If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  My own sefer keritut is made up of the memories I recorded throughout the unraveling of our relationship, and not the American civil divorce proceeding, which was relatively smooth and amicable, or the transfer of the get itself, which took place rather anticlimactically in a cramped rabbi’s office in the basement of a synagogue in New York City. It was in that same synagogue that my best friend got married two days before I received my get. In attendance at her wedding was the man I would marry four years later, in a future still impossible to imagine. At the time Daniel and I did not meet; I was so depressed that I could not even brush my hair or dress appropriately for the occasion, and he was on crutches after a terrible bike accident. I had given up on the dream of my life unfolding like a romantic novel, but God, it seemed, was already writing the next chapter. Only years later did I realize that my get, my best friend’s wedding, and my eventual remarriage were so intimately juxtaposed, like the volumes of tractate Gittin and Kidushin leaning innocently against one another on my bookcase.

  Instead of writing about that pokey synagogue basement where I received my get, I wrote about an afternoon flooded with light. It was an early spring day in Jerusalem, and I stood by the open door of the refrigerator cleaning for Pesach. I pulled out a half-rotten apple from the refrigerator and said to Paul, my husband of eight months, “Oh well, this apple looks pretty far gone. I suppose I’ll just eat it and be done with it.” He was sitting at the kitchen table with an open book, studying while eating, and he looked up at me with all the love drained from his face. “If you have so little respect for yourself that you’re going to eat a rotten apple, how am I supposed to respect you as my wife?” In synagogue just a few days later I would be chanting the Song of Songs, and I thought of a verse from the Bible’s book of love poetry: “Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the youths” (2:3). But here was I, prepared to eat rotten fruit, and therefore surely not fit to be the apple of anyone’s eye.

  I wrote, too, about our bicycle trip to the Galilee earlier that spring, where we rode around the dazzling blue waters of the Kinneret. We stayed in a youth hostel where they mistakenly put us in a room with bunk beds instead of a double bed, and Paul did not object. We biked for hours in the Galilean heat without speaking to each other, until we came to a rest stop and ate our pita and egg salad sandwiches. I wrapped up the remaining food in a plastic bag and tied it to the handlebar of my bike. He was bending over to tie his shoes, and he got up, saw the food tied to my bike, and said, “Let me check that you did that right.” He inspected my handlebars. “No, not like that.” He furrowed his brow and looked concerned, and though I should have known better, I asked what was bothering him. “You are so impractical, so irresponsible. If I can’t trust you to tie our sandwiches securely to your bicycle, how can I possibly trust you with my children?” How could anyone trust me with children? I was so often lost in thought or swept up in flights of fancy; how could I presume to think I was grounded enough to be a mother, or even a wife? I felt that Paul was confirming my deepest fears about myself: that I was inadequate in some fundamental and irreparable way. “A person should never instill excessive fear in his house,” we are told in Gittin (6b), and in the Talmud the word “house” is interchangeable with “wife.” A person should not instill excessive fear in his wife, but already I was terrified that he would leave.

  Ultimately we both left, because the end, when it came, was apocalyptic. Later I would learn it was just a small and easily contained brushfire that caused us to flee when we saw those flames in our backyard, but in the heat of the moment I ran and ran. I knew instinctively that one should run from a fire, and so I did, without realizing that it was my own hearth that was smoldering. The Talmud (Shabbat 115a) discusses what a person is permitted to save from a burning building on Shabbat, but at that moment I had no thought of saving anything except perhaps myself.

  I wrote about that first night after I fled. Paul returned to our apartment, but I could not bear to go back. Instead I slept on the couch of a friend who lived in our neighborhood and had sensed, though he was discreet, that all was not well in our home. I knocked on his door, carrying nothing with me, and asked if I could stay over. Simon was and still is a dear friend, and he did not ask any questions. In his living room was a maroon couch made of faux velvet, very similar to the couch in my parents’ house when I was growing up, and when I slept there it was like I had returned to the cocoon of my childhood, without any concerns or responsibilities. Several days passed in a blur. I rarely got up and did not distinguish day from night, hardly aware that the world outside continued to exist. I assume that Simon, kindhearted soul that he is, brought me food to eat. He definitely brought me a pen and a notebook, which is why I remember all of this.

  About a week later, Simon suggested that I move to his spare bedroom, and getting up from that couch felt like getting up from shiva, the traditional seven-day period of mourning. I was mourning my marriage, which had seemed so full of promise less than a year earlier when we delighted in our newfound love for each other and in the romance of moving across the world together. I was mourning the direction I had thought my life was heading, which seemed a farce. And I was mourning that part of me that had been so innocent and hopeful, that part of me that believed I was writing my love story on clean and crisp white paper, that part of me that thought I would never want to go back and erase.

  I wrote about that first Shabbat after I fled, during the Passover of my own exodus, when I was supposed to chant the Song of Songs in synagogue. I wondered how I would bear the incongruousness of singing the Bible’s celebration of carefree and sensual love with my own heavy and hurting heart. “My beloved is mine, and I am his, who browses among the lilies” (2:16). Who was I to be a conduit for this expression of young, innocent love—I, who had been discarded like a plucked and wilted flower? But I did not want to renege on my responsibility to the congregation. And so I resolved that I would sing these words not hopefully—the days of hope were over like autumn and gone like rain—but defiantly, fighting to keep my voice steady and to hold back the tide of tears. “Whither has your beloved gone, O fairest of women? Whither has your beloved turned?” (6:1). I held my head high and chanted these words as if daring Paul to return. “My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the bed of spices, to pick lilies” (6:2).

  At some point Simon connected me to Andrea, who became my running partner and who brought daf yomi into my life. He also took me with him to the library every day, which gave me a place to go, even if I was only pretending that I could concentrate on work. I don’t know how Simon realized what would be best for me during that raw and terrible time, but it seems inherent in his nature. A few years ago a friend sent me a poem she had written called “The Edge of Kindness,” imagining kindness as an island that extends as far as the eye can see but surely must have borders, and perhaps even precipitous ones. I read the poem and thought of Simon. I have sailed on the seas of his kindness for innumerable nautical miles, like a sixteenth-century explorer searching for the edge of the earth, and I have never come close to falling off.

  Simon encouraged me to keep writing. He also encouraged me to focus on work, and I tried to return to the book I was editing. The book dealt extensively with the section of tractate Gittin known as aggadot haHurban, the stories related to the Temple’s destruction. The Temple in the Talmud is known as bayit, a home, since it was the home for God’s presence among the people of Israel. The destruction of the Temple, hurban haBayit, is also the destruction of the home, and so many of the tales in this story cycle, which follow one another consecutively and span three pages of Talmud, deal with the devastation to Jewish family life: a wedding pillaged by Roman soldiers; a man who tried to divorce his new wife by falsely accusing her of sleeping with his friends at his wedding celebration; a brother and sister kidnapped by two separate masters and then forced to marry one another.

  In perhaps the most moving tale, the Talmud tells of a c
arpenter’s apprentice who falls in love with the wife of his master (58a). When the carpenter falls on hard times and needs to borrow money from his apprentice, the apprentice insists that his master send his wife to him as his bond. The master obliges. But then the apprentice gives the master grounds to suspect his wife of infidelity, and he suggests that he loan his master money to divorce his wife. The master accepts and reluctantly divorces his wife, who remains living with the apprentice. When the master cannot repay his debt, the cruel and conniving apprentice suggests that the master come work for him to pay it off. “So they [the apprentice and his new wife] used to sit and eat and drink while he waited on them, and tears used to fall from his [the master’s] eyes and drop into their cups. From that hour the decree [of the Temple’s destruction] was sealed.” The carpenter’s apprentice, who was supposed to learn from his master how to build homes, instead destroyed the home of his master. And because of the home he wrecked, God’s sacred home was destroyed as well.

  The stories of the Temple’s destruction in tractate Gittin are filled with tears and pathos, and as such they are anomalous in this tractate, which is otherwise preoccupied with technicalities. Gittin is much more about the “how” of divorce than the “why” of divorce. We learn about how a get is written, signed, folded, and transferred from one spouse to another, but there is almost no discussion about why a couple might get divorced, what sort of emotions might be involved, or how the matter can be handled most sensitively. But then on the last page of the tractate, after ninety pages of technical detail, we return momentarily to the emotional plane with one arresting line: “When a man divorces his first wife, even the altar sheds tears” (90b). Tractate Gittin is a reminder that we weep for the destruction of the Temple, but the Temple also weeps for the destruction of the Jewish family. The get itself is a dry formula, with the same wording used for every couple. But like the pages of my journals from that time, each get is stained with someone’s tears, and there is weeping in God’s house, too.

  KIDUSHIN

  Toward a Theory of Romantic Love

  Whereas Gittin is about how to get rid of a wife, Kidushin is about how to acquire one. A man acquires a woman, and never the other way around, as the Talmud tells us, “because it is the nature of a man to pursue a woman, and not the nature of a woman to pursue a man” (2b). The Talmud illustrates this principle by means of a parable. “It is like a man who has lost something. Who looks for whom? The owner looks for his lost item.” That is, Adam lost his rib when God removed it to create woman; thus every Adam spends his life looking for his missing Eve. We women are like the wedges in Shel Silverstein’s children’s book The Missing Piece, waiting for the right circle to roll by and trying not to let our edges soften too much in the interim.

  As a teenager, though, I resolved that I would not spend my life waiting around. I grew up quoting Anne of Green Gables (“Oh Gil, I don’t want diamond sunbursts and marble halls. I just want you!”) and Catherine Earnshaw (“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary”). Somewhat embarrassingly, my earliest ideas about romance were forged in the fiery furnace of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds; I can still picture the bright orange cover of the mass-market paperback I placed within the open math textbook on my lap, my knees tilted up toward my chest so I could sneak a few pages of reading during class. One junior high school summer, a few weeks after I had finished the novel, my mother and I stayed up past midnight watching the eight-hour TV miniseries adaptation. I was enchanted by the grand panoramic views of the Australian outback, the soft silk Ashes of Roses gown against Meggie’s flaming red hair, and the sublime melancholy of the music that would run through my head all summer long. That was the summer of my first boyfriend, and though I did not take the book with me to camp, I had already memorized the first paragraph:

  There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the price of great pain … or so says the legend.1

  This passage was my credo of romantic love, a statement of everything I believed about the human heart. I was determined that I would love just once, but that it would be a grand and majestic love that would demand every fiber of my being. I was sure that this love would be painful—deeply, agonizingly, heart-wrenchingly painful—but that the depths of pain would be matched by heights of ecstasy. I would put the thorn in my breast and perhaps I would die in so doing, but still I would do it.

  Throughout high school I collected the most beautiful literary passages I could find about romantic love and copied them down into an onion-skin notebook. Although I was an Eve rather than an Adam, I was prepared to do my part and declare, with Kenneth Koch: “I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years.”2 When I thought I had found someone worthy of loving, I would fall upon him hopelessly and passionately, leaving the poor young man feeling bewildered if not beleaguered. Often bored in class, I wrote love letters and sonnets on the blank back pages of my spiral notebooks. I never tore out the pages or showed them to anyone, certainly not to the one to whom they were addressed. I specialized in unrequited love, or “Love without hope,” as Robert Graves termed it in a poem about a bird catcher in love with the squire’s daughter. When the bird catcher tips his hat to greet her, he inadvertently sets the imprisoned birds free, and they all swarm around her head singing.3 Like the young bird catcher, I became a fool for love, whether it was the love of the non-Jewish boy who lived around the corner, my high school English teacher, or Gilbert Blythe himself—in ascending degrees of implausibility. Needless to say, I never caught any birds.

  I wonder how the rabbis of the Talmud would feel about all the energy I invested in my unrequited passions. In Kidushin (40b) the sages debate the relative merits of study and action: is it better to spend one’s days learning Torah or performing good deeds in the world? They ultimately side with Rabbi Akiva that study is greater, because study leads to action. I suspect that the rabbis would have told me that all my pining was fine, so long as it led to an actual romantic relationship—which in my case it rarely did. Or, as Shakespeare would have it, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action, and ’til action, lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame.”

  With time I developed a more sober view of romantic love. When I finally began healing from my divorce, I hoped that I would not love only once; I realized that there were multiple men with whom I could imagine leading a happy life. I also began to appreciate the range of different relationships that seemed to work, even against all odds. One of my college friends married a professor fifteen years her senior; another married a much younger undergraduate whom she had met while teaching abroad. My aunt, recently widowed, married a widower who had been her sweetheart in summer camp thirty years earlier. It was impossible to know in advance for whom one was searching; I could only pray for the ability to recognize the right person when I saw him.

  After my divorce, too, I came to realize that the right person is not always the person who seemed so right initially. The second chapter of Kidushin deals largely with betrothals that take place under false pretenses. A man may betroth a woman on condition that she has no “blemishes,” and then discover that in fact she has blemishes; if so, she is not in fact betrothed to him (50a). According to the rabbis, these blemishes include a scar from a dog bite, or too much cleavage, or a husky voice. At the same time, though, the rabbis teach in the same chapter that “it is forbidden for a man to betroth a woman without first seeing her, lest he s
ee in her something repulsive and be repulsed by her, since the Torah says, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’” (41a). That is, a man should not find out too late that he married a woman he cannot find attractive. If only this lesson had been internalized by the hero of Hawthorne’s story The Birthmark, a scientist who cannot bear the birthmark on his wife’s cheek. Finally she agrees to let him remove it, and she dies from the potion he makes her drink. I sometimes think that Paul married me on condition that I had no blemishes—that is, on condition that he not find anything he did not like. When things grew tough, we responded very differently: I felt that we had committed to one another unconditionally, and so we would find a way to work through our difficulties; he felt that the difficulties—the blemishes—undermined the commitment itself.

  When I realized, painfully, that the same person who swept me off my feet could pull the rug out from under me, I became more skeptical about romantic love. I knew what it felt like to be completely smitten, and I looked on with raised eyebrows as various friends fell passionately in love and told me all about it. Each time another friend gushed about a new relationship, I thought of Wendy Cope’s poem “The Orange.” Cope describes those glowing first moments of romantic love, in which even the most ordinary pleasures, like a huge orange shared among friends at lunchtime, make us smile and laugh.