As soon as she entered, those in the back stood up, and then those in front of them, each row rising as she passed, like plants shooting up from the ground, as though Atarah was sprinkling seeds and seeing them grow instantly. When Atarah seated herself at the table, all those who had sprouted up seated themselves.
Atarah turned her face to see each person in the packed room. Wendy remembered her speaking about the importance of personal transmission in teaching, how the sense that one is not alone can bring joy, and this can only be communicated by seeing the face of another. Atarah did not know there were people outside, faces pressed through the window to hear.
Atarah started her class, “‘The Book of Ruth: My Book of Transformations’ is my title tonight.
“I want to open with a quote by George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English devotional poet. He wrote, ‘When one is asked a question, he must discover what he is.’ I’m going to speak on characters in Tanach who are asked questions. In response to the questions, the characters have moments of recognition and transform themselves. I want to compare these characters to one unique individual who has confidence in her identity, her ability to transform both herself and those around her, and who has become quite significant for our holiday and our understanding of Torah.
“I’ll start with the most obvious example. She is a woman who has the capacity to act, to change her situation, but needs to be asked.” Atarah paused here and spoke each word slowly and deliberately, “Who knows if you have arrived at this position to do something about the situation of the Jewish people?”
After she stopped speaking, Atarah smiled with closed mouth like the Mona Lisa, signaling mystery in her question. She arched her eyebrows and looked around the room packed with students. She waited for a response, adding, “It isn’t so late yet; surely you are all still awake?” and continued to wait in silence.
“Queen Esther. She needs to be asked to do something and then she finally goes to the king, but not before?” came from the middle of the room.
Atarah gave a bright smile, showing her teeth this time, and responded, “Esther is queen before and queen after she is asked the question ‘who knows’ by Mordechai. Nothing in her status has changed. Yet, after his question, she has a new capacity to act. She perceives now that she has agency. She can petition the king and ask for her life and the life of her people. When she does this, nothing has actually changed in her status or her abilities, only her understanding that she is capable of taking action. If you notice, the text calls her ‘Queen Esther’ only after she begins to act.”
Atarah flashed her ready smile at the group. “Who else in Tanach is asked ‘who are you?’ I’ll give a hint, an impersonator, someone who is acting like someone else.”
A voice from the back called out, “Yakov answered his father’s question ‘who are you’ by saying, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn.’”
“Yafeh, nice. Our ancestor Jacob, in response to his father’s question, changes who he is. No longer will he be a simple man who dwells in tents. Now Jacob embraces the complexity of being that his brother Esau, a hunter and man of the field, embodies. Jacob becomes a different person, living his life in a more complicated way, a new self underneath the artifice of being his brother. Unlike Esther, something does seem to change in his status when he decides to incorporate this new identity into who he was before. One more, another impersonator, who costumes herself and in the process changes her future . . .”
A female voice, sitting near the front of the room called, “Tamar.”
Wendy whispered to Uri, “How do these people know so much?”
He responded, barely audible, “They’ve been learning all year.” Wendy shrugged in response; she couldn’t imagine being able to guess answers to these types of questions so quickly.
Atarah’s grin was satisfied. “Yes, thank you for that quick response. Tamar in Genesis 38 is a character who creates a plot for herself. No one needs to ask her who she is or tell her what to do. She goes to the place called petach eynai’im, the opening of the eyes, a metaphor clearly. Once there, she costumes herself so her father-in-law will assume she is a prostitute. Tamar has this moment of understanding that she must take matters into her own hands if she is to have any satisfaction from this family. In the process, she educates Judah, teaching him what it means to make a pledge and to take responsibility.”
Another female voice from the middle of the room spoke out. “Would Yehuda have become a leader if Tamar hadn’t educated him?”
Atarah again looked around the room, acknowledging the eager faces of the students she saw. She continued, “What is special about Tamar is both her demand for recognition, and that it is acknowledged. She is able to create a situation in which Judah must acknowledge her. More than that, he confesses Tamar is righteous; the child is his, and he should have given her to his son Shelah, whose name sounds like the possessive ‘hers’ in Hebrew, though that is probably not its etymological origin. What I’ve always found most impressive about the character of Tamar is the ‘breakthrough’ nature of her story. She is able to assess her situation, realize that there is a way out of it, and act cleverly, creating a breakthrough in her life. Isn’t that something we all yearn for, that breakthrough? I’m using this terminology straight from the Torah, right? Tamar’s oldest son is called ‘Peretz’ or ‘breakthrough.’”
Atarah continued, speaking slowly now, to be clearly understood. “There is another character, also in Genesis, who has her eyes opened. She is on the verge of death, in a seemingly hopeless situation, and suddenly, Hashem gives her a new sight . . .” Atarah was quiet, expectant, in awaiting a response.
The room remained hushed until a male voice in one of the rows near the front called out, “Hagar? An Egyptian handmaid?”
Atarah said, smiling, “Isn’t that the point of these stories? Hashem can communicate with anyone, when and how Hashem wants. Hashem opened Hagar’s eyes. Tamar may be the ancestress of King David and the messianic line, and Hagar a handmaid, but Hagar has a special contact with Hashem and even acts as a theologian, naming Hashem in a way no other characters do. The name Hagar gives to God is ‘El Roi,’ the God of seeing. Isn’t that one of the things we all seek from Hashem, and others as well—to be seen, to be recognized for who and what we really are, not who or what we may seem externally?”
Wendy turned to the man she hoped she was in love with next to her and saw his rapt attention to Atarah’s words. She’d have to explain to him that she needed to, as Atarah said, be seen for who she really was, a serious future professor, not a caterer who can be hired at will for a particular time slot. And who was Uri? A doctor who loved poetry and using narrative to heal? She would have to work on seeing him as he too wanted to be seen; he had been overworked this week, but it still wasn’t an entirely valid excuse for inviting people over without consulting her.
Wendy’s gaze went back to Atarah, who looked around the room at the faces of the students and continued, “If we look at the characters we’ve discussed so far, we see that they are all, at their core, vastly different from what they appear to be outwardly. Esther appears to be a gorgeous Persian queen, passive and perfectly assimilated. In fact she is a tremendously loyal Jew, willing to act and risk her life for the sake of her people. Jacob appears to be a simple man, following his mother’s commands, yet he is a hunter below his surface, tracking down two wives and two concubines, getting the flock of Laban to yield its best sheep to his possession. Tamar appears to be passive about her fate, when in fact she is a woman of tremendous resourcefulness and initiative, who will not allow herself to remain a widow in her father’s house forever. Hagar appears to be an Egyptian handmaid; however she is an exceptionally gifted seer, who communicates with Hashem on the highest of levels.”
Atarah paused and took a sip of water from the glass in front of her, saying a blessing over it quietly first. She did her visual sweep of the faces in the room and continued, “Now, our final character who is asked a
question and gave a response that changes her life.”
“Naomi?” a female voice called.
Atarah tilted her head to one side and said, “Naomi is asked, ‘Is this Naomi,’ and responded, ‘Don’t call me pleasant; call me bitter.’ I don’t see that as life changing. Still awake? Anyone?”
A male voice called out from the far back, “Ruth and Boaz, on the threshing floor.”
“Okay!” said Atarah, firmly pleased. “Boaz says to Ruth, ‘mi at,’ who are you, the same words Isaac asked Jacob. Ruth appears to be a Moabite on the surface. The Moabites are a people, the Bible tells us, who are ungenerous, inhospitable, and fight unfairly. They are objects of suspicion. Yet, Ruth is not like her ancestors. She is a loyal foreign woman, in the model of Tamar, Rahab of Jericho, and Yael the Kenite who act in unexpected ways to show loyalty to the Jewish people. Ruth the Moabite is not truly a Moabite at all. In fact, she is an ideal Jew, a person whose sense of what is appropriate goes beyond what any kind of legal framework would suggest is binding.
“There is a peculiarity about the book, in its very name for Ruth. Ruth is the protagonist in many senses, but the megillah is really the story of Naomi. It begins with Naomi’s loss of her biological family and ends with the proclamation, ‘A son is born to Naomi.’ Ruth’s declaration to Naomi that she will cleave to her, and go where she goes, seems to be an affirmation that she is ready to form a family with her, to remain with her. Naomi doesn’t completely accept Ruth’s definition of family, but stops arguing with her. It is the moment Naomi orchestrates between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor that creates the chance for a legally plausible family. That begins when Boaz asks Ruth who she is.
“The quotation I began our shiur with is apt here: ‘When one is asked a question, he must discover what he is.’
“Ruth doesn’t need that question, as so many characters do, to know who she is. Ruth knows all along she is a Jew and belongs to this family. It is Boaz who must be reminded of what he is. Ruth’s answer defines not just herself, but Boaz. She tells him, ‘I am Ruth your handmaid.’ Straightforward enough, but the second part of her answer is not related to the question. She says, ‘Spread your robe over your handmaid; you are a redeemer.’ She gives him an identity as ‘redeemer,’ which he isn’t quite sure about. She is the only character that I know of in Tanach to give an identity to another when asked about her own.
“Ruth, like Tamar, has a particular kind of self-confidence, the ability not only to know who she is, but what she needs from people around her. And, unique to Ruth, her ability to intuit the needs of others and help them with unbounded kindness makes her unlike any other character. Her relationship to Naomi seems, from her declaration, full of passion and substance, what one would want a lover to declare extravagantly: ‘Where you go, I will go.’ When Boaz speaks to her, it is all about legal matters: who is a nearer relative, what kind of ceremony needs to be done. He seems devoid of emotion. Ruth is completely emotion—she performs kindnesses and creates relationships that are entirely beyond legal bounds and is praised for that.
“What I find most fascinating about Ruth is her lack of a need for an external question. Her internal compass is sufficient. She does what is right in her own eyes, without being told. And that is really what getting the Torah is for, isn’t it?” Here she paused and did a visual scan of the faces in the room. “So that we act with hesed continually and unceasingly, like Ruth. That is one of the strongest purposes of the mitzvot, to create a possibility for us to act with unbounded kindness.”
“That, friends, is why we need Torah: to transform ourselves from cruel Moabites to kind Jews. Ruth the Moabite doesn’t need any prodding; it is the Jews around her who can’t see the necessity for their own recognitions and transformations. Naomi must learn to recognize the worth of Ruth, that Ruth is better for her than seven sons. Boaz is a redeemer, yet he can’t decipher his role until Ruth propels him to fulfill it.
“I will end this shiur with a story and final bit of poetry. There were two men, Rabbi Yohanan and Reish Lakish. One day Rabbi Yohanan was bathing in the Jordan and a man leapt in after him. He told the man, ‘Use your strength for Torah, hailech la’oraita.’ The man replied, ‘Your beauty should be for women.’ Rabbi Yohanan daringly said, ‘Do teshuvah and you can marry my sister who is more beautiful than I am.’
“A beautiful and simple fable—the man, Reish Lakish, repents from his position at the head of a band of thieves and gains wisdom and the hand of a beautiful woman. The two greatest conundrums of life, work and love, in Freud’s formulation, have been solved. Case closed. But the Talmudic story, like life itself, is more complex than that.
“One day in the house of study, there was a discussion about when a weapon is complete. Rabbi Yohanan asked Reish Lakish whether he had an answer. In asking this, he reminded Reish Lakish of his origins, saying, ‘A thief knows his weapons.’ This man, who elicited the transformation of another, who saw in him the next chapter, the possibilities in his book of transformations, was now insulting him publicly.
“Reish Lakish became sick and died. After his death Rabbi Yohanan could not be comforted, couldn’t find a partner who would find all of the twenty-four refutations that could sharpen a problem when he wanted to examine an issue from all sides. Actually, Rabbi Yohanan lost his ability to learn Torah, to use his weapon of choice in confronting his world. Finally, the rabbis prayed for a merciful and quick end to Rabbi Yohanan’s life. He too died.
“I tell this story as a pharmakon, a supplement, to remind us of the dangers of connection. Rabbi Yohanan saw a unique strength in Reish Lakish and asked him to channel it wisely. Yet, he himself severed that connection, insulting his friend, cutting them both off from the world. In the argument about when a weapon is finished, perhaps the question really was: is there ever an endpoint, a moment at which one is utterly certain that something is entirely complete?
“There may be pain and difficulty in making those connections—yet it must be done. Some need a question—‘who are you?’ or an instruction ‘your strength should be for Torah’ to enable them to change and transform. Others have the confidence and awareness to tap into the kesher, connection, with the Holy One of Place and the decoder of dreams, the begetter of kindnesses and restorer of souls.
“In his poem ‘The Layers,’ the American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote,
Live in the layers
Not in the litter.
Though I lack the art
To decipher it
No doubt the next chapter
In my book of transformations
Is already written
I am not done with my changes.
We are amailim ba’Torah, laborers in Torah. It is not simple or easy, but necessary. May we all be privileged on this holiday to find the art to decipher the next chapter in our book of transformations and to be aware that we are never done with our changes. Hag sameach.”
Wendy had never been in a room where such silence reigned. It was as though the breath of each individual in it, and those at the windows outside, was tied to the words of Atarah, and they wouldn’t let themselves exhale until she had finished. No one wanted to break the power of her words with the banality of their own. There was a hush for a few moments, as people absorbed Atarah’s words, let them penetrate their souls. The room remained silent as people began to collect themselves and rose to leave, stunned by the power of her message.
Wendy and Uri’s plan for the evening was to go back to her apartment after the midnight class to rest as much as they could before rising at 4:00 a.m. to walk to the Western Wall for morning prayers at the first possible dawn hour. Praying at the dawn hour was a Shavuot custom instituted to make up for the sluggishness of the Jewish people, who remained slumbering instead of waiting up eagerly for Moses to return with the tablets of Revelation on that first Shavuot. However, someone in Wendy’s group had written an article about how the availability of coffee in the sixteenth century popularized the custom of all
-night study sessions; no records of all-night Jewish learning exist before widespread consumption of caffeine. Wendy loved those quirky scholarly pieces of information that enabled one to see religious customs not as given from on high, but part of an evolution, a response to specific realities of the physical world.
When they got back to Mishael Street, Uri, who had logged long hours this week so he could be off tonight, went straight to sleep on the couch in Wendy’s living room, not bothering to make his way to a bed.
Wendy wanted to sleep and knew she should, so she’d be alert to walk to the Wall and then to host the friends coming over for a Shavuot meal later. But she was restless.
She opened her journal, somewhat neglected in the last few busy weeks of interviewing the older returnees in the cohort of Rahel the harpist, going on dates with Uri, writing the essays for the Lady Touro fellowship, finally finishing the literature review by the deadline to register, and attending Atarah’s classes. She started writing, jotting notes about the things that Brill had said; she would see if she could e-mail him and get that piece on the idea of Nachträglichkeit. She thought about Atarah’s teachings and how she still hadn’t resolved in her mind that Naomi was more heroine than Ruth. Ruth is the one who takes the risks and makes the biggest changes, but on arrival in Bethlehem she does Naomi’s bidding, becomes more of a surrogate womb and less of a speaking person; it seemed unfair that her child was taken from her by Naomi, deserving of a son or not. Desultory thoughts were attempting to organize themselves on the page. These were not what she was after.
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