity that has just been cursed by God with the burden of working the soil with toil (itzavon) all the days of their lives. (Yeats: “It's certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.”) The midrash relates that Noach provided this comfort because he was the first human being to be created with opposable thumbs, which made it much easier to till the earth or do almost anything with one’s hands.

I thought about this midrash when Matan began sucking his thumb for the first time this week. He has been trying to master this skill for quite some time now: First he noticed the thumb and stared at it for a few days; then he realized that he could put it in his mouth; and then he would chomp on it and gag himself, only to stick the thumb back in and gag again. Yet now he sucks away gleefully. As a result, his parents can sleep better at night – in the past, each time Matan would stir, one of us would have to reach over the side of our bed, feel around for the pacifier strewn somewhere across his crib, and poke our hands around in the dark (like a blind person groping around in broad daylight, to invoke an image from the Tohekha) until we found (oops, that was the wrong side of his head; nope, an eyelid; yeah, there it is!) his mouth and could stick the pacifier back in and then roll over back to sleep. But now Matan knows how to pacify himself: He wakes up, finds his thumb, and sticks it in his mouth with gusto. This one will comfort us indeed! Matan can rest (Nach) more deeply, and this solution finds favor (Chen) in his parents’ eyes much as Noach (in another anagrammatic midrash – chen is Noach backwards) found favor in the eyes of God.

Inevitably, in our lives as parents, I’m sure Matan will be the source of some Itzavon, which Rashi interprets as צער גידול בנים, the pain of raising children. It is not just pregnancy and childbirth that are part of God’s curse to Eve, but also the gap between expectation and reality: Parents invest everything in their children, only to find that thorns and thistles spring up from the soil in which they have planted their hopes and dreams. Itzavon, like Teshuka (desire), is the difference between what we have and what we want. Eve is saddled with Teshuka for her husband and Itzavon for her children, leaving her with little room for satisfaction. And yet until this point, Matan has been only a source of Naches, which of course comes from the Hebrew word Nachat, itself a variant on Noach/comfort. When I peer into the Teyva (ark) of his crib at night and watch him fumble for his thumb, I find myself paraphrasing the most poetic line from this week’s parsha: So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night; my love for you, Matan, shall never cease.

Note: Like everything I write, this dvar Torah owes much to the insights of Avivah Zornberg. For more on Noach and Itzavon, see “Despondent Intoxication” in The Murmuring Deep.

First Fruit

2011-09-16T00:04:00.003+03:00

This week I returned from my maternity leave from leyning. Since Matan’s birth, I have leyned only rarely. I was reluctant to commit to reading Torah because I worried that Matan might need to eat at that very moment when I was at the Amud, or that I’d be so exhausted from yet another sleepless night that I would not wake up in time for shul. Perhaps I was still traumatized by the memory of last Yom Kippur, when I nearly fainted while leading shacharit – this was also on account of Matan, though at the time I did not even know I was pregnant. But now with Matan more or less sleeping through half the night and blessed with patience and equanimity far beyond his four months, I felt it was time to return, at last, to reading an aliyah or two each week.

This week’s parsha is Ki Tavo, a reference to Benei Yisrael’s entry into the land of Israel and a reminder to me that I am re-entering the Torah reading cycle, this time as a mother. Like the farmer bringing his first fruit to the priest in the opening verses, I will come to shul with my own first fruit so that Matan might hear me recite from the Torah before the Lord my God. Unfortunately, it is not the Bikurim passage that I am leyning but rather the Tohekha, the long list of curses that will befall the people of Israel if they fail to observe God’s commandments. Poor Matan has been listening to me practice all week, and trembles at the breast each time I come to the verse about mothers eating their children. (He ought to realize that in his case it is the child who is eating from the mother and not vice versa.) In an attempt to reassure my hungry boy, I shift him from Har Eyval to Har Gerizim, and he latches right back on.

And perhaps I am correct in doing so. After all, when I look down lovingly at Matan (whose nicknames include everything from Matanushi to Nuni-nu), I find myself thinking about the words of the blessings shouted from one hilltop rather than the curses shouted from the other. I truly feel that God has opened for us the bounteous stores of the heavens to bless all our undertakings. Each night I watch Matan sleep with his arms above his head like Moshe fighting Amalek, confident and trusting that the world is a safe place. In the morning (“Would that it were evening,” I sometimes mutter groggily) I wake to the sound of our son gurgling to himself and staring mesmerized at his own two hands, which he turns slowly in each direction as if he is conjuring the dead. (I hope he is not doing that, because then, as the Torah threatens, the curses will catch up with him!) Lately he has also started turning around in his crib, so that I put him down with his head on one side and find him a few hours later with his feet and head reversed. (He who was once at the tail will soon be at the head.) He seizes every opportunity to stand up on his two feet, and perhaps it won’t be long until he is walking in His ways….

Matan and I do quite a bit of walking together, hopefully in God’s ways. Tonight, for instance, we walked back from the shuk in the early hours of the evening, his stroller laden with an overflowing basket of the last of the summer nectarines and the first of the green winter clementines. I sang the blessings and curses to Matan from memory, using the same nursery rhyme lilt for both so as not to scare him. He stayed awake for the entire 45 minutes of our walk, looking at me with his wide blue eyes and occasionally smiling and then looking away bashfully, as he is wont. Each time we came to a red light I leaned in close, planting small kisses on his cheeks and his forehead that will grow, someday, into mountains of blessings.

Moses and Motherhood: Of Manna, Melons, and Matan

2011-06-16T16:03:00.004+03:00

I was walking home yesterday, carrying Matan in a sling that hung over one shoulder, when I passed a watermelon kiosk. Since watermelons are so heavy, no one wants to carry them home from the market. And so throughout the month of June, when watermelons are at peak season, kiosks that sell nothing but watermelons spring up all around the city so that people can buy this heavy fruit close to home. As a nursing mother in need of constant hydration, I’ve been eating nearly half a watermelon a day since Matan was born. And so I stopped at the kiosk to buy another. The watermelons were four shekel a kilo; my purchase came to sixteen shekel. As the vendor put my melon in a plastic bag, I realized that it was exactly the same weight as Matan. I lugged baby and watermelon home – Matan in the sling, and the melon in the plastic bag – and deposited them in the bassinet and the refrigerator, respectively.

When I got home, I quickly prepared some lunch. I have learned to eat quickly, since Matan may stir at any moment, and then I’ll have to drop everything to feed him. Like most days, I ate my husband’s homemade gazpacho for lunch (made with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, peppers, and leeks), followed by watermelon slices. I realized that I was eating almost all of the foods mentioned by Bnei Yisrael in their bitter complaints about their desert diet: “We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, watermelons, leeks, onions, and garlic” (Numbers 11:5). Had Moses turned the Nile into a blood-red river of gazpacho, with the fish swimming among the vegetables? Before I could pursue this absurd speculation, I heard the first whimpers from Matan’s bassinet. I knew it was a matter of moments before his whimpering would turn to full-throated wailing for food.

I confess that whenever Matan stirs (and he is stirring at this very moment, as I type!), my first reaction is often a sigh of exasperation. Like Coleridge with his person from Porlock, I do not handle interruptions well; and I struggle with how to manage my time given that I never know when Matan will want to be fed. In this sense he resembles Bnei Yisrael in the desert: “Rabbi Acha bar Yaakov said: In the beginning the children of Israel were like hens that peck continuously at scraps, until Moses came along and established fixed meal times” (Yoma 95b). Bnei Yisrael, a people still in their infancy after recently leaving the narrow birth canal of Mitzrayim, had not yet learned how to eat fixed meals. Perhaps, like Matan, their stomachs were still too small to sustain them for more than three hours. And so God rained down manna for them to gather. The manna tasted like shad ha-shamen, rich cream, a phrase that might more literally be translated as “the fat breast.” Like breastmilk, which will taste like whatever the mother ate the day before, the manna had a variety of different flavors. The Talmud makes this analogy explicit: “Rabbi Abahu said: Just as with the breast, a baby can taste a variety of flavors, so too when Bnei Yisrael ate the manna, they could taste a variety of flavors. And some say: It was like an actual breast. Just as a breast can have various shapes and colors, the manna too had various flavors” (Yoma 95a). In any case, Matan seems far more content with his breastmilk than Bnei Yisrael with their manna; the people of Israel began clamoring for solids to be introduced to their diet only months after their delivery from Egypt.

[An excursus] The episode about the people’s clamoring and complaining takes place just after they have “marched from the mountain of the Lord” (Numbers 10:33), which was also the site of the burning bush: “Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Yitro, priest of Midyan, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horev, the mountain of the Lord” (Exodus 3:1). Both episodes involve the complaints of the people: In Exodus God tells Moses that he has “heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters” (3:7), and in Numbers the people “took to complaining bitterly against the Lord” (11:1). Both episodes also involve fire: “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush” (3:2), and “a fire of the Lord broke out against the people” (11:1). Moses questions his role in both scenes: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites form Egypt” (3:11), and “Why have I not enjoyed your favor, that you have laid the burden of all this people upon me?” (11:11). At the bush, God tells Moses to put his hand into his bosom as a proof that the people will listen to him (4:6); and when the people complain, Moses asks how God could say to him, “Carry them in your bosom” (11:12). In both episodes, God’s response to Moses involves gathering the elders of Israel: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel” (3:16), and “Gather for me seventy of Israel’s elders” (11:16). The passages parallel each other with uncanny linguistic precision as Moses balks at the burdensome role with which God had previously saddled him. [End of excursus]

Moses has had it with the querulous people, who cry out to him like little babies – the text uses the word bocheh, which is the same word used when little baby Moses cried out in his ark (Exodus 2:6). And indeed Moses relates to the people as babies when he in turn cries out to God: “Why have you dealt ill with your servant, and why have I not enjoyed your favor, that you have laid the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive this people, did I bear them, that you should say to me, carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant?” (Numbers 11:11-12). Moses insists that he is sick and tired of nursing the people and responding to their every whimper and wail. Why can’t they leave him alone? Is he their mother? Did he give birth to them? Avivah Zornberg points out that Moses himself did not have a normal nursing experience. He went through a period in the ark when he was deprived of breastmilk altogether, and when he was returned to his mother’s bosom, his mother acted as a hired wet nurse in the employ of Pharaoh’s daughter. We might say (with apologies to Freud, as per the title of this post) that Moses was traumatized at the breast, and has not recovered. No wonder he wants the heavy burden of the people –who weighed surely much more than a watermelon—taken out of his sling.

Like Moses, I sometimes find motherhood frustrating – especially now, as I sit nursing Matan while typing the end of this post, pecking at the computer with one hand like a hen pecking at scraps. But as I look down at Matan’s big fishy eyes staring up at me from my bosom, I’m struck once again by how adorable he is. I did in fact conceive Matan, and bear him; and so unlike Bnei Yisrael and unlike Moses, I really cannot complain.

Speech for Pidyon HaBen of Matan Aharon 10.6.11

2011-06-10T19:29:00.001+03:00

Two days ago, on Shavuot morning, Daniel and I sat in this park with Matan trying to lull him to sleep. Matan had conducted his own Tikun Leyl the night before, waking each hour to eat milk and spit up cheese in accordance with the custom to eat dairy on this chag. After a night of no sleep, I did not make it to shul that morning, so I davened in the park with Matan, sharing with him the highlights of Shacharit. Chief among them was Akdamut, the piyut recited before beginning the Torah reading, a long liturgical poem composed in the eleventh century by Rabbi Meir Yitzchak of Worms. This mystical poem moves from a description of the creation of the world to the splendors of the World to Come, and as I chanted aloud to Matan each of the ninety Aramaic stanzas, I realized how much of the piyut’s imagery was appropriate to the place where we were sitting that morning and where we are all now gathered today – beneath a trellis covered by a canopy of trees in a quiet corner of this beautiful park. The poem describes a messianic future in which all of the Tzadikim will gather in Yerushalayim, beneath a divine bridal canopy inside the Garden of Eden. There God will prepare a banquet for the righteous, and they will sit around tables of precious gems and drink their fill from overflowing goblets in a redeemed world. As we stand here today overflowing with joy, preparing to redeem our precious son and enjoy a Seudat Mitzvah on this beautiful Jerusalem morning, I cannot help but think that after joining with God in the creation of Matan, we have truly been granted a taste of the World to Come.

It seems fitting that we are celebrating Matan’s Pidyon HaBen not just two days after reciting Akdamut but also one day before reading parashat Baha’alotcha, the parsha that provides the textual underpinning for this ceremony.

כִּי לִי כָל-בְּכוֹר בִּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בָּאָדָם וּבַבְּהֵמָה בְּיוֹם הַכֹּתִי כָל-בְּכוֹר בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם הִקְדַּשְׁתִּי אֹתָם לִי. יח וָאֶקַּח אֶת-הַלְוִיִּם תַּחַת כָּל-בְּכוֹר בִּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. יט וָאֶתְּנָה אֶת-הַלְוִיִּם נְתֻנִים לְאַהֲרֹן וּלְבָנָיו מִתּוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לַעֲבֹד אֶת-עֲבֹדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד
“Every firstborn among the Israelites, man as well as beast, is Mine; I consecrated them to Myself at the time that I smote the firstborn in the land of Egypt. Now I take the Levites instead of every firstborn of the Israelites, and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites and Aharon and his sons, to perform the ritual service for the Israelites in Ohel Moed.” (Numbers 8:17-19).

Another connection to this week’s parsha appears in a recent daf yomi, Menachot 86b. In speaking of the lights that were kindled in the Mishkan—which is also the subject of the opening of the parsha, B’haalotcha et HaNerot-- we are told:
צו את בני ישראל ויקחו אליך שמן זית זך כתית למאור להעלות נר תמיד

“Command the Israelite people to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling the eternal lamp.” (Leviticus 24:2). The Talmud teaches:
אמר רבי שמואל בר נחמני אליך ולא לי לא לאורה אני צריך
Shmuel bar Nachmani questions why the Torah adds the extra word Elecha, for you. The Talmud’s response is that God specifies that the oil for this light is “for you” because the Ner Tamid is lit for the sake of human beings who need to be reminded of God’s eternal presence, and not for God, who needs no such reminder. It is we human beings whose faith in God’s presence may flicker and grow dim, and it is therefore we who need the eternal lamp, which burns not for God’s sake, but for ours.

We might extend this concept to say that God does not need the Bekhorot consecrated to him, and when we redeem them back, we are not just exempting them from priestly service. Just as God does not need the light of the eternal lamp, so too does God not need Matan Aharon to engage in Temple service. It is human beings of imperfect faith who need the reminder the lamp provides, just as it is human beings in an imperfect world who look to the potential of new life to perform some act of Tikun in the world, thereby inspiring us with hope for the future. And so Daniel and I would like to think that today we are not just buying back our son from the Kohanim; we are also dedicating him to doing God’s work in a world sorely in need of repair and renewal. We offer our Matan as a gift to partner in some aspect of God’s work, and to heal some part of God’s creation.

It is in this spirit of partnering in creation that we will shortly be planting a tree in honor of Matan’s birth and in honor of the birth of Hallel Libson, daughter of our friends Ayelet and Adi. The Talmud teaches in Masechet Gittin, in the midst of the aggadot about the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem, that there was a custom whereby whenever a baby boy was born, a cedar tree would be planted in his honor; and when a girl was born, a cypress. And when they would get married, the two trees would be cut down and used to make the poles for their chuppah. Now, we don’t want to make any assumptions about Hallel and Matan’s future romantic predilections –we cannot know whether Matan will date older women, or whether Hallel will consent to marry the boy next door—but Daniel and I do like the idea of putting down roots in the soil of Eretz Yisrael just a few years after we each made aliyah, as per the words of Shirat HaYam:
תְּבִאֵמוֹ וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ מָכוֹן לְשִׁבְתְּךָ פָּעַלְתָּ יְהוָה מִקְּדָשׁ אֲדֹנָי כּוֹנְנוּ יָדֶיךָ.
You, God, will bring them and plant them in Your own mountain, the place You made to dwell in, O Lord, the sanctuary O Lord. (Exodus 15:17)

The Mikdash is the province of Aharon HaKohen, Matan’s Biblical namesake, to whom many of the commandments of this week’s parsha are addressed. It is Aharon who is supposed to mount the lamps of the Menorah, and it is Aharon who supervises the Levites and prepares them to serve in Ohel Moed, the place of God’s dwelling during the Israelites’ journey to the promised land where they ultimately put down roots. More generally, Aharon is responsible for the ritual aspects of Jewish worship, whereas his brother Moshe gives them the Torah, the book of laws and teachings that we are meant to occupy ourselves with day and night, as we are reminded in Akdamut:
צבי וחמיד ורגיג דילאון בלעותא
God desires and longs and covets that Israel should toil in Torah study.

In naming our son Matan Aharon, we hope that he will embody both of these aspects of Jewish tradition – the lifelong commitment to Talmud Torah, as well as the rituals involved in divine service. We hope that our son, like his namesake, will be Ohev et HaBriot, and that his love for human beings will find expression in the teaching of Torah, so that he might be m’karvan la Torah – bringing other people closer to Torah. The root of m’karvan is also the root of korban, sacrifice. As we redeem our Matan Aharon today from the priestly responsibility for the korbanot, it is our fervent wish that he will dedicate himself to being one who is m’karvan laTorah, one who brings the light of Torah into people’s lives so that it may burn steadily and unwaveringly for all eternity.

Love in the Time of Omer, Again

2011-05-25T22:55:00.003+03:00

This Lag Ba’Omer I found myself thinking of Shimon bar Yochai and his son, who studied Torah together in a cave for twelve years. The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) relates that they shed their clothes and sat covered in sand up to their necks and broke from study only to dress and daven. It dawns on me that this is not so different from how Matan and I have been spending our mornings -- albeit without the sand.

Matan generally wakes up around 6am (to the extent that one can generalize about the daily habits of a two-week old). He doesn’t cry, but when I peer into his bassinet in the early morning light, I notice that his eyes (which are no longer brown, but bluish) are wide open. He blinks furiously when he catches my gaze, and I lift him up out and begin singing “Rise and Shine.” By the time Noah is getting his children into the “arky arky,” I’ve changed his diaper and carried him over to the rocking chair where I sit and nurse him. I marvel at the fact that my body can satisfy all his nutritional needs, like the carob tree and spring of water miraculously created for Bar Yochai and his son to sustain them in the cave. During this first nursing of the morning, I sing him Modeh Ani followed by “greatest hits” from Psukei D’Zimra and Shacharit, including most of the Hallelujahs. (My repertoire also includes El Adon, even on weekdays, because I love the melody so much.) Often he’ll wait to detach from the breast until I finish a particular Tefillah, though I’m not sure whether this is out of Koved Rosh or a keen sense of melody.

When Matan finishes nursing, we move on to Daf Yomi, which I don’t really learn but rather sing aloud. In the interest of time, I merely read through Steinstaltz’s commentary, making my best attempt to understand the discussion at hand. (As a friend recently quipped, instead of Baby Einstein, we are educating Matan through Baby Steinsaltz.) Yesterday we learned a sugya about the number of times oil must be added to a Minchah sacrifice that is offered in a vessel. The term used for each addition of oil is “Matan Shemen,” as I was excited to point out to our Matan. And now that we are on the Korban Todah, the thanksgiving offering (and the bread that came with it), I have the opportunity to share with Matan all the many reasons I have to be thankful after nine months of anticipating what it would be like to hold our child in my arms.

Matan usually falls asleep at some point in the middle of Daf Yomi (lately he’s been holding out until Amud Bet, so maybe there’s hope). I put him down in his bassinet and take advantage of the break to brush my teeth (at last!), jump in the shower, throw on some clothes, and eat breakfast. Then we head out for a morning walk. I gently place Matan in a sling without rousing him, strap the diaper bag (which has replaced my L.L. Bean backpack) over my shoulder, and invent a destination. Everywhere we go, we see the rest of the world busy at work, and I am reminded of how my life is so different now that I am on maternity leave. I think about Bar Yochai and his son, who emerged from the cave and saw everyone around them plowing and sowing and engaging in other forms of labor. They had just spent twelve years learning Torah, and so they could not identify with the working life. I know how they must have felt. Our apartment often feels like a cave, with my whole existence confined to the seat where I nurse and the table where I change Matan. It is hard to imagine that just two weeks ago, I was at my desk at work at 8:30 every morning, selling books to publishers across the country and communicating with clients around the world.

By the time Matan and I return from our walk, he is usually just waking up again, so I change him and nurse him while reading to him aloud from my novel. I want Matan to be exposed only to wholesome literature – thus far he’s been read Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude and the first half of Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’ s Last Stand. I enjoy reading him novels with dialogue because I can act out the various voices. Nonfiction doesn’t work as well; inevitably I give up and start reading to myself, because it doesn’t seem worth the effort of vocalizing in a monotone.

Matan falls asleep as I read to him, so I wheel his bassinet into the kitchen and place him down in it. While he sleeps I eat my lunch and try to answer a few emails. As soon as he wakes up, we turn on Skype and speak with either Matan’s Savta or my grandmother, depending on who is available. Everyone wants to see Matan on the video, but he’s too short to reach the camera, so I construct a booster seat atop the kitchen table consisting of my Norton Anthology of Poetry and Heschel’s Man is Not Alone. Matan’s feet dangle over the edge of the books, about an inch off the table, and he swings them while we Skype. Often he falls asleep mid-conversation, generally when my grandmother starts complaining about the weather in Princeton. I quickly lift him over my shoulder so his back is to the camera and he doesn’t seem rude.

Although he is a big sleeper, Matan always wakes up when I start playing our CD of Bialik nursery rhymes. We dance around the house to Yossi BaKinor and Rutz Ben Susi, two songs that I learned for the first time only this past week. (I now know them both by heart.) As the light begins to fade, I place Matan in his mechanical swing and play NadNed, and once again he dozes off. His head slumps forward and his blue hat creeps down over his eyes, so he looks like a smurf, or like one of the seven dwarves.

By the time Matan next stirs, his Abba is home to entertain him, make dinner, and relieve me for a while. One night last week the three of us tried to go to an evening shiur. We brought Matan in a carseat and D sat in between the two of us. After about ten minutes, Matan had woken up and I’d fallen fast asleep. D looked to his left and then to his right, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture….

When Matan falls asleep for the night (errr, for the first Ashmura of the night) we sing him the Shema followed by a few soothing songs, mostly Seudah Shlishit melodies. He will wake up every two hours throughout the night. Each time I hear him whimper, I find myself muttering God’s words to Bar Yochai: “Have you come to destroy my world?” But then I peer into his bassinet at his tiny clenched fists which he holds over his head, and at his fingernails the size of sesame seeds. As I lift him out to feed him yet again, I remember that I have created his world, and that he has essentially recreated mine. His eyes peek out from under his hat like Bar Yochai’s head beneath the sand, and I kiss him and hold him close.

Speeches for Brit of Matan Aharon, 18.5.11

2011-05-18T22:28:00.002+03:00

INK:

From the moment we found out I was pregnant, D and I began counting. A pregnancy is measured in nine months or forty weeks, each of which we counted in excited anticipation. By the time we came to Pesach and sang about Tisha Yarchei Leida, we were no longer counting months or weeks, but days to my due date. And then that date passed, and we moved to counting the days past my due date. By Yom HaZikaron the baby was three days late, so we walked the entire way back from Har Herzl to our apartment in the German Colony to try to stimulate the onset of labor. Then on Yom Haatzmaut, when I was four days overdue, we went to the Jerusalem Theatre for Hidon HaTanakh, a program I watch every year on the internet, hoping that if we watched it live, then the suspense that accompanied each Biblical trivia question would intensify the contractions that had already begun. We also wanted to give our baby a chance to review all the Torah he had learned in the womb, before he came out and forgot it all. (We are confident that if only his voice could have been heard from inside my uterus, he would have been the winner this year!) The Hidon seemed to have done the trick, because by the time we got home that afternoon, we were already counting the minutes between contractions.

That night, in between contractions I remembered to count the Omer – I guess that my head was already so used to counting by that point, which is perhaps the reason that this is one of the only years that I have made it so far in the Sefira. When we count the Omer, we are of course counting up the days to Shavuot, Zman Matan Torateinu, for which our son is named. He was born during the week of Shabbat Parashat Behar Sinai, which reviews the laws given at Sinai, including the countdown to שנת השמיטה. And he was also born during the sixth perek of Masekhet Menahot in the Daf Yomi cycle, the chapter that deals with Minchat HaOmer, the barley sacrifice brought to the Temple on the sixteenth day of Nisan, the second night of Pesach. The Talmud explains that this is also the night that we begin counting the Omer, and this chapter elaborates on the details of how we count, when we count, and what happens if we miss a day in the countdown to Matan Torah.

Our own Matan, having internalized the lesson of Yom Haatzmaut, held out until he could have his own independent birthday, and so he was not born until 7am the next morning. He was given to us after an unforgettable Tikun Leyl, a long night which I spent at home with my mother and D and our wonderful doula. As the night drew on and my labor intensified, it truly felt like the heavens were opening for our child to pass through into this world. When we finally drove to the hospital at 5:30am, the sun rising in a magnificent האיר מזרח over the hills of Ein Karem, it felt a little like the delirium of early Shavuot morning davening after a night of no sleep. Like Bnei Yisrael at Har Sinai, it was with loud cries and trembling that I received from heaven the gift of our son, our Matan.

Matan means gift, and it is used to refer to the gift of Torah, which Matan learned in the womb and which D and I have been teaching him since the moment he was born – today he is eight dapim old. The first letter of his name, Mem, is a remez to the first name of my mother’s father, Rabbi Mordecai Rubin, a beloved teacher of Torah with whom I had the privilege to study before he died just a year after my Bat Mitzvah. Matan’s name also contains the two letters Taf and Nun, which are the root of the Aramaic word for “teach” or “learn,” used in the Talmud to introduce an earlier teaching: Tanya, Tani, Tanu Rabbanan. Torah is passed down from generation to generation by teaching and learning, and it is our fervent wish to transmit to our son the love of Talmud Torah which is such an integral part of the lives of both of our families, and of our love for one another. D, I feel so fortunate that my son has such a special father, and so blessed that you are my husband. Watching you fall in love in love with our son has made me fall in love with you all over again. I pray that God will grant us the merit to raise our son to Torah, as well as to Chuppah and Maasim Tovim, and that the gift of our Matan will teach us the lessons of gratitude and awe, so that we may forever remember to count our blessings.

D:

Matan’s middle name is Aharon in memory of his great-grandfather, Aharon Yizhak Levenstein, whose twenty-fourth yahrzeit was yesterday. My zaidie was an extraordinary man: a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, a noted baal tzedaka, Holocaust survivor, businessman, and ardent Zionist. But first and foremost, he was a builder in every sense of the word: he sought, after the Shoah, to lay the foundations for future generations. Like Aharon HaKohen, he suffered the devastating loss of his first children but never lost his optimism and faith in a more vibrant future. After he survived the Shoah thanks to Oskar Schindler, he reconnected with his wife, who had survived separately, and at age 42 and 40, in an Austrian DP camp, they miraculously gave birth to my mother, an only child who in turn raised five children of her own and is now grandmother to ten, ken yirbu. We hope my zaidie is watching today with joy at the enormous success of his efforts to build the family and Jewish future which our Matan inherits.

We hope our son will combine the legacy he inherits with his own unique gifts, fulfilling a bracha in this week’s parsha:
וַאֲכַלְתֶּם יָשָׁן, נוֹשָׁן; וְיָשָׁן, מִפְּנֵי חָדָשׁ תּוֹצִיאוּ.
As a sign of Hashem’s blessing, harvests will be so abundant that older crops will overlap with the newer ones that, during the times of the Beit HaMikdash, were permitted only after the Omer offering had been brought. In naming our son after both of maternal grandfathers, we hope to mingle the old with the new. We pray that our son will embody the values of the older generation, while also coming into his own as a first-generation Israeli, which would have made all of our grandparents very proud.

As we stand here today with Matan Aharon on this seam between the Old City of Yerushalayim and the new, surrounded by all four of Matan’s grandparents and five of his many aunts and uncles, we feel the plenitude of Hashem’s bracha.

The prior generations played an active role in bringing Matan into this world. We are grateful to my parents, Baba and Saba, for remaining in Israel since Pesach and for organizing this simcha. We will also forever remember the devoted role played by Matan’s Savta Alisa, who has been living in our second bedroom for the past two weeks and can now add to her Jewish continuity professional portfolio the title of midwife par excellence. Thank you Savta, and thank you Saba Neil for making the trip at the last minute to join us at Matan’s brit. We know you also bring love and greetings from Matan’s great grandparents in Princeton, שיבדלו לחיים ארוכים. May we merit to celebrate all his milestones in good health together.

We also want to recognize our siblings Michael, Mindy, and Eytan who likewise made the trip to be here today. And a special thanks to Estie and Elizur, who prepared us with every conceivable baby provision except the baby himself. If our child is better dressed than we are, Estie deserves the credit. To all of you and Matan’s many uncles, aunts, and cousins, we love you much and are grateful for your support.

Finally, INK focused on the significance of Matan’s birth during Sefirat HaOmer, but I want to add that this transitional time has additional meaning for the two of us, as it was the period during which we fell in love. It is through the sacrifice of the Omer that the new generation, the latest offspring is celebrated and enjoyed on a festive morning when the eastern sky is illuminated. And it is during the Omer that we find the equilibrium of our love, as we move from the passionate ardor of Shir Hashirim to the more mature commitment of Rut and Boaz. So it is appropriate that it was on an unforgettable night and morning of the Omer that I found my love for you, INK, renewed. As I told our son immediately after he was born, he is blessed with a very special mother, which you have shown yourself to be in the first week of his life. Few mothers would begin reading to their children fifteen minutes after birth, and you are perhaps the only mother who has sung Daf Yomi to your baby each morning throughout his first week. You gave birth to Matan with a sensitivity, vulnerability, and profound strength that is authentically and wholly your own, and I am supremely privileged to share my life with you. Matan’s birth, which we celebrate today on Pesach Sheni, will forever be a midway point for us between Shir Hashirim and Megillat Rut, between passionate Ahava Raba and enduring Ahavat Olam. May we merit to shower our son with every form of affection, as we raise him in the image of our parents and grandparents to love Torah, Am Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael, and to always seek out the tzelem elokim that is inscribed on his adorable, perfect face.

Making Seder: Towards an Idea of Order

2011-04-16T23:36:00.002+03:00

For the past few weeks, my husband has been urging me to clear off my desk so that we can replace it with a baby crib. The crib, which arrived just a few days ago from my sister-in-law along with an array of car seats, strollers, and bright orange garbage bags filled with baby clothes, will not fit in our apartment until I get rid of my desk. But I have not been able to let it go. And so my great wooden desk--stacked with folders marked “ideas for the Pesach seder,” “Bronfman seduction,” “Babylonian menstruation,” as well as a pile of books including the JPS tanakh, Masechet Menachot, the current issue of Lilith, and Benne Lau’s book on Hazal--is an island in a sea of baby supplies. When sitting down before it, I cannot get up unless I push back one of the strollers, climb over a garbage bag, and straddle a big wicker box labeled “toys.” You might say that the baby supplies form a wall, to my right and to my left, and I am harboring a murderous urge to hurl rocking horse and rider into the sea.

Of course, I am extremely grateful to have received a full supply of baby goods from my sister-in-law, which saves us many hours and shekels in the weeks ahead. But the sheer physical reality of this paraphernalia crowding what was once my office has left me quite overwhelmed. In an attempt to reclaim some idea of order, I packed my bag for the hospital tonight, as instructed by the stack of eleven baby books behind my bed (all courtesy of the literary agency where I work): It is never too early to pack for the hospital – you must be prepared! In stuffing my hand cream, underwear, hot water bottle, and Alexander McCall Smith novels (I chose my hospital reading three months ago) into a tote bag, I felt a bit like the Israelites packing to leave Egypt. I too was gathering all the possessions I would need to take with me into the uncharted wilderness of motherhood, a land of flowing with milk, which I am told is characterized by many a Leyl Shimurim-- long nights of no sleep without even a pillar of fire to keep vigil beside me.

On the other hand, once the baby is born, it will no longer be inside of me, which I suppose offers some degree of relief. I find it amusing that watermelons came into season in Israel the very week I entered my eighth month, just when I began to feel like I was carrying one around. Perhaps in a few weeks, when beset by the wailing cries of a baby that wishes it were back in my narrow womb, I, too, will pine for the watermelon to be curled up mutely inside me again. We remember the watermelons we ate in Egypt....

That watermelon-sized baby inside me is really all I need at this stage. If I had to, I could flee to the hospital b’chipazon, without my hospital bag and with only my girded loins and my sandals on my feet. If my contractions drive me out of my home so that I cannot delay, I could leave even without preparing any provisions for myself. After all, Pesach is not a holiday of preparedness. No one is ever fully ready for Pesach when the sun sets on the fourteenth of Nisan. There is always more to cook, more to clean, more to study, more to prepare. Perhaps that’s why the matzah is such a powerful symbol. Matzah is unfinished bread. It is dough that has not been given sufficient time to rise. Eating matzah is a reminder that we don’t always have time to plan in advance, and that sometimes we must just pick up and run, placing our trust in God as we hurl ourselves forwards towards our divinely ordained destiny. I hope the baby that is cooking inside me does not emerge half-baked--and certainly I feel quite puffed up and leavened--but I don’t think I’ll ever feel completely ready for labor and childbirth, let alone motherhood. I do know, though, that this year I have a very different understanding of what it means to see myself as if I have left Egypt. I will be as prepared as I can be, and, in spirit of Dayenu, it will have to be enough.

Zaphod's Phylacteries (Menahot 37a)

2011-04-14T00:58:00.004+03:00

Today’s Daf (Menahot 37) ought to have been off limits for pregnant women. I already have nightmares about birth and babies – last night I dreamt that I left my baby on the stove for too long, and it started to cry because it was overheated. (I was grateful when my husband explained that this dream was obviously inspired by leaving artichokes on the stove for too long, which is a mistake I often make.) I know that birth is a natural process, but it also seems like a miracle from on high. If I am blessed with a healthy baby, I will be overcome with gratitude to God – to the extent that I find myself saying “Godwilling,” a word I never really invoked before, in every other sentence. It seems presumptuous to discuss baby names or to order a stroller or to talk about who will care for the baby while I teach this summer – how can I know that this baby will come out alive and well? I feel, more than ever before, how much is entrusted to God, and how little is in our human hands.

And so I was somewhat disturbed to find, amidst a discussion of Tefillin in the third chapter of Menahot, a reference to babies and birth defects. The Talmud is discussing the proper place for laying the head Tefillin. First the rabbis establish that the Biblical phrase “between the eyes” refers to the skull, specifically “the place where a baby’s head is soft.” As I’ve learned from my bumblebee-colored bedside companion “Pregnancy for Dummies,” the bones on the skull of a newborn are not yet fused, because the head must be able to squeeze through the narrow birth canal. For this reason it is so dangerous to touch the soft spot on a baby’s head. But it is that very soft spot (albeit not on a baby, of course) where the Tefillin are supposed to be placed. This discussion of the head Tefillin inspires a question from Pleymo, who asks Rabbi: “If a person has two heads, on which one should he lay Tefillin?” Rabbi, convinced that Pleymo is pulling his leg (one of his legs, at least), responds angrily: “Either get out of here, or be excommunicated!”

At that very moment, in the felicitous synchronicity that is often a feature of Talmudic narratives, a man happens to walk into Rabbi’s beit midrash: “In the meantime, a man walked in and asked: My baby was born with two heads. How much money do I need to give to the Kohen?” The new father is not asking about Tefillin, but about Pidyon HaBen. As we learn in the Torah, every firstborn has to be redeemed for the price of “five shekels per head” (Numbers 3:47). But what if the baby has two heads? That is, what if the baby resembles Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed former president of the galaxy in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy? The Talmud answers that baby Zaphod would need to be redeemed for ten shekels, five per head. And so Pleymo, who had just been rebuked by Rabbi for his silly question, is vindicated (or should I say redeemed?) by the inquiring new father.

The question about Zaphod’s Tefillin shel rosh remains unanswered, and the Talmud does not even consider what the three-armed former president of the galaxy is supposed to do about his shel yad. (OK, we understand that Tefillin go on the left hand – but what if you have two left hands? Which is different, of course, from two left feet….) Nor do we ever re-encounter the hapless father of the hydra-headed twins, who had to pay double for his Pidyon HaBen. And certainly we do not know anything about the expression on his wife’s face when she first laid eyes upon her Siamese progeny. I can imagine her look of horror, and can only hope, as I crawl into bed, that she does not haunt my nightmares tonight.

The Book of Names

2011-04-10T01:27:00.003+03:00

I spent much of my childhood dreaming up names for my future children. On Shabbat afternoons I would sit on the floor perusing our heavy World Book Dictionary in search of beautiful words. Afflicted with an overly poetic sensibility, I didn’t care much for the meanings of these words – I privileged sound over sense, which is how I came up with names like “Parsimonious Avarice the Evanescent.” I loved the seductive mellifluousness of the soft s’s, and didn’t mind that the name I had chosen for my firstborn in fact meant “Stingy Greed the Fleeting.” Her siblings would be known as Chevrolet Charlotta, Chaperon Cliché, and Azalea Rendezvous, names that were surely influenced by my reading of Anne of Green Gables. If Anne could rename herself Cordelia and refer to Barry’s Pond as “The Lake of Shining Waters,” then surely I, too, could martial the English lexicon in service of my own phonetic aesthetic.

Now, twenty years later, I am perplexed to find myself at a loss for a name for the child currently kicking around in my belly. Instead of reading the World Book, I sit in shul and pause at every other word in the siddur, wondering if it could be my child’s name. “L’hodot l’hallel l’shabeach l’faer” – Hodaya? Hallel? Shevach? Pe’er? Occasionally I also look in the parsha, though not this week, lest my child be afflicted with a name like Se’et or Sapachat or Baheret. I think about the names of my friends’ children, and the grandparents we might want to name after, and the names of the literary characters I love. But thus far, I have not had any brainstorms.

Perhaps this focus on names is an attempt to intellectualize my pregnancy, which has been the most intense experience of embodiment I could possibly imagine. If I concentrate on the name of the baby, I can take a break from thinking about the extra thirty pounds weighing me down and preventing me from leaping out of bed in the morning. I might actually delude myself into thinking that I can go for a morning jog, forgetting the intense pressure on my pelvis and the soreness in my upper thighs each time I try to take a long stride. I might even succeed in distracting myself from the terrifying awareness that the head of my baby needs to be able to fit through my own body and make its way into the world, a prospect that makes me tremble in fear of the pain that lies ahead.

The contrast between potential baby names and the pain of physical embodiment brings me to the beginning of Sefer Shmot, the book whose narrative we will recount next week at the Pesach seder. These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob. The book opens with the names of Jacob’s sons, who in turn had many more sons, in a process that surely involved great pain, since the midrash tells us that the Israelite women had six babies in their bellies at a time. The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased and reproduced and grew mightier very very much, and the land became filled with them. The language of the text, with its rapid succession of synonyms and its doubled “very very,” reproduces itself, replicating the embodied experience on the semantic plane. Suffering under their Egyptian taskmasters, the Israelites cry out (vayizaku), and shriek (va’yeanchu), and their moans (shavatam) and groans (naakatam) reach God’s ears in all their synonymous multiplicity.

Of course, while the Israelite men are laboring to build Pitom and Ramsees, their wives are laboring to bring forth their multiple births, who emerge so quickly from the womb that the midwives Shifra and Puah do not even have time to look at the birthstool and evaluate the sex(tuplets). Their moans and groans of childbirth blend with the moans and groans of their husbands in the fields, until God can ignore them no longer. I have taken note of you, says God to Moses, invoking the same language (פקד) used to describe the impregnation of Sarah: And God took note of Sarah… And Sarah conceived and bore a son. God takes note of the Israelites, causing them to reproduce en masse; but at the same time, God hears their cries and delivers the people from the narrow birth canal of Egypt. Perhaps this is the rationale behind the very first commandment given after the exodus:

That very day the Lord freed the Israelites from the land of Egypt, troop by troop. The Lord spoke further to Moses, saying, “Consecrate to Me every first-born, man and beast, the first issue of every womb among the Israelites is mine. And Moses said to the people: Remember this day, on which you went out from Egypt, from the house of bondage, how the Lord freed you from it with a mighty hand.

God delivered His firstborn son Israel from the womb, and immediately afterwards, we are commanded to consecrate our firstborns to God. When we experience the convulsions of childbirth, which I’m told are as cataclysmic as the splitting of the sea, we must recognize the divine hand that guides each firstborn through the narrow womb never before stretched by a child. We must trust that our moans and groans and cries and shrieks are reaching up to the throne of the One who is responsible for the creation of all new life, the One who takes note and delivers, and the One whose name is the ultimate mystery: I will be what I will be. And so this is what I have decided to tell myself as I puzzle over lists of names in an attempt to stave off my panic about childbirth: I will trust in God, and, with God’s help, it will be what it will be.

Reading while Walking while Pregnant

2011-03-03T23:51:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I went for a morning jog and tripped on the cobblestones of Derekh Hevron. This is not the first time I have had a bad fall while running—the sidewalks of Jerusalem are notoriously ill-kept, even though, as we learn in Masekhet Ketubot (112a), Rabbi Hanina repaired the roads of Israel when he arrived from Babylonia. (He started in Akko. Perhaps he didn’t make it this far south). I have fallen many times before, but never while pregnant. It was for this reason that when a few concerned pedestrians rushed to my aid, I found myself scared to get up. “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine,” I assured them, remaining hunched over lest they catch sight of my gravid belly. I have learned, over the past few months, that pregnancy is not a personal affair in this city. Everyone—both men and women, those who have had children and those who have not—feels at liberty to offer hectoring advice. The last thing I wanted was to be rebuked: “How can you run when you’re pregnant? You are endangering your unborn child!” And so I waited until everyone had dispersed before lifting myself up, brushing off my bloody knees, and continuing on my way.

I ran the full length of Derekh Hevron, and then came home to clean off. The soap stung on my open wounds, so I took advantage of the opportunity to practice the pain-management techniques we’ve learned in our childbirth class. I exhaled strongly through my mouth, shaping my lips in alternate configurations: “Hee hoo, hee hoo, hee hoo.” Our teacher told us to come up with a mantra to repeat when the pain gets very intense. Though I’m not pregnant with twins, the words that always come to mind are Rivka’s cry to God: "אם כן, למה זה אנוכי?" And if so, why do I exist? Rivka feels the struggle of unknown forces inside her and questions her very existence. Avivah Zornberg points out that Rivka’s name is an anagram of “Kirbah,” the interior space in which the babies struggle in Genesis 25:22: “The children struggled within her (b’kirbah).” Her womb becomes a scrambled version of her name, confounding her sense of identity.

I relate to Rivka’s confusion about the boundaries of her own identity when I feel the baby moving inside me. Suddenly I am more than just myself. This raises a host of ethical questions. Am I responsible for eating and sleeping healthily because my habits directly impact another creature? Are there new limits to my autonomy because of the alien being I am hosting inside? Take today, for instance, when I walked the 50 minutes from Baka to Meah Shearim while reading a novel. It is true that reading while walking entails certain risks: I might trip, or bump into someone, or fail to take note of a red light. These are risks that I’ve always been willing to take; it seems worth it, for the sake of all the pages I manage to read while in transit. But now that have a baby b’Kirbi, I am not so sure. I think about the opening of Masekhet Bava Kama (4a), where we are told, “אדם – שמירת גופו עליו הוא.” A person is responsible for guarding his own body from harming others. In the past, I have always interpreted this statement to mean that given my clumsiness and obliviousness, I should never carry an umbrella, or ride a bicycle, or drive a car – all of these activities extend the radius of the space for which I am responsible, with the risk that I might poke out someone’s eyes, or run over a hapless pedestrian. I always imagined that any potential damage would be outward, projected into the world with which I come into contact. Now, bestirred by a profound sense of my own inhabited interiority, I realize that this damage might also be inward. If I walk into a pole while reading and walking, it is not simply a matter between me and the pole, but between me and my unborn child.

If I am honest with myself, I recognize that part of the reason I am compelled to jog regularly and to read while walking is because I am uncomfortable with the notion of sitting still. I have a hard time doing nothing – the day is short, and the work great. If I ever find myself standing in line at the post office without a book to read, I go crazy; how can I just wait there, watching the minutes tick away? To some extent, pregnancy has enabled me to overcome some of this compulsiveness about using time to the fullest. When I feel the baby moving, I remember that even when I am doing nothing productive or creative, something is being produced and created within. This was a profound realization, as well as a spiritual one. When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, they questioned God: “Is God in our midst (b’kirbeinu – in our Kirbah), or not?” Of course, God longs for nothing more than to dwell inside the people: “They shall build Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell inside them.” It is paradoxically in those moments when I am most still that the baby inside me becomes most active, asserting its presence with powerful kicks and thrusts. In those rare moments of rest, when I stop relentlessly achieving and pursuing, I feel a sense of divine indwelling. I realize that it is not I alone—and not I and my husband alone—who are responsible for the creation of this child, who we pray will emerge into the world and render the image of God yet more manifest.

בניית המשכן כעבודה יצירתית: פרשת ויקהל

2011-03-03T23:37:00.008+02:00

האם בניית המשכן היתה עבודה יצירתית?
אנו מוצאים בתורה שכל פרטי בניית המשכן נמצאים פעמיים, בפרשות תרומה-תצוה כצויי מהאל למשה ("ועשית"), ובפרשת ויקהל פקודי כדווח על מה עשו ("ויעש"). כמעט כל הפרטים—המזבח, הכיור, המנורה, הכלים—זהים בין הצויי לבין הביצוע. ה' מצוה למשה איך לבנות את המשכן עם כל פרטיה, ואז בצלאל—האומן הראשי בונה לפי ההוראות. אבל – האם אכן כך היה המעשה?

אני רוצה להסתכל איתכם על כמה מדרשים שמראים שעבודת המשכן לא היתה רק מלאכה, אלא גם אמנות יצירתית. המדרש מביא תמונה אחר של בניית המשכן, תמונה שמראה שהחזון—הנושא של השבתון שלנו—היה חלק עיקרי בבניית המשכן. נקרא את המדרשים ביחד וננסה להבין –האם בצלאל היה אומן, או פשוט בעל מקצוע? האם יש לנו מה ללמוד מבניית המשכן, לגבי חזון ויצירתיות?

במדבר רבה י"ב:י
רבי יהושע דסכנין, בשם רבי לוי אמר: בשעה שאמר הקדוש ברוך הוא למשה: עשו לי משכן היה לו להעמיד ארבע קונטיסים ולמתוח את המשכן עליהם, אלא מלמד שהראה הקב"ה למשה למעלן, אש אדומה, אש ירוקה, אש שחורה, אש לבנה.
אמר לו: כתבניתם אשר אתה מראה בהר.
רבי ברכיה בשם ר' בצלה: למלך שהיה לו לבוש משובח עשוי במרגליטון.
אמר לבן ביתו: עשה לי כזה.
אמר לו: אדוני המלך, יכול אני לעשות כמותו?!
אמר לו: אני בכבודי ואתה בסממנך.
כך, אמר משה לפני הקדוש ברוך הוא: אלהי יכול אני לעשות כאלה?!
אמר לו: כתבנית אשר אני וגו' בתכלת, ובארגמן, ובתולעת שני, ובשש.
אמר הקב"ה למשה: אם את עושה, מה שלמעלה למטה, אני מניח סנקליטון שלי של מעלה, וארד ואצמצם שכינתי ביניהם למטה.
למעלה, שרפים עומדים, אף למטה, עצי שטים עומדים.
העמד אין כתיב כא, ן אלא עומדים, כנתון באסטרטיא של מעלה. הה"ד (שם ו): שרפים עומדים ממעל לו מה למעלה כוכבים, אף למטה כוכבים.

מה מפריע לדרשן? כתוב בתורה, ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם, וגם "וראה ועשה בתבניתם אשר אני מראה בהר." מה בדיוק הראה ה' למשה בהר? לא תבנית של המקדש שהוא היה צריך לזכור ולהעתיק, אלא חזון של אש בארבעה צבעים—דבר שבכלל לא קים בעולם שלנו! זה רק מגדיל את הבעיה – אם החומרים לא נמצאים בעולם, איך אפשר לבנות משכן מהם?

עבודת המשכן, אני רוצה לטעון, היתה עבודה של תרגום. משה היה צריך לתרגם את החזון שראה בהר סיני לעבודה של ממש בעולם שבו אנו חיים. משה לא אמור פשוט להעתיק דגם, אלא לתרגם את הדגם השמימי לורזיה ארצי. במקום שרפים עומדים, יהיה עצי שטים עומדים. אנו רואים את הקשר בין החזון לבין המימוש במדרש הבא:

תנחומא ויקרא י"א:ח'
וזה מעשה המנורה ( במד' ח ד).
מלמד, שהראה לו הקדוש ברוך הוא באצבע את המנורה, ואף על פי כן נתקשה בה הרבה משה לעשותו.
מה עשה הקדוש ברוך הוא?
חקקה על כף ידו של משה.
אמר לו: וראה ועשה בתבניתם (שמו' כה מ), כשם שחקקתיה על כף ידך.
ואף על פי כן נתקשה בה משה ואמר: מקשה תיעשה המנורה (שם שם לא). כלומר, מה קשה לעשות.
אמר לו הקדוש ברוך הוא: השלך את הזהב לאש והמנורה תיעשה מאליה, שנאמר: מקשה תיעשה המנורה.
כתיב תיעשה, מעצמה תיעשה.
מלמד, שנתקשה לו המנורה, והראה לו הקדוש ברוך הוא באצבע, שנאמר: [ו]זה.

המדרש הזה משחק בקשר בין העין לבין האצבע. ה' מראה למשה את המשכן, אבל "מקשה תעשה את המנורה" – מה קשה היה המנורה למשה, עם כל נביעה, כפתוריה, פרחיה,וששה הקנים. לכן ה' חקק את המנורה על ידו של משה. זה לא רק שהלוחות היו כתובים באצבע אלוהים, אלא גם התבנית של בית אלוקים, היינו המשכן. ובכך משה יכול להביא את המשכן חקוק על ידו משמים—מקום החזון—אל הארץ—מקום המימוש.

אבל עבודת המשכן היה לא רק עבודה של משה. עיקר העבודה נעשית על ידי העם, אנשים שנקראים "חכמת לב." מי היו?

רמב"ן שמות ל"ה: כ"א
(כא): ויבאו כל איש אשר נשאו לבו -
על החכמים העושים במלאכה יאמר כן, כי לא מצינו על המתנדבים נשיאות לב, אבל יזכיר בהם נדיבות.
וטעם אשר נשאו לבו -
לקרבה אל המלאכה, כי לא היה בהם שלמד את המלאכות האלה ממלמד, או מי שאימן בהן ידיו כלל, אבל מצא בטבעו שידע לעשות כן, ויגבה לבו בדרכי ה' לבא לפני משה לאמר לו אני אעשה כל אשר אדני דובר. וכבר הזכרתי זה בסדר האחר (לעיל לא ב). והנה אמר שבאו לפני משה כל אשר נשאו לבו לקרבה אל המלאכה, וכל אשר נדבה רוחו אותו הביאו התרומה. והנה משה אמר לכולם כי קרא ה' בשם בצלאל ואהליאב (פסוק ל), ואחרי כן קרא להם משה ואל כל חכם לב (להלן לו ב): שיבואו לפניו ונתן להם הנדבה:

מה מפריע לרמב"ן? למה כתוב גם "נשאו לבו" וגם "נדבה רוחו"? מה ההבדל? כנראה אלו שנדבה רוחם היו אלו שתרמו למשכן. אבל אלו שנשאו לבו היו אלו שמצאו בלבם ובטבעם שידעו איך לבנות בית לה'. הם קבלו סוג של השראה ומצאו שהם יודעים איך לבנות משכן, למרות שלא היה בהן שלמד את המלאכות האלו.

ובראשם היה בצלאל. מי היה בצלאל ומאיפה הוא קיבל את הידע שלו?

רמב"ן שמות ל"א: ב'
(ב): ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל בן אורי בן חור -
אמר השם למשה ראה קראתי בשם, ומשה אמר לישראל ראו קרא ה' בשם (להלן לה ל). והטעם, כי ישראל במצרים פרוכים בעבודת חומר ולבנים, לא למדו מלאכת כסף וזהב וחרושת אבנים טובות ולא ראו אותם כלל. והנה הוא פלא שימצא בהם אדם חכם גדול בכסף ובזהב ובחרושת אבן ועץ וחושב ורוקם ואורג, כי אף בלומדים לפני חכמים לא ימצא בקי בכל האומניות כלם, והיודעים ורגילים בהם בבא ידיהם תמיד בטיט ורפש לא יוכלו לעשות בהן אומנות דקה ויפה.
ועוד, שהוא חכם גדול בחכמה בתבונה ובדעת להבין סוד המשכן וכל כליו למה צוו ואל מה ירמוזו. ולכן אמר השם למשה שיראה הפלא הזה, וידע כי הוא מלא אותו רוח אלוהים לדעת כל אלה בעבור שיעשה המשכן, כי היה רצון מלפניו לעשות המשכן במדבר, ולכבודו בראו, כי הוא קורא הדורות מראש (ישעיה מא ד), כדרך בטרם אצרך בבטן ידעתיך ובטרם תצא מרחם הקדשתיך (ירמיה א ה). ובלשון הזה (לעיל טז כט): ראו כי ה' נתן לכם השבת על כן הוא נותן לכם ביום השישי לחם יומיים:
ולרבותינו בזה מדרש (שמו"ר מ ב):
הראה אותו ספרו של אדם הראשון ואמר לו כל אחד התקנתיו מאותה שעה, ואף בצלאל מאותה שעה התקנתי אותו, שנאמר ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל.
והוא כענין שפירשתי.
ועוד אמרו (ברכות נה א):
יודע היה בצלאל לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהן שמים וארץ.
והעניין, כי המשכן ירמוז באלו והוא היודע ומבין סודו:

מי היה בצלאל? המדרש מזכיר לנו שבני ישראל היו עבדים במצרים – הם עבדו בפרך, בחומר ובלבינים. עבודה לשם פרעה היה ההפך של עבודת המשכן – היא היתה עבודה גסה, בלי מנוחה, בלי מטרה—כי אם היתה מטרה, למה פרעה היה לוקח מהם את חומרי הבנייה כדי שצטרכו לעבוד יותר?(לא תוסיפון לתת תבן לעם ללבון הלבנים כתמול שלשלום מם ילכו וקששו להם תבן – שמות ה: ז) אבל עבודת המקדש היא עבודה מעודנת עם חומרים עשירים ודקים כמו זהב וכסף. מאיפה יש לעבדי פרעה לכשעבר מסורות של עבודה בחומרים אלו?

בצלאל כנראה קבל את הכשרונות שלו מה'. ה' מלא אותו רוח אלוהים, כמו שהוא מלא את אדם הראשון ברוח ה': ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים. חלקו השני של מדרש זה מקשר אותנו לבריאת העולם – בצלאל ידע לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהן שמים וארץ. מאמר זה מופיע בתלמוד מסכת שבת נ"ה, בפרק ט, מיד לפני הסוגיה הארוכה על חלומות ופתרונם. למה מופיע דווקא פה? אולי בצלאל מופיע כהקדמה לדיונם של חז"ל על חלומות ופתרונם כי בצלאל היה מין פותר חלומות. הוא ראה חזון—היינו החלום—והבין איך לפרש אותו, היינו איך לממש אותו. הוא ידע לצרף אותיות שנבראו בהם שמים וארץ, ולכן הוא היה סוג של בורא עולם: הוא ברא את עולמו של המשכן. כמובן, היה לו תבנית, אבל גם לה' היה תבנית כשהוא ברא את העולם: המדרש בבראשית רבה מתארת לנו שה' הסתכל בתורה ובכך ידע איך לבנות את העולם. אי אפשר להתחיל פרויקט אומנותי בלי שום דגם או מודל. הדרשה שלי היום באה מדגם של שיעור ששמעתי באנגלית לפני שנים ממורי אביבה זורנברג, שאני מתרגמת בשבילכם וכמובן, תוך כדי, מוסיפה את היצירתיות שלי. ככה זה לדרוש בתורה, ככה זה לכתוב, וככה זה להיות יצירתי. אפילו הקב"ה היה צריך להיעזר בדגם כדי לברוא את העולם:

בראשית רבה א:א:
אמון - אומן. התורה אומרת אני הייתי כלי אומנתו של הקב"ה.
בנוהג שבעולם, מלך בשר ודם בונה פלטין אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו, אלא מדעת אומן. והאומן אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו, אלא דיפתראות ופינקסאות יש לו, לדעת היאך הוא עושה חדרים, היאך הוא עושה פשפשין.
כך היה הקדוש ברוך הוא, מביט בתורה ובורא את העולם.
והתורה אמרה: בראשית ברא אלהים ואין ראשית אלא תורה.
היאך מה דאת אמר (משלי ח) ה' קנני ראשית דרכו:

אין בריאה ללא חזון שקודם לו. קודם כל צריכים לדמיין – אפילו אם באש שחורה ואדומה וירוקה ולבנה --את הפרוייקט, ורק אז אפשר להתחיל לממש אותו. כל סופר ומשורר צריך לעלות להר סיני בדמיון שלו ולראות את הדגם עשוי מאש לפני שהוא חוזר לשולחן כתיבה שלו ומתחיל לעבוד. ברור שהספר שהוא כותב לא יהיה גם עשוי מאש – הוא יהיה התרגום של החזון באש. אבל אם הסופר מצליח, עבודה הסופית תהיה משהו שיוכל להתיז ניצוצות בתוך הקורא, ולגרום אם לא ללהבי אש אז להתלהבות.

לפני שאני מסיימת אני רוצה לחזור לענין של השבת, שמוזכר במדרש האחרון שהבאתי, שמקשר בין "ראה קראתי בשם בצלאל" ל"ראו כי ה' נתן לכם השבת." מה הקשר בין בצלאל ועבודתו לבין השבת? פרשתנו מתחילה עם הצווי לשמור את השבת, ורק אז אנו עוברים לתיאור של בניית המשכן מה ענין שבת אצל משכן? בשבת אסור לבער אש. חז"ל למדו את כל ל"ט המלאכות שאסורות בשבת מעבודת המשכן – כל המלאכות שהיו חלק מבניית המשכן הם אסורות בשבת. אפשר להגיד שהשבת הוא ההפך של המשכן – בשבת אנו לא עוסקים במלאכה, ובניית המשכן כלל בו את כל המלאכות. אבל לדעתי זו תמונה יותר מדי פשוטה, כי גם החזון—גם העלייה להר—הוא חלק מהיצירה. למה פרשת ויקהל מתחילה עם מצוות שבת? כי התורה מבינה שהשבת היא לא רק המנוחה שמגיע לנו אחרי ששת ימי מלאכה, אלא גם המנוחה וההשראה שמאפשרת לנו להיות אומנים בשאר הימים. שבת היא אות בינינו לבין ה' – לכן לא לובשים תפילין בשבת, כי שבת היא אות בפני עצמה. בשבת ה' חוקק על ידינו—מקום לבוש תפילון--את הפרוייקטים שנעסוק בהם בשבוע הבא. שבת היא מעין עולם הבא – טעם של עולם אחר, כמו האש בארבע צבעי שאין לו קיום בעולם הארצי. בשבת יש לנו נשמה יתירה – כמו שה' מלא את בצלאל ברוח אלוהים, ה' גם ממלא אותנו ברוח ומראה לנו את החזון שהוא סוד אומנותינו. לכלנו יש נדבה ייחודי לתרום לעולם זה, ולכולנו יש את היכולת להיות מי שנשאו לבו לתרום לתיקון עולמינו. תפילתי היא שבשבתות כמו היום, נזכה לראות את החזון, ובימות השבוע, נשב כולנו ליד שולחן הכתיבה או מקום עבודה כל שהו, ונתחיל את מלאכת הקודש של מימוש החזון. שבת שלום.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Zevachim, chapters 1-2

2011-01-23T00:04:00.003+02:00

Perek Aleph: כל הזבחים שנזבחו שלא לשמן

(2a)
An off’ring must be sacrificed
For that off’ring. You must be precise.
You can’t bring a cow
And think about how
It’s a Pesach lamb. That won’t suffice.

(2b)
Stan, you happen to be walking by
In a market, and hear someone cry
“It’s a Get for Joanne
And for her husband Stan.”
Though the name’s right, it doesn't apply.

(3a)
An oven for food that you bake
Is infested! Inside there’s a snake!
If the oven is split
Can you salvage the bit
In the non-snake part? Redo the cake.

(6b)
Israel sins often, we owe
Sacrifices each moment. Oh no!
Fear not – we are spared
By a Torah that cared
That we not give up all our cash flow.

(12a)
Time for minchah! Then you realize
You forgot to do Musaf. Devise
A solution. Well, first
You do mincha. Reverse
Them you don’t. Musaf always applies.

(12b)
If you set aside your Korban beast
Then go crazy ere you see the priest.
Sanity then comes back
Do we cut you some slack
And let you bring that set-aside feast?

(13a)
Said Tarfon: By my sons I swear
There is something these two acts don’t share:
Sprinkling and collecting
I’m not recollecting.
Akiva got it. Tarfon fell off his chair.

(14a)
It’s the priest who puts blood on his fingers
(Can’t be done by Levitical singers)
The priest does it himself
He can’t count on an elf
Or a monkey. (Or ape-priest dead ringer.)

(15a)
A priest was once sprinkling blood
When his finger came off with a thud.
Is such mulilation
A clear desecration?
Oh yes! And this Kohen's a dud.

Perek Bet: כל הבחים שקבלו דמן

(16b)
Sacrificial blood can’t be received
By a non-priest. He can’t be relieved
By one impure, or sitting,
Without clothes – unfitting
Are these. So is one who’s bereaved.

(17b)
“The clothes make the man,” that’s the vest
And the breastplate, and all of the rest
Of the priestly attire
All needed to fire
A sacrifice. Don’t underdress!

(18a)
On festivals, Rav always stunk
Of alcohol. He got quite drunk
And so he refrained
From all preaching, til drained
Of the wine, and til out of that funk.

(18b)
There are those who say blindness impinges
On whether a man must wear fringes
Tzitzit must be seen
But a blind man has been
Seen by others, on whom this one hinges.

(19a)
Huna bar Natan professed
He was once with the Persian king, dressed
In his vestments. He felt
As the king fixed his belt.
“Kingdom of priests,” the Persian king blessed.

(19a)
Can a priest wear a band-aid or gauze
On his finger? This question gives pause.
Some say we suppose
He can’t wear extra clothes.
Others say: There are no band-aid laws!

(21b)
In the morning, one priest would clear ash
All the other priests woke to the clash
Of the wheels that went clink
As he lowered the sink
To the well, where it made a big splash.

(24b)
A priest who’s a lefty was screwed
Temple work with left hand was eschewed.
No matter how deft-
Ly you sprinkle with left
It is sinister blood, we conclude.

(25b)
If you’ve wounded the ear of a cow
(Do not worry, it’s dead – can’t say ow.)
Ere its blood is collected
The act is affected,
For mixing of blood’s not allowed.

(27b)
When you slaughter a sheep, you can’t say
“I will eat his meat some other day.”
Or “I’ll eat this outside”
If you do so, we chide
You: That’s Pigul, go throw it away.

(29b)
If you vow sacrifices, then wait
To bring them til some later date.
Your wife will not die
As she would if you cry,
“I can’t pay you!” Then you’ll lose your mate.

Nine Months, or Three Hundred Dapim

2010-12-21T20:31:00.003+02:00

For the first time today I felt the baby inside me kicking. It happened of course while I was learning Daf Yomi, which deals with the period of time in which a woman is considered impure after giving birth to a girl (Zevachim 38). Is it two weeks (Sh’vuaim), as per the pronounced form of the word in the Torah? Or is it seventy days (Shivim), as the spelling of the Biblical word seems to indicate? The baby continued kicking until the makhloket was resolved, and I was finally able to rest assured that the creature inside me enjoys learning Gemara as much as I do. If all goes well, this pregnancy will last me through Zevachim and Menachot, and the child will be born with full knowledge of both animal and vegetable sacrifices. Of course, I know that the baby will inevitably forget all its Torah when the angel strikes it on the mouth as soon as it takes its first breath (Niddah 30b). But still, I like to think that the clouds of glory it trails from the womb will be the pages of Gemara I’ve learned these past few weeks while lying in bed, because I’ve been too exhausted to wake up in time for my daf yomi shiur.

This week the pregnancy books tell me that the baby is the size of a banana, but I find these weekly produce updates difficult to follow. How can it already be a banana when last week it was an heirloom tomato? And what is an heirloom tomato anyway? Instead, I prefer to use the Gemara’s measurements, which are more familiar to me. When I first found out I was pregnant, the baby was a k’zayit. A month later it was k’beitzah, which is odd, since ostensibly it started out as an egg in the first place. By the third month, it was a kotevet ha-gasa, a date so large that were I to eat it, I’d be breaking my fast on Yom Kippur. (Thankfully I have no intention of eating my own child, like the threats of the Tochecha or the woeful women in besieged Jerusalem described so vividly in Eicha.) I have tried to make all the measurements match up, but I am told that the time of labor is significantly longer than k’dei achilat pras, the time it takes to eat three egg-sized pieces of bread with relish. I can only hope that like the Israelite women of this week’s parsha, I deliver quickly.

It is hard to imagine the delivery, which is still far off in the distant future, about a month after Pesach. Godwilling at the seder I will be singing “Asarah yarchei leydah,” since as anyone who has been pregnant can tell you, a pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, which is not nine months but ten. I hope that as I sing, the baby will join in a chorus of Shirat HaYam, imagining itself as if it, too, has gone forth from Egypt. As we start reading Sefer Shmot this week and setting off on the journey that will take us through Pesach, I begin thinking about the exodus from Mitzrayim, that narrow place that is likened to the birth canal from which the children of Israel were born. By that point perhaps I will already feel the birth pangs of redemption.

Still, if there is anything I have learned thus far about pregnancy, it is an appreciation for how many miracles are involved in the creation of new life. Every stage of this process fills me with awe and gratitude, and I have much to pray for in the coming months. The Talmud (Taanit 2a) teaches that there are three keys that are in the hands of God, which God does not entrust to any messenger. These are the key to rain, the key to childbirth, and the key to the revival of the dead. We pray for the first two keys during the second blessing of the Amidah, where we ask God to cause the rain to fall and to revive the dead. And so I have begun praying for the health and welfare of the unborn child inside me each time I come to this blessing.

When I don’t have time for formal prayer, I simply place my hand on my stomach and recite a version of the prayer that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to recite for him. We read in Pirkei Avot that Rabbi Yehoshua’s teacher praised him by saying, “Blessed it the one who gave birth to him.” Rashi explains that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to pass by the batei midrash of her town and ask the sages, “Please pray for this unborn child in me that he should become a Torah scholar.” I vary her prayer only slightly: “Please pray for this unborn child in me that he or she should become a Torah scholar, and be healthy, and be kind.” Perhaps that is a lot to ask for, especially given how many blessings I have received already. Each morning I wake up, look down at my growing stomach, and bless God who, in His goodness, renews creation every day. I imagine that the flutter I feel inside me is tiny egg-sized head nodding in assent.

Radical Judaism

2010-11-23T23:41:00.004+02:00

Tonight I went to a lecture by Rabbi Arthur Green, professor and rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and author of Radical Judaism. As soon as I got home, I typed up everything I could remember. I post it here:

During the twentieth century, traditional religion fought and lost two great battles against modernity. These were the battles against Darwinism and against Biblical criticism. These battles are over, and what we are left with is a level of consciousness that has to confront the radical awareness that God is not there. But if this is Emet, there is also Emet L’Amito, and that is the even deeper level of consciousness that says that nonetheless, God is there. How do we live with and make sense of that double consciousness, in light of the strides made by both evolution and Biblical criticism?

Evolution takes us to the subject of creation, which was the focus of medieval theology and the theology of the Zohar. But throughout the past hundred years, Jews have been primarily concerned with providence (is God there?) and authority (why listen to Him?). We moderns must realize that creation is every bit as essential to our theology, if not more. We speak often of Nachshon ben Aminadav, the first Israelite to jump into the Red Sea -- but what about the first organism to come out of the sea, and try to make its life on land? Evolution is the greatest sacred drama of all time. The question we must ask ourselves is what do religious people have to offer to this drama? As religious people, we understand that creation is the ongoing inbuilt desire in God to reveal itself to its many forms. Creation is the push towards greater diversity and greater complexity. Greater diversity means greater beauty, and greater complexity means greater consciousness. This greater consciousness pushes towards beings who are ever more aware of God. This notion of God is both immanent and transcendent, but its transcendence is a part of its immanence. We access the transcendent God when we realize that God is present in every moment in such a profound way that we will never be able to grasp it. Transcendence is thus the elusiveness of immanence.

We must strive to access a God that is both immanent and transcendent so that we can be partners in creation. Heschel spoke of being partners in creation, but when we say this today we speak with much more urgency. To be partners in creation is to take responsibility for the future of the planet. We live in an age of great environmental responsibility. We will need to change human behavior in massive ways, making drastic transitions in our lifestyle if we want to ensure the future of humanity. We would like to think that in another 100,000 years, the human beings of the future will be as ashamed at the terribly misguided decisions that we have made as we are ashamed of our chimpanzee ancestors.

In terms of Biblical criticism, we must recognize that yes, the Torah is human; but yes, the Torah is divine. The first question that God asks man in the Bible is Ayeka, where are you. This is the same divine voice that continues to call out to us. But it calls out in a language beyond words; it is we who create the words. The Torah that preceded creation contained nothing other than the name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, which is just vowels, just aspirated breath from a time before language existed. It is we who add the consonants. God spoke the first two commandments, Ehyeh and Lo Yihyeh (both plays on the divine name), and then Moshe translated the rest. This process of translating the divine call into words is a sacred process, which is why Torah is sacred. At the same time, though, we must remember Heschel’s answer to the question: Is the prophet an active partner in prophecy, or is he an empty vessel for the divine voice? Heschel answered the former. But if so, then the prophet is fallible, and is shaped by the constraints and conventions of his age. Prophecy (i.e. Torah) is a partly human creation, with all the limitations of any human creation. Sometimes we have to object to it, because it is antithetical to the values of our own age, which are ever-evolving. We must remember that it is we human beings who brought God into language, but that in bringing God into language, we ourselves were transformed. This is the Sfat Emet’s midrash on
את ה' האמרת היום...וה' האמירך היום
At Sinai human beings spoke God into words. And so yes, I believe in the covenant at Sinai, even though I believe that it was our idea. Sinai is essential language for me; it is a key element of my spiritual life, and of our spiritual language as Jews, regardless of whether or not it happened historically. We must not forget that when Moses took blood and dashed it on the people in Exodus 24, he was not doing so because God had told him to. This blood covenant was Moses’ invention for the sake of binding the people to God. And so the human impulse to create ritual is encoded in our divinely inspired human text.

The subject of ritual brings me to the subject of Mitzvah. A Mitzvah is a man-made opportunity for encountering the divine. Davening with tefillin is a reminder to stop for a moment in our fast-paced cyber-wired lives to listen to the call of Ayeka. Tefillin, like Shabbat, is a sign and reminder to heed the divine call. Unfortunately, we sometimes get so involved in doing the reminders that we forget what it is that we are supposed to remember. The rabbis thought that if they told us to say one hundred brachot every day, they would ensure that we live each day with a consciousness of God. But Jews are smart. They found a way of forgetting God even with one hundred blessings. They became so obsessed with counting the blessings that they forgot Who it is they are meant to be blessing.

Of course, Judaism is not the only response to the divine. All religions are human creations in response to the divine call. Is Judaism better than all the others? I wouldn’t say that. But I consider it a privilege to be born into a small religion that has such a great tradition, and I want to be part of developing and updating that tradition. I believe that Jews have some specific things to say that no other tradition says as well. Shabbat is one of the great gifts of Judaism to humanity. I’d love to be able to give it to the world, if I could first give it to the Jews again. And then there is the notion of being created in the image of God, one of the most important ideas that Judaism has to offer. Who would have thought that having a Jewish state would call this fundamental religious notion so much into question? We Jews have not done a good job of spreading the notion of Tzelem Elokim in the last 65years. This is not a political lecture, but given our track record, it will be very hard to convince the world that Tzelem Elokim is a fundamental idea of our tradition.

You ask me how to know which mitzvot to follow, and how to find a Jewish practice that works for you. To this I say: Learn a lot, try a lot of experiments, and take responsibility for your own Neshama. Theology is an art, not a science. We religious people have nothing we can prove, but proving and disproving is not a chessboard I am interested in playing on. I believe that religion takes place in the realm of the imagination, that realm which allows us to open our minds to music and poetry and to deeper levels of reality. Our job is to bring evolution and science to that realm of poetry. To do so we must silence ourselves to hear the Ayeka, and seek out ever richer and more vibrant language in which to translate the divine call into the language of human beings.

Running Commentary

2010-10-29T17:12:00.002+03:00

On my 28th birthday my parents gave me an Ipod. At the time I was a student living in Jerusalem, and I used to spend every morning jogging the streets of my city. In Jerusalem the street names are organized thematically, so that each neighborhood depicts a particular period in Jewish history, set of characters, or field of scholarship. The streets in leafy Rehavia are named for medieval parshanim—Rashi, Radak, Ibn Ezra; the narrow streets of Baka are named for the twelve tribes; and in the German Colony, where I live now, the streets are named for nineteenth century European rabbis. Jogging in Jerusalem is not just a form of exercise; it is a lesson in Jewish history.

And so I was already used to learning while jogging when I received the gift of an Ipod. At the time I was jogging about 45 minutes each day, which offered me a fair amount of listening time. This was just about a year after the internationally televised Siyum in Madison Square Garden, where Jews from around the world gathered to celebrate their completion of Daf Yomi – a program involving the study of a page of Talmud a day, completing the entire corpus in seven and a half years. And so I decided – that’s what I’ll do with my IPod! I decided to download daf yomi classes, and listen to a lecture each morning on that day’s page of Talmud. I didn’t know it then, but my life would never be the same again.

I started with Masechet Yoma, because that is what the international daf yomi community was up to when I began. One of the first passages I learned was about two priests who race one another up a ramp to the Temple altar because whoever gets there first will get to do Trumat HaDeshen, that is, to clear off the ashes from the previous day's sacrifices. Just as one priest begins to gain on his fellow, he stabs him with the knife used for slaughtering animals, and the lagging priest falls to his death. I thought this was an appropriate passage to learn while jogging, even if I’ve never been quite that competitive.

For the past four and a half years I have learned a page of Talmud every day. I don’t always learn while jogging, because usually I want to have the book open before me. Often I go to a class held at a local synagogue at 6:15am, in which a rabbi teaches the daf to a group of about a dozen middle-aged men, and myself. Other days I learn over dinner, careful not to drip tomato sauce over discussions about the sprinkling of blood on the altar. And sometimes I learn just before bed, falling asleep with the rabbis still arguing in my head about just how late a person can recite the bedtime Shema.

I have never missed a day of daf yomi, including the day of my wedding – and incidentally, I married a man from my daf yomi shiur, and now we learn together. Learning Torah has been a constant in my life, giving structure and meaning to my days. During particularly tough periods, on days when I found it hard to remember why I bother to get up in the morning, I found that my daily Talmud study was an anchor, if not a liferaft. I love the notion that with every day that passes, you are not merely one day older – you are one day wiser. What a healthier relationship to time, viewing time not as a mark of age but as an opportunity to grow in wisdom. This is in fact the Jewish view of time: The rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot that five is the age for studying Torah; ten is the age of studying Mishnah; fifteen is the age for studying Talmud, and the list goes on.

I often feel that my life unfolds against the backdrop of the Daf I am learning. My learning is a source of inspiration -- I write poetry based on the Talmud I learn, and have a blog devoted to poetic reactions to the daily daf. It has changed the way I see the world, and what my interests are: I’ve become fascinated by Jewish life in the early centuries of the common era, when the Talmud was compiled – a time when Jewish life was struggling to regain its foothold after the calamitous destruction of the Temple. The key players in this period have become as familiar to me as dear friends: Ben Azzai, who loved learning Torah so much that he couldn’t be bothered to get married and sacrifice precious learning time to raise a family; Rabbi Eliezer, who left his family’s huge farming estate to go learn Torah in Jerusalem, against his father’s will; Rabbi Joshua, who developed his love of Torah in the womb, because his mother used to pass by the Beit Midrash when she was pregnant with him; Rabbi Akiva’s son, who spent his entire wedding night studying Torah with his bride, and then lied to his father about what they had not done. In my eagerness to get to know these individuals better, I began translating a series of biographies of the sages of the Talmud, which should be available in English in within the next two years. Every time I sit down to translate, I marvel at my good fortune that in translating these books, I am essentially being paid to study Torah – it’s better than Kollel!

I am fascinated, too, by the possibilities that are open to me as a woman studying a text that for 1500 years has been analyzed primarily by men. What does it mean for me as a Jewish woman to read Talmud, a text whose heroes are primarily men – not to mention men who considered themselves experts in women’s psychology and anatomy? I am exhilarated by the notion of reading these texts through a woman’s eyes, especially as someone who regards herself as an independent self-sufficient adult, a role the Talmud could not imagine for women. I am intrigued by how the rabbis struggle to balance leaning Torah with making a living, which was the authentic form of being Jewish during the Talmudic era, very unlike the Haredi lifestyle of today. I am interested in the rabbis’ interactions with non-Jews, with aristocratic Roman matrons, with heretics and non-believers. And as an editor, I am fascinated by the organization of the Talmud, which is probably one of the most intensely edited books in all of world literature, its stories reworked again and again into tight literary units in which no detail is extraneous, and little is transparent. Any page of Talmud assumes that you know every other page – there is no clear beginning – so the only way to begin is already to know everything, which is why it’s difficult to begin, but once you have, it’s impossible to stop.

When finishing learning a tractate of Talmud, which I did just this past week, it is traditional recite a prayer known as the Hadran: Hadran alach v’hadrach alan. In classic Talmudic wordplay, the word Hadran, from Hadar, can have two meanings. And so the phrase can mean “may we return to you, and may you return to us:” may we have the opportunity to study this tractate again (because inevitably we’ll forget some of what we learn), and may it come back to us (because we hope that some of what we learn with stay with us). This speaks to me in terms of the power of learning to make the world endlessly interesting – there is always more to learn, which means that there is always a reason to keep living. But Hadar also means “beauty and glory” as well as “return.” So the prayer can also mean: “Our beauty is from you, and your beauty is from us,” which conveys the notion that we, with our own individual life experiences and our own unique perspectives, can enrich the study of Talmud; and that Talmud can enrich us.

The Hadran prayer goes on to contrast those who study Torah with those who are drawn to idle pursuits: “We are running and they are running. We are running to the World to Come, and they are running to the den of iniquity.” Whether jogging or learning, I don’t always know where I am heading; but I know that with every passing day, I am further along.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Avoda Zara: Perek Aleph לפני אידיהם

2010-10-24T00:00:00.002+03:00

(2a)
A Goy’s festival is called “Aid”
And three days before you can’t trade
Borrow, lend, buy or sell
Lest the Goyim feel well--
(Everybody feels well when they’re paid.)

(2a)
The Holy One someday will place
His Torah out in public space
“All who learned it, come take
Your reward, for My sake.”
All the nations will think it’s a race.

(2b)
First to come forward is Rome
Who made the whole wide world their home
“We built bathhouses, bridges
O’er perilous ridges.”
Said God: “Did you study my tome?”

(2b)
‘Twas Persians who stepped forward next
Though Rome’s fate had left them perplexed.
“We built bridges and cities
Waged wars by committee."
Said God: "No!" And left them quite vexed.

(3a)
God took Creation and said:
I am holding this over your head
If you study, you’ll gain
If not, chaos will reign
Without Torah, the planet is dead.

(3a)
Said the nations to God: "Please allot
One commandment. We’ll keep it or rot.”
Sukkah! So they constructed
But then self-destructed
By kicking. “Dear God, it’s too hot!”

(3b)
Twelve hours make up God’s day
Three he learns, three he judges away
And in spite of misdeed
The whole world still He feeds,
Then Leviathan sits down to play.

(4a)
“Rav Safra knows all – he’s first rate,”
So Abahu to Romans would prate.
But when put to the test
He was far from the best--
“He’s from Babel, their Torah’s not great.”

(4b)
God gets angry one minute each day:
When the coxcomb turns white, you should pray
For your foes quick to die
Rabbi Joshua tried
But he slept late, and said, “Not this way.”

(5a)
There are four types regarded as dead:
One who’s blind with no eyes in his head,
One so poor he is thin
One with leprosy skin,
One with no sons to live in his stead.

(5b)
Learning Torah should leave you quite broke
You should feel like an ox in a yoke
Like an ass with a load
As you set down the road
(Better metaphors could be invoked.)

(6b)
Rebbe received once some cash
From a Min at his festival bash.
“I am stuck either way:
If I take it, he’ll pray
But he’ll hate if I throw it away.”

(7a)
A woman may not remove hair
From her body on Moed. We care
That she ought not feel pain
On chag. Still, don’t refrain
If she’s happier without it there.

(8a)
When Adam first saw the sun set
He began both to weep and to fret:
“I have sinned, I will rot
And this world’s gone to pot.”
Then the sun rose, averting that threat.

(8b)
The Romans were fighting the Greeks
And losing, for quite a few weeks.
‘Til they joined with the Jews
Whom God wouldn’t let lose
This then led to a few winning streaks.

(10b)
Antoninus to Rebbe would sneak
In a tunnel each day of the week.
He would keep Rebbe fed
He would lift him to bed
And plead: “Help, it’s the next world I seek.”

(11a)
Onkeles converted. This Jew
Was wanted. So Rome sent a crew
Of soldiers to drag
Him to Rome, but they lagged
Because Onkeles converted them too!

(12a)
There’s a thorn in my foot! Ouch and ow!
There’s an idol here. Am I allowed
To bend down to pick
Out the thorn? Though I’m quick,
You might think to the idol I’ve bowed.

(13a)
A high priest may not leave this land
That is, Israel. Though we lift the ban
If he’s leaving to head
To a teacher, or wed
Him a wife who lives on foreign sand.

(13b)
You can buy market slaves from a Goy
Thus to bring them to Torah, with joy—
And also a cow
Though I do not know how
You’d convert cows to good Jewish boys.

(14b)
This here tractate of Talmud was turned
To by Abraham, who was concerned
With gods. But it took
Him much longer, this book—
He had 400 chapters to learn!

(15b)
A non-Jew should not be the teacher
Of our boys; for he may play the preacher.
Or bring into class
A big god made of brass
We Jews don’t like these decorative features.

(16b)
Rabbi Eliezer was taken
As heretic. He was quite shaken:
He said: “What did I do?
I am just a poor Jew!”
Said the Roman: It seems I’m mistaken.

(17a)
Ulla would come home and kiss
The soft hands of his beautiful sis
And others attest
Not her hands, but her breast--
Tell us sages, was Ulla remiss?

(17a)
This story is rather obscene
But Rabbi Elazar had been
To every last whore
Then he heard of one more
On his way, though, the wind intervened.

(17b)
Two sages were walking; they came
To a fork in the road. One said: “Dames!”
The other said worse—
“Idols”—They chose the first
But the harlots retreated in shame.

(18a)
Chanina ben Teradion had
A daughter who did something bad:
She walked daintily
So the Romans would see
And admire, which troubled her dad.

(18a)
Chanina ben Teradion was burned
With the Torah scroll he loved to learn.
As the parchment consumed
Still the black letters bloomed
In the world to come his place was earned.

(18b)
Rabbi Meir, at behest of his wife
Went to save his poor wife sister’s life
She’d been locked up as whore
He got her out the door
But the Romans pursued him in strife.

(18b)
Theaters and circuses? No!
These are places where Jews may not go!
Still you can’t fall asleep
Though you make not a peep
The whole point is through Torah to grow.

(19a)
Words of Torah must oft be repeated
And don’t think that you’ve been defeated
If you don’t understand
That is part of the plan
You will get more the more you’ve completed.

(20a)
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, it’s told
Stood on Temple Mount, there to behold
A beautiful dame,
Not a Jew. He exclaimed:
O my Lord, Your works are manifold!

(20b)
The Angel of Death is all eyes
Any sick person whom he espies
He will stand by her side
Til the person has cried
Then he spits in her mouth, and she dies.

(21a)
In Israel, you can’t sell your home
To a non-Jew. Instead let them roam.
This isn’t their place
So we grant them no space
(You’re aghast? Don’t blame me. Check the tome.)

Disembarking from the Summer Ark

2010-10-11T23:30:00.006+03:00

It happened as if on cue. The moment we finished reading Parashat Noach in shul this past Shabbat, just after the forty days of rain came to an end and God promised that “so long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease,” the floodgates of the sky opened and a heavy rain poured down over Jerusalem. Those who were early to shul came in summer clothes and stayed dry; those who were late walked in sopping wet; and those who were really late arrived in long-sleeves and raincoats. It was the first real rain of the season (other than a brief 7am drizzle a few weeks ago), and we could feel the ground thirsting to drink up every last drop after six months of parched dryness. By the afternoon the air was clean and crisp as if the whole atmosphere had just been laundered, and we went for a walk under the clear blue sky to mark that summer had ended and autumn had begun.

At kiddish after shul I told a friend that I don’t think women menstruated on the ark, because all natural processes ceased. There was no seedtime in the earth or in the human body. The ark was a place of stasis and suspended animation, with no birth or growth or death or rebirth. It was the opposite of the world we know, with its changing seasons, its days that grow longer and shorter, its waxing and waning moon. Although sometimes during hot August afternoons it may seem that “summer days will never cease,” as Keats said in his majestic “Ode to Autumn,” the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” always comes around. This year, when we sat sweating under the hot sun in the sukkah on account of the early holiday schedule, I found myself memorizing Rilke’s “Autumn Day,” a poem that captures the bittersweetness of summer’s end:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

The first stanza captures the immensity of summer, whose hot days are as oppressive as its long evenings are liberating. In those last hot days we find ourselves entreating the Lord to rein in the long days and dispel the heat with autumn breezes. And yet as the second stanza indicates, we don’t really want summer to end quite yet:

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

We want just a bit more summer, enough to allow the final fruits to ripen and swell and sweeten. Like Chazal, Rilke distinguishes between all fruit and the heavy wine, which is worthy of its own mention and its own blessing: Let all fruits be full, but blessed and sweet be the fruit of the heavy vine. This stanza is clearly heavily influenced by Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” which the poet composed on a September afternoon while taking a walk through the fields:

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Summer cannot end until all fruit is filled with ripeness to the core. We must have the last pomegranates and mangoes to seed and peel with sticky hands as the redness splatters the cabinets and the yellow juice trickles down to our elbows. It cannot rain before Sukkot because first we must gather in the gourds and the hazel shells and all the bounty of the harvest. Rilke invokes Keats’ powers of close observation and rich sensual language to describe the natural world at a particular moment in time. But Rilke is not a nature poet like Keats; he is, primarily, the poet of loneliness. And so for Rilke, the end of summer is about ripeness, but also resignation. As we see in the third and final stanza, the winds that are let loose are also stately sighs:

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Conjoining house and spouse, as the Talmud, too, is wont, Rilke asserts that to everything there is a season, and the time of building is over. Those who did not find someone to snuggle with during the cold winter nights ahead will have to wait until the next seedtime. Those who are alone—a state with which the poet is clearly intimately familiar—will find themselves staying up alone and wandering the avenues “restlessly,” a word that sounds (in this beautiful translation) like the rustling of the leaves with which the poem concludes. I imagine these solitary souls wandering with their chins up and their heads held high, and even as their jaws tremble with the enormity of the pain of loneliness, they do not cry. They have fixed their sights on the next corner, and the next, and they will acquaint themselves with the night until they are so tired that they are ready to collapse from exhaustion -- and only then, when they can be sure there is no danger of crying themselves to sleep, do they permit themselves to go inside again.

When I think of these night wanderers I am reminded of Steven Millhauser’s hypnotic novella “Enchanted Night,” about the lonely inhabitants of a small town in Connecticut who cannot sleep on a hot late summer night. Indeed, the first chapter is called “Restless,” and depicts someone who can't bear to stay inside anymore:

"A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits in bed and throws the covers off. Her forehead is damp, her hair feels wet. Through the screens of the two half-open windows she can hear a rasp of crickets and a dim rush of traffic on the distant thruway. Five past twelve. The room is so hot that the heat is gripping her throat. Got to move, got to do something. Moonlight is streaming in past the edges of the closed and slightly raised venetian blinds. She can’t breathe in this room, in this house. Oh man, do something. Do it… She can’t stay in this room, oh no. If she doesn’t do something right away, this second, she’ll scream. The inside of her skin itches. Her bones itch. So how do you scratch your bones? She has to get out there, she has to breathe. If you don’t breathe, you’re dead. The room is killing her."

When does the moment come when we accept that summer is over and the long, lonely coldness is beginning to set in? e.e. cummings takes a hard-nosed look at the cruelty of summer’s end, with the loss of any hope that blossoming friendships will ripen into mature love:

"summer is over
— it's no use demanding
that lending be giving;
it's no good pretending
befriending means loving"
(sighs mind:and he's clever)
"for all,yes for all
sweet things are until"

"spring follows winter
as clover knows,maybe"
(heart makes the suggestion)
"or even a daisy—
your thorniest question
my roses will answer"
"but dying's meanwhile" (mind murmurs;the fool)

"truth would prove truthless
and life a mere pastime
— each joy a deceiver,
and sorrow a system—
if now than forever
could never(by breathless
one breathing)be" soul
"more" cries;with a smile

The mind, ever clever, knows that summer is over, because experience has proven that nothing lasts forever: “all sweet things are until.” And yet while the mind has acknowledged the reality of the changing seasons, the soul is not ready to let go. As in Rilke’s second stanza, the soul cries out “more” in a final gasp for fresh air to breathe in a hot stuffy room, wishing for just a bit more ripeness and fruitfulness, and another chance for friendship to become love. The brain may be an expert in truth, but truth would have no point (“truth would prove truthless”) if the soul did not retain the hope that “now” could become “forever,” that is, that summer days might never cease. The stubborn soul will continue to write the poetry of summer in the lonely days of winter, to enclose those poems in long letters, and to memorize them while walking up and down the Connecticut avenues at night.

But summer is over. There's no use pretending. This week the creation and destruction stories will give way to the beginning of the saga of the Jewish people, starting with the charge to Abraham to get up, leave his home, and walk the streets from Ur Kasdim to Canaan. By the end of the week we will have begun praying for rain and dew, and Lord it is time. But I still want to carry with me some of the wonder and marvel of the first two parshiyot, those end of summer weeks when life remains full of ripeness and precarious potential. And I want to imagine that when the rain comes again, even the poet of loneliness will find himself seeking refuge in another’s arms, two by two.

Elul Reflections: What does God do on Rosh Hashanah morning?

2010-09-01T23:02:00.003+03:00

I have spent the past few weeks practicing Rosh Hashanah Musaf, and so my interest was piqued when I read on a recent daf of masechet Avodah Zara (4b) that “a person should not daven Musaf during the first three hours of the day on Rosh Hashanah.” There is no chance that will happen in my minyan, where Rosh Hashanah Shacharit is interminable; but my husband, who will be leaving for shul at 6am, might run into trouble. And so I read on.

The Talmud explains that the reason a person should not daven Musaf early in the day is “lest his deeds be scrutinized and his prayer be rejected, since judgment is then proceeding.” In other words, since God is in judgment-mode on Rosh Hashanah morning, we don’t want to attract His attention, lest He judge us too harshly. The Talmud explains that Shacharit is less of a problem because everyone is davening shacharit in the morning, so God is not likely to pay special attention to any one person. Even if the individual has sinned grievously, he will be absolved on account of the collective merit of the community with whom he prays. This is a good reason to choose your minyan carefully, because if the ship goes down, you don’t want to be on it (unless there’s a Dag Gadol waiting to rescue you and belch you out beside a leafy Kikayon). It’s also a compelling argument for Tefillah b’tzibur: when we pray with others, we can ride on their coattails, like a lagging biker drafting behind the big guys in front. Or to invoke a more serious image: If prayer is truly uplifting, it lifts all of us up to a higher spiritual place than where we would otherwise stand alone.

This text would be a short and sweet message for Rosh Hashanah, if only it ended there. But the Talmud goes on to question whether God actually spends the first three hours of the day judging the world. After all, we have a baraita on the previous daf (3b) which tells us that “The day consists of twelve hours. In the first three, God sits and studies Torah. In the second three, God sits and judges the whole world. When he sees that the world deserves to be destroyed, he gets up off his seat of justice and sits on his seat of mercy. For the third three hours, God sits and feeds the whole world, from ram’s horns to lice eggs. During the last fourth of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan.” This baraita deserves Gufa-treatment in its own right, especially in light of a recent New Yorker article by Rebecca Mead about the history of playgrounds and the purpose of play. For our purposes, we note that the baraita states explicitly that God spends the first three hours of the day not judging the world, but studying Torah. (Apparently God is as compulsive as I am about daf yomi!) And so why does our source on 4b assume that God spends the morning in judgment?

The Talmud, after first trying to play around with God’s schedule a bit (ahem, no dualistic double-booking! There is just one Reshut in the heavens!), ultimately concludes that the baraita is correct – God does indeed spend the morning studying Torah, and only later does He begin judging the world. And then the Talmud offers a surprising take on the nature of these activities: “Torah has ‘truth’ written in it, as it says, ‘Buy truth, and never sell it.’And so while occupied with Torah, the Holy One, blessed be He, will not overstep the line of justice. But when sitting in judgment, which is not designated as ‘truth,’ God may overstep the line of justice.” In other words, in quite a revolutionary reading, the Talmud is suggesting that the person who is being judged has more to fear when God is studying Torah than when God is judging the world. How so?

The Talmud explains that so long as God is judging, God is likely to “overstep the line of justice,” that is, to go lifnim mishurat hadin. This phrase, which is often translated as “going beyond the letter of the law,” appears throughout rabbinic literature, usually to describe a person who goes above and beyond the call of duty. For instance, in Bava Metzia (24b) we are told that Shmuel would return a lost object even if it did not have any identifying signs. Technically a person has to return a lost object only if it has such Simanim. Rav was surprised, but Shmuel explained that he was acting lifnim mishurat hadin. In one other instance that I can think of, we are told of God going lifnim mishurat hadin. This is in the Sifrei to Dvarim, in a commentary on the verse, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Rabbi Haggai comments: “God says: Not just have I given two paths, but I have gone lifnim mishurat hadin and said to you: Choose life!” In other words, God not only gives us a multiple-choice test, but He tells us the right answer! Certainly this is above and beyond the call of divine duty.

And so this source suggests that an inherent characteristic of justice is the ability to transcend what is just, and to go above and beyond what the law requires of us. But this is not true of Torah, which is described as Emet, truth. With Torah, we cannot go beyond the letter of the law, because Torah is the law. When studying Torah, we can’t smooth things over. Talmud Torah demands our strict attention to the finer points and nuances of the text. The goal is to figure out the truth of the text—what the text is trying to tell us—and not to offer a compassionate or forgiving interpretation when reading a harsh prophetic rebuke or a story that instills fear and trembling. When dealing with human beings, as we know from a famous midrash in Breishit Rabbah, God may opt to cast Truth to the ground. But not when studying Torah.

This text speaks to me as I work on my own Cheshbon HaNefesh during this month of Elul. All too often, I hold myself and others to the standards of strict justice, unable to overstep its line. I do not allow myself to go to bed until I have answered all the emails in my inbox, writing long and detailed responses to anyone who has written me in search of advice or emotional support; only to find myself resenting those people who do not, in turn, respond to me in a timely and thorough fashion. Likewise, I always make sure that all my work is finished before I leave the office, only to grow frustrated with my colleague when she leaves early for a weekend trip. I force myself to hold to a specific pace when swimming, only to get annoyed when one of the floating old ladies breaks my stride. Instead of viewing myself as just another member of this endearingly fallible human race, I become embittered and self-righteous, holding my stiff neck high as I summarily clear my inbox, lock the office door, and cut through the water.

In the catalogue of my own faults, I think not just of how I judge others, but also of how I study Torah. When I am learning or working—activities which constitute about 90% of a typical day—I find it very hard to break away from the text in front of me to attend to humanity. If the phone rings while I’m learning, my first instinct is often to be annoyed, rather than to be grateful that I have friends who want to spend time speaking with me. I can think of many other examples, but I’m too ashamed to share them here. Suffice it to say that all too often, I am in Emet mode, bent on figuring out the truth even at the expense of the living, loving human beings around me. I fail to remember that those human beings—and indeed all of humanity—would not have been created if God Himself had not once cast the angel of truth aside.

As I work on both my davening and my teshuva in preparation for the Yamim Noraim, I feel relieved that Musaf will not start until at least 11am. I would not want to be judged by a God in Emet mode, because I’m not always proud of the truth of who I have been. I hope that the new year will be filled with Torah study—with close and careful readings of the book of law that God gave us. But I hope, too, that this will be a year when we are all able to go beyond the letter of the law to be present for the people we care about, to forgive ourselves and others, and to take part in a religious community that lifts us up and brings us ever closer to the God in whose image we are created.

A Womb of His Own

2010-08-23T07:24:00.002+03:00

I have long been baffled by the choice of Torah reading for minchah on Yom Kippur. Why do we read the long list of prohibited sexual relations on the afternoon of the holiest day of the Jewish calendar? Yom Kippur is a day when we are commanded rise above the physical needs of our body. We do not eat or drink, and we dress in white like angels. Moreover, this is the one day of the year when sexual relations are explicitly prohibited by the Torah. Why then do we proceed to read about all those individuals whose nakedness we are forbidden to uncover?

Apparently I am not the only one troubled by this question. The new machzor from the Conservative movement, Lev Shalem, offers two possible Torah readings for minchah on Yom Kippur – the “traditional” reading about sexual unions, and an “alternate” reading that consists of the holiness code at the beginning of parshat Kedoshim. The latter choice is a compelling one, both because it dovetails with the shacharit reading from Acharey Mot (since these two parshiyot are consecutive and are often conjoined), and also because, as the editors of the machzor explain, “this passage has been called the holy of holies of the book of Leviticus” (and Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year). In defense of the traditional reading, the editors note that “in pre-modern societies, privacy in the family rarely existed. A public recitation of the rules that define and protect the family was deemed important on this day, when the entire community gathered for prayer and reflection.” They go on to surmise that the choice of Torah reading may have been associated with the custom of young men and women going out into the fields to arrange marriage proposals on Yom Kippur in the days when the Temple was still standing.

If these reasons seem too historically specific for our timeless tradition, they are at least more satisfying than the traditional explanations, cited in commentaries to Megillah 31a, where the rabbis establish the Torah readings for the various holidays. The Talmud states without elaboration, “On Kom Kippur we read Acharei Mot and the maftir is Ki Choh Amar Ram v’Nisa; at Minchah we read the Arayot (forbidden sexual relations) and the maftir is Yonah.” Rashi comments that “We read the Arayot – so that anyone who is sleeping with someone forbidden to him (literally: who has Arayot in his hands) will separate from them, because Arayot are a prevalent sin, because man’s soul enjoys them and his evil inclination wins him over.” According to Rashi, then, the minchah Torah reading is intended as a warning against this particular sin. The Tosafot offer a rather anti-feminist alternative to this commentary: “We read the Arayot—because women dress up in honor of the day, and so we need to warn the men not to fall into their trap.” The women are wearing their new white dresses and their holiday finery, rendering them particularly seductive. I might add that since Yom Kippur is a fast day, the women don’t need to be in the kitchen but can actually set foot in shul, for a change. Caveat gever! According to the traditional commentators as well, then, the minchah reading serves as a warning against sexual sins -- even though these are the sins that are supposed to be furthest from our minds on Yom Kippur.

This summer, when learning Masechet Shevuot, I was reminded of a rather startling connection between Yom Kippur at the Arayot. The second chapter of Shevuot deals with Yediot HaTumah, that is, with a person’s awareness (or his lack of awareness) that he is impure, or that he is entering a place of purity. There are several ways in which a person can sin in this regard. He or she may become impure but forget that he is impure and enter the Temple; or he may remember that he is impure but forget that he is in the Temple (apparently this was more likely the case for Babylonians, who did not have as strong a sense of Israel’s geography, and were therefore more likely to suddenly find themselves—oops!—in the Temple, of all places!); or he may forget both that he is impure and that he is in the Temple. In all such cases, the offender must exit the Mikdash by the shortest route possible and later bring a Korban Oleh V’Yored, that is, a sacrifice whose value depends on his financial state.

The Mishnah draws an explicit analogy between the way in which the impure person must exit the Mikdash, and the way in which a man must withdraw from a woman who becomes a Nidah during intercourse. In both cases, a space is entered under the assumption that this space is permitted, but it soon becomes clear that it is in fact prohibited. However, whereas in the case of the Mikdash, the person is expected to take the shortest path out, this is not the case in sex. There a man sins if he withdraws immediately, because to do so would render “his exit to be as enjoyable as his entrance.” Instead, as the Talmud goes on to relate, Rava advises that the man caught in such a situation should “stick his fingernails into the ground until it dies, which is good for him.” This is followed by a series of warnings to B’nei Yisrael to separate from their wives close to their menstrual periods. The Talmud cautions that “Anyone who does not separate from his wife close to her period – even if he has sons like the sons of Aaron, they will die.” (This is particularly interesting because as we read in the Torah reading at Yom Kippur shacharit, two of Aaron’s sons do in fact die young.) Conversely, “Anyone who separates from his wife before her period will have male children.” (The same consequence ensues if one makes havdalah, the Talmud goes on to say, underscoring the notion that separation is good.) This in turn leads to a consideration of the bizarre case of a man who is sure that he committed a sexual sin, but cannot quite remember whether he slept with his sister, or with his menstruating wife. This last case, of course, brings me back to the Arayot.

On Yom Kippur, the day we read the Arayot, much of the liturgy focuses on Temple ritual. This is especially the case during the Avodah service, which re-enacts the high priest’s activities on this day by quoting from the Talmudic tractate Yoma. Seven of the eight chapters of this tractate deal with every single step taken by the high priest as he prepares to enter the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of the Temple. The fifth chapter relates that the high priest would penetrate two levels of curtains, the outer and the inner (who says the rabbis didn’t know female anatomy?), and then heap incense on coals and wait until the whole house became full of smoke. Only after this climactic eruption did he withdraw from the Temple spent and triumphant, corresponding to the exuberant singing of “Mareh Kohen” in the Avodah service’s re-enactment.

In light of the analogy from Shevuot—in which entering the Mikdash is compared to penetrating a woman—the Yom Kippur leyning takes on a new level of meaning. The purpose of entering the Mikdash is to bring a Korban, that is, to be brought close (Karov) to God. This intimacy is analogized to sexual union. In this sense, the story of Nadav and Avihu’s death (on account of their coming too close to the altar when not in the proper state to do so) in the shacharit reading is analogous to all the improper sexual unions described in the minchah Torah reading. Entering the Temple when impure is like entering a woman who is forbidden, and in both cases, the consequences are dire. Moreover, the person enters into the Ezrat Nashim, an area named for the fact that women could not go beyond this point, but perhaps also significant because the whole Temple, with its nested chambers and vessels, was a very feminine space.

While these readings are my own, I am not the first to notice the analogy between the Holy of Holies and the womb. Bonna Devora Haberman, in her brilliant article “The Yom Kippur Avodah in the Female Enclosure,” offers a reading of the Avodah service as an erotic encounter: “The high priest may be understood as the symbolic instrument for attaining union of the Jewish people with the One...which culminates in orgasmic penetration into the holiest space.” Haberman argues that the incense is the aphrodisiac of the Avodah; and the sprinkling of blood offers atonement in much the same way that the shedding of menstrual blood allows for a new start, with the goat to Azazal cast off like a discarded egg. In learning Masechet Shevuot, I was struck by how Haberman’s reading of the Avodah service may be applied to other aspects of Temple ritual, including an ordinary person’s entrance into the Temple to bring a Korban—that is, to achieve closeness (Kirva) and intimacy with God.

The rabbis famously say that since the destruction of the Temple, our impulse to worship idols has been replaced by the sexual impulse. Instead of the temptation to enter into places of worship that are off limits, there is the temptation to sleep with those forbidden to us. The Minchah leyning about the Arayot is thus the contemporary counterpart to the Shacharit reading about entering the Temple in purity. In a nod to the psalm for Elul, the month of “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” both Torah readings remind us what it takes to merit to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our lives.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Shevuot (chapters 1 and 2)

2010-08-23T01:21:00.002+03:00

שבועות שתים :Chapter One

(2a)
The Torah lists laws one and two
But a person who knows what to do
Keeps four. It’s the case
With oaths made to save face:
Bad, good, claiming you didn’t, did too.

(5a)
You’re accountable for what you know;
Every school teaches that you can’t go
In the Temple when not
In a pure state. Forgot?
Bring a sacrifice as quid pro quo.

(5b)
Not each blemish is equally white
Skin discolored is more or less bright
We will tell if you show:
It’s like plaster, wool, snow
Or like egg gook that gleams in the light.

(8a, with Rashi)
A woman who gives birth must bring
A sin offering. That’s a strange thing.
We assume that she swore
“Ouch! I won’t any more
Have these kids!” She atones for that zing.

(9a)
Reish Lakish says the Rosh Chodesh goat
Is for sins of which just God takes note.
It’s Himself He impugns
For He lessened the moon
Cry the sages: That’s not what He wrote!

(10b)
Ketoret leftovers can’t be
Disposed of indiscriminately.
We use them to pay
Artisans, so they stay
In the Temple to work dutifully.

(11b)
A red heifer may not be fated
For worship, although designated.
You might find one that’s redder
Or one that looks better
(Of wives, too, this also was stated.)

(13a)
Rabi lists sins for which people must
Do pre-Yom Kippur Teshuva or bust:
Keeping foreskins intact,
Casting God off your back,
Quoting Torah in tones of disgust.

ידיעות הטומאה: Chapter Two

(14a)
The Temple courtyard renovation
Requires full participation
By prophet and king
And sanhedrin – and sing-
Ing by Israel, who join in elation.

(14b)
If you’re impure, you shouldn’t go in
To the Mikdash, for that is a sin.
And likewise they state
You should not penetrate
Your dear wife when she’s bleeding within.

(14b)
A Babylonian, who lives far away
Comes to Israel at last one fine day
He gets lost when impure
In the Mikdash, immured--
Is he blamed for not keeping away?

(15b)
Yehoshua ben Levi would say
Torah verses, at close of the day
And then fall asleep
So that Torah would keep
Him from harm. But that’s not quite okay.

(17a)
If you’re caught in the Mikdash, you must
Get out of there quickly or bust
Take the shortest way out
Don’t go running about
But with women, stay put, lest you lust.

(18a)
If your wife becomes Nidah while you
Are inside her, what are you to do?
Dig your fingernails deep
In the floorboards, and keep
Them there‘til you are past it. Say “phew!”

(18b)
When Havdalah with wine cup is said,
You’ll have sons with your wife in your bed.
But sleep with your spouse
When in Nidah – your house
Will be full of sons, but they’ll drop dead.

Sinking my Teeth into Torah

2010-08-04T21:36:00.003+03:00

I am dentally unstable. Every time I go to the dentist, I discover a new problem with my teeth. Just yesterday, when I went for an appointment to follow up on the extraction of a top tooth in June, I learned that the two teeth next to it have now become infected, and they too will have to come out -- leaving me with only two teeth on my top left side. The dentist also reported that in spite of my years of orthodonture, I’m going to need a brace on my top teeth in order to pull down an impacted wisdom tooth. When I heard that news, my jaw dropped. Another wisdom tooth? I had six wisdom tooth extracted when I was in high school. I remember that the dentist seemed to keep finding more of them, assuring me each time that I was exceedingly wise, but that this time he was finally finished. Apparently I am even wiser than he thought.

It is not the wise son, but the wicked one, who has his teeth blunted at the Passover seder. What does all this stuff mean to you, he asks his father; and because he excludes himself from the collective, his father tells him that he would not have been taken out of Egypt. Is this a fitting punishment? He who would not have been taken out has his teeth taken out instead? It is not a fate I would want for myself, though I seem to be losing teeth left and right. The Talmud in Masechet Brachot (56a) relates that if a person dreams of his teeth falling out, then his sons and daughters will die soon. Sounds ominous. I suppose I am lucky that I don’t have any sons or daughters to lose. On the other hand, at this point I don’t have very many teeth left to lose, either.

Perhaps the best example of the connection between teeth and wisdom in the Talmud is the figure of Rav Yehuda, the third-century Babylonian rabbi whose teacher Shmuel nicknamed him Shinana. The term means either “toothy one” or “sharp, brilliant one,” depending on the root (no pun intended), which may be either the Hebrew word for tooth (Shen) or for learning (Shinun). Either Rav Yehuda had incisive incisors or an incisive intellect, or perhaps both. I like to think that he chewed over everything he learned, and maybe even broke his teeth on a few difficult Talmudic passages. This once happened to me. I was learning daf yomi while unconsciously biting my finger, when I inadvertently bit so hard that I chipped my front tooth. The tooth remains chipped to this day, leading me to wonder whether I, too, merit Rav Yehuda’s sobriquet.

I hope that when I broke my tooth on Torah, I was enjoying what I was learning. Because if so, then the harm I caused my tooth could be classified as Shen (tooth), which is the term used in the tractate Bava Kama for one of the three types of damages caused by an ox: Keren, Regel, and Shen. Keren (horn) refers to intentional damage caused by an ox’s horn. Regel (foot) refers to the damage that an animal inflicts while walking. Shen refers to the damage done by an animal in the process of enjoying something, such as eating someone else’s vegetables. For all of these damages, the owner of the ox has to pay Nezek Shalem, the full cost of the damages (assuming like me, he does not have dental insurance).

Far better than damaging one’s teeth, of course, is using them to flash a toothy grin. This is what the children of Israel requested from God. In a midrash on the verse from Jacob’s blessing to his son Judah, “His teeth are whiter than milk” (Genesis 29:12), the Talmud relates an explanation offered by Rav Dimi:

The congregation of Israel said to the Holy One, blessed be He: Lord of the Universe, wink to me with your eyes, which will be sweeter than wine, and show me your teeth which will be sweeter than milk. (Ketubot 111b)

Apparently the children of Israel did not internalize the message that Moses learned after the Golden Calf episode, which is that no one can see God’s face and live. Or maybe they thought that God would make an exception to flash His pearly whites. (Brace yourselves!) In any case, this midrash leads into the following statement from Rabbi Yochanan:

Better is the man who affectionately shows his teeth to his friend than one who gives bins of milk to drink, for it is said in the Torah, “and his teeth white with milk” – don’t read L’ven Shinayim (teeth whiteness) but rather Libun Shinayim (the showing of teeth).

I suspect that Sisera would agree with this aphorism, as would, perhaps, Og the king of Bashan, the mythical Biblical figure who survived the flood because no one could vanquish him – until his Achilles teeth did him in when he tried to destroy Israel. The Talmud (Brachot 54b) relates that Og measured the size of the camp of Israel, found a mountain that was just that size, and plotted to uproot the mountain and throw it upon the camp of Israel. But Og’s plans were foiled by God: Just when the formidable king lifted the mountain over his head, God sent ants which bore a hole in it, so it sank down around his neck, covering his head. Og tried to pull the mountain off, but his gigantic teeth projected into the mountain, and he could not free himself. The proof text for this story is a verse from Psalms (3:8): “You have broken the teeth of the wicked.” Reish Lakish explains, “Do not read Shibarta (you have broken), but rather Shirbabta (you have lengthened).” God miraculously turned Og’s teeth into fangs that bore their way into the mountain. We might say that Og bit off more than he could chew, because the story ends with Moses taking an axe, leaping into the air, and killing the hapless ogre.

When it comes to my own teeth, I can only lament that I wish I were like the lover in Shir HaShirim, who was told, “Ah you are fair, my darling…Your teeth are like a flock of ewes, climbing up from the washing pool. All of them bear twins, and no one loses her young” (4:3). My teeth, though, seem more to resemble the ewes that lose their young than their fertile counterparts. Still, I take some comfort when my dentist assures me that all the teeth he extracts will be replaced with implants and crowns, and that no one who looks at me will notice the difference. Leaving his office, I can’t help but wonder: Is that what they call a tooth for a tooth?

The Careful Use of Compliments: Further Notes Towards a Theory of Romantic Love

2010-08-01T00:02:00.009+03:00

In moments of stunning clarity and insight, Isabel Dalhousie, the 40-year-old moral philosopher who is the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith’s The Careful Use of Compliments, contemplates her relationship with her lover Jamie. Isabel, once hopelessly in love with a dashing research fellow at Cambridge, knows all too well that “it was bad luck, just bad luck, to fall in love with the wrong person. People did that all the time; they fell in love with somebody who for one reason or another could never be theirs. And then they served their sentence, the sentence of unrequited, impossible love, which could go on for years and years, with no remission for good behavior, none at all.” But in Jamie, a man fifteen years her junior who tutors bassoon students in their beloved city of Edinburgh, Isabel has at last found a love that is requited. She and Jamie, though not married, are openly lovers, and they have a son together. Isabel is unable to believe her good fortune, particularly in those ordinary moments they spend together:

With the intimacy of a married couple--which they were not--but with the sense of novelty and awe of lovers--which they were--Isabel and Jamie prepared for their dinner with Cat. Isabel sat on the edge of her bed half dressed, examining a black cocktail dress and wondering whether it was the right thing to wear; Jamie came out of the bathroom wearing only a white towel wrapped round his waist, his hair wet from the shower, tousled, small drops of water on his shoulders and forearms. She looked up at him and then looked away because she did not want him to see her looking upon him. One looked upon with lust, or with something akin to lust, and one would not want to be seen looking upon one’s lover in the way in which a gourmet, sitting at the table, would look upon an enticing dish.
Jamie moved over to the dressing table and picked up a brush. Bending down to look into the mirror, he brushed his hair roughly, but it sprang back up, as it always tended to do.
"Don't worry," said Isabel. "It looks nice like that. Your hair sticks up naturally."
“It annoys me,” says Jamie. “Sometimes I think I’ll go to that place in Bruntsfield, you know the barbers near the luggage shop, and get a crew cut or one of those totally shaved styles.”
“You couldn’t,” said Isabel flatly. “It would be a crime.”
He turned to face her. “Why? It’s my head.”
She wanted to say, No, it’s not, it’s mine too, but she stopped herself. That was what she thought, though, and even as she thought it, she realized that Jamie was on loan to her, as we are all to one another, perhaps.

Isabel realizes that much as she loves Jamie, and much as she would like to possess him, he is ultimately not hers. He is her lover, but she does not own him. He is “on loan” to her, like a library book -- checked out and renewable, yes, but subject to being recalled at any moment. This notion reminds me of the famous story of Rabbi Meir and his wife Bruriah. The Midrash on Sefer Mishlei (31) tells of how Bruriah discovered that their beloved sons died suddenly on the Sabbath, but she hid their deaths from her husband so as not to cause him distress on Shabbat. She lay her sons on the bed, spread a sheet over them, and told her husband that they had gone to the study house. After he had made Havdalah, she posed this question to him: If someone were to lend her something and later come back to ask for it, should she return it? Rabbi Meir responded that of course she should return it. Bruriah then took her husband by the hand and led him to their bedroom, where she removed the sheet covering the bodies of their sons. Rabbi Meir began to wail, but Bruriah reminded him of his own assertion that one must return a pledge to its rightful owner. Her husband replied, “God has given, and God has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The notion that those we love are on loan to us, expressed by both Isabel and Bruriah, is one I feel in every fabric of my being. I identify with Isabel as she looks upon her freshly toweled lover. Like her, I wonder -- is it really my good fortune to be with you? Are you really mine? Can there really be someone who loves me in all my foibles and flights of fancy? It does not seem possible that such supreme joy could be my rightful lot. For a while I was certain that it was all just a dream, that you were a butterfly in a jar, and that the moment I unscrewed the cap you would flap your dazzling wings and fly away. I felt the need to keep you all to myself, to hide you away in a cupboard, to shield you from the prying eyes of others who would be eager to rejoice in a fortune that I did not believe was mine. On some level, I could not shake off the conviction that any expression of public joy would only become a public shame. I have never found it easy to graciously accept gifts, and I was wholly unable to accept the gift of you.

Paradoxically, it was only when I could adopt the notion of love “on loan” that I could allow myself to trust enough to be able to love you without fear. Only when I realized that you were not mine forever could I revel in the fact that you were mine for now. We have been married for six months, and every morning when I wake up beside you, watching as the sun streams in through the window and dances across your still-shut eyelids, I must pinch myself to make sure it is really true. I say Modeh Ani in the morning, thanking God not just for restoring my soul to my body, but for restoring you to me. For there you are, here with me on yet another blessed day! It is this sense of wild gratitude that enables me to love you without being paralyzed by the fear of losing you. It is, perhaps, the opposite stance of W.H. Auden, who writes of a lover who errs on the side of confidence in love’s endurance:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

I know that love will not last forever, because nothing beautiful lasts forever. An inherent characteristic of beauty is that it unfolds in time: A real flower is more beautiful than a plastic one because the real flower will ultimately wither. This is why Rabbi Elazar cries upon seeing the beautiful Rabbi Yochanan. The Talmud (Brachot 5b) relates that when Rabbi Yochanan came to visit Rabbi Elazar on his deathbed, the former pulled up his sleeve and a brilliant light fell from his arm. Struck by his beauty, which the Talmud elsewhere compares to a glass of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight, Rabbi Elazar began to cry. Rabbi Yochanan asked: Why are you crying? He answered: I am crying for this beauty that will be ravaged by dust.

As this sugya reminds us, evanescence is beauty’s hallmark. A thing of beauty is not, in fact, a joy forever. It is the knowledge that the object of our love, in all its beauty, is not guaranteed to be ours forever that renders our love so precious and so prized. We are on loan to one another, which means that sometimes we must acknowledge that “God has given, and God has taken away.” We live in spite of those moments. But there are also the moments we live for, when the impulse for blessing comes from another acknowledgement, uttered in wonder and incredulity: God has taken away, but God has also given.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Sanhedrin Perek Bet and Perek Gimel

2010-07-09T19:11:00.000+03:00

כהן גדול
Perek Bet

(18b)
A high priest must walk on bare feet
On Yom Kippur. The floor's not concrete.
He does not want to freeze
So he says, if you please,
Don't make leap years, for that means less heat!

(19a)
Through the market no woman should stride
With her son just a few steps behind.
For it happened once – oy!
That they kidnapped the boy,
Such a ransom they made her provide!

(20b)
Three mitzvot was Israel assigned
When it entered the land: First to find
Someone to be the king
And next: Amalek fling
To his death. Build the Temple, God's shrine.

(21b)
God gave Torah in Moses' time
We inherit this Torah, sublime.
But we must also write
Each our own, black on white,
Hence before you, dear readers, this rhyme.

(22a)
If a husband divorces his first
Wife, his whole world goes dark. It’s the worst.
And he feels such a void
Like the Temple destroyed
Into tears does the altar then burst.

(22b)
Elasha spent all of his earnings
On a haircut for viewers discerning.
He served as high priest
And he said—now at least
Everywhere I go, heads will be turning.

זה בורר
Perek Gimel

(23a)
Jerusalem’s wise men would say:
We won’t eat at a meal any day
Unless first we are told
Who will be there. We scold:
Share who’s coming, or we’ll stay away.

(24a)
Reish Lakish was a scholar well-suited
For Torah. He often disputed
With others, and taught
What his teachings had wrought
‘Twas like grinding two mountains uprooted.

(24b)
A witness must not have this vice:
He can’t lend at a very high price
Sell sabbatical fruit
Bet on pigeons for loot
Or spend all day long playing with dice.

(25a)
A butcher once sold something treif
From then on, all his meat was unsafe.
He regretted his wrong
And grew hair and nails long
But he never restored people’s faith.

(25b)
Thirteen years, Rabbi Zeyra collected
City taxes, a job he perfected.
When the clerk would decide
To come, Zeyra’d say: Hide!
And pay only for those still detected.

(27b)
A friend and a foe can’t report
To attest for or ‘gainst you in court.
What’s a friend? One who chanced
At your wedding to dance.
Foe? Of hate-and-won’t-talk-to-you sort.

(30a)
A man said: “My father’s bequest
Was some coins. But he laid them to rest
And I didn’t know where.
‘Til I dreamed: They are there!
But they’re tithings.” May he those coins wrest?

(31a)
A judge cannot walk out of court
And disclose any sort of report.
Like: I stood by your side!
Or: The others all lied!
This is how a tale-bearer comports.

(31a)
A poor little boy was once tried
In the court of Rav Nachman. He cried
When the court made him pay
And he wept all that day
‘Til some folks heard and rushed to his side.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Sanhedrin Perek Aleph: דיני ממונות בשלושה

2010-05-19T23:19:00.002+03:00

(2a)
We judge certain matters in courts
Of three: Damages, beatings and torts
And the calf we behead
When we find a man dead;
“And seducers!” So Meir reports.

(4a)
Do we follow the Torah as read
And ignore what is written instead?
Extra vav, extra yud
Does it matter? It should
Not (assuming we hold by what’s said).

(5a)
Rabi said, “So your nephew went down
Into Bavel. A new guy in town.
Will he teach? He will teach!
Will he judge? And he’ll preach!
But not blemishes, nope,” Rabi frowned.

(5b)
In a cemet’ry walked Rabbi Chiya,
Saw a man there and gasped: “Mamma Mia!
Priests can’t stand near the dead!”
Said the man: “My dad wed
A divorcee." (No more first aliyah!)

(6b)
A man steals some tall sheaves of wheat.
And then bakes it as challah to eat.
If he takes out some dough
Does he bless it although
It was stolen? Would priests want that treat?

(7a)
Was Moses’ brother possessed
For the calf was built at his behest!
He saw Chur lying dead
On the ground, and he said
“I am next!” and in fear acquiesced.

(7a)
I remember a time we adored
One another. The tip of a sword,
Wide enough for our bed.
Now estranged, there’s instead
A vast space where we rest in discord.

(7a)
A judge in a court would be wise
To imagine a sword ‘tween his thighs
At his feet, hell gapes wide--
If he takes the wrong side
He’ll be plunged to his dreadful demise.

(7b)
Rav’s landlord said, “Judge me in court.”
“But I know you,” was Rav’s quick retort.
“Rav Kahana will do it
Perhaps you will rue it--
I can’t guarantee his support.”

(8b)
If a woman is learned in Torah
(Of such women attests our Amora.)
Must a warning be given?
Or is she forgiven
If unwarned? A box of Pandora!

(11a)
Rabi, while teaching, once smelled
Garlic. Whereupon thus he expelled:
“He who ate it, walk out!”
Shmuel HaKattan, no doubt
Blameless, left the room as if compelled.

(12a)
Vegetables can’t be imported
To Israel, some rabbis reported.
We’re loathe to despoil
Our land with their soil.
“So what?!” other rabbis then snorted.

(14a)
Abahu, not yet an old geezer,
Went often to visit the Caesar.
There was always a dame
Who would sing out his name
We surmise his appearance did please her!

(15b)
Can a lion or wolf be your pet?
How domesticated can they get?
If they kill off a guy
We don’t kill them? We try
Them in court? Says Akiva: “You bet!”

(15a)
King David woke not by alarm
But by harp. (For those beeps can disarm!)
It was played by the wind
Which at midnight blew in
Playing music. It worked like a charm!

(17a)
“Moses is going to die
We’ll be led by young Josh, former spy!”
So Eldad and Mei-
Dad were famous for say-
Ing. “Come quail!” they would then prophecy.

(17b)
There are things that a town must provide
So a Torah sage there can reside:
Court and bathroom and shul;
Doctor, scribe, butcher, school.
Also fruit, for it makes you bright-eyed.

Threshing Torah

2010-05-18T02:59:00.004+03:00

Each year on Shavuot I debate whether or not to stay up all night. After a few hours of learning Torah, inevitably my eyelids begin to droop and I realize that I am unlikely to retain anything else. I could stay up all night, but wouldn’t it be better to wake up early to study when I’m more alert? This question is in fact the subject of a debate between two Talmudic sages, Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish, each of whom offers an opinion on the proper time for studying Torah. Their debate appears in Shir Hashirim Rabbah in the context of their exegesis of the words שחורות כעורב, “black as a raven.” Punning on the two Hebrew words, the midrash explains that Shchorot refers to Shachar (dawn), and Orev refers to Erev (evening). So too is Torah learned only by one who wakes up at dawn and goes to bed late in the evening, thereby maximizing time for study. But for those of us who can’t burn the candle at both ends (a phrase that refers not to both ends of the candle, but to both ends of the night – that is, late in the Erev and early in the Shachar), is the late night or the early morning the preferred time to learn? Here is where Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish chime in:

Rabbi Yohanan said: The threshing time for Torah is only at night, for it says, “She rises while it is yet night” (Proverbs 31:15), and it also says, “Arise, cry out in the night” (Lamentations 11:19).
Reish Lakish says: Both by day and by night, as it says, “You shall meditate on it day and night." (Joshua 1:8)
Reish Lakish said: Rabbi Yohanan was right in teaching me that the threshing time of Torah is only at night.
Said Reish Lakish: After I had labored at the Torah by day, it was remembered at night, as it is written, “And you shall meditate on it day and night.” (SSR 5:11)

Before trying to make sense of these opinions, it is worth pointing out the strange use of the words Grana shel Torah, which I have translated as the “threshing" time for Torah:
אין גרנה של תורה אלא בלילה
The Goren, as we know from Megillat Ruth, is the threshing floor – the place where the stems and husks of grain are beaten to separate the seeds from the straw. The English word “thresh” also means to discuss or examine an issue repeatedly, which may reflect the notion that the agricultural activity of threshing requires the repeated shaking of each stalk of grain until all the seeds are removed. In Hebrew, the word גורן , whose root meaning is “collection,” refers not just to the threshing floor but also to the harvesting season -- that is, the time of year that is celebrated on Shavuot. The term גורן thus connects both the agricultural and the historical significance of this holiday – it is a harvest festival but it is also a time of receiving and learning Torah. Or, to use an English pun that approximates this double entendre, it is a time both of collection (of grain) and of recollection (of Torah).

Reish Lakish, after trying to learn Torah both by day and by night, realizes that Torah cannot be learned all the time. His final two statements seem to contradict each other -- If he agrees that Torah is threshed only at night, why does he then say that he would labor in the daytime to find that his Torah became remembered (נהיר -- a word that Jastrow defines not just as “bright” but also as “remembered”) at night? Perhaps this contradiction can be resolved as follows: Reish Lakish comes to accept that the Torah that is collected in the day (the proper time for learning Torah) must be recollected at night. This notion is attested by modern research into the science of sleep: Neuroscientists tell us that it is during sleep that our brains compact what we learn in the day and transform it into long-term memory. We can learn all day long, but unless we allow our brains time to recollect all that we have collected, we will not retain much.

The experience of learning and forgetting Torah is an appropriate subject for Shavuot, because elsewhere in Shir HaShirim Rabbah we learn that the children of Israel went through the experience of learning and forgetting Torah while standing at Mount Sinai at the original Zman Matan Torateinu:

At the time when Israel heard “I am the Lord Your God,” Torah became fixed in their hearts, and they would learn Torah and they would not forget it.
They came to Moses and said: Moshe Rabbeinu! Be our intermediary!! As it is written, “You speak to us and we will obey, but let not God speak to us lest we die” (Exodus 20:16). What would be the point of our dying now??
Immediately they went back to learning and forgetting. They changed their minds and came to Moses. They said: Moshe Rabbeinu, if only God would reveal Himself [directly] to us again! If only He would kiss us from the kisses of His mouth! If only Torah would become fixed in our hearts as it once was!
Moses said to them: It is not the case now, but in the future it will be, as it is said: “I will put my Torah into their inmost being and inscribe it upon their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). (SSR 1:2)

This midrash teaches that the first commandment was fixed in the hearts of the Israelites such that they learned Torah without forgetting it. But something about this experience was too much for them, and so they asked Moses instead to serve as their intermediary. When they learned the rest of the commandments from Moses, they began to forget Torah, a condition that (as per the midrash) will continue until the eschatological realization of the messianic vision described by Jeremiah.

What was so unbearable about learning Torah without forgetting it? Perhaps the answer becomes clearer when we consider a parallel midrash that follows immediately after this one in Shir Hashirim Rabbah:

At the time when Israel heard, “You shall not have other gods,” the evil inclination was uprooted from their hearts. They came to Moses and said: Moshe Rabbeinu! Be our intermediary! As it is written, “You speak to us and we will obey, but let not God speak to us lest we die” (Exodus 20:16). What would be the point of our dying now??
Immediately the evil inclination returned to its place.
They changed their minds and came to Moses. They said: Moshe Rabbeinu, if only God would reveal Himself [directly] to us again! If only He would kiss us from the kisses of His mouth!
Moses said to them: It is not the case now, but in the future it will be, as it is said: “And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh” (Ezekial 36:26).

This midrash about the evil inclination describes a similar process as the previous midrash about forgetting: In both texts, first the children of Israel hear a commandment in a manner that is too much for them; then they plead with Moses to serve as a buffer; then they regret that decision and are told that they can only return to the former state in the messianic future. But what is it living without the evil inclination that is too much for them? To answer this question, we might look back to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, before they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What was life like for humanity before the evil inclination became part of the fabric of their being? The Torah does not tell us much about this experience, but inspired by our Shir HaShirim Rabbah source, I am tempted to imagine that Adam and Eve were bombarded constantly with blasts of “I am the Lord Your God” driven into their ears both night and day. They could not sin because to do so would be to bump into the legs of the divine presence (Chagigah 16a). Everywhere they turned they heard the piercing and deafening cry of God’s revelation. They lived in a constant and terrifying ever-present awareness of God, a state that Wordsworth romanticizes when he says, perhaps echoing the psalm for Elul, "I only have relinquished one delight / To live beneath your more habitual sway." So when the snake came on to the scene and offered them a chance to banish God from one tiny corner of Eden, they leapt at the opportunity.

And since the two consecutive Shir Hashirim midrashim so closely parallel one another, I must imagine Adam and Eve learning Torah, too. What was it like to learn Torah in Eden? There was no toil, because Adam had not yet been cursed. Nor were there any fertile and fruitful insights born, since Eve had not yet received the curse of the pains of childbirth. Devoid of toil and pain, learning Torah was an experience that required no effort from Adam and Eve. They did not have to struggle to learn because they never forgot anything. The midrash in Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer comments on the Torah’s statement that Adam was placed in the garden “to work it and to guard it” (Genesis 2:15):

“And what work was there in the garden, such that it is said ‘to work it and to guard it’? If you should say that there is labor in Eden—to plant the vineyeards and plow the earth or pile or cut the grain—didn’t all the trees blossom on their own? And if you should say that there was labor in Eden—to water the garden—wasn’t there a river that went through the garden? What did it mean to work it and to guard it? They would preoccupy themselves with the study of Torah and guard the way to the tree of life, which is Torah.” (PRE 13)

Until they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve had no evil inclination, and nor did they ever forget Torah. In the messianic days, when we are all laid to rest in an eternal garden of Eden, we will be restored to this pre-lapsarian state. We will have no evil instinct (because how can there be evil in a world that is Kulo Tov?), and we will not forget Torah. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to learn without forgetting. If everything that we have ever learned is constantly present in our minds, then there is no sense of time; every moment is ever-present, and thus every moment is the present. A world of no forgetting is like a wrinkle in time – a tesseract in which every moment can be conflated into the present one, and (given that there is no evil inclination) the Presence is always present.

As I stay up well past 2am writing this d’var Torah on Leil leil Shavuot, I am reminded that the world in which we live is a far cry from the Edenic end of days. We live in a world in which our evil inclination often gets the better of us, and a world in which much of what we learn tonight will be forgotten in the morning. We will have to relearn and review our Torah, and even “sleep on it” before it becomes recollected in our minds. We will have to go down on our hands and knees and beat out the seeds of new ideas from the stalks of the old. And yet it is this very toil that we rejoice in and celebrate at Zman Matan Torateinu. “Lie down for the night,” Boaz says to Ruth, inviting her to join him on the threshing floor after she has spent the day collecting sheaves of grain. “Then in the morning, if the redeemer will come, good! Let him redeem.” On this holiday of Shavuot, we take our places on the threshing floor of Torah to learn and forget and then learn again, awaiting the redeemer.

Against Writer’s Festivals: A Manifesto

2010-04-29T00:28:00.009+03:00

Next week is the second annual international writer’s festival in Jerusalem, where authors from all over the world congregate in Yemin Moshe to engage in a dialogue with one another. The festival is open to the public, and for a 40-shekel ticket, one can hear David Grossman in conversation with Paul Auster, or Jonathan Safran-Foer sharing a podium with Etgar Keret. A rare opportunity, and the talk of the town among the literati of Jerusalem. Since I work in publishing, and since my friends know me as a lover of books, everyone I meet keeps stopping to ask: “So, will I see you at the writer’s festival? You must be going to everything!” Contrary to their expectations, I am attending nothing.

Why not? Well, it is true that my life revolves around books. During the day I sell translation rights for books to Israeli publishers; I also moonlight as an editor and translator; and in the corners of my time I organize and edit the book reviews section of a Jewish magazine. In addition, I write study guides about books for reader’s groups; and I critique the manuscripts written by the friends of the friends of the friends of my friends (since I don’t seem to know how to say no to anybody, ever). On Shabbat, and when I am too tired to translate or edit or review, I indulge in reading books -- not those that have yet to be published (which I must squint at on screen as my eyesight continues to fail me), but those that are already printed and bound and available for sale on Amazon. And so yes, I love books. But loving books is very different from loving writers.

I do not love writers, certainly not most of them. In fact, having made a career out of working with them, I find most writers insufferable. (And here I must add warily: If you are an author-friend of mine kind enough to read the blog of my amateur writing self, please believe me: I am not talking about you!) From my experience, most writers, like most artists, are extremely egotistical. As well they must be. It takes tremendous self-confidence to believe that you have something to say that is worth writing. It takes a healthy ego to think that the best way for you to spend your time when you wake up in the morning is to sit at your desk and write. You have to have faith in yourself, in your talent, and in the fertility of your own creative mind. You have to be patient when the ideas do not flow, and you have to be willing to stare at a blinking cursor and trust that the floodgates of the imagination will burst forth again.

As I do not. I am besieged by doubts about whether what I have to say is worth saying, and I never think that writing is a good use of my prime working hours. I write only in the wee hours of the night (like now!), after I’ve come home from work, translated my daily quota of paragraphs, edited whatever is in my inbox, and read whatever I’ve promised to read for others. I permit myself to write—because writing requires permission, as if I am still in grade school waving my hand in the air for a bathroom pass—only when I have no other commitments, or when I feel sufficiently ahead in my work to take a brief break from other people’s words and indulge in organizing my own thoughts on paper. Disregarding Hillel I say: When I have time, I will write; and then rarely do I have time. Moreover, when the ideas do not come to me as quickly as I would like, I abandon ship and fix myself a bowl of ice cream. And when I do manage to finish a piece, more often than not I am reluctant to share what I have written, convinced that the words I plant excitedly tonight I will want to uproot regretfully in the morning, bearing sheaves of crossed-out pages…..

The writers who speak at writer’s festivals are not like me. For the most part, they trust in themselves and in their craft, and they speak with confidence to a crowd of adoring fans who ask them such inane questions as: Do you use a pen or a computer? Did you always know you were an author? I’m sorry, but I could do without this literary lovefest. Yes, there is much to learn from writers – but I learn not from hearing them speak, but from reading their words. I will read a book several times over and underline and copy out and buttonhole strangers with the passages I love (most recently, the peach seduction scene in Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector). This is far more valuable than hearing an author read from his book (unless he is a poet, but that is a different meter), or discuss the genesis of his most recent masterpiece. If I love a writer, I want to inhabit her paragraphs; I want to read her words until I can recite them by heart -- until I find myself unconsciously writing in her style and dreaming about her characters. I do not need to shake his hand. I do not need my copy of his book autographed. And I certainly don’t need to know where and when and how he writes.

I have attended author readings in the past, and rarely do I leave feeling satisfied. Often I become angry at myself for not writing more. Or worse, I grow jealous and resentful of the writer up there on stage, who allowed himself all those hours of cultivating his own ideas instead of editing and translating other people’s words like the lowly amanuensis that I am. What can I say? Literary events do not bring out the best in me. Books do.

I wonder if I will ever allow myself to become a “real” writer, by which I mean someone who dedicates her primary working hours to trying to write. Sometimes I hope I’ll give myself this chance. Most of the time I am just so excited to curl up in bed with a book by a writer I’ve never met and never hope to meet, and call it a day.

Love poems are never as good as sad ones

2010-04-29T00:19:00.003+03:00

1.
Love poems are never as good as sad ones—
And rarely do we write in times of joy.
If I could gaze into your eyes forever
I'd happily sink into dreaded cliché
Or abandon my pen to the wind, to the wings of a bird
To a feathered quill that would script out our names in the sky.

2.
They say she will tire of his poems,
Emailed to her desk at work
Not with flowers or fanfare or fantails
Nor folded-up newspaper wrapping
Just his words, in times new roman, time again
--And could I ever want for more than this--
She asks herself, composing
Her features for when she will see him next.

3.
i read too much billy collins
and everything i write sounds much like him.
sometimes i must ask--
is this a poem?
or just a confession i scribbled once
on the bottom of a shopping list--
eggs
yogurt
carrots
lettuce
i read
too much
billy
collins.

Leprosy and Learning: Parshat Metzora

2010-04-15T00:09:00.008+03:00

In honor of this week’s parsha, I went on a tour of my local leprosy hospital. I am fortunate to live around the corner from Hansen Hospital, an asylum and treatment center for patients with leprosy (or, more accurately, Hansen’s Disease) from 1877 to 2000. The building, a spacious two-story stone structure set in a walled compound across the street from the Shalom Hartman Institute, was designed by Conrad Schick, a German architect and missionary who also designed Mea Shearim and built several models of the Second Temple.

The outside of the Hansen building bears the inscription Jesus Hilfe, which is German for “Jesus Saves,” a testament to the Protestant community of Jerusalem which originally founded the hospital both to heal and to mission to the lepers who had formerly congregated as beggars at Zion Gate. The leprosy asylum, built to accommodate sixty patients, was a self-sufficient institution containing its own water cisterns, a vegetable garden, fruit trees and livestock. Patients spent their time sewing, drawing water, and performing daily chores. Since there was no known cure for the disease, they were treated with fresh air, a healthy diet, and a daily work routine, all of which were regarded as therapeutic.

Although the asylum was not a closed institution—patients were free to leave and entertain visitors—it was regarded as such. Leprosy still had tremendous stigma attached to it, although its bacterial etiology had been discovered by the Norwegian physicist Armauer Hansen in 1873. As Hansen proved, the disease is neither infectious nor hereditary. Nonetheless, the Biblical associations with the leper as unclean and impure, which can be found throughout this week’s parsha, continued to dominate:

As for the person with a leprous infection, his clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, "Unclean! Unclean!" He shall be unclean as long as the disease is on him. Being unclean, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46).

The Talmud, too, warns of the dangers of coming too close to lepers. The term used in Masechet Ketubot is not Tzara’at (the Biblical word which the Septagint inaccurately translated as “lepra" -- a general term for skin diseases already in the first century) but rather Ra’atan. Steinsaltz defines Ra’atan as “the disease of Lepra, Hansen’s Disease, erroneously termed Tzara’at.” The Talmud offers a detailed description of the causes of the illness:

R. Yose related, An old man of the inhabitants of Jerusalem told me: There are twenty-four [kinds of] skin disease, and in respect of all these the Sages said: Intercourse is injurious. But most of all is this is the case with those afflicted with leprosy. What is the cause of it? — As it was taught: If a man had intercourse immediately after being bled, he will have feeble children; if intercourse took place after the man and the woman had been bled they will have children afflicted with leprosy. (Ketubot 77b)

In other words, according to the Talmud, leprosy is a congenital disease of those whose parents conceived them right after bloodletting. It was clearly thought to be contagious, since the rabbis kept their distance from the afflicted:

R. Yohanan issued the announcement: Beware of the flies of the man afflicted with leprosy. R. Zeyra never sat [with such a sufferer] in a place where the wind blew from their direction. R. Eleazar never entered his tent. R. Ammi and R. Assi never ate any of the eggs coming from the alley in which he lived.

There was, however, one rabbi who used to sit with the lepers and even study Torah in their presence:

R. Joshua ben Levi attached himself to these [sufferers] and studied the Torah; for he said, “A lovely gazelle and a graceful doe,” (Proverbs 5:19). If [the Torah] bestows grace upon those who study it, would it not also protect them?

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi believed that the contagion associated with leprosy would not affect him because he studied Torah. He cites a verse from Proverbs which, in its original context, refers to marital fidelity: “Find joy in the wife of your youth. A loving gazelle, a graceful mountain goat. Let her breasts satisfy you at all times. Be infatuated with love for her always.” He interprets this verse as being about Torah, and argues that if Torah is graceful (i.e. a bestower of grace), surely it also has protective power over those who study it. That is, he knows that the lepers are contagious, but he believes that by virtue of his Torah study, he is immune to illness.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi came to mind today when I learned about Rabbi Aryeh Levin (1885-1969), who is part of the lore of the Hansen asylum. Reb Aryeh, who was appointed the official Jewish Prison Chaplain of the British Mandate in 1931, was famous for his visits to members of the Jewish underground imprisoned in the Central Prison of Jerusalem in the Russian Compound. He was also considered a tzadik for his work on behalf of the poor and infirm, and particularly for his visits to the leprosy patients. While most people kept their distance from the lepers, believing that they should “dwell apart,” Rabbi Levin visited them regularly, teaching them Torah and sitting with them outside. In this sense, he was a modern-day Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, a man who studied Torah in the presence of lepers with no concern for his own well-being.

Did either of these rabbis believe that Torah was a cure for leprosy? Is that why they studied with the lepers? It is difficult to know. The Talmud prescribes an elaborate treatment for those afflicted with this malady:

What is the cure? Abaye said: Pila, ladanum, the rind of a nut tree, the shavings of a dressed hide, sweet-scented clover and the calyx of a red date-tree. These must be boiled together and carried into a house of marble, and if no marble house is available they may be carried into a house [the walls of which are of the thickness] of seven bricks and a half. Three hundred cups [of the mixture] must then be poured upon his head until his cranium is softened, and then his brain is cut open. Four leaves of myrtle must be brought and each foot [in turn] lifted up and one [leaf] placed [beneath it]. It is then grasped with a pair of tweezers and burned; for otherwise it would return to him.

The Talmud seems to suggest that leprosy was some sort of bug in the skull requiring elaborate surgical extraction. Prior to the surgery, the cranium had to be softened by means of a concoction worthy of the weird sisters in Macbeth. All that toil and trouble, once the cauldron had bubbled, was then poured onto the skull to prepare it for surgery. This is a far cry from the first modern brain surgery (with anesthesia and antiseptic methods) performed in 1884 at the Epileptic Hospital in London, just one year before the cornerstone of the Hansen asylum was laid. The surgery was to remove a tumor, and not to treat a leper. The modern cure for leprosy is an antibiotic discovered in 1981; today it is administered free of charge by the WHO to patients around the world. The last leprosy patients left Hansen’s Hospital in 2000, and the building was closed and shuttered until April 2009, when it was re-opened to the public as a museum. “I grew up down the street from here,” one elderly woman told me during our tour this afternoon. “We used to pass the hospital on our way home every day. We’d always cross the street and run as fast as we could, so that the lepers would not catch up with us.”

The fear of lepers seems to be as old as recorded human history. Ancient legends suggest the reason that the Israelites were released from bondage in Egypt was that the ancient Hebrews were carriers of leprosy. Perhaps the fear stems from the mysterious nature of the illness, whose cure was unknown for so long yet whose symptoms were so alarming and repulsive: inflamed and discolored skin, and limbs that rotted and then fell off. In the Bible, Miriam gets leprosy for speaking Lashon Hara about her brother Moshe, suggesting an association between leprosy and sin. Indeed, the Talmud’s cranial surgery remedy is not surprising given that the stigmas associated with leprosy are not all that different from those associated with mental illness, whose etiology remains largely unknown to this day. We do not know what makes a person schizophrenic or bipolar, so we feed a concoction of chemicals that block the reuptake of serotonin to the little bug in the brain. Mental illness is often thought to be someone’s fault – the bad mother, or the hyperactive school child (or the parent who conceived after bloodletting, say). Our understanding of the brain—that organ by means of which we learn about everything in the world including the brain itself—is vastly behind our understanding of any other aspect of our biology. In lieu of scientific knowledge, we speak in terms of legend and lore, sin and blame – which is what leprosy and mental illness have in common.

When we exited the leprosy hospital into the bright light of a warm spring afternoon, D and I thought we might sit and learn Daf Yomi in the beautiful overgrown garden surrounding the hospital building. We wanted to imagine ourselves as Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, learning Torah among the lepers. After the horrific pictures of skin inflammation and suffering that we had seen inside the hospital museum, some sort of remedy seemed in order. But instead of daf yomi, I thought of a sugya in Eruvin that begins with a statement of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, the rabbi of the lepers:

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi stated: If a man is going on a journey and has no one accompanying him, let him occupy himself with the study of Torah, since it is said, "For they are a graceful wreath upon your head" (Proverbs 1:9). If he feels pain in his throat, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, "And chains about thy neck" (Proverbs 1:9). If he feels pain in his bowels, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, "It shall be a healing to thy navel" (Proverbs 3:8). If he feels pain in his bones, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, "And marrow to thy bones" (Proverbs 3:8). If he feels pain in all his body, let him engage in the study of Torah, since it is said, "And healing to all his flesh" (Proverbs 4:22). (Eruvin 54a)

Does Torah really bring “healing to all his flesh”? Is it really a סם חיים, an elixir of life, as we are told later on in this Eruvin sugya? I do not know. But if someone had to open my skull and pour something inside, I, for one, would like that thing to be Torah.

Yehuda Halevi meets Kobi Oz

2010-04-08T19:32:00.002+03:00

The popular Israeli singer Kobi Oz has set Yehuda Halevi's linguistically clever eleventh-century poem to jaunty music. See below for the original poem, my translation, and then a video incorporating the translation, with typographical surprises towards the end!

ידידי די / ר' יהודה הלוי

יְדִידַי-דַּי בְּאַהְבַת-בַּת כְּרָמִים
וְנָשִיר-שיר לְנֶאְדָּר-דָּר מְרוֹמִים.
אֲהוּבָך-בָּך וְעוּזָּך-זַך עֲצוּמִים
רְחוּמָך-מָך וחוֹמֶר-מַר רְחוּמִים
פְּלָאוֹת-אוֹת ונִיסִּים-שִֹים לְחוֹסִים
עֲשׁוּקִים-קִים והָאֵר-אוֹר תְּמִימִים
כְּאֶתמוֹל-מוֹל לְבָבִי-בִּי עֲדֵי כִּי
בְּפִשְׁרוֹן-רוֹן אֲהַלֵּל-לֵיל וְיָמִים.

O My Friend / R. Yehuda HaLevi

O my friend end now your love of drunken wine
And with song sung we will tell, Dweller on high
Love above, power of our hour of strength
Of compassion and of passion from within
Miracle full of the wonder underway
From oppressed pressed turned to light bright of the pure
Yesterday’s daze in my heart starts newly born
With a song sung I will raise praise all my days.

To a Horse in Pharaoh’s Cavalry

2010-03-24T14:42:00.002+02:00

In Shir HaShirim Rabbah, the classical rabbinic midrash on the Song of Songs, the rabbis ask a central question about this Biblical book: Heychan ne’emra? Where was it said? That is, in what historical moment was the Song of Songs originally composed and recited? What was the impulse for the Bible’s most romantic poem, and what was its original context?

As with most midrashic questions, the answer takes the form of a dispute among several rabbis. The first says that the Songs of Songs was originally recited at the splitting of the Red Sea; the second says that it was recited at Sinai; the third associates it with Ohel Moed, the Tent of Meeting; and the fourth says that Shir HaShirim was a poem recited in the Temple. The midrash does not privilege any one answer over the others, but as I see it, it is clear from its unfolding that the first rabbi, the one who associates Shir HaShirim with the Red Sea, has the most textual support for his claim. Throughout the vast corpus of Shir HaShirim Rabbah, the historical events most commonly discussed are the exodus from Egypt and the splitting of the sea – that is, the events we commemorate on Pesach, the holiday of freedom. And so I cannot help but wonder: What is the connection between Shir HaShirim and the exodus from Egypt? Is it merely that the song describes the reawakening of spring, which is when we celebrate Pesach? Or, as I’d like to suggest, is the midrash moving beyond this seasonal coincidence to make a deeper and more timeless observation about the relationship between romantic love and freedom?

Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa, the sage who posits that the Song of Songs was originally recited at the sea, cites as proof for his claim a particular verse from the poem: “To a horse in Pharaoh’s cavalry have a likened you, my love” (1:9). After all, why would the midrash choose this particular metaphor for the beloved? It’s not the most obvious of compliments, and certainly not one that most women I know would want to receive: “Hey babe, turn around -- your rump reminds me of Pharoah’s horse!” Bar Pappa is suggesting that this strange equestrian metaphor (reminiscent of the illustrations in the Babar books!) is an allusion to the original context in which the Song of Songs was composed, namely at the Red Sea.

Shir HaShirim Rabbah, an exegetical midrash which interprets each verse of the Song of Songs in order, eventually reaches this verse about Pharaoh’s horses, where it offers an interesting take on what exactly happened at the splitting of the sea:

Rabbi Eliezer said: [This is a parable to] a king’s daughter who was taken captive, and her father was about to redeem her, but she was gesturing to her captors and saying to them: I am yours, and I belong to you, and I will follow you. Her father said to her: What is this?! Do you think that I won’t be able to redeem you? Hush up, I hush you!

So too, at the time when Israel was encamped on the sea, “The Egyptians chased after them, and all the chariot horses of Pharaoh, his horsemen, and his warriors overtook them encamped by the sea” (Exodus 14:9). And the Israelites were gesturing to the Egyptians out of fear and saying to them: We are yours, and we belong to you, and we will follow you. The Holy One Blessed Be He said to them: What is this?! Do you think I won’t be able to redeem you? Hush up, I hush you. As it is written, “The Lord will fight for you, and you will keep quiet” (Exodus 14:14).

Although the midrash does not bring a proof text, the basis for the claim that the Israelites were gesturing at the Egyptians comes from the Biblical verses between the two that are cited above: “As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites caught sight of the Egyptians advancing upon them. Greatly frightened, the Israelites cried out to the Lord. And they said to Moses: Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the desert? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus 14: 10-12). The midrash is clearly troubled by the lack of faith that these verses reflect. How could the Israelites speak of their desire to return to Egypt at this most critical historical moment? How dare they say, “It is better for us to serve the Egyptians!” What chutzpah! To resolve this difficulty, the midrash suggests that in fact the Israelites were not expressing a genuine desire to return to Egypt. Rather, they were ingratiating themselves to the Egyptians as a way of protecting themselves in the event that their deliverance were to fail. Just as the king’s daughter feels the need to ingratiate herself to her captors just in case her father does not manage to rescue her, so too did the Israelites feel compelled to curry the favor of the Egyptians just in case God did not manage to transport them safely across the sea.

This midrash exonerates the Israelites, but not entirely. On the one hand, the midrash suggests that they did not really want to return to slavery in Egypt. Nor did they have the chutzpah to complain to Moses that they’d rather serve the Egyptians than anticipate the fate that lay ahead of them. This much is true. But on the other hand, the Israelites did not exactly have perfect faith in God either. On the brink of the exodus, as they stood in that no-man’s-land between the dominion of King of Egypt and the dominion of the King of Kings, they felt the need to secure the good graces of the former in case the latter were not to deliver on His promise. And so they said to Pharoah, “We are yours, and we belong to you” – that is, we are still your slaves, and we still serve you. Too scared of the uncertainty that lay ahead of them, the Israelites held on to a bad relationship, unable to take the risk of opening themselves to what the future had in store.

Unfortunately, this is a predicament that I relate to all too well. How often have I held on to the wrong relationship, determined to remain in the good graces of one who was not right for me merely because I was too scared to move on? This has happened several times over, but the moment I remember as most painful and most searing happened, ironically, just days before Pesach. Like an apple among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. I was standing before an open refrigerator wearing an apron and cleaning out the shelves with a sponge, determined to remove every last trace of Chametz. There, on the top shelf, was a half-rotten apple. “This apple is not in a very good state,” I said to you. “I think I will dispose of it by eating it.” You looked at me with all the love drained from your face, and you said, “If you don’t think that you are good enough to deserve to eat a fresh apple, how am I supposed to respect you enough to love you?” Something about the way you spoke those words to me made me realize subconsciously that it was all over. But the realization was only subconscious. In my mind I held on, against all odds, insisting that I was yours, that I belonged to you, and that I would follow you. As I nearly did—

Two nights later was erev Shabbat; like this year, Shabbat fell out just before the start of Pesach. We sat down to dinner in a fully-kashered and clean home. The candles were flickering behind us, but suddenly I realized that something else was flickering too – no – not flickering, but burning. Burning, all around! The yard behind our apartment was swept up in flames that leapt higher and higher against our ground-floor windows. A forest fire! I gasped, shocked and immobilized. And then what happened? I remember, but it is not a story that I can bear to tell. In the Many Worlds interpretation of our lives, who is to say which account matters most? Certainly on Pesach, the emphasis is not on what actually happened, but on the retelling of the story. And so this is the story I retell myself each year: Seeing the flames, you reached for the phone to dial 101, and I jolted myself into motion and bolted out the door. I ran, and ran, and ran – as fast and as far as I could. I did not know where I was running to, or what I was running from. The Talmud discusses what a person is permitted to save from a burning building on Shabbat, but at that moment I had no thought of saving anything, not even myself. I think that part of me realized (or part of me realizes now) that unless I ran—unless I made my exodus during that fiery plague—I would never have the courage to leave again.

That year on Shabbat Chol HaMoed I chanted the Songs of Songs in shul with a heavy heart, choking back tears. Upon my bed at night, I sought the one I love. I sought, but found him not. I must rise and roam the town, through the streets and through the squares. I must seek the one I love. My Pesach was not a feast of freedom, but of bitter salt water tears. Later people would tell me that we were lucky to get out when we did, but at the time, I could only look back longingly: “It would have been better to be in the fleshpots of that relationship that to die in this desert of loneliness,” I thought during the empty nights.

To a horse in Pharaoh’s cavalry have I likened you, my love. In years to come I would joke about this metaphor with other boyfriends, other men. Unaware of the parable about the king's daughter, I did not realize the gravity of what lay behind it. Now I do. Pesach, as contemporary rabbis like to say in their sermons, is about ridding ourselves of the Chametz inside of us. But as this parable teaches us, Pesach is also about learning to let go of the people in our lives who are not good for us, or whose hearts have already let us go. This is, of course, a very risky prospect. We do not always know that there is someone else waiting around the corner to deliver us, and perhaps there isn’t. Or perhaps he is waiting, but not in a bright pillar of flame but in the vague uncertainty of an amorphous cloud. We cannot know. The sea might split for us, or it might not. We might find someone else who is right for us—a prospect that is as difficult for God to arrange as the splitting of the sea—or we might not. But we cannot look back to what was before, and we cannot try to win the favor of someone who no longer loves us. We must remember what Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa tells us -- that the greatest love poem in the Bible was recited at the Red Sea, in that moment of uncertainty and terror, as the Israelites fled from Egypt believing, even if not yet consciously, that the future was one of promise.

Lots of Joy: Purim and the New Psychology of Happiness

2010-02-25T09:52:00.002+02:00

Much has been written about the “psychology of happiness,” a new field of research into well-being and the good life. A wave of books published in the past few years have raised such issues as whether we can know what makes us happy (Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert), the implications of positive psychology in the political sphere (The Politics of Happiness by Derek Bok), and whether women’s happiness differs from that of men (Bluebird by Ariel Gore). Gilbert, Bok, and Gore posit that happiness is something that can be attained, albeit with a bit of hard work, if we better understand our own mental processes. In response, a counter-genre has emerged from those who question whether the pursuit of happiness is really such a good thing after all (Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich and Against Happiness by Eric Wilson). It seems that there was hardly an issue of the 2009 New York Times Book Review that did not feature some book on happiness, or, more reflexively, an article about the genre of happiness books. Happiness is hip these days, as I could not help noticing when I began preparing for the upcoming holiday of Purim.

“When the month of Adar enters, we increase in happiness,” the Talmud teaches (Taanit 29a). This is a slogan that appears all over Jerusalem at this time of year, as many of the city’s storefronts are converted into costume bazaars (pirates, cowboys, fairies, and butterflies – the standard fare) and the stands in the shuk that sold dried fruit for Tu Bishvat now feature mini candy bars and Gummy Everything for inclusion in mishloach manot packages. When you walk into any of these shops you hear the same recording of happy voices singing “Mishenichnas Adar Marbim B’simchah,” like the ubiquitous Jingle Bells of American Decembers. Happiness, you might conclude, is plastic sunglasses and glitter and colorful wigs. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

Happiness is indeed about costumes and mishloach manot. Because if Purim is about being happy, then the mitzvot of Purim must give some indication of what Judaism’s conception of happiness is all about. And so while I’m no happiness guru (I wake up most mornings wishing I could fall through the floor), it seems to me that Purim has something to teach us about how we might stumble on happiness.

For one, happiness is about community. Sitting alone at home and reading books about happiness is not going to make you happy. But going to daven with a minyan to hear the megillah just might bring you a little closer. All the mitzvot of Purim involve other people; they must be performed in a communal context. To give gifts to the poor you must put yourself in a situation where you have contact with poor people; to send mishloach manot you must have friends to whom you can send them; to enjoy a the festive Seudah meal there must be others with whom to share it; and even the megillah reading is supposed to be read publicly, and in synagogue. The Jewish conception of happiness, as we learn from the mitzvot of Purim, is about surrounding yourself with other people, and involving yourself in their lives.

This is a lesson I was reminded of not long after the start of Adar, when I returned to my regular daf yomi morning shiur after a two-month honeymoon hiatus. My general tendency is to wake up feeling sad and dark, regardless of what is going on in my life. As the day unfolds, I tend to get progressively happier, and sometimes in the evenings I am positively giddy – until the next day dawns and the demons are back. But I've noticed that returning to daf yomi has had the magical effect of jump-starting my happiness. I love waking up knowing that I have a place to go, and that if I don't jump out of bed at that very moment, I won't make it in time. I love arriving at the shiur and seeing a host of familiar faces who take note of my presence and will wonder if I don’t show up one day. In short, I like starting my day as part of a community. Perhaps this is why we are supposed to daven with a minyan every morning – to remind ourselves, first thing, that we are part of something larger than ourselves. And perhaps this is why all the major mitzvot of Purim, the happiness holiday, must be performed in the presence of others.

The customs of Purim, too, offer lessons in being happy. On Purim we dress in costume so that we do not look or feel like ourselves. Part of being happy is about forgetting who we are, or tricking ourselves into thinking that we can be somebody or something else. This custom reflects the awareness that it is difficult to make ourselves happy unless we can, at least in part, forget ourselves. This is surely what lies behind the custom of drinking alcohol – it is a desire to shed some of our inhibitions and our painful self-awareness. Purim reminds us that happiness is just sadness dressed in borrowed robes. We wear painted clown masks over our furrowed brows and can’t help smiling as we see our friends in their own silly disguises. Perhaps this is why Keats invokes the image of the veil to describe the close kinship between happiness and melancholy:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine.

Delight is just veiled melancholy, and Purim is the day we put on the veil and peer out at the world through it.

Purim, though, is not the only occasion for happiness in Judaism. At three points in the Torah we are commanded to be happy (Lev. 23:40, Deut. 16:14, Deut 17:15). Like Mishenichnas Adar, this mitzvah, associated with Sukkot, also becomes a holiday jingle: V’samachta b’chagecha v’hayita ach sameach. Why “ach sameach”? Why not just “sameach”? Perhaps the Torah is teaching that we have to be happy even in spite of ourselves. We must be happy on demand, like the bright yellow “Don’t worry be happy” bumper stickers of the happy hippies. But as we all know, emotions cannot be mandated – we cannot force ourselves to feel a certain way. And so it seems that in the Torah, happiness is not a feeling but rather a way of acting. “V’hayita ach sameach” – you must act happy! Because to act happy is to be happy, in spite of, ach, how you might otherwise feel.

I have tried, over the years, to internalize this Jewish concept of happiness. No matter how sad or dark I am feeling, I always dance up a storm on Simchat Torah. I am convinced that if I circle just a bit faster, I'll be so dizzy that I'll manage to lose my bearings entirely. On Purim, too, I force myself to come up with ridiculously obscure costumes to delight my fellow Gemara-learning friends, even if the last thing I want to do on that day is dress up (or even get dressed at all). I regularly smile and act cheerful and try to greet everyone I meet with a sunny disposition, regardless of how I am feeling inside. It is, to some extent, an act, but I don't think it's disingenuous. I am aware that I stand the best chance for being happy if I act like a happy person.

On Purim we are commanded to take this to an extreme. We have to force happiness upon ourselves, acting happy so that we become happy. We act a certain way and, in so doing, we transform our emotional state. This process of acting as a means to feeling reminds me of the famous midrash in Masechet Shabbat about how God held Mt. Sinai over the heads of the Israelites like a bucket until they accepted Torah:

“And they stood at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 19:17). Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa says: This teaches that God forced the mountain over them like a bucket, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, very well; and if not, this mountain will be your grave….. Rava said: Even so, they upheld accepted it upon themselves in the days of Achashvosh. (Shabbat 88a)

Torah, like happiness, was not easy to take on. The Jews accepted happiness under coercion, much as we “force” ourselves, through our observance of the mitzvot of Purim, to act happy. But the end result was that by Purim, the Jews found themselves accepting Torah out of their own volition. So too may we find ourselves, on Purim, surprised by joy – dancing to a rhythm we didn’t know we had, and joking with people we wouldn’t have presumed to claim as friends. For those whose natural tendency is to go about the world somber and pensive and heavy with the weight of the world, Purim looms overhead like a very scary mountain indeed. For this one day alone, let us wear that mountain on our heads like a clown hat, casting our lots with those who are off making merry.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Batra Perek Bet: לא יחפור

2010-01-31T00:43:00.000+02:00

(17a)
A person may not dig a pit
Near his neighbor’s – don’t get close to it.
Or a cave or a trench
Or a thing that makes stench
Keep it far, lest your friend have a fit.

(18b)
Must the damager stay far away
If he fails, is it he who must pay?
Or is he who’s alarmed
By how much he is harmed
Is it he who has not been okay?

(19b)
Can you pee on your neighbor’s own wall?
Can your neighbor respond with a brawl?
If it’s only your pee
Go ahead. But stand three
Tfachim off if you’re pouring for all.

(20a)
A window’s made smaller in size
When a thing on the windowsill lies.
What’s impure, like the dead,
Through blocked windows won’t spread
Blocked with non-Jews or chickens in ties.

(20b)
If your friend’s storehouse rests right on top
Of the place where you open a shop
Don’t do baking or dying
Your friend will be crying
“The smoke and the stench! Have him shot!”

(20b)
“I can’t sleep ‘cause your baby’s so loud
And your hammering hurts, I avow!
And I’m losing my mind
From that millstone you grind”--
Is his neighbor’s behavior allowed?

(21a)
Yehoshua ben Gamla made schools
So that kids would be students, not fools.
From age six or age seven
They study, thank heaven
With schools in each town, and strict rules.

(21a)
When scholars are jealous they learn
Better. Jealousy’s not to be spurned.
If a teacher knows more
Then it’s he we want for
Our kids’ teacher. So give him his turn.

(21b)
A storekeeper may not give out
Roasted nuts to kids running about.
For he’s surely predicted
Those kids get addicted
Then parents must buy more, no doubt.

(22a)
Ezra ruled: All those peddlers, they may
Wander hawking their wares in the day
Selling jewels to the city
So girls will look pretty
We want our girls pretty, he’d say.

(22a)
Rav Dimi bought dates from abroad
To sell them. His plan, though, was flawed.
For Rava, discerning
He lacked in his learning
Said: Dimi, your sales are outlawed.

(23a)
A dovecote may not be built near
Any town. It’s the doves that we fear.
They might up, fly the coop
And above our fields swoop
Eating seeds from the plowed earth. Keep clear!

(24a)
A barrel of wine floats at sea
Near a town with a majority
Of Jews. We assume
It is kosher. There’s room
For doubt. Shmuel cries: I disagree!

(25a)
There are four winds that blow every day
But the north wind is crucial, they say.
It blows calmly. The west,
Common more than the rest
That’s where God is. We face there to pray.

(26a)
A tree full of fruit may not be
Cut down, axed, in its prime suddenly.
Said Hanina: My son
Lost his life, Came undone
When he chopped down a blooming fig tree.

(27b)
A tree overhangs in a space
That is public. A most public place.
We trim off one side
So a camel can ride
Past without getting whacked in the face.

Songs of the Plagues of Egypt

2010-01-08T03:20:00.006+02:00

I cannot enter into Sefer Shmot without being swept up by the inexorable rhythms of Natan Alterman’s Shirei Makot Mitzrayim (Songs of the Plagues of Egypt). This extended poem cycle was first introduced to me three years ago by Hillel the Younger, who gave me the precious gift of a first-edition copy with an inscription (in Hebrew) that haunts me to this day:

Ilana! Although the language of our communication is English, it would not be appropriate to dedicate a book by Alterman in a foreign tongue. Remember always that beneath every cry of freedom on Pesach lurks an Egyptian cry that does not find its place. May your reading be pleasant and fearsome—
H.M. (Jerusalem, the Holy City, Shvat 5767)

Since then, I have picked up this book each year on the eve of Parshat Shmot and tried to wrap my mind around its complex imagery, its tense dialogue, its drive to inevitable destruction. The poem vividly and terrifyingly depicts the Egyptian experience of the ten plagues in Egypt. As Professor Ariel Hirshfeld has explained, Alterman, who wrote and published this poem during the Shoah (1944), turns the plagues into a parable of destruction. In the opening poem, we are introduced to the Egyptian city of No-Amon, which is soon to be convulsed by a series of plagues that unfold with constant regularity, climaxing in the plague of the firstborn. This introduction is followed by a sequence of ten highly regular poems, each with six stanzas of four lines, corresponding to each of the ten plagues. In Alterman’s poems, the plagues are not just physical disasters, but also a gradual erosion of the mental state of Egyptian society. Blood, notes Hirshfeld, is not necessarily water that has turned to blood, but rather the color red which floods No-Amon with conflagration and carnage.

Throughout the poems, we hear the direct dialogue between an Egyptian father and his firstborn son, who bear witness to the terror around them. Their dialogue, as I noticed for the first time this year, is strikingly reminiscent of the language and tone of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig, about a boy assailed by a supernatural being as his father carries him home on horseback, most famously set to music by Schubert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e40Mm8baD7A
(Has anyone else noticed this parallel between Alterman and Goethe, I wonder?? And lo and behold, I just discovered – it was Alterman who first translated this ballad into Hebrew!)
As in Goethe’s ballad, the poems are shaped by the increasingly fearful cries of the son to his father, and the father’s faltering responses. “My father, my father,” cries the son in Goethe’s ballad, “the Erlkönig is grabbing me now! He will do me harm!” Likewise, in Alterman’s tenth poem in the cycle, the firstborn son, his face suddenly pale, calls out: “My father, where is my father? My bed is darkness.” The boy’s father answers him with a testament to the enduring strength of man: “My firstborn, my firstborn son! Darkness will not divide us, because father and son are linked by the tangles of darkness.” The concluding poem that follows the cycle of ten, “Ayelet,” ends with this glimmer of hope. The poem invokes Ayelet HaShachar, the last star seen before dawn, and appeals to the human ability to maintain hope in the face of pain and destruction.

After reading a brilliant d’var Torah by Rabbi Benny Lau dramatizing the Egyptian experience of the Israelites in their midst, I was inspired by my annual re-reading of Alterman to translate two sections into Hebrew: a part of the introductory poem, and the blood poem. May your reading be pleasant and fearsome!

En Route to No-Amon

No-Amon, with your axes of iron
Your gates, uprooted by night
They will come, plagues of Egypt, upon you
To mete out to you justice by night.

No-Amon, then it rose to the moon
The first cry, with no one to hear,
And the strong man who ran to the gateway
Collapsed, while still running, from fear.

Shrouded in cries, the king's city
Tossed forth in a wondrous hurl.
From chambers of grandeur to salt grains
From crown down to rags cast aswirl.

Among oft-told traditional stories,
Your cast-aside story burns fierce
Like a far-afield great conflagration
Past the thick clouds of time that you pierce.

Like the memories of sin, retribution,
Like a shirt steeped in red-blood libation
You rose-crept, with no mold encrustation
To the first of the paths of the nations.

1. Blood

Your night revealed, Amon, the stranger’s star above
And shown in light of fire, the face of wells and shores.
Entranced Amon you rose, a blood-red diamond stone
From tresses of a maid to pennies of the poor.

The poor man’s coin is gleaming, and drowning in red ink.
A damsel drawing water, her lips in fear assailed.
Her arm outstretched, extended: Come mighty Lord, come save!
The pail flies down, descending; and as it drops it wails.

As scarlet strikes the faces of those who sleep and wake
The maiden’s braids fly downward, like twine that ties the well
The lashes of all flesh flash flames. Through burning lips,
My Father, cries the son. Firstborn! he sounds, a knell.

I’m dizzy, Father, dizzy, and not from dancing rounds.
My breath, my Father, wheezing, my nostrils stuffed with sand.
Hold me close, support me, and clasp me till I fall,
Hold me as I, Father, draw water to my hand.

My Son, my Firstborn Son, the water’s turned so red
Pure blood poured out like water, and water poured like blood.
The well has depths of darkness, the beast – red eyes that flash.
For silent is the city, convulsed not in the flood.

My Father, is there no end to parched lips and to thirst?
The stranger’s star, Firstborn, shines forth above the land.
The waters, Father, rise, like fire in our jugs,
Our blood is redder, Son, and we are in their hands.

Divrei VaYechi: The Motive for Metaphor

2010-01-01T13:31:00.002+02:00

Much of parshat Vayechi consists of Jacob’s blessings to his sons, introduced by the verse: “And Jacob called to his sons and said, ‘Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in the days to come.” Jacob wishes to reveal his sons’ destiny to them. And yet what we find in the coming verses is not a revelation of the future, but a description of each of the sons in difficult Biblical poetry that is rich with imagery and metaphor. Reuven is “unstable as water”; Yehuda is “a lion’s whelp”; Isachar is a “strong-boned ass”; Naphtali will “yield rich dainties.” Why does Yaakov, in spite of his stated intention to bless his sons, in fact go on to describe them poetically? And how to account for this turn to richly metaphorical language at this point in the Torah, at the end of Sefer Breishit?

In Rashi’s first comment on this parsha, a Rashi that I have studied on many occasions with Avivah Zornberg, we find one answer to this question. The answer, says Rashi, is because Yaakov wished to reveal to his sons the end of days, but the shechina departed from him. He lost his connection to divinity, and could no longer reveal the future. Or, in more modern terms, his internet connection suddenly died on him. Now I don’t know about you, but when my internet connection dies—when I can no longer answer emails or read articles online or connect to the world outside myself—I tend to start writing poetry. In fact, for a long time I had no email at home just so that I would discipline myself to write more. And so identify with Yaakov’s turn to poetry at this moment when his own divine internet suddenly dies on him.

Rashi brings this comment about Yaakov’s desire to reveal the future in response to a different question – the question of why this parsha is “stuma,” closed. Rashi is commenting on the fact that the new parsha of Vayechi is written without any break from the previous one – there is no white space between the two parshiyot. Yaakov feels blocked; there is no white space in which to breathe free. And so what does he do? He composes in language that involves that maximum amount of line breaks and white space, that is, poetry. In a novel that I am reading now, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, the author describes reading a poem in the New Yorker, and highlights this very feature of poetry:

"Let’s have a look at this poem. You can tell it’s a poem because it’s swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it’s a poem. All the typography on both sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they’re saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here’s the guy who is going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton."

Poetry allows for maximal white space. It is an atteempt to fight the blockage. Perhaps this is the blockage that comes with old age; Yaakov knows that he is to die soon, and death is the great unknown. This might explain why both Yaakov and Moshe turn to poetry at the end of their lives – Yaakov at the end of Sefer Breishit, in parshat Vayechi; and Moshe at the end of Sefer Dvarim, in Ha’azinu and V’zot Habracha. Perhaps we feel a natural affinity with poetry at the end of life, when it becomes clear how much of the future will forever be blocked to us, because we will be cut off from it. This hypothesis reminds me of a theory of my professor Elaine Scarry, who argues in her book Fins de Siecle that the end of a century inspires poets to great heights. Scarry shows that a surprising number of history’s great poets did some of their most important work in the final decade of a century – from the 22 plays written by Shakespeare in the 1590s; to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the 1290s; to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in the 1790s. She argues for an inherent link between poetry and endings, a link that I would posit has as much to do with the end of life as it does with the end of a century. At the end of life, when we are drawn to reflect on the past and compelled to resign ourselves to what we will never know of the future, the soul turns to poetry to stave off blockage.

Of course, the knowledge of the future is not the only blockage. In parsha 11 of Kohelet Rabbah, the rabbis assert that
שבעה דברים מכוסים מבני אדם
Seven things are concealed (or kept secret) from a person. The Talmud goes on to list these items:
Yom HaMitah – the day on which we will die
Yom HaNechama – the day on which we will be consoled – or, in more human terms, the day on which we who are down and out will finally begin to feel better again.
Omek HaDin – The full depth of justice. A judge can never know whether his ruling is completely fair – at some point he makes a judgment call.
BaMeh Hu Mistaker – How a person will one day make a living, or, as we would put it in colloquial terms, “What am I going to do with my life?”
Mah B’libu shel chavero – What another person is thinking. You can never really know what is going onj in someone else’s head!
Mah B’Ibura shel Isha – What is inside the belly of a pregnant woman.
And finally, the emphatic, impassioned finale:
Malchut Zeh Shel Edom, Ematai Nofelet – When will this kingdom of Rome finally fall? Or, to quote my chevruta Sara, who tried to put this in more relevant terms when we learned this parsha on Thursday – “When will the bus finally come?!”

Now all of us are familiar with these unknowns. We all know what it is like to feel so distraught that we cannot possibly imagine when and how we will begin to feel better. We know what it is like to feel like you would to anything to know what another person is thinking! For better or for worse, our knowledge is inherently limited as human beings. We do not see the world through an Aspaklaria Me’ira, through a clear, illuminated lens. Only Moshe was able to see the world thus, as the Talmud tells us in Masechet Yevamot (49b). But even Moshe had his moment of blockage at the end of his life, as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev explains:

"At the end of Moshe’s days, the wellspring of wisdom was blocked off from him. And with this you can understand something wondrous: Why, in the song of Ha’azinu, the prophecy of Moses is so blocked? This is different from what we find in the rest of the Torah. Because Moses’ prophecy was generally through a clear illuminated lens, whereas all other prophets saw through an unilluminated lens. Thus Moses had the power to say what he had heard from God without any adornment through parables or riddles."

The Kedushat Levi actually criticizes Moses for his turn to poetic language, for he views that as the sign of a flaw in Moses’ prophetic ability. If only Moses could still see through the Aspaklaria Meira at the end of his life, he would not need to resort to the impenetrable poetry of Ha’azinu! Likewise, we might add, if only Yaakov did not have the Shechina Mistalek from him, he would have been able to reveal the end of days to his sons and not resort to such difficult poetic language.

Unlike the Kedushat Levi, I must admit that I’m rather happy that Moshe and Yaakov had their moments of blockage, because I am a lover of poetry. As a person who sometimes tries to write poetry, I know that it is in the moments of blockage and darkness that poetry is born. When meaning eludes us, we turn instead to language. When we are unable to focus on what we want to say, we focus on how we want to say it. When the view through the Aspaklaria window is unclear, we dress the windows in fancy curtains of similes and metaphor. Blockage, then, is an occasion for poetry. I think this notion is best captured by Wallace Stevens in his poem “The Motive for Metaphor”:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

The season for poetry is not the summer solstice, or primary noon, when the sun is high in the sky. Poetry is born in the shadows of autumn and the half colors of spring, when the obscure moon lights an obscure world, and the unknown and variable X replaces the clear and predictable order of ABC. This is a time of obscurity and shadows, when the Aspaklaria is only partially illuminated. At this moment when things will never quite be expressed, we cannot know what things are, but only what they are like. This is the motive for metaphor, and this is when poetry is born. None of us can know the future. But as I have come to learn in recent months, that inability l’galot et ha-ketz does not need to paralyze us or prevent us from getting married or moving forwards or blessing those we love. Rather, it can become, and often is, the impulse for poetry.

Tisch Drash

2009-12-23T17:31:00.002+02:00

D and I have chosen to speak today from Masechet Bava Batra, the tractate of Talmud that we are currently learning as part of Daf Yomi. This is a program in which thousands of Jews the world over learn the same page of Talmud every day, completing the cycle in seven and a half years. We began this masechet last August, and our learning has taken a variety of forms – some days we meet at a morning shiur in a local synagogue taught by Rabbi Benny Lau; other days we learn on our own after work; and still other days we meet in the evening to learn the Daf together over dinner. Our original goal was to wait until we finished the Masechet and then have a siyum-slash-wedding. But as we did not particularly want to put off today’s celebration until February, we decided that we’d get married now, and share with you some of what we have learned until this point.

I’d like to teach from a recent daf, 98, where we find a mishnah about a person who accepts a contract from a friend to build for him a wedding house בית חתנות for his son. The Mishnah considers the minimum size of house that is acceptable for this purpose – touching upon such issues as whether a person can choose to live in a home that resembles a cattle barn, and why a bride and groom are not advised to move in with their in-laws (at least according to Ben Sira, which may help to explain why his work is known as wisdom literature!). These digressions aside, in its discussion of the minimum dimensions of the wedding house, the Talmud draws an analogy to the Temple, which is often used as the model for other structures in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Chanina points out a contradiction between two different measurements of the Temple stated in two verses from the book of Kings – in one verse, the Kodesh Kodashim (Holy of Holies) is thirty amot high; and in another verse, it is twenty amot high. The Talmud reconciles this contradiction by explaining that one measurement refers to the height of the Holy of Holies from floor to ceiling, whereas the other measurement starts from the tops of the Kruvim (cherubim), which were ten amot tall, and goes up to the ceiling. But why would one opt to measure from the tops of the Kruvim rather than from the floor? The Talmud answers that this way of measuring comes to teach us that all thirty amot of the Holy of Holies were as empty as the uppermost twenty because the Keruvim, the cherubs, took up no physical space. Or, to quote the Talmud:
כרובים אינו מן המידה

Miraculously, the Kruvim did not take up any room. They existed in spiritual space only, and not in the physical world. This expression speaks to me, for I am a person who lives very much inside her head. I feel very grateful—and relieved!--to have found a partner who is so practical and down-to-earth --- someone who reminds me to cook food for myself, and prevents me from burning down my home while doing so. Much as I admire D’s pragmatism and his masterful organizational skills, I also feel privileged to be privy to his intellectual and spiritual depths. So much of our relationship developed in the context of classes we attended, poems we read, Shabbat meals we shared, and other tastes of the world to come—that world that is suspended somewhere beyond the physical and material realm. And so I love the next phrase that the Talmud uses to describe the Kruvim:
כרובים בנס היו עומדין
The Kruvim were suspended in a miracle. This is the same image that the Talmud uses elsewhere to describe the letters Mem and Samech in the Ten Commandments, which, although they were identical to their mirror images and although they are round, miraculously did not fall out of the tablets, but hung there with the other letters, suspended in a miracle. This notion of being suspended in a miracle is very much how I feel today – as if my whole life until this day hangs in balance with the wondrous miracle of joining my life today with D’s, surrounded by so many people we both love. On this day of Kedusha and of our Kidushin, we are not unlike the Kruvim, suspended in a miracle in the midst of the Kodesh Kodashim.

The Talmud explains that part of the miraculous positioning of the Kruvim was due to the fact their wingspans alone were equivalent to the entire width of the Holy of Holies. Where, then, were their bodies? The Talmud posits a series of possible answers: Perhaps they stood on a diagonal, or perhaps they stood with their wings overlapping, or perhaps they stood with their wings protruding from the center of their backs like chickens (this is the Talmud’s image, not my own!). What I like about all of these answers is that they all have to do with how to share space – how to make room for another person, and how to let another person into your space. That this space is the Holy of Holies is not incidental. I feel privileged, in the past few months, that D has made room for me in his life, and that I, in turn, have felt so eager to let him into mine. This intimate shared space, built on a deep trust that developed between us over time, is truly, to my mind, a sacred enclosure.

In speaking of the Kruvim, the Talmud goes on to ask
כיצד היו עומדין
How were they standing? Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Elazar disagree about this. One rabbi says that they were facing each other
פניהם איש אל אחיו
(perhaps looking into each other eyes?)
And the other rabbi says that they were facing the walls of the Kodesh Kodashim, meaning that they were turned away from each other, as per a verse from Divrei Hayamim (II 3:13):
ופניהם לבית
The Talmud famously resolves this contradiction by saying that both answers are correct, though they apply at different moments. When Israel is doing God’s will, the two Kruvim are facing each other; when Israel is not doing God’s will, they are facing away from each other.

It is my hope, in our marriage, that we will spend most of our time facing towards and not away from each other, working in partnership to do God’s will in the world. After all, it is from the space between the Kruvim that God speaks to the people –
ונועדתי לך שם ודברתי אתך מעל הכפורת מבין שני הכרובים
There I will meet with you, and I will speak to you, from above the cover, from between the two cherubim." (Exodus 25: 22)
God speaks from between the two Kruvim, a space that our teacher Avivah Zornberg describes as the “locus of desire.” I like to think that this is also the space between Ish and Isha, that is, the space of Shechina -- the presence of God whose dwelling place is the Holy of Holies and all our holiest moments.

Of course, two people, no matter how much they are in love, cannot and should not always be looking at each other. And so when we are not looking at one another, I hope that we are at least looking in the same direction, as expressed by the poet Frank Bidart: “The love I’ve known is the love of two people staring not at each other, but in the same direction.” Bidart’s image offers me a new way of thinking about this sugya. When both Kruvim are facing the walls, Pneyhem LaBayit, perhaps they are looking not at opposite walls but at the same wall, as D and I look together today towards our shared future. As we prepare to move into our own Beit Chatanot, we set our sights towards a future in which we will always have moments of looking into one another’s eyes; always make space for one another; and always carry with us the memory of today, of standing suspended in this miracle.

Epithalamion

2009-12-23T17:28:00.001+02:00

כל עולמינו כלו
ארץ תלויה על בלימה
לכה דודי, נשכימה—
נעלה כי יכול נוכל
נשבח כי טוב להודות
נברך כי מי יודע אם
לעת כזאת הגענו.

Aufrauf - Sunday Dec 13

2009-12-16T17:03:00.003+02:00

One of the major subjects of Parshat Vayeshev and of the Joseph story cycle is dreams – from Joseph’s dream of his brothers bowing down to him first as sheaves of wheat and then as stars in the sky at the beginning of this week’s parsha, to the two ministers’ dreams in Pharaoh’s royal prison, to Pharaoh’s two dreams about the sturdy and skinny cows, and then the solid and scorched corn at the beginning of next week’s parsha. Perhaps this preoccupation with dreams throughout the second half of Breishit has something to do with the fact that God is less of a visible player – God never appears to Joseph directly as He did to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. The closest that Joseph comes to prophecy is through dreams, a natural phenomenon with which all of us are familiar, but which Joseph interprets in each case as an omen predicting the future.

The brothers also consider dreams to have some reality to them, insofar as they find Joseph’s dreams threatening. Their motivation for throwing Joseph into the pit is at least in part to prevent his dreams from coming true. The Torah describes that the brothers saw him from afar, and said to one another: “That Ba’al Chalomot, that dreamer, here he comes! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits, and we can say, “A savage beast devoured him.” We shall see what becomes of his dreams!”

According to the simple reading of the text, this comment, “We shall see what becomes of his dreams”
ונראה מה יהיו חלומותיו
is meant as a snide remark. We will kill Joseph, and then we’ll see if his dreams come true, they say, mocking him incredulously. Rashi, however, reads this verse differently. Commenting on the words, “We shall see what becomes of his dreams,” Rashi says, “It is Ruach HaKodesh (the divine spirit) that speaks these words. That is, the brothers say “let us kill him,” and then God responds, “We shall see what becomes of his dreams!” Rashi explains why the latter half of the verse cannot possibly be spoken by the brothers – and here I quote from Rashi:
אי אפשר שיאמרו ונראה מה יהיו חלומותיו, שמכיון שיהרגוהו בטלו חלומותיו
“It would be impossible for the brothers to have spoken these words, ‘And we will see what becomes of his dreams,’ because once they killed him, they invalidated his dreams.”

Why is it that the brothers cannot have spoken the second half of this verse? Because, reasons Rashi, how could they possibly see what becomes of Joseph’s dreams if they kill him? Here I think that Rashi is playing on a double meaning – on the one hand, מה
יהיו
חלומותיו
refers to “what his dreams will become,” the content of his dreams, that is, what he will dream in the future. In this sense we can understand why Rashi says that the brothers could not have spoken these words – after all, once they kill Joseph, he will no longer have any dreams
בטלו חלומותיו
and would certainly be unable to share them with his brothers.

But of course,
מה
יהיו
חלומותיו
refers not just to the content of Joseph’s dreams, but also to whether or not the dreams actually come true. Here God is asserting that even if the brothers try to kill off Joseph, they will not succeed in killing off his dreams – as indeed the rest of the Joseph story will attest.

I am intrigued by this distinction between the content of Joseph’s dreams, and whether or not they actually come true, because I think it speaks to where D and I stand on the brink of our marriage. Until this point, we have spent much of our time talking about our dreams. The process of our getting to know one another was a process of sharing dreams with each other, not in a boastful way like Joseph with his brothers, but in an attempt to draw one another in to our hopes and aspirations. We have discovered many shared dreams—to always fill our lives with Torah and with literature, to live in Eretz Yisrael while remaining close with our families—and I think that much of what made our courtship so wondrous was realizing how many dreams we had in common. Moreover, in describing our dreams, we discovered that we spoke the same language – the language of ours favorite poets Yeats and Stevens, and the language of Talmud and midrash. We found that we shared the reflective, intense self-awareness that comes of keeping journals as a written emotional record of our failings and of our aspirations. Both of us moved from confiding in our journals to confiding in each other, as the record of our email correspondence attests. The Talmud in Masechet Brachot, in an extended passage about dreams and dream interpretation, famously states
חלמא דלא מפשר כאיגרתא דלא מקריא
a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not read (Brachot 55a). When I think of how eager I was to read each of D’s emails during the first few months of our dating, I can only hope that our dreams will be fulfilled with similar alacrity.

As we got to know each other better, D and I moved from sharing our individual dreams with one another to creating shared dreams, as we began to imagine a life together. “We will see whose dreams come true—mine or yours,” God scoffs at the brothers, according to Rashi’s reading, suggesting that God has His own dreams for Joseph. In the same way that Joseph’s dreams are bound up in God’s dreams for the Jewish people—such that God refers to Joseph’s dreams as “mine,” we can only hope that in the joining of our dreams, in the joining of ish and isha, we will create a space for shechina, for God’s presence and God’s role in the unfolding of our destiny.

Of course, the only way to know if a dream is true or not is to wait and see if it is actually realized. A dream is what scientists refer to as outcome-determinant – its outcome determines its nature. We cannot know if our dreams are going to come true, if our marriage is to be a good one, until we live out our lives together. Our dreams will carry us only so far – beyond that point, we must work to make them into reality, to climb out of the pits into which we’ll inevitably fall, and to return to the people we most love. John Donne, a poet that D and I have often quoted to one another, captures this notion in his poem about a man who is awoken by his lover in the middle of his dream, and says to her:

Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths; and fables histories;
Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best
Not to dreame all my dreame, let’s act the rest.

It is with great dreams for the future, and also with a deep faith in God, that D and I make the transition from dreaming our dreams to “acting the rest.” In the past month, as we have planned for our upcoming wedding, I have been again and again impressed by D’s ability not just to dream dreams – not just to come up with great ideas – but also to execute them smoothly and efficiently, whether by speeding on his bike to the other side of town on a moment’s notice, or by carrying a 30-pound box of wedding booklets up a big hill (no load is too heavy for D), or by organizing a bus to transport 60 people to another friend’s wedding just one week before ours. D is a master of logistics and organization, and I am grateful to him for tirelessly applying his skills throughout our wedding preparations. It may sound silly to say, but I couldn’t have gotten married if not for D! While performing each of these logistical feats, D always remains aware of the individuals who are involved. He takes the time write thoughtful personal notes, and to figure out how he can most meaningfully be helpful to others. As I got to know the Fs, I realized that D’s attention both to the logistical details and to the sensitivities of the people involved did not come from nowhere, but is typical of the entire family.

The Talmud teaches that a person who wakes from a dream and does not know how to interpret it should recite the following prayer:
חלום חלמתי ואיני יודע מה הוא....אם טובים הם, חזקם ואמצם כחלומותיו של יוסף....וכשם שהפכת קללת בלעם הרשע לברכה, כך הפוך כל חלומותי עלי לטובה
“I dreamed a dream and I do not know what it is. If it is a good dream, strengthen and sustain it like the dreams of Joseph…. And just as you converted the curses of Bilaam the evildoer into blessing, thus may You change all my dreams into good” (Brachot 55b). As we prepare to get married just a week from today, it is our fervent prayer that God will strengthen and sustain the good dreams we have shared, and convert them into blessing. To invoke the language of Birkat HaChodesh that we said in shul just yesterday, the prayer we recite each month at a time of new beginnings:
שימלאו כל משאלות לבינו לטובה
May all our heart’s wishes be fulfilled for good.
I know that both of our hearts are overflowing with hopes and wishes for the future. We are grateful to all of you for being with us today to take part in and to celebrate our dreams.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Batra Perek Aleph: השותפין

2009-12-06T23:37:00.002+02:00

(2a)
Two neighbors would like to divide
Up their backyard, or so they decide.
They both build the wall
So that if it should fall
They can split up the stones on each side.

(2b)
A man is forbidden to stand
In the field, on his friend’s fertile land
And to gaze and his grain.
Such a man must abstain--
Keep your eyes on your own, we command.

(3b)
A shul cannot be taken down
‘Til a new one is built on that ground.
Brought Rav Ashi his bed
Into shul, for he said:
They’ll rebuild it if I stick around!

(3b)
Herod said: “That’s the babe I desire!”
Then he killed off her fam’ly entire.
She went up to the top
Of the roof, and went plop
“Honey,” cried he, “It’s you I’ll admire.”

(4a)
Though saved, Bava Ben Buta was blind
Herod said, “A worse king can you find?”
“Do not curse the king,”
Bava said. A good thing!
Herod then had a (phew!) change of mind.

(5a)
“Our wall fell! And we both paid our share!”
Said his neighbor: “But you were not there!
It is my wall alone
And I’ll take every stone.”
We rule No! They must split, as is fair.

(7a)
“Hey, my windows are blocked by your wall.”
Said one man to his neighbor. Tough call.
For what are we to do?
Do we safeguard his view?
Must the neighbor go rebuild it all?

(7b)
They built a gatehouse for the bourgeoisie
And Elijah stopped visiting me!
That’s what gate guards are for--
Yes, they keep out the poor.
(Did Elijah then sleep in a tree?)

(7b)
“I’m a wall and my breasts are like towers”
This refers to rabbinical powers.
Rabbis are not affected
By robbers. Protected
Are all in their midst. No one cowers.

(8a)
“Feed me, Rabi,” poor Ben Amram said.
“Is there Torah inside of your head?”
Amram said to him, “No,
But pretend I’m a crow.”
Good thing Rabi agreed to share bread!

(8a)
A caravan of camels and asses
From city to city it passes
It comes to a town
Where idolaters abound
Do the riders get stoning and lashes?

(8b)
Shmuel bar Sheylat would teach.
Every day. No vacations, no beach!
Until he said, “I’ll take
Just a short garden break
From my students.” He thought of them each.

(9b)
Rav Achad’voy’s mother said, “Shoot
Rav Sheshet has made my son mute!”
Just one thing she could do--
She said, “Look at these two
Breasts that nursed you too, Sheshet, you newt!”

(10a)
If God loves the poor, why’s their fate
Miserable? Why no food on their plate?
Because charity’s swell!
We would all go to hell
If we had not the chance to donate.

(10b)
What is a person to do
To have sons – not just one, but a few?
Scatter coins to the poor
Lead his wife to adore
What he does when the time’s come to screw.

(10b)
“I’ve seen the whole world upside down!”
Yehoshua’s son said. “On the ground
Were the people of status.
While those with afflatus
Like sages, on high could be found.”

(11a)
Binyamin the Tzadik was in charge
Of collected tzdakah. Someone barged
In. “Please feed me,” she begged.
“I can’t.” Then he reneged
And he gave his own cash, sums quite large.

(11a)
Munbaz gave lots of cash to the poor
Said his family, “Munbaz! What for?
Your ancestors stored
Up a great cash reward
Don’t now waste it, Munbaz, we implore!”

(12a)
A shortcut that many folks take
Can’t be cut off for one person’s sake.
You’ll incur neighbors’ wrath
If you block off that path
Do you think we can swim through the lake?

(12a)
From the Temple’s destruction and ages
Beyond, prophecy went to the sages.
Did the prophets retire
Were sages inspired?
And did this all happen in stages?

(12b) For MA
Bat Rav Chisda on her father’s knees-
Said her Dad: You want which one of these?
Bat Rav Chisda was loath
To choose, so she said “Both”--
“I’ll go last,” Rava said, “If you please.”

(13a)
A person half-slave and half-free
Says, "I serve both my master and me."
But he hasn't a mate
So he can't procreate
Thus says Shammai, "It simply can't be!"

(13b)
Dad left us two slaves: One can make
Woven tapestries. One can serve cake.
I’ll take the weaver
I ask you to leave her
Will you keep the one who can bake?

(13b)
Tanach is a novel conception
Three books are they at their inception--
May they be attached
Say, with glue, may we patch--
Says Yehudah: No! I take exception!

(14b)
Broken tablets were stored in the ark
Moses shattered them, not on a lark.
Yea, although they went crack
Still we put them in back.
“Yasher Koach,” God warmly remarked.

(15a)
Who wrote the Bible? We wonder.
Some say Moses. That must be a blunder.
How could Moses have penned
“Moses here met his end”
Could he write once already down under?

(15a)
Was Job a real man or a fiction?
It’s a legend! We say with conviction.
But we’re given the name
Of the town where he came
From. Is that not a sure contradiction?

(16a)
Penina by God was created
To make Hannah that much more frustrated
So that Hannah would pray
In her drunkenly way--
When Tzaddikim pray, God is elated!

(16b)
Perfume-makers and tanners, we think,
Are both needed. But tanners – they stink!
Surely we all consent
Better makers of scent
Than the leathery hide on that mink.

(17a)
Miriam’s moment of bliss:
When she fell to her death with a kiss
She remained ever-fresh
For no worms ate her flesh
‘Twas the fortune of Moses’ big sis.

Apology

2009-11-11T09:45:00.002+02:00

I cannot be bothered
To wear different clothes every day.
In my city, the weather changes from week to week;
Once I find a suitable outfit for Sunday,
I wear it until the weather turns.

They say that the weather is forecasted; I don’t know where.
I wouldn’t know what to read, what dials to turn.
Sometimes a friend will say: Hey!
Tomorrow it’s going to rain!
And then I remember, or don’t, to wear boots.
I keep an umbrella with me at all times, just in case.
Sometimes I take it out of my bag in a downpour;
Sometimes I cannot be bothered.

At night I eat ice cream in plastic containers;
For lunch I pack lentils and rice
In rinsed-out ice cream containers.
Every day: Lentils, rice, and ice cream.
I cannot be bothered.

You would look lovely in make-up!
And why don’t you style your hair?
Can you see why I recommend contacts?
I hear you, but cannot be bothered.

Stockings are tight
Casseroles need time
Lipstick takes practice
Fashion requires a sense.

I am tight on time, and lack practical sense. In short,
I would if I could and I can but I won’t
I’m sorry—
I cannot be bothered.

Learning How to Pray: Further Reflections

2009-10-21T03:38:00.002+03:00

About a year ago, I signed up for a yoga class in my neighborhood. Several friends had recommended yoga as a way to help me feel more calm, centered, and connected to my body. But after just a few sessions, it became clear to me that yoga was in fact a lot like davening. As I have always wanted to learn how to be a better davener, I decided that my time was probably better spent in shul rather than in the yoga studio, and promptly dropped out of the class.

How is prayer like yoga? Well, for one, it is a very embodied practice. There are specific motions that need to be followed at particular moments in the service – there are times to stand and times to sit, and like the synchronized movements of the yoga class, everyone gets up and down at more or less the same time. While davening is not quite as physically taxing as yoga, it does require specific poses and positions – bowing, taking three steps back, lifting our bodies up on our tiptoes three times, resting our head in our hands. When I’m davening, I am always aware of my body. If I feel uncomfortable in my own skin, I find it difficult to sit through shul. On days when I wake up hating my body, I know that praying to God is going to be a particular challenge. Likewise, if I feel pain anywhere, that pain is magnified during shul, suggesting that my attention is more focused on my body than at other times. For the past few years, I have davened in a minyan with uncomfortable plastic chairs lined up in rows. Only when I found myself in a proper shul over Sukkot did I realize how valuable it is to have cushioned seats and a shtender, so I could sit comfortably with my hands at my sides and my Siddur at eye level before me. This, I thought, is the right position for davening!

Assuming the proper position is necessary because davening, like yoga, is a spiritual practice achieved through physical movement. In davening we connect with God through repetitive activity – each day we daven more or less the same service in the same order, with the same body motions. In order to be effective, this must be done with tremendous attention and concentration, which is known as Kavana. Prayer requires focus – we must identify what is truly important to us, and articulate those wishes in the context of the liturgy. I know people who swear by prayer’s efficacy; Sara Ivreinu loves to say, “אין כמו כחה של תורה.” My friend Rimona tells the story of how she decided on her 34th birthday that she was determined to get married before she turned 35. Each morning she would walk to the Kotel and pray to God that she would meet the right man. Sure enough, by her 35th birthday, she was married. Is this a testament to the power of prayer? Perhaps. I suspect, though, that it was by clarifying her deepest dream that Rimona was motivated to concentrate all her energies on realizing it. All too often we move passively and blindly through life, without taking the time to question whether we are spending our time and energy properly, and whether we are moving closer to fulfilling our goals. Davening challenges us to think about where we wish to be heading, which in turn makes it easier to get there. In this sense, yes, prayer has tremendous power and efficacy.

And finally, davening, like yoga, is a discipline. I’m sure it is not easy to attend a yoga class several times a week; nor is it easy to get up for minyan every morning. Yet davening must be practiced regularly. A person cannot expect to come to shul once a year and have an all-time spiritual high – at least I don’t think so. Rather, it is the accumulation of many early mornings, afternoons, and evenings spent in prayer that ultimately results in a moment of transcendence.

Is this where the similarities end? I recall that my friends who encouraged me to take yoga insisted that this was something I should do for myself. “You owe it to yourself,” they told me, and “you deserve it!” Davening, on the other hand, is not something I view as being primarily “for myself.” What makes davening most challenging for me is the fact that it requires time that I would generally prefer to spend on other activities. That is, it requires a sacrifice of time, which I consider to be my most valuable and limited resource at this point in my life. In this sense, it makes sense that prayer was historically a replacement for sacrifice in the wake of the Temple’s destruction. Instead of the morning offering, we offer God a part of our morning. We sacrifice several minutes of our day, including the time just after we wake up. I like to think that people who daven every morning are more humble, or at least more sensitive to the needs of other people, because they understand what it means to put someOne else first.

Ironically, it was signing up for a yoga class that helped me to realize the value of prayer. It remains a deeply challenging religious obligation, and one that I am sure I will wrestle with my whole life. At present I think about davening far more than I actually daven, but perhaps this is the first step. I take comfort in the fact that our infinitely rich liturgy offers us even a prayer for prayer, setting us off on our journey as we take those small steps forwards: O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall sing your praises.

See also November 16, 2007:
http://ktiva.blogspot.com/search?q=vayetze%3A+learning+how+to+pray

The Danger of Being Seen (Bava Batra 2a-b)

2009-09-06T09:40:00.001+03:00

Can catching a glimpse of another person cause damage? Is there a danger to being seen? Would the world be a better place if we could all put on invisibility cloaks once in a while? This is an issue that occupies the early pages of Masechet Bava Batra, which we recently began in Daf Yomi. The very first Mishnah is about two neighbors who share a yard, and wish to build a fence to divide their property. The Gemara goes on to ask about the case where one of the neighbors would like to build a fence so that the other cannot look into his yard; but the other neighbor would not like to have the yard divided. Is the first neighbor legally authorized to force the second to agree to the building of the fence? The answer to this question turns upon the matter of Hezek Re’iya, a phrase I had never formerly encountered, though the concept is all too close to heart.

Hezek Re’iya literally means “the damage of seeing,” and refers to the notion that the invasion of privacy caused by looking at someone else’s property is tantamount to physical damage. Those rabbis who support this notion believe that a person can legally prevent a neighbor from gazing into his property by forcing his neighbor to assist in the expenses of building a fence. On the opposite side of the fence are those rabbis who argue that “Hezek Re’iya la shma Hezek” – that is, the damage of being seen is not real damage, and therefore the neighbor who desires privacy cannot force his neighbor to join in the expenses of building a wall. The Talmud proceeds to consider how to interpret the mishnah first if there is indeed a concept of Hezek Re’iya, and then, in the next sugya, if there is in fact no such concept. These two sugyot are mirror images of one another, as symmetrical as the two halves of a divided courtyard.

The Talmud’s conclusion is that yes, there is indeed a notion of Hezek Re’iya – the damage of a being seen constitutes a very real form of a damage, and people have the right to protect their own privacy. I relate to this concept very deeply because I live in a small neighborhood with overlapping social circles in which people talk freely about one another. The street where I work is lined by nearly a dozen small cafes with glass storefronts, and anyone who walks by can see everyone inside. On each of the many times I walk down that street every day, I am conscious of all the pairs of eyes that could possibly be upon me at any moment. When I go out to restaurants with friends, I always insist that we sit at the very back table, furthest from the street, in an effort to avoid being seen. And, lacking an invisibility cloak, every so often I leave my house with a big sun hat that covers my eyes, reasoning that if I cannot avoid being seen, at least I can avoid the uncomfortable and tortured awareness that I have been seen.

Friends who know about my hypersensitivity to Hezek Re’iya have accused me of being paranoid, melodramatic, or uncharacteristically egotistical--do I really think that everyone is looking at me? I trace my condition (if I may call it that) back to my childhood, where I grew up as a rabbi’s daughter in a house on the synagogue property. We were neighbors with the shul, you might say, and although we had a fence separating our part of the yard from the synagogue’s, anyone who drove into the shul parking lot could always look into our windows. My parents were vigilant about drawing the shades at night and keeping the front yard neat. In shul, too, my siblings and I always had to be on our best behavior, because we were conscious that our actions set an example for others. We grew up feeling the eyes of the community upon us at all times, an experience epitomized by one unforgettable weekend in which my parents declared that we were having a “Shabbat in.” My father had the Shabbat off, but my parents did not feel like traveling. Nor did they want anyone to know that we were home. So we drew the shades, pulled the cars into the garage, and spent Shabbat in Secret Annex mode, davening and eating together while never leaving the house.

Now I live in an apartment in which no one can peer into my windows because they look out onto a concrete wall -- and yet I still remain painstakingly protective of my privacy. As per my last count, I now have three ex-boyfriends living within a two-kilometer radius – most of whom I deeply respect and care for, but none of whom I could run into without “the poor treason / of my stout blood against my staggering brain” (Millay). At present I feel like I spend my life dodging their gazes, even as I recognize (or hope) that they have moved on. Moreover, any time I enter into a new relationship, I feel the need to keep it secret for as long as possible (sometimes at the expense of honesty, I am ashamed to admit) – both because of the unparalleled thrill of getting to know someone intimately first on their own terms, without other people’s approving or disapproving gazes; and because of the terrified, trauma-induced conviction that this, too, shall pass.

I retain this fierce desire to protect myself from the gaze of others even as I expose my soul shamelessly on this blog, an irony that is never lost on me. (Ktiva shaney.) But in this season of Tshuva, I think about how I can mend my ways. This phrase reminds me of “Mending Wall,” and I tell myself that while good fences make good neighbors, they do not necessarily make good friends. Honesty and transparency are inherent values, as is learning to see ourselves as others see us. Because I live with the fear that others will speak about me, I have recently adopted a new policy: Any time I am walking down the street with a friend and we run into a third party, I make sure to bring up a new topic of conversation as soon as we part ways from that third party, lest I be tempted to say anything about the person we just met. I hope that others do the same when they run into me. This is, after all, a time of year when we are all being seen, as we pass under the proverbial staff one by one like sheep, with no one escaping the divine gaze. I pray that for all of us, this gaze will be a source not of damage, but of blessing for the year that lies ahead.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Metzia: Perek Aleph (שניים אוחזין)

2009-08-27T17:24:00.005+03:00

(2a)
Two are holding a tallis they find
Each one cries out, “This tallis is mine!”
Each guy swears that at least
He owns half the whole piece.
Then they split it. Both parties don’t mind.

(2b)
Ben Nanas was quite a straight guy
He did not like to make others lie.
Said Ben Nanas, “I’m loathe
To require this oath
One guy’s lying, you cannot deny!”

(3a)
Nobody in his right mind would dare
To deny, with his creditor there,
That he borrowed a calf.
So he says, “’Twas just half.”
Don’t believe him! Instead, make him swear.

(5a)
A shepherd would take sheep each day.
And he’d watch them go off on their way
Then return them at night.
He is not in the right
If he says, “I took no sheep today.”

(5b)
When a shepherd takes sheep he must be
Watched by witnesses, vigilantly.
For all shepherds are liars
With wayward desires
Don’t think they’ll confess sheepishly.

(5b)
Yochanan says, “We make each guy swear
That the tallis is his, fair and square.
Lest men take stuff they find
And declare, “It is mine.”
Legislate oaths – for scruples are rare.

(6a)
A person’s more likely to steal,
Than to lie earnestly and with zeal.
Because money can be
Returned regrettably
Words once spoken, though, can’t be repealed.

(7a)
A borrower and lender both stand
Each one with half a writ in his hand
“You owe me!” “But I paid!”
Are the claims that are made.
Solid proof must the court then demand.

(8b)
A guy rides in a wagon that’s led
By two species of beasts at the head.
That’s Kilayim! No good
Forty lashes, we should
Beat him with. Or the driver instead?

(9b)
A man is aboard his own ship
Sailing forth at a nice steady clip
Then some fishies jump in
To the boat, on a whim—
Are they his? Do we “walking yard!” quip?

(12b)
A man’s field got flooded. The poor
Guy. But guess what else, too, came ashore?
Fish! They landed in trees
“Fetch those fish, if you please,”
Said the man. “They are mine and not yours.”

(13a)
If you find a Get do not return
It. The woman may not still be spurned.
For the man may have written
It, then said, “I’m smitten
With her now -- and for her I yearn.”

(14b)
Some dude sells his farm to you but—
It was not his! Now you’re in a rut.
The field’s taken back
Do we cut you some slack?
If you farmed it, you get a pay cut.

(15b)
Reuven betroths his sister with cash
(You can’t do that! Why? Need we rehash?)
Well of course they’re not wed
We are asking instead:
Tell us, who has the rights to the stash?

(17a)
Shabtai son of Marinus once wrote
A ketubah. He promised a coat
To his bride. Lost forever,
Their Ktubah. “I never
made such a pledge.” Swear on that quote!

(18a)
If you drop your wife's Get in the street
And then find it beneath others' feet.
May the Get still be given
Though it has been ridden
Over by most people you meet?

(18b)
Rabah once found a Get. Here’s the facts:
In a factory where they make flax
“I’ve a Get,” he proclaimed
Just one man with the name
On the Get worked there. He took it back.

(20a)
We find loan documents, and they say:
One man borrowed from three guys one day.
We assume he who borrows
(Impoverished, with sorrow)
Has lost. Them to him we relay.

(20a)
We find loan documents. We agree
That if one man has lent cash to three
We return to the lender,
The likely contender
To own them. Indubitably.

Elul reflections: A Midtown Musaf

2009-08-19T10:09:00.004+03:00

Every Elul, as I review the melodies of the high holidays, I am reminded that I first learned to lead Rosh Hashanah davening while traversing the streets and avenues of Manhattan. It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I had a job writing about psycho-pharmacological drugs for a large pharmaceutical company in midtown. Each morning, I would commute by train from my parents’ house on Long Island to Penn Station. I would follow the crowds up the escalator out of the station, and as soon as I exited onto 34th street, I’d hit the Play button on my walkman. As I walked to work, I’d listen to a tape prepared by (now Rabbi Dr.) Ethan Tucker. The tape (which has since become an object of veneration and parody in certain very limited circles) started with “HaMelech,” the first word of Rosh Hashanah shacharit, and went all the way to the final kaddish at the end of Musaf. It lasted 42 minutes (with a lot of “and so on and so forth”), which was exactly how long it took me to walk the four avenues and twenty-five blocks between Penn Station and my office on the East side. I walked the same route each day, and so I remember vividly where I stood for each part of the davening: at Barchu I passed Macy’s; at Avinu Malkenu I crossed Times Square; by the U’netaneh Tokef, I was at the Korean grocery near Bryant Park, observing which flowers still looked appealing and which had wilted.

I have led davening on Rosh Hashanah for nearly ten years now. Every Elul I work hard to improve my Kavana, trying to focus my attention on repentance, on righteousness, and on channeling the prayers of the congregation upwards to heaven. But when the new year dawns and I stand at the Amud turning pages in the Machzor, I am inevitably thinking not just of the sweet taste of apples and honey that I’ll enjoy at Kiddish, but also of the cross streets and landmarks of the Big Apple.

I like to think that perhaps this association is not as inappropriate as it might seem. After all, the high holidays are about marking our path as we journey through life. Each year, we are called upon to look back on where we have traveled, take stock of our lives, and resolve to be more mindful of our ways in the future. When I stand before God and before the Kahal on Rosh Hashanah, I remember that I have much for which to be grateful -- for the paths I have traversed, the turns my life has taken, and the opportunities that await me around the next corner.

For Elul reflections from the past three years, see:

http://ktiva.blogspot.com/search?q=broken+foot
http://ktiva.blogspot.com/search?q=in+a+bind
http://ktiva.blogspot.com/search?q=counting%20sheep

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Kama פרק ד': שור שנגח

2009-08-09T23:22:00.002+03:00

(36b)
Must a Tanna flesh everything out?
Can he summarize, speak thereabouts?
Or like peddlers, repeat
What they hear; it's not meet
For a Tanna, who's someone with clout.

(37a)
The villain Chanan dealt a blow
To a poor guy. Rav Huna said, "Go
Pay him half of a zuz."
Counterfeit! He refused
So Chanan hit again. "Here you go."

(37b)
There are oxen who gore when they hear
Shofars sounded. Yup. Oxen are queer.
If they post-blast gore thrice
(Two times will not suffice)
They are muad for shofars, I fear.

(38a)
If a non-Jew learns Torah, his fate
Is like that of a high-priest: first-rate!
But the Jews stand to earn
More for all that they learn;
They're commanded! Chanina relates.

(38a)
Sent the Romans two soldiers to study
Some Torah. (Each learned with a buddy.)
They said: "Torah's OK
Except: 'No Jew must pay
If his ox gores a non-Jew's.' That's nutty!"

(38b)
Hate the Moabites. Yup, that is fine.
But do not wipe out all of their line
Because then the sad truth
Is: We'd be without Ruth
With whom our nation's fate is entwined.

(38b)
Do a mitzvah forthwith! Do not wait!
Be the first, like Lot's eldest; her fate
When she slept with her dad
Was to bring forth this lad:
David's grandpa. And hence: Procreate!

(39a)
An arena ox trained for the fight
Can gore all that he wants; it's all right
Those who own him don't pay—
He would gore anyway.
He is trained thus. A sorrowful plight.

(41b)
The Amazon Shimon would teach
"Every 'et' is a reason to preach."
Except one. We refrain
From that "et," not in vain
There is merit to gain from the breach.

(41b)
Said Akiva: I'll preach on that "Et."
I have something to say! Will you let
Me? We honor, yes, God;
But we also must nod
In respect to each sage – don't forget!

(42a)
A fisherman casts out his net
He will take all the fish he can get.
If he gets lots of big
Fish, he'll still hold his rig
Out for little ones too. You can bet!

(43b)
If an ox kills a girl or a boy
This is sad. We cry out with an "Oy."
And we hold it as bad
As if rather it had
Killed a woman or man (not a Goy).

(45b)
An ox prone to kill human life
Will cause people a whole lot of strife.
Such an ox can't be watched
For the job will be botched
You can keep it safe just with a knife!

(46a)
You may hold it an obvious matter
Still we say: Keep no rickety ladder
In the place where you live
For you will not forgive
Yourself when it falls down with a splatter.

Of Therapists and Old Ladies

2009-07-01T00:52:00.004+03:00

I have a confession to make: I do not believe in therapy. Over the course of my life, I have seen countless therapists, especially during my tumultuous college years – and yet I can’t point to a single successful experience. And so in recent years, I have developed my own “talking cure” -- one that enables me to interact with the world in a way that seems more sensible and meaningful given my needs and values.

I say that therapy has never really helped me. But I am not even sure what would constitute successful therapy. How do we trace the course of our own development as human beings? How do we know when we have become better or more actualized (as the lingo would have it) individuals? Rarely does therapy (at least as I’ve known it) involve the setting of clearly-defined goals, and thus it’s very hard to judge when the patient is “better.” A therapist is not like a an eye doctor who gives you a vision test and a prescription for glasses; with therapy, the test questions are ongoing, the prescriptions are vague, and often the world looks even blurrier as time goes on.

I am also troubled by the power dynamic in the therapy situation. The therapist takes money (generally very high sums!) from the patient, and it is therefore in the therapist’s interest for the therapy to continue a long time – a clear conflict of interest, given that presumably the patient who is “healed” would not need the therapist anymore. I once tried to leave a therapist and was told that that I was sabotaging my own recovery and preventing myself from getting the help I needed. What could I possibly say in response to these words, which undermined the very foundations of my capacity for agency? And so I felt I had no choice but to return again and again to expose myself even further – if I’d fail to disclose any information, the therapist would tell me, once again, that I was sabotaging my own recovery. The therapist, in contrast, would say little (how maddening!) and reveal nothing about him/herself. A friend once told me that he paid $100 for a therapy session, only to hear himself speak for 50 minutes – the doctor grunted, but did not say a single word. “You listen to me for free,” my friend said to me. “Why should I pay for it?”

My friend’s comment resonated for me because I am fortunate to be blessed with more dear friends than I have fingers on my hands. When something is troubling me, I can log on to Gmail chat and catch my friends in NY before they leave for work, or pick up the phone and call a sister, or change around some of the details and relay the matter to my wise parents. I know that I am very lucky in this regard, and that my situation is by no means typical – but I have never felt at a loss for someone to turn to in times of distress. Some of my most special friendships were forged in furnaces of pain and grief, at a time when I was hurting too much to have anything to offer – in those darkest of moments, I met people who believed in me and nursed me back to normalcy, to a place where I could at least reach out and take their hands as I took my first tentative steps forward again. Now, when I am healthy and stable and glad to be alive, my best friend and I usually email at least once a day (I when I get to work, and she when she awakens five hours later in EST) – it is part of our routine, a way for each of us to hear and be heard. She is a professor of medieval history, but I trust her responses to my innermost fears and longings far more than those of any professional psychotherapist.

My friends who believe in psychoanalysis tell me that their weekly therapy visits offer a chance to reflect on their lives, and a break from the fast pace of the day to day. It is true that my life is extremely fast paced --whether I am bounding up the hill to get to a chevruta, chasing after buses, or racing against the clock to send one more email before I have to leave work-- but I also have built-in meditation and reflection time. I swim for exactly 60 minutes almost every morning, time in which I have absolutely nothing on my mind (though I do count laps!). Swimming is a chance for any submerged fears and concerns to rise to the surface -- while I swim, my mind is a blank slate free to turn to anything that is troubling me. Was I rude? Did I say the wrong thing? Should I have offered to be more helpful? The rhythmic back-and-forth motion in the water allows me take my doubts in stride, and to work out ways of dealing with sticky situations. Often I get into the pool thinking about an email I am not sure how to respond to; by the time I come out, I've drafted the appropriate response and am ready to move on. Mysteriously the pool works its strange magic, offering a watery catharsis that obviates any need for therapy - at least for me.

I should add, too, that I am painfully self-aware. I keep a journal and write in it regularly – addressing my entries sometimes to myself, sometimes to the man I am mooning over, sometimes to God, and sometimes to no one at all. Nobody will ever read my journals (I intend to burn them!), but anyone who did would immediately realize that I have a long history with myself – I am all too familiar with my tendencies to shoot myself in the foot (or at least put my worst foot forwards), to sabotage my own chances for happiness, to plead that others are more competent or more beautiful than I am, to fall for the same kinds of men again and again and again. This is old hat for me, and any therapist would have a lot of catching up to do before he or she could offer any fresh insights. And, quite frankly, I can’t be bothered to update a total stranger on all that has transpired in my mind and in my heart over the last three decades….

As I write these words, I can already hear the objections of the therapists and psychologically-minded folks out there, all shaking their heads vigorously: No one can see themselves objectively! You may know yourself well, but that very knowledge constrains you! And your friends and parents have vested interests – they can’t give you dispassionate advice! I hear these objections and, in response, I want to add that I have developed my own replacement for therapy, a way of sharing the depths of my interior world with someone who is wise and objective and relatively disinterested: my old lady.

About seven years ago, I began volunteering for an organization in New York that cares for elderly, homebound individuals. I was assigned to Anna Kainen z”l, a blind woman who lived in a rent-controlled apartment just off of Central Park. I used to visit her at 10am every Sunday morning. For about half of our visits I would read her poems she had written (Anna had hundreds of handwritten manuscript pages that she dreamed that I, the budding editorial assistant, would one day publish for her under the Knopf imprint); for the other half of our time, we would talk about our lives. Anna, who had several unhappy marriages, would tell me about all the men she had gallivanted with; and I, in turn, would tell her about all the men I had not succeeded in doing any gallivanting with just yet. Anna became my confidante – I could tell her anything because she was homebound, and thus I could be sure that nothing I said would ever leave the confines of her apartment. When she died in February of 2004 on her 91st birthday, I suppose I felt the way one feels when a therapist moves away – a sense of loss combined with a sense of need, as if there were a hole in a ground that needed to be filled in before anyone got hurt.

Since Anna, I have had several old ladies in my life, on both sides of the Atlantic. The current one is perhaps the most beloved – though I may have said that each time. I call her Sara Ivreinu to distinguish her from the many Sara’s I know (this is not a name I say to her face, but as with many people in my life, she has a nickname in my head and in my pelephone!). Sara, as you might guess from her sobriquet, is also blind, though she maintains quite an active lifestyle in spite of her handicap: she volunteers as a receptionist in town and does all her shopping with a friend in the shuk.

Every Wednesday afternoon I meet Sara outside her apartment and we take a walk together through the streets of her neighborhood, ending up at the same shady green bench (although she is blind, she insists that we sit only on green benches!) where we rest our legs before I take her back home again. Sara comes from a different world, or perhaps a different planet – she is deeply religious (there are days when I look at what I am not wearing and thank my lucky stars that she can’t see me!), and extremely superstitious (cries of “Lo Aleinu” and “Kappara!”), and very very poor (מי שאין לה אלא חלוק אחד), and utterly terrified of anyone who is not Jewish (when I told her last spring that I was going to London for a conference, she turned to me horrified and said, “Are you going to have to talk to any Goyim?”). I once brought her Victoria’s Secret scented body lotion as a present from America, and when I helped her rub it on her hands she looked at me as if she had died and gone to heaven. Another time I took her out for coffee at her local pizza parlor because it was too rainy to walk outside, and she played with the plastic spoon that came with her coffee and asked me if I thought anyone would mind if she kept it to give to her grandson. I, who have measured out my life in coffee spoons (not to mention scented hand cream!), was beside myself.

Sara is, for all intents and purposes, my therapist. For an hour each week she listens to my woes and advises me on how to deal with my problems. She knows all about the politics of the small office where I work, the dynamics in my family, the papers I am writing for school, the men whom I am (unsuccessfully!) pursuing, and those who are (equally unsuccessfully!) pursuing me. There is nothing I cannot tell her – or almost nothing. I once tried to explain (proceeding cautiously so as to test the waters) that I had set foot in a shul without a Mechitzah. Judging from her horrified reaction, it was clear that I could never tell her the truth, which is that I read Torah in a fully egalitarian minyan every Shabbat morning. By the same token, I sometimes have to take her advice with a grain of salt (“Wash his clothes, clean his floor, and cook him dinner every night – and don’t let him touch you until he marries you!”). But overall, I feel comfortable being honest with her, and I trust fully in the wisdom of her years.

My relationship with Sara is a symbiotic one – we both benefit. She is lonely and eager for someone to talk to; I am in need of the sage advice of an older person who is not part of my insular Anglo community. It means a lot to her that I remember to call her every Wednesday morning to check in about that day’s visit; and it means a lot to me that she always remembers what is going on in my life, as if she had just reviewed her notes from the previous week’s session.

I have no doubt that the world is filled with elderly, lonely people who live by themselves and long for companionship. As they are advanced in years, these people often have the deep wisdom that comes of having experienced most of life, not to mention fascinating stories about what is past and passing. Likewise, I have no doubt, too, that the world is also filled with callow young adults who could benefit from the wisdom and guidance of someone who is sufficiently removed from their immediate social milieu. If only these two groups could find one another! It might put the therapists out of business, but I tend to think that the world would be a happier and healthier place for young and old alike….

People of the Book (Bava Metzia 29b)

2009-05-27T00:51:00.004+03:00

The physical objects that populate rabbinic literature include oxen, cows, spindles, coins, pigeons, dates, figs, flax, wool, jugs, lentils, fish, and even official documents and bills – but rarely ever books. And so I was surprised by this Mishnah, encountered on a recent daf:

If one found books, he should read from them once in thirty days. If he does not know how to read, he should roll them from beginning to end. However, he should not study in them for the first time, nor should another person read together with him.

At first I was puzzled. Why should a book be read once in thirty days? And what does it mean to roll a book? Rashi explains that all books in Talmudic times were written on parchment scrolls (no e-books or mass market paperbacks back then!), and these scrolls would get moldy if they weren't aired out regularly. Thus the person who came upon a lost scroll and held on to it until its rightful owner was found would be responsible for its proper care. The finder should either read the scroll once a month, or else roll it out. However, he should not study from it, because this would result in undue wear and tear of a particular section. Nor should he read from it with someone else, lest them two of them yank at different parts of the scroll and cause damage.

I am fascinated by this Mishnah because it is born out of the deeply literary culture of the rabbis, and yet it relates to texts exclusively as physical objects. A scroll needs to be aired out once a month, just like a pet dog needs to be walked every morning. This sugya is concerned with preserving the quality of the scroll, and not with any sense of reverence for what is written on it. Perhaps the text written in that particular scroll is best learned by two people in chevruta. But no matter! For the sake of protecting the scroll, it should not be subjected to over-use.

The Gemara goes on to consider the responsibilities of the person who borrows a very particular kind of scroll, one on which the words of the Torah are written:

If one borrows a Torah scroll from his fellow, he may not lend it to another person. He may open and read from it, provided he does not study in it something for the first time. Nor should another person read together with him.

With all due respect to this sugya, my own attitude towards my books could not be more different. A friend recently visited my apartment, looked at my full set of Steinsaltz gemarot, and remarked, "Oh, I see you bought some of them used." I laughed. "No," I corrected her. "It is I who used them!" I carry around the masechet I am currently learning in my backpack all day every day, and thus by the time I am finished with that volume, it is usually quite beaten up – my Yevamot is missing half its spine, my Bava Kama has a damaged front cover, and my Sukkah is water-logged. Still, I could not imagine it otherwise. I buy my books for the sake of using them – the physical object is secondary to its literary content. The more the Masechet looks like it is ready for the Genizah, the more emphatically I recite the Hadran.

That said, however, I am a generous book-lender, and I ask that my friends take care of my books and return them within a reasonable period of time. Certainly I would not want them to lend my books to a third party without my permission! The Talmud agrees with me on this one:

Why do we have the rule that one may not lend what he has borrowed in the case of a Torah scroll specifically? This is true of all other borrowed scrolls! It was necessary to teach this ruling specifically with respect to a Torah scroll for you might have said that a person is agreeable to having a mitzvah performed with his possessions [and the owner would therefore not object to having his Torah scroll lent out for study by a third party]. The Talmud therefore teaches us that this is not the case.

Even in the case of a Torah scroll, which is used for the mitzvah of Torah study, we must assume that a person would not want his copy lent out widely without his explicit permission.

This sugya about borrowed texts reminds me of my own attempt, back when I was in the fourth grade, to convert my bedroom into a lending library. I organized my books alphabetically by author, inserted an index card (with the words DATE DUE painstakingly printed in my best block letters) into the back of every book, and created a card catalogue (i.e. a single box of index cards) listing all the titles in my possession, with an asterisk next to Cheaper by the Dozen, Little Women, The Phantom Tollbooth, and the other books I particularly recommended. I encouraged my family members to visit their "local local" public library and check out books, provided, of course, that they returned them on time. Proceeds from late fines went into our family tzedakah box, and anyone who returned a damaged book would have their borrowing privileges summarily revoked.

Years later, I found myself a real library job. Two days a week after high school I worked as a "page" (as we were aptly termed) in the Main Street Public Library, where I was responsible for returning books to their rightful places on the shelves. If all the shelving was completed before the end of my shift, I would be assigned the tedious task of "shelf-reading," i.e. running my eye along an assigned set of shelves to make sure that all the books were arranged alphabetically and positioned neatly with spines facing outward, flush against the edge of the shelf. My supervisor was a proper library lady whose grey hair was secured tightly atop her head with so many bobby pins that I got a headache just from looking at her. She wore slipper-like satin shoes and used to sneak softly down the carpeted aisles to make sure she never caught any of us reading on the job. "When you are a patron, you may read; when you are a page, you are paid to shelve," she would insist, shaping her lips around every word and peering sternly over horn-rimmed glasses. I struggled to obey.

About a year later I graduated from page to periodicals clerk, which meant I sat at a great wooden desk supervising the use of the microfilm and microfiche machines (reminiscent of the Talmud's rolling scrolls), and reading stacks of old book review sections when business was slow. To my consternation, I was never deemed personable enough to be awarded the prized role of circulation desk clerk; this did not happen until college, when I found myself checking out books for my professors and fellow students (apparently by then, my social skills had improved sufficiently). Most of my time in college was spent "working at Widener"; when I wasn't sitting at the circulation desk, I was doing my own reading down in the stacks (level B-2, underground) in a history of science grad student's neglected carrel. (Lamont is for little guys, my friends and I would quip, deriding the lack of seriousness of those who patronized the undergraduate library at the other end of the quad. The underground Widener stacks remain one of my favorite places on earth, and I'm determined to get back there before I die.)

I suppose it was during those years spent working at libraries that I developed my appreciation for books as physical objects, an appreciation that I share with the rabbis of the Talmud. If you are being paid not to read, you inevitably come to value books for something other than their content. This attention to the material culture of the book was honed during my years as an editorial assistant at Knopf, where we had weekly meetings to decide upon each title's trim size (the length and width of the book), running heads (what would be written at the top of each page), format (hardcover or paperback), colophon (which of several graphic borzoi dogs would decorate the spine), and every other imaginable aspect of the book's physical appearance. Rough trim or smooth trim? French flaps? Wraparound jacket? The goal was to make our books look better than anyone else's, in the hope that they would fly off the Barnes and Noble shelves into the hands of as many customers as possible.

In my current job as a literary agent, I am also responsible for the circulation of books, albeit in a different context altogether. I spend my time reading book catalogues sent to our Jerusalem-based agency from publishers all over the world, ordering books for which I think we can sell Hebrew translation rights, and pitching these titles to Israeli editors. Often we have more requests for a book than physical copies, which means that publishers have to wait in line as the book is read and returned by a series of other editors, or else make do with a PDF. We keep track of which editors have which books in our sophisticated custom-made database, and relentlessly chase down overdue sample copies.

There are a few editors who are particularly delinquent when it comes to returning books, and I often imagine storming their offices to raid our missing copies. If so, I'd find myself no longer in Bava Metzia, but in Bava Kama (114b), where I encountered one of the only other book-related sugyot I can recall:

If a man identifies his articles or books in the possession of another person, and a rumor of theft in his place had already been spread in town, the purchaser would have to swear how much he paid for them, and would be paid accordingly [for returning the books].

This Mishnah refers to the case of a person who comes to his friend's house and finds his own books (which had been recently stolen from him) sitting there innocently on his friend's shelves. Assuming the theft was a known fact in the community, the owner is permitted to re-appropriate his books in exchange for the sum that the purchaser (who first must swear that he is not himself the thief!) had paid for them. While I am not accusing anyone at Yediot Achronot for stealing our books, I do have half a mind to pay them a visit one of these days....

As active, industrious literary agents, we like to keep our books in constant circulation. That said, inevitably there comes a point where we have to accept the sad reality that a particular title is just not going to sell. "She has gone out with every editor in Israel," I often joke to my colleague, waving a copy of Secrets of the Zodiac or (l'havdil!) the latest Marilynne Robinson (alas, alas). "What can we do? Nobody wants her." With heaviness of heart, we place the undesirable volume on the discard pile in the hallway, hoping that some kind stranger will pick her up, take her home, and leaf through her pages every month or so – even if he never reads a single word.

For the Birds

2009-05-20T01:20:00.003+03:00

I left the house at 7am today and returned home at 9pm, as I do most weekdays; except that this morning I apparently forgot to close my bedroom window. And so when I walked in the door tonight, exhausted and eager to collapse on my couch with Steinsaltz (the book), you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that two pigeons had made a home for themselves in my humble abode. One was perched atop my Shabbat hot water heater, its beak tucked underneath its neck contentedly; the other sat on my book case between my bentchers and my Jastrow Dictionary, as if it were prepared not just to teach itself Zmirot, but also to learn what they mean.

I do not react well to unexpected guests, and so for the first few minutes I simply shrieked at the top of my lungs, hoping that I would frighten away the intruders. But no such luck. These birds were the pictures of perfect equanimity, and even when I began flailing my hands wildly in their direction, they merely cocked their heads at me curiously as if wondering whether the entertainment I was providing was free of charge, or whether I'd be collecting contributions later on in the evening. I was still shrieking, apparently loud enough to attract the attention of my neighbor, who rapped on my door to find out what was going on. "TZIPORIM!!!" I screamed, pointing towards my doorway and grabbing on to his arm for dear life.

My neighbor tried to calm me down, but when he realized his attempts would prove futile, he told me that he was running out to find some equipment. "Sit down," he encouraged me, and somehow I managed to take his advice. I gazed up at the birds, neither of whom had moved even an inch. Seeing as they didn't seem to be going anywhere, I picked up a volume of forgotten lore and decided to make my best attempt at resuming my regularly scheduled evening activity.

One might have thought, "Shale'ach Teshalach" teaches that one must go to mountains to seek to fulfill the Mitzvah - "Ki Yikarei" teaches, this is not so, only if it presents itself. (Chulin 139b)

Well well well, wasn't I lucky! The mitzvah of sending away the birds had presented itself to me; I didn't even have to seek it out. The Torah teaches that if a person comes upon a nest with a mother bird and its eggs, the person is obligated to send away the mother bird before taking the eggs. I had been planning on preparing an omelet for dinner, so clearly I was justified in my attempts to banish my feathered friends. Unfortunately, though, it looked like dinner was going to have to wait….

I realized that I ought to learn more about my never-flitting fowl. I have always thought that the only aspect of owning a pet that I would actually enjoy would be naming the creature. Well, here was my opportunity! Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore… I had just returned that evening from a seminar about Moshe and competing prophecies, and in the Torah reading cycle we are about to enter the wilderness of Sefer Bemidbar, so I decided to name my birds Eldad and Meidad. This way I could cry out in outrage, with the appropriate Biblical cadences, "Eldad and Meidad are roosting in my apartment!"

Eldad and Meidad, I decided, had been inside for a while. They were perfectly comfortable in their present perches (certainly more comfortable than I was in my own home at present, and I was the one paying the rent!), and they weren't making much noise—no rapping, tapping at my chamber door. Moreover, though I am no expert in such matters, it seemed that they had left several hours' worth of icky green goop all over my windowsill, my kitchen table, and my shtender. My Sifrei Kodesh, rest assured, remained blessedly untouched, which led me to wonder – was this a sign from Shamayim? Let me see what threat is, and this mystery explore-- Was Someone trying to tell me something?

I heard a voice wailing like a dove and saying, "Woe unto my sons because of whose sins I destroyed my home." (Brachot 3b)

In the Talmud, the dove is often a symbol for the Shechina, since doves are loyally monogamous their whole lives. Perhaps my pet prophets were there to rebuke me for blogging at length about the delight I take in my solitary state? Were the birds attempting to destroy my home lest I become too comfortable in my present accommodations? Leave my loneliness unbroken!... "Prophet!" said I. "thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil." I thought for a moment. Maybe I should not be so quick to paint my visitors raven-black. Maybe they were intended as some sort of atonement, echad l'chatat v'echad l'olah. Still, was that really fair? It may not be good for man to be alone, I wanted to cry out in my own defense, but it's certainly worse for man to live with pigeons!

One may trap domesticated Herodian pigeons [on festivals]….. One may not trap pigeons that live in dove-coats and pigeons that live in attics. (Beitzah 24a)

I wondered if Eldad and Meidad were Herodian pigeons, that is, formerly wild birds who have learned how to live with human beings. These birds (and here I translate from Steinsaltz' zoographic marginalia) make their home in human habitations and are protected by their masters. They are named for Herod, the first to bring birds into his home. But I am no Herod, and my home is no Herodian mansion. If Eldad and Meidad were planning to stay in my one-bedroom apartment, then I would have to find a new place to spend the night…. Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!

Just as I was plotting where I might find moorings on Night's Plutonian shore, my neighbor burst in with a broomstick , a wig, a towel, a laundry basin, and a can of anti-roach spray. A curious approach to the problem, aimed both at making me laugh and at banishing the offending creatures. He sent me out into the hallway (with Steinsaltz, of course), and when he summoned me back a few minutes later, it was to reassure me that alas, I would not need to sleep over in his apartment that evening after all…..

Now it is a full three hours later, but last I checked, Eldad and Meidad were still perched patiently on my windowsill, as if hoping to appeal to my Herodian sympathies. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting. I am not a cruel person, but it was with some degree of triumph that I drew the casement tight and collapsed into bed with Steinsaltz, a pencil, and a cry of Nevermore.

It Takes Two to Tan Du

2009-05-17T00:47:00.005+03:00

For the past few weeks I have been composing in my head an extended poem on the pleasures of sleeping alone. Chief among them is the delight I take in reading in bed – at the beginning of the night, when I can fall asleep with my bedside lamp still on, my book eventually collapsing to form a tent over my face; at 3am, when the house is quiet and the world is calm, and I wake up delighted to have those stolen mid-night moments to my conscious self; and in the early morning hours, when I arise before my alarm clock and read by the light streaming through my open window. I have books that I will read only in bed; they live under the blankets and wait patiently while I read far more respectable volumes during daylight hours. Writing in bed, too, is another newly-rediscovered pleasure. There are entries in my journal that I am able to write only when alone under the covers, as if I cannot expose these negatives to the harsh light of day. A friend recently told me that she loves being single because her nightlife is so much more wild, and I could relate; it was only when I began sleeping alone that my wild literary nightlife took off.

I suspect that the women of the Talmud would not have been able to relate to the pleasure I take in sleeping solo. I don't know much about how the rabbis' wives spent their nights, but I'm quite certain that they weren't reading in bed. We hear in Masechet Sotah (6b, 31a) and again in Gittin (89a) about women who would spin flax and gossip by the moonlight, which seems to have been a popular evening activity. The Talmud states that the topic of conversation among these women served as an indicator of what had become public knowledge in a community. More specifically, each of these sugyot teaches that a woman's adulterous affair would be regarded as a known matter only when it became the subject of gossip among these tale-spinning women. Presumably those women who were gossiping about adultery rather than committing it then returned home to their husbands' beds, and it was only the most forlorn among them who were left to sleep alone.

The Talmud clearly looks pitifully upon any woman who does not have a man with whom to share her bed. We know this from a popular folk saying attributed to Reish Lakish that appears five times throughout the Babylonian Talmud (and never in the Yerushalmi):
טב למיתב טן דו מלמיתב ארמלו
The phrase literally means, "It is better for a woman to sit as two [tan du] than to sit alone by herself," though it takes on far more color in its various Talmudic contexts. In Bava Kama 110b, where I most recently encountered it, the phrase appears in a discussion of the case of a woman whose husband dies, and whose brother-in-law suffers from an unpleasant skin ailment. Is the woman obligated to formally release herself from levirate marriage to her brother-in-law? Perhaps she need not bother, because surely she would not have married her husband if she had known that there was any chance she'd end up with his ailing brother. But the Talmud rejects this supposition on the grounds of טב למיתב . A woman would marry a man even if his brother is repulsive because she would so much rather get married than remain alone.

In Masechet Kidushin, this expression is invoked on two occasions to explain the lengths to which a woman would go so as not to be alone. In the first instance (7a), the Talmud deals with the question of whether a woman can become betrothed to a man not by receiving money from him, but rather by giving him a present. That is, can she be betrothed by means of the benefit that she derives from the knowledge that he is receiving her gift? The sugya comes to the conclusion that ניחא לה בכל דהו, "it is better for her in any case" to be married than unmarried, and thus she is willing to betroth herself by giving rather than receiving a gift. Although Kidushin is generally defined as a transaction in which the man gives the woman something and she in return becomes betrothed unto him, the Talmud suggests in this sugya that a woman so desperately wants to be married that she'll actually give the man a gift rather than receive one, just so that she can become his wife.

The phrase טב למיתב occurs again on Kidushin 41a amidst a discussion of whether Kidushin can be performed by means of a messenger. Can a man send a third party to betroth his wife for him? The Talmud responds that a man must first see his wife before bethrothing her, "lest he see something unattractive in her after they get married and she become repulsive to him." A husband should not send a messenger to choose a wife for him; it is important that he see the woman so that he can know whether she finds favor in his eyes. The Talmud then asks whether the same logic applies to a woman. Should a woman, too, avoid accepting a proposal by means of a third party messenger? No! A woman, unlike a man, may rely on a messenger, because of טב למיתב . A woman has such a vested interest in getting married that even if she has not yet seen her suitor, we can assume she will accept him. Here the Talmud suggests that women are far less picky than men when it comes to choosing a spouse because a woman above all wants a husband, regardless of who that husband might be.

After reviewing each of these three sugyot, I cannot help but wonder: Why all the fuss about getting married? Was the Talmudic woman's life really so much better if she had a husband? The remaining two טב למיתב sugyot suggest an answer to this question that is not quite as simple as it first appears. These two sugyot, Ketubot 75a and Yevamot 118b, closely parallel one another, and thus I cite only the former here. The rabbis are discussing a man who betroths a wife on the condition that she does not have a particular blemish, and then discovers that she has that blemish; does the betrothal still take? The answer is no, even if she goes to a doctor and has the offensive mark removed. However, in the opposite case, a woman who makes such a conditional statement is indeed still betrothed on the grounds of טב למיתב . A woman desires to be married to such an extent that we can assume she will overlook those very blemishes that she had initially stipulated that she would not tolerate. This assertion triggers (both in Ketubot and Yevamot) a flurry of colorful comments attributed to various Talmudic sages about just how strongly a woman desires a husband:

Abayey: Even if her husband is the size of a sesame seed (!), she is proud to place her chair among the free women.
Rav Papa: Even if her husband spins wool [a lowly profession] she will call out to him to come sit with her at the entrance to the home (where they will be publicly visible).
Rav Ashi: Even if her husband is repulsive, at least she will not lack for lentils in her pot.

Each of these sages asserts that a woman wishes to have a husband, even a repulsive one, because of the status that is conferred upon her by being married. Were the sugya to end there, the Talmud's stance would be unequivocal: Better for a woman to be married than to be alone. Were Abayey, Rav Papa, and Rav Ashi to have the last word, then I might offer different advice the next time a friend comes to me and asks whether she should marry the man she is currently dating. I might even consider pulling those novels out from under my covers and replacing them with a husband of my own. Fortunately, however, the Talmud has more to say on this matter. The final line of this sugya is introduced by the word Tanna, suggesting that this last source predates (and is therefore assumed to carry more authority than) those Amoraic statements that precede it. This source asserts, "And all these women commit adultery and attribute their offspring to their husbands." That is, all these women who so desperately want to be married are really just interested in having a convenient excuse when they find themselves pregnant as a result of their adulterous affairs. Why do they need husbands? So that they can point to a legitimate father for their bastard children!

This final line, astonishing in its flippancy and subversiveness, casts the preceding Amoraic statements in a new light: A woman needs a husband so that she can "place her chair among the free women," that is, so that she can count herself among those women who are free to have adulterous affairs! And even if her husband is repulsive, she doesn't care, because she's just using him as a cover so that she can gallivant off and engage in extramarital sex! For this reason it is better for a woman to be married than to be alone. This reason, though, gives me pause. Personally, I must confess that I prefer the pleasure of reading alone in bed to the prospect of extramarital affairs. And while it might be fun to set off in search of a husband, the literature I read tends to be far more exciting than the life I might otherwise lead…..

I was reminded of these sugyot this past Purim, when a good friend brought me Mishloach Manot in the form of a beautiful glass vase stuffed with hamentaschen and other goodies. "When you finish all the sweets," she told me, "you can save the vase for the next time a man brings you flowers." I smiled, knowing that I would do no such thing. Instead, I washed out the giant vase, filled it with two kilos of lentils, and placed it in my cupboard alongside my beans, split peas, and other dried goods. I put a sign on the vase that contains four words from the Ketubot/Yevamot sugya: לא בעי טלפחי לקדרא – "she does not lack for lentils in her pot." From time to time I cook lentil soup, which I have served to numerous male friends over the course of this past winter. I am married to none of them, nor would I want to be.

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Kama פרק ג': המניח את הכד

2009-05-01T18:17:00.004+03:00

(27a)
Reuven leaves his jug out in the street
Shimon bumps into it with his feet
Barrel-owner must pay.
--Barrel? What did you say?
I thought jug! Jug is barrel. Repeat!

(27a)
Reuven's barrel is out in the street.
Shimon bumps into it with his feet.
The jug owner must pay
Jug? What did you just say?
I thought barrel. That's jug, I repeat.

(27b)
"You bumped into my barrel! Now pay!"
No, said Ulah, For it's not the way
Of most people to look
When they walk in the shuk
Keep your barrels inside and away!

(28a)
If a public path goes through your farm
Can you block it off? Widespread alarm
Would ensue. You cannot
That is, first you have got
To provide a new route free of harm.

(29b)
If you turn over mounds of dog shit
(It's good fertilizer, you'll admit.)
And some guy walks right in
Oh, what deep shit he's in
So are you! Because you pay for it.

(30a)
Rabbi Yehuda says: Take out your trash
Leave it there thirty days in a stash
For the sake of this plan
Joshua conquered the land
Should one step in it, you don't owe cash.

(31b)
Reuven strolls with his bucket along
Shimon comes with a beam, straight and long.
Just then BOOM! Hear the smash
Beam and barrel go crash
But we hold neither man in the wrong.

(32a)
Well a beam is quite phallic you know
And a bucket's a place it might go
If a man starts to vex
His poor wife during sex
Does he need to be careful? Or no?

(32a)
Is a man during sex like a beam-
Holder? Is that the case, does it seem?
Maybe he's like a wood
Chopper who (though he should
Have looked out), killed a man, not by scheme?

(32a)
Can you run fast in a public place
Should you slow down, for life's not a race?
If you cause a big spill
You're to blame, so we will
Blame. But pre-shabbat, you've got a case.

(32b)
Chanina would say when the light
Would begin to fade each Friday night:
"Let us go greet the queen
Who has come on the scene
Like a bride. Such a beautiful sight."

(35a)
Can an ox show behavior that's smart?
Can it do more than pull a big cart?
Papa's ox, when with ache,
in its tooth, it would take
Beer and drink 'til the pain would depart.

Trapdoor Day

2009-05-01T18:15:00.001+03:00

Trapdoor day
Awoke before dawn
Wanted to fall through the floor.
Forget the wrong side of the bed--
If only I could get up at all!
Would that it were night, not blasted morning--
Would that I could die here in the desert--
Would that I could fall into sleep, and out of this feeling I'm feeling!

Tears, all day tears, but from the depths of what divine despair?
Rivulets streak my face as I work.
The phone does not ring; I am grateful.
Nobody knocks; I am grateful.
Passing a hallway mirror, I grimace at red eyes, red nose, wet cheeks.
I prepare a face to meet any faces that I meet:
"Fine, fine, fine, and how are YOU?"
I'm full of it today.

At night I eat garlic and nobody kisses me, no one complains.
The chickpeas dance in the pot on the stove, trying to loosen me up.
Chicks, please!
Somehow the radio turns itself on; why am I suddenly singing?
Who's making faces at me in the mirror?
Who's making faces back?
Look who's come out from the trapdoor, hey--
Look who's come out from the trapdoor day!

Love in the Time of Omer (part II)

2009-04-22T00:52:00.003+03:00

The night before I left for camp one junior high school summer, my mother and I stayed up past midnight watching the eight-hour movie version of Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds – a story that was to dominate my views of romantic love for over a decade. I had read the novel earlier that year (I remember hiding the bright orange mass market paperback inside a textbook so I could sneak a few pages during social studies class), and it immediately overwrote everything I knew about Roman Catholic priests, Australia, and of course romance. I have not watched the movie since, but I can still conjure in my mind the grand panoramic views of the endless Australian outback, the soft silk Ashes of Roses gown against Meggie's fiery red hair, and the sublime melancholy of the music that would run through my head all summer long. That was the summer of my first boyfriend, and though I did not take the book with me to camp, I had already memorized its first and last paragraphs:

"There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the price of great pain... or so says the legend...

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it."

These two paragraphs were to become my credo of romantic love, a statement of everything I believed about the human heart. I was determined that I would love just once, but that it would be a grand and majestic love that would demand every ounce of my being. I was sure that this love would be painful—deeply, agonizingly, heart-wrenchingly painful—but that the depths of the pain would be matched by heights of passion and ecstasy. I would put the thorn in my breast and perhaps I would die in so doing, but still I would do it. Still I would do it.

When I graduated from junior high to high school, The Thorn Birds was supplemented by other articles of faith that shaped and hardened my romantic constitution, including Catherine Earnshaw's declaration to Nelly Dean that her "love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary"; a statement by Sartre encountered in a Rebecca Goldstein novel ("Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me…"); and Keats' valorization of a love "forever warm and still to be enjoyed / Forever panting, and forever young." I quote each of these passages from memory as I write this post because I learned them "by heart" – by which I mean that the ink with which these words were written coursed through my veins, beat against my staggering brain, and carved out the channels of each chamber of my heart.

With time, as I have loved and lost and loved and lost again, I suppose I have developed a more sober view of romantic love. Bronte and Keats have been supplanted by the determined calmness attained through great effort of will which I found in Edna St. Vincent Millay ("What lips my lips have kissed and where and why / I have forgotten" – a poem that goes on to invoke Wuthering Heights, I think); at some moments I was even able to adjure myself that "I find this frenzy insufficient reason / for conversation when we meet again" (though I highly doubt that I or Edna ever really believed that was true; what do we have if not for the frenzy?). I have resigned myself (not without kicking and screaming) to Yeats' take-no-prisoners enjoinder that "to be born a woman is to know / although they do not talk of it at school / that we must labor to be beautiful." When I chant Shir Hashirim on Pesach it is not with a heart open to the possibilities of the future, but with a heart weighed down by memories (What men have recited Shir Hashirim to me and where and why / I have forgotten….) And just this morning (while waiting each half hour for my next appointment to arrive at the London Book Fair), I memorized a poem by Jack Gilbert called "Waiting and Finding" (discovered in a recent New Yorker magazine), which I think I shall henceforth regard as my new credo of romantic love -- a poem that, like everything I have quoted until this point, I can now recite "by heart":

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tomtoms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

Like The Thorn Birds, encountered when I was less than half as old as I am now, "Waiting and Finding" relies on a musical metaphor for love. There is Colleen McCullough's "one superlative song," and then there is Gilbert's "perfect, shimmering sound." These two metaphors bookend my thoughts on romantic love until this point in my life, with the latter taking the place of the former. Love is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime song that the whole world stills to listen, but a series of cacophonous rehearsals in which everybody tries to learn how to play their part, and most of us never get it exactly right. The romance of romantic love lies not in the uniqueness of its limited-time-offer-only, but in the guaranteed "fading out and coming again" (enacted by the constant back-and-forth flashes from tomtoms to triangle throughout the first thirteen lines of the poem). For Gilbert, romantic love is romantic not because it requires us to surrender our lives, but because it requires us to live the surrender again and again. Love has poetry in the same way that a sunset has poetry; the color streaks across the sky as the light fades, but then the sun always rises. "The best," a phrase that appears in both texts, is something that costs us our lives for McCullough; but for Gilbert it is inevitably reborn again and again, like the morning light.

Unlike McCullough, for whom life ends when the song dies, Gilbert allows for the silences, and even acknowledges that the silences have their own appeal. As I sit alone in a tiny top-floor London hotel room overlooking a quiet park, scribbling these words in a notebook with my feet curled under me in the corner of a narrow single bed, I have no use for birds and thorns and savage breasts. I am beginning to like the silence – maybe too much.

See also "Love in the Time of Omer" (part I): http://tinyurl.com/c36qvl

Extempore Effusions on the Completion of Masechet Bava Kama: פרקים א-ב

2009-04-16T10:32:00.003+03:00

Perek Aleph: ארבעה אבות נזיקין

(2a)
Four groupings of damage may be
Inflicted on you or on me:
The ox and the pit
Are the fire. That's it?
Oh, the Maveh. The Maveh? You'll see.

(2b)
An ox can do harm in three ways
Horn – he willfully rams. Master pays.
Teeth – he'll eat what he'll find
(If he's yours, you'll be fined)
Foot – He tramples where others must graze.

(4a)
"Be your own bodyguard" that's the law.
Don't extend to your friend a big claw.
One who sleeps, he can be
Flailing dangerously--
He can hurt with his arms, legs and jaw.

(9a)
For a mitzvah, spend up to one third.
Third of all that you've got? Oh my word!
What if then there are three
Mitzvot? How can that be --
You'd be bankrupt. That's clearly absurd.

(10b)
Five men sat on a bench. It stayed strong.
Then a sixth man came ambling along.
He sat down. It went splat
It was Papa, who's fat!
Well, then Papa's the one in the wrong.

(11a)
This one's sad. If a baby's born dead
The placenta takes time, and instead
It comes out one day late
Mom must count days and wait
Til she's pure. Count from when? From the head.

(11b)
If a newborn is torn limb from limb
By a wild beast, say, on a whim.
There's no need to redeem
It would be quite unseem-
Ly. Poor baby! (Poor what's-left-of-him.)

(12b)
Olah, Chatat, Asham – we can't eat
Of their sacrificed burnt altar meat.
But the Shlamim, like most,
You can eat. Make a toast!
To dead animals! Ooh, what a treat.

(14b)
"Dude, your cow trampled on my Tallit!"
"Your Tallit brought my cow to its feet!"
So two men scream and shout.
Does it all even out?
Don't assume it's all so nice and neat.

(15b)
Do not keep a dog in your house
(It could bite off the head of your spouse)
Or a rickety ladder
(It might slip and shatter
And injure much more than a mouse.)

(16a)
When it's time for the Modim prayer, make
Sure you bow – there's a lot here at stake!
If you don't, then your spine
After seven years time
In the grave – it will turn to a snake!

(17a)
Rabbi Yochanan's students would cry:
"Teach us this halacha! How and why!"
He would answer. But he,
When he needed to pee
Would then wait 'til he washed to reply.

Perek Bet: כיצד הרגל מועדת

(17a)
The perilous feet of a beast
Can cause damage – some damage at least.
When it walks it will break
Any jug in its wake
Scatter pebbles and leave your rug creased.

(17a)
Your chickens were dancing in dough
(These were quite jolly chickens, you know.)
They pecked at the batter
Their footprints made splatter
It's full-damage payment you owe.

(17b)
Reuven threw a great jug from on high
While the jug was midair through the sky
Shimon came with a staff
Broke the jug into half
It would break anyway! Jugs don't fly!

(18a)
A dog took a still-flaming cake
Off the coals and proceeded to take
To the haystack his food
Quite a fire ensued
Restitution his master must make.

(18b)
A chicken was dancing in dough
Soon the chicken, it seems, had to go.
Not a nice sight, is it?
Home-made baked chicken shit?
Would you eat it? Ahem, that's a no.

(18b)
A chicken extended its beak
In a vessel of glass. Then it shrieked.
Oh the glass – how it shattered
The pieces were scattered
What havoc a chicken can wreak!

(19b)
A chicken with string 'round its foot
Runs. (A chicken, we know, can't stay put.)
It flutters and breaks
Everything in its wake
Strewing dirt, pebbles, feathers and soot.

(20a)
The cat ate my gymsuit –it's true!
Paula Fox, here's a sugya for you!
Is the way of a cat
To eat something like that?
No? Then cat-owner owes me a few.

(20a)
What if I set up camp in your yard?
I live rent-free when living gets hard.
You're not even aware
That I'm living right there.
I get benefit; you don't get scarred.

(20b)
Rav Chisda asked, "How do we know
If the tenant pays not-in-the-know
Master? Rami bar Chama
Said "Bring my pajama
I'll answer if you serve me. Go."

(21a)
There were orphans who owned a trash heap
There they stored what it is orphans keep.
Some guy built there a castle
Said Nachman, "A hassle
You've caused. And I hold it not cheap!'

(22a)
A camel is carrying flax
Which ignites in some hot burning wax
That is hung at the door
Of a man's roadside store--
"Was it Chanukah then," you must ask.

(23b)
A cow enters a fine fancy home
Not a place where a cow tends to roam!
Rubs its back on the wall
And erases the scrawl
Of the mural. Who repaints the home?

(25a)
The Torah is from where we know
A principle known as Dayo
If Miriam were spat
At by father, well that
Would mean one week. And God rules just so.

(26b)
A man has a rock on his chest
He gets up and it falls from his breast.
Is the damage his fault?
He meant not to assault!
He pays Nezek, but not all the rest.

(26b)
A baby is thrown off a roof
It resembles a comic book spoof:
Below, someone comes toward
It with quite a large sword.
Slashing baby midair. Babe goes poof!

(27a)
Someone falls off a roof and he lands
In a woman (Er… not in her hands)
What was done has been done
(And perhaps it was fun)
Are they married? This was not the plan!

לברכה ולא לקללה (Taanit 7a)

2009-04-12T09:23:00.002+03:00

It says, "May my words come down like rain" and it also says, "may my speech be like the dew" (Deuteronomy 32:2). If one is a proper Torah scholar, God's words fall like dew; and if not, they smite him like rain. (Taanit 7a)

It is Saturday night of Chol Hamoed Pesach, just a few days after we recited the prayer for dew, and I am sitting at my kitchen table drinking hot tea and reading an article about Talmudic stories. The article mentions the prayers for rain and dew in Masechet Taanit, so I find myself opening up my Gemara and reviewing that sugya. The Talmud is trying to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the two halves of Deuteronomy 32:2. Do God's words come down like rain (which falls with violent force) or like dew (which descends gently)? This depends on whether the Torah scholar is proper or not. The Talmud goes on to explain that a proper Torah scholar is one who studies "for the sake of God's name," and not for any ulterior motives. If the scholar studies for the sake of God's name, Torah becomes "an elixir of life"; if not, it becomes an "elixir of death." I hope that I am a proper Torah scholar, but (rather ominously) the ensuing events suggest otherwise….

Why is Torah analogized to water? It is written, "All who are thirsty shall go to the water" (Isaiah 55:1) to tell you: Just as water falls from a high place to a low place, so too does Torah not endure except in someone who is exceedingly humble. (Taanit 7a)

I have drunk my tea to the lees and I am thirsty again, so I walk over to my special Pesach hot water heater. But there is only a small amount of water left; it is time to refill the heater. First, though, I will lift up the lid and pour the remaining hot water into my cup. I am still thinking about the article I am reading and I fail to pay attention to what I am doing; the next thing I know, burning hot water is pouring down on the hand holding my glass tea cup, and I leap and yelp in agony and watch as my scorched hand turns a deep red.

Why is Torah analogized to fire? It is written, "Behold my word is like fire, declares the Lord" (Jeremiah 23:29). To teach you: Just as a flame does not ignite on its own, so too does Torah not endure in one who is alone. (Taanit 7a)

I feel as if my hand has just been singed by fire, and I am not sure what to do. Whom can I ask? Rashi explains that "one who is alone" refers to someone who has no study partner to challenge and sharpen his or her learning. It is true that if I had a study partner, that person might be able to offer assistance in just such a situation! I am hurting too much to think straight, but somehow I manage to pull the brown packaging tape off my freezer (which is prohibitively marked "CHAMETZ"), grab a frozen bag of string beans, and place it on my burning hand. The coldness feels soothing, but when I lift the bag for a moment, I am distressed to see that my hand is covered by several protruding welts, reminiscent, perhaps, of the plague of boils…..

If a scorched disciple [צורבא מרבנן] is boiling, it is Torah that is boiling in him, as it is written, "Behold my word is like fire, declares the Lord (Jeremiah 23:29). (Taanit 4a)

A term often used in the Talmud for a young Torah scholar is צורבא מרבנן, which literally means "a scorched one of the rabbis." As I rummage through my bathroom cabinet for aloe vera gel, I wonder if I now qualify for this distinction. Perhaps I do not remember standing at Sinai, but I certainly received the water of Torah in an experience of fiery flames. And I certainly learned a good lesson tonight (albeit a lesson I seem to need to keep learning again and again). My hand hurts too much to concentrate on studying, so I put aside my book and decide to go to bed. I hope that the rain is truly over and gone, and that when I wake up in the morning, the world will be bathed in gentle dew.

Drawing Out: From Exodus to Exegesis

2009-04-07T10:57:00.003+03:00

"By the merit of the righteous women who lived in that generation, the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt." So teaches the midrash in Tanchuma Pikudei 9, which goes on to tell the story of how Egyptian oppression was so great that the Israelite men lost all desire to sleep with their wives. The women, in an attempt to rectify the situation, went out to the fields to seduce their husbands. How did they do it? They would go out and draw water, and God would arrange that small fish should enter their jugs. The women cooked the fish and carried them out to their husbands in the field. When they had eaten and drunk, they took their mirrors and looked into them with their husbands. She would say, "I am more beautiful than you," and then he would say, "I am more beautiful than you," and as a result, they would awaken in each other desire, and they were fruitful and they multiplied.

This midrash tells the story of how the women succeeded in re-kindling desire in their husbands, thereby drawing them out from the misery of slavery. By the merit of these women who managed to draw out their husbands, God in turn drew the children of Israel out of Egypt.

This emphasis on "drawing out" finds its echo in the midrash on the four sons which we recite as part of the Haggadah. To draw out is the engage and to arouse someone's interest. Of the four sons, two naturally engage, and two are unable to do so. That is, the wise and wicked sons are eager to engage through their questions. They seem to genuinely want to know (whether out of intellectual curiosity or hard-nosed cynicism) what the rituals of Pesach are about. In contrast, the simple son and the one who does not know how to ask are able to engage only on the most minimal level, if at all. Mah zot? asks the Tam; and his brother cannot say even that.

The responses given to the sons reflect an awareness of their level of engagement. The wise and wicked sons, who have no problem saying whatever is on their mind, are given responses that signal restraint. The wise son is instructed in "the laws of Pesach, that we do not have an afikoman after the Pesach." Of all the laws of Pesach, why should this one be singled out? It seems important to teach the wise son is told that there are limits; no matter how much he may want to engage, even Kol Hamarbeh L'saper has its bounds. The wicked son is restrained even more forcefully -- his teeth are blunted, and he is told that even if he had been around at the exodus, he would have been excluded from redemption. God would have left him back in Egypt. He would not have been drawn out.

The simple son and the interrogatively-challenged one, in contrast, are drawn out -- they are given a version of the Pesach story that is far longer than anything they were able to articulate. The simple son is quoted a verse that serves as a one-sentence summary of the whole story: "It was with a mighty hand that the Lord brought us out of Egypt from the house of bondage." The response to the son who does not know how to ask, too, focuses on the process of coming out of Egypt: "This is on account of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt." With these answers, the father is to draw out those sons who are unable to engage deeply on their own.

The essence of the exodus--that is, what physically happened in Egypt--was a process of being "drawn out" from bondage. The metaphor most commonly invoked is that of giving birth -- Egypt was the birth canal of our people, we were "delivered" only after painful "labor," and the story itself would not have happened if not for the crucial intervention of righteous midwives. But perhaps another, equally-apt metaphor is that of exegesis. Exegesis, too, is a form of "drawing out" -- we draw out meaning from the Biblical text by means of our interpretations of that text .This is what we do at the Seder when we study the midrashim on parshat Bikkurim that form the core of the Maggid. We read meanings that others have drawn out of these verses, and we draw out our own meanings. The word "exegesis" comes from the Greek words ex (out) and hegeisthai (to lead) – exegesis is a form of leading out. Thus exegesis is, etymologically, an exodus. By engaging in exegesis, the seder enables us to experience the exodus on a whole new level -- we ourselves perform the act of "drawing out" that defined this key moment in the history of our people.

The Hebrew word for exegesis, midrash, comes from the root darash. It is interesting to note that the first time the verb darash appears in the Torah is in Parshat Toldot, where we are told that Rivka, who was experiencing difficult labor pains, went to "seek out" or "draw out" God. Rivka was thus the first person to engage in midrash. Maybe it really is by the merit of righteous women that we were redeemed, as the midrash puts it. Maybe the connection between the two metaphors --birth and exegesis-- is closer than we might have thought. And finally, maybe by engaging in midrash at the seder we are, through our acts of "drawing out," becoming God's partner not just in creation but also redemption.

The Way It Still Is: An Excerpt

2009-04-07T10:51:00.001+03:00

The below is taken directly from The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven (Translated by Dalya Bilu; Melville House, 2009)

Interviewer: So how did it happen that you went to study law?
Feminist writer: It was a coincidence. With women, you know, things happen by chance. There was a man I wanted to impress.
Interviewer: Did you want him to fall in love with you?
Feminist writer: I knew I didn't have a hope.
Interviewer: But surely he must have been impressed….
Feminist writer: He didn't even know I was studying. You see, he wasn't in the country at all, there was no contact between us. I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
Interviewer: And afterwards?
Feminist writer: What afterwards? There is no afterwards. There is no earlier and later in love. When he felt like summoning me, I went to be his mistress. That's the way it still is.

מנחת יהודה וירושלים (Malachi 3:4)

2009-04-03T00:17:00.002+03:00

It is Thursday night before Shabbat HaGadol, and the air in Jerusalem is charged. I decide that it is not enough to listen to the rabbis discussing the halachot of Pesach all day on Reshet Moreshet, my favorite frum radio station. I want to be a part of it all! Besides, the weather took a sudden turn today -- when I got to the office (after a morning seminar on the history of the Haggadah), I removed several layers of clothing and turned on my fan. For several hours I have been trying to concentrate on work, but I keep hearing Wordsworth echoing in my ears: "All things that love the sun are out of doors." I simply cannot bear to miss the final hour of daylight. And so I push aside the pile of contracts on my desk, empty the heavier books out of my backpack, and set off in the direction of the center of town, light on my feet and humming my favorite Chad Gadya melody.

My thoughts and wishes bend towards the shuk, where I intend to buy fruits and vegetables for Shabbat; but on the way I stop in a clothing store or two, hoping that I might find something colorful to wear for Pesach. I generally buy clothes only before the major holidays; this way, I feel like I am buying not just for myself, but lichvod ha-chag. I come to refer to my various items of clothing as "last year's Pesach skirt" or "the lace shirt from Sukkot two years ago." The Talmud teaches that a man is obligated to bring joy to the members of his household before Pesach. What brings joy to men? Wine. And what brings joy to women? Colorful clothing (at least in Bavel). I walk into a store where countless young mothers with elaborately-wrapped head coverings are balancing babies on their hips and hangars between their teeth. I pull a purple skirt off the rack, hold it against my waist, and bring it to the register. Clothes in Israel are very poorly made and very cheap, which is why I like to shop here. After a year or two of wear, I have a fresh set of curtains for my windows and a convenient excuse to buy something new.

By now it is after 8pm, but I am sure the shuk will be open late, as it always is on Thursday nights. This week the regular pre-Shabbat crowds are even more frenzied: the countdown to Pesach has begun. "Pesach magiya, Pesach magiya," one vendor shouts as he hawks pots and pans and dishes and sink racks. One stand over, the vendor at my favorite bakery yells out, "Thirty pitas for ten shekel, thirty pitas for ten shekel, rabotai, don't miss out!" I smile at the antiphonal fugue created by their overlapping cries: "Pesach is coming" and "Thirty pitas for ten shekel." The words for "don't miss out" are "אל תחמיצו," which literally means, "Don't become chametz!" I wonder if he realizes what he is saying.

Everyone in the shuk is buying paper goods and aluminum cake pans, and some shoppers have already begun stocking up on the ubiquitous "matzah ashira" coconut cookies, which make my stomach turn. (On Pesach my diet usually consists of fruits, raw vegetables, yogurt, ice cream, and chocolate bars; I won't eat anything with matzah or anything that is made especially for Pesach. Matzah pancakes? Matzah pizza? I'll wait a week for the real thing.) I buy one knife, one spoon, one fork, and one sponge, as is possible only in the shuk. I cannot help but notice the tremendous poverty around me: the stooping old woman in a kerchief who asks the string bean vendor to give her, for free, the shriveled cut-up beans that he is planning to discard anyway; the old man rattling his cup and asking passers-by for just one shekel; the tired mother who tries to bargain down the price of the eight peppers she is buying to cook for Shabbat. "I will surely open the floodgates of the sky for you and pour down blessings upon you" (Malachi 3:10), God promises in this week's Haftarah – we are waiting with open arms.

For Shabbat I want to make a fruit salad, so I take note of all the new spring fruits: Thick-skinned oranges have replaced the clementines I carried around in my backpack all winter, and the apples are big and shiny again. There are passionfruit instead of pomegrantes, and the grapes are small and shriveled but the pomellos beam like giant yellow suns. One stand has a sign that reads "הגיעה הפיינק ליידי," the pink lady has come! Who is the pink lady, I wonder? הנא אנוכי שולח לכם – who, exactly? Then I see the arrow pointing to a carton of bright pink apples and I figure it out.

Perhaps the best sign that Chag Ha-Aviv is upon us are the strawberries piled up in mounds so high that they block my view of the vendors standing behind them. I buy my strawberries from a man with stained red fingers who sells them for 5 shekel a kilo, which means about 40 strawberries for a dollar. "Do you eat strawberries yourself?" I ask him, and he looks down at the mountain of red fruit in front of him and grimaces. He uses a dustpan to shovel the strawberries into flimsy plastic containers – I buy two kilos, and never have trouble finishing them over the course of the week. I try to remember to come to the shuk with a big tupperware so I can transfer my strawberries immediately; they are the most fragile of fruits, and inevitably they get beaten-up on the bus when not suitably protected.

I know that I am finished shopping in the shuk when I feel like I've been doing Avodah b'pharech: my back is breaking, my shoulders are aching, and there is no room in my bag for even just one of those bright yellow lemons beckoning to me from across the alley. Dayenu. Exhausted, I trek down to the bus stop, adjust the canvas bags on both my shoulders, and breathe a sigh of relief as my bus pulls up and I get on. The driver winks at my bare shoulders but I insist on paying anyway, unwilling to accept his pass-over. I make my way down the aisle and observe that all the Haredi men are learning Arvei Psachim, anxiously guarding the empty seats next to them lest a woman like me sit down. No matter. The bus driver has the radio on loudly – a rabbi is expounding on the lengths to which a person should go when cleaning for Pesach. I take a seat, put down my bags, and look out the window at a city poised once again, as in each generation, to re-experience redemption.

I Wish I Could Seduce You in the Nude (Bava Kama 86b)

2009-03-25T10:00:00.004+02:00

Yesterday's Daf (Bava Kama 86) considers the question of whether a naked person can be embarrassed. The Talmud begins by quoting a Braita which states, "If one embarrasses someone while he is naked, he [the embarrasser] is liable, and embarrassing someone naked is not the same as embarrassing someone when he is clothed…. Our master said: If one embarrasses someone when he is naked, he is liable. But is a naked person capable of being embarrassed? (?ערום בר בושת הוא) Rather, this refers to a case where the wind has bunched up his clothes and a person comes and lifts his clothing further, thereby embarrassing him."

The Talmud, although at first asserting that it is indeed possible to embarrass someone while that person is naked, goes on to question this assumption. As Rashi explains, "Since he does not care about walking around naked in front of others, what does he have to be embarrassed about?" Presumably a person who does not mind if others see him naked is immune to other people's opinions of him, and is therefore not susceptible to embarrassment. The Talmud is then left with the question as to why the Braita taught that a person is indeed liable for embarrassing someone who is naked, and concludes that this was a person who was at first only partially naked. The embarrasser comes along and exposes him even further, and thus he is considered to be liable.

The discussion of the relationship between nakedness and embarrassment immediately conjures, in my mind, the seduction scene in the garden of Eden, where we are told that "The two of them were naked (ערומים), the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame (יתבוששו). Now the serpent was the shrewdest (ערום) of all the wild beasts that the Lord had made." Adam and Eve, when they are naked, are not capable of experiencing embarrassment. They do not view their sexuality as something to hide, and thus they walk about freely in the garden, unclothed. Once they eat of the fruit, however, they become capable of embarrassment, and their first act is to cover themselves. In this new state of self-consciousness, they realize that they have something to hide, and they hide it. Milton gives eloquent voice to the moment of Adam's awareness of the need to clothe himself:

But let us now, as in bad plight, devise
What best may, for the present, serve to hide
The parts of each other that seem most
To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen--
Some tree, whose broad smooth leaves, together sewed,
And girded on our loins, may cover round
Thos middle parts, that this new comer, Shame,
There sit not, and reproach us as unclean. (Book IX lines 1091-1098)

Shame is the key word in this passage, suggesting that the major difference between before and after Adam and Eve eat the fruit is whether or not they are capable of embarrassment. Before the serpent came on the scene, Adam and Eve were completely comfortable with one another. Their sexuality was nothing to be ashamed of; it was part and parcel of who they were. Jewish tradition does not hold that humanity discovered sexuality only after they ate the fruit; rather, as Rashi states, the snake was impelled to tempt Eve in the first place because "he saw them [Adam and Eve] in naked intercourse, and he desired her." As Rashi's statement teaches us, Adam and Eve had sexual relations before they ate the fruit, before they were capable of being embarrassed.

I wonder about this totally innocent, un-self-conscious sexuality. What was it like? For one, there was probably not much seduction involved. Adam and Eve were like a little boy and a girl playing together naked in a sandbox, unaware that there is anything of which to be ashamed. (Interestingly, right after discussing whether a naked person can be embarrassed, the Daf proceeds with the question of whether a minor (קטן) is capable of embarrassment.) I imagine that at this point Adam and Eve had a relationship of total intimacy, in which there were no barriers separating them from one another. After all, Eve had just been created from Adam's rib, and so in their relationship with each other, they retained the memory of this formerly conjoined state. They were not really two separate beings quite yet, because they shared everything. And they could not be embarrassed yet because embarrassment involves the act of exposing, whereas they were already fully exposed at all times, both in their sameness and in their differentness. (It is interesting to note that their different parts, in the Torah, are referred to as "their embarrassings," as in Deut. 25:11-12, a verse that is frequently quoted in Bava Kama: "If two men get into a fight with each other and the wife of one comes up to save her husband and puts out her hand and seizes him by his embarrassings [במבושיו], you shall cut off her hand." "Embarrassings" is understood to mean genitals, though the word itself comes from Boshet.)

The genitals are not a site of Boshet until after the serpent, when Adam and Eve know a more mature, self-conscious sexuality. Now their differences are something to conceal; and now, presumably, they can flirt and seduce and play games with one another. They are no longer Arum in the sense of naked; they are Arum in the sense of shrewd. This was not God's original intention for humanity, of course. This was not how God envisioned the relationship was to be between man and his help-meet. And most importantly, this was not what God expected when He told them, in the final verse before the serpent comes on to the scene, "Thus shall a man leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, so that they become one flesh."

I find God's injunction very perplexing in the wake of what follows. After all, it is all very well and good to command man and woman to become one flesh when they have no self-consciousness and no shame and they prance around the garden without a stitch. But I cannot help but wonder: Is this ideal really attainable after Adam and Eve become capable of experiencing shame? Can they really become one being once their differences are a source of self-conscious embarrassment and seductive allure? Or, to phrase the question somewhat more provocatively, are intimacy and eroticism really compatible with one another?

Most (though thankfully not all!) of what I know about seduction comes from literature, and if there is anything I have learned, it is the following: Seduction requires clothing. All the great seduction scenes involve some sort of strip tease. In Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes," my favorite literary seduction, Porphyro hides in Madeleine's chamber and gazes at Madeleine, witnessing the following:

Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed.

The poem's attention is not on the flesh but on the clothing. We do not know what body parts become exposed (nor would we want to know!); we are told only of the unclasped jewels, the loosened bodice, and the rich attire that falls to the floor. This marshalling of elaborate sartorial detail as a form of restraint is of course the source of the poem's seductive power. We, like Porphyro, are in Madeleine's thrall.

This preoccupation with sartorial detail is true of nearly every seduction scene I can recall. Consider Billy Collins' "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," where the poet, engaged in this very project, tells us that

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Dickinson's nakedness is the speaker's ultimate destination, but the entire poem is preoccupied with the journey there. Likewise, Robert Herrick acknowledges in "Upon Julia's Clothes" that what catches his eye about Julia is how she moves in her clothing:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.

And if we consider the most vividly-imagined seduction in the Bible (second only to Eden, perhaps), we are told that "Potiphar's wife would each day try [to attract] Joseph: The clothes she wore in the morning she would not wear in the evening, and the clothes she wore in the evening she would not wear in the morning" (B. Yoma 35b). In case the Talmud's point is lost on us, Rashi clarifies two terms here: "To try" means "to seduce" (thank you, Rashi) and "the clothes" were "for him" (what would we do without you?). The Biblical account relates that Joseph, when he flees, leaves one of his garments with her (ויעזוב בגדו אצלה), perhaps a sign that he refuses to take part in these games of seduction which are all about clothing.

It is often noted that the Hebrew word for clothing, בגד, comes from the same root as the word for "treachery." Clothes are a way of deceiving and tricking; thus Tamar "took off her widow's garb, covered her face with a veil, and wrapped herself up" (Genesis 38:14) in order to seduce Judah. It is not surprising that clothes play such a role in seduction because seduction, too, necessarily involves duplicity. To seduce is to play a game of revelation and concealment; it is to alternately expose and then hide, as in the classic case of the strip tease. But therein lies the rub, because if there is something that you are hiding, then you cannot be completely transparent. So long as you are alternately revealing and concealing, then you are not sharing everything with the other person. Thus seductiveness precludes intimacy.

The converse, I fear, is also true: intimacy precludes seductiveness. If you expose everything and keep nothing from the other person, you lose your allure. As a dear friend once told me, there is nothing seductive about a person who walks around naked all the time. There is nothing exciting about a person who tells you everything about himself, or makes herself completely available from the start. Is a knowing half-smile not infinitely more alluring than an ear-to-ear grin?

I do not have an answer to this quandary. As a person who values honesty and transparency in all my relationships, and yet who also strives for the deepest form of connection with another person, I find this matter deeply troubling. As the Talmud ultimately tells us, one cannot be naked and also be embarrassed. How can we help but long for the intimacy and utter lack of self-consciousness that Adam and Eve knew in the garden? And how can we resist the temptation to reach for the fruit and gaze, mesmerized, as that fragrant bodice rustles to the floor?

Why I Leyn: A Manifesto

2009-03-17T10:01:00.005+02:00

Last Thursday night I was waiting at a bus stop in Givat Shaul, practicing the leyning that I had xeroxed onto a few folded sheets of paper. Moses was late in coming down the mountain, and the bus was late in coming to our part of Jerusalem, so I went ahead with the golden calf. Although I was chanting very quietly, almost inaudibly, I nevertheless managed to arouse the attention of the two Haredi young men who were waiting with me on the street corner. "Listen to her," one of them said to the other in Hebrew. "I have heard there are girls who do that! Weird, weird. Can you believe it?" I lowered my voice even more, conscious that once again I had become a Curiosity (not to mention a girl!).

I am aware, though, that it is not just among Haredi men that I am regarded as "weird" for my dedication to reading Torah. Anyone who has ever lived with me (including my Catholic college roommate, who knew how to leyn herself after four years of sharing a suite) has inevitably asked me, at some point or another, "Why do you do that? Why spend so much time going over the same thing again and again? What's the point?" And yet for me, I cannot imagine a life without reading Torah. If not for leyning, as I see it, what would be the point?

Reading Torah, for one thing, is a way of structuring my life so that I am always attuned to the rhythm of the Torah reading cycle, in the same way that davening keeps us attuned to the cycle of light and darkness. V'higita bo yomam valayla, Joshua charges the people (Joshua 1:8) – you should recite Torah day and night. When I practice a little bit of Torah reading each day, I ensure that the words of Torah are always running through my mind. As a result, I find myself quoting verses that suddenly become relevant in other contexts, making jokes that invoke the parsha, and even occasionally choosing what I will eat on Shabbat based on which foods are mentioned in the coming week's reading. This, for me, is the true way of following Rav Ami's interpretation of Proverbs 22:18, which states that words of Torah should be "in your belly, that they be set together on your lips." Explains Rav Ami, "When do you preserve words of Torah in your belly? Whey they are set together constantly on your lips (Eruvin 54a).

I do believe that it is by leyning that Torah is best remembered. Only when you learn Torah along with the cantillations do you ensure that you never accidentally omit a word or change around vowels or stresses when reading. No one who has leyned the first aliyah of Trumah would ever say "v'aSU li mikdash" (or at least I should hope not). By setting Torah to music, Torah develops a rhythm and a life-force of its own, infused with human breath. The words come to life off the page, as if the letters of the scroll have suddenly arisen from their fixed places and begun to dance, gaily waving their crowns. This is how I feel sometimes when I am leyning an aliyah that I have truly mastered. (Note: This happens very rarely; I am no grandmaster, though I am related to a few of them!) I feel like I am not leyning the Torah, but that the Torah is leyning me, carrying me aloft on its eagle wings. I think of this as a "leyner's high," similar to a "runner's high." After a few verses of leyning an aliyah well, I begin to feel like I am flying, carried forwards by the words that are singing out from me in full-throated ease. (Aye, Keats. It was the nightingale, and not the eagle!)

Leyning Torah is also a hobby that fits quite well into my life. I learn not from a Tikun but from xeroxes. These xeroxes are mostly courtesy of Random House, where my like-mindedly frum colleague and I used to share a Tikun Simanim, stored on the shelf between our cubicles. Each week we’d go together to the xerox machine and photocopy our respective aliyot. There was no Genizah, so I saved all of those pages. I went on to bring them with me to Israel, where a very organized friend encouraged me to sort them into color-coded vinyl sleeves by parsha, arranged in two great looseleaf binders. Each week I pick out the pages for that particular parsha and carry them with me wherever I go. Since I tend to live like a turtle, carrying much of my life in the heavy L.L. Bean backpack that I have owned since high school, I’m grateful not to have to shoulder the extra weight. In addition, I’ve discovered that xeroxed leyning is the perfect reading material to bring to a party, where entering with a book may be taboo. But who would notice a couple of folded sheets of paper in my back pocket? And who would notice if I slip off to the corner for a few minutes to practice, reveling in whatever it is I am leyning?

Of course, there are aliyot that I enjoy more than others. I have my favorites, and generally they are other people's favorites as well, which results in a fair amount of alpha-male style competition. The most desirable aliyot are generally the narratives with the most intense dramas: the temptation in the garden, the binding of Isaac, the rape of Dina, the seduction of Judah, the revelation of Joseph, the night of the Exodus, the splitting of the sea, the golden calf. Would that I could leyn them all!

Around this time of year, when we are deep into the wilderness of Mishkan building instructions, the competition dies down. And yet I have to confess that I, for one, love leyning the vast tracts of Mishkan material, and try to take on as much as possible! Leyning an aliyah from Vayakhel-Pekudei, as I see it, is a bit like reciting the Avoda service on Yom Kippur – the recitation becomes a reenactment. In her mind-boggling article "The Yom Kippur Avoda within the Female Enclosure," Bonna Devora Haberman argues that this part of the high holiday liturgy, the prayer leader becomes symbolically identified with the high priest in the Holy of Holies:

"The prayer leader does not lay her hands on a bull, a ram, or goats; she does not sprinkle blood; she does not enter the Holy of Holies. Indeed, she does not displace her two parallel touching stocking feet even when fully prostrating herself on the ground as part of the Avoda. She is absorbed in a standing prayer as the representative of the community. Recounting the acts with the intentionality of prayer substitutes for performing them. The Avoda is a symbolic representation of the service performed first in the desert Tabernacle, then in the holy Temple in Jerusalem through a gesticulated, cantillated community prayer experience."

Just as the prayer leader on Yom Kippur symbolically reenacts the rituals performed by the high priest in the Temple, so too does the Torah reader of the Mishkan parshiyot symbolically reenact the building of the this structure. This is why the leyning of the Mishkan, more so than any other section in the Torah, must be absolutely flawless. After all, the Mishkan is described in the most specific of dimensional detail, dictated from God on high: "And on the front side, to the east, fifty cubits: fifteen cubits of hangings on the one flank, with their three posts and their three sockets, and fifteen cubits of hangings on the other flank--on each side of the gate of the enclosure--with their three posts and their three sockets" (Exodus 38: 13-15). To recite these verses is to construct in words the Mishkan that the Isrealites built in the desert, much as Coleridge's speaker sought to recreate in measured language the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan:

With music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

Beware – because words construct verbal edifices. Torah is the blueprint God used in creating the world, as we learn in Breishit Rabbah, and so the way we read Torah determines the way we construct the world. If we mispronounce even one syllable of Vayakhel-Pekudei, if we read, say, forty cubits instead of fifty, then the entire edifice could come tumbling down. (Or at least so I tell myself, as I practice this week's leyning.) And furthermore: If Rabbi Akiva could find meaning to every "Et" in the Torah, must we not be sure to pronounce each one properly? Think of how many drashot hang on every word (if not every letter; if not every tip of the yud) in the Torah. We who leyn are playing with fire, much like Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua in the house of Elisha's father -- for were not the words of Torah given in fire on Sinai? (Tosafot to B. Chagigah 15a).

Reading Torah, I am arguing, is a weighty responsibility; but it is also a great source of pleasure. Each time I leyn, I discover new puzzles in the text: I muse on why a particular syllable is stressed, or why a concept seems to repeat itself. These questions inform my writing and thinking all week, and carry me into Shabbat. Most weeks, the very last thing I do before Shabbat is swim. Generally I am down to the wire, and I only have about twenty minutes in the pool. But just before I dive in, I go over my leyning once more, so that I will be immersed in words of Torah as I cut through the water. One Friday afternoon a few months ago, I found myself dreaming of a pool that would enable me to practice my leyning while swimming. In such a pool, I envisioned, there would be seven lanes (leyns?), one corresponding to each aliyah. A series of overhead projectors would flash the words of each aliyah onto the bottom pool surface of each lane, so that the swimmer could follow along as she made her way face-down through the water. Now there's an invention to rival the pleasure domes of Kubla Khan, and the hanging curtains of the Mishkan!

Here Lives a Happy Family

2009-03-13T00:58:00.005+02:00

With colorful strokes of Crayola
Depicting six stick figures holding hands
Across a white sheet of paper,
The family below her has hung
On their door this sign:
"Here Lives a Happy Family"

Each evening Clara climbs the stairs
On her return from teaching school
(teaching students the age of one of
Those stick figures, she figures)
Up up up the stairs, tired from the day
Panting with the weight of
Books and papers and the groceries
She's picked up on her way
(one onion, two apples, a bag of pasta,
a quart of milk). Up up up
Passing, each evening, their sign:
"Here Lives a Happy Family."

Clara's door is just a door. No signs.
Her mother has told her "Women who live alone
Should not announce it to the world!
You have to be careful." Clara does not need
A sign, anyway – no one comes to visit,
And she herself knows well which door is hers:
The apartment one flight up from
"Here Lives a Happy Family."

Clara hears the rhythms of their life
Through the floorboards. The mother
Wakes first, heats the whistling teapot.
She rouses her children one by one, each time
A little louder: "henry Henry HENRY
You must get up Get Up GET UP"
(Clara wakes each day with Henry.)
Then the father leaves. He shuts the door
Behind him: "Bye kids!" –BANG.
It is not hard for him to go; he knows
He will return twelve hours later, he
Will find them just the same,
Clamoring over the table behind
The happy-holding crayoned hands:
"Here Lives a Happy Family."

Clara laces up her boots,
Swings a bag over her shoulder
Bites into an apple (breakfast), locks her door,
And sets off down the stairs at half past six.
She tries to dart past, tries to look away, but still--
She always glances, always turns around
As if she has forgotten something, dropped
Something behind her – or ahead:
Here Lives a Happy Family.

The Sexy Widow (Ketubot 65a), my costume this Purim

2009-03-10T11:01:00.007+02:00

My translation from Ruth Calderon's Hashuk, Habayit, VeHalev: Aggadot Talmudiot (Keter, 2002)

Long-limbed Choma crossed the entrance hall of the courthouse with purposeful strides. Her thick mass of black hair stubbornly peeked out of her kerchief to see what was going on in the world. Even now, when dressed in black mourning clothes, she was enveloped in the same loveliness -- as simple as fresh baked bread and just as appealing. It was impossible to mistake her gait for anyone else's. The walls swayed like young lambs to the rhythm of her heels.

That morning the courtroom was empty. It was the height of summer, and even market day did not bring anyone to plead their case in court. Peddlers did not even bother to tip their scales before the handful of buyers who made their way through the humid heat. Lead weights carved in the shape of ducks, each one a bit larger than the next, sat still like a family of birds who had fallen asleep, their beaks tucked into their gray metal backs.

The gaming stands, which were usually noisy and crowded, were deserted. The game boards and the mosaic tiles lay at rest. The pigeon racers scattered seeds to their pigeons, who pecked aimlessly at the emptiness. No one showed up to gamble.

On a day like this, the courtroom effectively became a study house. Rava reviewed his learning on his own. If only he could learn with Abayey, his study partner, they would be able to knock off a difficult section of the Gemara from Tiberias. Rava felt Abayey's absence like a phantom limb that continued to ache. Without Abayey, he grew more distant from the world. He missed his friend's learnedness, the way he always looked at everything through a different lens. Rava reviewed the passage on "presumed despair," part of the laws about returning lost objects to their rightful owners. He tried to recall Abayey's voice, his manner of speaking, his gait.

The beadle who was nodding off by the doorway almost did not notice Choma when she entered. The beadle roused suddenly and announced: "Next case: The provision of alimony to Choma, the widow of Abayey."

It was difficult for Rava to hear the name of his beloved friend spoken aloud. He smiled as he remembered how Abayey used to juggle eight eggs, throwing one into the air and catching another, without any of the fragile shells touching one another. How when they used to walk through the market, Abayey would shake hands with even those elders who were not Jewish. Rava sat in the judge's seat at the front of the courtroom and recited his oath of justice. The responsibility of presiding in court weighed heavily on him. He had chosen this life in spite of the wishes of his wife, who had wanted him to go into business. She wanted wealth and he came home with empty pockets, hoping only to return in the evening as he had left in the morning: free from sin or error. He wondered to himself whether it was in fact an exaggeration to compare the fear instilled in the heart of the judge to the fear of death. Was it really as intense?

While he was still mulling it over, Choma was sitting silently, her hands folded in her lap. Rava did not know how to address her after the beadle had retired to the side room to eat, when they were left alone in the courtroom. "Rule on the alimony due to me," the woman said. Rava knew that it was his duty to rule on the amount of money that the widow would receive from her husband's heirs, an amount that would ensure that she could maintain the same standard of living as she had when her husband was alive. He ruled accordingly. "Rule on an additional sum due to me for wine." For wine? He and Rava never drank wine when they were together. He grew suspicious, and looked at Choma intently. He used his friend's nickname in an attempt to show the grounds for his claim: "I know Nachmani. He wasn't a wine drinker…. You're telling me that he would serve it to you?" Choma stood up. The dark fabric of her dress glided down the curves of her body and stopped at her ankles, swaying slightly. When she stood upright before him, she was taller than he remembered her. The thread of justice hung taut between them.

The woman paraded over to the judge's bench, keeping her eyes fixed squarely upon him. He looked at her dark lips and heard her voice, low and slightly hoarse: "I swear, my lord, he used to serve me wine in a goblet this big." As she spoke, she flung her hand above her in a deliberate motion, and the sleeve of her black dress bunched at her shoulder and revealed her arm all the way up to her elbow. For a split second, the smooth whiteness of her arm was bared. Splendor enveloped the courtroom. Rava looked at Choma. The whole world faded into a blurry background, and the arm glowed. The woman and her light attracted him with a force that was beyond his control. Somehow he managed to turn from his seat and escape from the courtroom as if chased by a demon. As he fled he muttered something unintelligible about how he was unfit to serve as a judge and about the wine that she would either receive or not. From the entrance he turned back to look at her – a dark and erect figure, her kerchief pulled back and her hair exposed, enveloped in a great light.

When he came to his home he found his wife, the daughter of Rav Chisda, seated beside the stove. Rava stood behind her, and although it was not his usual way, he grabbed her and carried her off to bed. He seemed like a total stranger when, without saying a word, he took off his clothes, peeled back her garments, and ravished his wife. When he later lifted himself up and dragged himself to his room, she was arranging her dress, blushing like a young girl. There was one moment of serenity in the house. Then suddenly a shadow passed over his wife's brow and she asked: "Who was in the courtroom just now?" He could not bring himself to lie to her. "Choma, the wife of Abayey."

His wife's face lost its softness. Rejecting the hand he offered, she ripped the lock off the bureau and left the house in a frenzy. The door to the courtyard slammed behind her.

Rava did not move from where he stood. He did not see how his wife chased Choma to the outskirts of Machoza, and he did not hear how she screamed, "You killed three husbands and now you've come to kill mine too!"

This story is based on a sugya from Ketubot 65a, translated here:

Choma, the wife of Abayey, came before Rava.
She said to him: "Rule on the food due to me in alimony." So he did.
[She said:] "Rule on the wine due to me."
He said to her: "I know Nachmani" (a nickname for Abayey), "He wouldn't serve you wine."
She said to him: "I swear, my lord, he used to serve me wine in a goblet this big."
When she demonstrated what she meant by lifting her arm, her arm became exposed.
And a great light fell upon the courtroom.
Rava stood up and went home
He demanded sex from his wife, the daughter of Rav Chisda.
The daughter of Rav Chisda said to him: "Who was in the courtroom today?"
He said to her: "Choma, the wife of Abayey."
She [Rava's wife] went after her [Choma] and beat her with the lock of a chest until she was driven out of Machoza.
She [Rava's wife] said to her [Choma]: "You killed three men, and now you've come to kill another?"

So Remembering Him: The Paradox and Paradigm of Amalek

2009-03-08T10:45:00.003+02:00

This week is Shabbat Zachor, one of the special shabbatot preceding Pesach. In the Maftir aliyah, we read Moshe’s account of Amalek’s cowardly attack on Israel: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt – how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary….Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” (Deuteronomy 25: 17-19)

This commandment seems to contain two contradictory injunctions. On the one hand, we are told “remember” and “do not forget.” On the other hand, we are instructed to “blot out the memory of Amalek,” which suggests that we should forget Amalek entirely, leaving not even a mental trace. Were we to successfully fulfill the second injunction, the first injunction would make no sense: How can we remember what has already been blotted out?

The message of Shabbat Zachor seems to be a dual one, Zachor v’Tishkach b’dibur echad. We have to simultaneously remember and forget Amalek, suggesting that remembering and forgetting are equally important acts. Yet this is surprising. We often hear about the Jewish imperative to remember: Remember the Sabbath day, remember the exodus, remember that you were a stranger in a strange land…. But since when is forgetting a positive value?

I was thinking about this question recently when studying Kohelet Rabbah, a midrashic collection that examines many of the themes in the book of Ecclesiastes, including vanity, the futility of human pursuits, and the absence of lasting value in a world of transience. The speaker in this book, Kohelet king of Jerusalem, describes his attempt “to study and probe with wisdom all that happens under the sun.” The rabbis in the midrash identify Kohelet with King Solomon and assume that this verse refers to Solomon’s quest to study all the Torah there is to learn. And yet Solomon finds that learning Torah does not just consist of remembering what he has learned, but of forgetting it as well. In commenting on Kohelet 2:12, “My thoughts also turned to appraising wisdom,” the rabbis state, “Do not read this as "turned (paniti)," but rather "emptied (piniti). I emptied myself like a vessel that is alternately filled and then emptied. So too did Shlomo alternatively learn Torah and then forget it” (KR 2:12).

This seems to be another instance of the futility that is so rampant in this book, but in fact, as the midrash shows, quite the opposite is true: “The rabbis of Babylonia would say in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak: It is for man's own good that he learns Torah and forgets it, because if a person were to learn Torah and never forget it, he would study Torah for two or three years and then go back to hi s work, and he would never invest his whole life in Torah. However, since a person learns Torah and forgets it, he never desists or retreats from the study of Torah” (KR 1:13). The midrash suggests that there is an inherent value in forgetting what we have learned, because this enables us to spend our lives learning. If so, then the ideal student is not the plastered well that never loses a drop, but rather the ever-flowing fountain from which water evaporates and then returns to its source.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Kohelet Rabbah depicts learning and forgetting as bound up with one another, because indeed this is very much how our brains work. We do not remember everything our minds assimilate, nor would we want to. So much of what we notice in the world or absorb about our surrounding is irrelevant to us in the long term--the weather forecast for a particular morning, the price of eggs in the market in a town we once lived, the name of every student in a class we once taught--and we are lucky that we are able to shed it with such abandon. Were we never to forget a thing, our brains would become so cluttered with useless information that it would be difficult to retrieve information that is still of value. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges captures this notion in his short story “Funes the Memorious,” which tells of a man who falls off a horse and experiences a form of reverse amnesia, such that he cannot forget anything at all:

“When he fell, he'd been knocked unconscious; when he came to again, the present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories….Now his perception and his memory were perfect…. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the features of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho…. Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf….He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentous, and almost unbearably precise world….He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars.”

Funes is the sponge who absorbs everything but is unable to filter. His memory is so overwhelmingly vast that it cripples him. If only he could forget some of what he knew, he might be able to lead a normal life. Nietzsche captures the problematic nature of a person who lacks the capacity to forget: “It is possible to live almost without memory, indeed to live happily, as the animals show us, but without forgetting it is utterly impossible to live at all.” This statement is true not just on the intellectual level, but on the emotional level as well. All of us go through moments in life that cause us pain and distress. Were we always to re-experience those moments with the same immediacy, they would prevent us from ever being able to move on. Instead, with time, our memories begin to fade, and new experiences are superimposed such that the traumatic events of the past become woven, we hope, into the larger fabric of our lives. “Time cures all ills,” we are commonly told, though the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millet calls this cliché into question in one of her sonnets:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide.

Millet’s outburst becomes, in the second half of the poem, a musing about the paradoxical relationship between memory and forgetting:

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, – so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

In an effort to forget her lover, the poet seeks out a place that bears no trace of his memory – a place where he is utterly blotted out from under the heavens. When she finally finds such a place, her instinctive reaction is to point out that indeed, in that place, “There is no memory of him here!” And thus the very absence of any trace brings back a torrent of memories.

Perhaps this is the same paradox of memory and forgetting that we find in Parshat Zachor. We must blot out any memory of Amalek, but in so doing, we must be acutely conscious of what it is that we are blotting out. In the holiday of Purim, which we will celebrate this coming week, we are commanded to drown out the name of Haman, who is considered a descendant of Amalek, by sounding noisy groggers whenever Haman’s name is read in the Megillah. Paradoxically, however, we are not allowed to drown out Haman’s name completely. If the sound of the groggers renders Haman’s name inaudible, the reader of the Megillah is halachically obligated to repeat the name of Haman so that everyone can hear it. Judaism is not a religion of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Mentioneds.” We speak out Voldemort’s name loud and clear, and only then do we say Yimach Shmo. Before we erase, we must record; before we drown out, we must make sure we hear.

I hope that as we move on from Parshat Zachor to Purim, we will become better equipped to strike the appropriate balance between memory and forgetting. May our lives always be rich with learning, with the ability to create meaning from our experiences, and with the healing that enables us to move on.