Deborah
Deborah’s earliest memory of Danny was the glint of the sharp knife moving toward his tiny penis.
Though there were people crowded all around her eight-day-old brother, she could see everything clearly from the arms of her mother, who was standing in a corner of the room, alternately staring and wincing.
Danny lay on a pillow on the lap of his godfather, Uncle Saul—actually a distant cousin, but his father’s closest male relative—whose strong but gentle hands were holding Danny’s legs apart.
Then the mohel, a tall, gaunt man in white apron and prayer shawl, placed a clamp around her brother’s penis and a bell-shaped metal shield that covered the tip down to the foreskin. At the same moment his right hand raised what looked like a stiletto.
There was a silent gasp as the males present all dropped their hands instinctively to cover their own genitals.
After rapidly reciting a prayer, the mohel pierced the baby’s foreskin and in a single motion, swiftly sliced the tissue all around the rim of the shield. Little Danny wailed.
An instant later, the ritual surgeon held up the foreskin for everyone to see, then dropped it into a silver bowl.
Rav Luria intoned the prayer in a mighty voice, “Blessed art Thou, O ruler of the world, Who has commanded us to make our sons enter into the covenant of Abraham our father.”
There was a sigh of relief, followed by a cheer.
A whimpering Danny was returned to his beaming father.
Rav Luria then called out to everyone to eat, drink, sing, and dance.
Since the Code of Law demands it, the men and women were separated by a partition, but even from her mother’s side, Deborah could hear her father’s voice above all the others.
When she was old enough to speak full sentences, one of the first things Deborah asked her mother was whether there had been a similar celebration when she was born.
“No, darling,” Rachel answered gently. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you just as much.”
“But why not?” Deborah persisted.
“I don’t know,” her mother answered. “That’s the way the Father of the Universe ordained it.”
As time passed, Deborah Luria learned what else the Father of the Universe had ordained for Jewish women.
In the men’s morning prayers, there were benedictions to the Lord for every conceivable gift:
Blessed art Thou Who hast enabled the rooster to distinguish between day and night.
Blessed art Thou Who hast not made me a heathen.
Blessed art Thou Who hast not made me a female.
While the men were giving thanks for their masculinity, the girls had to be content with:
Blessed art Thou Who hast made me according to Thy Will.
Deborah was enrolled in a traditional “Beis Yakov” school, whose sole purpose was to prepare Jewish girls to be Jewish wives. There, they read the Code of Law—or at least a specially abridged version compiled for women in the nineteenth century.
Their teacher, Mrs. Brenner, constantly reminded the girls that they were privileged to help their husbands fulfill God’s injunction to Adam to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”
Is that all we are, Deborah thought to herself, baby machines? She did not dare ask it aloud, but rather waited impatiently for Mrs. Brenner to provide an explanation. The best her teacher could offer was that since women were created from one of man’s ribs, they are therefore only part of what men are.
Pious though she was, Deborah could not accept this folklore as fact. And yet, she did not dare give voice to her skepticism.
By chance, years later when he was in high school, Danny showed her a passage from the Talmud that she had never been allowed to read during her own education.
It explained why, during intercourse, a man must face down and a woman upward: a man looks at the earth, the place whence he came, a woman at the place where she was created—the man’s rib.
The more Deborah learned, the more she became resentful. Not only because she was regarded as inferior, but because the sophistry of the teachers tried to convince the girls that this was not really the case—even while explaining that a woman who gives birth to a boy must wait forty days before she becomes “pure” again, whereas one who gives birth to a girl must wait eighty days.
And why, when a tenth man was lacking to make a quorum needed for prayers, could no Jewish woman be counted as a substitute, although the final place could be filled by a six-year-old boy!
When in synagogue, she dared to peek over the curtain fringing the balcony where she sat with her mother and the rest of the women. She would look at the parade of old men and teenage boys called up to read the Torah and ask, “Mama, how come nobody up here ever gets a chance to read?”
And the pious Rachel could only answer, “Ask your father.”
She did. At lunch that Sabbath. And the Rav replied indulgently.
“My darling, the Talmud tells us that a woman should not read a Torah portion out of respect for the congregation.”
“But what does that mean?” Deborah persisted, genuinely confused.
Her father answered, “Ask your mother.”
The only person she could rely on for straight answers was her brother, Danny.
“They told us that if women stood in front of the male worshipers it would confound their minds.”
“I don’t get it, Danny. Could you give me a for instance?”
“Well,” her brother responded uneasily, “y’know. Like Eve when she gave Adam … you know …”
“Yes.” Deborah was becoming impatient. “That I do know. She made him eat the apple. So what?”
“Well, that sort of gave Adam ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Hey, Deb,” Danny apologized, “they haven’t told us that yet.” To which he added, “But when they do, I promise I’ll tell you.”
Ever since she could remember, Deborah Luria had wanted the privileges bestowed upon her brother at his circumcision. But as she grew up she was obliged to face the painful fact that she could never serve God to the fullest … because she had not been born a man.
PART I
1
Daniel
When I was four years old, my father called me into his study and lifted me onto his huge lap. I can still remember the sagging wooden bookshelves filled with tall leather volumes of the Talmud.
“All right,” he said gently. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
“What’s that?” I inquired.
“Well, naturally,”—my father beamed—“God is the beginning—as well as the unending. But you’re still too young to delve into mystical concepts. For today, Daniel, we’ll just start with aleph.”
“Aleph?”
“Well pronounced,” my father said with pride. “You now know one letter of Hebrew.”
He pointed to the second symbol on the page. “And what comes next is bet. So now you can see we are learning the Hebrew aleph-bet.”
And so we continued for the remaining twenty letters.
Curiously, I don’t remember having to struggle with a single thing my father taught me. It all went straight to my heart and mind from his, and burned there like the eternal light above the Holy Ark in synagogue.
The next thing I knew I was reading in Hebrew the first words of my life: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth …,” which I duly rendered into Yiddish.
This German-Hebrew dialect, which first evolved in the medieval ghettos on the Rhine, was still the language of our everyday life. Hebrew was sacrosanct, reserved for reading holy texts and prayers. And thus I repeated the first words of Genesis, “In Ershten hut Got gemacht Himmel un erd.”
My father stroked his gray-flecked beard and nodded. “Well done, my boy. Well done.”
His praise was addictive. I studied even harder to earn more of it. At the same time, on my father’s part there was a ceaseless upward spiral of incre
asing expectations.
Though he never said it, I knew that he assumed I would absorb this knowledge into the very fiber of my being. By some miracle I learned it all—the holy words, the sacred laws, the history, the customs, the intricate attempts of scholars through the ages to extract God’s meaning from a wisp of commentary.
I only wish my father had been a little less proud, because the more I knew, the more I realized how much I still had to learn.
I know each morning Father thanked the Lord for his great gift. Not just a son but—as he always put it—such a son.
I, on the other hand, was in a constant state of anxiety, fearing I might disappoint him in some way.
Father towered over other rabbis, physically as well as spiritually. Needless to say, he also towered over me. He was a large man, well over six feet, with shining black eyes, and while both Deborah and I inherited his dark complexion, unhappily for her, she got his height.
Papa cast a long shadow over my life. Whenever I was chided in the classroom for some minor lapse, the teacher always tortured me with comparisons: “This from the son of the great Rav Luria?”
Unlike my fellow classmates, I never had the luxury of being able to be wrong. What was innocent for others somehow was regarded as unworthy when it came to me: “The future Silczer Rebbe trading baseball cards?”
And yet I think that was why my father didn’t send me to our own school, on the same street as our house. There, I might have gotten special treatment. There, such sins as giggling at the teacher—not to mention tossing chalk at him when he turned to the blackboard—might have gone unpunished.
Instead, I had to make the long—and sometimes perilous—journey from our house to the notoriously rigorous Etz Chaim Yeshiva ten blocks north, an institute of learning where the principal was known as the greatest rabbi of the century—the twelfth century.
Each school day, including Sundays, I rose at dawn to say morning prayers in the same room as my father, he wearing his phylacteries and prayer shawl, swaying as he faced east toward Jerusalem and praying for our people’s restoration to Zion.
In retrospect, this puzzled me—especially since there was now a State of Israel. Yet I never questioned anything this great man did.
School began promptly at eight and we spent till noon on Hebrew subjects, mostly points of grammar and the Bible. In our early years we concentrated on the “story” parts—Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and Joseph’s multicolored coat. As we grew older and more mature—that is, at about eleven or twelve—we began to study the Talmud, the massive compendium of Jewish civil and religious law.
The first of its two parts merely sets forth the precepts codified by subject. These contain no fewer than four thousand rules and postulations.
I sometimes wondered how my father could retain so much of this inside his head. Indeed, he seemed to know by heart not only the precepts but the commentaries as well.
Talmud class was like a junior law school. We began with obligations concerning lost property, and by the end of the semester, I knew, if I happened to come across fruit spilled out on the ground, whether I could keep it or must turn it in.
At noon, we all went down to lunch where we could see across the room our female schoolmates, who were segregated for the Hebrew classes. After dessert, always little square bits of canned fruit salad, we sang grace, and the older boys had to rush upstairs to the synagogue to say afternoon prayers before our secular studies began.
From one o’clock till half past four, we lived in a completely different world. It was like any New York public school. We began, naturally, by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. At this point, the girls were with us. I suppose some modern sage had decreed that there was no harm in both sexes studying Civics, English, and Geography in the same room.
Except on Friday when we ended early for the Sabbath, it was almost always dark when we finally emerged.
Then I would wearily head home and, if I managed to arrive intact, I sat down and gobbled up whatever dinner Mama had prepared. Afterward I remained at the table doing my homework, both sacred and secular, until in my mother’s estimation I was too exhausted to go on.
I spent very little of my childhood in bed. In fact, the only time I can recall being there more than a few hours was when I had the measles.
For all its near-sweatshop regime, I loved school. Our double day was like two banquets of knowledge for my hungry mind. But Saturday was my special Day of Judgment. For then I had to show my father what I had learned that week.
He was quite simply the Almighty Power in my life and—just as I imagined the Jewish God to be—incomprehensible, unknowable.
And capable of wrath.
2
Timothy
St. Gregory’s parish school was doubly religious. The boys and girls would begin each school day with an affirmation of both Faiths: Americanism and Catholicism.
Regardless of the weather, they would assemble in the concrete playground, where Sister Mary Immaculata would lead them first in the Pledge of Allegiance and then the Paternoster. On cold winter days their words came out in little white puffs, sometimes—symbolically enough—briefly turning the school yard into a kind of terrestrial cloud.
They would then file inside, respectfully silent—for they feared Sister Mary Bernard’s ruler no less than hell-fire and damnation.
There were occasional exceptions. Self-styled tough guys like Ed McGee and Tim Hogan were fearless enough to risk the next world for the sake of pulling Isabel O’Brien’s pigtails.
Indeed, there were moments of such rowdiness that Sister actually despaired of the boys’ salvation. By the end of September she had begun to include in her nightly prayers a special plea that Our Lady send a speedy end to this semester. Let the incorrigible duo terrorize a stronger soul than hers.
At the door of every classroom there was a stoup of holy water so that each child could dip his fingers and bless himself, or—in the case of Tim and Ed—flick drops on some hapless victim’s neck.
The parochial school curriculum was like that of ordinary public schools—Math, Civics, English, and Geography, and the like—with one significant addition. As early as kindergarten, the Sisters made it clear that at St. Gregory’s the most important subject was Christian Doctrine—“To live and die a good Catholic in this world in order to be happy with God in the next.”
Sister Mary Bernard was obsessed with the early martyrs. She would often read to her class with relish the gory details from Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Her already rubicund face would become nearly crimson, perspiration fogging her thick spectacles, which sometimes, as her fervor mounted, would slide down to the end of her nose.
“The mad Emperor Nero was especially cruel,” she expounded. “For he had our holy martyrs torn to pieces by hungry dogs—or smeared with wax and then impaled with sharp stakes to be ignited and serve as torches.”
Even at horrifying junctures like this, Ed McGee was not beyond whispering, “Sounds like fun, Timmo. Why don’t we try it on O’Brien?”
When Sister Mary Bernard felt her audience was sufficiently mesmerized, she would close the book, wipe her brow, and come to the moral message.
“Now, boys and girls, you must remember this was a privilege. For if you are not a Christian, suffering all the fires of a thousand hells will not permit you to be called a martyr.”
This modulated into another of her more frequent themes: the others in the outside world. The unbaptized. The heathen. The damned.
“You must refrain from—indeed, avoid at any cost—friendship with non-Catholics. For these are not people of the true Faith and they will go to Hell. It is easier to recognize the Jewish people by the way they look and dress. But the greatest danger is from Protestants—they’re hard to spot and will often try to convince you they are Christians.”
After learning how to avoid eternal damnation, they turned to their next priority—preparation for their first Holy Communion.
They be
gan to learn the catechism.
Each week they were obliged to commit to memory a certain number of questions and answers from this fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church.
What are the chief punishments of Adam which we inherit through original sin?
The chief punishments of Adam which we inherit through original sin are: death, suffering, ignorance, and a strong inclination to sin.
What is the chief message of the New Testament?
The chief message of the New Testament is the joyful salvation through Jesus Christ.
Their textbook contained discussion questions with homespun examples.
“Isabel O’Brien.” Sister Mary Bernard pointed to the red-haired girl sitting near the window.
“Yes, Sister?” Isabel asked, obediently rising to her feet.
“Isabel, if a girl loves her radio more than her rosary, is she going full speed toward Heaven?”
The little girl’s pigtails whipped across her face, as she shook her head. “No, Sister. That would mean she’s going full speed toward Hell.”
“Very good, Isabel. Now, Ed McGee—”
The stocky boy slouched upward to an approximation of vertical.
“Yes, Sister?”
“Suppose a boy spends five hours a day playing ball and only five minutes praying. Is he doing all he can to love God?”
All eyes in the class were on Ed. They knew Sister had been saving this one especially for him.
“Well?” she demanded impatiently.
“Uh,” Ed temporized, “that’s a real tough question.” Twenty-four pairs of little hands tried to stifle twenty-four high-pitched giggles.
“Come here immediately,” ordered Sister Mary Bernard.
Ed ambled toward the front of the room, knowing full well what was in store. Before Sister even asked, he held out his palms. She glared at him, then sharply struck his outstretched hands, as Ed tried to maintain his smirk without wincing.
The teacher then admonished the entire class. “There’ll be more of that for anyone who dares to act disrespectfully.”