The Daf on the Bus, Again

I am on the bus with my double stroller, trying to keep the twins calm. Liav is eating a baguette, strewing crumbs all over her fleece, the stroller, and the floor beneath. Tagel is inexplicably screaming “bubbles,” her favorite activity, but as far as I can tell there are no bubbles in sight and I have no idea how to console her. I hand her a ball. She throws it on the floor angrily, it rolls to the front of the bus, and she sobs louder. I offer her a piece of baguette. She throws this too. I take a sip of my water, unsure what to do next. Tagel starts yelling, “Mayim, mayim,” insisting on holding my bottle. I hand it to her, knowing that she will object if I try to screw the cap back on. Predictably, she spills it all over herself and her sister. Tagel bursts out laughing, but now Liav is shrieking. I reach into my bag for a dry washcloth, and the man sitting across the aisle from me—a religious man with an open Gemara—kindly offers to hold the stroller so I can have two free hands. I look at the top margin of his Gemara and sure enough, he is learning the sixth chapter of Yevamot, which I started last night. Looks like he’s up to the case of the man who is just about to have sex with his wife on a rooftop when suddenly he rolls over, falls off the roof, and lands in the waiting arms of his brother’s childless widow, penetrating her. I wonder if I should spare him all the rabbinic deliberations and just summarize the Talmud’s conclusion: “The bottom line,” I’d tell him, “Is that it all counts. Intentional or unintentional, voluntarily or by force. It’s all the same.” But this man is still holding onto my stroller for me, and so for the sake of my daughters I wisely bite my tongue. I wipe off the girls’ dresses and make out why Liav is screaming – she wants her pacifier. Oh well, so much for trying to wean her off it – in light of the glares from my fellow passengers, I give in. Liav sucks away contentedly, and Tagel amuses herself by alternately crying out “egg” and “moon” while pointing excitedly to the first page of the Very Hungry Caterpillar board book. Both girls are relatively calm. I am about to sit down when a religious woman, her hair and every inch of her body covered, taps me on the shoulder and motions that she wants to whisper something in my ear. I lean in, my mind already racing: What parenting blunder have I committed now? What did I do that this mother of eleven-or-so kids sees fit to censure me? The woman whispers, “Excuse me, when you bend down, I can see your….” I thank her, not even bothering to adjust my pants. Yes, I should tuck in my shirt. But as far as I know, there is no one about to roll off the roof of the bus. And besides, there is no time – the girls are crying again.

Divrei Vayera

            Last week was the first Shabbat that we could make Kiddush and Havdalah with the kids, thanks to what is known in Israel as shaon horef, the winter clock. For the first time this season, the kids were awake when the Shabbat siren went off and Matan could rebuke me with cries of “Muktzah, muktzah” when I tried to give our very congested Liav one more dosage on the nebulizer machine during the “eighteen” minutes. Soon we were all lighting candles together in front of an open window, watching the rainstorm abate and breathing in the scent of the freshly-washed earth, as if it too had bathed for Shabbat. The twins, now 1.5, saw me cover my eyes and started playing along, convinced that it was a game of peek-a-boo, known in Hebrew as “Cuckoo.” And so I blessed over the candles to cries of Cuckoo, and then we all made our way around the corner to the neighborhood shul. On the five-minute walk home Matan and Tagel delighted in splashing through the puddle-wonderful driveway; Liav simply took off her shoes and sat on the ground, waiting for someone to pick her up. We came home, took off the kids’ wet clothes, and made Kiddush and Motzi – and miraculously everyone managed to hold off on drinking or spilling their grape juice until it was time. It felt like an idyllic Shabbat -- until it was not.

            On Shabbat afternoon we were all cooped up inside because it was raining again. The sky was dark and overcast and I was reminded of the first line of Jane Eyre: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” For us, too, “the cold winter had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.” The kids needed constant attention and D and I were exhausted, and at some point I snapped at him unnecessarily. He snapped back. We kept carping at one another, and before long the storm outside was nothing compared to the tempest in our teapot. Arguing in front of the kids on Shabbat; it doesn’t get worse than that, I thought.

            I am fortunate that D has a capacious and forgiving soul, and by the time we had turned off the lights and gathered around the havdalah candle—with the kids all washed and ready for bed, excited about the fire and the grape juice—we had more or less made up. But I was still reeling from our fight when I sat down later that evening to read through the following week’s parsha, Vayera. It is a parsha about family dynamics – about the relationship between Abraham and his wife Sarah, Lot and his daughters, Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac. No one has an out-and-out fight, but nor are these models of exemplary relationships.

            When the parsha opens, Abraham invites three strangers into his tent, commanding Sarah to “Hurry, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” (18:6) He does not say please or invoke any terms of endearment, nor does he take the time to explain to her why he needs this food so quickly or invite her to join the messengers once they break bread. When Sarah overhears the news that she is going to have a son, she laughs: “Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment – with my husband so old?” (18:12) Later she realizes that she has insulted Abraham and covers up by lying, insisting that in fact she did not laugh.

            In the parsha’s next scene, Abraham tries and fails to count out ten righteous men so as to defend Sodom from destruction. The angels arrive at the gates of the city and Lot greets them and welcomes them into his home. When the townsmen demand that he release these new arrivals so that they can abuse them, Lot instead offers his own daughters: “I beg you, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please; but do not do anything to these men, since they have come under the shelter of my roof” (19:7-8). It is presumably those same daughters who then go on to get their father drunk and sleep with him after the destruction of Sodom: “Our father is old… Come, let us make our father drink wine, and let us lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father” (20:31-32).

            If these family dynamics weren’t awful enough, the camera then pans back to Abraham and Sarah, who have just arrived in Gerar. Abraham lies and says that Sarah is his sister so as to save his own life, since he is concerned that the king of the place, Avimelech, will kill him so as to take his wife. Following the episode with Avimelech, Isaac is born and Sarah insists that Abraham cast out his other son Ishmael, who is banished to the wilderness. And of course, after banishing one son, Abraham proceeds nearly to sacrifice his second son in response to a divine command in the parsha’s climactic final scene.

Taken as a whole, the figures who populate this week’s parsha seem to be far kinder and more sympathetic to outsiders than to their own family members. Abraham privileges the needs of strangers over his wife’s feelings, and Lot protects those same strangers by sacrificing his own daughters. Abraham listens to God’s voice, which makes him the patriarch of the Jewish people; but he does so at the expense of his own sons. Why?

Alas, I can identify all too well with this tendency. With our own families, we sometimes make the mistake of believing that we can get away with behavior that would be unpardonable with others. Our family members love us unconditionally, so if we fly off the handle on a particular rainy afternoon, then surely they will come around and forgive us. Perhaps it is also the case that we assume that our family members are part of ourselves; if we are rude to them, it is only because we are acting as a team towards some higher purpose – say, to be hospitable to angelic guests, or to perpetuate humanity after terrible destruction. We forget that the people we love have feelings, and that those feelings ought to be as dear to us as our own. When they hurt, we hurt. And it is precisely because they love us unconditionally that we must guard their feelings so carefully.

The midrash states, “Great is peace, for the great name that was written in holiness may be erased for the sake of peace between a man and his wife” (Vayikra Rabba 9:9). The midrash refers to the Sotah ritual, whereby a man who suspects his wife of adultery tests her by bringing her to the Temple, where the priest writes out the divine name and dissolves it in water. God allows for God’s own name to be erased so that there is peace within the house. My intention here is not to condemn our Biblical forbears, who are powerful if complex role models. But the next time I find myself about to lose my temper with the people I love most, I hope I will stop and count to ten. I may not be able to save the city, but hopefully I will preserve peace within the walls of our home.