It is not by chance that these issues arise in tractate Sanhedrin, with its discussion of when capital punishment is warranted. According to the rabbis, respect for the inalienable human dignity endowed by the divine image in which all humans are created does not invalidate the justness of capital punishment. Trying to balance the two values, the rabbis go to great lengths to preserve the integrity of the human body even while administering capital punishment. The punishment of burning, for instance, involves pouring hot lead down the throat of the condemned while leaving the exterior of the body intact.
When I think about the implications of being created in the image of God, I am reminded of the class pictures we used to take in elementary school every year. The photographer first took a picture of the entire class, and then each student was called in for an individual portrait. Before taking the individual shot, the photographer directed his assistant to try out various backgrounds to achieve the ideal contrast. First they hung up a white curtain behind me, but it made me look too pale. Next they tried red, but that clashed with my pink dress. Then they tried a light blue, and the photographer decided that yes, this was the best background for me. I came to realize that not everyone looks beautiful against every background, and not everyone shines in every context. But each person contains a spark of the divine, and so I retain the faith that for each person there is a context in which he would stand out. Even if I never see that person in that context, I try to treat him with respect and dignity because I am confident that such a context exists. My belief in the divine spark in every human being is a direct corollary of my belief in God, and it is just as fundamental to my faith.
The challenge of constantly bearing in mind the dignity and integrity of a fellow human being is, in a sense, the essence of marriage. I used to think of marriage as a goal to be attained, but now I recognize that the ideal marriage, like Leibovitz’s Messiah, is a lifelong aspiration. This is certainly the case for Daniel and me. Our rapturous first year together was followed by significant challenges, but I remain grateful to God for the opportunity to build my life with such a wonderful human being. Indeed, the mere fact that we have merited to spend our life together seems proof of divine providence.
Ultimately I believe in God because I cannot live my life any other way. True, I can’t prove the existence of God in a way that would satisfy all my teenage summer students. Likewise, I cannot explain why following each and every commandment has the effect of making me a better person and the world a better place. But the totality of living a life infused with reverence for God and the study of God’s Torah has enriched me in ways I can only begin to fathom, and in life’s most joyous and wondrous moments it seems impossible to conceive of a world without divinity. I do not know if this is sufficient to merit me a place in the world to come, but it is certainly sufficient to inspire me each day anew to make a place for God in this world.
MAKKOT / SHEVUOT
Sarah Ivreinu
Tractates Makkot and Shevuot continue Sanhedrin’s discussion of courtroom procedure, focusing specifically on the testimony of witnesses and the punishment for capital crimes. At the end of tractate Makkot (24b) the Talmud describes an arresting scene in which four rabbis are ascending to Jerusalem in the wake of the Temple’s destruction. When they arrive at Mt. Scopus, which overlooks the city, they rip their clothes in mourning. Then, when they advance to the Temple Mount, they espy a fox scampering out of the Holy of Holies. Three of the rabbis begin to cry, but Rabbi Akiva instead bursts out in laughter. “Why are you laughing?” the other three ask him. “Why are you crying?” Rabbi Akiva responds.
The three rabbis explain the obvious reason for their tears—the holy site of connection between God and Israel has been ravaged. Rabbi Akiva, in turn, explains that he is laughing because he is reminded of a verse from Isaiah (8:2) in which the prophet calls upon two witnesses, Uriah and Zechariah. Uriah, who lived during the First Temple period, offered a prophecy of doom and destruction: “Zion shall be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins” (Micah 3:12). Zechariah, in contrast, offered a prophecy of hope: “There shall yet be old men and women in the squares of Jerusalem, each with a staff in his hand because of great age. And the streets of the city shall be crowded with boys and girls playing” (Zechariah 8:4). According to Rabbi Akiva, Isaiah’s conjoining of the prophecies of Uriah and Zechariah suggests that the latter is dependent on the former: until Zion is plowed, Jerusalem cannot experience a renaissance. And so now that Uriah’s prophecy of doom has been fulfilled, Rabbi Akiva is confident that Zechariah’s prophecy of hope will come true as well.
Rabbi Akiva’s optimism reminds me of my dear friend Sarah Ivreinu, “Sarah our blind one,” as I came to refer to her. I met Sarah while volunteering for a charitable organization that matches young visitors with the elderly and homebound. Sarah, in point of fact, is neither. In spite of her blindness, she maintains quite an active lifestyle: she volunteers as a receptionist in an office in town, attends regular classes and lectures, and shops every Thursday with a friend in the shuk, where I would occasionally run into her.
For about four years—from shortly after my divorce until a year after our son was born—I visited with Sarah every Wednesday afternoon, rain or shine. We met on the sidewalk outside her apartment in a run-down neighborhood at the edge of the city. From there we set off on a walk together through the local streets, ending up at the same shady green bench (although she is blind, she always insisted that we sit only on green benches) where we rested our legs before I accompanied her back home again, chatting all the while. Sarah, who came to Israel from Persia as a young child, is from a different world than I—she is deeply religious (there are days when I look at what I am not wearing and thank my lucky stars that she can’t see me), extremely superstitious, terrified of anyone who is not Jewish, and utterly unaware of many of the pleasures I take for granted. I once brought her Victoria’s Secret scented body lotion as a present from America, and when I helped her rub it on her hands she looked at me as if she had died and gone to heaven. Another day, when it was too rainy to walk, I took her out for coffee at her local pizza parlor, and she played with the plastic spoon that came with her coffee and asked me if I thought anyone would mind if she kept it as a souvenir.
Sarah was my therapist during those four years, though I’m not even sure she knows what a therapist is. In the wake of my divorce, friends and family members encouraged me to seek professional help, but I was resistant. I am dubious of the efficacy of therapy for me. It seems to entail a pledge of honesty that I have a hard time keeping. I am, by nature, a storyteller; when I chronicle the past I inevitably craft it. And so I don’t think I could commit to speaking truthfully in a therapeutic context—let alone in a courtroom.
The Talmud in Shevuot explains that the courts go according to what a witness says rather than what a witness means to say. For instance, the rabbis consider the case of a witness who swears to have seen a “camel flying through the air.” Ravina suggests that perhaps this witness saw a large bird, and called it a camel. The other rabbis respond that we follow a person’s “mouth,” not his “mind” (29a). But what about therapy, where the mouth is supposed to be a means of giving voice to the contents of the mind? I worried about all of the uncertainty that therapy seems to entail. A therapist is not like an eye doctor who gives a vision test and a prescription for glasses; with therapy, the test questions are ongoing, the prescriptions are vague, and often the world looks even blurrier as time goes on.
The Talmud then considers the question of whether women may serve as witnesses (30a), resolving that they may not. The Rabbis invoke a verse from Psalms (45:14): “The honor of a king’s daughter is within”; so too should all women confine themselves as much as possible to private spaces. But Sarah bore witness to everything that went on in my life, and she could see even what I could not. She knew about the office politics in our literary agency, the dynamics of my family, the men I had pursued, and those wh
o had pursued me. She was particularly helpful when it came to strategies for getting out of awkward situations, like the time when Omri and Daniel—who knew each other by sight but had never had a proper conversation—audited the same university seminar. I told Sarah about the class and asked her what to do. “Tell Daniel to be a mensch and introduce himself,” Sarah advised wisely. Although Jerusalem is a big city, most of the people I know travel in similar circles, and I have Sarah to thank for setting the stage for many more amicable encounters.
The Talmud is no stranger to awkward situations. One of my favorites appears in tractate Shevuot (30b), where Rav Huna’s widow is summoned to appear in court before Rav Nahman. Rav Nahman is in a bind; he can’t figure out whether he should stand before the woman or not. If he stands, it may appear as if he is partial to her case. But if he doesn’t stand, it will appear as if he is failing to show respect to scholars of Torah, since “the wife of a scholar is treated like a scholar.” He ponders the matter and finally comes up with a creative solution. He asks his attendant to throw a duck across the courtroom so that it flies in his direction. This way, he will jump up when he sees the duck and will therefore end up standing before Rav Huna’s widow without appearing to favor her. Sarah, too, came up with many such “flying ducks,” saving me—and Daniel—from potentially uncomfortable encounters.
There was nothing I could not tell Sarah Ivreinu—or almost nothing. I once tried to explain (proceeding cautiously so as to test the waters) that I had “visited” a synagogue in which men and women sat side by side. Judging from her horrified reaction, it was clear that I could never tell her the truth—that I read Torah in a fully egalitarian minyan every Shabbat morning. By the same token, I sometimes had to take her advice with a grain of salt (“Clean his floor and cook him dinner every night—and don’t let him touch you until he marries you!”). She encouraged me to pray, and she reminded me each week that I was in her prayers. I was reassured because I had no doubt that if anything had the power to move the heavens, it was the intensity of her fervor.
I’ve spent my life learning from books, but my visits with Sarah taught me how much I can learn from other people. This is a message of tractate Makkot as well. “How foolish people are,” Rava exclaims. “They rise before a Torah scroll, but don’t rise before a great man” (22b). There were plenty of reasons to rise before Sarah—because she was wise, and upbeat, and unflappable. Like Rabbi Akiva on the Temple Mount, she taught me to find blessing in the most unlikely situations. One day we were walking down the street and a friend stopped to greet her. Sarah turned to me and said, “Did you see that? People can walk right by me without my noticing, because I can’t see them. When they stop to say hi, it’s a double kindness.” Another day she told me that she had to give thanks to God because her bus stop had been returned to its previous location. The stop had been just outside her home for years, and she’d taught herself to walk the twenty-one steps from her apartment to the curb so that she’d be able to catch the bus to work each morning. But when the stop was moved three blocks away, she could no longer find her way. Her neighbors rallied behind her, petitioning the municipality and carrying posters with her photograph, making her into something of a local celebrity. The stop was restored, and she was able to go back to her normal schedule. For Sarah this was nothing short of miraculous.
Sarah was with me through my divorce from Paul and my marriage to Daniel—she witnessed the devastation of Uriah’s prophecy and the redemption of Zechariah’s. She afforded me a hopeful perspective in the moments when I most needed it, and she taught me to appreciate and celebrate life’s miracles. During our first year of marriage Daniel and I often visited her together, each of us holding on to one of her arms as we walked through the streets of Jerusalem. We watched old men and women lean on their canes, the streets crowded with boys and girls playing together as if in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy. Zechariah goes on to ask in the name of God, “Though it will seem impossible to the remnant of this people in those days, shall it also be impossible to Me?” (8:6). As the three of us settled outside on one of the green benches where she and I had sat so many times before, I marveled that it had not been impossible after all.
AVODAH ZARAH / HORAYOT
Frost at Midnight
After we got married, Daniel and I moved to Abu Tor, a neighborhood not far from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, sacred to three faiths. We would open our windows on summer evenings to hear the chiming of the bells from the Church of the Dormition, the wail of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer, and the crooning voice of a guitar-strumming Israeli pop singer setting ancient Hebrew psalms to modern tempos at a concert in the outdoor amphitheater at Sultan’s Pool, just west of Mount Zion. As we sat by our window taking in this polyphonic symphony, we could not help but compare our current milieu to the American melting pot in which we were both raised. We wondered about how different our children’s experiences would be from our own, a discussion informed by our study of tractates Avodah Zarah and Horayot.
Avodah Zarah means “strange worship,” referring to non-Jewish practices. The tractate deals with the issues that arise when Jews live among and interact with non-Jews. Though the rabbis were writing about Jews living among Romans in the land of Israel and among Persians in Sasanian Babylonia, the questions they ask seemed to pertain just as well to my childhood in late-twentieth-century America, such as: may a Jew get a haircut from a non-Jewish barber (29a), or eat in a restaurant owned by non-Jews (37b), or take advantage of sales during the holiday season (13a)? I was surprised to discover how many aspects common to the minority experience rendered this tractate relevant to the Jewish diaspora today.
The first words of Avodah Zarah are lifnei eideihem, “before their holidays,” referring to the weeks leading up to the non-Jewish holiday season, a phrase that makes me think of the candy canes and “Jingle Bells” ubiquitous during my childhood winters. My parents took pains to explain to me that candy corn is delicious and fir trees are pretty but Halloween and Christmas are “not ours.” Our world was starkly divided into Jews and everyone else: the Jews were all family members and friends in school, synagogue, and summer camp; the non-Jews included the custodian who locked the synagogue doors, the barber who cut my hair, and the sanitation workers who cleaned the streets. Though we had non-Jewish neighbors, we lived in sprawling suburbia and did not know them well; most people we knew by name were Jewish.
As I got older, I became increasingly conscious of being a minority. After nine years in a Jewish day school, I attended a public high school where I was the only observant Jew. There I was an emissary of Jewish religion and culture to my Hispanic, African American, Irish Catholic, and white Protestant classmates and teachers. I could not act in any of the school plays since they were all performed on Friday nights and Saturdays, nor could I run in any Saturday track-and-field meets. I brought my own food for lunch every day and ate sequestered away in a corner of the library, since I found the smell of the cafeteria so noxious. (At the time I thought it was the odor of non-kosher meat that I couldn’t stomach, but later I realized that I simply can’t abide cafeteria food.) When I missed school for the Jewish holidays, I would ask my friend Erin to tell the various teachers why I was out: “Ilana is absent for Shoo—I mean, Shavoo—I forget. Another holiday.” My classmates learned about Judaism from me, and I benefited from my exposure to the ethos and practice of American multiculturalism, which taught me to tolerate and appreciate difference without sacrificing my own particularity.
Now that we make our home in Israel, Daniel and I think more about the questions discussed in Horayot, the Talmudic tractate that follows Avodah Zarah. Horayot is about a world in which Jews have sovereignty, taking their instructions from Jewish leaders and Jewish courts. In Horayot the sages consider issues such as: What if the rabbinic authorities permit a woman whose husband has disappeared to remarry, and then her husband is discovered to be alive after all (2a)? What happens when the rabbinic court
changes its ruling on how the sabbatical year is observed (4b)? What is the protocol when the leader known as the nasi (the same title is used for the president of Israel today) is found to have committed a sin (10a)? These questions make sense in the modern State of Israel, where Jews are the majority culture in spite of being a minority in the broader context of the Middle East.
Abu Tor, where we still live, is technically a “mixed neighborhood,” but it is in fact quite segregated—all of our immediate neighbors are Jewish, and there are no Arabs at all on our side of the hill. Daniel and I have little substantive engagement with Arabs, but as we go about our daily routine, we have much casual contact: Arabs deliver our mail, stock our food in the supermarket, fill our prescriptions at the pharmacy, and make our coffee at the local cafe. In each of these encounters, at most a few words are exchanged. Though Arabs and Jews see and affect one another regularly, the two populations lead parallel lives, and real relationships are regrettably rare. As residents of the Jewish state and as the national minority, Israeli Arabs know more about our culture than we do about theirs; certainly there are more Arabs who speak Hebrew than Jews who speak Arabic. But we lack more than just a common language. Arabs and Jews have different news media, different calendars, and different days of rest—their Friday is our Saturday. I imagine that few Arabs have any idea what the Talmud is, just as I have no real notion of what Hadith are. And if there is an equivalent of daf yomi for students of the Quran, I have never heard of it.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 18