In spite of owning a veritable library branch in this country, I was still not an Israeli citizen. By the time I reached tractate Ketubot, I had been living in Israel for three years. At some point my boss told me that she couldn’t keep paying my salary if I remained on a work visa. I had learned from Virginia Woolf the importance of a steady income, and so I had no choice but to head over to the Ministry of the Interior and submit my application as a member of the nation that for millennia was looking for a country of its own. It seemed appropriate that while waiting for the clerk to announce my turn, I sat learning the final pages of Ketubot, which are about the importance of making one’s home in the land of Israel.
The final mishnah of the tractate (110b) teaches that one member of a married couple may force the other to move to the land of Israel, but neither may force the other to leave. It does not matter whether it is the woman or the man who wants to live in Israel; this spouse always has the upper hand. The Talmud includes a series of hyperbolic statements in praise of living in the land, including, “Anyone who lives in the land of Israel is like someone who has a God; anyone who does not live in the land of Israel is like someone who is godless.” These statements are followed by stories about Talmudic rabbis who so fervently desired to live in the land of Israel that they went to extraordinary lengths to do so. Rabbi Zeyra, for instance, could not bear to wait for the ferry to take him there, so he grabbed on to a tree branch and swung across the river. (Presumably he did not have very far to go.) Once they arrived, Rabbi Abba kissed the cliffs of Akko, and Rabbi Hanina repaired the roads. (The sidewalks of Jerusalem are in dire need of his services.) Unfortunately, none of the rabbis invested in improving Israeli bureaucracy, which was why my naturalization process, though relatively smooth, nonetheless entailed quite a few long afternoons of waiting.
Eventually I left the ministry with my Israeli identity card and called my mother in New York to share the good news: “I’m an Israeli citizen!” I announced. “Mazel tov!” she responded, unaware that I had had any intention of making aliyah.“What will you do to celebrate?”
I thought about her question for a moment. Aliyah, Hebrew for “ascent,” is the term used for moving to Israel, which is regarded as an upward journey. But I did not regard my aliyah as something momentous. It was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream; until I met Paul, I never even considered moving to Israel. And even once I did, I did not think of myself as having moved to Israel, but rather to Jerusalem. I am not a political animal; I was drawn to the Torah that comes forth from Zion. But then I had an idea. I would invest in bookcases! This seemed like the most appropriate way to celebrate my Israeli citizenship. After all, I had not felt ready to buy and build hardwood bookcases until I was committed to calling Israel my home; and conversely, I could not feel fully rooted in a place until my books were properly organized and displayed. And so shortly after I made aliyah, I spent a few late winter afternoons wandering from store to store in the industrial area of Talpiot comparing models. I finally found what I was looking for at Ace Kneh U’vneh, a store whose rhyming name (especially when compared to its alliterative English equivalent “buy and build”) I loved almost as much as its furniture. The bookcases were made of a material that the store catalogue referred to as book, which is Hebrew for beech. So I bought and built (along with a friend and her trusty toolkit), and then I embarked on the more difficult project of arranging my books on my shelves.
In arranging my books, I tried to be as methodical as possible. My Steinsaltz Talmud volumes all went on the top shelves, along with any related reference books. Another shelf was reserved for those teachers who’d inspired me (through their classes or their texts) since moving to Israel: Avivah Zornberg (whose classes on the weekly Torah portion I attended devotedly), Ruth Calderon (whose book about Talmudic stories I went on to translate), and Rabbi Benny Lau (whose classes I attended and whose books, too, I eventually translated). Poetry (Hebrew, English, and bizarre hybrids of the two like E. E. Cummings in a language that knows no capitals and no vowels) were all situated at eye level, so they could flash immediately on the outward eye. Nonfiction books relating to the history of science (most of them ordered from academic presses through my literary agency account under the pretext of trying to sell them to Israeli publishers) were shelved together, including books on leprosy in premodern science and mesmerism in Victorian Britain. On the bottom shelf, where no one was likely to bend down and look, I hid all the books I was embarrassed to own: Vegan with a Vengeance, The No-Gym Workout, How to Behave in Dating and Sex, and the ones I can’t even mention.
In the glory of late-night arranging and rearranging there was one moment of panic, when I realized that I had grouped my various prayer books with the Everyman poetry series simply because they were all the same height. I thought of my favorite part of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness when the author relates how, at age six, his father cleared a space for him on his bookcases and let him put his own books there: “It was an initiation rite, a coming of age: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man.” Oz describes how, in an effort to conserve space, he arranged his books by height. That night, he was made aware of his error: “Father came home from work, cast a shocked glance toward my bookshelf, and then, in total silence, gave me a long hard look that I shall never forget: It was a look of contempt, of bitter disappointment beyond anything that could be expressed in words, almost a look of utter genetic despair. Finally he hissed at me with pursed lips: ‘Have you gone completely crazy? Arranging your books by height? Have you mistaken your books for soldiers?’”5 I felt like Oz’s father, Arieh Klausner, was glaring at me from his position on the top shelf—had I gone completely crazy?
Still, I knew there was rhyme and reason to the organization of my poetry and nonfiction (respectively), and no shortage of imagination when it came to the fiction. I had one shelf for my dozens of novels by Israeli writers: Michal Govrin, Yael Hedaya, Meir Shalev, David Grossman, et cetera. I had another shelf for novels I had not yet read, and yet another shelf for books I had edited. And below them were two empty shelves, because now I had more space than ever before.
These two empty shelves served as a reminder that there was another bookcase, too, waiting to be bought and built. This is the bookcase that someday, God willing, I hoped to fill with the twelve gigantic boxes of books still sitting in my parents’ basement on Long Island. These include classics from childhood and high school: the complete novels of Austen and the Brontës, all the Norton poetry and literature anthologies, and everything A. S. Byatt has written to date. There, too, are the rest of the books I took with me when I left Random House—each with the Knopf rough trim and the handsome Borzoi on the spine. I missed them all like dear long-distance friends: how often did I ache to reach out for one of them—to check if I am remembering a favorite passage correctly or reread those delicious final paragraphs that send shivers up my spine each time afresh. Now that I had made aliyah, I no longer experienced the longing for Zion that had been such a hallmark of the Jewish people for centuries. Instead, I cast my thoughts toward the diaspora as I pictured the books in my parents’ basement, longing for the day when all the exiles would at last be ingathered.
* * *
Once I owned bookcases, I went ahead and purchased a full set of the Talmud, which I had previously bought only tractate by tractate. The full thirty-seven volumes took up two entire shelves, but I did not always keep them together. Sometimes I would place tractate Ketubot next to A Room of One’s Own, or I’d slip Yevamot next to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and revel in all the creative possibilities that a Talmudic library of my own afforded. I thought about Virginia Woolf being turned away from the library at Oxbridge by the beadle who apprised her sternly, “Ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”6 I thought of the women who populate tractate Ketubot, who belonged to their husbands no matter how brazen and bold.
Virginia Woolf and Homa looked down at me from their new perch on my bookshelves, and I could see that they were pleased.
NEDARIM / NAZIR
Ascetic Aesthetics
As a college student I lofted my bed high above my desk so that I could never conveniently lie down in my dorm room, convinced that by doing so I would avoid the temptation to nap casually. Sleep was slothful, and the less I could get by on, the better. Regardless of when I went to bed, I set my alarm for 5:30 every morning; the alarm clock was on my desk, so I had to jump down to turn it off, by which point I had no energy to climb back up to the loft. Suffice it to say that the snooze button was not invented for people like me—or for the individuals who populate tractate Nedarim.
Nedarim deals with the laws of vowing, and most of the vows cited in the tractate involve denying oneself benefit from someone or something. All of these vows are voluntary rather than obligatory. A person elects to observe certain prohibitions, presumably in an effort to deepen his or her piety and religious commitment. The Talmudic rabbis speak of people who vow to deny themselves sexual pleasure, or to abstain from eating certain foods, or to refrain from enjoying the company of a specific person, to give just a few examples. The subsequent rabbinic discussion revolves around the extent and applicability of various vows: If a person vows not to eat meat, may he still eat grasshoppers and fish (54b)? May a man vow not to take any pleasure in sex with his wife (15b)? Can a person vow to do something that does not seem humanly possible, such as not to sleep for three days (15a)—as indeed I had tried to do?
For the most part the Talmud frowns upon the making of such vows. They are regarded as restrictive and binding, and they add on prohibitions beyond those already stipulated in the Torah. After all, aren’t Jews limited enough in what they can eat and with whom they can sleep? Why take on additional strictures? The rabbis quote from the book of Ecclesiastes (5:4): “Better not to vow than to vow and not fulfill.” They warn that every time a person takes a vow, the notebook recording all of his deeds is opened in heaven, and God reevaluates his fate more critically (22a). Far better, the Talmud seems to suggest, to live by the Torah’s laws and leave it at that.
But ironically, even my study of daf yomi was a vow of sorts. The Talmud speaks in Nedarim of a person who pledges to wake up and learn a particular biblical book or Talmudic tractate, explaining that it is as if such a person has “made a great vow to the God of Israel” (8a). I take my daf yomi vow very seriously—if I can’t learn first thing in the morning, then often I will lug my volume of Talmud around all day as a way of reminding myself to learn and ensuring that I feel saddled until I do. And I do not let myself go to bed until I have learned the day’s daf. In general I thrive on daily commitments—from exercise to journal writing to word-a-day calendars. But once I take them on, I find it hard to break free.
If I had to trace the origins of my tendency to bind and commit myself, I’d have to go back to my early adolescence, to the period when I was living in my father’s house—to invoke the Bible’s distinction between a woman’s vows made in her father’s home and those made in her husband’s home (Numbers 30:4–17). I suppose it began at my bat mitzvah, which coincided with the week we read the Torah portion Naso. I gave a speech about the Torah’s discussion of the nazir, which appeared in my portion and is the subject of the eponymous next tractate in the Talmud. The nazir, as described in the Torah and elaborated upon at length in the Talmud, is a person who vows to take on a set of strictures that include refraining from drinking wine, shaving and haircutting, and coming into contact with the dead for a period of at least thirty days. These strictures are intended as a means of drawing closer to God and achieving a certain level of holiness.
In my bat mitzvah speech I focused on the biblical injunction that the nazir must bring a sin offering at the end of his period of abstention. At first it seems strange that someone who seeks to become more holy has to bring a sin offering. How can holiness be sinful? In tractate Nazir, Rabbi Elazar HaKapar considers this question: “What does it mean, ‘And he shall make expiation for the sin that he incurred on the soul’? (Numbers 6:11). Against what soul did he sin? Rather, he sinned in that he distressed himself [by abstaining] from wine. And if one who distresses himself by abstaining only from wine is called a sinner, how much more so is one who abstains from all things a sinner!” (Nazir 19a). The rabbis did not regard Judaism as a religion of asceticism. We are expected to enjoy the delicious and pleasurable aspects of life—not in a greedy or hedonistic manner, but in a way that acknowledges and pays tribute to their divine source. We are not supposed to engage in self-denial, but to enrich ourselves with all that life has to offer. So I believed.
At the time, I was on the brink of adolescence, speaking from the elevated synagogue bimah in a navy blue polka-dot suit chosen by my mother, with my hair tied back in a bow I was sure was too big for my head. I had no idea how prescient my speech would prove when, just a few years later, I became ill with anorexia. It began when I was at the start of my sophomore year in college, sleeping on my lofted bed and rising before dawn. Initially I was not focused on losing weight; I simply became, like the nazir, obsessed with asceticism and determined to get by on less. I mused on the phonetic similarity between “ascetic” and “aesthetic,” believing that through self-denial I could achieve a sort of delicate beauty. Even words like “svelte” and “petite” began to assume, in my mind, a positive valence. Soon I would begin to think of anorexia in this way as well, conjuring a snow-white princess who glided along in a winter fairyland, leaving no footprints.
Although I never stopped eating three meals a day, I severely restricted my diet and the range of foods I would eat. As the number of calories I consumed decreased with each passing week, food assumed more and more of a central role in my life. I drove myself to extremes of hunger so that during class I’d be fantasizing about a green apple in my backpack, counting down the minutes until the lecture would end and I could savor that first juicy bite. Late at night I’d push myself to stay awake until I was so hungry that I could not bear it anymore, at which point I’d surrender to sleep. One night I had to stay up very late to finish a paper due the next morning, but I was so hungry that I could barely sit upright at my desk. To help push me through the night, I lined up a row of Cheerios next to my keyboard and told myself that for each paragraph I wrote, I would eat one Cheerio. Ten Cheerios later, I collapsed into bed, vowing that I would skip breakfast as a sin offering for having eaten.
As September cooled to October and October chilled to November, I became increasingly manic. Intense hunger acted on me like a double espresso; I was wired, energized, alert, and increasingly charged. That semester I took on an especially difficult course load, adding a fifth class to the standard four required of undergraduates. I began waking up earlier than ever before, determined to fit as much into each day as possible. Each morning I’d arrive at the gym just as it opened and claim my treadmill; although I preferred to run outside, I could study on the exercise machines and thus be twice as efficient. I planned my whole day so that I’d never waste a minute: I called my parents while I got dressed in the morning, ate breakfast during my first class, jogged back to my dorm room for lunch, and ate dinner at my desk while checking e-mail. I was proud of my ability to squeeze so many activities into my day, much as I squeezed my body into smaller clothing sizes with each passing week.
By November I had lost so much weight that I had to wear four layers of clothing to stay warm, and my roommates grew concerned enough to refer me to the university health services. The next thing I knew I had been committed to the eating disorders ward of a hospital, catapulted from the Ivy League to the IV League, as I grimly quipped. There at last I had to face up to the image of who I had become. In one of the most oft-quoted stories in tractate Nazir (4b), the rabbis tell of a nazir from the south, a shepherd with “beautiful eyes, a fair countenance, and a head of curly locks.” This nazir relates that one time, while drawing water for h
is sheep, he caught sight of his reflection in the well and was seized by his evil inclination. “Empty one,” he said to himself, “why do you take such pride in a world that is not yours, when in the end you will become worms and maggots?” He realized that in becoming a nazir, he was priding himself in his capacity for self-denial, even though he was destined for the same fate as every other human being on this earth. The true achievement was not self-denial, but surrendering his pride and complacency and realizing that he was a human being who, like most everyone else, enjoys good wine, is susceptible to impurity, and needs a haircut and a shave every once in a while.
Of course, it was only later, when I became a survivor of anorexia—marked by its ravages and shaped by its torturous toll—that I could appreciate the parallels between the nazir and the anorexic, and the ironic significance of the words I’d spoken on my bat mitzvah morning. Like the anorexic, the nazir aspires to a certain level of self-perfection, believing that he or she can transcend ordinary needs and desires. The nazir looks scornfully upon drinking wine in the same way that the anorexic turns her nose down at food; she doesn’t need it, or can at least get by without it, because she is in pursuit of a higher goal. That goal, whether it is holiness or thinness or some amalgamation of the two, remains ever elusive, because we are embodied flesh-and-blood human beings. And it entails far too many sacrifices along the way.
For months after I was released from the hospital, food continued to divide me from those I loved most. I told myself that my sisters could eat whatever they wanted because they were beautiful, whereas I had to compensate for my unattractiveness by beating my body to unnatural thinness until I almost broke. When I passed thin women on the street I turned my head wistfully, as if they must be in possession of the ultimate happiness. And when I ate too much I felt guilty and gluttonous. I remember one of the first times I finally felt full after many months of deprivation. The heaviness in my stomach seemed as unnatural as a malignant growth. Distressed and uncomfortable, I crawled into the corner of my dorm room and began shrieking in anger and frustration. I clutched desperately at my legs; I twisted the flesh on my arms; I covered my mouth and eyes in shame and felt terribly alone. It was a long time before I appreciated how full life could feel when I went back to breaking bread with those I loved.
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