Deathless. Andrew Ramer

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СКАЧАТЬ daughter Dinah, and the forth was the tragedy of being told that his favorite child, Joseph, was dead. The first event elevated him and the second three events nearly destroyed him. Fortunately the fourth event had a happy ending and I am grateful to this day that I had a part in it.

      Grandpa Jacob was a shrewd businessman, a wise investor, and during the years that he and his wives lived in Haran he became even richer than he was when he arrived, which was how he was able to support all of us. But after eleven years in Haran he decided that he wanted to return to Canaan, to be with his own clan and to get out of the shadow of his father-in-law, Laban, who ran the family concern up north. Laban wasn’t too happy about them going; in fact, he had a huge fight with Jacob and refused to let them leave. That strange story about Rachel stealing Laban’s teraphim is grounded in something that really happened.

      Contemporary scholars don’t know what teraphim were. But I do. Scholars speculate that the teraphim were household gods. Not quite. They were winged creatures who represented the goddesses and gods we called the Elohim. They were the power animals of those divine beings, in a way, their living thrones. But to understand what they represented back then I want you to think about the framed certificates you see in restaurants that tell you that they’re legally entitled to serve food and alcohol, and in doctors and dentists offices that tell you that they’re licensed practitioners. The teraphim, usually made of wood or clay or bronze, but sometimes carved from stone, were issued by various temples and let customers know that they were dealing with a legitimate business which was registered with the local authorities, to whom they paid taxes, and whose scales were regularly inspected by them.

      Now Rachel didn’t steal the teraphim, and she didn’t take all of them. She and Leah and Jacob had a meeting with Laban to tell him they were leaving. He refused to let them go at first but Rachel negotiated with him, reminding him that the family business had prospered because of her and Jacob’s work. He eventually agreed to let her take two of the family’s seven teraphim out of the wooden chest where they were stored and leave with them. Those two small wooden teraphim were enough to set up the family business officially in Canaan, independent from the ties that had bound them to Haran since the time of Abraham’s great grandfather Serug, the first merchant in the family and the one who set up the family business. So it was Rachel who actually legitimized the family’s concerns in Canaan, and you ought to know that. But the redactors of your Torah were uncomfortable with the story of a woman of power, so they turned her into a tricky thief.

      I remember the teraphim from when I was a little girl. They were kept in a wooden chest in Rachel’s tent. There were similar but not identical, one a bit larger than the other. Both of them had wings that spread out to their sides, and both of them had cuneiform writing on them, which let you know they came from two different temples and licensed their owners to operate two different businesses, one directed toward material trade and the other toward livestock. You’ll hear more about those figures and this chest so don’t forget about them. We took them down to Egypt with us, and they came out with us all those years later. But I’ll tell you about that when I come to it.

      Now is the right time to tell you about the first critical event in my grandfather’s life. The family left Haran, and since so many people and flocks were traveling, it took a very long time to get back to Canaan, months and months. Then he sent two messengers ahead to let Esau know they were coming, and they returned telling him that Esau had planned a huge feast to welcome them back. Today a man who is stressed out might just go for a massage and then soak in a hot tub. The night before they all met up with Esau and his family, Grandpa went off by himself to visit to the nearby shrine of the god Baal Hadar, one of the Elohim. That’s the night when Jacob wrestled with a strange man and became Israel.

      Today we might say that Grandpa needed more male energy to return home again after all those years and face his butch twin brother, so he opened himself up to an encounter with a man who served at that temple. His name was Uzzi and he was a holy one, a kedesh, which King James’s Bible casts into English as “sodomite” but which is usually now translated as “cultic male prostitute.” The story in your Torah says that Jacob and the man wrestled all night and that Grandpa’s thigh was wrenched out of its socket. But the truth is that “thigh” or “hip” was a euphemism invented by an uncomfortable man several hundred years later, who couldn’t acknowledge that a defining moment in Jacob’s history happened while he was being the passive partner in anal sex with a sacred priest trained in the Middle Eastern version of what we now call Tantra. Instead of telling the truth, that Grandpa had a marvelous spiritual experience that led him to change his name to commemorate the event, the “holy one” was later desexualized and morphed (I do love that new word) into an angel. But angel means “messenger” in Hebrew, and that’s what those kedeshim considered themselves to be—body-to-body messengers of one of the many aspects of the Divine.

      In the 21st century, when people define themselves with labels, you might be inclined to ask yourself: “Was Jacob gay? Or, closeted?” Not a chance! My grandfather was what thirty years ago we’d call “a notorious heterosexual.” Today he would be labeled metrosexual, perhaps, but his father Isaac occupies a different place on the famous (or is it infamous?) Kinsey Scale. Way back then none of that had any bearing on who they were in their own lives. When a man spent time with a holy one and had wives and children, his encounter had very much more to do with his spiritual life than his sexual preference. Remember that. There is much I like about the present, but for all of its freedom, it is restrictive in different ways than the ones I grew up with, and this matter of labeling is one of them.

      So let me talk about Grandpa Jacob’s wives and concubines, who are all so important to my story. Let’s begin with Rachel, who was Grandpa’s favorite. Everyone said that she was beautiful, round and shapely, with a busty figure like many of our goddesses had. And we are taught by the Torah to feel sorry for poor Rachel, as she had to wait for so long to have a son, while Leah had boy after boy. But the truth is that Rachel had a daughter Maacah a year after she was married, and then she had Joseph, two years later. Then she had Rabat, and then she gave birth to twin daughters, Tovah and Zillah. After they were born she delivered a stillborn boy, and then, just as the story still says, Rachel died after giving birth to her last child, a son she named Ben-oni, “Son of my sorrow.” Jacob renamed him Ben-yamin, which most people say means “Son of my right hand,” but which really meant, “Son of the south,” which is where he was born.

      Rachel was buried in the region that much later belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, and it says so in the Bible. But people think that her tomb is on the road to Bethlehem, which was in Judah’s territory, and for generations a tomb there has been a place of pilgrimage, but just as the tomb in Hebron is the wrong one, so too is that one on the way to Bethlehem. Herod rebuilt it, but it was the wrong place even then. I tried to correct him, but that’s a story for later on, perhaps. Rachel’s death was devastating to my grandfather. It was a sadness that he wore like a garment, even years later when he married again for love, and even after his family had grown and prospered.

      I never knew Rachel but I remember Leah, and I always liked her. Rachel was the favored wife, but Leah was the first wife, which is how they set it up themselves, and neither of them minded that. Rachel was very involved in the family business, but Leah loved being a mother and devoted most of her time to the family’s children, her own and everyone else’s. The Torah says that she was soft-eyed, weak-eyed, or doe-eyed, but I remember Leah very well and she had the most extraordinary eyes—pale pale hazel—the color of green grapes, big and shining. She had very dark skin. We all did. And there was something haunting about her face, with those pale eyes staring out from it. Even as an old woman she had a regal bearing. The Torah says that she had six sons and only one daughter, Dinah, but Leah also had another daughter, Rizpah. The two full sisters were very close. The Torah has some things to say about Dinah, and I have a few more, but that too is a story for later, about love and lust and other tents.

      As I mentioned above, Rachel and Leah each had maids who they gave to their husband as concubines. These two women were sisters, just as their mistresses were, СКАЧАТЬ