Erev Rosh Hashanah 2015/5776
Libertina
Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg
I want to open my remarks
tonight with a story, written by Ruth Calderon, an Israeli Talmud scholar and
former member of Knesset, with whom I studied this summer. The piece is closely
based on a surprising passage from the Talmud, and Calderon has embellished it
and developed the characters much more extensively than the original passage[1]:
Rabbi Hiya bar Ashi lies on the stone floor, spread-eagled.
He is praying.
It is market day, and his wife is out. He enjoys being alone
in an empty house. Only this way does he find peace. It is strange, since the
whole world lies open to him: the study house, the courtroom… She, his wife, is
quiet and earnest, always in her corner between the stove and the oven, dressed
in a kerchief and gown. Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, she leaves home
to go to the market.
“May the merciful one save me from the evil impulse!” he
utters his usual prayer…. He seeks to ward off untoward thoughts. He prays with
great fervor and concentration, until his heart pulses to the rhythm of his
prayers.
One day his wife returned home early and unexpectedly. . . .
When she left home [in the morning] he was standing in prayer, wrapped in his
tefillin. Shortly thereafter, she realized she had forgotten the basket for
fish and came back to retrieve it. . . . In any case, she returned at that very
moment when he did not intend for anyone to see him. He thought he had the
house all to himself when he cried: “Save me from the evil impulse! Saaaave
meeee from the eevil impulse!”
She was shocked to discover her husband prostrated on the
floor. . . “And to think,” she mused,” for several years he has not been
intimate with me. What evil impulse could he possibly be so afraid of?” A sense
of hurt and suspicion flared up inside her. Was there another woman?
She crept out of the room quietly and retreated to a side
room. She stood in front of the mirror, passing her hand over the lines of her
face. Her reflection was like the face of an elderly woman. Her kerchief was
drawn tightly over her forehead, concealing her hair. Her eyes were sunken.
Deep wrinkles lined both sides of her nose. . . . Each Friday evening she would
hope for him to approach her bed, but each Friday evening she was once again
disappointed.. . .
She fled outside, and walked distraught all the way to the
market. The color fled from her pale cheeks, and her heart beat rapidly. She
thought only of her pain and shame.
When she returned home, her face was restored to its natural
color. She set a pot to boil on the stove, rinsed fruits and vegetables,
preserved the leftover quinces, sliced cucumbers for pickling. All the while
she concocted a plan.
On Thursday she set out for the market as usual, early in the
morning. But instead of turning toward the western part of the market, where
her fellow housewives made their way among the stalls, she continued on, as if
in a daze. She headed in the direction of the caravans, toward the foreign
vendors whose stalls lay beyond the bounds of a proper woman. These vendors
came from afar and sold clothes, spices, and jewelry. . . Bangles jingled on
their ankles.
She approached, and with clenched hands she counted out her
coins. She handed over half the money reserved for fruit and all the money set
aside for fish as well as the small sum she saved from week to week to buy a
new cloth for the Sabbath table.
As if in a dream, she selected a dress, jewels, sandals, and
a belt as well as a bundle of myrrh. She unfolded her sack and placed
everything inside and then left without saying a word.
At an earlier hour than usual she set her steps toward home.
Nothing felt normal. The world was awry. … . She hummed to herself until she
came to the alley leading to their house. In a secluded corner she stepped into
the revealing dress, fastened the belt, freed her long hair from its kerchief,
tied a dangling jewel around her wrist and a bangle around her ankle. . .. She
tied the bundle of myrrh around her neck. . .. After she finished dressing, she
applied eye shadow to her eyelids with an unpracticed hand. When she approached
the cistern in the yard, she saw the face of a different woman entirely
reflected in the water: the face of Libertina [of Babylon,] she who instilled fear
in all married women.
“I am Libertina, …” she whispered. “May the Merciful one save
you.”
At that very moment Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi was studying in the
garden. A light breeze fluttered the branches of the pomegranate and olive
trees. The Mishnah he was learning was difficult, and his mind was unfocused.
Suddenly he looked up and saw the image of a woman – and what a woman she was!
“What, who are you?” he asked, spellbound. “I am Libertina…,” she replied
indulgently, enjoying the game. She was surprised to find that the rituals of
courtship came naturally to her. She made her way toward him in the garden, at
once close and distant, familiar and foreign.
(I’m going to skip a steamy scene
here, but you can use your imagination!!)
When he caught his breath again, she ordered, …that he bring
her a pomegranate from the top branch. He did not dare refuse her. His legs
were covered in scratches from the tree branches, and when he climbed down, the
branch beneath him broke, and he tumbled down after it. She took the fruit from
his hand….
When he limped to the house, his wife was already lighting
the oven. He was conscious of his torn clothing and the scratches on his arms.
He worried that the scent of Libertina clung to his hair, which was still
disheveled even after he combed through it with his fingers. His heart and soul
felt undone too. There was no way to take back what he had done. He was
consumed by guilt.
He looked over at the bench beside the oven, which seemed
suddenly so inviting. …He cast a parting glance at . . . . the good woman who
had borne him his children, who had once made his heart dance when he peered at
her through the lattice from the man’s section of the synagogue. The fire in
the oven burned high and red. . . He entered the oven and sat inside.
With her two strong arms, [she reached into the oven] pulled
out his faint body, . . .. When he awoke, his legs were wrapped in rags, soaked
in ointment.
She asked quietly “Why?”
For a moment he remained silent, and then he told her the
whole story. . . . She listened calmly, and when he finished, she said, “It was
I.”
He knew this was his opportunity for love, even redemption,
but he averted his glance. “But in any case, my intention was to transgress,”
he said.
She raised her arm as if to object, and her wrist jingled.
She unfastened the jeweled bangle and placed it on the table before her.
Surprising - to find such a
story in a 2000-year old rabbinic text.
And it’s so familiar.. . . Not
a Hollywood story of boy meets girl, boy and girl overcome many obstacles to be
together, boy marries girl. Here, the rabbis tell a mundane story of what
happens many years after the wedding. After the excitement of courtship, after
the birth of children. The husband and wife are now too familiar with each
other. The passion has faded.
And yet, the story gives us
hope. During the scene in the garden, we see that it is possible to breathe new
life into what has grown old.
On Rosh Hashana, this is what
we are prompted to consider. How have we grown old? Not necessarily in age, but
in how we meet ourselves, each other and the world. Where are we stuck? What
can we make new again?
In this story, Rav Hiyya is stuck
doing what he thinks a pious man is expected to do. He devotes himself to
repressing his passion, what he sees as an evil impulse, through obsessive
prayer. And the Talmud critiques him for doing this – it shows how his piety
has created distance between himself and his wife, whom he loves.
On the other hand, the wife,
whose real name we will never know, takes a risk. She tests her own limits, and
the limits that society places on her as a devoted, aging housewife. She heeds
a wake-up call, when she witnesses her husband on the floor groveling in
prayer. And for one afternoon, she takes leave of the expected. She doesn’t
skimp her money to buy a Shabbat tablecloth or smelly fish. Instead she
splurges on clothes for herself, and fragrant perfume. And by diving into the
unknown, she pursues the possibility of bringing new energy to her worn-out
life.
It is no coincidence that the
couple’s passionate meeting takes place outside among fruit trees. In rabbinic
literature, the orchard is a place of transformation – where boundaries can be
tested, and where there is potential for new fruit.
I don’t think this story is
advocating committing adultery. Instead, it provokes us to consider how we
might transform ourselves by leaving the security and comfort of what is known,
within the relationships and the life that we already inhabit. It
wakes us up to consider where we are stuck. It also shows how the energy that
we may perceive as an “evil impulse” can be channeled, breathing new life into
deadness.
Libertina, in the Talmud, is
the name of a famous prostitute from Babylon. But for the purpose of this
story, “Libertina” is meant to be understood as, “the liberated one” – the one
who is not stuck, and certainly not dead, neither in body or in spirit.
Libertina comes to test others to liberate themselves.
Ultimately, this story is about
fear. The fear of taking leave of where we are and of stepping into what could
be – who we could be.
Rabbi Alan Lew z”l, writes about
two different kinds of fear: pachad and yir’ah. Pachad
is the fear of taking leave of what is holding us back. Yir’ah is
the combination of fear and awe which we encounter in the act of
leave-taking. Pachad is the fear of leaving the familiar – Egypt.
Yir’ah is the fear of the unknown expanse that lies before us –
the wilderness.
Pachad is
what led the Israelites, as they were fleeing Egypt – Pharaoh’s army coming
after them – to cry out and complain, “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt
that you had to take us out here to the desert to die? Isn’t this exactly what
we were talking about in Egypt when we said ‘Let us be and we’ll serve the
Egyptians, because it is better to serve the Egyptians than to die in the
desert’?”
Lew writes:
This is
the critical moment, and extremely familiar to each of us. We are stuck. We are
being pressed. Pharaoh’s army is coming after us and there’s nowhere to go but
into the sea. One of our children is failing in school or in life or in both
and we have no idea how to help them. The bills must be paid but we don’t have
enough money in the bank to pay them. We love our spouse desperately but our
marriage continues to deteriorate no matter what we do, or how hard we try to
make things better. Our job is driving us into a deep depression and we just
don’t feel that we can go on, but we don’t know how we would make ends meet—
how we would support our family— without it. We have to do something and we
have no idea what to do, so we panic.[2]
Rav Hiyya is driven by his pachad
to walk into the oven, and flee from the opportunity to renew his connection
with his wife. Whereas, as she stands at the stove, pickling the cucumbers and
preserving the quinces, the wife is somehow able to work through her pachad,
and then see clearly what she must do to revive the marriage.
Liberation, (or Libertina),
emerges, after we stay still for a while with the pachad, until
it subsides. Then we can see clearly, that the next step must be forward, into
the sea. We take that step, trembling with yir’ah, with a new
kind of fear that is really awe – awe at what is actually possible.
Lew teaches:
. . . I
think there is an even deeper fear operating here . . . and that is the fear of
our own power. We get used to living without power and without love. We come to
believe that this is how our lives should be. We become comfortable within the
confines of these limitations. They surround us like the walls of a womb. When
our real strength begins to declare itself, when the intensity of love presents
itself to us, we are torn out of this comfortable cocoon. This is a frightening
experience, and if our courage fails us, we will choose to live without our
full power, without passionate intensity. We will settle for something that
feels safer and more comfortable. Better to settle for a life that seems easier
to hold[3].
As we see in the story - when
we adhere too closely to what we’ve grown to expect of ourselves – rather than
choosing to become who we could be –we actually risk a kind of
death. Not a literal death, but the death of our most precious relationships –
and the death of our own spirit.
For the wife, the sight of her
husband groveling on the floor is a wake-up call.
For R. Hiyya, the wake-up call is
the impulse to take his own life.
On this Rosh Hashanah – and at
any moment – each of us is invited to hear our own wake-up call.
Perhaps we hear it in the voice
of a spouse – or the voice of a child or parent.
Perhaps we hear it in our own
hearts – or in the sound of the shofar.
In this New Year we are called to
take leave of those places where we have become stuck, or stale, or dead.
In this New Year, we are called
to take leave of the fear that keeps us from changing.
In this New Year, Libertina
calls us to step forward, from the fear of what is known, into the awe and the
power of the unknown.
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