If All the Seas Were Ink
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But I spoke of this to no one, even when Andrea suddenly grew self-conscious after all her enraptured gushing and said to me soberly, “And what about you? How are you?” The Talmud in Yoma (75a) cites a debate between two rabbis about what a person should do when distressed, based on a verse from Proverbs: “If there is distress in a man’s mind, let him quash it” (12:25). The Hebrew word for “quash it,” yashhena, sounds like yashena, “distract,” but also like yisihena, “tell.” According to Rabbi Ami, the distressed individual should distract himself with other things. According to Rabbi Assi, he should tell of his woes to others so that he feels less burdened by them. I followed Rabbi Ami, choosing distraction over confession. Were I to attempt to narrate our failed marriage, I would surely just blame myself: I was not mature enough, I had not sufficiently taken into account the needs of others, I had not worked hard enough at it. I may have been a self-avowed romantic, but I’d failed at the most important romantic relationship. How had this happened, how? I wondered, echoing the repeated “how” of Lamentations—the book of the Bible known in Hebrew as Eichah (how), in which the prophet Jeremiah elegizes the Temple. I fingered the drawstring on the window shade above my desk as I read about the crimson thread in the Temple that miraculously turned white at the moment on Yom Kippur when the people’s sins were forgiven.
Living alone, I identified with the high priest who was sequestered for seven days prior to Yom Kippur in a special chamber of the Temple to prevent him from contracting impurity. During this period other priests appointed a “backup wife” for him in case his wife were to die, since he was required to atone for his household and could not do so unless he had one. This may sound terribly unromantic, and indeed the Talmud is often regarded as a highly unromantic text, particularly when it comes to the transactional nature of marriage. But this is only because, for the rabbis, the object of longing was rarely wives, or even other women. Rather, when the rabbis wax most poetic, they are frequently speaking about the Temple, which was destroyed generations before the Talmud’s inception.
In learning Yoma, I became swept up in the romance of Temple lore. I dreamed of the seven-branched golden candelabra, the sink where the priests rinsed their hands, and the muchni, the clanking mechanical pulley system that lowered the sink into a pit of water beneath the Temple floor. I shared in the rabbis’ nostalgia for the Temple’s glory days—particularly the First Temple era, when the priests were not yet corrupt (or so the rabbis claim) and the ark of the covenant still stood in the Holy of Holies. By the time of the Second Temple, the Talmud teaches, the Holy of Holies was empty and the ark had disappeared, leading to mystery and intrigue surrounding its whereabouts.
There is a Talmudic story about a priest engaged in Temple service who once noticed that one of the paving stones in the floor was slightly higher than the rest (Yoma 54a). He went out to report on his discovery to his fellow priests, but “he had not yet finished speaking when suddenly he died.” (This kind of instantaneous zapping is a common trope in rabbinic stories.) The Talmud concludes that this must have been the place where the ark of the covenant was buried. Surely anyone who came so close to discovering the hidden ark would not live to tell the tale. This passage continues with a story about two priests who were busy picking worms out of the wood that was set aside for burning on the altar. One of them dropped his axe—presumably on the spot where the ark was buried—and immediately a fire broke out and consumed him.
The more dramatic the Talmud’s stories, the more they took on a life of their own. One evening while washing the floor of my apartment, I noticed that one of the tiles was loose. I had already covered the floor with soapy water and was soaking it all up with a rag affixed to a sponga pole—the traditional way to clean the floors in Israel—when I came to that loose tile and trembled. I approached it with trepidation, half expecting fire to come forth and consume me if I put down my bucket of soapy water in the wrong place.
The rabbinic discussion of the Temple is fiery and passionate, at times bordering on the erotic. The rabbis relate that even though Jericho is a full ten-parsa distance from Jerusalem, the women of Jericho did not need to put on perfume because the scent of the incense wafting from Jerusalem was so powerful. Even the goats of Jericho would sneeze when their nostrils were tickled by the fragrance. In Jerusalem the scent was so concentrated that it was not just ordinary women but also brides who could forgo any fragrance. The incense, made of cinnamon, saffron, cassia, myrrh, and other spices whose names are as seductive as their scents, intoxicated the sages of the Talmud. As one elder reports, “Once I went to Shiloh [the site of the portable sanctuary where Jews worshipped prior to the First Temple], and I breathed in the scent of the incense from between its walls” (Yoma 39b). As I imagined the spices wafting from the Temple’s clefts, I could almost hear the breathless panting.
Of course, there is no nostalgia for what remains; nostalgia is the longing for what once was. No one who is happily wed grows nostalgic about marriage, as Byron quipped in Don Juan: “Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife / He would have written sonnets all his life?” And one does not speak nostalgically of a Temple that is still standing and operational. Not surprisingly, the opening chapter of tractate Yoma includes a lengthy discussion of the reasons for the Temple’s destruction. When it comes to the First Temple, these reasons are all related to the Jewish people’s sins against God: the Temple was destroyed because of the sins of idolatry, or adultery, or murder. In explaining the sin of idolatry, Rabbi Yohanan quotes a verse from Isaiah (28:20): “For the bed shall be too short for a man to stretch himself out on it.” He explains that this verse refers to a couch too narrow for both God and an idol to lie on (Yoma 9b). The imagery invoked is the intimate space of a bedroom, a reminder that the Temple was the space of the most intimate connection between God and Israel. As Rav K’tina states, “At the time when Israel would go to the Temple on the festivals, they would roll back the ark curtain to reveal the cherubs, who were hugging each other, and they would say: Look at how beloved you are of God, like the love between a man and a woman” (Yoma 54a). This same passage compares the poles that protruded through the ark curtain to a woman’s breasts poking through the fabric of her dress. God has no place to sleep because there is an idol in His bed, and on account of that idol, His most intimate chamber is destroyed.
One evening as I sat learning daf yomi on my Romeo and Juliet balcony, I was suddenly transported to fair Verona, where I laid my scene. I imagined Juliet leaning her cheek against her gloved hand as Romeo gazes up at her under cover of darkness. Juliet sighs (“Ay me!”), and Romeo hangs on to her every sound and gesture (“She speaks! O, speak again, bright angel”), wooing her from below in language reminiscent of the Song of Songs, which Shakespeare seems occasionally to invoke (“Stony limits cannot hold love out”). I imagined the balcony as the site of many subsequent late-night trysts, as it is the one place where the lovers can speak freely to one another without risking the wrath of the Montague and Capulet clans. Surely Juliet longs, each day, for night to come, so she can go out on her balcony to speak to Romeo.
And then I imagined that one day, Juliet comes home to find that her parents have boarded up her balcony. Her window is covered with wooden planks fixed crudely to the wall, and pieces of the railing, hacked at with axes and spades, lie strewn on the street below. “Her gates have sunk into the ground, he has smashed her bars to bits” (Lamentations 2:9). Juliet is utterly distraught: how will she see Romeo that evening? How will she communicate with her lover? “See, O Lord, the distress I am in! My heart is in anguish” (Lamentations 1:20). It is not only her balcony she has lost, but the whole elaborate system of semaphores and scheduling that she and her lover have constructed to ensure that they see each other regularly. Juliet wails. “Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheeks wet with tears. There is none to comfort her of all her friends” (Lamentations 1:2).
The rabbis, in mourning the Temple, were not just mourning a physical e
difice but an entire system of connecting with God—one that involved daily sacrifice, fragrant incense, elaborate vestments, and golden trumpets. I, too, felt that I was mourning not just my marriage but all my romantic dreams—dreams that involved late-night roving and star-crossed love. I’m not sure if, after the destruction of the First Temple, the Jews dared hope that there might someday be a second. I only know that in my own life I harbored no such expectations.
* * *
I was convinced I’d never re-marry, but one night my imagination got the better of me and I pictured myself again a bride. It was late Friday afternoon during that magical, mystical time the rabbis refer to as “between the suns,” on the cusp of the day that is waning and the night about to fall. (I suppose the English equivalent is twilight, meaning “two lights.”) Uneasy about the prospect of a long evening alone, I put on a long white flowing dress and walked outside to head toward synagogue. But then I changed my mind and instead set my steps toward the walls of the Old City, entered the stone gate, and walked down the narrow cobblestone paths to the Kotel, the last remaining wall of the Temple, singing the prayers to welcome Shabbat along the way. I’ve never felt any special connection to the Kotel, but I was eager to visit the site of all the rituals I’d been reading about for weeks in tractate Yoma. And there was something thrilling about the notion that the Temple Mount—the object of thousands of years of Jewish longing and the place toward which Jews the world over direct their prayers—was just a half-hour walk from my apartment. “Arise and shake off the dust of the earth / Wear glorious garments reflecting your worth,” I sang, feeling my soul increasingly uplifted with each successive stanza of the mystical prayer Lecha Dodi, “Come My Beloved,” in which the Sabbath is greeted like a bride.
When I reached the Kotel I had already finished chanting Maariv, the evening service, and so I whispered a few words of silent petition and turned back toward home. I learned in Yoma that the high priest was supposed to enter the Holy of Holies and offer only a short prayer, lest the people waiting anxiously outside grow worried that he had somehow behaved incorrectly and would never emerge from that holiest of places (Yoma 52b). My prayers, too, lasted only seconds, and I didn’t even bother to elbow my way through the crowds of devout worshippers between me and the wall. I did not need to touch the cold stones because I could feel the weight of their history when I pressed my fingers against the Talmudic page. By the time I got home, the sky was pitch black, and I was hungry and exhausted, ready to learn daf yomi over dinner and collapse into bed.
Since I usually ate my Shabbat meals alone, I rarely bothered to prepare anything elaborate. Often on Friday afternoons I would cook while listening to recordings of daf yomi classes on my laptop. One week I was preparing a salmon while listening to daf yomi, which suddenly turned to the subject of fish (Yoma 75a). The rabbi teaching the class quoted a biblical verse cited on that day’s page of Talmud: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free” (Numbers 11:5). I was intrigued, but I had to keep cooking or I would not be ready in time for Shabbat. I unwrapped the salmon and rinsed the soft pink flesh in the sink, trying to make out the voice on the computer that was narrating the Talmud’s discussion.
I turned off the tap and listened closely. On Yom Kippur we are commanded to engage in self-affliction. The manna we ate in the desert was a form of affliction as well, since the children of Israel received only enough to eat every day and had to endure the uncertainty of whether there would be new manna tomorrow. Instead of the manna, the Israelites really wanted fish, which is the reason that they complained to Moses: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free.”
But did the Israelites really eat free fish in Egypt? Weren’t they slaves? The leading third-century Babylonian sages, Rav and Shmuel, try to make heads and tails of the verse. While listening to their debate, I sliced the salmon fillet in two halves, dubbing them Rav and Shmuel. I sprinkled some oregano and lemon juice on Rav and put him in my toaster oven, which was the only oven that fit in my pokey apartment. Shmuel would have to wait on the counter for a while.
The Talmud goes on to quote the sages’ conflicting opinions. Rav says, “Fish means fish,” insisting on a literal reading of the biblical text. Shmuel says, “Fish means illicit sexual relations,” invoking the pervasive Talmudic analogy between food and sex. I closed the toaster door, but they kept at it. Rav says, “It says ‘the fish that we ate’—this must be a literal reference to food.” Shmuel says, “It says ‘for free’—did we really get free food? It must mean the illicit sexual relations that the Israelites were free to engage in before they received the Torah.” Rav tries to defend himself, flapping his half-tail vigorously: “When the Israelites were in Egypt, they used to dip their jugs into the Nile. God would cause a miracle to happen: fish would get swept into the jugs as well, and they would have food to eat.” Shmuel insists that eating is a euphemism for something else. He quotes a verse from Proverbs: “Such is the way of the adulteress. She eats, wipes her mouth, and says, ‘I have done no wrong’” (30:20).
Shmuel, what a dirty mind you have, I scolded the piece of fish lying limply on the counter. I covered him up with a piece of foil and hoped that my neighbors could not hear. Rav, modestly browning in the oven, has his comeback prepared. “The daughters of Israel were not adulteresses! They were not loose women! After all, as it says in the Song of Songs: ‘A locked garden is my beloved bride’” (4:12).
Shmuel is not so sure. “But it says that when the Israelites were in the desert, they were crying for their families! What do you think that means, ‘for their families’ (Numbers 11:10)? They were bemoaning the fact that now that they had the Torah, they could not just sleep around with any woman they wanted.”
“Ding!” went the toaster. Rav was ready to come out. I unwrapped Shmuel and rested him gently on the oven tray.
“Ha v’ha havay,” says the Talmud, affirming that both are correct and making peace between the pieces. The Israelites were crying both because they missed the fish and because they missed the illicit sexual relations they enjoyed in Egypt.
“Ha v’ha havay,” I sighed placatingly, placing the two pieces of fish side by side in a glass dish. Resolved, I picked up the phone to call a friend. “Do you want to come over for dinner tonight? I just made fish.”
* * *
I did not always cook for Shabbat. Through my editing work I had met Hedva and Ari, a warm and friendly young couple with three small children who often invited me to join them for Shabbat meals. Hedva was just a few years older but seemed light years ahead of me. She was a preschool teacher with a soft, calming smile, and she was beautiful in a put-together sort of way, her hair neatly combed, her clothes flattering but not fancy. Ari, an academic whose dissertation I’d edited, was smart and kind and gracious, and I idealized the couple’s seemingly perfect marriage, their starched white tablecloth, their beaming children, and the delicious golden challah loaves that Hedva baked every week. The Talmud in Yoma (38a) speaks of the priestly bakers of the Garmu family who refused to share their bread recipes with anyone else. I was sure Hedva would share her recipe with me if I asked, but there was no way I would bother baking challah when I lived alone. I could easily get by with a couple of mass-produced rolls from the corner store, which were enough to satisfy the requirement to make a blessing over two loaves of bread on Shabbat. I thought of a line from Yoma: “One cannot compare a person who has bread in his basket to a person who does not have bread in his basket” (74b). The phrase recurs several times throughout the Talmud, and refers not just to food but also to sex. One cannot compare the haves and the have-nots. Hedva and Ari made delicious challah, but whenever I said goodbye to them on their doorstep and walked back home on Friday nights, I was left thinking not about what they had but about what I had not.
* * *
In those early days after my divorce, I jogged every morning. I would wake up convinced that if it weren’t for the compulsion to hit the pavement, I would never summo
n the willpower to get down from my loft bed. If I were going to run, it had to be before the 7:00 a.m. traffic clogged the streets, which meant I had to get out of bed right away. And so I did, each morning. In winter I dressed in leggings with a warm protective headband covering my ears; I did not mind the cold because it, along with the adrenaline rush, jolted me out of my morning despondency. By the time I got back from my run through the hills and valleys of Jerusalem, I was too sweaty to do anything but shower. Then I naturally got dressed, at which point I figured I might as well start the day. And so by running I staved off despair.
I had been a runner since I was a teenager, when I was a proud member of my high school track and field team. I used to train in the summers with my friend Kitty, who shared my love of poetry. Each week we would choose another poem to memorize while running around the track. I kept a photocopy of the poem folded up in the pocket of my gym shorts, and the two of us took turns testing each other, consulting the text only when necessary. We started with Milton’s sonnets, which were easy to memorize because their iambic meter matched the pounding of our feet against the pavement: “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” As we built up our endurance, we moved on to longer works like Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” which I returned to when I was embowered in my Jerusalem studio with its lofted bed, romanticizing my solitude.