I came to comparative literature from classics, where I had no business being, not having studied Latin and Greek in high school. After semesters and summers of trying to keep pace with boarding-school graduates who sang out their Latin and Greek like dons-in-training, and slogging through pages of Virgil and Homer each night when just to parse a line could take me an hour, I was relieved to take a literary-theory class in which intellectual success was measured out in brilliant or at least clever acts of mind, not philological mastery, and social success in degrees of sartorial and intellectual sophistication, and every paper seemed like a gleeful attack on exactly the sort of grim, grinding, grammatical puzzles I’d been struggling to solve for two years.
It was a good time to be a deconstructionist at Yale. De Man had cancer but was still among us, and his 1941 essay in a Belgian newspaper calling for a “solution” to the “Jewish problem” and an end to the “Semitic interference” in Western literature had not yet come to light. Literary theory still held the answer to everything, and attracted the brightest graduate students in the country. De Man’s classes were hushed and reverential; he was dying, and we knew it, and prepared for class as if we were dying alongside him, starved for his thin smile of approval, his quiet nod to continue. We waited for him to unfold poems like pieces of origami. He and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.
All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire.
I read the French feminists, too, and learned about the provisionality of identity. My identity had always felt pretty provisional to me, and now it turned out to be a social construct, not a biological fact or a matter of inheritance. My womanhood was an effect of material signifiers—lipstick, hairstyles, clothes—and literary and cultural texts that, in the interests of hegemonic power, denied me, suppressed me, objectified me, and shoehorned me into false binary oppositions, such as the opposition of sensuousness to reason, heterosexuality to homosexuality. “I” was a performance, not an essence, although in the labyrinthine world of campus politics this was a tricky distinction: I knew several undergraduate staffers at the Yale Women’s Center who were busily discovering their essential lesbian selves, and others who were very performatively declaring themselves “political lesbians”—lesbians for all intents and purposes, that is, except in the apparently non-essential matter of sexual desire.
Not that any of this solved the basic problem of what to do about my life, particularly my romantic life. If femininity was nothing more than a performance, then appearances mattered more than ever—were all that mattered, really—and being successfully feminine required an even fiercer commitment than I’d ever managed to make to the art of self-presentation: to fashion, hair, weight loss, and, for a would-be female graduate student in comparative literature, the exact right mix of sweetness and knowingness. Far from liberating me, feminist theory was making me more self-conscious than ever.
One aspect of my self that was starting to seem usable, though, was my Jewishness, which I had refused to think about once my bat mitzvah was over. Jewishness was hot. Jewish writers and thinkers—Kafka, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas—had been reconfigured as deconstructionist precursors. Graduate students were parsing rabbinical texts to learn the rabbis’ playful approach to interpretation, their Walter Benjamin–like appreciation for the fragment, their disregard for the plain sense of texts. During my senior year, the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who was doing the final cut of his nine-hour Holocaust movie, Shoah, visited Yale from Paris, and one of my professors made his interviews with camp survivors the main text for her class on psychoanalytic theory. Geoffrey Hartman was starting a video archive of Holocaust testimonies and was editing a volume of critical studies of midrash, to which Derrida would contribute.
Meanwhile, I started dating an Orthodox graduate student. Or rather, I should say, I was dated by him, since our romance, such as it was, was largely a product of his energy. Harold Bloom, a powerful reader of mystical and heretical Jewish texts, had taught us to be suspicious of “normative” Judaism, but that wasn’t a concern for me, because I was only playing along, an accidental, undercover anthropologist.
Philip—I’ll call him—was a ba’al teshuvah, a born-again Jew. I registered him at first only as a misfit seeking the company of other misfits, such as—I figured that he figured—me. He was a physics geek, smart and round and sweaty and abrupt. I can’t remember how we met or what exactly we did in the early phase of our relationship, though I recall a lot of coffee being drunk in the underground library’s cafeteria, otherworldy because lit almost entirely by vending machines. We didn’t go out on dates. He asked a lot of questions, and I gave a lot of answers. It was, I think, an interview. Once I met Philip’s criteria, we moved quickly to the next phase of the operation, which was spending Shabbat together.
“Together” is the wrong word, actually. It’s not as if I was going to stay with him. He drove me to the home of some friends of his in Westville, a neighborhood in northwest New Haven where many Orthodox Jews lived, and left me there. He then went to stay with another friend nearby. My hosts were very normal and very nice. The father of the family was another bearded ba’al teshuvah, a graduate of our school, pleasingly formal in his white shirt and black pants. His wife was sweet-faced, Orthodox-born and-educated, and her headscarf and long skirt had an odalisque sensuality. I remember three daughters, the oldest being about nine; there may have been a baby. The girls followed me around in happy astonishment, delighted to discover someone in greater need of correction than themselves. I could sing the blessing over the candles, but when I went to the bathroom I tore the toilet paper, a mysteriously forbidden act. I nearly began eating without waiting for the blessing—less out of ignorance than nerves. The following morning, I brushed my teeth with toothpaste and applied lipstick, two more mysterious violations of etiquette. The girls asked me repeatedly to reassure them that my parents were Jewish. They made a big show of trying to parse the categorical error that I represented: a Jew with no idea how to conduct herself on Shabbat.
Dinner was an exercise in successful cliché. There was the authentic version of everything that had been pallidly alluded to on my family’s Shabbat table. The dining room was ablaze with candles, one for each member of the family and a pair just for me. My hostess waved her hands enigmatically in the air and covered her eyes before saying the blessing. There was a two-handled laver and a basin for washing the hands before saying the blessing over the challah. There was a smell of braised meat. Sabbath songs were droned in a minor key throughout the meal. Crystal bowls of candy had been put out for snacking before dessert. Philip dropped me off and left for synagogue with his friend; my hostess and her children and I dressed, lit the candles, then, after the men returned, stood at attention during the blessings. Then the meal was served. I was glad to be a stranger in this particular strange land, I thought, because as a woman I had the option of hiding behind the gestures of female obligation. I could help lay out the silverware, carry in the food, clear the table, wash the dishes.
Except that I was never allowed to. My hostess deflected almost every offer to help. Her children could set the table, she said. She let ot
her female guests clear, but when I tried to help she shooed me away with a friendly laugh. I slunk embarrassed back to the realm of the men, where my host was teaching some piece of Torah that I didn’t understand.
It took me decades to understand that I had entered a domain so defamiliarized that I had to be maneuvered carefully around it, like a space alien likely to smash the furniture. The thirty-nine melachot and the rabbinic add-ons ramify throughout a Sabbath-observant household, transmogrifying the performance of the most apparently simple tasks. Most people have heard of the rules about not turning on lights or stoves or electrical appliances, but fewer understand that when an Orthodox Jew clears the table on the Sabbath she won’t sort the dishes by size, lest she perform the melachah of sorting. When she washes the dishes, she’ll wash only those she needs later in the day; the others she will set aside or, if that means they’ll turn foul, rinse. She won’t use a sponge, a scouring pad, or a dishtowel, lest she perform the melachah of wringing. She will use only one of those nylon pads with big fibers, or a nylon bottle brush. She may refuse to scour congealed grease, lest she violate the rabbinic edict against molid, making a new substance by changing something from one state to another. If she dries a dish, she will hang up the towel, not squeeze it out. When she wipes down the tablecloth, she will blot a spill, not scrub it out, lest she wring or launder, another melachah.
When I learned this last rule, I finally understood the plastic tablecloth, white and embossed with a floral motif, so seemingly out of place in this elegant, faintly Central European household. Every corner of the house offered up a puzzle that only further study would solve: the bathrooms with the torn stacks of toilet paper (lest you tear) and the absence of toothpaste (lest you smooth, a further refinement on the melachah of scraping), the bedrooms with Scotch-taped outlets (lest you kindle), the desks void of pens and scissors (lest you touch muktzeh; that is, an object prohibited under rabbinic law because it might lead to melachot such as writing and cutting).
The synagogue offered some respite from my mounting sense of freakishness. I walked there with Philip—my hostess and her daughters having stayed home to prepare the house for the afternoon luncheon—sat upstairs in the women’s section, and hoped that no one would notice my ignorance of the prayers. Not, I didn’t know at the time, that they would have cared if they did. Women don’t have to pray the same thrice-daily prayers that men do. They are not required to say prayers at specific times because they’re expected to submit to the more open-ended temporal discipline of mothering. Had I read Arendt by then, I would have had a theory to explain the difference between male and female behavior on the Sabbath. On Saturday, men cease from purposive, end-oriented endeavors. They free themselves to sing and drink and study Torah for the sake of studying Torah, Torah lishmah. They take action in the Arendtian sense of the term. They meet and greet and dispute. They fulfill their human potential. Women, on the other hand, do what they’ve been doing all week. They labor. They serve and clear and tuck the children into bed. They meet biological needs and provide emotional sustenance.
All this had more appeal than I felt it should have. I explained it to myself this way: My hostess could have pulled off her wig and become a doctor anytime she wanted to, so I didn’t have to pity her. She had chosen her life, and since she had considerable personal authority she endowed it with a dignity I’d never perceived before. In Hebrew school I had learned that Judaism, as a religion, venerates the family; even if traditional Judaism doesn’t grant women the power to study or lead services or do any of the things that give Jewish men honor in the eyes of other Jews, one day a week it honors the homes their wives make, the nourishment they provide, the bodies with which they make more bodies.
When I became a new mother myself, restricted to activities that could be synchronized with a baby’s schedule, I began to see a genuine logic to this argument. That weekend, though, I thought of it as a rationalization against a much more powerful allure. I had never quite realized that there was a way to escape myself so ready to hand. I could just marry Philip and disappear into a long Sabbath afternoon! I could relinquish the overwhelming burden of being me and take up the lesser burden of being a member of a holy community. I could have my Jewish textuality and a sense of being right with the world, too.
That afternoon, Philip took me for a walk in a park. For the first time, he struck me as manly. I liked the way he steered me down the paths without touching me, a protective bulk of a man. I admired his mastery of the Orthodox idiom, the half-Yiddish of the yeshiva bocher. I half closed my eyes and squinted at the trees, imagining myself in something calf-length and woolen, him in a round fur hat and a long black suit. I made myself start an argument with him about whether separate spheres for the sexes were confining or liberating, and whether women should have the right to study Talmud. But my heart wasn’t in it. His world was fixed and solid in ways mine wasn’t. It made no sense to quibble with that. After Havdalah, Philip dropped me off at my apartment. He called the next day. I never called back.
PART FOUR
THE FLIGHT FROM TIME
1.
A FEW CENTURIES AFTER THE DEATH OF THE ASIDOI, THERE AROSE A SAVIOR in Israel. His name was Jesus.
By the time he appeared in the book in which we came to know him—I am talking about the Gospel of Mark—he was already the Messiah, the one destined to come at the end of the seven millennia or aeons or days. Our first glimpse of Mark’s Jesus has him being baptized in the wilderness while the Spirit of God descends and declares him to be his son. Very shortly after that, Jesus does away with the Sabbath.
You may wonder why I say the Gospel of Mark, since the Gospel of Matthew precedes that of Mark in the New Testament. But Mark’s Jesus is older than Matthew’s. Mark’s gospel, written sometime between 68 and 73 C.E., cast the mold for the other Gospels. The Gospels according to Matthew and Luke incorporated much of Mark; the Gospel according to John came along a generation later. Mark, in fact, probably invented the genre called “gospel,” the quasi-biographical novella offered up as an act of evangelical witnessing. The real importance of Mark, though, is that he wrote a literary masterpiece. His Jesus towers above the others, an abrupt, difficult man-god impatient with his disciples, secretive about his mission, and brimming with irresistible life. It is in Mark’s Jesus that we feel the rough, uncanny power that inspired a new religion, rather than just a following.
Also remarkable is how much Mark makes of the Sabbath. No sooner does Mark’s Jesus return from the wilderness than he strides into a synagogue in Capernaum during Sabbath services and drives a demon out of a man. It is his first miracle. His audience is stunned into silence, in part because the exorcism succeeds so well and in part because Jesus broke Sabbath law to perform it. Possession by a demon is a chronic condition and therefore something one should wait until the Sabbath is over to address. Jesus’ disrespect for Sabbath law infuriates the Pharisees, the local religious leaders. (After the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees evolved into what we call the rabbis, and they were very particular about their Sabbaths.)
The Pharisees start stalking Jesus, and soon enough they catch his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath. He utters his aphorism: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” And right after that, possibly even on the same Saturday, Jesus enters a synagogue and heals a man with a withered hand, another chronic condition that could have waited. At which point the Pharisees, who have begun muttering in dismay in the back of the room, step outside and set in motion the plot against Jesus that will ultimately result in his arrest and crucifixion.
Why does Mark care so much about the Sabbath? Don’t be too distracted by the question of who Jesus “really” was and what he would have thought about the Sabbath. That someone named Jesus, Yehoshua, existed, that he had a message and a following and an effect on the world—historical evidence renders that fairly indisputable. It is probably safe to say that the historical Jesus would not have been dismissive of
something as deeply woven into Jewish life as the Sabbath. The historical Jesus would have been a passionately religious Jew talking to other passionately religious Jews, or, more specifically, a Galilean talking openly to other Galileans and more cautiously to Judeans. (Galileans were known for their folk piety, Judeans for their intellectual prowess and a certain condescension toward Galileans.)
That Jesus, if he raised the topic at all, would not have been making an argument against the Sabbath; he would have been taking a stand in the larger debate about what it meant to be a good Jew, with a corresponding opinion on the proper observance of the Sabbath. For that Jesus lived in a time of acute anxiety and extremes of behavior both religious and irreligious. The monkish Essenes in their desert communities forbade defecation on the Sabbath, while just up the road, in Jerusalem, Hellenizers blithely ignored the niceties of Sabbath boundaries. In between lay thousands of shades of ritual precision, with most people probably looking no further than their neighbors for guidance. When it came to the Sabbath, the historical Jesus would have had reform, not revolution, in mind. He was a Reform rabbi, not a Jew for Jesus.
But Mark was not talking about the historical Jesus. He was talking about the Christ, the anointed one, a hero in a cosmological drama. Mark doesn’t explain Christ’s attitude toward the Sabbath, but he does give hints in the way he tells his story. Of all the Gospel writers, Mark is the least patient. He moves his story along much more efficiently and economically than his counterparts do, and he says “immediately” a lot. The Greek word for “immediately,” euthys, occurs fifty-one times in the New Testament; forty-one of those times are in Mark. John the Baptist dunks Jesus in the water, and the instant Jesus comes up—euthys—the heavens rip open and the Spirit descends like a dove from the sky. The Spirit tells Jesus that he is God’s beloved son, and immediately casts him out into the wilderness. Jesus tells the fishermen Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him, and they do so immediately. The next thing you know, it’s the Sabbath and they’re barreling into the Capernaum synagogue and Jesus immediately begins to teach.
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time Page 12