If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  We spent much of our first year of marriage studying Talmud together. Neither of us enjoyed household chores, so we developed a system whereby one of us—generally Daniel—washed the dishes or cleaned the floor, while the other—generally me—read daf yomi aloud. This way, what might otherwise feel like a burden was lightened by the pleasures of Torah and togetherness. One night I read aloud to Daniel the Talmudic debate in the opening pages of Sanhedrin (6b) about whether absolute justice is possible in our imperfect world, a discussion that lays the theological foundation for the tractate. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Rabbi Yose HaGlili, pits Moses against Aaron as straw men. Moses strove for absolute justice and lived by the motto, “Let the law cut through the mountain,” believing that the iron rule of law could break through the dirt and stone of this world. Aaron, in contrast, was devoted to the pursuit of peace and advocated instead for compromise, settlement, and accommodation. Moses was a man of truth, but Aaron was a man of peace.

  I’m not sure whom I side with in this debate, but Daniel, to be sure, is in Aaron’s camp. He is not one to pick a fight or provoke, nor does he allow himself to go to bed angry. “When our love was strong,” the Talmud states on the next page of Sanhedrin, quoting a folk proverb, “we could sleep on the tip of a sword. But now that our love is no longer strong, even a bed of sixty amot [the length of a forearm] is not wide enough for us” (7a). When we first got married, we slept on a mattress on the floor until we had time to buy a bed. It was only a bit more comfortable than the tip of a sword, but we hardly noticed.

  I was, to a large extent, the same person I had been when I was married to Paul, but the dynamic between Daniel and me was completely different. A teacher once told me that the key to a happy marriage is the ability to recognize that the traits that drive you most crazy about your spouse are expressions of the very same traits you love most about him or her. It frustrated Daniel—as I’m sure it frustrated Paul—when I left the artichokes to boil for hours on end, so absorbed in my novel that I did not notice when the whole apartment began to smell like burnt vegetable matter because all the water had evaporated from the pot. But Daniel recognized that my carelessness is bound up in my passion and my ability to lose myself in something I love; that my rich intellectual life goes hand in hand with my disregard for practicalities; that the woman who can’t be bothered to learn the art of makeup is the same woman who won’t notice if the dishes were thoroughly cleaned or if the floor was swept after dinner. I may not tie the sandwiches to the handlebars properly, but I’ll definitely have a great book of poetry in my backpack—one that we have both not read and can enjoy together even if our picnic lunch lies strewn by the roadside several kilometers back.

  Daniel took my faults in stride and even jested about them, dancing around the kitchen with me while we waited for the pasta to boil (after I’d ruined the fish we were supposed to be eating), and graciously putting on earplugs when I practiced chanting my Torah reading aloud for a solid twenty minutes. He sent me e-mails in iambic pentameter, challenged me to identify his allusions to Yeats and Stevens, read copies of my best college papers and shared his with me. Endlessly creative in his affections, he called me by silly nicknames, surprised me with tickets to outdoor concerts of ancient liturgical poetry, and took me at dusk to see the Old City walls illuminated as if by magic lantern in a summer light festival.

  Later we referred to that newlywed year as “another lifetime” because so much of what we did together became impossible once our children were born. Instead of a honeymoon, we went on long weekend trips to London (for a wedding) and Paris (to visit friends), coordinating our tourism with daf yomi. While we were in the Tower of London we studied Sanhedrin’s laws about how a person is hanged, and at the Palais de Justice we reviewed the procedure for interrogating a witness. Back in Jerusalem we hosted Shabbat meals for various groups of friends featuring Talmud-themed dishes such as Reish LaQuiche—a quiche named for the sage Reish Lakish, who sold himself as a gladiator in his youth but then reformed his ways and became a prominent Torah scholar—or a dessert consisting of a cup of pomegranate seeds in a glass that we introduced simply as “Rabbi Yohanan,” since Rabbi Yohanan’s beauty is compared to a glass of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight. Through it all, we attended the morning daf yomi classes together, where we gave nicknames to the various older men who comprised the rest of the class: “the bear,” a warm and fuzzy man with a thick beard who asked all the best questions; “the dentist,” who reminded us of Mr. Dussel from Anne Frank; and “the laureate,” who resembled a classic portrait of Wordsworth. After class, we each headed to work, though I stopped first at the pool.

  Beset now with a broken toe, I swam instead of jogging. I had first started swimming years earlier, when I’d broken my foot in the middle of tractate Yoma and needed a new form of exercise. I became a member of the Olympic-size swimming pool that was conveniently located on the ground floor of the office building that housed our literary agency; the window above my desk overlooked the pool, so I watched children careen down the twisty waterslide and land in the water with a delighted splash as I answered my e-mails.

  The Talmud in Sanhedrin (17b) speaks of all the institutions that must exist in a particular city in order for a Torah scholar to live there. The first is a civil and criminal court, which explains why this discussion appears in tractate Sanhedrin. But there are nine others: a charity fund, a synagogue, a bathroom, a doctor, a bloodletter, a scribe, a butcher, a schoolteacher, and a public bath. The pool was my equivalent of the public bath; I could no sooner imagine living in a pool-less Jerusalem than in a city in which Torah study is not a preeminent value.

  I couldn’t figure out a way to study Talmud while swimming, but even in the pool, my mind was never empty. I left photocopied poems encased in a protective plastic sleeve at the edge of the pool and memorized them as I swam. There is something about the end-stopped nature of poetry (in which each line comes to an end at a fixed point) that is akin to swimming in a pool, where one has to turn around after each length. When I got to the edge of the pool, I stole a glance at the next line and then cut back underwater, stroking to the rhythm of the poem’s meter reverberating in my head. This was how I memorized all of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Turannos,” regaling Daniel after each swim with another stanza of the poem’s stormy passion and aquatic imagery: “Though like waves breaking it may be, / Or like a changed familiar tree, / Or like a stairway to the sea, / Where down the blind are driven.”1

  Other days I reviewed the weekly Torah reading while swimming laps. The Torah is divided into fifty-four portions that are chanted each Shabbat of the year (and sometimes combined). Each portion is in turn divided into seven aliyot—the plural of aliyah, Hebrew for “ascent,” since one person is called to ascend to the Torah for each aliyah. At the time I chanted at least one aliyah each Shabbat at my local egalitarian minyan. Daniel prayed elsewhere, at an Orthodox minyan down the street, but he overheard me practicing all week long (earplugs notwithstanding). By the end of the week, I usually knew the aliyah more or less by heart and could chant it in my head underwater. I dreamed of inventing a pool that would enable me not just to review but also to learn my Torah reading while swimming. The pool would have seven lanes, one corresponding to each aliyah of that week’s Torah portion. (Torah reading is also known as leyning, from the Yiddish word for “reading,” and so each lane would double as a leyn.) A series of overhead projectors would flash the words of each aliyah onto the bottom pool surface of each lane so that the swimmer could follow along as she made her way face-down through the water. This way, swimmers could choose their lanes according to what they were leyning.

  I think about what the Talmudic sages would have made of my leyning pool. In Sanhedrin (101a) they teach that one should not recite biblical verses in secular contexts, lest Torah become regarded as something frivolous. The rabbis speak specifically of the Song of Songs, the Bible’s book of erotic poetry, which they worry will be
come a mockery if read as anything other than sacred writ. I imagine the sages would have been none too pleased by my chanting Torah in a bathing suit in the Jerusalem public pool. Many waters cannot quench my reverence for Torah, I imagined myself reassuring them, nor can rivers or pools sweep it away.

  * * *

  The summer after we got married I had the chance to share my love of Torah with a group of American high school students when I took my first serious teaching job. I do not think of myself as a teacher. I tend to prefer to work in quiet solitude, alone in the library with a book I am reading, translating, or editing. But the Talmudic sages extol the value of teaching, asserting that one who learns but does not teach resembles a fragrant myrtle tree in the deserted wilderness (Rosh Hashanah 23a)—perhaps the rabbinic equivalent of the Buddhist koan about the tree falling in the forest with no one around. In Sanhedrin the sage Reish Lakish—the one for whom our Shabbat quiche was named—asserts that anyone who teaches his friend’s child Torah is regarded as if he fashioned him (99b), since a person is shaped by the Torah he learns. And at the beginning of the next tractate, Makkot (10a), the Talmud cites Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi’s oft-quoted assertion that he learned much from his teachers, even more from his colleagues, and most of all from his students—and I suppose this was true for me as well.

  Though I had come prepared to teach Talmud, my students wanted to talk about existential religious questions. An elite group of high school juniors accepted to the summer program for their academic merit and intellectual aptitude, they would stay up all night arguing about God, faith, the divinity of the Torah, and the problem of theodicy. In the mornings, arriving at class exhausted and bleary-eyed, they pressed me to help them think it all through: If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world? What really happened on Mount Sinai? Do we have souls, and what happens to them after we die?

  I listened patiently, taking the time to hear them out. My earnest and troubled students assumed that I had figured out all the answers for myself, because if I hadn’t, how could I possibly concentrate on anything else? I tried to explain to them that yes, these were all good questions, but they no longer kept me up at night. It is not that when we grow up, we stop thinking critically, or that we miraculously find all the answers. But on some level, as Rilke puts it, we learn to live our way into the answers—in a way that does not stop us from going on with the rest of our lives.

  Fortunately, though, I knew what to say in response because many of these questions are conveniently addressed at the end of tractate Sanhedrin (90a). Following on the heels of the Talmud’s discussion of capital punishment, the final chapter of Sanhedrin discusses those sins that are so grave that they deny the individual a place in the world to come. These sins are primarily lapses of faith, including denying the divinity of the Torah and denying that the dead will be revived.

  Invoking the Mishnah in Sanhedrin, I told my students that both the divinity of Torah and the revival of the dead are fundamental tenets of my own faith. I believe that Torah is divine. But for me this does not mean that God handed the entire Written and Oral Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. Rather, Sinai is the human record of an encounter with God. As a human record, this document is historically contingent: it was written at a particular historical moment, and reflects the biases of its time. This record has had to be adapted to later generations, both to changing historical circumstances and to evolving theological understandings. Those adaptations are known as midrash—the creative commentary that reworks and retells the Bible so as to render it ever relevant.

  In high school my students had surely learned, as I had, about the difference between natural numbers and rational numbers. Natural numbers are integers: 1, 2, 3, etc. Rational numbers are the decimals in between, including 1.1, 1.12, 1.23378. Both sets are infinite, but only the rational numbers are infinitely dense, meaning that there are an infinite number of rational numbers between any two natural numbers. Torah and midrash are similar. Between any two words—or occasionally even letters—in the Torah, there are an infinite number of midrashim, or reinterpretations, that are possible. The Talmud in Sanhedrin captures this notion in an exegetical reading of a verse from Jeremiah (23:29): “Behold My word is like fire—declares the Lord—and like a hammer that shatters rock.” The sages comment, “Just as a hammer strikes innumerable sparks off the rock, so too does a single verse have many meanings” (Sanhedrin 34a). When studying and teaching Torah, we are meant to generate sparks.

  And yet perhaps sometimes there can be too many sparks. The Talmud at the end of Sanhedrin (99a) explains that even someone who challenges the divinity of any single verse in the Torah is denied a place in the world to come. “Yes,” said one of my students, “but what about the verse that calls my sexual practice an abomination?” I could identify with the impulse to deny certain verses; obviously there are parts of the Torah that are more problematic to a modern, egalitarian, pluralistic sensibility. Yet I see no reason to excise particular verses because midrash offers a ready alternative. Although there is a venerable midrashic tradition that must be taken into account, Torah is infinitely dense, and I have faith in our creative reading strategies. There is a fine line, I recognize, between extolling the creative possibilities of midrash and declaring that Torah can say anything we want it to. Even so, I believe too much in the former to allow the fear of the latter to hold me back.

  My students, though, were not satisfied. “But how can you believe in the Torah when it has been so clearly contradicted by modern science? Aren’t the miracles of the Bible scientifically impossible?” I told them that I did not experience this tension, because religion and science belong to two separate realms. We can look to science to answer how the world was created and to religion to answer why the world was created. Science can say if the universe is expanding or contracting, but only religion can inspire us to connect to other people in meaningful ways so that the universe does not seem so vast and lonely. I do not question my faith or subject it to rigorous scientific analysis because the proof is in the pudding, or in the Shabbat noodle kugel: my life is richer and more meaningful because I am in an ongoing relationship with God. I perform mitzvot—religious commandments—because they are a way of engaging in that relationship. A mitzvah is an opportunity to encounter the divine. Saying a blessing before eating is a way of involving God in the meal, and praying in the morning is a way of infusing the day with holiness. Whenever possible, I try not to pass up those opportunities. Granted, not every mitzvah offers an obvious path to God, but I have enough faith in the system as a whole to suspend my doubt about some of its particulars.

  Perhaps there is an element of blind faith involved, but I believe that the more I live my life in accordance with God’s commandments, the more I will feel God’s presence. Conversely, the more I doubt and question and run away from the tradition, the farther away God will seem. And so just as each morning I wake up and lift up the shades to let the sun stream in to my bedroom, I also try, each day, to open the gates of my heart and let God in.

  * * *

  The other lapse of faith identified in Sanhedrin as being so grave as to deny a person a place in the world to come is the sin of saying that there is no basis in the Torah for the notion of the revival of the dead. As the Talmud explains, this is a case of the punishment fitting the crime; surely any person who does not believe in an afterlife in which the dead will be revived should be denied a place in that afterlife.

  Although the Bible makes no mention of an afterlife, rabbinic tradition refers to an end of days in which the Messiah will come and the dead will be revived. Perhaps the revival of the dead is simply another way of saying that what we see is not all we get. Given all the injustice and oppression in our world—given all the bad things that happen to good people, to paraphrase the title of a book that was on my father’s bookshelf when we were growing up—I must believe that there is another realm in which the scales of justice are recalibrated. At the same time, this does not absolve me of t
he responsibility to pursue justice in this world. I think of the messianic era as more of a challenge to humanity to pursue our ideals than as a divine promise that these ideals will someday be realized. And it seems that the Talmud does not disagree, at least according to one rather fabulous story in tractate Sanhedrin (98a).

  The Talmud relates that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi once asked the prophet Elijah when the Messiah would arrive. “Ask him,” said Elijah, and he directed Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi to the gates of Rome, where the Messiah sat among the sick and wretched changing the bandages on their wounds. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi dutifully set off for Rome, where the Messiah told him that he would come “today.” Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi returned to Elijah and told him that the Messiah had promised to come that day, but had not held true to his promise. Elijah explained that the Messiah was in fact quoting a verse from Psalms: “Today, if you will heed His voice” (Psalms 95:7). That is, the Messiah will come the very same day that people do God’s work in the world. This work seems to involve sitting among the sick and wretched at the gates of the city and the margins of society, helping them find healing. The notion of the Messiah, then, is a metaphor for the redeemed world to which we aspire. The world will not be redeemed when the Messiah comes; rather, the Messiah will come when we redeem the world.

  The modern Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibovitz wrote that a false Messiah is any Messiah who has already come. The messianic era is an aspiration and an ideal, rather than a stage of history. And so I strive to do my small part to hasten the Messiah, a charge I associate with recognizing and respecting the common humanity of all my fellow human beings. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 37a) teaches that all coins are minted using a single stamp and come out identical to one another, but all human beings are created according to the same template as Adam, and yet no two people are identical. For this reason, says the Mishnah, anyone who destroys a single human life is regarded as if he has destroyed an entire world, and anyone who saves a human life is as if he has saved an entire world. By the same token, every human being can say, “The world was created for me.” Each person alone is sufficient grounds to create the world, and no one may say, as we learn later in Sanhedrin, “My blood is redder than yours” (74a).