* * *
By the time the girls were a few weeks old we were up to the end of Exodus in the Torah reading cycle, with its elaborate descriptions of the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that traveled with the Israelites through the desert. In the midst of the Torah’s detailed description of the building of the mishkan, Moses reiterates the commandment to keep Shabbat. This has led generations of commentators to speculate on the relationship between the mishkan and Shabbat. As we learn from tractate Shabbat (74a), the list of the thirty-nine labors that are prohibited on Shabbat is derived from the various forms of work that were undertaken to build the mishkan. In some sense, then, Shabbat is the opposite of the mishkan. The mishkan is about human labor, construction, and creativity, or “thoughtful work,” as the Torah describes it at the end of Exodus. Shabbat, in contrast, is about resting and desisting from creative labor. In other words, the mishkan represents the modality of building, whereas Shabbat represents the modality of being.
Following the birth of the twins, I spent much more time “being” than “building.” Most days I did not turn on the computer, or cook, or attempt to do much of anything but nurse, change diapers, and nurse some more—and yet somehow, by the end of the day I was always exhausted. I yearned to return to the mishkan modality of dressing for work, leaving the house, and feeling like a productive member of society. This was not a new feeling. I remembered it from Matan’s early weeks of life, and I suppose it is familiar to all working women who become mothers—life suddenly stops, or veers off course, and it is hard not to feel completely derailed.
After a few months, though, our family got back on track. The Talmud speaks of the shofar blasts that were sounded to announce the start of Shabbat (Shabbat 35b). The contemporary equivalent is the Shabbat siren, which is sounded all over Jerusalem when it is time to light candles. Nowadays when the siren goes off on Friday afternoons we carry the twins over to the window to light candles, and Matan trails behind with his drill or his electric mixer or whatever electrical appliance he is obsessed with that week. “Put that away, it’s muktzeh,” we tell him, and at last he understands what that means. The girls, who go for increasingly longer stretches without nursing, will sit in their high chairs and feed themselves bite-sized pieces of chicken as Daniel and I chant Kabbalat Shabbat at the table. I think about how the mishkan and Shabbat may be opposite modalities, but not always. In our very sitting there together, we are building a family.
PESACHIM
Take Two
Part of the experience of learning daf yomi is the dissonance between the subject of the tractate under study and the period it coincides with in the Jewish calendar. I felt this most acutely when I began learning tractate Pesachim at the start of summer and continued all the way through the high holiday season in September, a long time away from Passover. When summer began I learned about how to search the house for hametz, the unleavened products forbidden on the holiday, and when to burn any remaining traces. By July I was deep into a discussion about when and to what extent it is permissible to perform work on the day before Pesach. And with the start of the Hebrew month of Elul at the beginning of August, when it is traditional to begin atoning in advance of Yom Kippur, I was instead immersed in the laws of the Paschal sacrifice: when is it slaughtered, how is it roasted, who eats it, and with whom.
Much of the second half of tractate Pesachim could just as easily have been included in Seder Kodshim, the order of the Talmud that deals with sacrificial worship. Pesachim had me splattered with blood and knee-deep in roasted entrails and animal fat that must be consumed immediately and may not be left over until dawn, according to biblical law. I watched by the Temple outskirts as representatives of all of Israel arrive in three shifts to slaughter the Pesach sacrifice on behalf of larger groups, who then eat the meat together. As each shift enters, the doors of the Temple courtyard are closed and the shofar blasts are sounded. The priests stand in rows carrying gold and silver bowls for collecting the sacrificial blood, which they then sprinkle on the altar as the Israelites sing the psalms of Hallel. They then hang the sacrificial meat on iron hooks and flay it to prepare for the roasting. I thought of my early morning runs through the shuk, when I sprinted past the narrow alleyways at 7:00 a.m. just when the meat trucks were arriving and opening their back doors to reveal whole animal carcasses dangling from hooks, the blood dripping onto the ground as strapping young men with impressive muscles removed the fresh meat to deliver to the butcher stalls for salting and chopping.
I spent most of that summer ensconced in the Temple, witnessing each stage of the preparation of the Pesach sacrifice. But then again, this is not unlike how I usually spent the month of Elul. For most of my adult life, I led the Musaf service on Yom Kippur in various egalitarian minyanim on both sides of the ocean. To prepare myself spiritually and liturgically, I listened over and over again to recordings of the service on my headphones while going about my daily business. My favorite part of the high holiday prayers has always been the Avodah, the ritual reenactment of the high priest’s activities on Yom Kippur. It is the most vivid, embodied aspect of the Yom Kippur service, in which the synagogue becomes the metaphorical equivalent of the Temple and the prayer leader is analogized to the high priest who designates two goats: one as a scapegoat that is knocked off a cliff, symbolically bearing the people’s sins, and one as a sacrificial offering whose blood is sprinkled in the Holy of Holies. The Avodah ends on an exultant note, with the singing of a rousing liturgical poem about the radiance of the high priest’s face when he emerges unscathed from the Holy of Holies.
But when I learned tractate Pesachim, I did not lead any high holiday services. The twins were seven months old and Matan was a rambunctious toddler, and it was hard enough for Daniel and me to take turns just showing up to synagogue, let alone trying to inspire a congregation. For the first time in over a decade, I did not spend Elul listening to recordings of the Yom Kippur prayers. Without the cries of “Who shall live and who shall die” accompanying me as I went about my daily chores, I felt bereft of my spiritual preparation for the high holidays. I could sooner imagine searching my house for hametz than searching my heart for misdeeds that needed to be righted.
I was lamenting this sorry state of affairs one morning while emptying the dishwasher. I had risen at 5:00 a.m., eager to steal the only quiet moments of the day before the kids awoke. I stood there putting away the previous day’s dishes while listening to my daf yomi podcast. The daf mentioned trumat hadeshen, the first ritual activity performed in the Temple every morning, which involved clearing away the ashes from the previous day’s sacrifices. Trumat hadeshen is not unlike emptying the dishwasher, a ritual that links the day that has passed to the day that is dawning. While trying not to let the glasses clink against one another, I peered out our kitchen window to watch the sun paint the sky above our view of the Old City where the Temple once stood. I froze the breast milk I had pumped the previous day and arranged Matan’s place setting with his map-of-the-world placemat and his monkey sippy cup. These were activities I performed every morning; they are “love’s austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden put it,1 and they are, in a sense, my version of the korban tamid, the daily sacrifice offered every morning in the Temple. Yom Kippur would soon be upon us, but even before that, the kids were bound to stir. So while the gates of prayer were still open, I offered mine: May the high holidays herald a year that is as sweet as the taste of mother’s milk on a baby’s tongue, and as full of blessing and promise as every new day that dawns.
* * *
The fourth chapter of tractate Pesachim considers the matter of local custom, specifically with regard to the question of working on the day before Passover. In places where it is customary to work on this day, work is permitted. In places where it is not, work is forbidden. But what if a person travels from one place to the other? The rabbis teach that such an individual must adopt the stringencies of the place he has left, and the stringencies of the place where he
has arrived. If in either place they do not work on the day before Passover, then he must take the day off (50a).
The Talmud’s discussion reflects an awareness that customs vary with geography, and a person who moves to a new place must take the time to get to know the customs of the new community. I experienced this lesson firsthand on Shavuot that year, when we received instructions that Matan, age two, was to come to gan dressed in white, bearing a basket of fruit for the holiday. The gan used the biblical word for basket, tenne, per Moses’s instructions to the Jewish people to bring a basket of first fruits to God: “You shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, put it in a basket [tenne], and go to the place where the Lord your God will choose to establish His name” (Deuteronomy 26:2). The only basket we had at home was the large brown straw basket we’d used to carry our newborn Matan during his bris (circumcision) ceremony, so we threw in a few peaches and nectarines, dressed Matan in a white T-shirt and beige shorts, and sent him off to gan, relieved that we had remembered to follow the special instructions for that day. Little did we know.
We realized our mistake even before we entered the building. Outside the gates leading into the playground we watched as the other toddlers filed out of their parents’ cars decked out in their Shabbat finery: white lacey dresses for the girls, and white sailor suits (or at least crisp button-down shirts) for the boys. It seemed they were all carrying identical white wicker baskets, about a fifth the size of the monstrosity that poor Matan could barely balance in his tiny arms. Their baskets were decorated in flowers and leaves; Matan’s was utterly bare. Daniel and I looked at each other and grimaced, cognizant, yet again, of how difficult it is to be new immigrants to the Jewish homeland, whose customs and mores seem both deeply familiar and incomprehensibly foreign.
As I left the gan, my head hung in embarrassment for Matan and for myself, I was reminded of one of my favorite children’s picture books, Molly’s Pilgrim. Molly is a Russian immigrant to the Lower East Side. Just before Thanksgiving, her teacher assigns all the students to make a pilgrim doll and bring it to school. When Molly’s mother learns the definition of a pilgrim—a new immigrant who came to America for religious freedom—she creates Molly’s pilgrim in her own image, a babushka-clad lady in a long skirt. The other children tease Molly because her pilgrim looks nothing like theirs, but the kind and sympathetic teacher assures Molly that “it takes all kinds of pilgrims to make a Thanksgiving.” And indeed, this is essentially what Matan’s teacher told me at pickup that afternoon, when I apologized that we had sent Matan in the wrong clothes, bearing the wrong basket.
Shavuot is a pilgrimage festival, one of the three holidays when Jews are required to come to the land of Israel. Like Thanksgiving, which coincided with the American pilgrims’ first successful harvest, it too is a harvest festival and a time of thanksgiving, in which we offer our first fruits in gratitude to God. This holiday had particular poignancy for us as immigrants to the State of Israel; we were pilgrims, and Matan was our first fruit. Perhaps it is somewhat appropriate, then, that the basket he paraded across the stage at gan during the Shavuot celebration was the basket we used to carry our firstborn at his bris. Still, I could only hope that by the time our second and third fruits reached his age, we’d be better acquainted with the local customs.
* * *
For the most part Matan was fine in gan, so long as we remembered to send him with his beloved stuffed Elephant, which he slept with every night and was inseparable from throughout the day. But then one morning the inevitable happened: we lost Elephant. It was at the beginning of the school year, and Matan could not get through the day without his pachyderm. Initially panicked, we searched our home, the gan, and the bike path that connects the two, but all to no avail. Thankfully we were able to avert disaster, because Daniel managed to track down and purchase another elephant just in time. The new elephant was cleaner and less worn than its predecessor, but Matan seemed to accept our assurance that Elephant had merely taken a bath.
And so all was well again, until the gan located the lost elephant a few days later and handed it to Matan. But Matan was already clutching the new elephant, and he looked at us confused. “Two Elephants, one two?” he asked imploringly. He regarded his Elephant as unique and inimitable, and was bewildered by the sudden multiplicity. Which elephant was Elephant? Could both be equally beloved? And if not, what should we do with the other one? Fortunately, all of these questions were addressed on the page in Pescahim I learned right in the middle of the elephant crisis.
The Mishnah (96b) considers the question of what happens when a Paschal lamb is lost and another lamb is designated for the Paschal sacrifice in its stead. There is in fact an entire tractate in Seder Kodshim dedicated to problems arising from replacement sacrifices. This tractate, Temurah, is based on a single verse in the Bible: “One may not exchange or substitute another for it [a sacrificial animal], either good for bad, or bad for good. If one does substitute one animal for another, the thing vowed and its substitute shall both be holy” (Leviticus 27:10). A person may not sacrifice one animal for another, say, so as to save money by offering an inferior alternative. If someone commits this forbidden act, both animals are subject to the laws of sacrifice. If the original sacrifice is a nedava, a voluntary offering, then both animals are brought to the altar. But if the original sacrifice is one that cannot be brought twice, such as a chatat (sin offering) or a Paschal lamb, then the replacement animal cannot be sacrificed and it also cannot be treated like a regular, unconsecrated animal. The only option is to let it graze until it develops a blemish, at which point it is unfit for sacrifice. Then it is sold, and the proceeds are used to buy another sacrifice.
In the case of a Pesach sacrifice, as the Talmud teaches, the halachah depends on when the original animal is found. If it is found before the replacement lamb was slaughtered, it is as if that animal was actively “pushed aside” when its replacement was sacrificed, so it cannot be brought as another offering but must be left to graze. If the original was found after the replacement was sacrificed, then the original can be brought as a shelamim, a similar and related sacrifice.
So what did all this mean for Elephant and elephant? In our case, the original elephant was found after the second elephant had already been consecrated. That is, Matan had already transferred all his love and affection to the replacement elephant, thereby designating it as Elephant. Thus the original elephant need not be left to graze, and both elephants were valid sacrifices. We decided, therefore, to leave one Elephant at gan and one at home, in the hope of avoiding similar problems in the future.
Fortunately our twins, who started gan at the age of nine months, were not yet attached to stuffed animals. They were, however, very attached to me, which made it hard for us to be apart. Each morning I was beset by doubts about whether I should be entrusting them to another person’s care. Could someone else really replace their mother? The answer, I discovered, was yes and no. Someone else could play with them and feed them baby food and put them to sleep, but only I could breastfeed them. Perhaps this was why I never taught the twins to drink from bottles; on some level, I realized that it was only breastfeeding that made me truly irreplaceable.
Throughout that year I ran to the gan twice a day to nurse. Each day I arrived at the gan breathless, my breasts full and bursting, and a Talmudic aphorism running through my head. When Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai begged Rabbi Akiva to teach him Torah in prison, even though the Romans had outlawed Torah study, Rabbi Akiva responded: “More than the calf wants to suckle, the cow wants to nurse” (Pesachim 112a). Still, though my need was more urgent, the girls were just as excited to see me as I was to greet them. The moment I walked in the door they grinned at me from ear to ear and raised their arms above their heads with joyous squeals. Each was my one and only beloved: inimitable, irreplaceable, and unique.
* * *
I loved greeting the girls at the end o
f the day, but I dreaded having to decide whom to pick up first. Sometimes I would be lucky—I’d arrive at the gan and Tagel would still be sleeping, so I’d pick up Liav and spend a few moments alone with her before bringing her with me to wake her sister in the back room lined with cribs where all the babies slept. But other days I’d show up to find the two of them sitting on the floor, each eagerly crying “Emma, Emma” (they could not yet pronounce long vowels, so they pronounced the Hebrew word for mother, ima, like the Jane Austen heroine). If only I could swoop them both up simultaneously, but they were usually on opposite sides of the room. I wished that I could perform a feat worthy of King Solomon—not to divide one child for two mothers, but to divide one mother for two children.
Whenever I found myself forced to choose between the two girls, I thought of the rabbinic principle that “one does not pass over mitzvot.” This principle, which appears in Pesachim (64b) and throughout the Talmud, means that if there is a commandment that is right in front of you, you should fulfill it before searching for other commandments. Thus, when the priest walks over to the altar to sprinkle sacrificial blood on its four corners, he should start off with the corner that is closest to him, because “one does not pass over mitzvot.” I recited a version of this principle in my head: “One does not pass over twins.” Like the priest who may not walk past one corner of the altar to sprinkle blood on the next, I would not pass over one daughter to reach another. Inevitably that meant that her sister would burst into tears, and then I would have to set down one twin to retrieve the other, by which point they would both be crying.
Whenever I described to my friends the challenges of parenting twins, I received expressions of sympathy and incredulity, of the “I-Don’t-Know-How-She-Does-It” variety. Even the Talmud seems to be wary of things that come in pairs, as we learn from the tenth and final chapter of tractate Pesachim. Unlike the previous nine chapters, which deal with the Paschal sacrifice, this is the one chapter that covers the ritual of the Passover seder: the four cups of wine, the eating of matzah and bitter herbs, and the recitation of the Hallel psalms. All is explained in a clear and orderly fashion until the middle of the chapter, when the rabbis seem to get drunk on seder wine as they break from the halachic discussion of the seder to engage in several pages about superstition, demonology, legend, and lore.
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 25