The shofar is sounded at the conclusion of daily morning services in the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah. In Jerusalem there may be as many as three or four synagogues on a given block, and when I jogged around the city at dawn, I heard one after another. Hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a religious commandment, and the rabbis in tractate Rosh Hashanah (27b) discuss whether a person who happens to be walking past a synagogue on the holiday and overhears the shofar blast has fulfilled his ritual obligation. They conclude that a person has fulfilled this obligation only if he “directed his heart,” that is, if he listened to the sound of the shofar with deliberate intentionality—an indication that what is most important is not the sound of the shofar but how that sound resonates within us.
The shofar is supposed to remind us to repent, a notion reflected in the rabbinic discussion of the case of a broken shofar. The Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah (27a) considers the case of a shofar that is cracked and is then put back together. Is such a shofar kosher for use on the holiday? What if one adds on extra materials—such as glue—to put the shards back together? Is the glued shofar kosher? The rabbinic discussion is reminiscent of the ancient Greek paradox known as the Ship of Theseus, which deals with the question of whether an object that has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object. Consider a ship that is comprised of wooden planks. One plank decays, and is replaced by a new plank. Then another plank decays, and it too is replaced. This process continues until none of the original planks remain. Is the vessel still the same ship?
Like the paradox of the ship, the Talmud deals with the question of when things change and when they stay the same. When is a shofar still a kosher shofar, and when is it changed into something else? Given that we are who we are, how much can we reasonably be expected to transform ourselves? In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke describes standing before the statue of a Greek god and finding himself utterly in its thrall. The statue—although it is missing a head and eyes—seems to look back at him with dazzling intensity. The poem climactically concludes with the terrifying charge, “You must change your life.”
This is also the charge of Rosh Hashanah. Each year we recite in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, “Repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the evil decree.” And so I strive for transformation not just while scribbling in my journal but also while standing before God in prayer—on Rosh Hashanah, and throughout the year.
* * *
“Know Before Whom You Stand,” read the gold letters above the ark in the synagogue in which I grew up. But around the time I learned tractate Rosh Hashanah, my “standing before God” took place not in a proper synagogue, but in a minyan, a small prayer community that I organized along with a group of friends. New prayer communities are always popping up in Jerusalem, a city in which finding the ideal synagogue is a quest that can rival Orwell’s search for the perfect pub. Our minyan, Kedem, was fully egalitarian, with men and women participating equally in all parts of the service. We followed the traditional liturgy and read the full Torah portion every Shabbat morning. In a country divided into religious and secular camps—and in which gender egalitarianism is generally assumed to belong solely to the latter—Kedem was for a long time an anomaly on the Israeli synagogue scene. But having grown up in an egalitarian synagogue, I felt uncomfortable praying in a segregated space where women and men played different roles. At Kedem our constituents were mostly Americans living abroad, particularly students, so the minyan had a very transient feel, with many members departing at the end of the summer. When September rolled around, we scrambled to find volunteers to blow the shofar and lead the many high holiday services, as well as to help with setting up the physical space—we met in the music room of an elementary school, stacking the prayer books atop the grand piano.
On Chanukah, when we borrowed an extra Torah scroll from another synagogue but had no room for it in our makeshift ark, I volunteered to house it in my studio apartment. I laid the scroll on my desk and covered it with a prayer shawl, but I was all too conscious of its presence. I did not feel comfortable walking out of the bathroom in a towel because I did not want to uncover my nakedness when there was so much holiness in the room. Nor did I feel I could gossip on the phone with friends, lest the verse prohibiting tale-bearing rise off the page to rebuke me. Rather, I conducted myself with the utmost propriety for the thirty-six hours I was roommates with the Torah scroll—and then breathed a sigh of relief when it was time to give it back.
The Talmud teaches that “a person should always first arrange his prayers, and then pray” (Rosh Hashanah 35a), and the Hebrew word for prayer book, siddur, also means “arrangement.” By serving as a coordinator of the minyan, I took this dictum very seriously. Most weeks I spent many hours preparing for and organizing services for the upcoming Shabbat, and so my whole week felt oriented toward that day, which is indeed what the rabbis mandate: in tractate Rosh Hashanah (31a), Rabbi Akiva teaches that there is a special psalm for each day of the week. The psalms for the first six days are about the creation of the world, and the psalm for Shabbat is about the world to come. In our daily prayers, we precede the psalm for each day by counting that day with reference to Shabbat: today is the first day of the Sabbath, today is the second day of the Sabbath, and so on. This counting resonated deeply with me as each week I took stock of how many days I had left to organize services for the coming Shabbat.
During services, I spent most of my time making sure there were enough chairs, reminding people when to open the ark, and redirecting visitors who accidentally wandered into our minyan in search of one of the many other synagogues located on the same street. Leading the minyan was ironically both a reason to come to synagogue and an excuse not to pray. With all my administrative responsibilities, who had time to concentrate on speaking to God? At the end of tractate Rosh Hashanah (35a), we learn that Rabban Gamliel would excuse field laborers from the responsibility to pray regularly, since they were busy in the fields and could not afford to leave their crops unattended. I was also too busy to pray, and I wondered whether making it possible for others to pray was also an acceptable form of worship.
Since I rarely had focused time in synagogue, I carried my siddur with me wherever I went. In moments when I felt totally lost—when I could not bring myself to show up for any of my appointments, or even bear to write about how I was feeling—I spoke to God through the siddur. I didn’t always use it, but I wanted to know it was there if I needed it. I also never left the house without my planner and my journal—to stay organized, and to ensure that I had a place to record my thoughts. Suffice to say I did not travel lightly. My planner, my journal, my siddur—they are, each in their own way, my books of life.
TAANIT
Two by Two
On Rosh Hashanah we commit to changing our lives, and then we spend the rest of the year trying to make good on that promise. For months I’d persuaded myself to bask in my solitude as if it were summer sunlight, not realizing how parched it left me until, unexpectedly, the soil of my soul began thirsting again. I was ready for a change. Appropriately, it was around this time that I started learning tractate Taanit, which deals largely with fasting in times of drought. I looked up to the heavens like the thirsty rabbis, and suddenly Omri fell into my life.
I met Omri just before I studied the mishnah at the end of Taanit about courtship rituals in the land of Israel, which took place, surprisingly, on the most serious and somber fast day of the Jewish calendar: “Never were there any more joyous festivals in Israel than the fifteenth of Av and the Day of Atonement, for on them, the maidens of Jerusalem would go forth dressed in white garments—borrowed ones, so as not to cause shame to those who had none of their own.… The maidens went out and danced in the vineyards, saying, ‘Young men, look and observe well whom you are about to choose. Regard not beauty alone, but rather look for a virtuous family, for ‘Grace is false and beauty is vain’” (26b).
I was not wearing a white dress when I first
met Omri, nor was I out dancing in the vineyards, but there was something enchanted about our first few dates. He was on reserve duty in the Israeli army and I was busy preparing for the Jerusalem book fair, a biennial international event in which a group of editors and agents from around the world come to Jerusalem for a week to learn about book publishing and Israeli literary culture. I spent the week at a hotel with the other participants, and so when Omri came back on leave, I told him to meet me in my hotel room, as if I were accustomed to such assignations. He came after dark and crept out before dawn to return to his base, and I pretended we were having a clandestine tryst under wartime curfew.
At the time I found it difficult to think of myself as attractive, let alone beautiful. “Grace is false and beauty is vain,” I said to myself as I put on the same clothes I’d worn the day before—why bother with a new shirt when the current one wasn’t yet smelly? I dressed in long denim skirts with large pockets and elbow-length sleeves that worked for both winter and summer, obviating the need for separate wardrobes. I had no patience for sartorial distractions, insisting with Jane Austen that “[d]ress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.”1 Instead I prided myself in my dedication to learning, a passion Omri and I shared.
When I prepared for dates with Omri, I didn’t try on clothes, but I tried out various Talmudic passages I might share with him. On one of our early dates we walked through the Cardo—the main thoroughfare in Roman Jerusalem of Hadrian’s time—and discussed the Talmud’s story about the encounter between the Caesar’s daughter and the reportedly ugly Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania (Taanit 7a). The Caesar’s daughter inquires about the implications of an ugly man being such a great scholar of Torah. “How can such beautiful wisdom be contained in so ugly a vessel?” Rabbi Yehoshua responds with a challenge: “Does your father the Caesar keep wine in gold vessels?” “Of course not,” the Caesar’s daughter responds. “But he is the Caesar. Shouldn’t he use the finest vessels?” So the Caesar’s daughter promptly transfers all her father’s wine to gold vessels, and of course the wine spoils. It is not the vessel that matters, but what is contained inside, as the rabbis teach in a mishnah (Avot 4:20). Or so I thought at first, but Omri saw it differently.
“The Caesar’s wine spoils when it’s placed in gold vessels,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but it is the wine that matters and not the container,” I responded, thinking of the mishnah in Avot.
“Is it?” Omri questioned. “Had the wine been placed in clay vessels, it would have been just fine. The fact that the vessels were gold made a difference. The vessel matters. Besides, wine is a liquid.”
“So?” I asked. Omri had clearly given this more thought than I had.
“A liquid takes the shape of its container. The wine assumed the shape of the gold vessel.”
Omri transformed the way I understood this Talmudic story. I’m no longer as dismissive of the vessel, or of what is on the outside. Who I am is related to what I learn because I give shape to my learning, just as the vessel gives shape to the wine poured inside it. Moreover, just as a gold vessel spoils the wine it contains, there is some sort of chemical reaction that takes place between me and the Torah I learn. I am transformed by the Torah I study, and the Torah I study is transformed by my insights.
My study dates with Omri opened my eyes to a new kind of relationship in which the Torah we studied not only took our shape but also filled the space between us, like the optical illusion of the vase that is also two faces. Although Omri and I learned much Torah together, we were not learning the same Torah. It is impossible for any two people to learn the exact same Torah, because the moment someone internalizes what he or she has learned, that learning begins to assume his or her shape. In this sense, the vessel and the contents are inherently interrelated.
Of course the vessel—the outside—is not just who I am but how I look. Yeats insisted 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.” I first encountered those lines in a high school poetry class, where I resolved that I cared too much about what they actually did talk about in school to be bothered with what they did not. In college I refused to wear my hair down even though, on the rare occasions when my hair band snapped and I had no choice but to let my hair free, I was always met with compliments. It was not just that I was suspicious of beauty. I was well aware of the power of beauty to turn heads, but I wanted to know that I would have that power in reserve should I ever need it. If I wore my hair down every day, I thought, then no one would comment. So long as I looked ordinary 99 percent of the time, people would notice the moment I made any effort whatsoever, and so I’d have an easy way to make myself pretty when necessary. It was like, say, having a superpower that I saved only for those critical moments when I was being pursued by the archvillain and had to suddenly fly or become invisible.
With Omri I did not feel I needed any superpowers, at least not at first, when our relationship seemed to be soaring. After a few months of dating I tried to persuade him to take up daf yomi so we could learn together, but I soon realized that this was a mistake. Omri was a thorough student who could not bear to leave any stone unturned, and so I would forever be trying to turn the page while he would stay my hand. He needed to understand every turn of phrase and every logical leap in the Talmudic text, whereas daf yomi demands a certain degree of superficiality or it is impossible to keep pace. I was as exasperated with his slowness as he was with my speed, and in the end we gave up.
Tractate Taanit discusses the ideal study partnership and teaches that a person cannot learn Torah alone. “Rabbi Hama said in the name of Rabbi Hanina: Why is it written, ‘Iron and iron together’ (Proverbs 27:17)? Just as iron sharpens iron, two scholars sharpen each other’s teachings. Rabbi bar bar Hana said: Why is Torah analogized to fire? As it is written, ‘Are all my words not like fire? spoke the Lord’ (Jeremiah 23:29). To teach that just as fire cannot ignite on its own, so too do words of Torah not endure in the single individual” (Taanit 7a). Learning Torah, like falling in love, is supposed to set us on fire. I believed that I would know I had met the right man when we had the right “learning chemistry” as well as the right “romantic chemistry.” But the heart and the head are not always in the same place, and Omri and I stayed together even after we began learning alone.
On some level I was so committed to the relationship because Omri protected me from loneliness. I thought of Honi the Circle Drawer, whose name comes from a story in Taanit (23a) in which he draws a circle and refuses to move from it until God brings rain during a season of drought. In another tale on the same page of Taanit, Honi plants a carob tree even though he knows he will not be able to eat from it. As he explains to a passerby, he is planting the carob tree for his descendants, just as his ancestors planted for him. Honi then proceeds to fall into a deep sleep lasting seventy years. When he wakes, no one recognizes him anymore or accords him respect. He sinks into depression and prays to God that he might die. The story concludes with Honi’s death and another rabbi’s declaration that a person cannot live in social isolation: “Either companionship or death.” Omri was a companion during what would otherwise have been a very lonely stretch of life.
It is Omri I have to thank for much of my knowledge of Jerusalem. He loved to explore the city and used to take me on late-night rambles around its lesser-known neighborhoods and alleyways. Like me, he walked everywhere, rain or shine. But he always carried an umbrella with him, whereas I couldn’t be bothered. It seems that there are two types of people—the raincoat wearers and the umbrella carriers—and I am the former. Raincoat wearers cover themselves up as best as possible, hoping that they will be sufficiently protected by their waterproof outer layer. Umbrella carriers are more proactive; they lift a protective covering over their heads and carve out a corner of the world where the rain will not fall. I thought of the story of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, who once set ou
t on his way when it started to rain. “Master of the Universe,” he cried out, “the whole world is at peace but Hanina is distressed?” The rain ceased. When he got home, he cried out, “Master of the Universe, the whole world is distressed and Hanina is at peace?” And then the rain came (Taanit 24b). Unlike Hanina, I don’t feel the need to carve out my own corner of dryness. I’m happy to let the rain fall on me and on the trees and flowers that need it, covering myself with a raincoat and accepting, come what may, the inevitable inconvenience.
The inconvenience of rain is exacerbated by the fact that in Israel, where the daily news report includes mention of the water levels in the Sea of Galilee, one is never allowed to complain about precipitation. “Rain is a blessing,” as Omri often rebuked me when I complained. Or, as the rabbis declare in Taanit (7b), “A rainy day is as great as the day that the heavens and earth were created.” I tried to celebrate the romance of the rain, particularly when I watched it pour down my windows at work while I was safe and dry inside, bundled in the warm afghan I kept folded in my desk drawer. I told myself that in an era of global warming, I ought to feel grateful that the seasons still change, the rainbow comes and goes, and all this glory has not passed away from the earth. Each time it rained, no matter where I was and how little protective gear I had with me, I tried to respond like the sage Nahum Ish Gamzu in tractate Taanit (21a), who would greet every calamity that befell him with the faith that “this, too, is for the best.”
Growing up in the American Northeast, I, like so many others, took rain for granted. There was always an abundance of water, and the question was not whether it would rain enough to fill the sea, but whether the sun would come out tomorrow. But Israel has distinct wet and dry seasons. It may rain any day from October to March, but then it is completely dry in the spring and summer months. Often the start of the rainy season comes unexpectedly: the sky is no more overcast than usual; the forecast is the same as the day before and the day before that; no one thinks to carry an umbrella. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, the skies heave. Within moments, the streets are flooded and the sidewalks are dotted with muddy brown puddles. Bus drivers try to remember where the switch for the windshield wipers is located on the dashboard, pedestrians duck under the awning of the local grocery for cover, and students rummage through their backpacks for a plastic bag to put over their books. Everyone remembers where they were at the moment the rainy season began—it is an event worthy even of its own name, biblical in origin: the yoreh.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 6