Читать книгу Deathless - Andrew Ramer - Страница 11

In which the author reveals one of

the major lost secrets of her people

My grandmother Zilpah named her first son after the god Gad, who was one of the Elohim or gods, that we believed in, one of Asherah and Yahweh’s sons. My father Asher was her second son. Expecting a daughter that time she named him after the goddess herself, but I’m getting ahead of my tale. So let’s go back to Isaac.

The family business was flourishing, largely because of Rebecca, who was a natural businesswoman. Merchants were always stopping by her tent to see what she was selling. She and Davah her sister-in-law ran the whole concern after Abraham died. Rebecca was often on the road herself, visiting local princes and the petty kings and few remaining queens who ruled the city-states that dotted Canaan, bartering and trading. After Sarah and Abraham both died and were buried in the cave that they bought from Sarah’s lover Efron, Rebecca began to visit Hagar and Ishmael at Lahai-roi, the village they lived in, for she’d met an older woman named Suvah at Abraham’s funeral, liked her and liked spending time with her.

Usually Isaac stayed home in Beersheba when his wife traveled, watching over their sons and playing music. He was a very fine composer and had a lovely voice, which I inherited, as I was often told. He and Davah were both fond of a game that’s the ancestor of backgammon, and the two of them would play for hours, while servants looked after Esau and Jacob. One spring, however, Isaac decided to join Rebecca when she traveled out to visit Lahai-roi. Which leads me to another subject.

In my youth we had none, but in this day and age I find that there are three main taboo subjects—death, God, and sex. Death I know nothing about, personally, although I’ve witnessed it far more times than even an emergency room medic in the worst war zone or inner city hospital, so I’m quite an authority on it. I’ve seen people die in more ways than anyone else I’ve ever met. And I’ve seen people kill and get killed in more ways than a person ever should. On that one subject alone I could write an entire book. But I won’t. God is a subject that I have spoken about already. This seems like a good time to talk about sex, that other potent three-letter word.

A few years ago I read an article in a women’s magazine about how to heal yourself from the toxic values of a sex-negative culture. The author proposed that we remember the days when there were sacred prostitutes, and reinstitute them as sexual healers. I had to laugh, having grown up with what you call sacred prostitutes and counting several among my friends and family, our family. But, and I speak with authority here—you can’t have sacred prostitutes in a sex-negative culture. They can only exist in a place and time when sex is considered holy, when people are conceived in joy, raised in joy, and come to their own sexuality in that way—joyfully. You can’t reinstitute sacred prostitutes any more than the founders of the first kibbutzim could raise non-authoritarian non-bourgeois non-ghettoized children by mandating and enforcing new childrearing practices. In other words, you can’t turn a dog back into a puppy, or a sex-constrained adult into someone who’s free in their body and hasn’t ever felt any shame.

When I was a girl we had sacred prostitutes, although that’s not what we called them. We called them Holy Ones, “holy” from the same root as the word you used today to refer to God—Kadosh—Holy, Set Apart. But in my youth the culture was already changing. Shame was first appearing, an unforeseen by-product of the expansion of the patriarchy, which seemed a good thing at the time, just as automobiles seemed good at first. No more horseshit in the streets. Who knew that what you can’t see or smell or step in would turn out to be far more toxic? Same with sex-negativity. It seemed like a way to channel energy into more productive avenues. Alas, looking back on two and a half thousand years of sex-negativity I would have to say that all it’s done is channel energy into rage, resentment, and destruction. But in the time of Isaac there was almost no shame around sex or the human body. The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent hadn’t been told yet, but it would be later on—a story told to defame the goddess and her serpent, not for us phallic but a symbol of her umbilical cord, that serpent a living creature come to share the Goddess’s wisdom with the first two human beings. Back in my youth when people fell in love they believed that they were encountering one of the Elohim through their beloved. (You can read about the lasting influence of this idea in some interpretations of Song of Songs in the Bible, and by reading some of the wonderful poems of Rumi. Another wonderful man. I met him once in a tavern reciting some of his poetry.) Among the Elohim were many who took lovers of both genders, and sometimes contained more than one gender within themselves. This is challenging for me to talk about, not because it’s about sex but because in those days we had no such labels as straight, gay, bisexual, transgender. Or, we had all of them, tucked away inside ourselves, a reflection of all the Elohim, all their aspects to be embodied as we each saw fit. So, as you will see again and again in this story, people made love-choices in varied ways, which became problematic as the patriarchy became entrenched in our culture.

Having discussed sex, let’s go back to the story of Isaac. Remember that he and Rebecca went to see Hagar at Lahai-roi. The last time Abraham’s two sons had seen each other was at their father’s burial. Before that they hadn’t seen each other in years, so that last meeting had been a time of awkwardness and grief. Their next reunion was different. Isaac had mellowed over time, while Ishmael had remained wild and unpredictable. He was taller, darker, more brooding than his half-brother, but both of them shared the same father-wound. Abraham adored his first son, Ishmael, and it had been torture to him to send him away, but he did, and Ishmael never forgave him for that any more than Isaac forgave their father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz, humiliating him in front of his friends.

But over the days and weeks of that visit their families saw very different sides of the two men, which was both unsettling and enlivening. The past was behind them and when they saw each other again the brothers reconnected with joy. They laughed and talked and talked and went for long long walks. Night after night around a fire Isaac would sing and Ishmael would play his bone-flute. Sometimes they played songs they remembered from childhood, sometimes they sang new songs, or made them up as they went along. And little by little their hearts opened up in a way that I hope you’ve experienced yourself, like flowers in the sunshine. (I have.)

It had been years since Isaac and Rebecca had been physically intimate, but they were the very best of friends—and since friendship was what had connected them from the first, and because they didn’t know about sexual shame, you can imagine the mutual joy and laughter they experienced when they sat down to have a conversation one night around a crackling fire, and Rebecca admitted to Isaac that she was falling in love with Suvah—and Isaac shared with her his feelings about his brother. True, Ishmael had a wife, several concubines, and a good number of daughters and sons. But what he felt with Isaac was different. It was the meeting of two embodied gods, grounded in their prior history, and it awakened in each a depth of feelings neither had ever known before. So the long-separated half-brothers became lovers, their union later sealed, ironically and deliberately, by the head priestess of Asherah at Luz. Within a year Isaac had moved into Ishmael’s stone house in Lahai-roi, although to your eyes it would be called scarcely more than a stone hut. But it was the grandest building in the village, in fact the only building, in a small village of scattered tents. And that stone house became Isaac’s home for the rest of his life, his and Ishmael’s.

Now you can see now why there’s so little about Isaac in your Torah. Not because he was traumatized by his near sacrifice, which never really happened, but because the later redactors didn’t know how to redeem him, a runaway youth who nearly had himself castrated, fathered twin sons, and then became the lover not only of another man, but of another man who was also his half-brother. The writers, editors, and redactors couldn’t leave Isaac out of the story but they skipped over him as much as they could, so that only a few clues remain, the mention of Lahai-roi being one of them. The later editors retold the story about Abraham, Sarah, and the king of Gerar as if it had happened to Isaac and Rebecca, to give him what today would be called “solid heterosexual credentials,” because they had to leave Isaac in in order to get to his son Jacob, who they really liked. And then they told lots of stories about Grandpa Jacob, that multi-married adventurer, to distract us from everything they’d left out about Isaac, because we still knew those stories, back in the time of the judges and the first kings of Israel. But they did, accidentally, leave one little lingering clue. The word they use for what Isaac and Rebecca did out in the fields, “play” or “sport,” depending on how you translate it, is also used to talk about what Ishmael and Isaac did when Isaac was small, which is not what they did then, but which lay the foundation for what later happened—delicious and mature and sexy love.

In spite of what the Torah tells you, Isaac wasn’t buried in Hebron, in the same cave as his parents. He and Ishmael were buried in the same grave, at Lahai-roi, and all through the time of the judges and into the early years of the monarchy, young men who loved each other in Judah and Israel would go there to seal their vows. In fact David and Jonathan went there, but as the patriarchy grew in strength and same-sex love was outlawed, visits to the tomb were forbidden and the custom forgotten. But imagine how the world would be now, if the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac, at war in such painful ways, had always remembered that their founders were not just sons of the same honored father, but also lovers. There would be no war now, no hatred, no fear. Only love and joy would exist between our two peoples. (Although I tremble in telling this story, afraid that I will find myself having to go into hiding, like poor Mr. Salman Rushdie, for telling stories that will outrage the orthodox of both the Muslim world and the Jewish. Although, on the other hand, to make them rage together could be a unifying thing and perhaps what I’ll be most remembered for. We shall see.)

All of this background material is gradually getting us up to the time of my own birth, in that tent you’re probably tired of hearing about. So please stay with me for a little while longer and I promise you that you’ll get there, because you now know the story about Abraham and Sarah, and the story about Isaac and Rebecca, and Isaac and Ishmael. But before I go on to tell the story of the next generation, of Esau and Jacob and his wives and concubines and all twenty-five of their children, who were my father and my aunts and uncles, let me tell you about Davah, purged from history by the Stalinist editors of the past. And then, when this chapter is over, we’ll be ready for that tent made of goatskins, washed and scraped with stones, cleaned and stretched out on frames in the sun to dry, then painstakingly sewn together with goat gut for thread.

As you now know, Davah was the youngest daughter of our ancestors Sarah and Abraham. All three of her older sisters, who were born in the north, went back there to marry and never returned to Canaan. But Davah, who was born in Canaan, remained there her entire life. Now, for several generations, as I may have said earlier, the family business was divided into two divisions, trade and pasturing. Archaeologists say that the Torah is wrong when it mentions camels in the time of the patriarchs and matriarchs because they hadn’t been domesticated yet, but they are wrong, as I told you in an earlier chapter. (See. People think the elderly repeat themselves but don’t know it. Not in my case. I repeat myself and I do know it. I like my own stories. They’ve kept me company for all these years, haven’t they?)

So yes, we had camels, although they were rare and expensive. It was Davah who decided to make camel breeding a third part of the family business. She ran it herself for years, and when she got older Leah helped her and then my Aunt Dinah ran it, before we all went down to Egypt. It’s because of my great aunt Davah that domestic camels are now common in the Middle East. She built up the business until we were making more from selling camels than we were from our flocks and our trading combined. And there used to be prayers offered to the God of Davah, El the Generous, for camel’s milk was a part of our diets way back then.

So, you know the basics of the story I want to tell you from the Bible, if you’ve read it, and I hope you have. For all my criticism of the book as it exists now, it is more than two thousand five hundred years old, which can be said of very few other books. It’s an artifact, like those wonderful statuettes done by Keturah and Abraham’s daughter Kalyah, which are found in museums all over the world. You may not like them, but would you go in and change them? A famous artist once drew a mustache on a copy of DaVinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa, and we write midrashim, stories about Torah stories, that are not unlike mustaches. But would we change the original because we don’t like it? No. And so it should be with your Torah. For all of its failings, it is an ancient text, one worth honoring, as you would if you dug it up somewhere, rather than found it in a library, or in the ark of a synagogue.

So all of you camel lovers, say a prayer of thanks to Davah and let’s move on with our story. Rebecca and Isaac had two sons, who were twins. The eldest, Esau, was just as the stories about him say, a kind of a jock, rough, rugged, ruddy, an outdoorsman. You can see why Isaac liked and encouraged him as he was growing up. Esau was all the things that Isaac had wanted to be when he was a boy—strong, determined, and independent. Butch. Isaac was like some of the tame suburban husbands I see walking on Venice Beach, kids in tow, but with a crazy wild look in their eyes, gazing out on the surfers. Each time that Esau went wild, beating up his brother, teasing the shepherd boys, stealing animals from the flocks and trading them for knives or bows and arrows, Isaac would take him aside and give him a good talking to, a talking to that never said in words but always said in tone, “Son, I’m proud of you! I collapsed after my one big rebellion. So do what you want to do and don’t hold back.”

Although Isaac left his marriage after his father died and spent the rest of his life in Lahai-roi with his beloved Ishmael, his sons were young adults at the time, finding their own way in the world. And Isaac was devoted to Rebecca for the rest of his life. She took over the family business and so they saw each other fairly often, and it’s Suvah her beloved and not Isaac who was buried next to Rebecca in that tomb in Hebron, the real one that everyone’s forgotten about.

Growing up, Jacob had been something of a mama’s boy, just as your Torah depicts him. (See, it isn’t all wrong.) You can understand why he was Rebecca’s favorite. Esau had no interest in the financial aspect of the family business. He liked nothing more than to be out all day with the flocks, alone, rather like his Uncle Ishmael. Jacob on the other hand was a people-person, and he was fascinated by the traders who passed through our region, going up to Mesopotamia, down to Egypt, and to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. He would stand behind his mother as she inspected their wares and worked out deals with them, staring at everything they brought as if it were food. As soon as he was old enough, Rebecca began to include Jacob in her work, increasingly allowing him to make deals for them all.

In alignment with their very different temperaments, the Torah redactors seem to paint Esau and Jacob as fraternal twins, but I remember the first time I saw my beloved grandfather’s twin brother. I must have been five or six and one day our camp that was really a village was all astir with the news that Esau had just arrived. Having never seen him before, and not having photographs yet, or even portrait painters, I was stunned to see hobbling toward Grandpa’s tent an ancient man with the same bent back, the same long scraggly beard, hairy nostrils, and the same eyebrows, thick and wiry, crawling over his dark wrinkled forehead like twin caterpillars, just like Grandpa Jacob’s. Sitting around a fire that evening, I kept staring at him, so very like my grandfather in looks and yet nothing like him in personality. The Torah focuses on personality and draws them as fraternal twins, but—they were identical!

From the Torah you would also think that Esau and Jacob were never close, but that wasn’t the case. Although they were very different temperamentally, they were like many sets of twins I’ve known down through the ages. My father told me that even when they were very old they would finish each other’s sentences. They got sick at the same time, and laughed at the same dumb jokes. And they were both pranksters. Here’s one that the family talked about for years. As young boys the two of them dyed a newborn lamb a deep blue and brought it back to Isaac’s tent, pretending that it was an omen, a magical lamb that had been born that way. Isaac, a joker himself, pretended to believe them, and told them he was going to make a special offering of it, and invite the entire family, even their cousins from Haran. Embarrassed, and in love with that little lamb, the two confessed, to the laughter of the whole clan.

Perhaps you have something like this in your family, a phrase or a slogan that means nothing to anyone else but a great deal to all of you. In my family, even when we were down in Egypt, if you wanted to tell someone how absurd something was you would say, “Look at that blue lamb,” and for centuries afterwards blue dye and blue threads held a special place among our people; think of the blue fringes on our garments. There’s another story like that in our family. It’s not a funny one, but in a funny way it led to a dietary tradition among our people, one that I’ll talk about a little later on.

According to the story in the Torah, Jacob, under his mother’s direction, swindled his older brother out of his birthright. The good news here, as it will so often be the case, is that however lovely a story it is, it isn’t a true one. But truth be told, Esau was happy to tend our family’s flocks and leave the trading arm of the business to his brother and the camels to his mother. The story, however, is a marvelous one, don’t you think? But the trickery and the discomfort weren’t Isaac and Rebecca’s, nor Esau and Jacob’s. The real discomfort belonged to the later writer of that tale, who didn’t know what to do with Isaac and wanted to both distance his listeners from him and yet somehow redeem him. And Jacob didn’t go north because he was fleeing from his brother’s wrath; he went north because of work. Over several generations the center of the family business had remained in Haran, run by Abraham’s brothers and their sons, so contact needed to be kept up with them. That’s why Jacob traveled north, and he ended up spending a little more than a decade in Haran, learning more about the family business from its heads, and getting richer himself. It was there that he met and married Rachel and Leah.

The story you know about Jacob working for seven years for Rachel and then being tricked on his wedding night when Leah ended up in his bed is another one of those stories that aren’t true. A later redactor of the Torah was very uncomfortable with the notion that his ancestor had married two sisters, which was forbidden in his own day, although not in Jacob’s. How to explain it? By inventing a trick, which was one of his favorite plot devices. But there was no trick. Jacob my grandfather was in love with Rachel but they were never able to talk well. However he and Leah had a great relationship. Those two could sit up all night talking, whereas with Rachel, there were always long stretches of silence, and not always the restful comfortable kind.

The two sisters were very close, and being the kind of man that he was, marrying two sisters who suggested the union to him themselves seemed perfect to Jacob, as several of the Elohim had married siblings, sometimes even their own. “My brother Esau is a real man out in the world, but I am a real man in bed,” is the kind of thing my grandfather Jacob might have said to himself. And each of them, Leah and Rachel, were given a servant as a wedding gift by their father, something horrendous that fortunately doesn’t happen anymore in most parts of the world. (I say this in case you think I miss the past and find it preferable to the present.) The servants, Bilhah and Zilpah, were also sisters, and both of them had children with my grandfather. Liberal Jewish congregations now add to their prayers the names of “the four mothers,” Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, but they usually leave out my own grandmother Zilpah and her sister. Fortunately for us, Grandpa Jacob saw us all of his wives and concubines and their children as equals. He was a wonderful father and grandfather. My father Asher adored him, and I did too.

My grandfather’s life was shaped by four defining events. You know them from the Torah in a garbled fashion. One was his encounter with an angel, the second was the death of his beloved wife Rachel, the third was the rape of his daughter Dinah, and the forth was the tragedy of being told that his favorite child, Joseph, was dead. The first event elevated him and the second three events nearly destroyed him. Fortunately the fourth event had a happy ending and I am grateful to this day that I had a part in it.

Grandpa Jacob was a shrewd businessman, a wise investor, and during the years that he and his wives lived in Haran he became even richer than he was when he arrived, which was how he was able to support all of us. But after eleven years in Haran he decided that he wanted to return to Canaan, to be with his own clan and to get out of the shadow of his father-in-law, Laban, who ran the family concern up north. Laban wasn’t too happy about them going; in fact, he had a huge fight with Jacob and refused to let them leave. That strange story about Rachel stealing Laban’s teraphim is grounded in something that really happened.

Contemporary scholars don’t know what teraphim were. But I do. Scholars speculate that the teraphim were household gods. Not quite. They were winged creatures who represented the goddesses and gods we called the Elohim. They were the power animals of those divine beings, in a way, their living thrones. But to understand what they represented back then I want you to think about the framed certificates you see in restaurants that tell you that they’re legally entitled to serve food and alcohol, and in doctors and dentists offices that tell you that they’re licensed practitioners. The teraphim, usually made of wood or clay or bronze, but sometimes carved from stone, were issued by various temples and let customers know that they were dealing with a legitimate business which was registered with the local authorities, to whom they paid taxes, and whose scales were regularly inspected by them.

Now Rachel didn’t steal the teraphim, and she didn’t take all of them. She and Leah and Jacob had a meeting with Laban to tell him they were leaving. He refused to let them go at first but Rachel negotiated with him, reminding him that the family business had prospered because of her and Jacob’s work. He eventually agreed to let her take two of the family’s seven teraphim out of the wooden chest where they were stored and leave with them. Those two small wooden teraphim were enough to set up the family business officially in Canaan, independent from the ties that had bound them to Haran since the time of Abraham’s great grandfather Serug, the first merchant in the family and the one who set up the family business. So it was Rachel who actually legitimized the family’s concerns in Canaan, and you ought to know that. But the redactors of your Torah were uncomfortable with the story of a woman of power, so they turned her into a tricky thief.

I remember the teraphim from when I was a little girl. They were kept in a wooden chest in Rachel’s tent. There were similar but not identical, one a bit larger than the other. Both of them had wings that spread out to their sides, and both of them had cuneiform writing on them, which let you know they came from two different temples and licensed their owners to operate two different businesses, one directed toward material trade and the other toward livestock. You’ll hear more about those figures and this chest so don’t forget about them. We took them down to Egypt with us, and they came out with us all those years later. But I’ll tell you about that when I come to it.

Now is the right time to tell you about the first critical event in my grandfather’s life. The family left Haran, and since so many people and flocks were traveling, it took a very long time to get back to Canaan, months and months. Then he sent two messengers ahead to let Esau know they were coming, and they returned telling him that Esau had planned a huge feast to welcome them back. Today a man who is stressed out might just go for a massage and then soak in a hot tub. The night before they all met up with Esau and his family, Grandpa went off by himself to visit to the nearby shrine of the god Baal Hadar, one of the Elohim. That’s the night when Jacob wrestled with a strange man and became Israel.

Today we might say that Grandpa needed more male energy to return home again after all those years and face his butch twin brother, so he opened himself up to an encounter with a man who served at that temple. His name was Uzzi and he was a holy one, a kedesh, which King James’s Bible casts into English as “sodomite” but which is usually now translated as “cultic male prostitute.” The story in your Torah says that Jacob and the man wrestled all night and that Grandpa’s thigh was wrenched out of its socket. But the truth is that “thigh” or “hip” was a euphemism invented by an uncomfortable man several hundred years later, who couldn’t acknowledge that a defining moment in Jacob’s history happened while he was being the passive partner in anal sex with a sacred priest trained in the Middle Eastern version of what we now call Tantra. Instead of telling the truth, that Grandpa had a marvelous spiritual experience that led him to change his name to commemorate the event, the “holy one” was later desexualized and morphed (I do love that new word) into an angel. But angel means “messenger” in Hebrew, and that’s what those kedeshim considered themselves to be—body-to-body messengers of one of the many aspects of the Divine.

In the 21st century, when people define themselves with labels, you might be inclined to ask yourself: “Was Jacob gay? Or, closeted?” Not a chance! My grandfather was what thirty years ago we’d call “a notorious heterosexual.” Today he would be labeled metrosexual, perhaps, but his father Isaac occupies a different place on the famous (or is it infamous?) Kinsey Scale. Way back then none of that had any bearing on who they were in their own lives. When a man spent time with a holy one and had wives and children, his encounter had very much more to do with his spiritual life than his sexual preference. Remember that. There is much I like about the present, but for all of its freedom, it is restrictive in different ways than the ones I grew up with, and this matter of labeling is one of them.

So let me talk about Grandpa Jacob’s wives and concubines, who are all so important to my story. Let’s begin with Rachel, who was Grandpa’s favorite. Everyone said that she was beautiful, round and shapely, with a busty figure like many of our goddesses had. And we are taught by the Torah to feel sorry for poor Rachel, as she had to wait for so long to have a son, while Leah had boy after boy. But the truth is that Rachel had a daughter Maacah a year after she was married, and then she had Joseph, two years later. Then she had Rabat, and then she gave birth to twin daughters, Tovah and Zillah. After they were born she delivered a stillborn boy, and then, just as the story still says, Rachel died after giving birth to her last child, a son she named Ben-oni, “Son of my sorrow.” Jacob renamed him Ben-yamin, which most people say means “Son of my right hand,” but which really meant, “Son of the south,” which is where he was born.

Rachel was buried in the region that much later belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, and it says so in the Bible. But people think that her tomb is on the road to Bethlehem, which was in Judah’s territory, and for generations a tomb there has been a place of pilgrimage, but just as the tomb in Hebron is the wrong one, so too is that one on the way to Bethlehem. Herod rebuilt it, but it was the wrong place even then. I tried to correct him, but that’s a story for later on, perhaps. Rachel’s death was devastating to my grandfather. It was a sadness that he wore like a garment, even years later when he married again for love, and even after his family had grown and prospered.

I never knew Rachel but I remember Leah, and I always liked her. Rachel was the favored wife, but Leah was the first wife, which is how they set it up themselves, and neither of them minded that. Rachel was very involved in the family business, but Leah loved being a mother and devoted most of her time to the family’s children, her own and everyone else’s. The Torah says that she was soft-eyed, weak-eyed, or doe-eyed, but I remember Leah very well and she had the most extraordinary eyes—pale pale hazel—the color of green grapes, big and shining. She had very dark skin. We all did. And there was something haunting about her face, with those pale eyes staring out from it. Even as an old woman she had a regal bearing. The Torah says that she had six sons and only one daughter, Dinah, but Leah also had another daughter, Rizpah. The two full sisters were very close. The Torah has some things to say about Dinah, and I have a few more, but that too is a story for later, about love and lust and other tents.

As I mentioned above, Rachel and Leah each had maids who they gave to their husband as concubines. These two women were sisters, just as their mistresses were, daughters of a woman named Helbenah. Bilhah the younger sister worked for Rachel. She was a tiny woman, wiry and quick. She spoke quickly, moved quickly, and she did everything as if there wasn’t enough time, which was a very odd thing as we didn’t have clocks or watches yet. It was just her temperament: speedy. All the women in the family had jobs, and Bilhah was in charge of food preparation. When I talk about my family I’m speaking of more than eighty-five people, plus servants and guests. Bilhah didn’t do all the cooking herself, but she did coordinate it, which was a lot of work, like running a summer camp, which I only mention because it’s something I once did, back in Germany, between the two World Wars, work at a Jewish summer camp. Maybe I liked her because I associated her with food. All of us kids did. Or maybe I liked her because of who she was, sweet and warm herself, femme in a way that I liked even as a little girl. She and grandfather had two sons and a daughter named Ahuvah. Sadly, Bilhah got into some trouble later on, but I’ll tell you about it when I get there.

In spite of a certain, I would say, natural nostalgia for the past, I can’t help but comment on the insanity of slavery, concubinage, and the insane way in which people were bought and sold and given away as gifts. These things all still go on, under different names, but they were horrible then and are horrible now, only it never occurred to me to question them for about a thousand years. So you have to remember that my grandmother Zilpah was Bilhah’s older sister, and Leah’s maid—her property actually. Eventually Leah gave Zilpah to my grandfather, as people did back then, and they had two sons together, Uncle Gad and my father Asher, and three daughters, my aunts, Bikurah, Hadar, and Yael. Grandma Zilpah was a taller version of her sister Bilhah, but she was very different in temperament. Bilhah was fast and my grandmother was slow. Her words were slow, her actions were slow. She walked with a slow rolling gait and she was always the last one done eating, to the annoyance of her sister, who liked to have all the eating utensils washed up and put away as soon as she herself was done eating. Not that our table was very fancy. To begin with, we didn’t have a table. We all ate sitting on the ground, from clay bowls, with our fingers, sitting on woven mats and animal skins.

My grandma’s job was shearing, weaving, garment and rug making. We needed a lot of it, cloth for garments, rugs and coverings for the floors of our tents, and for the backs of our donkeys and camels, although we also traded for a lot of the skins and fabric we used, and got a lot of our rugs from the Bedouins. Grandma was always bent over a floor loom, or doing hand-weaving from a loom that was strung between her body and a tree trunk, or sewing or mending, or embroidering. She tried to teach me and my sister Tamimah. I was terrible at it and Tamimah was good. Besides, by the time that I arrived, Grandma was always sick, with one thing or another, and spent more and more of her time in her tent. Looking back on it now I’d say she had rheumatoid arthritis in her legs, but we didn’t know about that then. We called what she had “the achy bone disease,” to distinguish it from the “stabbing bone disease, the “burning bone disease,” and several other similar disorders.

Even when she was sick, Grandma kept weaving. She had a wonderful sense of color and style. I would give anything to have one of her garments, but alas, none of them survived, except in stories. It was she who Grandpa Jacob went to when he wanted to give Uncle Joseph a special gift, and she wove and embroidered the cloak that you can still read about, the coat of many colors is what it’s usually called, although that’s not the case at all. It was deep blue and had long hanging sleeves, and I may have more to say about it later. Her hands were always stained with dyes, and she was the one who hennaed the hands and feet of all the women in our family. Once, in the late Middle Ages, I tried my hand again at embroidery, and made a cover for an ark using one of her designs. I worked on it for years and it hung for years in a synagogue in Mainz, but it wasn’t anything like Grandma would have made, and was sort of an embarrassment to me. I was glad when they threw it out after about thirty years.

Now you know the basic cast of characters for my tale, with one exception. After Rachel his beloved wife died, my grandfather Jacob married a third full wife, a lovely younger woman named Adah bat Idrah. She was a Perizzite, the daughter of a local chieftain, a woman of power and influence in our area. Idrah her mother did a lot of trading with our family. This is how she and Jacob met. Idrah’s family were well known for making what were later called idols, but we mostly thought of them as souvenirs or decorative art. I liked Adah a lot, and I liked her three daughters, Gali, Anat, and Batshuah. Now I can hear you muttering, “What the hell is she talking about this time? They aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible!” And that’s exactly my point. In the one that exists today women are only mentioned when something they did or was done to them had something to do with the men around them—and a wife who only bore her husband daughters was left out of the text along with those three daughters, who were my cousins and earliest playmates.

On this note (and notice please how short a paragraph this is) I will stop. The tent awaits. (And if you think I’ve forgotten about Dinah, or about Joseph’s disappearance, I haven’t.)