People who know that I was once diagnosed with anorexia often ask me how I managed to recover. It is a hard question to answer, but the Talmud has furnished me with one helpful metaphor. The phrase the rabbis use for undoing a vow is l’hatir, which means “to untie.” To get out of a vow is literally to untie oneself from the knots and strictures with which one was previously bound. Recovering from anorexia was a process of unbinding myself from all the rules that had previously shackled me, from the number of Cheerios I could eat to the number of miles I had to run. I have come very far from those terrifyingly manic days, but I still fight the tendency to overschedule myself and to get by with less food and less sleep. If recovery means living as if one had never been afflicted in the first place, then I don’t believe it is possible to recover fully from anorexia. Like the vowers of tractates Nedarim and Nazir, I will always be drawn to commitment and self-denial. But I’d like to think that with time, I have learned to untie some of those strictures and loosen up.
SOTAH
A Still Unravished Bride
In explaining why tractates Sotah and Nazir are juxtaposed in both the Torah and the Talmud, the rabbis remark that “anyone who witnesses the Sotah in her disgrace will vow to become a nazir and abstain from wine” (Sotah 2a). The rabbis seem to be suggesting that the disgrace of the sotah—the woman who is suspected of adultery—is so disturbing and demoralizing that onlookers would swear off wine lest they lose control and engage in extramarital affairs. In some sense, then, the nazir and the sotah are opposites: the former curbs his or her desires, whereas the latter gives in to them freely. Perhaps it is surprising, then, that in spite of my penchant for self-denial, I saw myself drawn to the sotah too.
To be sure, I would never want to be the sotah. The Bible (Numbers, chapter 5) explains that such a woman is brought to the Temple by her husband, who suspects her of straying. There the high priest uncovers her head and forces her to drink “bitter waters” in a fearsome trial by ordeal. If she is in fact guilty, the waters will cause her belly to swell and her thigh to sag, and she will become “a curse among her people.” If she is innocent, her belly will instead become full with child. And so whether she is innocent or guilty, the fate of the sotah is inscribed on her body for all to see, transforming her from seductress to spectacle.
It is all too easy to point to the sotah as a prime example of all that is patriarchal and misogynistic about Judaism’s biblical and rabbinic roots. Merely because a woman is suspected of adultery, she is publically humiliated by her husband and the all-male priesthood? But as the Talmud explains, the bitter waters that the sotah is forced to drink contain the name of God dissolved in ink. And so the sotah imbibes a sacred text, which is what I try to do as well when I study her tractate. The meaning of sotah is “one who turns,” since the sotah is one who is suspected of turning astray. Today, though, more and more women are turning back to the traditional texts of Judaism and finding their place in them. In an era when no woman will be brought to the Temple as a suspected adulteress—the Talmud states on the opening page of the tractate that the ritual fell out of practice in the wake of the Temple’s destruction—my study of tractate Sotah fills me with the hope that women will find other ways of being drawn to the sacred.
Rather than being outraged by the sotah, I am drawn to her tale. And who wouldn’t be? In this tractate about suspicion and sexual transgression the sotah becomes the ultimate enchantress, like Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” a “faery’s child” who seduces knights with her “wild wild eyes,” fills them with nightmarish visions, and then leaves them “alone and palely loitering” on the cold hillside. Several passages of tractate Sotah are voyeuristic if not downright pornographic, so much so that I would peek ahead at the next day’s page to determine in advance whether I’d feel comfortable attending the all-male daf yomi class at synagogue the next morning. I did not want to be the only woman in the room when the high priest undressed the woman such that “anyone who wants to see her could come see” (7b). And, oh, how the rabbis look on!
The undressing of the sotah is described in graphic detail. The Torah merely stipulates that the priest uncovers the woman’s head, but the rabbis add that the priest dishevels her hair and exposes her breasts, “assuming they are not too lovely” (8a). (One has to wonder what qualifies the priest to make such an assessment.) He also seizes her clothes, removes her jewelry, and ties a coarse Egyptian rope just over her breasts, which suggests a form of bondage or sado-masochism but is explained more practically as a way of ensuring that all her clothes don’t fall off. Crucially, the exposure of the sotah is only partial. But it is the very partial nature of undressing that is the source of its seductive power, as I know from a lifetime of reading romantic poetry and novels.
So many great literary seduction scenes involve acts of gradual undressing. Of course, there is a difference between being forcibly undressed and undressing voluntarily, and the sotah’s humiliation is not to be minimized. But the effect on the spectators is not all that different. In Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the virginal Madeleine undresses as her suitor Porphyro secretly gazes at her from the closet in her chamber, witnessing as she “loosens her fragrant bodice” so that “her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.” We do not know what body parts become exposed; we are told only of the unclasped jewels, the hair freed of its pearls, and the clothes that fall to the floor, leaving Madeleine “half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed.” Elaborate sartorial detail is marshaled as a form of restraint, and we, like Porphyro, are in Madeleine’s thrall. This is true, too, of Billy Collins’s “Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” where the poet imagines himself alone with the great nineteenth-century poetess in Amherst and reports that he “proceeded like a polar explorer / … sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.”1 Dickinson’s nakedness is the speaker’s ultimate destination, but the poem is more preoccupied with the journey there. And then there is Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” where the poet is seduced not by Julia’s bare flesh but by “the liquefaction of her clothes.”
Notably none of the women in these poems undresses completely, presumably because total nakedness is far less sexy. The rabbis in Sotah (10a) discuss another classic literary seduction story in which the biblical figure of Tamar takes off her widow’s garb and dresses as a prostitute, so that she might trick her father-in-law Judah into sleeping with her. She then presents him with evidence of what he did—the seal, cord, and staff she took as pledge that he would pay—and traps him into admitting his wrongdoing.
Clothes are a way of deceiving and tricking, as Tamar knew all too well. Perhaps it should not be surprising that clothes play such a role in seduction because seduction, too, necessarily involves duplicity. To seduce is to play a game of revelation and concealment; it is to alternately expose and then hide, always denying total transparency. But therein lies the rub, because if there is something that you are hiding, then you cannot be completely open. So long as you are alternately revealing and concealing, then you are not sharing everything with the other person. Thus seductiveness precludes intimacy.
The converse, I fear, is also true: intimacy precludes seductiveness. If you expose everything and keep nothing from the other person, you lose your allure. There is nothing seductive about a person who walks around naked all the time. And there is nothing exciting about a person who bares his soul from the outset.
As a person who values honesty and transparency in my relationships, I struggle with this balance between intimacy and seductiveness. I prefer to present who I am without makeup and without dissembling, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. I have no patience for playing games. But what is seduction if not a more sophisticated version of the classic games of childhood—show-and-tell, hide-and-seek, and catch? Gather around and peer in as I show you; look for me when I hide from you; catch me if you can. If I do not run and I do not hide, who will bother to come looking?
I feel this tension, too, wh
en I write. My writing about the texts I study is deeply personal, baring truths about myself that I’d otherwise conceal. But I write because more than I seek to guard truth, I strive for beauty. When it comes to lived life, I am a deeply private person. But when it comes to written life—to life refracted through artistry—I unclasp the whalebone stays and turn away with lowered eyes as my loosened bodice rustles to the floor.
* * *
In the Talmudic text, too, the writing sometimes seems to be in service of beauty as much as—if not more than—it is in service of halachic truth. In the opening pages of Sotah, for instance, the rabbis discuss how much time a woman must have been secluded with a man in order for her husband to have legitimate grounds for suspecting her of adultery. Various rabbis suggest their own answers to this question, each of which is laden with sexual overtones (Sotah 4a). In perhaps the most Freudian response, Rabbi Eliezer says, “For the time it takes to encircle a date palm.” Rabbi Akiva follows the phallic metaphor with an ovoid one: “For the time it takes to roast an egg.” Rabbi Yehoshua has his own associations: “For the time it takes to mix a cup of wine,” invoking the common Talmudic analogy between drinking and sex; elsewhere the rabbis teach that a man should not think of another woman during sex because “a man should not drink from one glass while his eyes are on another” (Nedarim 20a).
But perhaps the most suggestive answer of all is that of the sage known simply as Pleymo, who remarks, “For the time it takes to extend an arm into a basket and grab a loaf of bread.” Bread, too, is frequently associated with sex in the Talmud. Later on that page we are told that “anyone who eats bread without first washing his hands—it is as if he had sex with a prostitute” (4b). Furthermore, snatching bread from a basket seems to suggest illicit activity, and the extended arm is surely also phallic. Perhaps because of these associations, Pleymo’s response preoccupies the rabbis, who want to know whether the loaf of bread is hot or cold; whether it is densely or loosely packed in the bag; whether it is a fresh loaf or a stale one; whether it is made from wheat (which may slip from the hands) or from barley (which would not); whether it is soft or hard. This is clearly no ordinary loaf of bread.
The rabbis’ X-rated discussion of the time in which a man and woman must be sequestered in order for there to be grounds for suspicion goes on for quite a while, certainly for longer than it takes to roast an egg or mix a cup of wine. The text unfolds as a sequence of metaphors that begins to seem more similar to a poem than to a halachic conversation—more beauty than truth. All of these metaphors are intended, perhaps, to refocus our attention away from the act itself, but ironically the metaphors are more suggestive than any description of intercourse could ever possibly be. And more erotic.
In her memoir A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle laments that novelists are too explicit when it comes to sex. “If we’ve made love, we don’t need to be told about it; if we haven’t, a description of its physiological process isn’t going to tell us anything. When the writer who is not afraid of the mysterious leaves something to the readers’ imagination he is like the beautiful burlesque stripper who, with her diaphanous veil, added a sense of mystery to the human body.” L’Engle says that one of the sexiest scenes she has ever read appears in Madame Bovary, where Emma and Leon get into a “carriage with drawn shades” that is seen driving through the streets “sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship.”2 The passion and potency of this scene lie not in what we can see but in what we can’t. And so too with the sequestered sotah. It’s hard to imagine that the rabbis were trying to write a great sex scene, but their diaphanous veils of metaphor are irresistibly seductive.
Even when resorting to metaphor, the sages do not leave the sotah alone for a moment. They are concerned that she might try to seduce her husband while they are traveling to the Temple for her trial, and once she arrives, they worry that she will entice the young priests working in the Temple. The sotah in the rabbinic imagination is a dangerous temptress who blows in like a hurricane with wild hair and lustful eyes, seducing everything in her wake.
Moreover, the seductiveness of the sotah seems to be contagious, because throughout the tractate the rabbis go on to describe several other scenes of lust, passion, and seduction, some of which border on the pornographic. We are told, for instance, that the biblical Joseph resisted the charms of his master Potiphar’s wife by digging his nails in the ground so that his semen poured through his fingernails (36b). Torah, too, has seductive power in this tractate. Ben Azzai teaches that a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah so that if she is rightfully accused of adultery and drinks the sotah waters, she will know that her Torah learning may delay her punishment. But Rabbi Eliezer offers a notorious dissenting opinion: “If a man teaches his daughter Torah, it is as if he has taught her promiscuity” (Sotah 20a). Their opinions seem to allow for only two possible types of women, both defined by their sexuality—one adulterous and the other promiscuous. Two pages later, the rabbis tell the story of a virgin who falls on her face and prays, “Master of the Universe! You created heaven and You created hell. You created the righteous, and You created the wicked. May it be Your will that men will not stumble on my account” (22a). Perhaps if she had learned some Torah, she might have had another dimension to her identity beyond her sexual appeal.
The rabbis go on to discuss the relationship between wisdom and promiscuity, playing on the Hebrew word arum, which means both “shrewdness” and “nakedness”; both terms appear in the story of the snake in Eden. This discussion reaches its climax with Rabbi Yossi ben Hanina’s claim that “words of Torah can only be fully learned by one who makes himself naked before them” (21b). Rabbi Yossi is commonly understood as suggesting that in order to learn Torah deeply and fully, you need to strip yourself of any preconceived notions and start anew. But I’m not so sure. To me it seems that the most meaningful way to study Torah is by searching for the interconnections and resonances between Torah and the rest of one’s reading, learning, and living. Torah cannot be studied in a vacuum. So I prefer to interpret Rabbi Yossi’s statement as implying that to learn Torah, you have to be willing to make yourself vulnerable. You have to expose yourself, ripping your shirt to your breast and drawing on your most secret and shameful moments. You have to summon the courage to let the text resonate in the darkest recesses of your soul, in the hope that the text will illuminate your soul, and your soul in turn will illuminate the text.
My learning and writing have always been very intimate experiences. Rarely am I indifferent to the passage of Talmud I am learning. I cannot help but engage the text because the text engages me. At several points in the Talmud the rabbis interpret the verse “Moses commanded Torah, an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob” (Deuteronomy 33:4) as reading not “inheritance” (morasha) but “an engaged woman” (m’orasa). For the congregation of Jacob—the people of Israel—Torah is like an engaged woman, a “still unravished bride,” as Keats would have it. There is always more to tease out, always more to be revealed.
GITTIN
Writing Divorce
Tractate Gittin, which deals with the laws of divorce, takes its name from the plural of get, the rabbinic term for a divorce document given by husband to wife. Though a wife may sue for divorce in a rabbinic court, it is only a man who may give his wife a get. In the Bible this document is known as a sefer keritut, literally “a book of severing” (Deuteronomy 24:1), which a husband writes and transfers to his wife if he wishes to sever their connection. And so to become divorced, one needs to write a book. Indeed, much of the focus in tractate Gittin is on the act of writing: What sorts of ink must be used to write a get? On what types of surfaces may it be written? Must the husband himself write the get? Need the get be personalized for a specific woman? Can it be written in advance with the names then filled in, like the games of Mad Libs we used to play as kids on long car trips? What if five gittin are all written on the same paper, and one set of witnesses signs below? Given all these concern
s, the tractate may be read as a primer in how to write oneself out of a marriage, which is what I, too, tried to do: armed with a pen, a blank journal, and a bewildered and broken heart, I set out to write my way through divorce.
And here I must pause, and preface these words from my sefer keritut with an important caveat. Obviously Paul figures in them prominently; how could he not? But I have no doubt that if Paul were to write his version of this story—his sefer keritut—it would read very differently, and it would ring just as true. When it comes to “matters between him and her,” as the Talmud puts it, there is no objective truth; there is only faithfulness to the truth as we remember it. I have no desire to speak ill of my first husband but merely to narrate my own experience. To the extent that he figures in that experience, I can only ask my readers to divorce the real Paul from my account of him, and to read with a generous and forgiving eye.
I, too, try to be generous and forgiving when I look back on my journals from that period. Sadly, much of what I wrote during the breakup of my marriage is incoherent because I wrote only in the rawest, most painful moments, when I could barely hold a steady hand to paper or see through the veil of tears. Sometimes I simply made slash marks across the page, like the jagged lines of the broken hearts I used to doodle in my middle school notebooks. I found it difficult to document specific conversations and moments, perhaps because any form of writing is an attempt to convert experience into art, and the ugliness of it all felt so remote from anything artistic. I was also overcome by shame—ashamed that my marriage had failed, ashamed that I had failed—and so I did not want to be writing, but rather erasing this chapter of my life. Can a get be written on a page covered with erasures? the rabbis ask. It seems to me a silly question. All divorce is written on top of erasure. We try to write our love, but it doesn’t come out as we want, so we erase; then we try again to write our love, and again we erase; until eventually some of us give up writing our love, and instead we write a sefer keritut.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 13