If All the Seas Were Ink Read online

  Throughout our courtship I was generally the reserved one, the hesitant one—as exhilarated as I was terrified about striking that perfect, shimmering note again. At one point I came to a Talmudic legal discussion about whether one may use dye made out of the bark of trees grown during the sabbatical year, when it is forbidden to derive benefit from anything that grows from the land. The rabbis explain that the laws of the sabbatical year apply only to items that provide benefit when they are consumed. When the pigment is removed from these dyes in the boiling process, anything that remains is useless, so they are considered used up and hence forbidden during the sabbatical year (Bava Kama 101b). It was a dry legal passage, but I bristled. I wanted us to keep discovering each other, to continually animate and never exhaust one another. Daniel assured me that the more we got to know each other, the more we would want to know—our colors would keep blending to form ever-brighter and more variegated hues, and our love would not be a sealed vat but an ever-flowing fountain.

  After we’d been dating for a couple of months, I convinced Daniel to take up daf yomi with Bava Metzia. He began joining me at the morning daf yomi classes I was then attending at a local synagogue, though we always made sure to stagger our entries so that it would not appear as if we were arriving together at 6:15 a.m. Apparently this was OK, since the Talmud in Bava Metzia teaches that “when it comes to these three things, a person is permitted to deviate from the truth: his tractate, his bed, and his inn” (23b). That is, a person can lie about whether he has learned a particular tractate, and he can lie about the bed or inn where he slept the previous night. At least Daniel and I were transparent about our tractates.

  * * *

  The opening chapters of Bava Metzia deal with the laws of returning lost objects. When is the finder obligated to return the lost item and to what lengths must he go to do so? Daniel, early on, decided that I was his missing piece, and he was bold enough to tell me so. But I had only recently broken up with Omri, whom I’d dated for even longer than I’d been married to Paul. After two failed relationships, I was more interested in the lost rings of figs described in the first chapter of Bava Metzia than in finding the person who might or might not have walked off with one of my ribs. The opening pages of Bava Metzia present the rabbinic principle that the burden of proof is on the person who wants something in his fellow’s possession (2b). After several months of dating, Daniel wanted my consent in marriage, but I still needed to be convinced.

  Looking back, I can see now that I gave him quite a hard time. Painstakingly protective of my privacy, I never wanted us to be seen in public. I was falling in love in spite of myself, and I thought of our relationship as a fragile butterfly with fluttering wings that I wished to keep cupped in my hands. I worried that the harsh light of other people’s gazes might damage or still those dazzling wings, and I was terrified of suddenly being deprived of all the beauty that seemed to have blessedly and unexpectedly flown into my life. I suspect the Talmudic sages would have understood. In a discussion of the importance of storing one’s money in a safe and secure place, Rabbi Yitzhak comments, “Blessing is only found in that which is hidden from the eye” (Bava Batra 42a), quoting a biblical verse about God blessing his people’s storehouses. Daniel was my newfound treasure, and for just a little while longer, I wished to keep our relationship a secret. And so although we were “going out,” most of our dates consisted of reading poetry together in the private domain of one of our apartments.

  The first time Daniel came to visit me he brought me a bag of dates that he’d purchased in the shuk, which was, as it turned out, where he shopped as well. He was making fun (and making pun) of the fact that I had never agreed to properly date him, but I thought of one of my favorite contemporary poems, Edward Hirsch’s “Dates,” about the symbolism of the date in ancient and medieval Jewish and Arabic traditions. I read the poem aloud to Daniel that evening, savoring my favorite images as I licked the sticky sweetness off my fingers: Hirsch writes that when God banished Adam from Paradise, he ordered him to uproot the date palm, and so Adam replanted it in Mecca. “Thus is the bitter made sweet again.”1 I wondered if my own heart of palm could be replanted in new soil, and if it would blossom yet again.

  * * *

  Daniel later told me that he mistook me for a painfully shy recluse like Emily Dickinson. As was characteristic of our poetic and Talmudic exchanges, I responded by invoking the first chapter of Bava Batra, which we had just begun learning. I was not a recluse, I told him, but I believed in hezek re’iya. Hezek re’iya, which literally means “the damage of seeing,” refers to the notion that the invasion of privacy caused by looking at someone else’s property is tantamount to physical damage. The term comes up in a discussion about two neighbors who argue over the construction of a fence. One would like the fence built so that the other cannot see into his yard, but the other does not want his yard divided. Is the first neighbor legally authorized to force the second to agree to the fence? Those rabbis who support the notion that hezek re’iya constitutes a real form of damage agree that a person can legally prevent his neighbor from gazing into his property by forcing him to agree to the construction of a fence. On the opposite side of the divide are those rabbis who argue that the damage of being seen is not real damage, and therefore the individual who desires privacy cannot force the fence upon his neighbor. Ultimately, the Talmud concludes that yes, the damage of being seen constitutes a very real form of damage, and people have the right to protect their own privacy.

  I can trace my own sensitivity to hezek re’iya back very far, to my early childhood as a rabbi’s daughter, growing up in a house on the synagogue property. Although we had a fence separating our yard from the synagogue, anyone who drove into the parking lot could always look into our windows. My parents were vigilant about drawing the shades at night and keeping the front yard neat. In synagogue, too, my siblings and I had to be on our best behavior because our parents insisted that our actions set an example for others. We felt the eyes of the community upon us at all times, an experience epitomized by one unforgettable weekend in which my parents declared that we were having a “Shabbat in.” My father had the Shabbat off, but my parents did not feel like traveling. Nor did they want anyone to know that we were home. So we drew the shades, parked the cars in the garage, and spent Shabbat in Secret Annex mode, praying and eating together without leaving the house.

  From an early age, my siblings and I learned never to reveal more than we needed to about our family. If someone called to speak to the rabbi, we were supposed to say, “I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone right now,” and not that he wasn’t home, and certainly not that he was at Mrs. Knecht’s funeral or at the supermarket buying more paper towels. My parents are warm and welcoming hosts, as everyone who knows them will attest, but they instilled in each of us the value of privacy. For me it has become second nature. I eschew social media and group e-mails, preferring to communicate with one person at a time. My journal seems a more appropriate repository for my reflections than my Facebook “status,” and I care that my personal space remain just that.

  And so for as long as possible I kept my relationship with Daniel a private affair. If I referred to him it was only casually, as a summer fling, which was of course what I most feared. When my mother came to Israel on a business trip two months after we’d begun dating, I hinted that I was seeing someone, but didn’t elaborate. On her last afternoon in Jerusalem, I reluctantly agreed to let her meet him, but only briefly—I deliberately waited until Daniel was on his way to catch a bus out of town and asked if he’d stop by my apartment with just five minutes to spare. (I marvel that here, too, he indulged me, never once patting me on the shoulder and saying “Don’t be a ninny”—which was what I surely deserved.) Since we kept our relationship just between us for so long, it was only later that we discovered how intimately connected our families already were—my brother had gone to camp with his sister, my sister had gone to college with his brother, and my
other sister belonged to the same campus community where Daniel had gone to graduate school.

  With so much else to talk about, Daniel and I never engaged in Jewish geography—a game I try to avoid. When I introduce myself, I generally offer only my first name unless pressed; in the circles in which I travel, most of the people I meet are likely to know at least one member of my immediate family. It seems far more likely to be known than unknown in a world of increasing interconnectedness, and I would like to be free to introduce myself on my own terms. Early in our relationship Daniel and I read Whitman’s poem about the “noiseless patient spider” standing isolated on a promontory, launching “filament, filament, filament out of itself, ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.”2 I wanted that gossamer thread I was flinging to catch, but I was not yet ready to get caught up in an elaborate web of social networks.

  Living in Jerusalem, I knew all too well that it is impossible to share something with a friend and expect it to stay a secret, because as the Talmud states in Bava Batra (28b), “Your friend has a friend, and your friend’s friend has a friend.” The Jerusalem I inhabit is less a city than a small village of overlapping social circles in which everyone knows (and talks about) one another. The street where I work, Emek Refaim, is lined with a dozen small cafes with glass storefronts, and anyone who walks by can see everyone inside. When I walk down this street, I am conscious of all the pairs of eyes that might possibly be upon me at any moment. Were I to sit in the windows of one of those cafes with Daniel, I was convinced that half the city would know, within moments, that we were together. And the city was not even the limit, because Jerusalem is one of the most popular tourist destinations of Jews the world over. I am constantly running into people from earlier stages of my life: a classmate from my Jewish day school, an acquaintance from Harvard Hillel, an old friend from the Upper West Side. Everyone passes through Jerusalem, as a friend once joked in the refrain of a sestina.

  Of course, the other side of the coin is that sometimes being seen is deeply affirming. Part of what made me feel most at home in Jerusalem was the number of familiar faces I spotted whenever I walked down Emek Refaim. The name of the street literally means “The Valley of the Ghosts,” though for me it has generally been a pleasant haunting. At the time I followed a rather predictable schedule, and so each day I’d see many of the same faces—the fellow 6:00 a.m. joggers, always at the same part of the jogging path at the same time each day; the mothers pushing their kids in strollers to preschool just when I was coming back from my daf yomi class; the owner of the stationery store who walked down my street each morning on his way to work. And then there were my friends who lived in the neighborhood, whom I’d run into at the bakery on Friday mornings, or at the coffee shop in the afternoons, or at the bus stop. The brief exchanges of pleasantries with those I knew by name, and the smiles and nods from those I did not, contributed significantly to my sense that I was known, recognized, acknowledged.

  Still, I did not want all those familiar faces to know and recognize and acknowledge Daniel’s role in my life—at least not yet. First I needed to figure out just how much a part of each other’s lives Daniel and I would become. To some extent that answer was figured out for me by Daniel’s father, who was in faltering health and was determined to see his son happily wed. Seeking to honor his father, Daniel wanted to make it a fait accompli, whereas I was still on the fence. I loved Daniel, but how could I trust in his love for me? As we dated farther into Bava Batra, we came to the concept of the shechiv mera, a man who is on his deathbed. His words carry an authoritative weight that those of a younger, healthier man would not (Bava Batra 131a). I could not decide to marry on someone else’s timetable, but at some point I was going to have to take a leap of faith.

  When we got married less than a year after we’d met, it was a fearful and thrilling leap, and one that called to mind another tiger poem, Eliza Griswold’s “Tigers,” which describes two lovers standing at the edge of a precipice with tigers threatening them from above and below. As they cling to a vine at the edge of the cliff, they resolve, “Let us love one another and let go.”3 I told myself that there were tigers above and below; there was as much to fear if I did not marry Daniel as there was to fear if I did. There were no guarantees, but I could live my life based on either what I hoped would happen, or what I feared might happen. And so marrying Daniel was less an act of courage than an act of faith. When confronted with tigers above and below, I chose Griswold’s pluck over Blake’s terror.

  * * *

  Our wedding took place in New York and not Jerusalem because we thought it would be easier for Daniel’s father, who walked him down the aisle. He was still strong enough—or perhaps invigorated enough by the magnitude of the moment—to leave his walker at the end of the synagogue aisle and lean on Daniel, who was supported by his mother on the other side. A marriage ceremony is traditionally regarded as a time of divine favor in which our prayers are more likely to be answered, as if the poles of the wedding canopy could pierce the heavens. I felt the gravity of the moment as I stood at Daniel’s side, facing my father, who was conducting the ceremony. I prayed for Daniel’s father, and I prayed for us, and I tried not to look past the edge of the canopy. There were nearly three hundred people in the room, and my knees were quaking.

  I knew that I loved Daniel, and he had convinced me that he loved me. But such a public avowal of our love for one another seemed antithetical to my Dickinsonian sensibilities—I told Daniel that I would be very glad to celebrate our nuptials, but first I wanted to elope for a few years and make sure that it was really going to work.

  “How can you know what will be with us?” I asked him. “Are you a prophet that you can see what the future holds?”

  “No,” he responded, “but you are a scholar of Torah, and a scholar is preferable to a prophet,” he told me, quoting from Bava Batra (12a).

  “Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” I pressed on, invoking a William Matthews poem we had read together.

  The allusion was not lost on Daniel, who was quick to tell me that I was like a great city to him, or like a park that finds new ways to wear each flounce of light. “Soil doesn’t tire of rain,” he quoted right back at me just moments before he walked down the aisle.4 He had the last word, and I could only follow him with my eyes and smile.

  At the time we were almost at the end of Bava Batra, where the Mishnah (98b) teaches about a person who accepts a contract from a friend to build a wedding house for his son. In considering the minimum size of house that is acceptable for this purpose, the rabbis draw an analogy to the Temple, which is often used as the model for other structures in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Hanina points out a contradiction between two different measurements of the Temple stated in two verses from the book of Kings—in one verse, the Holy of Holies is thirty cubits high; in another verse, it is twenty. The Talmud resolves this contradiction by explaining that one measurement refers to the height of the Holy of Holies from floor to ceiling, whereas the other measurement starts from the tops of the cherubs, which were ten cubits tall, and goes up to the ceiling. But why would one opt to measure from the tops of the cherubs rather than from the floor? The Talmud answers that this way of measuring comes to teach that all thirty cubits of the Holy of Holies were as empty as the uppermost twenty because the cherubs took up no physical space.

  As the Talmud goes on to relate, the cherubs were “suspended in a miracle” (99a), hovering in spiritual space alone. This phrase spoke to me as someone who lives very much in my own head, walking through the world with my nose in a book and forgetting to turn off the stove until I come to the end of the chapter. Daniel has wide-ranging intellectual interests, but he also knows how to drive a car, change a tire, and unclog a drain. My fears notwithstanding, I felt fortunate to be joining my life with someone who shares my intellectual and spiritual depths but is also practical and down-to-earth. We would both fill our home with books, I trusted, but Daniel would be the one to ensure I di
d not burn it down.

  The Talmud then explains that part of the miraculous positioning of the cherubs was due to the fact that their wingspans alone were equivalent to the entire width of the Holy of Holies. Where, then, were their bodies? The rabbis offer several possible answers: perhaps they stood on a diagonal, or perhaps they stood with their wings overlapping, or perhaps they stood with their wings protruding from the center of their backs like chickens. It is a delightfully whimsical passage, blending the profound and the particular, the momentous and the mundane—as marriage does, too. And it relates to questions of how to share space—how to make room for another person, and how to let another person into your space. That this space is the Holy of Holies is not incidental. I was privileged that Daniel was making room for me in his life. And although I was not without considerable trepidation as we stood on the precipice of our new life together, I remained hopeful that the wedding house we were building would always be a shared and sacred space.

  SANHEDRIN

  Another Lifetime

  I learned tractate Sanhedrin during our first year of marriage, one of the happiest years I can remember. The tractate focuses on the administration of justice in Jewish society, including the composition of civil and criminal courts, the role of the king and the judge, and the forms of capital punishment. Friends joked with me that the Talmud’s emphasis on the value of compromise in judicial proceedings surely came in handy during the first year of marriage, a time of learning to live together and make sacrifices for the sake of each other. But it’s not really true. During our first year of marriage Daniel and I never argued, not even once; having met and married relatively late in life, we were both just so happy to have found that person whose needs we would gladly accommodate. It was a blissful prelapsarian stage in which, free of the stresses of raising children, we could simply enjoy the miracle of our togetherness—all the while learning about stoning, hanging, decapitation, and the Talmud’s other forms of punishment for the most heinous of crimes.