Deathless. Andrew Ramer

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СКАЧАТЬ our flocks and our trading combined. And there used to be prayers offered to the God of Davah, El the Generous, for camel’s milk was a part of our diets way back then.

      So, you know the basics of the story I want to tell you from the Bible, if you’ve read it, and I hope you have. For all my criticism of the book as it exists now, it is more than two thousand five hundred years old, which can be said of very few other books. It’s an artifact, like those wonderful statuettes done by Keturah and Abraham’s daughter Kalyah, which are found in museums all over the world. You may not like them, but would you go in and change them? A famous artist once drew a mustache on a copy of DaVinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa, and we write midrashim, stories about Torah stories, that are not unlike mustaches. But would we change the original because we don’t like it? No. And so it should be with your Torah. For all of its failings, it is an ancient text, one worth honoring, as you would if you dug it up somewhere, rather than found it in a library, or in the ark of a synagogue.

      So all of you camel lovers, say a prayer of thanks to Davah and let’s move on with our story. Rebecca and Isaac had two sons, who were twins. The eldest, Esau, was just as the stories about him say, a kind of a jock, rough, rugged, ruddy, an outdoorsman. You can see why Isaac liked and encouraged him as he was growing up. Esau was all the things that Isaac had wanted to be when he was a boy—strong, determined, and independent. Butch. Isaac was like some of the tame suburban husbands I see walking on Venice Beach, kids in tow, but with a crazy wild look in their eyes, gazing out on the surfers. Each time that Esau went wild, beating up his brother, teasing the shepherd boys, stealing animals from the flocks and trading them for knives or bows and arrows, Isaac would take him aside and give him a good talking to, a talking to that never said in words but always said in tone, “Son, I’m proud of you! I collapsed after my one big rebellion. So do what you want to do and don’t hold back.”

      Although Isaac left his marriage after his father died and spent the rest of his life in Lahai-roi with his beloved Ishmael, his sons were young adults at the time, finding their own way in the world. And Isaac was devoted to Rebecca for the rest of his life. She took over the family business and so they saw each other fairly often, and it’s Suvah her beloved and not Isaac who was buried next to Rebecca in that tomb in Hebron, the real one that everyone’s forgotten about.

      Growing up, Jacob had been something of a mama’s boy, just as your Torah depicts him. (See, it isn’t all wrong.) You can understand why he was Rebecca’s favorite. Esau had no interest in the financial aspect of the family business. He liked nothing more than to be out all day with the flocks, alone, rather like his Uncle Ishmael. Jacob on the other hand was a people-person, and he was fascinated by the traders who passed through our region, going up to Mesopotamia, down to Egypt, and to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. He would stand behind his mother as she inspected their wares and worked out deals with them, staring at everything they brought as if it were food. As soon as he was old enough, Rebecca began to include Jacob in her work, increasingly allowing him to make deals for them all.

      In alignment with their very different temperaments, the Torah redactors seem to paint Esau and Jacob as fraternal twins, but I remember the first time I saw my beloved grandfather’s twin brother. I must have been five or six and one day our camp that was really a village was all astir with the news that Esau had just arrived. Having never seen him before, and not having photographs yet, or even portrait painters, I was stunned to see hobbling toward Grandpa’s tent an ancient man with the same bent back, the same long scraggly beard, hairy nostrils, and the same eyebrows, thick and wiry, crawling over his dark wrinkled forehead like twin caterpillars, just like Grandpa Jacob’s. Sitting around a fire that evening, I kept staring at him, so very like my grandfather in looks and yet nothing like him in personality. The Torah focuses on personality and draws them as fraternal twins, but—they were identical!

      From the Torah you would also think that Esau and Jacob were never close, but that wasn’t the case. Although they were very different temperamentally, they were like many sets of twins I’ve known down through the ages. My father told me that even when they were very old they would finish each other’s sentences. They got sick at the same time, and laughed at the same dumb jokes. And they were both pranksters. Here’s one that the family talked about for years. As young boys the two of them dyed a newborn lamb a deep blue and brought it back to Isaac’s tent, pretending that it was an omen, a magical lamb that had been born that way. Isaac, a joker himself, pretended to believe them, and told them he was going to make a special offering of it, and invite the entire family, even their cousins from Haran. Embarrassed, and in love with that little lamb, the two confessed, to the laughter of the whole clan.

      Perhaps you have something like this in your family, a phrase or a slogan that means nothing to anyone else but a great deal to all of you. In my family, even when we were down in Egypt, if you wanted to tell someone how absurd something was you would say, “Look at that blue lamb,” and for centuries afterwards blue dye and blue threads held a special place among our people; think of the blue fringes on our garments. There’s another story like that in our family. It’s not a funny one, but in a funny way it led to a dietary tradition among our people, one that I’ll talk about a little later on.

      According to the story in the Torah, Jacob, under his mother’s direction, swindled his older brother out of his birthright. The good news here, as it will so often be the case, is that however lovely a story it is, it isn’t a true one. But truth be told, Esau was happy to tend our family’s flocks and leave the trading arm of the business to his brother and the camels to his mother. The story, however, is a marvelous one, don’t you think? But the trickery and the discomfort weren’t Isaac and Rebecca’s, nor Esau and Jacob’s. The real discomfort belonged to the later writer of that tale, who didn’t know what to do with Isaac and wanted to both distance his listeners from him and yet somehow redeem him. And Jacob didn’t go north because he was fleeing from his brother’s wrath; he went north because of work. Over several generations the center of the family business had remained in Haran, run by Abraham’s brothers and their sons, so contact needed to be kept up with them. That’s why Jacob traveled north, and he ended up spending a little more than a decade in Haran, learning more about the family business from its heads, and getting richer himself. It was there that he met and married Rachel and Leah.

      The story you know about Jacob working for seven years for Rachel and then being tricked on his wedding night when Leah ended up in his bed is another one of those stories that aren’t true. A later redactor of the Torah was very uncomfortable with the notion that his ancestor had married two sisters, which was forbidden in his own day, although not in Jacob’s. How to explain it? By inventing a trick, which was one of his favorite plot devices. But there was no trick. Jacob my grandfather was in love with Rachel but they were never able to talk well. However he and Leah had a great relationship. Those two could sit up all night talking, whereas with Rachel, there were always long stretches of silence, and not always the restful comfortable kind.

      The two sisters were very close, and being the kind of man that he was, marrying two sisters who suggested the union to him themselves seemed perfect to Jacob, as several of the Elohim had married siblings, sometimes even their own. “My brother Esau is a real man out in the world, but I am a real man in bed,” is the kind of thing my grandfather Jacob might have said to himself. And each of them, Leah and Rachel, were given a servant as a wedding gift by their father, something horrendous that fortunately doesn’t happen anymore in most parts of the world. (I say this in case you think I miss the past and find it preferable to the present.) The servants, Bilhah and Zilpah, were also sisters, and both of them had children with my grandfather. Liberal Jewish congregations now add to their prayers the names of “the four mothers,” Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, but they usually leave out my own grandmother Zilpah and her sister. Fortunately for us, Grandpa Jacob saw us all of his wives and concubines and their children as equals. He was a wonderful father and grandfather. My father Asher adored him, and I did too.

      My grandfather’s life was shaped by four defining events. You know them from the Torah in a garbled fashion. One СКАЧАТЬ