Fervor, page 22
“You mean you’re on their side?” I said. I leaned forwards, and she removed her hand.
“Don’t be silly, it’s not a question of sides. I just want everyone to get along. Whether Tovyah likes them or not, his family are the only people who will ever understand him. Except you, of course.”
She asked if I would help bring about a reconciliation between Tovyah and his parents. She thought I might have more sway over her brother than I realised.
Meaning what?
“Meaning,” she said, “I think he might be a little in love with you. And after tonight, I can understand why.”
By the time I went to bed, I was dizzy. It wasn’t exactly a crush, but it wasn’t far off. I kept seeing her face in the shadows, recalling the sound of her voice. I could still feel her curled fingers against my thigh.
* * *
Over the course of the next two days, I hoped to catch Tovyah alone, if for nothing else than to wish him happy birthday. I had ummed and ahhed over what to get him as a present and was not entirely confident with my choice. But his door remained closed. He and his sister went out early each morning, and I had no idea how they spent their days. Other students were interested in seeing Elsie in the flesh too, but Tovyah managed to shield her from intrusive eyes.
On Sunday night, I was heading home after several drinks in town with the boy I was still, to my surprise, seeing. It was late, and on the long walk up Woodstock Road I found the streets deserted. A single car drove by, and the headlights blinked, startled by a speed bump. When I came in through the main gates, the college was dark and quiet. Apart from in the library, where the odd lighted window attested to the work of a few tireless students, no one was about, not even the nocturnal smokers you normally passed on the steps up to the great hall. Back on my own corridor, light from Tovyah’s room spilled through the crack under his door. My heart thumped. Looking at that sheet of light, I felt I was in the presence of something beyond simple good luck. This is hard to explain. I was overcome with a tremendous sense of peace. Like hovering on the verge of sleep. Woozy, lightheaded, perhaps a little sick. The more I looked at it, the more I realised something was off. As I watched, the carpet outside Tovyah’s room grew bright, then dim, and then brighter again. Strangest of all was the colour, a sort of dull gold. That doesn’t do it justice. It was a colour I had never seen before. I felt a wave of nausea. Then, as if compelled, I got down on my knees and traced the outline of the glow with my finger against the floor. Where the light shone the carpet felt warm to the touch. And I knew then, with absolute certainty, that there is a God who created the universe, a fog at the centre of the flame. Just as I knew that I loved Tovyah and I loved his sister also, that even though one of them was confrontational and difficult and the other I barely knew, I loved them both with a kind of selfless love that would last as long as I lived and perhaps beyond. The way God loves. God who created each and every one of us, who knows all and has always been there, and who watches over everything forever. Just as I had always known. And Tovyah knew it too. Despite everything, he must. And so, Hannah was dead wrong about her daughter. Elsie had summoned God’s light, and her children were celebrating His glory together. I felt a happiness so intense I thought I might pass out.
I heard voices, what sounded like a muted argument. Then a shout. But when I tapped on the door, the voices hushed, the light was extinguished, and all the warmth in the carpet was gone.
EIGHTEEN
The following day, a little hungover, and already embarrassed by the thoughts that had filled my head the previous night, I emailed Ruth, the rabbi at the liberal synagogue, to ask what she could tell me about Kabbalah. Without guidance, my own investigations had not taken me far, even after I’d swallowed my pride and visited the central libraries. The English versions of the Kabbalistic texts were mostly the work of oddballs and eccentrics, such as Samuel Liddell Mathers, founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a man born in Hackney who dressed up as an ancient Egyptian to perform magic ceremonies. I didn’t think he had much to tell me about the beliefs of actual Jews.
Ruth said it wasn’t her area, though what she understood of the Kabbalah, she admired. It emphasised personal connection with God over the performance of arbitrary rituals, she said, and did much to debunk the vengeful King of Kings depicted in the Old Testament. I liked Ruth, but her well-reasoned answer disappointed me. It was the more occult side of Kabbalism—how the fanatics had read the mystical texts—I wanted to know. The scraps I had picked up, mostly from Hannah’s book, did not satisfy me. Ruth said if I wanted to learn more, I should talk to Rabbi Michael, who ran the Ben-Scholem society. Odd that she should direct me to the very people who believed she had no right to call herself a rabbi in the first place.
Rabbi Michael was not in when I reached the society, but the doorkeeper I’d met previously was there. “Still working things out?” he asked me.
I left my name and number for the rabbi, and we arranged to meet the following day for a coffee in town. I had the idea he would see this as an opportunity for evangelism and arrived nervous. The rabbi greeted me with a broad smile.
“The girl who never came back!”
“You recognise me?”
“You came once and only once to Shabbat. You looked about as comfortable as the little boy who wandered into the ladies’ room.”
It was only now I realised he was American. I apologised for my absence, explaining that I attended a different synagogue these days. He asked which one. When I confessed that I was with the liberals, I expected him to tell me I was on an express train to Hell.
“Think I care about where you pray? It’s all Judaism.”
I berated myself. The night of the Schultz lecture, he and his congregation had welcomed me—a total stranger—with a warmth virtually unknown among atheists. Pull up a chair, they said, have something to eat. And when I had coldly and clumsily ignored their friendliness, he’d immediately forgiven me. No wonder Ruth had a genuine respect for him, despite theological differences. I asked if he remembered Tovyah, another student who used to go to his services.
“Of course. Interesting boy. Interesting family! I suppose you’re worried about what he’s going through. To tell the truth, me too.”
I asked if the rabbi had read Hannah’s book, and he said no, he didn’t care to.
“That girl has issues,” he said, “but she’s no witch.”
When I asked if witches exist, he laughed. I said what about golems or dybbuks, and he laughed again. “What is this? Been neglecting your studies, yes, spending too long in the cinema?”
“But doesn’t it mention witches in the Torah?”
“Wandering through the desert, the Israelites were frightened by an army of giants. Are such things true? It is true that there are some very tall men, and a tall man is a giant. To me, Michael Jordan is a giant, no? And guess what. I wouldn’t fancy my chances in a fight with the guy!”
“So you don’t take the book seriously.”
“Between you and me, Hannah Rosenthal should stick to politics. On Israel, she makes a lot of sense. On the nature of miracles, less so.”
We didn’t end up talking about Kabbalah. I suspected that Rabbi Michael would tell me much the same as Ruth, that the mystical books were not mainstream Judaism, but perhaps held a certain wisdom if you were patient enough to go looking.
Instead, we discussed Tovyah. He hadn’t been to a Friday dinner all term. The rabbi urged me to bring him along sometime.
“You know Tovyah’s an atheist, don’t you?” I said.
“Poor boy. There is no pain worse than the absence of God.”
Was that so? I thought of Tovyah’s door, a crack of light at the base. And I wondered again if the belligerent non-believer stuff was all a front.
When we’d shown up at the café, the rabbi had ordered a peanut butter brownie, confiding that these were his “great weakness.” He now dunked his brownie into his coffee and took a bite. I asked him about the biblical figure of Jephthah. This was the story Elsie rewrote for class, the story which got her worried teacher to send her to therapy, all those years back. The episode is the inciting incident of Hannah’s narrative.
“That’s not a very nice story,” the rabbi said.
I explained that it was connected to an essay I had to write.
“The first time I heard about Jephthah I was twelve. My Bar Mitzvah was coming up. At that time, I was really thinking about what it is to be a Jew. Why were we so different from everybody else anyway? ‘The chosen people.’ Chosen for what? As you can see, I was a real teacher’s pet, and I did a lot of reading on my own. And one night in my bedroom I read this awful tale. I was so upset, I ran to my parents and I said, ‘It’s off! I’m not becoming Bar Mitzvah!’ I thought my father was going to beat me black and blue.” The rabbi gave a sad smile, presumably remembering the old man, either dead or on the far side of an ocean, with no more violence left in him.
“Why were you so disturbed?”
“You mean you don’t know the story?”
* * *
According to the Book of Judges, Jephthah was born east of the River Jordan in the ancient mountains of Gilead and he rose from destitution to preside over his people. This was long after the death of Moses, but before the coronation of Saul. A difficult period for the Israelites. They lived in houses built rapidly from stone and slime, and families banded together under flimsy coalitions, not so much a nation as an assembly of vagrants, ragged men and women who argued over the price of livestock and cursed one another for their misfortunes. For hundreds of years, they’d been imprisoned first by one hostile neighbour and then by another, recalling the slavery in Egypt and Pharaoh’s whips. This was the blood-soaked world into which Jephthah was born, himself the progeny of sin—his mother was a harlot. Sorry, Kate, that’s not my word, and I don’t like saying it. But it tells you what they thought of her. Her name, I’m afraid, is lost.
Bastard is another word I don’t like, but it’s apposite. Again, forgive me. There must have been many bastards born in those chaotic years between the death of one Judge and the emergence of a successor, when so many Israelites had forgotten their Torah and had fallen to serving Baal, or as the Christians call him, Beelzebub. Not all were treated as harshly as Jephthah, though, cast out of Gilead by his legitimate brothers, assured he would not inherit a thing from his lecherous father. He fled to the edges of Canaan, far from his kin and from life as he had always known it. He settled in Tob. Whether he stood in exile, gazing over the low sands, and whispered to himself that Hashem had other plans for him than this, is not told.
Out in the strange land of Tob, mentioned nowhere else in the vast biblical narrative, Jephthah thrived. Endangered sons often see their luck turn around in the old tales—think of Daniel and the lions, think of Joseph winning first his freedom and then untold riches.
You know those stories at least? I’m kidding. Gentiles know those ones.
In exile, Jephthah made friends. He grew strong, fell in love, got hitched. He worked in the sweat of his brow, nurturing the land, and when he went to bed at night his sleep was unbroken by worries or regret. In time his wife gave birth to a daughter, the couple’s only child. Often the day’s end found Jephthah eating fruit in the shade of an olive tree, and bouncing the little girl on his knee as she babbled her enchanted baby-talk. If he hadn’t been marked by God as one of his people’s deliverers, Jephthah might have had a really happy life. You can’t say the same for Moses or Samson, murderers both, whose inability to contain the hurricane of passions they were born with always excluded them from the ordinary joys. Unlike them, when Jephthah first spoke to Hashem, he had everything to lose.
Now we come to the moment Jephthah’s destiny was sealed. Years passed and a day came when enemies from the East, the Ammonites, once again made war with leaderless Israel. And the elders of Gilead, the same men who once spat in Jephthah’s face and called him bastard, came to him for help. Somehow they knew it was this harlot’s son who would help them defeat their invading neighbours. “But you guys hate me, you kicked me out of town,” Jephthah said. “Why do you come now, just when you’re in trouble?” A reasonable question that contains its own answer.
Despite the resentment Jephthah felt towards those who had cast him out and cut him off, and despite the nameless dread now rising in his chest, he consented to lead the fight against the sons of Ammon. On one condition. He wanted to be made sovereign over all the people of Gilead. A high price, you’ll think, but it was a great deed he was being asked to perform, and the deal was struck.
Poor Jep. Why did he have to look for a higher station than the one that had contented him so long? The resentment of the bastard son, punished for the sins of his father, dies hard. And so, when Jephthah was called upon to serve his people, the people of his God, he bargained for his own interest. This arrogance, this self-centredness, did not go unremarked by Hashem, in whose book the words and acts of all the men and women on Earth are set down in ink so dark that even He is powerless to wipe it clean.
Don’t forget that, Kate. You can say you’re sorry, but there are no fresh starts. You want to start over, become a Christian.
On the eve of the battle with the Ammonites, the Spirit of God came to Jephthah and a second bargain was made. Don’t misunderstand. Hashem did not appear to our boy in the way He once appeared to Moses atop Mount Sinai. Nor did Hashem speak. So how did Jephthah know He was there? The Scriptures don’t say. I like to think he noticed the swaying of a candle flame on a windless night, or a tremor along his back. Regardless, Jephthah asked what generals have always asked their gods at such times: give me victory over my enemies, let me dance in the streets with all my conquering brothers. And in return he offered up an oath to Hashem, who had not forgotten how this bastard son likes to barter with destiny. “If you put those Ammonites under my sword,” Jephthah vowed, “then when I get back from battle, whatever comes out of the house first is yours.”
Animal sacrifices were common then. Had been since Cain and Abel—apparently our forefathers believed Hashem was pleased to see his lesser creatures set alight. Feel ok, Kate? You’re not vegetarian, I hope.
At daybreak, the red sun was low and massive on the horizon. The Israelite army, if you can give that name to the unorganised rabble, to the crowd gone mad, swelled over the plains and through the towns and hamlets. By the afternoon, blood ran through the streets of Aeror and Minnith and twenty cities besides. Jephthah stood in the thick of the battle, hacking at his enemies, half sick with the smell of gore. So many corpses festering in the heat, grown men crying for their mothers at the gate of death. When the sun sank into the sea that evening and the moon rose, the victory Jephthah had prayed for was his. Look how the bastard had risen: now he was not only leader of his people, he was a war hero, marked out for special favour by invincible Hashem. With a prayer in his heart, he knelt down, grabbed a fistful of earth, and brought it to his lips.
And then he made his way back home. You’re a smart kid, you see where this is going.
At the long day’s end, he reached the village of Mizpah in Gilead. With aching limbs, he trod the familiar road until his own house appeared, and there, rushing through the open door to meet him, her arms open, her lips stretched in a smile, was his only daughter. For a single ecstatic moment, he forgot his vow. And then, he remembered. “What’s wrong?” his daughter asked when she saw how his face fell. The news of the battle had carried, and she was looking forward to a celebration.
“I have opened my mouth to God.”
Jephthah hardly dared hope that Hashem might show him the same leniency that was extended to Abraham when he raised the knife to Isaac’s neck. After all, Jephthah made the vow of his own free will. But if not Hashem, perhaps his daughter would tell him what he wanted to hear, that he didn’t have to keep his word, that men before him had broken their oaths and lived. The young girl didn’t even ask what he’d sworn. Here was her father before her, the best man she ever knew, letting tears fall into the dust without even wiping his eyes. The tone she now used, whether it was bitter, resigned, defiant, ironic, or pious is unrecorded. “If you opened your mouth to God, then you must do as you have sworn.”
The girl’s mother, if she lived to witness this conversation, is not mentioned in the texts. Perhaps death spared her that horror. The girl, meanwhile, asked a favour. She wanted a reprieve of two months, to climb the mountains of Gilead and lament her virginity. She had no children, no one to carry on the line. Never has anyone wanted the sun to halt in its revolutions more than Jephthah did those two months. Each night he prayed that time would cease its march into the future, that the whole world would be suspended, that the morning would never break, and that every living thing would be stuck fast in its place forever. But Hashem was deaf to Jep’s pleading now, and the days continued to grind down as they always had. Soon the eight weeks were up, and the obedient daughter returned from the mountains.
The rabbis have observed that human sacrifice was explicitly forbidden by Mosaic law and so we should not take what is written at face value. Hashem would never allow it. Between you and me, I find this interpretation a convenient sidestep. It is known that these were dark years for the Israelites; brutalised by slavery and warfare, they had all but forgotten the law handed down at Sinai. Besides, Jephthah would hardly be the only man in history to convince himself of a relationship with God that never existed. Who knows if he could even tell the difference anymore between Hashem, Jupiter, Vishnu, or Beelzebub? All we are told is that whichever god’s name he believed he was acting in, Jephthah did with his daughter “according to his vow which he had vowed.”
