Jerusalem was probably not quite as bad as Harpania, but even so, the dating scene did not look good for women. Once I accompanied a friend to a singles event—the only such event I ever attended—and was distressed to see that the women outnumbered the men by nearly two to one. And the gap was not just in quantity but in quality as well. Most of the women were dressed in stockings and modest but flattering fitted skirts, their stray gray hairs dyed, and any wrinkles or skin blemishes covered by painstakingly applied makeup. The men—their pants baggy, their hair disheveled—looked like they had just rolled out of bed. I thought of items on sale in a supermarket: The women were the perishables, stamped with expiration dates that were rapidly approaching. The men were the canned goods; they didn’t look all that appealing, but they could remain on the shelves indefinitely until someone finally decided to pick them off. Everyone sat in a circle nibbling on stale cookies and drinking apple juice from a carton in plastic cups, playing silly icebreaker games led by a pretty woman in a bright purple dress, her hair wrapped in a colorful turban. Whenever it was my turn, she flashed me a smile that seemed kind but patronizing, as if I were a little child with a long way to go—even though I imagined that we were about the same age. She acted like she was a preschool teacher and the rest of us were her toddling charges. Since when had being single become so infantilizing?
Living in Jerusalem, I was surrounded by the assumption that everyone wanted to be married, and that those who weren’t were incomplete and longing for things to be otherwise. Unlike in New York City or Cambridge, there was no respect for the high-powered businesswoman or the tenured professor; so long as she was single, she must be unhappy. I didn’t mind being unmarried, but the thought of other people’s pity made me cringe.
The Talmud, too, looks pitifully upon any woman who does not have a man with whom to share her life and, more specifically, her bed. Five times throughout the Babylonian Talmud, the sage Reish Lakish quotes a popular folk saying: Tav l’meitav tan du m’l’meitav armelu, meaning “It is better for a woman to sit as two than to sit alone by herself.” The rabbis’ discussion of this statement unleashes a flurry of colorful comments about how much a woman is willing to put up with just so that she can have a husband (Yevamot 118b):
Abayey said: Even if her husband is the size of an ant, she is proud to place her chair among the free women.
Rav Papa said: Even if her husband is a carder, she hangs him on the doorposts of her house and dwells in matrimony.
Rav Ashi said: Even if her husband is a stalk, she does not lack for lentils in her pot.
It seems the Talmud cannot imagine a woman who could be both happy and single. Even so, Abayey, Rav Papa, and Rav Ashi are not granted the last word. The passage concludes with the following assertion: “And all these women commit adultery and attribute their offspring to their husbands.” That is, all these women who so desperately wish to be married are really just interested in having a convenient excuse when they find themselves pregnant as a result of their adulterous affairs. Why do they need husbands? So that they can point to a legitimate father for their bastard children!
This closing line, astonishing in its flippancy and subversiveness, casts the preceding statements in a new light: According to the Talmudic sages, a woman needs a husband so that she can “place her chair among the free women,” that is, so that she can count herself among those women who are free to have adulterous affairs! She doesn’t care if her husband is a stalk, because she’s just using him as a cover so that she can gallivant off to her extramarital affairs. For this reason it is better for a woman to be married than to be alone.
To some extent Omri functioned as a similar cover for me. He was not my husband, but as my long-term boyfriend he enabled me to place my chair among those who were free from the torture of attending singles events and being “set up” by concerned, well-meaning strangers. “Are you looking to meet someone?” people often asked me, and immediately I would rush to assure them that no, I had quite enough lentils in my pot, thank you very much.
Shortly after I studied this passage in Yevamot, a friend came for Shabbat dinner bearing the gift of a large glass jar full of hard candy. “When you finish all the sweets,” she told me, “you can save the jar and use it as a vase for the next time Omri brings you flowers.” I smiled, knowing that I would do no such thing. Instead, I washed out the jar, filled it with a kilo of lentils, and placed it in my cupboard alongside my beans, split peas, and other dried goods. I put a label on the jar with that line from Yevamot: “She does not lack for lentils in her pot.” Most nights that summer I had lentil soup for dinner—alone.
* * *
In the Talmud it is clear that men have the advantage when it comes to marriage, which is described as a one-way transaction in which a man acquires a woman and may be legally wed to several women at once. The Talmud speaks of the sanctity of marriage, but we hear other less conventional voices as well, such as the following account in Yevamot:
When Rav would visit the city of Dardishir, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?”
And when Rav Nachman would visit the city of Shachnetziv, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?” (Yevamot 37b)
Rav and Rav Nachman, two prominent third-century Babylonian sages, apparently had a practice of marrying (or perhaps simply sleeping with) women for a single day. I understand what was in it for the sages, who presumably had to travel often and could not always take their wives with them. But I can’t help but wonder what sort of women would be interested in these one-night stands. Perhaps they were so desperate for companionship that they would rather have a man for one night than be alone forever? Or perhaps they were enchanted by the notion of being associated with such a great rabbinic luminary? The Talmud contains not a hint of criticism of these practices, perhaps a testament to the surrounding culture’s more relaxed attitude toward sexual ethics. But I find it hard to relate.
Personally I am drawn to those Talmudic stories—few and far between though they may be—of women who have free rein to choose among various men, rather than the opposite dynamic. This is the case with Rava’s wife, who actively chooses her husband rather than waiting around like a wallflower to be plucked. She is introduced in the context of a discussion about marriage and fertility, in which the rabbis aver that “any woman who waits ten years after the death of her husband before remarrying will never give birth again” (Yevamot 34b). I first encountered this passage in the morning Talmud class I attended at a synagogue in Jerusalem, when mine was the only womb in the room. While I knew the Talmud wasn’t talking about me personally, the discussion on the page before us was certainly more about me than about any of the men at the table. Suddenly I felt as conspicuous as Virginia Woolf traipsing across the all-male precincts of Oxbridge.
Rav Nahman goes on to qualify that “this was taught only with regard to one who did not intend to remarry; but if a woman intended to remarry, then she will indeed become pregnant.” Rav Nahman, perhaps influenced by the Greek notion that female hysteria was caused by “wandering womb,” suggests that a woman’s psychology may affect her fertility. According to Rav Nahman, so long as a woman intends to have intercourse again, her reproductive organs will not wither. I was reassured, but the subject matter still seemed a little too close to home, and I hunched over my volume of Talmud with lowered eyes.
It is at this point in the passage that Rava’s wife makes her appearance, though it seems like she was there all along, sitting in on an all-male study group just like me. Unlike me, however, she was not able to remain anonymous. Upon hearing the rabbis’ assertions, Rava leans over to his wife and tells her that this is no hypothetical conversation: “The rabbis are murmuring about you.” She, too, had been previously married and it seems she had waited a long time before remarrying and becoming Rava’s wife. Rushing to her own defense, Rava’s wife seizes upon Rav Nahman’s corollary. She assures Rava that although she did not remarry for over a decade, her womb did not
close up because she always intended to remarry. Or, as she tells Rava somewhat romantically, “My eye was on you all along.”
I am impressed by the bravado of this woman who sits next to her husband while he is studying Torah with his colleagues and defends herself by professing her longstanding romantic interest. She clearly has a will of her own, even though she remains nameless. We learn more about her elsewhere in the Talmud, where she is known as the daughter of Rav Hisda. The Talmud relates the following anecdote from her youth:
The daughter of Rav Hisda was sitting on her father’s lap. They were seated before Rava and Rami bar Hama. Rav Hisda said to his daughter: “Which of these men do you want [to marry]?” She responded, “Both of them!” Rava said, “Then let me be the second one.” (Bava Batra 12b)
Rav Hisda’s daughter, a girl young enough to sit on her father’s lap, is like a greedy child in an ice cream shop who wants both chocolate and vanilla. If given the choice between two men, she’ll take them both! But Rava does not miss a beat. To the extent that he can still control his fate, he intercedes. He does not want to be the first of two men to marry Rav Hisda’s daughter, which would mean either that he would die, or that they would divorce. Now it becomes clear how Rav Hisda’s daughter could have known in advance that she would become Rava’s wife. She always knew that she would remarry because she’d chosen Rava as a young girl, and so she is confident that her dormant womb will rally when she wishes to become pregnant again. In the margins of my copy of Yevamot, I gave her a thumbs-up.
* * *
In Yevamot, the emphasis is not just on marriage but also on having children, which is the first commandment in the Bible—to increase and multiply. The Talmud in Yevamot (61b) discusses a debate between Beit Hillel, who maintain that a man must have at least one son and one daughter to count as having fulfilled this commandment, and Beit Shammai, who maintain that a man must have two sons. All the sages agree, however, that fulfilling this commandment is so paramount that a man may even sell a Torah scroll so as to have enough money to have children. The Talmud then goes on to cite the case of Rav Sheshet (62b), who was childless because the classes taught by his teacher Rav Huna went on for too long. Rashi explains in his commentary on this page that Rav Huna did not allow for bathroom breaks, which affected his student’s virility. But I wondered whether perhaps Rav Sheshet found himself staying so late in the study house that by the time he got home at night, his wife was already asleep. I, on the other hand, used to go to evening classes with the deliberate goal of staying out as late as possible before coming home to an empty house.
The tension between studying Torah and raising a family is dramatized in the figure of Ben Azzai, who captured my attention in a conversation about procreation in Yevamot (63b). Rabbi Eliezer asserts that anyone who does not engage in this commandment is considered as if he has committed murder, since the charge to procreate is juxtaposed in Genesis with the verse prohibiting bloodshed. Rabbi Yaakov then demurs that anyone who does not engage in this religious commandment is regarded as diminishing the image of God, since the charge to procreate is also juxtaposed with the verse about man being created in God’s image.
At this point, Ben Azzai chimes in and declares that anyone who neglects the commandment to procreate is regarded as if he both commits murder and diminishes the image of God. The other sages leap up and lambast Ben Azzai for his hypocrisy: “Ben Azzai, there are those who preach and practice well, and those who practice well but do not preach well. But you—you preach well but do not practice what you preach!” Presumably Ben Azzai himself was unmarried, or at least he did not have children. And so he can offer only a faltering defense: “What can I do? My soul desires Torah. The world can be sustained by others.”
On those nights when I walked back from class alone while all my friends with kids were ensconced at home, I sometimes pretended that I, like Ben Azzai, had made a conscious choice. Certainly I had far more time to study Torah than I would if I were saddled with the responsibility of raising a family. I enjoyed waking up early every morning and rushing out the door to my daf yomi class, and then coming home late after attending evening lectures. At the same time, I can’t help but wish that I’d known, back then, that it was just a temporary stage of life. If only I, like Rav Hisda’s daughter, had sat on my father’s lap as a young girl and hand-picked my two husbands. Then perhaps I wouldn’t have felt a flutter in my womb each time I went out among the streets and by-ways of Jerusalem, looking despairingly at the thousands of male humans in search of my Frog. All herring and mackerel, it seemed.
KETUBOT
I Am a Jewish Man
The alternative to being single was being married, but the Talmudic view of marriage, too, leaves much to be desired. Tractate Ketubot deals with the laws related to married life and the responsibilities stipulated in the ketubah, the marriage contract. In practice, though, much of the Talmudic discussion is focused on the valuing (and devaluing) of women. The sages consider the financial aspects of marriage, a transaction in which a man acquires a wife for a specific sum of money. That sum depends on whether the woman is a virgin at the time of betrothal. Virginity is a key theme of the first chapter of Ketubot, since a husband may claim to have discovered that the woman he married was not in fact a virgin and therefore the transaction was made under false pretenses. It may emerge that the woman had not had intercourse but had suffered an injury that ruptured her internally, in which case the rabbis debate whether she, like any nonvirgin, is acquired for a discount. In any case, all women—whether virginal or not—were expected to move from their father’s home directly to their husband’s home, with all their property transferred from one man to the other. I couldn’t help but wonder how I fit into this scheme, as an independent woman in Jerusalem living in a room of my own.
And thus my thoughts turned to Virginia Woolf, who tried to find answers to her own questions about femininity in the books about women’s history lining the walls of the British Museum. Examining the card catalogue, Woolf found herself marveling at just how many books were written by men about women: “Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women … it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention,” she writes in A Room of One’s Own.1 And yet Woolf was not interested in books written by men with their distorted portraits of women; she wanted to know how women could write more books themselves, and what they would need in order to do so. Like Woolf, I was flattered, vaguely, to find that women were objects of such great interest to the rabbis, who devoted all of Seder Nashim—a full sixth of the Talmud—to their affairs. But when I read through tractate Ketubot I identified not with the women whose dowries were being negotiated but with the men who were doing the negotiating.
After A Room of One’s Own, I returned to Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, a book I had first read ten years earlier when I was a student in Cambridge, strolling through the same green courts and quadrangles that Virginia Woolf describes. Laqueur writes about the fluidity of sex as an interpretive category, arguing that much of what we regard as fixed was not always so. Today we are used to thinking of the body in terms of two sexes—we view these biological distinctions as “real” and uncontestable, although we recognize that gender—the psychological, emotional, and social qualities that make us male and female—are socially constructed. But Laqueur shows that this is a very modern view; for much of human history, the cultural categories of gender were assumed to be real, whereas physical sex was conventional and subject to change. To be a man or woman implied a certain social rank and cultural role rather than a biological reality. Women were regarded as inferior manifestations of men rather than as a different category altogether, with female genital anatomy thought to be an involution of male anatomy. It was only in the Enlightenment that a biology of hierarchy (men as superior to women) gave w
ay to a biology of incommensurability (men are different from women). Although in the Bible the first woman is described as “a helpmate opposite him,” Laqueur contends that it was not until centuries later that women became, for the first time, the “opposite sex.”
Laqueur inspired me to think differently about the historically contingent meanings of biology and gender. If what is fixed was not always so, then perhaps it was time to reevaluate my own relationship with sexual identity in Judaism. Perhaps a Jewish woman of the twenty-first century has more in common with a Jewish man of rabbinic times than with his wife—insofar as one can identify with Talmudic men without conspiring in the oppression of women. After all, women in the Talmud rarely owned property or lived independently, whereas I (and many women like me) earn a salary, have my own apartment, and participate fully in the social and political life of my community. I do not place a premium on virginity or on reproductive capacity; I value myself far more for the amount of Torah I have mastered. In another era, that would have made me a man.
To be sure, I identify with certain Talmudic men more than with their wives. I am more similar to Rabbi Hiya than to his wife, Yehudit, for instance. At the same time, though, I imagine I would make very different choices than Rabbi Hiya, who insisted that Yehudit bear him a third “bellyful” of twins even though the pain of birthing the first two sets nearly killed her (Yevamot 65b). Hopefully I’d be more sympathetic. Because, pardon the anachronism, but if I were a Jewish man living in Talmudic times, I’d like to think I’d have also been a feminist.
* * *
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”—this is Woolf’s central thesis, though it applies to Talmud study as well. In order to study Talmud, a woman must have money to buy books and a place to sit and learn without interruption. But ironically, for modern women like myself who wish to study Talmud, it is often not finding a room of one’s own that is so problematic, but carving out space in the public sphere. We women can learn all the Talmud we’d like behind closed doors, with all the websites and podcasts in the world at our disposal. But when we bring our volumes of Talmud out into the open, we often run into trouble.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 10