If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  I discovered this for myself when I once again tried to learn Torah on an airplane. Intent on my study, I was not amused when a man sitting a few rows back tried to attract my attention.

  “Brovender’s or Drisha?”

  This was his pick-up line, a reference to two major institutions of women’s learning, one in Jerusalem (where I was flying to) and one in New York (where I was flying back from, via Frankfurt). I looked up from my volume of Talmud to find a tall man with a sleek mane of black curls standing next to my aisle seat, peering down at me with a curious half smile. He was about my age, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and he pointed to my book. “Where do you learn?”

  I sensed immediately that my observer was way too cool and slick for my taste—his T-shirt said WANTED in big letters, which he decidedly was not. Moreover, I had just finished the third chapter of Ketubot, which discusses the punishment for seduction and rape. If a woman is seduced consensually or raped, the perpetrator has to pay her father a fine for his crime; the fine is higher for rape, since the rapist must also pay for the pain he inflicted. The rapist is additionally required to “drink from his vessel” (Ketubot 39a), that is, to marry his victim—even if she is lame or blind or afflicted with a skin disease. I wondered if any of this would interest the man speaking to me, who went on to share his name and his background: Elad was a chozer b’she’elah, a person who grew up religious but decided to throw out the Torah he learned as a baby with the ritual bath water. He left Jerusalem and moved to New York, where he was spending most of his time, as he put it, “bumming around.”

  “I’m in this inheritance battle with my siblings—my father died two years ago, and left us a hundred thousand dollars. We’ve spent over a million arguing about it.” He tells me this proudly, checking to see if I am impressed by the sums of money he quotes. I am trying to pay attention, but my mind wanders when he says inheritance. Was it karka or m’taltelin, land or moveable property? If his father had left a widow, would she have gotten first dibs? Are his sisters and brothers both equally entitled to their father’s possessions? What if his sisters are married? These were the very issues the Talmud considers on Ketubot 49b, the page I had open before me.

  “You’re lucky your father left you anything,” I tell Elad, who is my unwelcome interlocutor if not yet my seducer. “He could have been a white crow.” Elad leans over my seat to look at the page. The rabbis are discussing a law voted upon in Usha stating that a father is obligated to feed his sons and daughters when they are young. Is this the halachah, or not? Rabbi Yehuda seems certain that it is: “Will a crocodile have babies and cast them on to the whole village?” In other words, a person cannot churn out babies and expect the community to take care of them. Rav Hisda agrees: “If a father were to refuse to feed his children, the townspeople should turn over a mortar for him to stand on and call out, ‘The crow loves his children, but this man does not.’” And how do we know that the crow loves his children, asks the Talmud? After all, doesn’t the Bible say, “[God] gives bread to beasts, and to crows who cry out” (Psalms 147:9)? If God has to feed crows, then surely their parents are not taking care of them! La kashya, says the Talmud—it’s not a difficulty. Rav Hisda was referring to black crows, who feed their young, whereas the biblical verse was referring to white crows, who do not. Elad follows along, but he does not look happy. He still wants to impress me, and he can see that it is going to be a challenge.

  “I wrote a book, you know,” he tells me. “Maybe I can show it to you, since you work with books?” This line figures in all the dreams and nightmares of anyone who works in the publishing industry. Elad scurries off to fetch his book from his seat some rows back, and my companion to the left, an American man in his sixties who has already told me that he runs a shipping business in Italy, raises his eyebrows. “That guy likes you,” he says, followed by: “Jewish men are like Italian men—very horny, you know.” I attempt a half smile. “Save me,” I plead. I think of the halachic distinction between a woman who is seduced in a field, where it is possible that she cried out for help and no one heard her, and a woman who is seduced in a town, where surely someone would have heard. An airplane is more like a town than a field, I reason—let it be known that I cried for help.

  Elad returns with an elegant black leather-bound volume that was clearly self-published. As with most Israeli books, the pages are too white, and I squint under the cabin lights. The book, a commentary on the Torah, is entitled the Klil Tiferet, “because my last name is Klil. This is what I call myself as a commentator. I was feeling bored, and so I wrote this book.” He points out a few passages that he wants me to read—all the sections on women. (A common fallacy: if I am female, then surely it will be the parts in a book that are about women that will most speak to me.) While I squint at his pages, he tries to do business with my seatmate. Argh, I requested an aisle seat for this very reason—there’s nothing worse than sitting between two big talkers! I can generally get through four pages of Talmud on a transatlantic flight, but not with all these distractions.…

  After ten minutes of feigning interest in the Klil Tiferet (the commentary, not the commentator), I am saved by the Lufthansa flight attendant and her duty-free cart. “Excuse me,” she tells him. “We’re about to begin serving dinner. I must ask you to return to your seat.” Elad borrows my pencil to scrawl his phone number in the top margin of my Talmud, right above the title of the chapter: Na’ara She-nitpat’ta, the woman who is seduced. He’s on a different connecting flight, but he urges me to call him when I get to Jerusalem. “We’ll hang out,” he tells me. “Don’t worry, I have nothing to do anyway.” By then, I would fortunately be back home in my room of one’s own. In the meantime, I open my volume of Talmud and try to plow on.

  * * *

  In exploring the subject of women and fiction, Woolf considers how women have figured in the fiction written about them by men. She points out that although we know very little about historical women—how women lived on a daily basis—fiction teems with colorful, larger-than-life female heroines, from Cleopatra to Emma Bovary. The contrast, she notes, is staggering: “Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”2 Woolf contends that if we knew about women only from fiction, we would imagine them to be people “of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.”3

  Woolf’s analysis applies to Talmudic women as well. Whereas the women discussed in the legal sources in Ketubot are regarded as the property of their husbands, the heroines of the tractate’s literary stories “burnt like beacons,” to quote Woolf.4 These are surely not historical women, but products of the rabbinic imagination—which makes them arguably only that much more remarkable. There is, for instance, the brazen woman who dupes her suitors and marries a man of her own choosing. I penned this limerick in her honor (Ketubot 22a):

  A beautiful maiden-girl said

  To the suitors who flocked, “But I’m wed!”

  And once every last dope

  Had abandoned all hope

  She married her heart’s choice instead.

  Another heroine who inspired me with her pluck appears in the context of a Talmudic discussion about how much wine a woman should be permitted to drink (Ketubot 65a). This question is relevant in disputes about alimony: if a woman was used to receiving a certain allotment of wine from her husband, does the court continue to allot that same amount of wine to her after her husband’s death? In this story, Homa, the widow of Abayey, comes to court after her husband’s death to secure her alimony payments. The presiding judge, Rava, also happens to have been Abayey’s study partner, and the Talmud pits Abayey’s study partner and his wife passionately against each other, as I tried to dramatize in the following sonnet:

  Abayey’s wife, named Homa, came t
o court

  She barked, “Dole out my food!” So Rava did.

  She then said, “Next my wine—now be a sport.”

  Fair Rava said, “I can’t do as you bid.”

  “But hubby dear served wine in glasses tall!

  How tall, you ask? I’ll show you.” Homa raised

  Her hands above her head; her sleeves did fall

  Revealing shoulders bright. So Rava gazed.

  Quick, quick ran Rava home, his loins aflame

  And laid his wife to bed. She gasped: “Explain!

  Who was in court?” “Er … Homa was her name.”

  His wife’s eyes flashed in envy, rage, disdain.

  So Rava’s wife beat Homa to the ground:

  “You’ve killed three men,” she screamed. “Now leave this town!”

  Rava’s wife accuses Homa of being a murderous woman—a reference to the fact that Homa had been widowed three times. And there the story ends, bringing the curtain down on the widow who seduced her late husband’s study partner and the jilted wife bent on revenge.

  Such a closing scene, with its close-up of two women, is rare in the Talmud—even rarer than the “Chloe liked Olivia” plot that Virginia Woolf was surprised to discover on the shelves of the British Museum. Woolf laments how frequently male writers depict the relationships between women as contentious, and suggests to her audience that they write about female friendship instead. But I enjoyed getting to know these feisty heroines. Just as Homa’s arm casts a ray of light in the courtroom, her story provides a bright contrast to the legal discussions that dominate this tractate, in which women are spoken about but rarely given voice.

  * * *

  My study of Ketubot was, against all odds, an empowering experience. One morning I went jogging while listening to a daf yomi recording and was saved by the page of Talmud I was learning. I was on the road to Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz hotel at the southern edge of Jerusalem that overlooks Bethlehem and the Judean hills. Usually when I ran that route, I went no farther than the giant statue of the matriarch Rachel, who stands tall and proud with two little children clinging to the hem of her skirt. The base of the statue bears an inscription from the book of Jeremiah: “And the children shall return to their borders” (31:16), a prophetic vision of a time when Jacob’s sons will be restored to their land. At this point, I would pause for a moment to read those words about returning, and then turn around and head back home.

  On that particular morning, however, I decided to continue onward and head into the fields stretching beyond the hotel, which contain two hundred olive trees planted in parallel rows. Part of me knew I was being a little daring in running in a deserted field on the outskirts of town, but I was engrossed in daf yomi and light on my feet, and I threw caution to the wind. As I ran I learned about Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who would sit and study Torah with lepers, unafraid of contagion. He is mentioned in Ketubot (77b) in the context of the Talmud’s discussion of cases in which a man is forced to give his wife a divorce. If the man has a repulsive skin disease, a woman cannot be expected to stay married to him, and therefore the rabbinical court may force him to divorce her and set her free. The mention of skin disease leads to a discussion of the lengths to which various rabbis would go to avoid all contact with those who suffered from ra’atan, a terrible malady associated with leprosy: Rabbi Yohanan cautioned people to stay away from the flies that had come near the afflicted, Rabbi Zeyra never sat downwind from them, and Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Assi never ate any of the eggs that came from the alleyways where these lepers lived. In contrast, we are told, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi was not afraid to sit among them.

  I was imagining Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi studying with the lepers when all of a sudden I heard the sound of several dogs barking in the distance, all looking angrily in my direction. I kept running, but the dogs only came closer. They barked louder and came closer still. Soon I was surrounded by eight ferocious dogs at waist level, all barking fiercely and running alongside me.

  Though I was terrified, I knew it was important that I not show the dogs my fear. I thought about a scene in a Maisie Dobbs novel, in which the British sleuth thinks she is alone in an abandoned barn when all of a sudden a threatening dog rears its head. Maisie, through intense powers of concentration, manages to calm her whole body so that the dog senses her fearlessness and backs off. If only I can stay calm like Maisie, I thought, I’ll be OK. Then my thoughts drifted to more frightful literary canines, the terrifying black dogs of Ian McEwan’s eponymous novel. I shivered to think of June Tremaine’s nightmarish encounter with those savage bloodthirsty beasts in the French countryside in the months after World War II. Unlike Maisie, I had no way of calming myself down, and unlike June, I did not have a knife in my pocket. My literary imagination could distract me for only so long; how was I going to ward off the very real dogs that were surrounding me at that moment?

  The Ketubot recording was still playing in my ears; just as I had not thought to stop running, I also did not think to take off my headphones. I learned that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi would justify his risky behavior by invoking a verse from Proverbs: “A beloved doe, a graceful mountain goat” (Proverbs 5:19). When people asked him how he dared get so close to the lepers, he would respond, “If Torah graces those who learn it, will it not also protect me?” (Ketubot 77b). As the dogs ran around me, I recited Ben Levi’s words to myself again and again: “If Torah graces those who learn it, will it not also protect me?”

  Somehow inside me I sensed that as long as daf yomi kept playing in my ears, I would come out of this situation unscathed. I thought about King David, who learned that he was destined to die on the Sabbath and therefore spent every Shabbat studying Torah; so long as he was learning, the Angel of Death was unable to overtake him (Shabbat 30b). I thought, too, about the Talmud in Sotah (21a), which interprets the verse “When you walk it will guide you” (Proverbs 6:22) to mean that Torah protects us wherever we walk in this world. Is Torah not a tree of life to those who hold fast to it? The olive trees around me swayed in the breeze, as if nodding in agreement.

  Just as I was running out of sources about the protective power of Torah, I came to the main road at the edge of the field and saw a truck in the distance. I did not want to cry out lest I provoke the dogs, but I began waving my hands wildly in the air, and the driver turned in my direction. The dogs, seeing the approaching truck, immediately dispersed, their barks growing fainter and their heads hanging low in defeat. I thanked the driver for rescuing me, but I, like Yehoshua ben Levi, knew that Torah was the true source of my salvation.

  * * *

  As a person who learned on the go, I soon realized that the symbol of my independence was less a room of my own than a place to store all my books. Jerusalem has many libraries but nothing that rivals the British Museum, and so I had no choice but to amass my own collection. This proved a challenge given how often I moved. For years I kept my books in cardboard boxes, unpacking what I could. I piled books in my closet, in the backs of my kitchen cupboards, under my bed, and along my windowsills, but inevitably I had to keep at least four or five boxes unopened. Each time I needed to find a particular volume to reference, I would empty several boxes quickly and haphazardly without always bothering to put everything back properly—so many of my books lay strewn across piles of boxes and spilled across the floor.

  I’d considered giving away some books, but I’d written in almost all of them, so the thought of parting was unbearable. Every volume of Talmud that I have studied is marked up in pencil with the date I learned each page scrawled on top, a summary of each section jotted in the margins, important cross-references circled, and favorite passages underlined. (A friend once looked at the tattered spines and asked me if I’d bought my volumes of Talmud used. “No,” I responded proudly. “I used them!”) My poetry books contain notes like “devouring lover with eyes,” “death of hope,” and “no second chance,” which I rely on to help me choose the right poem to match—or challenge—the va
rious emotional states of myself and my friends. And in my novels, my favorite passages are marked in pen and often indexed by page number in the back. While I could give away my copy of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, say, and buy a new one someday, it would be frustrating to have to go through the whole book for the sake of that gorgeous passage about what it means to come to know a loved one’s habits. This is true, too, of the descriptions of unrequited love in Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunday Philosophy Club, and the Seltzer Equilibrium calculations in Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and the Costco section of Dara Horn’s In the Image—to give just a few examples.

  Moreover, the more time passed, the more books I accumulated. When I first moved to Israel, I was worried that I would not be able to find easy access to English-language books. During my last few months in New York, while finishing off a third year at Random House, I had nightmares about endless Shabbat afternoons in the holy land with nothing to read. To ward off disaster, I raided the Random House book room and mailed two boxes of books to Jerusalem, hoping that these would sustain me until a friend would visit and bring reinforcements. (I joked that like the Israelites leaving Egypt, I left Random House “with multitudinous possessions.”) Then, when I began working at the literary agency, I started bringing home any books we were unable to sell to Israeli publishers. It was not long before the Israeli branch of my personal library had nearly doubled.