The Journal I Did Not Keep

by Lore Segal

  Is it so uncomfortable to have to imagine a voiceless Adam with Eve all the time she is disputing with the tempter that pious scholarship prefers to think him away? The JPS translation reads: “She took of the fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband and he ate.” St. Augustine gives the matter a gallant spin: It was out of love for Eve that Adam chose to sin with her. If so, how very human of him that, in the cool of the evening before that same day is done, he has put the blame on her!

  I want to compare a very different order of narrative that we seem also to know by osmosis. The Grimm stories, too, remove the awkward presence of the impotent male. Where is the fairy-tale father—what is he doing—while this second wife, the witch stepmother, is mistreating his biological children? He is “away” on a business trip or out hunting, not, in any case, present at the commission of the evil. Only Hansel and Gretel’s father is a reluctant presence on the page. Are we puzzled that he gets to share in the happily-ever-after? Wouldn’t we prefer him to have been away on business or hunting instead of standing beside his murderous partner? The narrative spotlights the woman. Whether absent or silently present, the male plays the lesser part of accessory, not the patriarchal force but a pushover. In the fairy tales he can be translated right off the page and hardly be missed, reminding me of certain men in my own family.

  A SPOILED CHILD

  If there was ever a child made to feel good about himself, it was the boy Joseph. His father made him a coat of many colors, understood as the ornamented tunic that distinguished royal princesses. Nor was it some Shabbat best. It’s what he wore out in the fields when his father sent him to check up on his brothers.

  A spoiled child is not an attractive character. Did Joseph tattle on the boys because that’s what little brothers do? Was it to grab his father’s attention, or because he was a natural truth-teller? Was he like one of those law-abiding children who won’t cross against the light? As a young man he would reject a woman’s repeated sexual advances because they were unethical. And the woman, like his brothers, became his enemy and set out to ruin him.

  Joseph not only dreamed self-aggrandizing dreams but, in the morning, related them to his family. The first dream’s metaphor came from farm life at harvest time: The brothers’ sheaves bow themselves down before Joseph’s upstanding sheaf. Next the boy dreamed in global terms: The minor and major heavenly bodies—the boys and his parents?—prostrated themselves before him. Even his father, Jacob, was taken aback and “kept these things in his mind,” meaning he didn’t know what to make of them? The brothers hated the obnoxious child. What happens when heaven shows a preference for one son, or one man, over another, is a recurring biblical theme. Cain killed Abel; King Saul spent years trying to hunt down God-favored David.

  The Joseph story recounts the complications of planning a murder by committee. The boys’ agreement to murder Joseph comes apart. Scholarship supposes two traditions, one in which brother Reuben and another in which brother Judah oppose the killing. Reuben, appalled at the prospect of his father grieving the loss of his favorite child, cannot or dares not oppose his brothers to their faces, but Judah persuades them that killing Joseph is less profitable than selling him into slavery. Interesting that they revenge themselves not only against the insufferable boy but also against that coat of many colors, adding the red of wild animal blood to fool their father. If I happen to be eating while the news reports some modern inhumanity, I remember how Joseph’s brothers, having cast Joseph into the pit, sat down to have their supper. How differently they will feel and speak and act in the latter part of the story, when they are grown men with sons of their own.

  In worldly terms, Joseph becomes one of the Bible’s most successful men. Whatever he does turns out well: As a slave he runs his Egyptian master’s household; imprisoned, he governs the institution that immures him. His God-given ability to interpret dreams is the means by which he recommends himself to power. Joseph understands that Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cattle that are consumed by seven sick cattle foretells the seven years of famine that are destined to follow seven years of plenty. Pharaoh chooses this clever foreigner to be Egypt’s top man who will manage Egypt’s economy. Might we be just a little suspicious of the details of this triumphal narrative? How would it read if the chronicler had been Egyptian?

  Be that as it may, the spoiled child has grown into a superbly capable manager who makes Egypt the full larder for the region. He will be in a position to save his own family from hunger when Jacob sends the brothers come to buy provisions. Joseph’s revenge against his murderous brothers is not lethal. He plays them and teases and scares them for a while. We are moved when Joseph, the superbly successful stranger in a strange land, reveals himself; he weeps with the emotion of being with his kin, to be speaking his own language. He will ease the brothers’ well-grounded terror and console them for their wickedness by arguing that they have been at all times acting as the Lord’s pawns. Looking back on the spoiled child’s dreams, didn’t they all come true? Didn’t they turn out to have been sent by Joseph’s God?

  MICHAL IN LOVE

  Leaving the Song of Solomon aside, we don’t read our Bible for romance. But I want to consider “love” as a Leitmotif in the narrative that concludes with the Haftorah of this week’s portion.

  Is Michal the only biblical woman in love? The story tells us she loves David. There are so many characters who love David it’s enough to drive poor King Saul out of his mind. It is not only his younger daughter Michal but Saul’s son and heir, Jonathan; King Saul’s God, even King Saul himself—they are, all of them, in love with the designated usurper. When Saul learns of Michal’s feelings he hurries her into the marriage with David not, certainly, to satisfy her passion but to infiltrate his enemy’s household. Michal risks her royal father’s wrath by acting as a wife, rather than a loyal daughter. Interesting that it requires her woman’s cleverness to save David, the hero of so many battles and escapes: Michal lowers him out the window and he gets away because she has made up a household idol—who would have imagined such a convenience among David’s belongings?—to look like David being ill.

  Saul, curiously enough, gives David’s wife, Michal, to be the wife of one Paltiel. No need for the story to spell out that it is an act meant to humiliate David. David, who has added the wise and capable Abigail to his household of wives and concubines now dispatches his captain Abner to demand the return of Michal. A scene no bigger than a single sentence renders Paltiel’s devotion and his helplessness: “Her husband went with her, and walked weeping behind her as far as Bahurim where Abner said, Turn back, and he turned back.” This tender detail amidst all the things that biblical narrative does not spell out is invitation to midrash. Imagine Michal shunted from her loving, unloved husband, the loser Paltiel, back to the other one, God-favored David, whom she can’t help loving. The magnificent David must have been a terrible man to be in love with. David’s part in the story is to be King Saul’s favorite musician and healer, his soldier and giant-killer, harvester of hundreds of enemy foreskins. Having exiled himself in order to evade the king who has grown murderous, David’s business is to prevent his followers from murdering Saul; to take care of his parents, and to sack the southern cities in Ziklag keeping a politician’s eye on his future. What we don’t see and can’t imagine is David addressing his husbandly attention toward his wife Michal.

  We fast forward and come at last to our Haftorah. Saul is dead. David is king. The ark, loaded onto a new cart, is en route to the City of David when God “breaks” the young man, Uzzah, for raising his hand to the sacred object though all he meant was to prevent it from falling. David, appalled and frightened, reroutes the dreadful ark to the house of Obededom, the Gittite, who is promptly overwhelmed with blessings, so David sends for the ark and carries it to its permanent home in the City of David. The story says that Michal is looking out of the window and sees the procession accompanying the ark with joyful shouting and horns blowing. Every sixth step there
is a stop and the sacrifice of an ox or fatted calf to be shared out among all the houses of Israel. “David dressed in a priestly linen ephod danced with all his might and whirled before the Lord.” When he comes, at last, to bless his own household, Michal is walking toward him, screaming at him like the untamed shrew: What has become of Michal’s tenderness and loyalty? Her voice has the ugly sound of hurt. “The king of Israel did himself proud today exposing himself before his own servants…” she says, which is rude but not rude enough to give relief to her painful anger: “…exposing himself,” she says, “before his own servants’ slave women, like any low-life.”

  How we read David’s answer depends on our sympathies. Mine are with the embittered woman. “I shall be a dancer before the Lord,” David begins nobly and beautifully, but spitefully adds, “who has chosen me over your father and all his house. I will lower myself and make myself even smaller in my own eyes,” he continues, “and yet be honored among these very slave women of whom you speak.” If you love David you hear the expression of a man’s humble confidence in his future. I hear the offended tone of a man’s pride lacerated by the wife who has spoiled his day of triumphant celebration.

  God disagrees with me. David is His man. David’s seed will rule Israel. “And Saul’s daughter Michal bore no children to her dying day” is the end of Michal’s love story.

  Many thanks to the below where these writings previously appeared, in slightly different form.

  MAGAZINES, JOURNALS AND NEWSPAPERS

  Spry for Frying, Ladies’ Lunch, Dandelion, The New Yorker

  The Fountain Pen, Harper’s Magazine

  A Child’s War, Literary Hub

  Divorce, Mom Egg Review

  Ladies’ Days of Martinis and Forgetting, Epiphany

  How Lotte Lost Bessie, The Fifth Wednesday Journal

  Making Good, The American Scholar

  Fugue in Cell Minor, The Antioch Review

  Noah’s Daughter, The New England Review

  Prince Charles and My Mother, The Journal: A Literary Magazine

  The Secret Spaces of Childhood: My First Bedroom, Michigan Quarterly Review

  The Pink Lie or My Grandfather’s Walking Stick, Social Research: An International Journal

  Memory: The Problems of Imagining the Past, Writing and the Holocaust, Holmes and Meier

  The Gardeners’ Habitats, introduction to On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, Basic Books

  Jane Austen on Our Unwillingness to be Parted from Our Money, The Antioch Review

  Passing Time, The New Republic

  Translating the Olden Times, The Journal of Literary Translation

  Table Talk: “Nice”, The Threepenny Review

  Plots and Manipulations, The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays

  Afterword to the UK 2018 edition of Other People’s Houses, Sort of Books

  On Courtesy, On Argument, On Intimacy, New York Times

  What Did Adam Know and When Did He Know It?, The Spoiled Child, Michal in Love, The Forward

  BOOKS

  Other People’s Houses, Harcourt Brace & World

  Her First American, Alfred A. Knopf

  Lucinella, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

  Shakespeare’s Kitchen, The New Press

  Half the Kingdom, Melville House Publishing