Silence
[1986]
Silence is foreign to her. There's something inherently alien about it to a woman from New York, who grew up in a small apartment shared with two brothers, a mother, a father, and an ever-changing stream of relatives and friends and people wanting to talk to the reb. The family, both literal and metaphorical, is big, extended, and noisy.
Whether in the home or in the shul, sound is part of life. The talking. Singing. Klezmerim, always, at every dinner and wedding and bar mitzvah... And even outside the tightly-knit world of her family and her people, the City is still always loud, always alive, rich with car horns and street bands and a hundred other sounds.
Zipporah cannot remember such a silence as this.
There are some noises-- the rabonim and the others murmur a little, among themselves. Little grunts, words and snatches of words, passed around like tokens. But not so much, not so loud, nothing like what it would be back in the city, everyone talking at once. These are little gifts one to another, small things...
The fire adds its own chorus, soft pops and hisses. Also, every now and then something cries out, out there in the darkness: a desert owl or a jackal, sending long shivering cries through the night to fetch up, shuddering, against their little circle of firelight. But that is all.
And beyond these little noises, the silence is huge and absolute.
It is old. It is the same deep night-silence that existed here, in the desert, when the prophets lived, when the Temple was destroyed, when Moshe led the Bene Yisrael here from Egypt over three thousand years ago. It is the silence of the desert that her ancestors knew for forty years, but they came through it in a sea of people and made their own city each night on the empty sands. And tonight there are only seven of them, out here.
We are trespassing, she thinks to herself in Hebrew. Then she shakes her head to herself; no. This land is theirs. By blood, by sweat, by the tears of her people. The men she is with, they know this land. It is in their bones and their blood and their skin. The one leading them out here is a man with skin as brown and tough as leather. This earth is his inheritance.
Perhaps it is only she who is trespassing, here from America, the land across the water, come in a silver bird from a steel city...
The moon is a thin, sliver crescent, barely there in the black sky. The dunes roll away endless and pale toward the distant Mediterranean. A bird cries out, not the owl of earlier, but she does not know enough to identify the species, as several of the men with her do.
They do not exclude her. Not exactly. If she asks a question, they answer it, politely. But briefly, simply, as few words as possible. Her Hebrew is fluent, more than fluent, but the accent is there no matter what and this as surely as her gender marks her as outsider. She is yehudim, yes, of course, but-- but the unity that provides is absolute only in the outside world. Among her people-- among these men of her people-- she is a stranger, granted admittance only as a concession. The kabbalah is not for women. The oldest rites and the oldest secrets are not for women.
(But Ya'akov ben Ha-levi is a name that commands respect here. Enough respect that the letter she carries-- on parchment, each letter written painstakingly by her father in beautiful script-- has served as a key, has opened the doors that would have been closed for her, has gotten her here. Here, to the desert.)
All the same, with their silence they remind her that she is here not by right, but by respect alone. A woman's place is... not here, wherever it may be. Not under a vast and starry sky in the middle of the Judea desert, thirty miles from the nearest tiny town, three miles back to where they left the truck.
Zipporah reaches down into the cool sand at her feet and gathers up a handful, letting it trickle through her fingers, drop back down to the earth to join with it again. She is thirty-five, now, and the knowledge that she is not, strictly speaking, welcome here no longer grates on her as it would have when she was younger. Ten years ago, maybe even five, she would have become angry. She would have seized the first off-hand comment as a reason to leap into a debate with them of the Talmud, the Tanakh, the Hekhalot-- anything at all, to show she has studied as well and as long as them, that she has earned the right to be here.
That was then. This is now. Guilt and grief drive her, these days, and she is not so filled with the wild fire of her youth, not so ready to begin battles and wage wars. Her father would say she is learning wisdom. And past time, my daughter.
Zipporah bat Ha-levi lets the handfuls of sand fall through her fingers, over and over, finding peace in the rhythm of it, setting her soul to ease with it. She thinks of her distant ancestors, coming through the desert in a great wave of people, seeking a homeland half-myth, half-memory. As always she knows the keen warfare of the religious and the realistic in her-- the Scriptures say that six-hundred-thousand came from Egypt, out of slavery to the promised land. History tells her it cannot have been more than twenty-thousand.
But does it matter? Twenty or six hundred. It was people, a great mass of them, a living breathing crowd of men. And women. And the children, and the animals...
And if it was only twenty-thousand then, it does not matter, because every one since has made this journey, whether physically or only in the sense of knowing the story. Every man and woman has crossed his own desert, and the number of them is more than six-hundred-thousand. It is as many as the grains of sand that stretch to the sea.
The desert is a part of G-d. The night is a part of G-d. These men, her brothers in study, in the mysteries, are a part also of G-d. And the silence... that too...
Shalom. Deep peace, great peace. It is only for this little space of time before the dawn, these few hours, but it is here now. Zipporah closes her eyes, and listens to the silence.
Silence is foreign to her. There's something inherently alien about it to a woman from New York, who grew up in a small apartment shared with two brothers, a mother, a father, and an ever-changing stream of relatives and friends and people wanting to talk to the reb. The family, both literal and metaphorical, is big, extended, and noisy.
Whether in the home or in the shul, sound is part of life. The talking. Singing. Klezmerim, always, at every dinner and wedding and bar mitzvah... And even outside the tightly-knit world of her family and her people, the City is still always loud, always alive, rich with car horns and street bands and a hundred other sounds.
Zipporah cannot remember such a silence as this.
There are some noises-- the rabonim and the others murmur a little, among themselves. Little grunts, words and snatches of words, passed around like tokens. But not so much, not so loud, nothing like what it would be back in the city, everyone talking at once. These are little gifts one to another, small things...
The fire adds its own chorus, soft pops and hisses. Also, every now and then something cries out, out there in the darkness: a desert owl or a jackal, sending long shivering cries through the night to fetch up, shuddering, against their little circle of firelight. But that is all.
And beyond these little noises, the silence is huge and absolute.
It is old. It is the same deep night-silence that existed here, in the desert, when the prophets lived, when the Temple was destroyed, when Moshe led the Bene Yisrael here from Egypt over three thousand years ago. It is the silence of the desert that her ancestors knew for forty years, but they came through it in a sea of people and made their own city each night on the empty sands. And tonight there are only seven of them, out here.
We are trespassing, she thinks to herself in Hebrew. Then she shakes her head to herself; no. This land is theirs. By blood, by sweat, by the tears of her people. The men she is with, they know this land. It is in their bones and their blood and their skin. The one leading them out here is a man with skin as brown and tough as leather. This earth is his inheritance.
Perhaps it is only she who is trespassing, here from America, the land across the water, come in a silver bird from a steel city...
The moon is a thin, sliver crescent, barely there in the black sky. The dunes roll away endless and pale toward the distant Mediterranean. A bird cries out, not the owl of earlier, but she does not know enough to identify the species, as several of the men with her do.
They do not exclude her. Not exactly. If she asks a question, they answer it, politely. But briefly, simply, as few words as possible. Her Hebrew is fluent, more than fluent, but the accent is there no matter what and this as surely as her gender marks her as outsider. She is yehudim, yes, of course, but-- but the unity that provides is absolute only in the outside world. Among her people-- among these men of her people-- she is a stranger, granted admittance only as a concession. The kabbalah is not for women. The oldest rites and the oldest secrets are not for women.
(But Ya'akov ben Ha-levi is a name that commands respect here. Enough respect that the letter she carries-- on parchment, each letter written painstakingly by her father in beautiful script-- has served as a key, has opened the doors that would have been closed for her, has gotten her here. Here, to the desert.)
All the same, with their silence they remind her that she is here not by right, but by respect alone. A woman's place is... not here, wherever it may be. Not under a vast and starry sky in the middle of the Judea desert, thirty miles from the nearest tiny town, three miles back to where they left the truck.
Zipporah reaches down into the cool sand at her feet and gathers up a handful, letting it trickle through her fingers, drop back down to the earth to join with it again. She is thirty-five, now, and the knowledge that she is not, strictly speaking, welcome here no longer grates on her as it would have when she was younger. Ten years ago, maybe even five, she would have become angry. She would have seized the first off-hand comment as a reason to leap into a debate with them of the Talmud, the Tanakh, the Hekhalot-- anything at all, to show she has studied as well and as long as them, that she has earned the right to be here.
That was then. This is now. Guilt and grief drive her, these days, and she is not so filled with the wild fire of her youth, not so ready to begin battles and wage wars. Her father would say she is learning wisdom. And past time, my daughter.
Zipporah bat Ha-levi lets the handfuls of sand fall through her fingers, over and over, finding peace in the rhythm of it, setting her soul to ease with it. She thinks of her distant ancestors, coming through the desert in a great wave of people, seeking a homeland half-myth, half-memory. As always she knows the keen warfare of the religious and the realistic in her-- the Scriptures say that six-hundred-thousand came from Egypt, out of slavery to the promised land. History tells her it cannot have been more than twenty-thousand.
But does it matter? Twenty or six hundred. It was people, a great mass of them, a living breathing crowd of men. And women. And the children, and the animals...
And if it was only twenty-thousand then, it does not matter, because every one since has made this journey, whether physically or only in the sense of knowing the story. Every man and woman has crossed his own desert, and the number of them is more than six-hundred-thousand. It is as many as the grains of sand that stretch to the sea.
The desert is a part of G-d. The night is a part of G-d. These men, her brothers in study, in the mysteries, are a part also of G-d. And the silence... that too...
Shalom. Deep peace, great peace. It is only for this little space of time before the dawn, these few hours, but it is here now. Zipporah closes her eyes, and listens to the silence.