Chapter 3: My Home

I was born and lived in Bethlehem, Judah. The tribe of Judah. Our home stood at the edge of the village. Not far from Rachel's tomb.
Father got the land-holding from his father. Father loved to tell anyone willing to listen that he had planted five botmaTN3 trees before he ever built the first barn, cleared the ground of stones, or put up the first pen.

My father planted five botma trees. Not one. Not two. Five!!!

You have to grasp how shocking the last sentence you just read is, and you'd do well to read it again and again. My father planted five botma trees!!! You don't know what a botma tree is? It's a terebinth!

Every time I recall that whole 'planting' affair, I am appalled. Why?

The 'terebinth,' or as we called it, botma, was not one of the seven species. It was an ornamental tree; some called it an 'asherah,' and it was not the custom to grow or tend it. And in any case, it was not the first tree that law-abiding citizens were in the habit of planting…

And the worst part? It was the very last tree you would ever boast that you, with your own hands, before anything else, had planted.

Don't get me wrong. The land is full of terebinths. Their astonishing shade was a blessing. But no one among the children of Israel(!) deliberately planted terebinths and tended them. These trees grow on their own, and can reach the height of their glory if you leave them be.

…and whoever did plant terebinths anyway did it in secret, and certainly did not brag about it. But my father did everything backwards, and over the top.

The lives of our neighbors, the other families of the tribe of Judah, were easier. They acted by the simple, sensible command: "And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food."

The members of our tribe, the tribe of Judah, worked by the book. We did all we could to conquer the land, to dispossess it, and to settle in it. Exactly as the angel had instructed.

But, no thanks to us, most of the other tribes, just blew it. The tribe of Judah 'carried' all the rest of the tribes on its back. We were born into a reality where the responsibility is first of all ours, and often only ours, and we got used to it.

Nothing new in your frame of reference. I believe you know exactly what I mean.

I remember those days, and I even miss them… because every time a new land-holding was established in the tribe of Judah, the whole family, without exception, cleared the ground of stones.

The cleared stones marked off the plot and softened the slopes of the field into terraces. It was backbreaking labor under the scorching sun. Dry earth, thorns, and hills of gray-white limestone from horizon to horizon. You have no idea how much imagination it took them to sing, all together, with enormous fervor, the following song, again and again:

"For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and honey."

If you close your eyes, you can see how that singing filled every corner of the land-holding while the trees were being planted. The people of Judah understood the importance of planting fruit trees over the urgency of building the house and every other task. The planting of the seven species was a festival day for the whole community.

They planted vines that within four years became a works of grapes, raisins, and wine. At least two fig trees, which after some four years (and a bit of luck) became a gold mine of fig-cakes, an essential energy reserve for everyone in the house and a currency, good as cash, all year round.

Pomegranate trees that were nature's pharmacy and readied our bodies for the hardships of winter. An olive grove, the foundation of every bite! The oil we pressed from the olives was the oxygen of our lives. Don't confuse this with your frame of reference. For you, olive oil is also a perfect antioxidant. For us it was literally "oxygen." Without it we could not have survived.

And last but not least, honey! No. No. No. I'm not talking about those jars of bee-poop you buy at the supermarket. Honey, that's the black syrup we used to press from the fruit of the date palms. I think nowadays you call this wondrous honey 'silan,' and the date palms you call 'tamar', but our silan-honey was natural, with no added sugar, and it was the most delicious liquid nature ever made.

I thank you for listening, but I must admit I am wary with you… because I do not know you yet. I hope you understand there is a basis for my suspicion. I will certainly understand if you too, at least at this stage of my story, show caution and a critical eye toward me. You could argue, for instance, that just like my father, Abraham our father also did not plant fruit trees. "And Abraham planted a tamarisk-tree in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the LORD, the Everlasting God." And you'd be right!

Lately, in fact, we and our dear brothers of the tribe of Simeon have gone back to singing and reciting the song "And Abraham planted a tamarisk-tree…," which comes straight to us from the Book of Genesis. True, Abraham's tamarisk-planting happened ages ago, but only lately have we grasped what a wonderful deed it was. Unlike my father, Abraham our father had a good reason to plant tamarisks in Beer-sheba. It was his ingenious way to mark the location of water sources in the desert.

To this day, and many generations later, the descendants of the tribe of Simeon, "And they had for their inheritance Beer-sheba", give thanks for it, as Joshua wrote in his book. Without those tamarisks, the people of Simeon would have died of thirst when they came to inherit the land.

I'm afraid I'm digging at you too much, and you might think I'm wandering off the main point. But I have to explain to you why the story of planting the trees matters. It is tied to the story of my life, twice.

The first time: my father was in no hurry to plant fruit trees. Each year he planted only a few of them, which 'forced' us again and again to count four years until they ripened, and let my father fulfill the verse: "And what man is there that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not used the fruit thereof? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man use the fruit thereof."

In short, my father found a loophole to dodge the military service that came with the conquest of the land. Do you understand what kind of man he was? I'm sure you know the type. Every generation has them. They don't die, they just get replaced.

The second reason?

I was raped, while still a child, in my own home!!! Under the shared shade of those five goddamn terebinths.

I don't have the strength to talk about it now, because every time I remember it, I arrive at the same wretched conclusion. It's my fault.

I'm asking you not to give up on me at so early a stage, and not to judge my conclusions, even if they are wretched or foolish. It may be that the conclusion "it's my fault" really is idiotic, but I need you to be brave and keep reading without judging me.

I take a breath.
I need a small moment to breathe.
This isn't easy for me.

Every time those five terebinths and my first rape beneath them come back to me, a thought stronger than I am rises in me, one I cannot escape:

Maybe I, too, was to blame…

And maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe I could have prevented all of it. I dunno… I'll never know.

There, I've said it…

But the mere thought of the possibility that "it's my fault" freezes me. Does that seem logical to you? That I'm to blame for my own rape? I don't know. It's confusing, and it's hard for me.

I promise to tell you everything later on. And thank you again. Thank you for going on listening to me and not blurting out that maddening line: "Where did you get this nonsense that it's your fault…" and abandoning me.

The very fact that you keep on reading and listening to me is not a given. Everyone else abandoned me long ago. More than three thousand years.

All right! So if you're listening anyway and you've made it this far, I'll let you in a little more. The children in our village split into two: the group that idolized Rachel and the group of children that idolized Leah. Leah ImenuTN4, at least in the case of the tribe of Judah, really was the great-grandmother of us all. We all knew the song:

"And she conceived again, and bore a son; and she said: 'This time will I praise the LORD.' Therefore she called his name Judah."

We even made up a dance for this song. Because after you sing the first part, you spin around, throw your hands up in the air, point at a random kid from the tribe of Manasseh, Ephraim, or Benjamin, and shout, jeering: "and she LEFT, OFF, BEAR-ING!!!!"

I belonged to the smaller group, the one that idolized Rachel. Idolizing Rachel over Leah may seem trivial to you. I wish you were right.

I'm afraid you don't understand what I mean when I say 'idolize.' From my short visit here I've gathered that your sense of reality is defined mainly through the digital space, which is rather new and surprising to me, and, to be honest… even to you.

If you'll admit the truth, as of today all your connection to famous figures in your life happens mainly in the imagined digital arena. The experiences and the expressions of adoration are carried out in quick taps through your fingertips.

In other words, your phone's keyboard grants you an unbearable lightness in choosing, criticizing, experiencing, hopping between and swapping out the objects of your interest and adoration, faster than the turning of the seasons.

I had only Rachel.
By day, by night.
In summer and in winter.
And Rachel was adored by the girls my age because she had been granted to be loved.

Rachel was granted to be the only woman in the world(!) who experienced the ultimate love. Rachel won the love of Jacob.

A love not measured in words.
A love not measured in time.
A love that could not be gauged by the force of the pain it brought with it,
a love that could not be measured in units of effort, if such units of measure exist at all.

Jacob's love for Rachel is the love, with a capital L, that every girl coming of age will ever want for herself. You too!

Can you grasp the size and force of the love folded into this short verse? "And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her."

Seven years, for Jacob, were like a single weekend. Do you get it? Or this short verse?

"…and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served with him yet seven other years."

What an enormous love! Jacob's love for Rachel did not come at the expense of his bond with Leah, because the love for Rachel was so great that it easily contained Leah too.

This is a love with the force of seven years and another seven years… and if it had needed another seven years.. In fact, it is a love multiplied infinitely by 'seven years.' It is a love of eternal life. There's no such thing.

You ask why "eternal life"? This love was granted eternal life because even you and I, at this very moment, thousands of years later, speak with envy and adoration of the love Rachel was granted. And so it is an eternal love that grants Rachel, eternal life.

So you have to understand that for us the monument of "Rachel's tomb" is not a "tomb" but a marker in time, meant to say that a love like that, which once happened, is possible.

Rachel's tomb immortalizes the ultimate love we will always long for but which, sad to say, none of us has yet experienced, except Rachel.

That's it. We were a small group of innocent girls from the tribe of Judah, and between the laundry, the drawing of water, the churning of cheeses and the gathering of seeds, we dreamed of a love like that and believed that our adoration of Rachel, might bring us closer to it.

How did our adoration of Rachel show itself? Very simply. We worked so hard at the daily housework. We tried to finish before the hot midday hours. And then, instead of resting a little and gathering strength for the evening chores, we would run and meet at Rachel's tomb.

To keep it short, I'll let you assume that Rachel's tomb was a kind of WhatsApp group called "The Hot Girls (the tribe?) of Bethlehem."TN5 Because only the girls who truly thought they deserved it came to these daily meetings.

We would meet there in the hot midday hours. Bethlehem was empty of parents and old folk who did nothing but scold us all day. The heat waves sent them off to cool down in the wine cellars and the grain pits.

What did we do?
We ran wild!
How did we run wild?
We made up songs!
And sang.

Just a moment, before you go on. Picture a hill 775 meters above the sea. At a hot midday hour. Picture the lowland spread at our feet in a huge half-arc. Now picture the sun in the middle of the sky.

Can you see in your mind the giant stadium and the perfect lighting rig I'm talking about?? Your Eurovision is nothing, nothing at all, compared to what we had there.

Now let's talk about our sound system. We would screech out our souls, tear our vocal cords to shreds, make up songs, and it sounded something like this:

Avadeit b'Rachel sheva shnin, v'ad sof yomai,
klum havei b'anpi, b'ahavati atah.

Avadeit b'Rachel sheva shnin, v'ad sof yomai,
matbei leih l'Abba, b'ahavati atah.
B'meiti miPaddan, meitta Rachel, b'ar'a dichna'an,
uvaderech at nachat,
b'orcha d'Efrata,
Beit Lechem atya.

Wow. For a second I forgot you don't have the faintest idea of Spanish.. sorry.. of Aramaic… I'll try to explain to you what the song we made up says. It tells the story of Jacob's love for Rachel, and it goes roughly like this:

I served for Rachel seven years, and to the end of my days,
the time is nothing at all, in my love for her.

I served for Rachel seven years, and to the end of my days,
I swore to Father, in my love for her.
When I came from northern Syria, Rachel died, in the land of Canaan,
on the way she rested,
on the road to Ephrath,
to Bethlehem she came.

There, I forgot to tell you that although at home we spoke 'Yehudit'TN6 , the holy tongue, the new language that had seeped into the land from the north and spread among the peoples of Canaan and the region in my day was Aramaic.

It's important you understand: had we dared to foul our mouths with 'Yehudit', that is, the holy tongue, in public, they would have hung us by our feet and lowered us into an abandoned water cistern.

On the other hand, Aramaic, which was not yet widespread, later became the language everyone spoke with everyone, the language of trade and communication among all the peoples who lived between Aram and the land of Canaan.

In short, Aramaic for me is like Spanish for you, and a worldwide music career demands singing in a language with a big potential audience…

…and one more thing: thank you so much for coming this far and listening to me. You grant me a moment of hesedTN7, soul-restoring grace, in which you remind me that I too was once a child.

I have tears in my eyes now…

Do you understand? I thought I was singing to Rachel, because I wanted to get from her the 'recipe' for sublime love, but only now do I realize that those songs were for me. For myself.

Why?
Because no one sang to me.
No one ever cheered me on.
That's how it is in the tribe of Judah.
No cheering on.
No appreciating.
Not a single kind word.

Life inside 'the great, tight-knit community of the tribe of Judah' looked good only from the outside. But everyone was out for themselves. I was alone. We were, and we remained, a collection of lonely girls inside a community that only from the outside looked warm.

Don't be angry with me, but in a certain sense you too have managed to preserve the strange structure of the Jewish community, of the tribe of Judah. Generation after generation, in many places around the world, you created and nurtured 'tight-knit' Jewish communities that survived the hardships, but quite a few of you, just like me, lived in a cold, painful, sad loneliness within, inside a community that was vibrant and warm on the outside.