Then Rimmon led his mother outside the walls to a mount of olives at whose foot ran the Brook Kidron, rich with gardens and pomegranate trees and beds of many vegetables. From the trees the young farmer cut boughs and four corner poles, and with his cords built of them a booth in which he and Gomer would sleep for eight nights: on the mount as far as one could see were these booths, each with its branches so interlaced that a sleeping man could waken in the middle of the night and see the stars. Thus the Hebrews remembered the lonely decades in the desert when they were coming to know Yahweh in their ragged tents: each year all men of Israel and Judah took to their booths as Gomer and Rimmon did now.
In the morning they rose early and left the mount of olives, returning inside the city, where they worshiped at the temple, Gomer standing outside with the women while her son went into the sacred place to gaze at the holy of holies, to which only a few priests were admitted. Later he joined his mother to observe the animal sacrifices during which perfect bulls were led lowing to the altar, and here as the solemn rite was concluded, with incense penetrating the brain, Rimmon caught an understanding of man’s eternal submission to Yahweh; and as the sacrificial fires twisted upward the significance of his faith was burned into his consciousness. This city he would remember forever, and on the sixth day Gomer heard him whispering, “O Jerusalem, if I forget you let my eyes be blinded, let my right hand lose its cunning.”
But it was not only for these solemn moments that pilgrims made the long trek to Jerusalem; for after the days of worship had ended, after the fields were gleaned and the grapes were pressed, lyric celebrations occurred in which festivities as old as the land of Canaan were re-enacted, and none was more compelling than the night on which the unmarried maidens of Israel dressed themselves in white gowns, newly made, to go out into the vineyards on the way to Bethlehem where ceremonial grapes had been held in reserve, and there to nominate one of their number to enter the wine press with her new dress clutched about her knees, where she would dance upon these final grapes while her sisters sang in the most ravishing tones the unharmonized plain chant of longing:
“Young men, young men of Jerusalem!
Lift up your eyes and see whom,
See whom, see whom,
You shall marry.
Look not for beauty,
Look not for smiles,
But look for a girl of good family,
A family that worships Yahweh.”
And as the girls danced about the wine press Rimmon watched with growing wonder the freshness of the faces and the desirability of these laughing eyes as they flashed past him in the torchlight, begging him to sample them, to see whom he would marry.
But after a while the girl whose ankles were deep among the grapes grew weary, and she signaled for a replacement, and by chance the girls of Jerusalem picked as her successor a beautiful stranger from the north, Mikal the daughter of the governor of Makor, and men swung her into the wine press. As she clutched her new dress to keep it from being stained, Rimmon experienced the curious sensation that the dress was in a sense his dress—it had come from his kitchen and he had known it before even Mikal had known it—and it danced of itself, a swirling, beautiful white robe; and he reached for his mother’s hand, congratulating her upon having made such a garment.
Then his heart exploded with the love that would never leave it, for it was not the dress that was dancing, but a girl twisting her head to the music, laughing, trying vainly to keep the juices of the grape from staining her new dress, and finally, when she saw that she could no longer protect it, dropping it and throwing her hands in the air as the tempo of the music increased and she became stained even to her face with the purple that in the end dripped from her chin as she tried to taste it with her red tongue. It was a primitive moment that recalled the entire history of the Hebrews from before the days when they knew Yahweh or the Pharaohs, and Rimmon stood entranced, but when the music ended and it became some other girl’s turn to press the symbolic grapes, it was he who lifted Mikal from the vat, and she hung for a moment in the air, looking down at him.
“Rimmon!” she cried, and she allowed him to set her upon the ground and to brush away the grape juice, and when his rough hand reached her face she did not draw back, but kept her stained chin raised toward his, and he kissed her.
On the way home from Jerusalem he informed his mother that he was going to marry Mikal, and she objected on the grounds that a Hebrew boy should not marry a girl whose family was more Canaanite than Hebrew. Rimmon would not listen to this argument, and his mother found in him the same kind of hardness that she had had to develop over the preceding decades. This pleased her insofar as her son’s character was concerned, but it frightened her when applied to the matter of selecting a wife, and she wondered what she could do to prevent a hasty decision. As they were picking their way through the swamp north of Megiddo she asked casually, “Are you aware of what Governor Jeremoth’s name means?”
To Hebrews a man’s name carried a significance unknown in other nations, and Rimmon, anticipating his mother’s purpose, said, “It means high places, and he worships in the high places.”
“His whole family does, and for him to go to Jerusalem, or for his daughter to dance at the festival, is offensive.”
“Are you warning me against Mikal?” he asked abruptly.
“Yes. Our town has many excellent Hebrew girls, loyal to Yahweh.” She was strongly impelled to advise him that he had been chosen by Yahweh for some austere purpose, that it was imperative for him to make his peace in all ways with Yahweh, but she could not do this, for she had no conception of what mission he had been called upon to serve. She therefore gave the limpest of all arguments: “Have you considered marrying Geula? She comes from an old priestly family.”
At that moment they were heading through the worst part of the swamp, and at the mention of Geula’s name Rimmon made an ugly face, which angered his mother and she berated him: “Geula may not be beautiful, but she knows virtue, and it is not proper to make faces at a girl of marked devotion.” Rimmon stopped this argument by saying, “I was making faces at the water snake that slipped from the rock,” and his mother grew silent and moved closer to him, for the nearness of a poisonous snake was frightening when she knew that her son had been singled out for some austere purpose.
When they cleared the swamp and climbed to higher ground they saw ahead of them the broken walls of Makor, and each compared that poor town with the grandeur of Jerusalem, and they saw for themselves what a miserable place it was; the invading armies had destroyed so much. Where eight hundred people had lived inside the walls in comfortable houses during King David’s time, fewer than five hundred now lived in near-poverty. The rich fields outside, which had supported nine hundred farmers, had now only a hundred peasants who never knew when the next marauder would burn their crops and carry them off to slavery. These were dreadful years in Galilee, during which Makor sustained the smallest population of its long history, but Gomer suspected that evil of greater magnitude lay ahead. It must have been for this reason that Yahweh had spoken to her in the tunnel, charging her with the task of preparing her son for the trials that faced the Hebrews, and now, as she returned to the town which had brought her such little happiness, she clutched his hand and headed for the main gate, unaware that the test would fall not upon him but on her.
Against his mother’s wishes Rimmon married Mikal, and against Gomer’s own wishes she soon had to confess what a pleasing girl the governor’s daughter was: laughing and beautiful, Mikal quickly proved that she was going to make Rimmon an excellent wife; she brought him a dowry larger than he could have expected and she prevailed upon her father to let him run the olive grove, not as foreman but as co-owner. She moved into the bleak house by the postern gate, sewed the necessary clothes, and then gave testimony of her love for Rimmon that no governor’s daughter was required to give. One morning as Gomer lifted the water jug onto her head preparatory to the long descent and l
onger walk through the dark tunnel, Mikal took down the jug and said, “From now on I shall fetch the water.”
The tired old woman looked down at the bright face, so hopeful in the morning light and so satisfied with the child that was growing near her heart, and Gomer said, “Today you have brought me rubies,” and she bent down and for the first time kissed her daughter and continued, “The only remaining thing I can do for my son is going to the well.” She carried the jug herself, but each morning young Mikal would watch for the moment when her mother started for the well, and she would lift the jug and say, “Now I shall fetch the water,” and each morning old Gomer would refuse the offer, but her heart was overcome that her daughter had again volunteered.
Then came the days of terror. Out of the south, eastward of Megiddo, appeared the great army of the Pharaoh Necho, with men by the thousands and chariots whose dust obscured the sun, with generals in pleated tunics and foot soldiers burdened with spears. Fanning out swiftly in all directions the army occupied crossroads and villages and even walled towns.
“We are going north to crush Babylon forever,” the armed emissaries told Governor Jeremoth, “and from Makor we require two hundred men and their supplies. By sunset tonight.”
A cry of protest went up from the town, and when Jeremoth was reluctant to identify which men must go, the Egyptians did the job for him. Throwing a cordon about the town they first marched off everyone living outside the walls. When Jeremoth protested that these were the farmers who fed the town, the Egyptian general shouted up at him, “When you begin to starve, your women will find the fields. You have five daughters. You’ll eat.”
They then searched the houses and picked every man who looked as if he could walk a hundred miles. At Gomer’s they grabbed Rimmon as a prize soldier and told him on the spot that he was to be a captain of the Hebrews, and before he could say good-bye to his mother or his wife they had him outside the walls, where they began immediately to give him orders. He started to protest that he would not lead his Hebrews against the Babylonians, but he did not finish. An Egyptian soldier—not even an officer—struck him across the neck with a war mace and he fell unconscious to the ground.
From the wall his mother saw her son fall and she thought he was killed. Like an ordinary woman struck with terror she wanted to whimper softly, but an outside power took possession of her throat and from the walls she pointed with a long right arm and an extended forefinger. Her hair blew in the evening wind and her figure seemed to increase in its gaunt height, losing its stoop, and from her throat came for the first time a voice of extraordinary power, echoing across the town and into the hearts of the Egyptian invaders:
“O men of Egypt! Too long have you tormented the children of Yahweh, too long. You march north to battle which hyenas and vultures will long celebrate as they tear at your bones. You proud generals in pleated tunics, at the great battle your eyes will be put out and you will spend your years in darkness, toiling for the Babylonians. You insolent charioteers in armor, your horses shall drag you through cinders, and rocks of the field will clutch at your brains. You priests who accompany the mighty force to give it sanction, how you will dream of Thebes and Memphis”—if Gomer could have heard her words she would have been perplexed, for she knew nothing of Thebes or Memphis—“how you will dream of Egypt when you toil in the slave pits of Babylon. And you, Pharaoh Necho, ride north with your banners flying and the wheels of your chariot churning dust. But you ride in vain, for Egypt is lost.”
Her words shattered in the air like spears striking rock, and an Egyptian captain, seeing their effect on his troops, shouted, “Silence that foolish woman,” so that Governor Jeremoth himself ran to her and shook her; and when she regained her senses she saw that Rimmon was not dead but had risen and was doing as the Egyptians wished, and thus the army moved northward, picking up whole towns and nations as it went, preparing itself for the day when it must face the Babylonians. As an ordinary woman Gomer watched her son disappear, then sought the consolation of her daughter Mikal, and they joined the other bereft women along the wall, looking eastward to where eddies of dust marked the latest desolation to visit Makor.
… THE TELL
In the kibbutz mess hall Cullinane was always amused, when the subject of women arose, to see how vigorously his Jewish friends argued that in their religion women were treated as equals. One night before Vered left for Chicago she had said, “No religion in the world treats women with more regard than Judaism,” and Eliav added, “Our religion reveres them.”
“If there ever was a case of protesting too much,” Cullinane said, “this is it.”
“What do you mean?” Vered snapped.
“I can only judge by four things,” the Irishman said defensively. “What the Torah says. What the Talmud says. What I see. And what I hear.”
“What have you seen?” Vered asked.
“I’ve been going to synagogues a good deal,” Cullinane replied, “and in the new ones, if women want to attend they have to sit in a balcony behind a curtain. At older ones, like the Vodzher Rebbe’s, there’s no place for them at all.”
“Women prefer it that way,” Eliav insisted.
“Not from what I overhear from the tourists at the dig,” Cullinane said. “American Jewish women tell me, ‘I’d refuse to be tucked away in a balcony behind lattices.’ And even the men say, ‘When I go to worship I want to sit with my family.’ ”
On this matter the testimony of the Torah was clear. Women under Judaism were treated no worse than Near Eastern women in general: deplored at birth, endured in adolescence, married off as soon as possible, discriminated against in law and subjected to misery if they became unwanted widows. Numerous were the Biblical texts in which some Old Testament hero rejoiced at the news he was the father of a son, and one of the morning prayers recited by men included the passage: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a woman.”
The sixty-three tractates of the Talmud developed each of these themes: “Happy is he whose children are male and woe to him whose children are female.” In passage after passage this massive body of Jewish teaching admonished against the dangers of the female. “Talk not overmuch with women, even with one’s own wife,” read one passage, to which Maimonides himself added the gloss: “It is known that for the most part conversation with women has to do with sexual matters, and by such talk a man brings evil upon himself.” The Talmud specifically directed that women must not be taught to read religious works, and often during the dig Israeli religious newspapers carried reports of resolutions drawn up by one group of fanatics or another: “It is the function of Jewish girls to marry at seventeen and have children as quickly as possible.”
One night the English photographer appeared at dinner with a passage from the Talmud which summarized the ideal Jewish wife. “She was married to the famous Rabbi Akiba. She found him when he was forty years old, an illiterate peasant. She married him and sent him to the yeshiva, where he lived apart and studied while she worked to earn their living. At the end of twelve years he returned home one night to tell her that he must do more studying, so she sent him back for another twelve years and kept her job. After twenty-four years he finally came home, but she was so old and decrepit that his followers tried to throw her aside as a beggar and, I quote, ‘the great Rabbi Akiba allowed her to come forward and kiss his feet, saying to his followers, “All that is mine or yours comes from her.” ’ ”
Vered was angry. “Don’t forget that when the judges were weak, Deborah rallied the Jewish people in battle against General Sisera.”
“When was that?” the Englishman asked.
“1125 B.C.E.”
Eliav said with more restraint, “And there was Huldah the Prophetess, who was of critical significance in getting Deuteronomy accepted as the core of Jewish faith.”
“When did she live?” the photographer asked.
“621 B.C.E.”
“Isn’t it strange,” Cu
llinane asked, “that whenever we get on this topic you cite two women who lived more than twenty-five hundred years ago …”
“What about Beruriah?” Vered cried. None of the Gentiles had heard of her. “Or Golda Meir?”
“My point,” Cullinane said, “is that the Catholic church showed real capacity in finding places for women like Saint Theresa and Catherine of Siena. A sect of Protestants did the same with Mary Baker Eddy. In Judaism this doesn’t happen.”
Vered was eager to reply. “As little girls we play a game in which we ask, ‘Why were women made from Adam’s rib?’ ” And she could still recite the answer: “God deliberated from which part of man to create woman. He said, ‘I must not create her from the head that she should not carry herself haughtily; nor from the eye that she should not be too inquisitive; nor from the ear that she should not be an eavesdropper; nor from the mouth that she should not be too talkative; nor from the heart that she should not be too jealous; nor from the hand that she should not be too acquisitive; nor from the foot that she should not be a gadabout; but from a hidden part of the body that she should be modest.’ ”
“I am impressed,” Eliav said, “that in religions which do as Cullinane wants, female unhappiness is so great, whereas we Jews go pleasantly along with little divorce, little prostitution and less neuroticism.”
“Everyone knows that a Jew makes the best husband in the world,” Vered said.
“You have no feeling of being left out?”
“We Jewish girls get what we want,” she insisted. “A home, a family, a secure haven. Public praying in the synagogue? That’s for men.”
The Source: A Novel Page 42