Jephte's Daughter (7 page)

“I hope a good one.”

“That is why you are here now, listening to the rantings of an old man. You must be a good one. Everything depends upon it. I am arranging a marriage for Batsheva in Jerusalem with the kind of person needed to carry on our family. I have just told her about it and she is a little shocked. She will no doubt tell you all about it and ask your advice.”

“Now, wait a minute. I just teach the child stories…”

“Let us not fool each other, my dear Miss Elizabeth. You have her trust, more than a parent. I am not asking you to understand and approve of how we live, just not to sabotage my efforts.”

“It will be difficult for me not to express an opinion, and I cannot lie.” Ah, that felt wonderful.

He nodded approvingly. “I am glad to hear that, because I need to believe that you are honest, trustworthy.” He sat down behind his desk and took out a checkbook. “My daughter tells me you are planning a trip to England to continue your studies at Cambridge?”

“I am waiting to hear about a scholarship.” Her eyes followed his poised pen intently.

“And when would you need to leave for this term of study?”

“As soon as possible. As soon as I hear about my grant.”

“Would ten thousand dollars be enough to tide you over? No, perhaps fifteen thousand with all the extra expenses. A graduation gift, let us call it.”

He wrote rapidly, a small smile lurking in the corners of his mouth. “I guess you will be able to leave soon. This week, no?”

She stood up and held her open palms against her cheeks. They felt so hot, burning with anger and embarrassment.

“You have a beautiful daughter, Mr Ha-Levi. I would not want to hurt you or her in any way.”

“Of course not, my dear, of course not.”

I ought to say: “Please do not cheapen this discussion by trying to bribe me.” That’s what they say in the movies, in books. But I may not get that scholarship. And Graham MacLeish, who had indeed shown up at Fat Henry’s with a bottle of champagne and a teenager he had introduced as his visiting daughter, had made his apologies and said that wasn’t it a wonderful coincidence that he would be guest lecturing at Cambridge next year, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if her scholarship came through.

She cashed the check the next day and called Batsheva from the airport that same night. “If you need me, write. I’ll be there for you.” Liar and hypocrite.

Israel’s major airport, Ben Gurion, is a tiny place by international standards, but one of unmatched variety. There you will find groups of Arabs with red or black kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads, sitting next to black Abyssinian priests and Hassidim in fur-trimmed hats and white stockings. There, too, are the Israelis returning from New York, Los Angeles, Rome, and Paris, outlandishly dressed and beaming from the heavy load of suitcases that bulge with mysterious and wonderful surprises, like the pockets of a small boy.

And always, as in any international airport in the world, there is the endless stream of exotic, seductively dressed women, who bring the pungent swish of nylon stockings, the heady mixture of expensive and cheap perfume, the inviting click of high heels down a long corridor.

Isaac Meyer Harshen—waiting to board the 7
P.M
. TWA flight to New York and from there the connecting flight to Los Angeles—saw, heard, and smelled none of this. Nor was he conscious of the women who briefly turned their heads to smile at him, or simply to stare.

It was his height that was the initial attraction. His long legs and slim, aristocratic body that even the plain black suit (battle fatigues of the army of the faithful) could not hide, made him an exceptionally attractive man. His hair was thick and dark and curly with small
payot
over his ears. His face was narrow, but distinguished-looking, with large, serious dark eyes and lashes extravagantly thick for a man. His short beard was a dark brown and neatly trimmed to reveal full, sensitive lips. His hands, too, were elegant, with long white fingers and immaculately clean nails.

He was totally unaware of the effect he had upon women. Indeed, had Isaac Harshen had the least consciousness of those who stopped to regard him with interest, he would have looked up immediately from the Talmud he was immersed in, pursed his lips in disdain, and whispered:
prutzas
. Whores.

Isaac Meyer had never been out of Israel before. As a matter of fact, except for several trips to visit other yeshivoth in Bnei Brak, or to pray at the graves of saints in Hebron, Bethlehem, Safad, and Tiberias, he had hardly been out of Jerusalem. Ever since his father had wrapped him in a prayer shawl at the age of three and delivered him to the rebbes at the
heder
, he had followed a straight and narrow path from his home in Meah Shearim to the yeshivah and back again, with few detours.

He had never listened to radio broadcasts, even the news, because it might taint his purity of thought; and a television, which did even more to excite the imagination, was completely
treife
, full—he had heard—of lewdness and all kinds of evil temptations, as were movies, concerts, plays, museums, and all other places where men and women were allowed to mingle freely, leading to adultery and all kinds of looseness. This was the clear opinion of the men who taught him and brought him up and he had never had either the inclination or the courage to question it.

His rebellions had been brief and swiftly crushed. He had not liked the first day in
heder
, although the rebbe had tried to ply him with sweets, to sing and dance with him. He had wanted his mother and had cried for her. But, slowly, he had given up hope and understood that he must repress his feelings and soon his mother would come back to him. But she never did really. Not completely.

From then on he was surrounded by a world of somber, bearded men: his father, uncles, grandfathers. They had taken him and shaved off all his long curls and left him only two long ones at the temples for
payot
. The stubble of his scalp had itched and itched until it grew in.

And all day, from 7
A.M
. until 5 or 6
P.M
., he spent bent over his books in the sunless classroom, endlessly repeating in monotonous rote the
aleph-bais
, the prayers, the words of the holy Torah. Until second grade he had rebelled in his heart and spent hours looking out of the window into the street, watching the men and the pretty women passing by.

But then a new teacher entered his life.

“You are wasting time for which you are accountable to your Creator, Isaac Meyer,” the teacher told him, pinching his ear and leading him to the corner as the children around him pointed and stared. “A person who passes by a tree and looks up to say ‘What a beautiful tree’ is deserving of death,” his teacher told him, “because he is wasting valuable time for learning Torah.”

The teacher had a long stick that reached far. It smashed the nails of those whose attention wandered even for a second. It poked the ribs of those who prayed too quickly, without the proper concentration and devotion. It tore welts into the backsides of those whose speech included impure words. Even Hebrew was not allowed to be spoken, the language of the land. It was the language of the Zionists, the unholy men who had degraded the language of the Bible into a street language. They spoke in Yiddish, studied in Yiddish.

He was afraid of the stick and desperately craved approval from his teachers, his parents, the other children. And then, suddenly, quite by accident, he asked a question that the teachers did not know the answer to. They looked at him in wonder. They called in the principal, and then the principal called his parents. They called him a
gaon
, a brilliant light of the generation. He began to study day and long into the night, always searching for better questions, but sometimes coming across wonderful answers.

And then he began to learn things by heart and found it very easy. It created a picture in his mind that he could call up at any moment. He could tell on what page and what part of the page of an eight-hundred-page volume a particular passage could be located. Soon he had learned every page in all twenty volumes of the Talmud by heart, as well as those in many hundreds of books of commentaries.

His teachers treated him with awed respect and solemnly discussed what should be done with his education when he reached his Bar Mitzvah. It was decided that he be entered in the city’s most difficult and exacting Talmudical academy under the direct supervision of Reb Avigdor, himself a widely revered scholar, author of many original commentaries upon the Talmud.

Under Reb Avigdor, his learning knew no bounds. He learned to use not only his memory, but also his perception and creativity, to make intuitive leaps of understanding between tractates to infer the solution to difficult points of law. Most of all, he learned to respect the letter of the law, dedicating himself to weighing the minutiae of Talmudical exegesis the way one weighs diamonds: If a man hires the donkey of another man to deliver a load of hay and he uses it instead to deliver figs and the donkey falls down and breaks its leg, destroying the load, who must pay? The donkey’s owner, or the one who rented it, and how much should the damages be, and on what grounds…?

At thirteen, he grew lip hair, and his voice began to change. Inside, he felt an uncontrollable longing he didn’t understand. He looked at pictures in the street of movie marquees with women in long clinging dresses in the arms of handsome men. He began to study the way the cloth clung to the bodies in the pictures, going over each detail at night in bed until the unthinkable happened. Then, full of guilt and apprehension, he would devise punishments for himself. Sometimes he would say psalms all day, and sometimes immerse himself in a cold
mikvah
in the morning, before the water was heated up for the day. It became pure torture to walk in the street, to be near women. He averted his eyes from them, as he was taught, so as not to let his
yetzer harah
, his Evil Inclination, rule him. It was as if an angel and devil struggled over his soul every minute of the day. Then, after years of repression, it became unexpectedly a little easier for him as he developed a fine sense of contempt for both his weakness and the women that aroused it. They were
prutzas
, or other men’s wives, or those who would one day be other men’s wives. Off limits even to look at. The dropping of his eyes, the fearful pounding of his heart, the almost hatred of himself for his longing, eventually became his habitual reaction to any woman who was not a close relative. His emotions, constantly and cruelly cut back like the shoots of living grasses, finally began to wither and to send out shoots no more. All his affection, his tenderness, he poured out into his studies and toward the old men who were his teachers and guides. Each word they uttered he wrote down like a lover, to pore over in private in order to extract the greatest joy and meaning from it. The teachers and their words—only they would give him eternal life. Everything else was chaff.

And so he had almost ceased to think of women entirely by the time he was twenty-three years old and Reb Avigdor approached him with the heady news about Abraham Ha-Levi’s visit and the search for a bridegroom for Batsheva. He knew he needed a wife. The Torah commanded one to “be fruitful and multiply.” He needed at least four children, two boys and two girls to fulfill this
mitzvah
. Also, vaguely, he understood that in order to keep learning, he must have some form of livelihood that either a working wife or a father-in-law would provide.

But now, actually on his way to meet his future bride (for so she would be, he had no doubt, if it was
Beshert
, if God decreed), he gave some thought to what he expected in a wife. If he had been before a congregation, or in front of a classroom, he would have phrased it thus: The only purpose in life for a true daughter of Israel was to bear Jewish children and to make it possible for her husband to learn. Whatever sacrifice a true daughter wishes and is fit to make to advance these two goals, was fitting. When a woman prayed to thank God for making her according to His will (just as a man prayed each morning, thanking God for not making him a woman), she prayed to be able to bear as many children as possible and to take every burden off her husband so that he might increase his learning. Of course this was difficult for the woman, but life was no easier for her mate. Man was made by God to be the scholar, while woman’s intelligence was given only to lighten his heavy load of Torah learning by being the wage-earner, cooking, cleaning, raising the children and keeping them disciplined and quiet. He knew nothing about the inner workings of a woman’s mind or heart, having only the stern example of his mother and sisters to learn from. And their narrow but not unhappy existence taught him this: that a pious daughter of Israel yearned and strove only to see her husband succeed in his studies. What other happiness was there for her aside from that and bringing children into the world? And if her joyous good fortune in life was to be the partner of a gifted
talmid chacham
, a Torah scholar, she would consider herself the most fortunate of women because in no other way could she ever have any stature in the World to Come.

He went to the bathroom and washed his hands. Being face-to-face with the ordinary people of the twentieth century made him feel contaminated, physically soiled. He looked at himself in the mirror, wishing his beard was already flecked with the gray of age. Only then would he get the total respect he craved. Only then would all his ideas be taken with total seriousness, not questioned as they were now by teachers and colleagues. The long, pointed stick of his rebbe was internalized now and he used it more mercilessly than his teacher ever had, beating himself into submission to some impossible ideal born of constant moral lectures on man’s need to improve himself. I must hurry, he thought. He was always in a hurry. The yeshivah taught one not to waste precious time. But often it became just a hurry sickness, an irrational anxiety. He hurried to escape his thoughts, to escape his worries. He hurried without reason or goal. But most of all he hurried to get away from himself, from his deepest fears, fears so terrible he could not face them. And what Isaac Meyer Harshen feared most was that he was a hypocrite and, ultimately, an unbeliever who did not think that God could search the depths of his soul, in which was hidden this fact. He understood this sin, but intransigently refused to repent. In pure fact, this was the one thing that helped him to maintain his sanity, the arrogance of his independence. On the outside, he kept every shred of law and custom. But in his heart he felt the dark, secret joy of doubt. To that part of his conscience no pointed stick had ever been able to penetrate. He washed his hands again and went out to join his rebbe.

Reb Avigdor, his teacher and mentor, was a man esteemed throughout the Jewish world as a final authority on many ritual matters. He admired Reb Avigdor with all his heart, but did not understand him always. Spending Shabbat with him, he would be startled to find the sage rising early to help his wife set the table for lunch. Other times, Reb Avigdor would say he had to leave early because he had promised his wife to help with the cleaning. The students would look at each other in amazement and search for the hidden, Kabbalistic meaning of such behavior, never dreaming that the simple truth, openly revealed, was all there was. Reb Avigdor had been asked to accompany Isaac to America. Unlike his student, he sat in the airport looking around him with a child’s wonder and simple pleasure. He had never been out of the country before, never been on a plane. He looked over the different kinds of people, averting his eyes from the most obviously immodest women, but enjoying the colors and sounds, the newness of experience. He regretted that his wife was not with him, knowing that she would have much of value to say about it all. He liked to talk to her because he firmly believed she was so much wiser than he. His open, cheerful face contracted a little, thinking about their last conversation. He had discussed this match with her and she had shaken her head.

“The girl has seen too much. She is not like the girls of Meah Shearim.”