Like Rebecca, I also had two babies struggling within me, though I identified more with Sarah’s delight at the news of her annunciation than with Rebecca’s dismay. When the ultrasound technician first informed me that I was having twins, I burst out in joyous and incredulous laughter. It seemed so wildly wonderful and impossible—I was hoping for a baby to grow inside me, and lo and behold there were two! Of course it was too early to tell anyone, and I wanted to wait a few hours even before telling Daniel, lest I disrupt his concentration at the library. But my excitement was so great that it was uncontainable. So I left the health clinic, boarded the bus, and announced to the bus driver that I was pregnant with twins. He looked at me as if I were crazy, and asked if I wanted to pay three fares.
* * *
The babies inside me soon made their presence known. From very early on I was able to detect two distinct patterns of fetal movement. The one on top gave sudden, jolting kicks, as if leveling a blow at an imaginary opponent; when this baby moved, my whole stomach protruded and the motion was visible even through my shirt. The baby on the bottom didn’t so much kick as undulate, fluttering around just above my pelvic bone in a gentle, rhythmic dance. I couldn’t help but ascribe personalities to them: The one on the bottom would be sedentary like Jacob, whom the Bible describes as a “simple man, dwelling in tents” (Genesis 25:27). The other would always be on the prowl, like Esau the hunter. And so I referred to the two fetuses as Jacob and Esau, addressing various passages from my learning to them.
As I paged my way through tractate Shabbat I noticed the babies kicking along as if wanting to participate in the Talmudic discussion, which was surprisingly relevant. The eighteenth chapter of tractate Shabbat deals with births that take place on Shabbat (is this kind of labor permissable?), and the nineteenth chapter extends this discussion to the question of circumcision on Shabbat (is it permissible to carry the knife to the ceremony?). The answer, in both cases, is yes. It is permissible, too, to violate Shabbat to satisfy any of the demands of a laboring woman, no matter how irrational they may be (128b). Even if she is blind but insists that someone light a candle for her, one should go ahead and do so. I was sure Matan would love that one.
I did not have many irrational demands during my pregnancy. I didn’t crave pickles or ice cream at midnight but continued to eat my regular vegetarian diet of bean and lentil soups, quinoa, bread, and outrageous quantities of dark chocolate—plus a few dates and nuts for extra calories. Nor was I plagued by varicose veins or stretch marks; my body continued to serve me well. I jogged into my sixth month and swam once I became too heavy to jog. In those last few months, people sometimes asked me why I didn’t take it easy and give my body a rest. “For me, resting is running,” I responded, hurrying along on my way. As my due date approached I felt productive, alive, and teeming with excited anticipation.
Like Matan, the twins arrived late. I carried to full term, determined not to let the doctors induce me. I was confident that the babies would come when they were ready, and hopefully when I was ready too—that is, once I had finished tractate Shabbat. I had five pages left of the tractate when I came to the rabbinic injunction to “repent one day before your death” (153a). The rabbis question how anyone can know when he will die, and conclude that he should repent every day as if it were his last. The day of death and the day of birth are similarly unpredictable, I mused. And it was during that very musing, while lying in bed with my Talmud open, that my water broke.
Daniel and I agreed that the most sensible thing to do would be to get a good night’s sleep before the contractions became more painful. He turned over, closed his eyes, and promptly drifted off. As soon as I heard his breathing slow, I stealthily turned on my bedside lamp and opened tractate Shabbat, which I was sure I could finish. On the penultimate page (156a), which I reached in that last hour before dawn just as the contractions grew more intense, the rabbis discuss a series of astrological predictions based on the relationship between the day a child is born and the shaping of that child’s character: “One who is born on Sunday will be strong; one who is born on Monday will be quarrelsome; one who is born on Tuesday will be rich and fornicating.…” Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi associates each of these destinies with the creation story. For instance, just as the waters were divided on the second day of creation, a baby born on this day will participate in divisive exchanges. On the other hand, if the twins were born on the Thursday that was then dawning outside my bedroom window, they would be committed to loving-kindness, because this was the day the fish were created. Rashi explains that fish do not work to find their own food but rely on the loving-kindness of God, who supplies them with all they need. It sounded sufficiently auspicious to me.
In the morning Daniel and I dropped Matan off at gan and then walked home slowly. “How are you feeling?” a neighbor asked as we passed by her on the sidewalk. At that point I was stopping every ten minutes to breathe my way through the contractions with my hands on my knees and my head hanging down between my legs. Luckily she caught me just after the worst had subsided. “I’m fine,” I assured her, forcing a smile, because those early stages of birth seemed too intimate to share. I was not in a rush to enter the medicalized environment of the hospital with its needles, monitors, and harsh fluorescent lighting, and I told Daniel that I preferred to proceed by candlelight at home. Daniel humored me for just a few more minutes, until it became clear that it was time to go.
As I both feared and anticipated, as soon as I got to the hospital an anesthesiologist came in to ply me with the promise of relief that an epidural would afford. I was adamant in my refusal; I had not taken any medicine when Matan was born, nor did I wish to do so now. I wanted to feel the labor in all its intensity, not to be deprived of any aspect of the experience. And so I turned down the anesthesiologist, an older man with a long gray beard and a black kippah. “You don’t understand,” he told me. “I give women epidurals as a way of helping out the Shechinah. The divine presence is in pain whenever a woman is in pain. I relieve the woman’s pain so as to relieve the Shechinah.” Oh dear, I rolled my eyes. So now the doctor was trying to win me over with religious precepts.
Not to be outdone, I thought back to a passage from tractate Shabbat (88a) in which the Talmud, amidst a long excursus on the giving of the Ten Commandments, quotes a biblical verse about the children of Israel’s preparations for this event: “And they took their places at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 19:17). The rabbis explain, “This teaches that the Holy One Blessed Be He forced the mountain over their heads like a bucket, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, well and good. And if not, this mountain shall be your grave.” I quoted this passage to the anesthesiologist, insisting that he was holding the epidural over my head like a bucket, threatening to drop it upon me. If I refused to accept, this would be my grave, I told him, punning on the Talmud’s use of the same word for “grave” and “womb.” Suffice it to say that he left me alone after that.
* * *
By the time I was ready to push the two babies out, the room resembled a cocktail party, with two midwives, two pediatricians, one obstetrician, and the defeated anesthesiologist milling around. I howled and screamed and shrieked and closed my eyes, too scared to look. A girl! She was a beautiful blonde with big blue eyes, and Daniel joined my parents, who had been waiting behind a curtain, to greet her as the pediatrician took her Apgar. But I was still kneeling over the bed, struggling to birth her sister. I tried to block out their voices as they fawned over the baby’s long fingers and her nails the size of sesame seeds. “Now, now, push!” yelled the doctor above the din. I felt the second baby’s head as it tore at my flesh like a searing hot iron, and then they were both in my arms, the blonde who had come out first and a delicate brunette, also a girl, also with bright blue eyes. Sisters! After God holds the mountain over the head of the children of Israel, the Talmud recounts that He made a condition with all of creation: if Israel accepts Torah, creation will exist; if not, the world
will be restored to a formless void (88a). I sat propped up in my hospital bed gazing from one girl to another, awed by creation.
* * *
In the days following the twins’ birth, Daniel and I devoted many conversations to the question of what to name our daughters. This was surprising given how much of my childhood I spent dreaming up names for my future children—though I’d come a long way from Azalea Rendezvous and Regatta Serenade. The only thing I knew for certain was that they would have to be names that we could pronounce. Daniel and I speak Hebrew with American accents, and our R’s—which sound nothing like the Hebrew letter reish—are most jarring. I didn’t want a situation in which I would yell at my teenager to go to her room, and she would respond insolently with, “You can’t even pronounce my name right.” We also wanted names that all our American relatives would be able to say without twisting their tongues, which meant I’d probably have to give up on the multisyllabic Hebrew names I liked—Chavatzelet, Shlomtzion, Achinoam.
As we leafed through the name dictionary, I thought of a midrash about Jacob’s struggle with the angel in the book of Genesis. Jacob asks the angel to identify himself, and the angel challenges, “Why do you ask my name?” (Genesis 32:30). The midrash on the book of Genesis (Genesis Rabbah 78:4) connects this verse to another encounter between a human and angel that appears in the book of Judges: Samson’s father Manoach asks the angel his wife has encountered for the angel’s name, and the angel responds, “Why do you ask my name? For it is a secret” (Judges 13:18). The midrash explains that angels’ names remain a secret because they change based on the particular mission the angel is sent to accomplish. I imagined that in choosing names for our children, Daniel and I were also in some sense charging them with unique missions in the world. I pictured thousands of winged angels hovering over us, each representing a different name and each beating its wings in hopeful anticipation that perhaps that angel might be the one whose mission would match the name we chose.
* * *
With this midrash in mind, we invoked very real angelic presences. We’d named Matan—whose full name is Matan Aharon—for each of our maternal grandfathers, Mordecai and Aharon. Matan is also the Hebrew word for “gift,” an expression of our overwhelming sense of gratitude to God for the miracle of birth. The twins, too, had beloved namesakes. We named Liav for Daniel’s father, since she was the first grandchild born after his death; the Hebrew word av, which is at the root of her name, means “father.” Tagel, meaning “she will rejoice,” comes from the same root word as Gilla, the name of my maternal grandmother. I hope that we succeed in instilling in them the values of their ancestors, and that they grow to love their names. If not, I will tell them they should be grateful that they are not Azalea and Regatta, and hope that they agree.
* * *
Even before we settled on names for our girls, I resumed daf yomi by cracking open tractate Eruvin, which deals with the boundaries within which a person may walk and transport objects on Shabbat. As I lay there nursing, I pretended that the hospital was a study house and I was not a postpartum mother but a disciple of the sages absorbed in the Talmud’s discussion of the four domains that relate to the laws of Shabbat: public (a thoroughfare where more than six hundred thousand people pass), private (an area four handbreadths by four handbreadths, marked off from the surrounding space by walls), a carmelit (a space neither public nor private), and a makom petur (a place exempt from the laws of carrying). The rabbis teach that it is forbidden to carry anything from one domain to another, and it is also forbidden to carry anything more than a minimal distance within the public domain.
I thought about the distinctions between these domains during the three days I spent in the maternity ward following the births. I was in a small room that I shared with two other women. Unlike me, they were ultra-Orthodox, each with at least five other kids at home. We were separated from one another by colorful curtains that hung from tracks on the ceiling. The tracks surrounded the perimeters of each of our beds, with room for just the bed, a small bassinet (or two), and a nightstand. When all the curtains were opened, as they were when the cleaner came to wash the floor on Friday morning, the illusion of three separate “private domains” was shattered, and it became clear just how near we all were to one another. Even with the curtains drawn, I could hear everything they said to their visitors, and they could hear me read aloud from the Talmud’s pages to my newborn daughters.
In those early pages of Eruvin, I was struck by the Talmud’s discussion of dyumdin, the double pillars that were placed around public wells in order to cordon them off into private domains in which it would be permissible to draw and carry water on Shabbat. At the beginning of the second chapter (18a), the Talmud records a discussion in which the rabbis try to determine the etymology of this word, which they posit comes from the conjoining of the Greek prefix dyu, meaning “two,” with the Hebrew word amud, meaning “pillar.” They then consider concepts that relate to the prefix dyu, including the two faces (dyu partsufin) of Adam. According to the midrash, Adam was created with one face in front and one face in back and was then split down the middle to become male and female. Each of our twin daughters lay in her own plastic hospital bassinet on wheels, with pink tags marked “Kurshan A” and “Kurshan B.” Depending on which way the girls were facing as they slept, I’d rearrange the bassinets periodically so that I could see the fronts of their heads. They were my double pillars, supporting my world.
* * *
For the first few weeks after I returned from the hospital, it was impossible to leave the house. I had nursed Matan for his first year of life, but nursing twins was something else entirely. The girls needed to eat every two hours, and each feeding lasted over an hour; so there was almost no time when we could be apart. Although my mother urged me to try to feed both girls at once, plying me with a fluffy twin nursing pillow, I refused. My excuse was that I wanted time alone with each of my daughters, but in truth, I wanted a free hand to hold a book. It was while breastfeeding that I encountered a midrash in tractate Eruvin (54b) on the verse, “A loving doe, a graceful mountain goat. Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; be infatuated with love of her always” (Proverbs 5:19). As they often do when confronted with the Bible’s erotic imagery, the rabbis interpret this verse as referring to Torah. Just as a doe has a narrow womb and is beloved unto its mate each time anew, so too are words of Torah equally special the first time they are studied and on every subsequent encounter. Moreover, the rabbis go on to explain, just as a breast is available with plentiful milk every time the baby wants to suckle, so too is Torah always available for those who want to savor its rich insights. I took comfort in the fact that my daughters not only learned Torah with their mother’s milk, but the milk they imbibed was in fact Torah.
Learning daf yomi while nursing served as a way to retain some semblance of my former pre-twin life in spite of all that had changed. I was on maternity leave from work, which meant that my professional life was on hold. I also couldn’t run or swim yet, since my body was still healing from the birth. And it was difficult to see friends, because I was nursing too frequently to leave the house. I felt like I was on leave not just from work but from so much of my life. And so I was fortunate to have daf yomi as a link back to the person I had been before my whole life contracted to the couch and bed.
Holed up at home, I thought of the story in tractate Shabbat about Shimon bar Yohai and his son, who retreat into a cave for twelve years to escape Roman persecution (Shabbat 33b). A miracle occurs, and a carob tree and a spring of water are created for them so that all their needs are provided for, and they do not have to worry about sustenance. They need only each other so that they can study Torah together, in much the same way as my daughters needed only to nurse and I needed only to feed them. It seemed miraculous to me that my body could satisfy all their nutritional needs; I was the carob tree and the spring and the study partner, all in one.
I did not bother to get dressed in those
early weeks, just as Bar Yohai and his son shed their clothes and sat covered in sand up to their necks, like talking heads. On those rare occasions when I left the house to take a walk with my double stroller, I felt blinded by the harsh light of day and bewildered that everyone else was rushing to and from work, going about their daily business. So too, when Bar Yohai and his son leave the cave after twelve years, they are taken aback by the sight of people planting and sowing and working the earth. “They are forsaking the eternal world of Torah for this transient world,” they mutter in disdain, their eyes burning up the world around them. A heavenly voice rebukes them for being so dismissive of the rest of humanity: “Have you come to destroy My world?” I confess that I muttered this same question quite a few times when one or another of the girls woke Daniel and me yet again in the middle of the night, preventing us from ever sleeping for more than a two-hour stretch: Dear babies, have you come to destroy our world?
But of course they could not destroy our world because they constituted it, which is a lesson that Bar Yohai learned as well. He and his son are commanded by the heavenly voice to return to their cave, and when they come out again twelve months later and survey the landscape, they conclude, “The world is enough with just me and you.” Sitting there on the couch with one baby on the breast and one leaning against me, I looked at them both in weary elation and reached the same conclusion: the world is enough with me and you.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 24