If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  Ultimately, I sided with Rabbi Akiva. It is OK, I decided, to be in a place in life where I can withstand only those winds that are blowing right here and right now. Perhaps there are stronger winds that would knock me over—certainly they had knocked me over in the past, and were they to blow again, I had no doubt that I’d be flat on my back, flailing helplessly. And yet, as Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach,” the world has no certitude, but “the sea is calm tonight.” The winds were not blowing at this very moment, and in my friend’s parents’ sukkah, where I was eating a homemade meal with good people, the colorful paper chains hanging from the ceiling were dancing in the breeze, and my volume of Talmud lay open before me. Of all the biblical holidays, it is Sukkot—when we leave the security of our homes and subject ourselves to the elements—that is referred to in the Bible as “the time of our rejoicing.” Joy, then, is about the ability to celebrate what we have right now, to see our half-full cup as running over. As we are exhorted each year on Sukkot by Ecclesiastes, “I commend rejoicing in life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and rejoice” (8:15). And so I took another sip of wine, relished the sweet honeyed challah, and rejoiced in the moment.

  * * *

  I had a crisis in my home just when I moved on from Sukkah to Beitzah, the tractate that deals with festival observance, specifically those restrictions imposed on ordinary human activity so as to enhance the sanctity of the day. The Hebrew word beitzah means “egg,” and the name of the tractate comes from its opening mishnah, which has to do with whether it is permissible to eat an egg that is laid by a chicken on a festival. As the rabbis explain, everything must be designated for festival use in advance of the day, which is impossible if something is not yet born. The first few pages of the tractate continue this avian theme, exploring such questions as the sexual habits of various fowl, the permissibility of moving a ladder from one dovecote to another, and the collection of eggs from a bird’s nest. Given this preoccupation with all things bird related, perhaps I should have been less surprised when I came home a few days after starting tractate Beitzah to discover two pigeons roosting in my apartment.

  At the time I was accustomed to leaving my apartment before dawn and returning long after dusk. Since I lived alone, there was no reason to hang around in the morning or to rush home for dinner. I would leave home hastily, eager to start the day. One morning I forgot to close my kitchen window. When I walked in the door that evening, ready to collapse on the couch and learn the next page of Beitzah, I was startled to discover the two pigeons. One was perched atop my Shabbat water heater, its beak tucked underneath its neck contentedly. The other sat on my bookcase between my prayer book and my dictionary, as if it were prepared not just to teach itself the traditional prayers, but also to learn what they meant.

  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 these birds were the pictures of equanimity, and even when I began flailing my arms wildly in their direction, they merely cocked their heads at me curiously as if we were playing a game of charades and it was their turn to guess. I was loud enough to attract the attention of my neighbor Amir, who rapped on my door to find out what was going on. Amir was a single Israeli guy in his late thirties who was always inviting large groups of people over for raucous Shabbat meals that he encouraged me to join. I rarely did, preferring to eat alone with a book. But this time, for a change, the racket was coming from my side of the wall. When Amir walked in I was still so discombobulated that I did not know what to say. But when words fail me, poetry usually comes to the rescue: “Unmerciful disaster,” I croaked as I pointed to the intruders in my chamber.

  If Amir had read Poe, it was certainly not in English. Ignoring what I’d said, he instead tried to calm me down. When this didn’t work, he told me that he was running out to find some equipment. “Sit down,” he encouraged me, and somehow I did. I gazed up at the birds, neither of which had budged. 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:

  Beit Shammai say: One may not move a ladder from one dovecote to another, but he can tilt it from window to window. Beit Hillel permit this. (Beitzah 9a)

  I wondered if Amir was going to return with a ladder, since the birds could easily fly out of reach. But then I had an idea. I have always thought that the only aspect of owning a pet that I would actually enjoy would be naming the creature. Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore.… In tribute to tractate Beitzah, where the Mishnah records many disputes between the houses of Hillel and Shammai, I named my intruders after these first-century sages who founded opposing schools of thought. “But this is my house,” I insisted, as I watched Hillel flit to my Shabbat hot plate as if preparing to engage me in conversation about its halachic status.

  One who traps pigeons that live in dovecotes and pigeons that live in attics is liable. (Beitzah 24a)

  Just then Amir 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 to the hallway and then summoned me back a few minutes later to show me that the birds were now perched on the windowsill outside, looking in. I thought of Hillel the sage, who learned Torah by peering down through a skylight when he could not afford to pay the entrance fee to the study hall, and wondered if these feathered scholars were hoping to listen in on my daf yomi study. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting. It was with some degree of triumph that I shut the casement window tight and collapsed into bed.

  * * *

  It was not just my apartments that seemed temporary, but also my residence in Israel. Although I had a full-time salaried job, most of my friends were American students who came to Israel for the academic year and then returned home in the summer. When September rolled around I would scroll through the list of contacts in my cell phone and delete half the names and numbers, a revolving door of Davids, Talyas, and Rachels. I wondered if this was how grade school teachers felt when they said goodbye to their students each June and greeted the new crop in September. Still, my job had gone a long way toward making me feel less stuck, as had the steady pace of turning the next page of daf yomi.

  Friends both in Israel and America often asked me, “Are you in Israel for good?” and I didn’t know what to answer. I had come to Israel in love with a man, but the place had a romance of its own, and it exerted a hold on me. Once I had begun creating a life on the other side of the world, it was hard to imagine picking up and leaving it all behind. My family was supportive of my decision to stay, so long as I came back to visit once a year. But even on those annual visits back to New York, it was unclear to me—and to my parents—whether I should head back to Israel with fuller suitcases and transport more and more of my possessions east across the Atlantic. Where would I ultimately make my home? I had not committed to staying in Israel for the long term. How could I, as a single woman in a rental apartment? Besides, what does it mean to be in a place for good? Do people ask that question about other parts of the world?

  Eventually I began to think of “for good” as the English translation of l’tovah, for goodness, as in the blessing that we recite on the Shabbat before each new Jewish month: “May all our heart’s wishes be fulfilled for good.” And so I would respond that yes, I hoped that everything I did in life was toward a positive end. More than that, though, I could not say. Israel was the place where I had a job, and that job kept me rooted for the time being. Like the children of Israel in the wilderness, I would often pick up and relocate, but each of my temporary homes afforded me stability and shelter. And so even though I couldn’t answer my sister’s question about what the future held in store, I—unlike the children of Israel—was no
t complaining.

  ROSH HASHANAH

  The Book of Life

  Rosh Hashanah is commonly translated as the Jewish near year, an occasion for dipping apples in honey and spending long hours in synagogue praying to God for a year of blessing. But in tractate Rosh Hashanah there is not one Jewish new year, but four: one for festivals and the dating of legal documents, one for tithing cattle, one for agriculture, and one for trees. These various ways of marking time do not present a conflict until Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua break out in a fierce debate about when the world was created (10b): on the first of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah as we know it) or the first of Nisan (the month of Passover, when the Jews were freed from Egyptian bondage). Each rabbi marshals an elaborate body of evidence in support of his contention, and the resolution of their debate ultimately hinges—rather surprisingly—on the astrological map of the sky on the night of Noah’s flood, which the Torah tells us took place “in the second month on the seventeenth day of the month” (Genesis 7:11).

  My cosmological sensibilities are different, but I relate to the notion that there are various ways of marking time. Since high school I have kept track of my schedule using daily planners—notebooks with space to record daily appointments, commitments, and deadlines. When I lived in New York I bought my planners at the corner drugstore and had to annotate them before I could use them. Each year I’d copy over from my Jewish calendar all the dates of the Jewish holidays, the Shabbat candle-lighting times, and the names of the weekly Torah portions, superimposing Jewish time on secular time.

  When I came to Israel, I brought my American planner with me, but it wasn’t until Rosh Hashanah rolled around that I realized how backward that was. The new year was starting now. Why did my planner not end until December 31? And so I bought a new planner that started with Rosh Hashanah. In Israel, I discovered, the holiday season refers not to the break between Christmas and New Year’s but to the festive month of Tishrei, in which there are rarely more than three consecutive work days in any given week. I learned to follow not just the holiday cycle but the fruits that come in and out of season: the pomegranates that redden and ripen in time for Rosh Hashanah, the citrus that turns from green to yellow as the autumn days grow shorter, the apples and persimmons that dominate the open-air market in winter, and the moist tender apricots available for one month right around Shavuot. When shopping for produce I feel connected to the cycle of the seasons and the growing patterns of the land, whose fruit is sweet to my palate.

  The question of how to mark time and the seasons is central to tractate Rosh Hashanah, much of which deals with the laws governing the sighting of the new moon and the fixing of the calendar. On the Jewish calendar, every month has either twenty-nine or thirty days, depending on when the new moon appears. In ancient times the start of a new month was based on the testimony of witnesses who would come to the central court in Jerusalem to report on their sighting of the new moon in the sky. Sometimes these stories were quite colorful (and hence suspect): “I was climbing a hill in Maale Adumim when I saw the moon prancing between two rocks, its head resembling a calf, its ears resembling a goat, its horns resembling a deer, and its tail resting between its thighs” (Rosh Hashanah 22b). For witnesses who lacked such descriptive power, the patriarch Rabban Gamliel would hold up a chart with various diagrams of the moon so that the witnesses might choose which image most closely resembled what they had seen in the sky. The patriarch and the court in the land of Israel had exclusive control over the establishment of the calendar, which became a hallmark of rabbinic authority as well as a means of asserting the land of Israel’s centrality.

  In Israel it is not just the years but also the weeks that follow a different pattern: the Israeli weekend falls out on Friday and Saturday, while Sundays are regular working days. Many of my American friends living here lament that the loss of Sundays is the most difficult part of moving to Israel, but I don’t see it that way. I have never liked Sundays. In college a friend and I coined the term “Sunday doldrums” to refer to that sinking feeling of having so much to do and seemingly infinite time in which to do it—with the consequence that nothing gets done at all. This disorder was clinically labeled by the early twentieth-century neurologist Sándor Ferenczi as “Sunday neurosis,” consisting of “headaches or stomach disturbances that were wont to appear on this day without any particular cause, and often utterly spoilt the young people’s one free day of the week.”1 This was my affliction as a college student. I set my alarm for 7:00 a.m. every Sunday and forced myself to be up and out by 7:30, determined to take advantage of every minute. But twelve hours later, when the sun set and I was thoroughly exhausted, I felt like I’d gotten nothing done.

  Sundays in America seemed to slip away into the late, empty hours of the night, never quite living up to their promise. But Fridays in Israel have an energizing, even frenetic arc, with each hour drawing closer to Shabbat. I wake up on Friday and I know exactly how many hours I have until sunset to accomplish everything on my to-do list. So I throw in a load of laundry, dash to the bakery to pick up fresh challah, come home to roast vegetables for a salad, hang out the laundry to dry, finish editing a paper I promised to return to someone that week, dash off a few e-mails, fold the laundry, and then wash the floor before the sun begins to make its descent. Even the most mundane tasks become infused with an aura of sanctity because they are performed “lichvod Shabbat”—in honor of Shabbat. It is the loss of this sanctity that the great twentieth-century theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik lamented when he described Shabbat in America:

  It is not for Shabbat that my heart aches; it is for the forgotten “erev Shabbat” [eve of the Sabbath]. There are Shabbat-observing Jews in America, but there are no “erev Shabbat” Jews who go out to greet Shabbat with beating hearts and pulsating souls.2

  Here in Jerusalem, where the restaurants close and the traffic disappears from the streets and time seems to slow down as Shabbat begins, erev Shabbat has its own unique character. The moment the sun sets, I put away my Friday to-do list. I have checked off everything that absolutely must get done, and the rest can no longer plague me once I light the candles and slip into the slow, peaceful rhythm of the day of rest. Only after Havdalah, the ceremony that concludes Shabbat, do I take out my planner once again to see what awaits me in the coming week.

  * * *

  God, too, keeps a planner of sorts, mapping out not His days but ours in advance of Rosh Hashanah. The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16b) relates that on the Day of Judgment God inscribes the names and fates of all the Jewish people in three different books. The first is reserved for those who are completely righteous; God records their names in this book of life and signs it on Rosh Hashanah. The next book is reserved for those who are thoroughly wicked; God records their names in this book of death and it, too, is signed on Rosh Hashanah. The third book contains the names of all the rest of us, those in the middle; God enters our names in pencil, so to speak, on Rosh Hashanah, but then waits until Yom Kippur before sealing our fates for life or death. It is during this period that God plans out our years, deciding who will live and who will die, who will make it into the book of life and who will not.

  My own book of life, though, is not just my planner. In my planner I record the external realities—where I need to be when, and with whom. But then there is my journal, a record of what happens beneath the surface, in the deep and rocky emotional terrain of my heart, a landscape that sometimes feels so alien and barren that it may as well be on the moon—orbiting the earth, and keeping pace with sublunary reality, but a different thing entirely. Like the moon, my journal entries are merely a product of my own reflections, waxing and waning depending on how much light I shed on to the page.

  I began chronicling my days in second grade when my parents gave me a Rainbow Brite journal, each page of which was a different bold color. When I flipped back to read what I’d written, I could make out my pencil etchings only on the yellow and orange days; the red and blue days were
illegible. Still, I tended to write more on “blue” days than on “yellow” days—on days when I was sad or worried, rather than on days when I was happy and carefree. After all, if I was carefree, then why bother reflecting? My journal writing was never a celebration but more of a wallowing or, at best, a series of determined resolutions fiercely pounded onto the page.

  The Hasidic sage Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev would go to bed each night and examine his thoughts and deeds for that day. If he found fault with them, he would say to himself, “Levi Yitzchak will not do this again.” Then he would chide himself, “Levi Yitzchak said exactly the same thing yesterday.” And then he would reply, “Yesterday Levi Yitzchak did not speak the truth, but he does speak the truth today.”3 I can relate. I tell myself that by writing and reflecting on my life, I will become a better person. So many of my faults and bad habits seem to be a product of merely failing to live deliberately, with a heightened consciousness of what I am doing and why. Surely there are only so many times that I can scribble, “I will not eat chocolate after 10:00 p.m.” before I finally start listening to myself. So writing becomes a sort of shofar, the ram’s horn blown throughout the holiday season to call on us to mend our ways.