As residents of Abu Tor and of Jerusalem more broadly, Daniel and I wonder what sort of multicultural ethic we will bequeath to our children. Certainly they will know that we live among people of diverse faiths—they’ll see Arab kids in the local park and watch Christian nuns in starched white habits file by on their way to a local monastery. Daniel attends an Arabic language class every Friday, and at some point our kids will surely sit in on a class or two. But most of their substantive interactions, too, will probably be with Jews; the local public schools where they’ll study are entirely Jewish, since Jews and Arabs have separate school systems. That said, I’d like to think that my children will have a much broader concept of what it means to be Jewish than I did. As a child growing up on Long Island, my concept of a Jew was narrowly defined in terms of race and class. Most of the Jewish men I knew were doctors or lawyers, and all were white. But for our children, presumably, being Jewish will connote a much wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic possibilities: they will grow up alongside Jews who are Ethiopian, Persian, Moroccan, and French, and they will interact on a daily basis with Jews who operate cranes and sweep floors, as well as Jews who are policy makers, city officials, and soldiers. How different from my own childhood experiences.
There is so much I took for granted that my children may never enjoy. I developed from a young age a love of reading and learning that Israeli schools do not seem to inculcate. I worry that Daniel and I will have to fight an uphill battle to cultivate intellectual curiosity in this culture in which schools seem to be training grounds for the military, instilling discipline and conformity rather than creativity and passion. Even Israeli preschools seem more regimented than their American counterparts. There our children will learn to sit quietly in a classroom with thirty-five students and one teacher, and they will also be exposed to different children’s classics: they will sing “Ooga Ooga” rather than “Ring around the Rosie,” and they’ll read the Israeli children’s book about Pluto the dog from Kibbutz Megido rather than Lyle Lyle Crocodile from East 88th Street.
When they are just a few months old, we will take our children to the American consulate in Jerusalem to claim their American citizenship, but their time in America will be limited to annual summer visits with grandparents and cousins. Although we speak English at home and hope they will grow up reciting the British and American poetry we will teach them, they will likely not speak English with their own children. And so we are concerned for our children’s future, but we are even more concerned for the future of their children and their children’s children.
Many of my peers are also concerned for the future generations of their Israeli families, but I suspect their concerns are primarily existential: Will there still be an Israel? Will the occupation dismantle our society from within, or will our enemies destroy us from without? Having actively chosen to make my home in Israel, I share these fears, but I have philosophical concerns as well. So much of who I am and what matters to me has been informed by the education I have received—the novels I love and the poetry I memorize. This rich literary heritage is not just a conduit for deep values, but also the lens through which I view the world and the reason I write sonnets and limericks about pages of the Talmud. I wonder if the marginal notes in my volumes of Talmud will mean anything to my children and grandchildren, who will have such different literary associations.
For all that I want our children to receive the riches of our American heritage, when it comes to myself, I am forever striving to become more Israeli. I read the news in Hebrew, keep up with Israeli fiction, and am slowly developing a tougher, more assertive exterior. Still, I wonder to what extent I have succeeded in my efforts at integration. At this point I have spent twenty-six years in America and over a decade in Israel, and it is hard to know which part of my identity is more salient. I still keep up with The New Yorker, which my mother saves and brings each time she visits, and I am so regularly in touch with my family in Eastern Standard Time that my brain automatically calculates the seven-hour difference. I lived in Israel for three full years before I officially made aliyah, perhaps a testament to how much I still felt rooted in the diaspora.
If I have become Israeli, I am an Israeli with full consciousness of the diasporic road not taken. The Talmud in Horayot (11b) teaches that a ruler who sins must bring a he-goat sacrifice as atonement. Rebbi, the leader of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, asks if he himself must bring a he-goat—that is, he asks if he is considered the ruler of the Jews. Rav Hisda responds by putting him in his place: “Your rival is in Babylonia.” That is, although Rebbi is the leader of the Jewish community in Israel, there is a competing community in Babylonia with a leader of its own. For me, too, living in Israel has meant that I have a heightened consciousness of Jewish life in the diaspora and of all the cultural riches that I will have to make a conscious and deliberate effort to pass on.
Tractate Horayot (13b) recounts a struggle for power that takes place in the study house. Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Natan seek to oust Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, whom they regard as unfit to serve as patriarch, a title used for the leader of the Jewish community in the land of Israel. Plotting against him, they decide that they will catch him unprepared and quiz him on the obscure tractate Uktzin, which they are sure he does not know well. They explain that if there is any part of Torah that the patriarch does not know, then he is not worthy of his title. Rabbi Meir explains his reasoning by quoting from Psalms (106:2): “Who shall utter the mighty acts of God? Who can declare all his praises?” They read this verse as meaning that the only person fit to utter the mighty acts of God and serve as the leader of the Jewish community is someone who knows how to utter all His praises, that is, someone who knows all of God’s Torah—even Uktzin. Many Israeli students probably relate to Wordsworth as students of Talmud relate to Uktzin—something within the known universe but remote and recondite. I wonder what my children and grandchildren will know of my beloved Romantics. Will they be able to write an essay about memory and loss in “Tintern Abbey,” a poem that captures these experiences so deeply? And if not, what will be the “abundant recompense”?
Living in Israel means that Torah is a fundamental part of our identities and of our relationship with one another. And it is this legacy, above all, that we wish to bequeath to our children: Zion not as an experiment in Jewish self-government but as a rich and vibrant hub of Jewish learning. I would like our children to grow up in Jerusalem, where the billboards are plastered not only with movie and theater advertisements but also with announcements about rabbis teaching classes at various synagogues around town. The Talmud in Avodah Zarah contrasts theaters and circuses with Torah learning (18b), and I can only wish that our children, like their parents, will want to spend their leisure time engaged in study. I hope that living in the promised land and in the land where the Mishnaic sages established their study houses will deepen their encounters with Torah and Talmud. “A person does not learn Torah except from a place where his heart desires it,” the rabbis teach in Avodah Zarah (19a), and for both Daniel and me, Israel has been that place.
Israel—and Jerusalem in particular—enables us to remain true to the Jewish religious milieus in which we feel most comfortable. Daniel grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue where men and women sit separately and where certain ritual roles are limited only to men. In my father’s Conservative synagogue, in contrast, men and women sit side by side and participate equally in all parts of the service. If Daniel and I lived in suburban America, where there are rarely two synagogues within walking distance of each other, we probably would have had to choose one affiliation or the other. But here in Jerusalem, where Jewish life is so rich, the synagogue is really just a place to pray and not a Jewish center. Like several couples we know, we have each been able to remain active members of our own synagogues while still being part of the same social circle.
During the first year of our marriage we spoke about what our children’s Judaism would look like—would their
concept of synagogue be one in which men and women sit separately or together? Would they grow up with images of women wrapped in prayer shawls, or would this ritual garment be coded male for them? As a feminist, I considered it important that both my sons and my daughters be exposed to egalitarian prayer; I was as concerned about my daughters being excluded as I was about my sons taking part in that exclusion. And so we decided that we would take turns bringing our children to synagogue with us. The Talmud in Avodah Zarah (19a) cautions that “anyone who learns Torah from only one teacher will never see blessing.” We like the notion that our children will have multiple models of how to live a meaningful and committed Jewish spiritual life, and we feel fortunate that we live in a city that has made this possible.
By raising our children in Israel we hope that they will internalize the rhythm of Jewish life—that they will watch the city slow each week to the pace of Shabbat and that they will know which holiday is approaching based on the storefront displays: jelly donuts in the bakeries before Chanukah; costumes in the toy stores during the month before Purim; matzah and hard, stale Pesach cookies lining the supermarket aisles as spring sets in. Even if they do not go to a religious preschool, they will mold candelabras out of clay for Chanukah; they will reenact the story of the ten plagues before Pesach; and they will roast potatoes over bonfires for Lag Ba’Omer, a day celebrating the spiritual light of the Talmudic sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. In Israel these are not just Jewish holidays but also part of the national culture. I am grateful that for our children, living Jewishly will be as natural as the air they breathe (including those smoky Lag Ba’Omer bonfires), permeating every fiber of their being.
We hope, too, that by growing up in Israel, our children will develop a sense of collective responsibility for the Jewish people at large and for Israeli society in particular. The Talmud in Horayot (12b) mentions the anointed priest in charge of encouraging the Jewish soldiers on the eve of battle. Our children, if they are of sound body and mind, will be expected to join the army or take part in the national service corps. If nothing else, these experiences should give them a strong stake in the welfare of the State of Israel. We hope our children will discover the social and political issues about which they are passionate and will take part in the relevant public discourse—each in their own way working to create a more just and ethical Jewish society.
In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge addresses his infant son slumbering at his side, telling him that he will grow up in a very different environment from his father’s: “Thou shalt learn far other lore / And in far other scenes!” Whereas Coleridge grew up “in the great city … and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars,” he rears his son in the countryside, “by lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds.”1 The poet celebrates his ability to bequeath a utopian childhood to his son, who will never know the drudgery of dark city schoolrooms with their stern preceptors. Our children, too, will grow up in a very different environment from the one in which their American-born parents were reared. But perhaps one day it will be not we who feel the need to bequeath so much of our literary and cultural heritage to our children, but our children who will teach us about the “far other lore” of the society in which they were born and raised. Most of our closest friends here in Israel are American immigrants like ourselves, and there are many aspects of the local culture that remain a mystery to us. Perhaps through our children we will learn the latest Hebrew slang popular among their peers or finally understand the various units of the Israeli army and what they do.
Of course, I cannot know where our children will ultimately choose to build their own lives and whether it is the questions of Avodah Zarah or Horayot—of diaspora or national sovereignty—that will speak to them more deeply. At the end of “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge blesses his son: “Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, whether the summer clothe the general earth with greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing.…” I hope that Daniel and I will merit to raise children who experience both the richness of Judaism and the value of living in a multiethnic society regardless of where they make their homes. Whether it is the hot Jerusalem sun that beats down on them or the New England redbreast that sings in their backyard, may the seasons of their lives always be full of sweetness.
PART IV
The Order of Holiness
ZEVAHIM / MENAHOT / HULLIN
Holy Eating
If there was any quality that Daniel and I were certain we did not want to pass on to our children, it was my vegetarianism. I did not think of myself as a vegetarian until I met Daniel and joined his family at a Shabbat table laden with roast beef, rack of lamb, and sautéed duck, none of which I could identify. His mother noticed that I filled my plate with rice and broccoli and asked if I was vegetarian. “I guess so,” I told her, wondering about it myself. I did not avoid meat as a matter of identity or principle, but as a general aesthetic preference: why pick the flesh off the wing of a dead bird when there was fresh quinoa salad on the table? I became a full-fledged vegetarian only a year later, after learning Seder Kodshim, the order of the Talmud that deals primarily with sacrifice and ritual slaughter.
Sacrificial worship ceased to be an element of Jewish religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century, but this did not prevent the rabbis of the Talmud from expounding at great length on the details of the sacrificial rites—both as a way of commemorating the practice and as an expression of longing for a redeemed world in which sacrifice would be restored to Zion. The first tractate of Seder Kodshim, Zevahim, is essentially a giant barbecue. We learn about which animals may be burnt on the altar and what happens if they are left to burn for too long or sacrificed with improper intentions or accidentally mixed with other sacrificial offerings. The Talmud enumerates four primary sacrificial rites: slaughtering the animal, receiving its blood in a basin, carrying the animal to the altar, and sprinkling the blood on the cover of the ark. Sacrifice was such a bloody business that there were holes in the floor of the Temple intended for draining the excess blood, which would flow into the Kidron river valley (Zevahim 35a). And the pile of ashes from a day’s worth of sacrifices grew so high that it had to be cleared off first thing every morning.
I learned about how the priest would kill sacrificial birds by a process known as melika, slicing the neck with his nail while taking care not to sever it completely (Zevahim 64b). That was when I decided that I could no longer eat my mother’s chicken soup, my last carnivorous vestige, which I’d previously permitted myself because it didn’t look anything like flesh and—well—because it was delicious, and it made my mother happy. I realized that chicken soup, too, was once a thing with feathers. In consciously renouncing flesh-eating I was perhaps bringing myself back to that antediluvian stage before God permitted Noah to eat meat (Genesis 9:3), that idyllic era in which the trees of the garden provided for all of humanity’s needs. At the very least I was returning to the period of the Israelites’ desert wanderings, when, according to Rabbi Yishmael, they were forbidden to slaughter “lustful meat,” that is, meat that they desired to eat for their own nourishment and pleasure, without any sacrificial component. Rabbi Akiva disagrees, arguing that although the Israelites had not yet been given the laws of ritual slaughter, they were permitted to stab animals with a knife—a process known as nehira—and consume the flesh (Hullin 17a). I was prepared to engage neither in slaughtering nor in stabbing, and I decided that I would simply abstain from meat altogether.
My aversion to meat-eating has nothing to do with any affinity for animals. I live in fear of the cats that leap from the municipal garbage bins (known as “frogs” in Hebrew because they are big and green) when I try to throw out the trash. But as I made my way through Seder Kodshim, I was struck that alongside countless passages about bloody dead animals and their entrails, the Talmud also contains several stories and legends about animals who are very much alive, many of them so outlandish that later ge
nerations of scholars struggled with whether to dismiss these tales as fanciful or to regard them as philosophical allegory, since they could not possibly be taken at face value. There is the discussion at the end of tractate Zevahim (113b) about how the mythical re’em—a kind of unicorn—survived the flood; surely it could not fit in Noah’s ark, since, as Rabba bar bar Hana testified, “I once saw a young unicorn and it was as big as Mount Tabor!” The rabbis suggest that perhaps Noah inserted the tip of its nose into the ark. But then wouldn’t the waters of the flood plunge the unicorn up and down, another rabbi asks? No, reassures Reish Lakish, they tied its horn to the ark and thus it was spared from drowning. But weren’t the waters of the flood boiling as punishment for the hot passion with which people sinned? Yes, but the waters adjacent to the ark were cooled so that the unicorn could survive, just as the waters of the ocean depths remained cool for the fish. And thus the rabbis manage to spare the unicorn not just from the flood but also from their own barrage of Talmudic questioning.
Another richly imagined animal tale is that of the emperor and the lion (Hullin 59b). The Talmud contains several stories in which the Roman emperor challenges one of the sages with a theological question, presumably playing out a rabbinic fantasy about being on intimate terms with the highest echelons of power. In this case, the emperor asks Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania about a biblical verse (Amos 3:8) that compares God to a roaring lion. The emperor asks how God can be so great if He is likened to a lion; after all, any good horseman can kill a lion. Rabbi Yehoshua responds that God is not likened to an ordinary lion, but to a special kind of lion from Bei Ilai. “Show him to me,” demands the emperor, and Rabbi Yehoshua warns him that he will not be able to behold this creature. But the emperor insists, and so Rabbi Yehoshua appeals to God in prayer and the lion sets out. When it is still quite a distance away, it roars. Immediately all the pregnant women miscarry and the walls of Rome collapse. When it comes a little closer, it roars again and the teeth fall out of the mouth of every man, including the emperor himself. Like Pharaoh begging Moses to stop the plagues, or like the Israelites beseeching Moses to shield them from God’s voice at Sinai, the emperor pleads with Rabbi Yehoshua to pray that the lion return to its place. And so it does.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 19