Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Women prefer it that way,” Eliav insisted.

“Not from what I overhear from the tourists at the dig,” Cullinane said. “American Jewish women tell me, I’d refuse to be tucked away in a balcony behind lattices.’ And even the men say, ‘When I go to worship I want to sit with my family.’”

On this matter the testimony of the Torah was clear. Women under Judaism were treated no worse than Near Eastern women in general: deplored at birth, endured in adolescence, married off as soon as possible, discriminated against in law and subjected to misery if they became unwanted widows. Numerous were the Biblical texts in which some Old Testament hero rejoiced at the news he was the father of a son, and one of the morning prayers recited by men included the passage: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a woman.”

The sixty-three tractates of the Talmud developed each of these themes: “Happy is he whose children are male and woe to him whose children are female.” In passage after passage this massive body of Jewish teaching admonished against the dangers of the female. “Talk not overmuch with women, even with one’s own wife,” read one passage, to which Maimonides himself added the gloss: “It is known that for the most part conversation with women has to do with sexual matters, and by such talk a man brings evil upon himself.” The Talmud specifically directed that women must not be taught to read religious works, and often during the dig Israeli religious newspapers carried reports of resolutions drawn up by one group of fanatics or another: “It is the function of Jewish girls to marry at seventeen and have children as quickly as possible.”

One night the English photographer appeared at dinner with a passage from the Talmud which summarized the ideal Jewish wife. “She was married to the famous Rabbi Akiba. She found him when he was forty years old, an illiterate peasant. She married him and sent him to the yeshiva, where he lived apart and studied while she worked to earn their living. At the end of twelve years he returned home one night to tell her that he must do more studying, so she sent him back for another twelve years and kept her job. After twenty-four years he finally came home, but she was so old and decrepit that his followers tried to throw her aside as a beggar and, I quote, ‘the great Rabbi Akiba allowed her to come forward and kiss his feet, saying to his followers, “All that is mine or yours comes from her.” ’”

Vered was angry. “Don’t forget that when the judges were weak, Deborah rallied the Jewish people in battle against General Sisera.”

“When was that?” the Englishman asked.

“1125 B.C.E.”

Eliav said with more restraint, “And there was Huldah the Prophetess, who was of critical significance in getting Deuteronomy accepted as the core of Jewish faith.”

“When did she live?” the photographer asked.

“621 B.C.E.”

“Isn’t it strange,” Cullinane asked, “that whenever we get on this topic you cite two women who lived more than twenty-five hundred years ago …”

“What about Beruriah?” Vered cried. None of the Gentiles had heard of her. “Or Golda Meir?”

“My point,” Cullinane said, “is that the Catholic church showed real capacity in finding places for women like Saint Theresa and Catherine of Siena. A sect of Protestants did the same with Mary Baker Eddy. In Judaism this doesn’t happen.”

Vered was eager to reply. “As little girls we play a game in which we ask, ‘Why were women made from Adam’s rib?’” And she could still recite the answer: “God deliberated from which part of man to create woman. He said, ‘I must not create her from the head that she should not carry herself haughtily; nor from the eye that she should not be too inquisitive; nor from the ear that she should not be an eavesdropper; nor from the mouth that she should not be too talkative; nor from the heart that she should not be too jealous; nor from the hand that she should not be too acquisitive; nor from the foot that she should not be a gadabout; but from a hidden part of the body that she should be modest.’”

“I am impressed,” Eliav said, “that in religions which do as Cullinane wants, female unhappiness is so great, whereas we Jews go pleasantly along with little divorce, little prostitution and less neuroticism.”

“Everyone knows that a Jew makes the best husband in the world,” Vered said.

“You have no feeling of being left out?”

“We Jewish girls get what we want,” she insisted. “A home, a family, a secure haven. Public praying in the synagogue? That’s for men.”

The more Cullinane heard on this matter—and it came up at many dinners—the more correct he found Vered to be, in a thirteenth-century sense. In primitive societies it was man’s job to placate the gods and woman’s to keep the home, but this was dangerously close to the Germanic ideal of Kaiser, Kinder, Küche. He was willing to concede Eliav’s point, that one of the reasons why Judaism had been so strong internally was its subtle relationship between the sexes, but he could not forget that Christianity overwhelmed Judaism partly because of its emotional appeal to women. Judaism was a religion for men, Cullinane said to himself. Christianity for women.

Now, with Vered gone, he thought increasingly about women and it was often he who raised the question in the dining hall. Tabari held that Arabs had the best attitude: “My father once said he never wore a new shoe until he had limbered it up three times over the head of his fourth wife. You Americans have ruined the relationship between the sexes, and Israel would be ill-advised to follow your example.”

“Actually,” Eliav added, “Israel has an excellent approach. You’ve seen our bright young girls in the army.”

“I’ve also seen the statements of the religious groups. ‘Every honest girl is married by seventeen.’”

“The nutty fringe,” Eliav commented.

“Do you also dismiss the desire of American Jews for their women to join them in synagogue?”

Tabari interrupted. “It’s the same in Islam. Women are free to enter the mosque if they sit apart and shut up. I think they prefer it that way.”

“Wait till some kind of reform Judaism hits this land,” Cullinane forecast. “You’ll find one million Israeli women behaving just like Russian women and American women.”

“You forget two points,” Eliav said. “Have you read any recent studies on circumcision? How it eliminates some kinds of female cancer? How it insures better sexual relations in that it decreases man’s sexuality somewhat but increases his ability to perform well when he does?”

“I never found that circumcision slowed me down,” Tabari reported.

“Are Muslims circumcised?” Cullinane asked.

“Of course. Besides, we Arabs are Semitic.”

“My second point,” Eliav continued, “is an ugly one to bring up. But throughout two thousand years the religious loyalty of Jewish women has been tested many times, in the most horrible ways men can devise. They’ve been burned alive, thrown into ovens, torn apart … Invariably the most faithful Jews have been our women. They like their religion as it is.”

“And they’ll continue, until a reform movement hits the land,” Cullinane said.

“Don’t you believe it,” Eliav replied. “Judaism has always provided a special place for women. You take Deborah …”

“Please! Not somebody three thousand years old.”

“All right, Golda Meir.”

“Making her Foreign Minister was one of the smartest things Israel has done,” Cullinane granted. “Gives the men an example to point to for the next three thousand years.”

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