Chapter 4: My Third Friend

There is something that has not changed over the years. Each of us keeps a small circle of close women friends. I imagine it is more or less the same for you.
In most cases the 'first' friend will always be there for you; she'll always listen to you to the end, won't judge you, and will be there for you, but when it happens, you're not yet mature enough to understand it. The 'second' will be the interesting friend who arrives with a great noise and disappears about the same way, and the 'third' is the friend you know the least about but think about the most. In your world she's the girl who looks more or less like you but, unlike you, has time to post something new every day, thousands of followers, and always looks happier.

You realize there's 'something' you don't know exists in the world of your 'third' friend, because she always brings with her something mysterious and unclear that makes you court her again and again, asking for her attention each time anew.

You could argue that for you 'it's not exactly like that'… and that I'm offering a 'simplistic, inaccurate description.' You're right. Because I thought so too… and that is exactly where the trouble starts for girls of our kind.

My 'third' friend was from the tribe of Reuben. Every year she would come to us with her parents from across the Jordan, with the mikneh. 'Mikneh' means flocks of sheep and goats. I promise to try to speak less in biblical language and more in plain 'Hebrew.' It's a little hard, and I'm really trying.

Hashtag #TheHolyTongue. There, I got something right.

Like her whole family from the tribe of Reuben, they lived beyond the Jordan in the hill country of Gilead and Bashan. I have no idea where that is. I have never been there.

They had so many sheep and goats, and they were in constant motion, herders and wanderers. Once a year they would come to us too, and every time they came, it was like the merriest fair you could imagine.

We bought hides and wool from them, and in return they got access to our water sources. In the two months they grazed in the area, the price of meat dropped and there was a 'barbecue' every night.

Picture music deep into the night.
Picture good food and dancing. Is there anything better than that?
You see? Without them we were just 'Bethlehem, tribe of Judah.'
When they were around, it was 'Bethlehem, the City That Never Stops.'

And the height of it all, the 'third' friend. She was a shepherdess in a perfect dress. To me she stood for absolute freedom.

I wanted to be like her. Today she's here. Tomorrow she's there.

I wanted to have her smile. She was a free, untethered party girl.
I wanted to be her.
I wanted to be like her.

In the short time she came to visit, I chased her unattainable attention.

She didn't say much about where she lived beyond the Jordan, 'Medeba.' And when she did, she would sweep us up in stories of the wondrous mountains, and in our imagination we would roam with her the plains beside the brook of Arnon, and bathe with her in its rushing waters.

The stories of a faraway and so-beautiful land turned her into a perfect princess, at least in my eyes.

Today I understand that her life was not easy, that she was a wanderer who suffered greatly on the roads. She slept under the open sky even in winter, when the lashing weather kept her company. She had to face predators at an unreasonable frequency.

Every night she took part in guarding the mikneh. (All right, I promise, this is the last time I write biblically. But you have to admit that "mikneh" is a beautiful word.)

I was captivated by her charm, and the way I saw it, her dress fulfilled the famous song: "Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee."

She was the untethered princess in the perfect dress with the lovely smile.
I was the only one who thought so.

All my other friends were from the tribe of Judah. They told me I was wrong, and their explanation was simple: "She idolizes Leah. We belong to Rachel."

They were trying to say that she was a descendant of the tribe of Reuben, Leah's firstborn son, who was a less-loved child, as you could gather from the songs we sang out of the Book of Genesis.

That argument annoyed me. Those simplistic stigmas, are wretched. I would answer them in a voice full of self-importance: the mere fact that she's of the tribe of Reuben, of the family of Carmi, does not make her an admirer of Leah.

In the talks we had at Rachel's tomb, I tried to explain that the whole split into 'camps' did not interest her in the slightest. Because as far as I was concerned, the princess in the stained dress was 'far beyond all that.'

My beloved friends would attack me with questions to prove that I didn't really know her, and that only made me think about her more. When they ran out of words, they would remind me of the song that I(!) made up and had stopped singing ever since I met her.

You already understand that this song too was in the language of the Eurovision of the Middle East, Aramaic. Right? I want to sing it to you. It goes something like this… just a moment.. I need to recall it, because I sort of repressed it… to tell the truth, this song wasn't the only thing I repressed from that wretched time:

Efrayim u-Menashe, kir'uven ve-Shim'on, yehon li,
ve-lo kifhaz kamayim Reuven.

Reuven be-tipshuteih, avad bechora,
nafal be-het de-gadol, hillel mishkav avui,
va-yateiv mizbecha raba, le-mehzei al yardena,
klum havei be-anpei, ve-lo yakum od.

In a free Hebrew rendering, the song said roughly this: the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (Rachel's grandsons) are more loved than the tribes of Reuben and Simeon (the rejected children of Leah, the 'unwanted' wife). And then we sang that Reuben was an idiot, that line needs no explaining to you, who made the mistake of his life when he chose to lie(!) with his father Jacob's handmaid.

Reuben is such a fool, he lost his birthright (he lost it to our tribe, Judah), fell into a great sin, defiled his father's bed, and as if that weren't enough for this tribe, they went on with their nonsense and built a great altar beyond the Jordan, which raised a fear of schism and even of rivalry against the centrality of the people of Israel west of the Jordan river.

The truth? I agreed with my friends that Reuben was reckless, a fool who gambled the whole pot and lost it, and so we, the tribe of Judah, with our wisdom and the consistent responsibility we showed, won by default.

On the other hand, I never understood why the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the grandchildren of Reuben still have to live with a lingering sense of insult and rejection. Today, after thousands of years and looking back, I understand the children of the tribe of Reuben in every generation.

Why? Because their wretched lives demanded of them, insistently, to prove again and again that they were not reckless or foolish. They had to cope every day, hour by hour, with the fact that their mother was, after all the pretty words, a kind of 'necessary compromise.'

This emotional structure produced vulnerable, insecure people, no matter how hard they tried to prove the opposite or to hide it. And that insecurity only made them make more and more foolish mistakes.

People of this kind tend more and more to avoid contact with others, in your modern world they shut themselves away in front of the computer. In my world they avoided meeting people and herded more goats and even more sheep.

Do you get this? Leah was a devoted mother 'exactly as one should be.' Jacob loved her as much as one 'should', but it doesn't really matter whether she was a 'good' and devoted mother. Because every child, the children of the tribe of Reuben included, wants to be loved, with no reason, no excuses, no explanations, no conditions, no questions.

No one wants love in a measured dose of 'as much as one should,' or to be cared for 'properly.' Everyone deserves to be loved unconditionally; it is a basic thing every one of us asks for. Each of us needs one person who will love and believe in her or him and, as in Reuben's case, accept him as he is.

Without it? You get a slippery slope where we are forced to build a fragile, endless story that explains us to ourselves over and over. It is the surest way to develop in us, unconsciously, a sad and contagious emotional disability that, God forbid, we pass on to the next generation, our children, soft creatures we are meant to love with all our hearts, with no reason, no excuses, no explanations, no conditions, no questions.

The tribe of Reuben, in every generation, pays a price for not having been loved for no reason. And from there it was also never seen as "a needed tribe," nor counted as "a tribe that can." Remember that. Remember that word. 'I.'TN8 Your child's sense of 'I' begins with being loved, needed, and able.

Maybe it was this very thought about Reuben, "the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge", that made me fall under the spell of the goatherd in the stained white dress.

The friend in the white dress was the most energetic thing I ever met in my life. She said she 'takes life as it comes.'

I didn't understand what she meant. She would say all kinds of other sentences, clever but also strange, that I had never heard from anyone else. For example:

"The way of the world is the essence of everything. We are part of the world, and we have nothing to be ashamed of."

I barely understood the words. What is 'the way of the world'? What is 'essence'? But I would nod my head to impress her. I didn't want her, woman of the wide world, to think I was some idiot who had never once left Bethlehem and had nothing in her head.

She would go on to say that the Moabites were their neighbors, and that they knew how to enjoy life, good music, song, and above all, good food. With no shame at all. The Moabites knew how to feast. They reveled in the tastiest things, and they ate and celebrated life every day and into the night.

"Really?" I asked with big calf eyes. And spit began to fill my palate. The feeling of hunger reminded me that I hadn't put a thing in my mouth since yesterday… and then, my mother's shouts yanked me back, all at once, to reality.