Deathless. Andrew Ramer

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СКАЧАТЬ of the expansion of the patriarchy, which seemed a good thing at the time, just as automobiles seemed good at first. No more horseshit in the streets. Who knew that what you can’t see or smell or step in would turn out to be far more toxic? Same with sex-negativity. It seemed like a way to channel energy into more productive avenues. Alas, looking back on two and a half thousand years of sex-negativity I would have to say that all it’s done is channel energy into rage, resentment, and destruction. But in the time of Isaac there was almost no shame around sex or the human body. The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent hadn’t been told yet, but it would be later on—a story told to defame the goddess and her serpent, not for us phallic but a symbol of her umbilical cord, that serpent a living creature come to share the Goddess’s wisdom with the first two human beings. Back in my youth when people fell in love they believed that they were encountering one of the Elohim through their beloved. (You can read about the lasting influence of this idea in some interpretations of Song of Songs in the Bible, and by reading some of the wonderful poems of Rumi. Another wonderful man. I met him once in a tavern reciting some of his poetry.) Among the Elohim were many who took lovers of both genders, and sometimes contained more than one gender within themselves. This is challenging for me to talk about, not because it’s about sex but because in those days we had no such labels as straight, gay, bisexual, transgender. Or, we had all of them, tucked away inside ourselves, a reflection of all the Elohim, all their aspects to be embodied as we each saw fit. So, as you will see again and again in this story, people made love-choices in varied ways, which became problematic as the patriarchy became entrenched in our culture.

      Having discussed sex, let’s go back to the story of Isaac. Remember that he and Rebecca went to see Hagar at Lahai-roi. The last time Abraham’s two sons had seen each other was at their father’s burial. Before that they hadn’t seen each other in years, so that last meeting had been a time of awkwardness and grief. Their next reunion was different. Isaac had mellowed over time, while Ishmael had remained wild and unpredictable. He was taller, darker, more brooding than his half-brother, but both of them shared the same father-wound. Abraham adored his first son, Ishmael, and it had been torture to him to send him away, but he did, and Ishmael never forgave him for that any more than Isaac forgave their father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz, humiliating him in front of his friends.

      But over the days and weeks of that visit their families saw very different sides of the two men, which was both unsettling and enlivening. The past was behind them and when they saw each other again the brothers reconnected with joy. They laughed and talked and talked and went for long long walks. Night after night around a fire Isaac would sing and Ishmael would play his bone-flute. Sometimes they played songs they remembered from childhood, sometimes they sang new songs, or made them up as they went along. And little by little their hearts opened up in a way that I hope you’ve experienced yourself, like flowers in the sunshine. (I have.)

      It had been years since Isaac and Rebecca had been physically intimate, but they were the very best of friends—and since friendship was what had connected them from the first, and because they didn’t know about sexual shame, you can imagine the mutual joy and laughter they experienced when they sat down to have a conversation one night around a crackling fire, and Rebecca admitted to Isaac that she was falling in love with Suvah—and Isaac shared with her his feelings about his brother. True, Ishmael had a wife, several concubines, and a good number of daughters and sons. But what he felt with Isaac was different. It was the meeting of two embodied gods, grounded in their prior history, and it awakened in each a depth of feelings neither had ever known before. So the long-separated half-brothers became lovers, their union later sealed, ironically and deliberately, by the head priestess of Asherah at Luz. Within a year Isaac had moved into Ishmael’s stone house in Lahai-roi, although to your eyes it would be called scarcely more than a stone hut. But it was the grandest building in the village, in fact the only building, in a small village of scattered tents. And that stone house became Isaac’s home for the rest of his life, his and Ishmael’s.

      Now you can see now why there’s so little about Isaac in your Torah. Not because he was traumatized by his near sacrifice, which never really happened, but because the later redactors didn’t know how to redeem him, a runaway youth who nearly had himself castrated, fathered twin sons, and then became the lover not only of another man, but of another man who was also his half-brother. The writers, editors, and redactors couldn’t leave Isaac out of the story but they skipped over him as much as they could, so that only a few clues remain, the mention of Lahai-roi being one of them. The later editors retold the story about Abraham, Sarah, and the king of Gerar as if it had happened to Isaac and Rebecca, to give him what today would be called “solid heterosexual credentials,” because they had to leave Isaac in in order to get to his son Jacob, who they really liked. And then they told lots of stories about Grandpa Jacob, that multi-married adventurer, to distract us from everything they’d left out about Isaac, because we still knew those stories, back in the time of the judges and the first kings of Israel. But they did, accidentally, leave one little lingering clue. The word they use for what Isaac and Rebecca did out in the fields, “play” or “sport,” depending on how you translate it, is also used to talk about what Ishmael and Isaac did when Isaac was small, which is not what they did then, but which lay the foundation for what later happened—delicious and mature and sexy love.

      In spite of what the Torah tells you, Isaac wasn’t buried in Hebron, in the same cave as his parents. He and Ishmael were buried in the same grave, at Lahai-roi, and all through the time of the judges and into the early years of the monarchy, young men who loved each other in Judah and Israel would go there to seal their vows. In fact David and Jonathan went there, but as the patriarchy grew in strength and same-sex love was outlawed, visits to the tomb were forbidden and the custom forgotten. But imagine how the world would be now, if the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac, at war in such painful ways, had always remembered that their founders were not just sons of the same honored father, but also lovers. There would be no war now, no hatred, no fear. Only love and joy would exist between our two peoples. (Although I tremble in telling this story, afraid that I will find myself having to go into hiding, like poor Mr. Salman Rushdie, for telling stories that will outrage the orthodox of both the Muslim world and the Jewish. Although, on the other hand, to make them rage together could be a unifying thing and perhaps what I’ll be most remembered for. We shall see.)

      All of this background material is gradually getting us up to the time of my own birth, in that tent you’re probably tired of hearing about. So please stay with me for a little while longer and I promise you that you’ll get there, because you now know the story about Abraham and Sarah, and the story about Isaac and Rebecca, and Isaac and Ishmael. But before I go on to tell the story of the next generation, of Esau and Jacob and his wives and concubines and all twenty-five of their children, who were my father and my aunts and uncles, let me tell you about Davah, purged from history by the Stalinist editors of the past. And then, when this chapter is over, we’ll be ready for that tent made of goatskins, washed and scraped with stones, cleaned and stretched out on frames in the sun to dry, then painstakingly sewn together with goat gut for thread.

      As you now know, Davah was the youngest daughter of our ancestors Sarah and Abraham. All three of her older sisters, who were born in the north, went back there to marry and never returned to Canaan. But Davah, who was born in Canaan, remained there her entire life. Now, for several generations, as I may have said earlier, the family business was divided into two divisions, trade and pasturing. Archaeologists say that the Torah is wrong when it mentions camels in the time of the patriarchs and matriarchs because they hadn’t been domesticated yet, but they are wrong, as I told you in an earlier chapter. (See. People think the elderly repeat themselves but don’t know it. Not in my case. I repeat myself and I do know it. I like my own stories. They’ve kept me company for all these years, haven’t they?)

      So yes, we had camels, although they were rare and expensive. It was Davah who decided to make camel breeding a third part of the family business. She ran it herself for years, and when she got older Leah helped her and then my Aunt Dinah ran it, before we all went down to Egypt. It’s because of my great aunt Davah that domestic camels are now common in the СКАЧАТЬ