Popular psychology holds that when we first fall in love, the brain releases neurotransmitters that contribute to increased energy, rapid pulse, a sense of heightened perception, and a more positive outlook on life. And indeed, the Talmud in Kidushin (81a) relates several stories of rabbis who acquire superhuman strength upon falling in love. For instance, Rabbi Amram hosted a group of beautiful women following their redemption from captivity. Lest he be tempted to approach them, he asked the sages to remove the ladder leading up to their attic room. One day one of the women passed by the opening to the attic, casting a radiant beam of light. Upon seeing her splendor Rabbi Amram ran and moved the ladder back in place, even though it was so heavy that it ordinarily required ten men to lift it. Fortunately he managed to subdue his evil inclination by yelling “Fire!” when he was halfway up the ladder, such that all the sages rushed in and he was saved from temptation. In another story, Satan appeared to Rabbi Akiva in the form of a beautiful woman perched at the top of a palm tree. Desperate to reach her, Rabbi Akiva managed to leap halfway up the tree. He was saved just in time when Satan revealed his true identity. A similar story is told about Rabbi Meir, who spotted a beautiful woman (again, Satan in disguise) across the river. When no ferry came, he swung from a rope and forded the river. He too was spared.
As both the psychologists and the rabbis would have it, then, romantic love is not just an intense emotional experience, but a somatic one as well. Our body chemistry shifts when we fall in love—we become almost like superheroes, or like the biblical Jacob, able to roll a heavy stone off the mouth of a well with Rachel looking on. I think of it as the orange stage of love—that stage when the whole world seems aglow with possibility and ordinary things are infused with the thrill of being alive. Sadly, though, it is often just that—a stage. The glow fades, and the succulent fruit is no more.
And so gradually I adopted a different credo of romantic love, one that seemed more true to the reality of my own loving and losing. Instead of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, I identified with Jack Gilbert’s “Waiting and Finding,” a poem about a boy in a kindergarten music class who wants to play the exotic red and gold tom-toms but finds himself instead stuck playing the ordinary triangle. Unlike the tom-toms, the triangle is not played continuously; it is struck only every so often, and then it reverberates and fades out until the time comes to strike it again. Still, the boy finds that it is the sound of the triangle that stays with him because it teaches him that love is something that we spend our lives finding, then losing, and then waiting to find again. During those loveless stretches, we must live, as Gilbert puts it, “silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting for the best to come again.”4
According to Gilbert there is no one superlative song of the thorn birds, but rather a series of cacophonous rehearsals in which everybody tries to learn how to play their part, and most of us never get it exactly right. The romance of romantic love lies not in its unique, once-in-a-lifetime quality but in the guaranteed fading out and return. Love thus has poetry in the same way that a sunset has poetry: the color streaks across the sky as the light fades, but then the sun always rises.
For the thorn birds, life ends when the song dies. But Gilbert’s poem is a reminder that life goes on in periods of silence. We wait and wait, and then perhaps we find. In this sense, we are all on a quest like Adam. But what we are searching for is not our one and only missing piece but rather another opportunity to fall in love, to savor the orange, to strike the perfect shimmering note on the triangle. We are waiting for the best to come—again.
PART III
The Order of Damages
BAVA KAMA / BAVA METZIA / BAVA BATRA
Suspended in a Miracle
I met, dated, and married my husband Daniel against the backdrop of my learning of Bava Kama, Bava Metzia, and Bava Batra. These tractates—originally one long tractate that was subsequently subdivided—contain the core of the Talmud’s discussion of civil law, specifically how people interact with one another and share space: What happens if my ox falls into your pit? Or if I rent out the second story of my home to you, and it collapses? Or if you open up a shop near my home and the noise keeps me up at night? As I let Daniel more and more into my life, the Talmudic text became a primer for how to look out for the other: how to seek out that person who will become a lifelong partner, and how to look out for that person as dearly as—if not more dearly than—we look out for ourselves.
Even before I met Daniel, I struggled with how to look out for myself. At the beginning of Bava Kama we are taught that “a person is responsible for guarding his own body” (4a). That is, a person should take care not to harm others with his or her physical person. It is a skill I have had to master because I’ve spent most of my adult life walking through the world with a book, reading as I walk. Somehow I am able to see and assimilate the words on the page while also being aware of the bumps in the road, the shape of the cobblestones, and the telephone poles and traffic meters that interrupt the sidewalk. I have a friend who lost her vision a couple of years ago. She works with a “mobility instructor” to learn to memorize the paths she takes regularly, so that she will not trip or stumble. I am blessed with decent vision, but I can very much relate.
There is a science to reading while walking. It is easier with poetry than prose (the line breaks provide a natural opportunity to look up), and with paperbacks rather than hardcovers (less weight to support), and with larger-print books (less squinting). But at this point there is almost no book I wouldn’t take with me on the road, and I would never, ever leave the house without something to read. When I first moved to Jerusalem, I spent Shabbat afternoons taking walks with the guidebook a close friend had given me, choosing a different route each time. Though sometimes I was too absorbed in the map or the illustrations to lift my head from the page and look at the building in front of my eyes, I tried to take in the stones as well as the stories. I discovered landmarks such as the “Dead Groom’s House” on Jaffa Road, built in 1882 by the parents of a Christian Arab young man who died on the eve of his nuptials but whose parents decided to hold the ceremony nonetheless—dressing the dead groom in his festive garb and seating him next to his unsuspecting bride. (Today the building houses the Ministry of Health.)
Another week I visited the former leper hospital around the corner from my apartment. It was a building I’d passed hundreds of times, though I’d never before stopped at its gates to walk down the long stone pathway lined with overgrown trees leading to an abandoned but still striking stone edifice. The outside of the building bore the inscription Jesus Hilfe, German for “Jesus helps,” on account of the Protestant missionaries who founded the hospital to heal and mission to the lepers of Jerusalem, who had formerly congregated as beggars at Zion Gate. I thought about Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who studied Torah with the lepers, and I learned about his modern counterpart, Rabbi Aryeh Levin, who began visiting the lepers to study with them after he met a woman weeping at the Kotel—the last remaining wall of the Temple—for her afflicted son.
During the week, when I was too busy going about my daily business to do any touring, I was mostly oblivious to my surroundings because I was buried in other books unrelated to my environs. I read poetry in elevators, short stories in doctor’s offices, and long novels while waiting in line at the post office or the supermarket, marking time not in minutes lost but in pages gained. Often I’d carry around all three in my bag just in case; the prospect of being caught stranded without a book to read was a fate equivalent in my mind to one of Dante’s circles of hell.
Over time I developed a reputation in Jerusalem as the woman who reads and walks. One morning I went jogging as usual but failed to look where I was going and bumped into a pole. For the next few days I had a huge bruise on my forehead, and everywhere I went I was met with the same response, often from people I regarded as total strangers: “Oh, so you were reading while walking again!” I tried to defend myself, insisting that no, in this
case I was jogging and there was no book in sight, but no one believed me. The Talmud (Bava Kama 32a) warns about the dangers of running recklessly: According to the opinion of the sage Issi bar Yehuda, if a person who is running and one who is walking collide and injure one another, it is the runner who is responsible for all damages because he is the one acting in a “changed” manner—that is, his behavior is different from the way that people ordinarily move through the world. However, Issi bar Yehuda qualifies that if one runs at twilight on the eve of the Sabbath, he is exempt from paying damages, because everyone is allowed to rush to get ready for Shabbat.
Fortunately I have never injured another person while running, or while reading and walking, for that matter. In this sense I am what is known in Bava Kama as a shor tam, an “innocent ox.” A shor tam has never gored another animal or person before; it stands in contrast to a shor mu’ad, which has a history of goring and therefore incurs higher damages for its owner should it gore once again. Indeed, the only person I ever injured with my ambulatory derring-do is myself, but these minor injuries seem worth all the hundreds of extra pages I’ve managed to read in transit.
The one place in Jerusalem where I never take out my book is the shuk, the open-air marketplace where I do my food shopping. The shuk and the bus I ride home after shopping are two of the rare common spaces of Jerusalem, places where people from all sectors of society come into contact—from Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews to Arabs to secular teenagers sporting tight black jeans and pierced belly buttons. In the shuk I jostle my fellow bag-laden shoppers as I lean over to choose the juiciest tomatoes, the spiciest olives, the warmest and crispest potato burekas. I follow my nose and eyes, enticed by the pungent-smelling cheeses and the cardamom-flavored Turkish coffee. The rabbis say that “one who eats in the shuk is like a dog” (Kidushin 40b), and Rashi explains in his commentary that such an individual lacks any sense of dignity. But sometimes I cannot resist—I reach into my bag and take out a pita so hot that the plastic bag encasing it has become clouded with steam, and I savor each bite. I buy my produce from two brothers I’ve gotten to know personally; each week we check in with one another as I lean in to examine their grapes or to pile juicy lemons in my bag. Then I make my way to the herb stall, owned by a religious man with a black kippah on his head who offers me his commentary on that week’s Torah portion as I pick from his piles of fresh basil, parsley, mint, and lettuce leaves. Finally I head to the dry goods stall run by a young Ethiopian family, where I buy quinoa, oatmeal, lentils, and beans in bulk, occasionally inquiring about a new grain that I don’t recognize.
When I shop in the shuk, I must be fully conscious of everything around me, which is why I would never dare to read. I am careful to bury my wallet deep in the zippered compartment of my bag, since the shuk is notorious for rampant pickpocketing—an issue that is treated in Bava Kama (118b) in the chapter about various kinds of theft. In my left pocket I keep only the bills and coins I will need for my next few purchases; in my right pocket is my shopping list and a pen for crossing out each item I purchase. I type up and print out the shopping lists at home, working off a master list template that I modify and label by the name of that week’s Torah portion: “Shuk list Noah,” “Shuk list Lech Lecha,” et cetera. I am not only careful about guarding my money but also about treading gingerly through the aisles filled with bags, carts, and discarded cardboard fruit and vegetable boxes. I try to keep my distance from the old, shrunken religious women in thin headscarves who drag their carts behind them without looking back, relying on their fellow shoppers to get out of their way. Every so often a lanky teenager comes rushing through the aisle carrying over his head a wooden tray stacked with hot, freshly baked pita, which he delivers to the nearest bakery stall. I marvel that he doesn’t crash into any of the elderly ladies with their market carts, scattering oven-fresh pita on the floor.
The Talmud in Bava Kama brings several tales that involve accidental run-ins in the shuk and other public spaces. My favorite is the case of the camel laden with flax that passes by the door to a store where a candle is burning in the entryway (22a). The flax catches fire and the upper story of the store bursts into flame. Who is responsible, the owner of the camel or the owner of the store? The rabbis respond that if the candle was outside the entryway, then the store owner is responsible; if it was inside the store, then the camel owner is responsible. But Rabbi Yehuda grants that if the candle in question was a Chanukah candle, then the store owner is never implicated since he—like Issi bar Yehuda’s runner who was rushing to prepare for Shabbat—was engaged in performing a mitzvah, a religious commandment.
I have had several such close encounters in the shuk, though thankfully none have involved camels or conflagration. All too often I find myself with my head in someone else’s smelly armpit, or I look down to see that my feet are straddling another shopper’s bag of carrots. Even so, I would choose the shuk over the supermarket any day. I take pleasure in knowing the people from whom I buy my produce and feeling like they are a part of my life. I also enjoy noticing which fruits come in and out of season as prices grow successively lower and then mount again. Each year I wait until the strawberries stacked in heaps that reach my shoulders are sold for four shekels a kilo, and then I watch the vendor shovel them into a plastic container with a dustpan. I look out for the first apricots in May, the first pomegranates in August, and the first green clementines in September that turn increasingly yellow as the fall sets in.
At the shuk I buy as much produce as I can carry, and when I cannot manage to lift another kilo, I hobble to the bus stop. By this point my shoulders are aching and I have red streaks across my palms where the handles of my bags have dug into my skin. I place the bags down at the bus stop, my feet encircled by my purchases as I wait to board the crowded bus, elbowed by other tired shoppers who try to cut ahead of me.
The buses in Jerusalem, like the shuk, offer another opportunity to come into contact with a wide swath of society. While the public buses in the more religious neighborhoods of the city are segregated, with men in front and women in back, I am free to sit wherever I want on the bus home from the shuk. That said, I often get strange looks from the Haredi men standing near me when I practice my Torah reading for the coming Shabbat. I chant from the Torah in synagogue almost every week and carry around photocopies of the portion I am learning folded into my pocket for easy access whenever I have a free minute. But Haredim do not believe in gender egalitarianism in prayer, or in women singing in public, since a woman’s voice is thought to be provocative. I try to sit down next to someone who won’t mind my quiet chanting, though it’s hard to predict who will be an accommodating seatmate. Once I decided that I’d rather put my bags on my seat than sit down myself; it would be easier not to have to reach down again than to sit comfortably for the ride. The querulous, hectoring old lady sitting next to me would have none of it: “You can’t take up a seat just for your bags,” she insisted, lowering them to the floor herself. “But it’s my seat,” I protested. “I’m just electing not to sit in it.” Don’t I have as much of a right as anyone else to one seat in the public domain, however I may choose to use it? This is not a case that comes up among the property laws discussed in Bava Kama, but it seems like it would fit right in.
* * *
It was from shopping in the shuk that I learned how to share public space while still looking out for myself; and it was from my relationship with Daniel that I learned how to share intimate space while continuing to honor my own emotional vulnerabilities. I can’t really say when Daniel and I first met, since it was less a proper meeting than an experience of inhabiting the same space for one evening a week over the course of the many months that we were both in Avivah Zornberg’s class on the weekly Torah portion. The class, which I had been attending for years, was a lifeline for me. Zornberg is not just a brilliant reader of texts but also a kind, compassionate human being who seeks out the spark of God in every single person with whom she crosses paths. Wh
enever she speaks, I feel like she is addressing her words directly to me, as if I am the only person in the room. Perhaps that is the reason I never noticed Daniel, who was apparently sitting just a few seats over and trying to catch my eye for several weeks.
Daniel claims he first noticed me when I quoted from Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger” in class, a poem our teacher invoked to describe how the tranquility of the biblical patriarch Jacob was interrupted by the agitation of his son Joseph. When called upon, I recited the poem in full, apparently twisting the sinews of Daniel’s heart. From the outset our courtship revolved around poetry, and it was for a long time an epistolary romance: Daniel e-mailed me selections from the poems he was analyzing in his PhD dissertation, and I wrote back analyzing his analyses until we had taken each poem thoroughly apart. But when Daniel grew so bold as to send me Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” I demurely refrained from comment, afraid of being too explicit about what was in fact unfolding between us—“the smiles that win, the tints that glow.”
The Talmud in Bava Kama (41b) relates that the sage Shimon HaAmsuni was famous for coming up with an exegetical interpretation of every word in the Torah, even the most insignificant word et, which is essentially a grammatical placeholder. But then he came to the verse that begins with the word “et” and reads, “[Et] the Lord your God you must fear.” Here he did not offer any interpretation, since the point of this verse is that one should fear only God, and nothing else. His students questioned how he could throw away his life’s work, and he responded, “My students—just as I receive merit for exegesis [drisha], so too will I receive merit for refraining from exegesis [prisha].” I trusted that Daniel appreciated our correspondence even when I demurred to comment.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 15