If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  For the eleven months after his father’s death, Daniel said Kaddish, the traditional mourner’s prayer, three times a day. This was a significant commitment: each day he woke up early enough to get to morning minyan, and he interrupted his afternoon of research or teaching to find a minyan for the afternoon and evening prayers. Throughout that year I often thought of Emily Dickinson’s poem about stopping for death: “Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me.” It is not easy to stop for death, as we learn in Moed Katan. The Talmud cites several stories about rabbis who made it difficult for the Angel of Death to claim their souls (28a). Rav Hisda, for instance, never stopped learning Torah, such that Death—which has no power over Torah—could not snatch him up. Desperate, the Angel of Death went and climbed atop the central pillar holding up Rav Hisda’s house, causing the pillar to collapse. Startled by the noise, Rav Hisda looked up from his learning, and at that moment, the Angel of Death catapulted him into his carriage, and off they drove.

  As this story underscores, death never comes at a convenient time, and almost always the soul wants more. How much Daniel and I would have loved for his father to have been able to meet our twins, who were born one year later. But as the Talmud teaches in Moed Katan, “One’s length of days, one’s children, and one’s food depend not on one’s merits, but on fortune” (28a). And so Daniel honored his father by stopping for death three times a day, interrupting whatever he was doing to find the nearest minyan and recite the Kaddish. During that entire year, I never once saw him put on tefillin, because he did so only at synagogue. In my eyes, though, his steadfast commitment to his father crowned him in a sort of halo, a form of radiant splendor.

  These days, Daniel prays at our desk by the window. Though he bows in the direction of the Temple Mount, which is visible in the distance, usually his attention is at least partially focused on our kids, who eat breakfast at the adjacent table. Sometimes when he is in a rush in the morning he leaves his tefillin on the windowsill, somewhere between the phrenology bust and the photograph of his father. Taken together, the phrenology bust and tefillin and photograph remind me of seventeenth-century vanitas still-life paintings, with their arrangements of skull and hourglass and flowering plant. “Still life with sadness,” I might call our triptych, a reminder that in spite of divorce and in spite of depression and even in spite of the agony of death, there is still life. At the desk beneath the windowsill containing our vanitas, I type out this story of our lives.

  HAGIGAH

  Torah from the Heavens

  I will never forget where I was when I learned tractate Hagigah, because the volume still bears a luggage identification sticker. The tractate deals with the laws relating to the commandment to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year, on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Appropriately, I was preparing to board a plane to Israel at the time, due to land just a few hours before the start of Passover. My trip was not a pilgrimage but the return flight after the London Book Fair. The rest of my flight consisted largely of British Jews who were heading to Israel for the holiday. Standing in line before the El Al ticket counter, I was surrounded by flocks of Hasidic men in black and white who were squawking through their beards and flapping their dress bags in a frenzy of preflight excitement. I’d begun learning on the long Tube ride from the fairgrounds at Earl’s Court out to the Heathrow terminal, and I was still clutching my volume of Talmud in my arm when I walked over to join them in the queue.

  I was dragging a huge suitcase full of the catalogues and foreign rights guides I had amassed at the book fair, but my luggage was nothing compared with what I saw all around me. Families with four or five young children were accompanied by caravans of suitcases, duffel bags, hatboxes, baby strollers, and diaper bags; pacifiers were being dropped by drooling babies hanging over their mothers’ arms; and their oblivious fathers hid behind large leather-bound tomes and moved their lips in a feverish undertone. The line inched forward slowly, but none of the penguins around me seemed bothered by the glacial pace. And so it seemed only natural to me that while I was waiting, I’d open my Talmud and plow onward through the unlearned pages of daf yomi that had accumulated during my busy trip abroad.

  I was up to the second chapter of tractate Hagigah, which contains the largest concentration of mystical material in the Talmud. Presumably this material is included in Hagigah because the Torah (Deuteronomy 16:16) commands that all Jews must appear before the face of God on the pilgrimage festivals that are the subject of this tractate, an encounter with the divine that inspires mystical musings. The opening mishnah enumerates those matters that should be studied very cautiously in small-group settings: the laws of forbidden sexual relations (which may be taught to no more than three students at a time), the details of the creation of the world (which may be taught only to a pair of students), and the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a chariot of fire (which must be taught only one-on-one). Without elaborating on any of these matters, the Mishnah goes on to caution, “Anyone who looks into four matters is deserving of never having been born: What is above, what is below, what is in front, and what is behind” (11b).

  Absorbed in my learning, I was somewhat oblivious to what was going on in front of and behind me. Perhaps I ought to have noticed the flurry among the Hasidic men, who peered out over the tops of their books and glanced in my direction. Perhaps I should have listened to them whispering in Yiddish and noticed the nervous glances exchanged beneath raised eyebrows. But my head was buried in those matters that are wondrous and concealed and hidden, as Ben Sira, a sage from Jerusalem in the early second century BCE, would have it: “In that which is wondrous to you, do not expound. And in that which is concealed from you, do not investigate. Examine that which is permitted to you; you have no business with hidden matters.” Ben Sira’s text was excluded from the canonized Hebrew Bible, but his statements are occasionally quoted in the Talmud, as on the page of Hagigah I had open before me (13a). I imagined that all the Hasidic men around me were quoting from Ben Sira too, insisting that I had no business studying Talmud.

  In the circles in which I travel—among liberal American Jews and religious Zionist Israelis—it is widely accepted that women may study the same Talmudic texts as men, and indeed there are several institutions of higher learning devoted to such purposes. In ultra-Orthodox circles, however, women’s learning is generally restricted to Bible and religious ethical literature. I am not sure of the justification for this practice—are women told that Talmud study is beyond them? That it is unnecessary for them? One bewigged woman, standing behind me in line, leaned over and said to me in Yiddish-accented Hebrew, “It is Talmud? And you can understand something in it? A little bit?” Perhaps that was my opportunity to expound on the wondrous, but I merely nodded, without lifting my head from the book.

  My learning was soon interrupted again by a tall uniformed Israeli man with a dark ponytail who wanted to know if I had packed my bags myself. I closed tractate Hagigah so that I could focus on his security questions: “Why are you going to Israel? You have family in Israel? No family? You live in Israel? Why do you live in Israel if you have no family? You are from America? Why don’t you live there?” I tried to answer the security agent, but these were not questions with simple answers. Why was I living in Israel, so far from my family and friends? I had come because of Paul, sure, but what was keeping me? Certainly it was not my apartment, since in those days I moved so frequently. Nor was it Omri or any of the men I’d dated, since none of these relationships seemed particularly promising. It was still just a couple of years after my divorce, and I was unprepared to make long-term commitments. Even Israel seemed at times like a temporary home, a place where I was living for the time being.

  The agent had still more questions. How did I know Hebrew? Where had I learned it? I explained that I grew up in a family of Hebraists—my American parents spoke Hebrew to me as an infant—and that I went to an American Jewish day school with a rigorous Hebrew program. Since arrivi
ng in Israel, I told him, I’d tried to read a Hebrew novel every few months. Perhaps I should have added that I was also learning Aramaic through my Talmud study, since the Talmud is written in both languages. The Mishnah, the oldest part of the Talmud, was written in Hebrew in the land of Israel, and much of it deals directly with the land. I might have told him that for me, learning Jewish texts in English in the diaspora would always feel like a pale shadow of the real thing—which was why studying Talmud in Israel had taken on so much significance. But was I really expected to share all this? I was sure that no biblical pilgrim had ever been subjected to such rigorous interrogation.

  The Mishnah warns against delving into “what is in front of you and what is behind you,” which were the very questions the agent was getting at. What was behind me? How had I gotten to a place in life where I was living alone, halfway around the world from the people who knew me best? And what was ahead of me? Where was my life going, and what was I doing to ensure that it was heading in the direction I wanted? Even when I was by myself, scribbling away in my journal, I was loathe to ponder these matters too closely. The daily planner I carried in my backpack lasted until September of that year, and after then, I had no plan. What lay ahead?

  “Gate C6,” the clerk told me as if in answer to my question, stamping my boarding pass. I made my way to the gate and resumed learning. The Talmud functions as an elaboration on the text of the Mishnah, and so it is not surprising—though it is somewhat ironic—that the Talmud proceeds to expound at great length on each of the restricted subjects enumerated in the Mishnah. The rabbis brazenly ask about the details of the creation of the world: Was the heaven or the earth created first? How tall was the first man? How many layers did God create in the heavens? The rabbis describe each layer of heaven in surprisingly poetic terms: There is the layer known as Vilon, “where morning enters and evening exits, and creation is renewed.” There is Shchakim, “where the millstones grind out manna for the righteous.” And Ma’on, “where the ministering angels sing songs by night and are silent by day” (12b). Just when I got up to the final layer, a voice on the loudspeaker announced that my El Al flight was boarding, and soon we too would take off into the heavens.

  My seat on the plane was right behind the wing, below which I could nearly make out the wheels on the runway. I thought of the mystical chariot of Ezekiel, which rose to heaven with wheels and wings. According to the Mishnah’s hierarchy, this is the most esoteric subject of all; it is dangerous to learn about Ezekiel’s chariot even one-on-one. The Talmud in Hagigah (13a) tells the story of a young child who sat reading about the chariot in his teacher’s house when suddenly he was consumed by flames. Then there was Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, who expounded on the chariot before his teacher when at once a fire came down from the heavens and surrounded all the trees in the forest, which then burst into song (14b). Suddenly I felt light-headed. Was there a dip in cabin pressure? I looked out through the window to the endless expanse of sky and the outstretched wings of the plane with its wheels now tucked beneath. The page of Talmud danced before my eyes, and thinking of Yeats’s Irish airman, I relished the lonely impulse of delight that I so often felt when studying Torah.

  A few hours later, when I got up from my seat and made my way down the aisle toward the bathroom, I passed rows of men slumped over their own volumes of Talmud in exhaustion. “All who learn Torah at night—the Holy One Blessed Be He affixes to him a thread of loving-kindness by day” (Hagigah 12b). I returned to my seat and resumed learning as the plane flew through the night. One black-hatted man who was still awake and learning continued to peer at me suspiciously, but when I caught his eye I could only think about how we were both—at least literally—on the same page.

  The same Talmudic sage who speaks in praise of learning Torah at night goes on to relate that night is not meant to be taken literally. He explains, “All who learn Torah in this world—which resembles night—the Holy One Blessed Be He affixes to him a thread of loving-kindness in the next world, which resembles day” (12b). As the plane began its descent, I considered how little in my life seemed clear and illuminated and how much took place under cover of darkness.

  Finally grounded, I went through passport control and came to the arrivals section, where parents waited for their children with open arms, husbands awaited their wives with eager smiles, and important dignitaries were greeted by uniformed men carrying handwritten signs bearing their names in block letters. No one was waiting for me on this side of the ocean; I’d be traveling back from the airport in a public van to my studio apartment. Still, after a week at the London Book Fair, I felt like I was coming home. In their discussion of the laws of the pilgrimage festivals, the rabbis in tractate Hagigah focus on the biblical injunction that no one visit the Temple empty-handed (Exodus 23:15). Hence the mandate to bring sacrificial offerings on each of the pilgrimage festivals. When I disembarked the plane, as when I’d boarded, I was carrying my well-worn volume of Hagigah tucked under my arm. And so I was not making my pilgrimage back to the holy land empty-handed; for the time being, daf yomi was my offering.

  PART II

  The Order of Women

  YEVAMOT

  Lentils in My Pot

  I was unmarried throughout the entire year and a half in which I learned the tractates in Seder Nashim, which deal with the relationships between husbands and wives. As I pored over Talmudic pages about who is permitted to marry whom, and how betrothal takes place, and what happens if a wife is suspected of being unfaithful, I thought of Rabbi Akiva’s commentary about the plague of frogs in Egypt. “There was just one frog,” said Akiva, interpreting the biblical verse that literally reads, “The frog came up and covered the land of Egypt” (Exodus 8:2). Akiva explained that this one frog in turn gave rise to enough frogs to cover the entire land. His colleague responded by invoking the classic distinction between halachah (law) and aggadah (legend). Akiva’s expertise was the former, and so Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya chided, “Akiva, what are you doing studying aggadah? Desist from these words, and go study the laws of skin blemishes and impure tents” (Sanhedrin 67b). As a single woman living alone, I suppose I had as much business studying Seder Nashim as Rabbi Akiva had studying aggadah. But I could not help but daydream about that one and only Frog who would overlook my blemishes and come to my tent in the guise of a handsome prince.

  Yevamot, the first tractate in Seder Nashim, literally means “sisters-in-law.” The tractate deals with the biblical law of levirate marriage whereby a man is obligated to marry his deceased brother’s widow so long as she is childless. This is the case even if the man already has a wife, since men in Talmudic times were permitted to marry more than one woman. The rival co-wives of polygamous men are known as tzarot, a word that also means “troubles.” And so when I began learning this tractate during the summer of 2007, I jokingly referred to this period as my summer of tzarot. If nothing else, there was the trouble of how to understand the complicated family relationships discussed in this tractate, such as the case of a man whose brother is married to his mother-in-law, or the case of two men who accidentally switch wives under the wedding canopy, and other confusing liaisons.

  And then there was the trouble of being single. Officially I was still dating Omri, but our relationship was faltering, and by that point I was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be. I probably ought to have broken up with him sooner than I did, but I was still more scared of being alone than of being with the wrong person—and that says a lot, given that I’d been married to the wrong person just two years earlier. That summer, in addition to learning Yevamot, I reread D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover when a used copy appeared in the rack outside my local bookstore. Lawrence writes about the difficulty of finding a suitable mate: “The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few, in most personal experiences. There’s lots of good fish in the sea—maybe! But the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring your
self, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”1 The lack of eligible single men in Jerusalem was a frequently voiced lament among my female friends, who always seemed to far outstrip their male counterparts. Lawrence says this explicitly, quoting a verse from Jeremiah (5:1): “‘Go ye into the streets and by-ways of Jerusalem, and see if you can find a man.’ It had been impossible to find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet—though there were thousands of male humans. But a man! C’est une autre chose!”2 Jeremiah, who prophesied the destruction of the Temple in the early sixth century BCE, was looking for any upright and godly person on the streets of Jerusalem. My own requirements, of course, were a bit more specific.

  If I found no one in Jerusalem, I resolved, I would head to Harpania, a meeting place for singles who had no luck in their hometowns (Yevamot 17a). Rabbi Zeyra says that the name Harpania comes from the two Hebrew words har (mountain) and poneh (turn). Harpania is the mountain that people turn to if they come from such bad genealogical lines that no one wants to marry them: “Whoever cannot identify his family and his tribe turns there to find a mate.” It is clear from the Talmud that the Jews of Talmudic Babylonia were very preoccupied with their family trees. They prided themselves in tracing their ancestry all the way back to the Babylonian exile in the days of King Yechonia (600 BCE). And they were interested in marrying only those of “pure lineage,” those who could construct family trees back for generations. Certain parts of Babylonia were regarded as genealogically “purer” than others, and apparently Harpania was the worst; as the Talmudic sage Rava proclaims, “Harpania is deeper than hell.” And so anyone who could not find someone to marry was encouraged to try his luck there.