Current Project

Earlier, during the prayers leading up to the Torah service, I had peeked through the divider, seeking a glimpse of my son, hoping to fulfill my own curiosity about the men on the other side: what did they look like? Were they looking over at us? Despite the best intentions of the ancient rabbis, or perhaps secretly precisely because of them, there was a deeply erotic charge to this whole secluded enterprise. I imagined myself a millennium earlier, peering through Moorish screens in Cordoba or Grenada, engaged in the very same Jewish woman’s curiosity about the men on the other side of the screen…

…I ran from my mother those many decades ago, I ran from her fears and her sorrows. I ran to the men’s world of debate and speculation. I live there still, and I find it a congenial world. But I know that somewhere my mother sits, and all her mothers before her, waiting for me to return, waiting for me to bring them into the light.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, how symbolic diseases can be.” We are talking over an Asian Fusion dinner, two modern women in a sophisticated urban restaurant. It’s hard to talk this way, for we are educated, rational, skeptical. Each of us recounts the war stories of contemporary privileged life: a brush with cancer, too early death by cardiac arrest. Malfunctions of the immune system: lupus, MS. Malfunctions of the reproductive systems, human echoes of the fish blighted by pollution: infertility, multiple miscarriage, diseases of the breast, the ovaries. Odd complications after simple cataract procedures. And then we hint at the symbolic resonance: diseases of the heart, of the organs of sex and creation of life, of the ability to see.

Rabbi Isaac Luria, the Kabbalist of Tzfat, taught that our souls can only function in a physical body. No physical body, he taught, without its task of tikkun, repair of the world or the soul. More important, he taught, no repair of the soul or the world without a body. This material existence is all we have, he cautioned; this is the stage on which we play out our cosmic roles, do our holy work. As above, so below. As below, so above.

“Do you believe that we have souls?” These are not topics for polite conversation. Not topics fit for dinner in an Asian Fusion restaurant. We lower our voices, lean closer. “Do you think our souls have gender?” Share our secret musings: “Do you think our souls choose their path in life, choose to come in a female body?” Ponder the great mysteries, forbidden by mocking in our time: “Do you think your soul is male, here to learn the lessons offered by a life in a female body?”

“They were famous rabbis,” my mother would say. “Even though my father was a Hebrew teacher, it was my mother’s family that carried the line.” Then she’d go into one of her long, complicated family stories, intricate webs of people with strange names who had lived in places that no longer existed, that I could never find on a map, and anyway the spelling always changed, with so many different combinations of scz’s and iedcz’s that I’d lose the connecting thread. Besides, everyone in the new world claimed their old world family had been illustrious—the Jews all descended from great rabbis, the Poles from lines of counts and noblemen, the English all with royal blood, the French laying claim to chateaux in the countryside. It was tiresome, really, all this striving after lost family pedigree. Even as a child, I wondered why no one had ordinary ancestors.

Still, it’s you I long to know, Isaac SagiNaHar.

…..I am the daughter you did not have. If only I had been the one you were able to recognize as your true heir, the one who sat at your knee with her brothers and was initiated into the mysteries and joys of the tradition. The daughter you plucked out of the kitchen, away from the secrets of plants and herbs, fruits and spices, and led to the worlds of invisible knowledge.