If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  During those weeks before Purim I was very pregnant indeed. Unable to see past my belly to my feet, I could not know what the next few days and weeks held in store. Would I give birth on Purim, as my due date predicted? Would the births be smooth and the babies healthy? What would it be like to be a mother of twins? I could no more have told you at that moment than I could have foretold, back when I first learned tractate Megillah, that one day I would remarry, create a new life for myself, and bring new life into the world. And so aware that I could not predict the future, I resolved that I would instead pray that one day, when I read the story of my life backward, this chapter would have a happy ending.

  MOED KATAN

  Trapdoor Days

  If Megillah is the happiness tractate, then Moed Katan appears all the way at the other end of the emotional spectrum—certainly when it comes to the third and final chapter, which deals with the laws of mourning. I identified with the themes of this tractate, thankfully not as a mourner but rather as one who has been, at various points in my life, acquainted with the night.

  I write of my bouts of depression tentatively, with head hung low. I am all too familiar with the tendency to romanticize dark feelings—to say that they are the sign of a creative, artistic soul, or that they reflect a capacity to feel more deeply. I acknowledge the validity of mental illness, but my own depressive tendencies have always struck me as the failure to develop adequate coping mechanisms. Perhaps I have been blessed with such a supportive family and social network that I have never had to learn to combat the demons on my own. The Talmud in Moed Katan (17a) states that anyone who feels that his evil inclination is getting the better of him should “dress in black, and wrap himself in black, and go to a place where no one knows him.” The sages are referring to someone who is tempted by sin and desperate for an outlet, but the tendency to spiral down into the dark pit of depression is a temptation too, and I can certainly identify with the impulse to wear all black and avoid social contact. The problem is that wherever you go, there you are. Even in that dark place where no one knows me, I am still stuck with myself, and the aloneness often serves only to exacerbate the dark feelings.

  That was how I felt the year my marriage fell apart, which was also the year I tried, for the first time, to wear tefillin—a subject that comes up with surprising frequency in Moed Katan. Tefillin are small leather boxes containing parchment inscribed with verses from the Bible. They are essentially miniature Torah scrolls worn on the forehead and arm so that the wearer may embody Torah and remain cognizant of its teachings. The commandment to wear tefillin was taken very seriously by the sages of the Talmud. We are told in Moed Katan (25a) that Rav Huna, upon discovering that one of his tefillin straps had turned over, fasted for forty days in penance. Although in modern times tefillin are worn only during morning weekday prayers, in Talmudic times—and in subsequent generations—they were worn all day and had no special association with prayer. For instance, the Talmud (Moed Katan 26a) relates an anecdote about a man who took off his tefillin to go to the bathroom at some point during the day, only to return and find an ostrich pecking at them!

  The origin of the commandment to wear tefillin appears in the book of Exodus: “It shall be for you a sign upon your arm and a reminder between your eyes, so that God’s teaching will be in your mouth, for God took you out of Egypt with a mighty arm” (Exodus 13:9). Tefillin serve as a direct link between the intentions of the mind and the actions of the arm, both of which should be guided by the Torah’s values. In the Talmud, studying Torah and wearing tefillin are intimately related. The sages state explicitly that women are exempt from tefillin because they are exempt from Torah study (Kidushin 34a). But in our modern egalitarian world where women like myself learn Torah alongside men, I was hard-pressed to find a compelling reason not to adopt tefillin as a regular practice. And so as I watched Paul put on tefillin every morning, I decided I would join him.

  Upon wrapping tefillin around one’s hand, it is traditional to recite a verse from Hosea (2:21–22) that is also associated with Jewish wedding ceremonies: “I will betroth you to Me forever, and I will betroth you to Me with righteousness, justice, kindness, and mercy. I will betroth you to Me with fidelity, and you shall know God.” With each day that I wrapped tefillin around my arm, our marriage increasingly unraveled. Paul and I prayed side by side in the mornings, standing at our kitchen table overlooking the unkempt garden outside our ground-floor window. But we seemed to spend more time engaged in conversations with God than with each other. Much as toddlers parallel play, oblivious to one another’s presence, we parallel prayed. This was particularly ironic since it was prayer that had originally brought us together: we’d met in a synagogue, where we’d tried to ignore each other’s stolen glances and concentrate instead on speaking to God. On more hopeful days I thought of a line from a poem by Frank Bidart: “The love I have known is not the love of two people looking into each other’s eyes, but of two people looking in the same direction.” But I had no way of knowing if we were in fact directing our prayers toward the same desired end.

  Paul and I had been married in the heat of summer, but already by winter a chill had set in. The growing awareness that we were no longer joined together in kindness and mercy drove me into a dark place in which I found it very difficult to pray. “The worst is not, so long as we can say this is the worst,” I kept telling myself, quoting King Lear, but then things would get even worse. Perhaps the Jewish equivalent to this quote is “From the depths I have cried out to God” (Psalms 130:1), because there is something about hitting that lowest point that moves the soul to the uplifting experience of prayer, like a diver’s feet buoyed up by contact with the ocean floor. But I still felt quite sunk, and it was not long before I found it impossible to wear tefillin anymore.

  The rabbis draw a connection between tefillin and sadness in their discussion of mourning in Moed Katan (15a). They teach that a mourner is forbidden from wearing tefillin based on a passage in Ezekiel in which God tells the prophet that He is going to take his wife from him but that Ezekiel may not mourn her. Ezekiel, living in the early years of the sixth century BCE just before the destruction of the First Temple, serves as an object lesson for the Jewish people: God would soon destroy their Temple, but the people would not be allowed to mourn it because they were at fault in their failure to obey God. “Put on your splendor,” God says to Ezekiel (24:17), and the rabbis interpret splendor as a reference to tefillin, which are regarded as a form of adornment. Ezekiel is supposed to wear his tefillin as a sign that he is not observing mourning practices for his wife, and thus the rabbis conclude that under ordinary circumstances, a mourner should not wear tefillin.

  I was not aware of this law during the year I tried to wear tefillin, but I understood intuitively that tefillin and depression did not mix. I had many trapdoor days, as I came to refer to them—days when I just wanted to fall through the floor and escape my life. As is often the case with depression, the mornings were the worst. I’d wake up by Paul’s side as if he were a total stranger. Some days I was too unhappy to shower and I just wore the clothes draped over my chair from the day before, with no frills or accessories. If I could not even be bothered to put on earrings, how could I adorn myself in the splendor that tefillin represent? Other mornings I showered but then couldn’t put on tefillin until my hair had dried. So there were logistical complications in addition to emotional ones. Once it became clear that it was impossible for me to put on tefillin every day, I gave up on the practice altogether. It remains bound up in associations far removed from kindness and mercy, and I have been unable to return to it since.

  * * *

  The notion of a trapdoor day came to me during the year after I graduated Harvard, when I was at the peak of my academic career. I graduated with highest honors and won a one-year fellowship to study in Cambridge. “From Cambridge to Cambridge, there is nothing like Cambridge,” I initially quipped, just as Moses Maimonides famously stated that “from Mos
es to Moses, there was no one like Moses.” But for me, Cambridge, England, was a far cry from Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard I was part of a warm and vibrant Jewish community where I organized a Conservative minyan and spent my free time sitting in on large lecture classes about intellectual history, literature, neuroscience, religious thought, and anything that captured my interest. The world felt dazzlingly alive and I woke up each morning determined to use every moment to the fullest. But in Cambridge, England, where the weather was overcast and dreary and the sun set two hours before dinner, the world seemed to be closing in on me.

  I came to Cambridge as the recipient of a John Harvard Fellowship, which entitled me to a generous stipend while I lived in what was reputedly the bedroom of the original John Harvard, who went on to donate his estate and library to a new school in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Harvard was a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in the 1630s, and his room—or his “rooms,” as they were known—seemed not to have changed much since the seventeenth century. The main sitting room was large and cavernous, with wood-paneled walls and a low ceiling. The mantel was decorated with badminton rackets, oars, and rugby balls, and atop the sealed fireplace hung the Harvard Veritas shield and the Emmanuel purple lion. I had to duck to enter the front door, which was made for a time when the average person was considerably shorter. A metal plaque on the lintel read “Mind your head,” though I often forgot. A story in Moed Katan (25a) tells of Rav Huna’s deathbed, which the sages were unable to fit through the doorway of his house. How then could they remove his body for burial? One sage suggested raising it through a hole in the roof, but this was not acceptable because “the honor of a scholar demands that he pass only through the door.” In the end, they had to beat down the door so as to remove Rav Huna. I regarded my low doorway somewhat morbidly. My fellowship was supposed to be a great honor, but there was no way my bed could possibly fit through the entry.

  John Harvard’s “rooms” included a bedroom with a sloped floor made of creaky, uneven boards that groaned whenever I put my feet down. There was also an immense wardrobe with the bar for hanging clothes protruding from the back to the front so that I could see only one item of clothing at a time. I referred to it as my “Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe wardrobe” and had dreams about getting swallowed up inside it and emerging halfway around the world in the other Cambridge. Adjacent to the bedroom was a study that was formerly a “gyp room,” or servants’ quarters, with a large mahogany desk I found far too intimidating for the humble nature of my academic work. I generally preferred to perch on my bed with my laptop, my back leaning against the dark paneled walls.

  But the Harvard rooms were most notable for what they lacked—namely, a bathroom. The closest toilets were one courtyard to the right, and the showers were one courtyard to the left. I slept with my shoes on at night because inevitably I had to wake up to use the loo, and I did not want to have to fumble for footwear in the dark. I am told that the long line of Harvard scholars who preceded me in those rooms—all men, as far as I know—used to pee out the window and aim for the duck pond for which the college is famous. Often it was the quacking of the ducks that woke me up at night, and I glared at them irritably on my way to the bathroom under cover of darkness.

  No doubt the John Harvard Fellowship is a dream come true for most of those who receive it, and I would never want to sound ungrateful. The year was entirely unstructured, with nothing demanded of me except to receive any visitors graciously and to enjoy the opportunity for intellectual exploration. Officially I was enrolled in the English department pursuing a master’s in early nineteenth-century literature. That is, I was studying Wordsworth on the same campus where Wordsworth received his formative education. What could be more thrilling? And yet, as I read a section of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude while sitting on the grass beside the duck pond, I identified all too much with the poem’s ponderous tone:

  I was detached

  Internally from academic cares,

  From every hope of prowess and reward,

  And wished to be a lodger in that house

  Of letters, and more: and should have been

  Even such, but for some personal concerns

  That hung about me in my own despite

  Perpetually.

  I, too, wished to be a lodger in the house of letters, and should have been—but some personal concerns held me back.

  At Cambridge I discovered that I cannot abide unstructured time. Most days I woke up in the morning with absolutely nowhere I had to be and nothing I had to do. There was much that I wanted to read—I was determined to make it through Coleridge’s intellectual autobiography, among other classics of British Romanticism—but no one was checking up on me or reading alongside me, nor did I have the support of a daf yomi community. Had I been learning daf yomi that year, I suspect I would have had a less isolating experience and that I would have sought out connections with others who were on the same page. Instead my only scholarly relationships were secular. Once a week I met with a leading expert on Wordsworth and Coleridge who sat in a tall-backed rocking chair, swayed back and forth, and looked at me with piercing eyes. He waited for me to direct the conversation, and I struggled each week to think of a brilliant question to pose. Then, with the sun already set on a cold winter afternoon, I retreated back to my dark John Harvard rooms to read until I fell asleep.

  My days at Cambridge were painfully lonely. The Talmud in Moed Katan (15a) teaches that a mourner is forbidden to engage in sheilat shalom, that is, to greet other people and inquire after their welfare, as part of a general avoidance of unnecessary speech. I thought about this concept of sheilat shalom on days when I saw no familiar faces, such that there was no opportunity to greet or be greeted. Socializing among students primarily took place in the local pubs with names like The Red Lion or The Queen’s Arms. I don’t enjoy drinking and I was uncomfortable socializing in pubs, nor did I want to come home with my black clothes—only black seemed cool enough—reeking of smoke.

  A few weeks into the Michaelmas term I found a home in a Shakespeare reading group that met every Friday night to read an entire Shakespeare play aloud, in parts. Reading Shakespeare became my alternative to Shabbat dinner. It was also a way to dress in black and wrap myself in black—that is, to shed my own skin and assume another identity for a few hours. Thankfully the group met in an empty classroom and not in a pub, though there was plenty of wine to go around.

  I was also at home in the library, where I spent long hours reading about Coleridge’s opinions on mesmerism, phrenology, and other ideas we’d dismiss today as pseudoscientific—a continuation of my undergraduate work. I was interested in how poetry became a medium for Wordsworth and Coleridge to engage in dialogue about the reigning scientific ideas of their day, and how these ideas, though subsequently debunked, became enshrined in their work. One day I wandered into an old curiosity shop and bought myself a phrenology bust—a statue of a head with all the mental functions mapped on to the skull. According to the principles of phrenology, human character may be deduced from the bumps on the skull. Phrenology paved the way for our contemporary understanding of cerebral localization, the idea that particular brain functions correspond to specific regions in the brain. But the notion that character is reflected in the shape of the skull is no longer the province of science, but of boardwalk fortune telling.

  Now that phrenology bust sits on the windowsill above my desk in Jerusalem, where it serves as a reminder of fallen myths. A few months into my fellowship I learned that John Harvard did not actually live in the John Harvard rooms, and in fact the building that contains them was not completed until at least a year after he graduated. The fellowship, too, was not all it was cracked up to be—at least not for me. The Harvard suite radiated an aura of privilege and prestige, but the dim rooms with their groaning floorboards were cold and haunting. As the John Harvard fellow at Cambridge I learned that the dream of hours of uninterrupted time to read and
study will forever tempt but inevitably frustrate me. My year in England taught me that the fellowship of others is more important than any academic fellowship. Armed with that lesson, I have learned, for the most part, to stave off despair.

  * * *

  I write this book as the mother of three children under the age of three, at a time in my life when quiet is hard to come by. In the evenings when they are blessedly asleep I sit in the main room of our Jerusalem apartment at the long desk my husband and I share, lining the window. I translate literary texts while Daniel, a professor of English literature, grades student papers. My side of the windowsill contains my phrenology bust, which winks at me as I type, encouraging me when I struggle to find the right words. His side contains a framed photograph of his father, looking up at him with kind, twinkling eyes.

  Daniel placed that photograph there while mourning his father, who died following a long battle with cancer one year after we were married. Sometimes when guests come to visit, they look at the figure in the photograph, who bears clear resemblance to Daniel. “Wow, your father looks so much like you,” they exclaim, and we try to find a way to switch to the past tense so that they understand. Often we simply appeal to our toddler son Matan, who refers to the figure in the photograph as Saba alav hashalom, which translates as “Grandfather who rests in peace.” Matan does not understand death, but he knows that Saba alav hashalom never comes to visit.

  The laws of mourning in Moed Katan reflect an understanding that the death of a parent is different from any other loss. For instance, if a person learns of the death of a relative more than thirty days after the fact, he does not observe shiva or shloshim, the seven-day period of intense mourning and the thirty-day period of less intense mourning practices; however, if it was a parent who died, then shiva and shloshim are still observed (20a). Likewise, a person is obligated to rend a garment upon hearing the news of a relative’s death; that rent garment may be stitched back together properly after the period of mourning, unless the deceased was a parent (22b). When a parent dies, the rent in the fabric of life is never fully repaired.