Like most of my classmates, Kitty wasn’t Jewish, and each time a Jewish holiday came around I had to explain why I was missing another day of school. One summer day she asked me why I wouldn’t be able to join her for a run, and I told her it was Tisha b’Av, the fast day commemorating the Temple’s destruction. At the time, our local synagogue was undergoing renovations to build a new youth wing. My father was the rabbi and we lived on the synagogue property, as Kitty knew from her occasional visits to our home. Nonetheless, perhaps I should have anticipated her confusion. “I’m sorry I can’t join you today. I have to fast. Why? The Temple was destroyed.” Kitty paused, puzzled by my explanation. “The Temple was destroyed?” she questioned, raising her eyebrows. “I thought they were just renovating.”
* * *
I felt like my world, too, was destroyed when I broke my foot that Yoma summer. Ever oblivious to my body, I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but one morning I returned from my run, tried to get into the shower, and realized I could no longer walk on my left foot. Tears were streaming down my cheeks as I reluctantly hobbled into a cab to head to the emergency clinic. I was crying not out of pain—I can bear tremendous amounts of pain as long as it’s merely physical—but out of fear that if my foot were broken, I might have to stay off it. One of my greatest pleasures was walking the streets of Jerusalem. Since I’d first moved to Israel with Paul two years earlier, my feet had traced a continuous path throughout the streets of the city. I rarely took buses or cabs, preferring to take in the city at my own pace, attuned to its daily rhythms and its subtle changes in light. Only occasionally would I lift my feet from the surface of the ground—not because I regard the land of Israel as holy, but because I am a lover of texts, and my reading and learning have always been intimately connected to walking. Whenever possible, I read novels set in Jerusalem, and then visited the places described—the YMCA stadium (sadly demolished a few years later) where David Grossman’s Rhino used to watch soccer games in Someone to Run With; the old Arab house where Batya Gur’s Zahava was brutally bludgeoned in Murder on Bethlehem Road; the park in San Simon where the tour guide in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a Boy describes the War of Independence battle that took place there.
For a while, though, I was going to have to rest. The X-ray results were unequivocal, as were the doctor’s instructions: “Minimal walking, and no running for six weeks.” That night as I lay in bed with my leg propped up on a stack of books—I owned only one pillow, and needed it for my head—I came across a story in Yoma about two priests who raced each other up a ramp to the Temple altar. Whoever got there first would get to do trumat hadeshen, the first sacrificial ritual performed in the Temple each morning, which involved clearing off the ashes from the previous day’s sacrifices (22a). When the two were neck and neck, one pushed his fellow aside, causing him to fall and break his foot. I wondered whether the injured priest was struck, as I was, by the words we recite every Shabbat morning: “God guards all [my] bones; not one of them breaks” (Psalms 34:21). The ideal, of course, is for “all my bones to say, ‘O Lord, who is like You?’” (Psalms 35:10), as we recite elsewhere in the liturgy. But my bones were not cooperating.
The next day was the first day of Elul, the final month of the Jewish calendar, a month that is devoted to repentance in preparation for Yom Kippur. Jewish tradition teaches that throughout Elul our lives hang in the balance—will we put our best foot forward or stumble over the obstacles in our path? Will we be inscribed for life or death? The liturgy of the Al Chet, the long confessional prayer recited many times on Yom Kippur, links most of the sins to the parts of the human body: “For the sin of wanton eyes, for the sin of being stiff-necked, for the sin of the evil tongue.” And then, of course, there is the line that involves feet: “For the sin of running with our legs toward iniquity.” At least I wasn’t able to do that in my present state.
In my more upbeat moments, I hoped that staying off my feet might offer me an excuse to turn my gaze inward. The Yom Kippur liturgy states that “God searches all the inner chambers of the stomach and checks the kidneys and the heart.” God gives the ultimate internal exam, and we are supposed to follow His example. I had been running for so long—away from my loneliness, away from my shame, away from my sadness. But now, huddled over Yoma with my broken foot, it was all catching up with me.
Looking back now I realize that in mapping out the Temple I was, almost in spite of myself, mapping out my heart. Elsewhere in the Talmud Rabbi Akiva teaches that the Hebrew word for man, ish, and the Hebrew word for woman, isha, differ only in the letter hey, which is the symbolic representation of God’s name (Sotah 17a). The other two letters common to both words are aleph and shin, which spell aish, fire. If a man and woman’s union has merit, the divine Hey will reside between them; if not, a fire will break forth and consume them, perhaps emerging from the uneven floorboards.
It’s a moment I so rarely let myself recollect, but the last night that Paul and I broke bread together, we sat down for Shabbat dinner at our small wooden table that faced a bare wall in our rental apartment. The Shabbat candles were flickering behind us, but suddenly I realized that something else was flickering too—no, not flickering, but burning. Burning! The yard behind our apartment was swept up in flames that leapt higher and higher outside our ground-floor windows. I gasped, momentarily paralyzed by shock. And then what happened? Seeing the flames, Paul reached for the phone to call for emergency help. I lunged for his hand to pull him along with me but then let go and bolted out the door myself. I ran and ran, perhaps sensing that if I didn’t flee then, I never would. And then for a long time I kept running.
When the Temple was destroyed, the rabbis began compiling their teachings to form the Mishnah, which led to the Talmud, and ultimately text study occupied much of the central religious role that had formerly been the province of Temple ritual. My marriage, like the Temple, had ended in conflagration. But for a while at least, studying Yoma was my sanctuary.
SUKKAH / BEITZAH
Temporary Homes
I was walking with my sister in Manhattan during one of my visits back from Israel in the aftermath of my divorce. “Can you imagine where you’ll be in ten years?” she asked me as we crossed at 96th Street. The traffic was at a standstill, and ten years seemed like an eternity. I always forget, until the light turns green again, how fast the cars whizz by. I looked at my sister, wishing I could answer for her instead. Her future seemed so much more certain: she was in a stable marriage, pregnant with her first child, and enrolled in medical school. I, though two years her senior, was between apartments, still taking it day by day, and I had no idea how to respond.
I was, at the time, a bit like the children of Israel in the wilderness, who wandered for forty years following their liberation from Egypt. During this itinerant period they complained about the food, complained about their leader, and built temporary huts known as sukkot, or booths, the plural form of sukkah, from which the tractate takes its name. In the middle of my study of tractate Sukkah, I moved from one temporary apartment to another, unable to commit to anything long term. Indeed, in the span of my first two years of daf yomi learning, I lived in four different apartments, wandering through the wilderness even though I’d already arrived in the promised land.
Sukkot is also the name of an autumn holiday in which Jews commemorate the period of the Israelites’ wandering through the wilderness by leaving the comfort of their homes to dwell for a week in small huts that they build in their backyards or on their apartment porches. Much of tractate Sukkah deals with the construction of these huts—what materials they may be made of, how tall they must be, how many walls they must have. I studied these laws diligently, but I never built a sukkah of my own—perhaps because the idea of a temporary home seemed superfluous at a time when my regular home seemed so short term.
During that period, the main source of stability in my life was not my home but my work. Shortly after the divorce I landed a job at a small literary
agency in Jerusalem, where I sold foreign rights to Israeli publishers. My job involved reading book catalogues in search of titles that would be suitable for the Israeli market, speaking with Israeli editors about their acquisitions interests, answering e-mails from colleagues abroad who were pitching their new titles, and conducting auctions among Israeli publishers competing for rights to publish the same book. Beyond the nature of the work, which I enjoyed, the need to report to an office on a regular basis provided a basic framework for my days, and I never lacked for what to read.
The best part of the job was definitely the books. Twice a week our assistant came back from the post office dragging a metal granny cart overflowing with packages, each filled with the latest offerings hot off the presses of the major American publishers. I read through the glossy book catalogues like a kid in a candy store and ordered not just what I thought we could sell, but anything I wanted to read—literary novels, the collected works of my favorite contemporary poets, the latest academic books on Talmud and Jewish studies. Opening the mail was like getting birthday presents every day, and I told myself that with all those books, I could never possibly be lonely.
My obsession with books was hardly new. In my high school job as an aptly named “page” in the local public library, I was once nearly fired when my boss found me in the basement where I was supposed to be sorting through recent book donations. Instead, though, I was crouched among piles of books with my notebook and pen, copying out a favorite passage from a tattered paperback copy of A. S. Byatt’s Possession—which opens with a scholar poring over marginalia in a library basement. At Harvard, too, I worked as a circulation clerk at the Widener Library and spent most of my remaining hours deep in the stacks, munching cold pancakes purloined from the dining hall breakfast and scouring Victorian novels for references to contemporaneous scientific ideas, or making forays to the Judaica department six flights up. I spent the year after graduation studying British romantic poetry at Cambridge and then worked for three years in the editorial department of Random House, reading poetry aloud to myself as I walked the streets of Manhattan to and from work. When Paul and I married, I left that job to follow him to Israel, where at first I worked as an editor and ghostwriter before starting at the literary agency. If I had to append an epigraph to my CV, it would probably be from Ecclesiastes, which is chanted on Sukkot each year: “The making of books is endless” (12:12).
In addition to the books, other highlights of my job at the literary agency included my annual trips to the international book fairs in Frankfurt and London. I attended my first Frankfurt fair in October 2006, which coincided with tractate Sukkah in the daf yomi cycle. The Frankfurt International Book Fair is the world’s oldest and largest, dating back over five hundred years to shortly after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type. Originally attended by local booksellers and readers—Hilary Mantel writes in Wolf Hall that Oliver Cromwell stopped by—the fair has become the single most important international publishing event. It is held on the sprawling grounds of the Messe, a trade fair in downtown Frankfurt that includes several multistory exhibition halls connected by escalators, moving walkways, and a tram service. But on that first visit I was most struck not by the scale of the fair but by the setup of the exhibition halls. A different floor is devoted to each country, and the floors are arranged in numbered rows and lettered aisles, such that every exhibitor is located by its coordinates: S972 for Random House, P973 for Norton, H17 for HarperCollins. Along these rows and aisles, each publisher or agency sets up a booth to exhibit its recent and forthcoming books. And so the Frankfurt Book Fair, which appropriately falls out right around Sukkot every year, is in fact a festival of booths.
I spent my first Frankfurt Fair lugging around a briefcase with foreign rights guides, book catalogues, and my copy of tractate Sukkah, which I tried to learn discreetly between meetings. But it is hard to do anything discreetly at the fair, where it is all about suits and trappings, and nothing passes show. Editors and publishers dress to the nines in fancy business suits, elegant high-heeled shoes, and expensive silk blouses. One of the reasons I love living in Israel is because of the informality of the dress code: I can get by dressing for work in jeans and sweaters. But in Frankfurt I had to wear black dress pants, an elegant frilly sweater, and uncomfortable leather shoes that I would not be caught dead wearing on any other occasion. My colleague, with whom I shared a hotel room, often tried to convince me to put on makeup, though I could not bring myself to go that far. Makeup has always seemed to me like a colossal waste of time and money. But looking around the fair, I realized that I might be the only woman who was not in lipstick, and I was surely the only woman carrying around a volume of Talmud.
As I made my way from booth to booth for meetings scheduled every half hour, I couldn’t help but examine each one to see if it would qualify as kosher—that is, fit for religious purposes. And so instead of thinking about world rights and preemptive bids, I was counting walls, hollowing out imaginary holes in the ceiling above, and estimating dimensions using the rabbinic measurements of amot and t’fachim, the length of a forearm and the width of a fist. Contrary to what I might have expected, there were indeed several kosher sukkot at the Frankfurt festival of booths. If you hold by dofen akumah, the notion that a right angle may be considered as constituting part of a single wall, then the HarperCollins booth, with its small skylight, would be kosher. On the other hand, the Hanser booth, with its two walls completely open, was certainly not. The Random House booth took up a full row in the American hall and was lined by framed and backlit full-color book jackets of forthcoming Spring 2007 titles; this was definitely what the rabbis would call noi, elaborate decoration. Penguin Putnam’s booth had a giant black-and-white penguin painted on one of its walls, but the rabbis explicitly say that an animal cannot serve as a sukkah wall. And so I continued to take note of each booth as I wandered through the wilderness of the Frankfurt Buchmesse.
One night I was obligated to attend a fancy reception for the German publisher Suhrkamp in a private room at a five-star hotel. All around me, women with elaborate hairdos and men with manicured mustaches leaned in to kiss one another on both cheeks. I tried to blend in with the beige curtains, hoping that I could hide in the corner by the tray of Swiss chocolates. Choking in a cloud of cigarette smoke, I dreamed of the clouds of God’s glory that accompanied the Israelites throughout their desert wanderings. I looked forward to eating a home-cooked meal in my friend’s sukkah when I got back. In Frankfurt, kosher food was hard to come by—it was basically sausages or starve. Fortunately, I had brought four boxes of granola bars with me, which I nibbled on between meetings, but I had not eaten a proper sit-down meal since arriving in Germany. To invoke the Talmud’s term for the type of snacking that is permissible when not eating in a sukkah, it was all “temporary eating,” achilat aray, or, as I came to refer to it, “achilat awry.”
When I returned to Jerusalem, my friend Yael’s parents invited me to join them in their rooftop sukkah for the first night of the holiday. It was a lovely evening. The sukkah swayed in the breeze and I shivered in the white sweater I wore over a light floral dress; by day it was still summer, but the nights had grown chilly. Yael sat opposite her parents, who were flanked by two older couples, neither of whom I had previously met. Yael’s mother turned to me. “I hear you’ve been learning daf yomi,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to share some words of Torah with all of us?” At that point I had been learning for only a few months; I was hardly a Torah scholar. Nor had I embarked on my study plan with the intention of teaching others. But I realized for the first time that night that a commitment to studying Torah bore with it a responsibility to share that learning. And so I pulled out my volume of Talmud, which I was accustomed to carrying with me at all times, and read about a debate between Rabbi Akiva and Rabban Gamliel, glancing occasionally over at Yael, who was the only one who knew why the text spoke to me so powerfully.
The sages discuss the case
of a person who builds a sukkah on a boat, presumably while taking a long overseas voyage during the holiday. Rabbi Akiva argues that such a sukkah is kosher, but Rabban Gamliel disagrees. The Talmud then goes on to relate the following punchy anecdote:
There is a story about Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva who were once sailing aboard a ship. Rabbi Akiva stood up and built his sukkah on the ship. The next day, a wind blew and overturned it. Rabban Gamliel said to him, “Akiva, where’s your sukkah?” (Sukkah 23a)
Rabban Gamliel disagrees with Rabbi Akiva’s decision to build a sukkah aboard a ship, presumably on the grounds that such a sukkah is inherently unstable. When Akiva’s sukkah indeed collapses, Rabban Gamliel essentially says “I told you so,” knocking the wind out of Akiva’s sails.
As the subsequent Talmudic debate demonstrates, the disagreement between these two sages hinges on their differing understandings of how stable a sukkah must be. According to Rabbi Akiva, a sukkah is kosher so long as it can withstand regular, predictable weather. But Rabban Gamliel maintains that a sukkah must be stable enough to withstand more than it is likely to confront—even those raging gales that blow only rarely. Otherwise, as Rabban Gamliel might have put it, all is just “futility and pursuit of wind,” to quote again from a refrain in the book of Ecclesiastes.
The dispute between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva is one I played out in my head all the time. “OK,” I’d tell myself, “you’re managing your life right now, but what if you suddenly lost your job? What if your very few friends were to leave the country? What if you had to move again?” I thought of the empty cardboard boxes collapsed in my closet. Each time I’d moved, I’d packed up my possessions. I had started saving them between moves, which seemed to make sense given how frequently I kept packing up and relocating. Suddenly the routine I had constructed for myself seemed to be as flimsy as those cardboard boxes. Yes, I was in a place where I could withstand the little breezes that destabilized me every so often—a lost bus pass, a missed appointment—but what if another gale were to blow? Where would my sukkah be then?
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 4