Jephte's Daughter (42 page)

She pulled her hands away with revulsion.
Shalom bais
, she thought with real horror. The irony of it. Domestic peace. Harmony between husband and wife. The ideal of a Jewish marriage. She had heard of abused women wanting to divorce their husbands and the husbands dragging it out for fifteen years with those words:
Shalom bais
, they would tell the rabbinical court, and the court would believe them and tell the couple to try once again. She knew that under Jewish law, a woman could not divorce her husband. He had the exclusive right to deny her her
get
, her writ of divorcement, without which she might never marry again in the eyes of God and the state.

In the Talmud it was written that if the rabbis decided a woman had been wronged and was entitled to a divorce, then they had the authority to beat the reluctant husband until he agreed. But that was not the practice in the modern State of Israel, which nevertheless adhered completely to the Talmud in all other matters dealing with marriage and divorce. Why, they had even jailed a husband for ten years for refusing to give his wife a divorce on the grounds of his impotence, but because he still refused to give her a divorce, she remained unable to remarry, growing old and childless and bitter in her faith. Ten years!

She saw the pleased smile that lit the corners of Isaac’s mouth, and it threw a spark into the smoldering fire in her chest, illuminating her mind and her heart with the clear flame of determination. “You can say anything you like, Isaac, that is true,” she said calmly. “But I promise you, all of your faithful Hassidim, the Hassidim who have accepted you because my father chose you, will hear all the sorry, intimate details of our marriage.” She was satisfied to see the smile fade from the corners of his mouth.

He rose to his feet as the realization hit him that he was no longer dealing with a frightened young girl who could be bullied and tortured. He felt a grudging respect growing inside of him, and a growing need to see her grovel before him.

“I am sorry to hear that you wish it so. You know, the Talmud says God Himself weeps when a husband divorces the wife of his youth.” His voice rose piously.

“I don’t think He will this time, Isaac,” she said dryly.

Like chess players, they were both quiet, considering their next move. Isaac gave up the hope of getting her into the bedroom. Batsheva abandoned the idea of offering him more money. Finally, she looked at him wearily and asked simply: “Isaac, I don’t want to hurt you any more. Let us be reasonable and treat each other with compassion. You know I can’t stand the sight of you. I will divorce you in the end. Whether or not you make me fight and hang out all our dirty laundry is up to you. What is it you want?”

“I want my son.”

“You don’t even like kids, Isaac. Get married to someone like your mother. You’ll have ten before you know what hit you.”

“Still the same dirty little slut,” he said viciously. “I will not let my son, the heir to the Ha-Levis, be brought up by a whore and her Christian lover.”

Her face went white. “What are you talking about?”

“Ah, so you see I can also prepare surprises. Not just you who kidnaps and fakes suicides. What right have you to ask anything from me? You, who put me through months of mourning for my child, who made me say
kaddish
, the prayer for the dead, for him. Yes, I know about David Hope, the priest. I have my ways. Nothing is hidden from me. Like God.” He smiled again.

She felt herself fill with loathing and contempt and fear. She was simply afraid of him, of what he was capable of doing. And guilty, too, for the pain he had no doubt suffered because of her. Perhaps he was right, she thought. Perhaps she had no right to enjoy happiness after what she had done. Perhaps God would stand beside Isaac against her.
Mida k’neged mida
—measure for measure. She had stolen his son from him—now he would take Akiva from her.

Isaac spoke again, not looking directly at her, but over her, at her agonized brows and forehead: “I am asking you again, for the soul of our son, for the good of all the people who look to both of us for guidance and for example, will you come back to me?” He stood over her now and as she sank deeper into the chair, he seemed to tower like an immensity that cannot be overcome, that blocked out all light. The young Batsheva would have broken down in tears and run away. But she was not that pure, fragile child anymore. She was a woman whose faith had undergone terrible trials and had emerged whole. It sustained her now. She got up and faced him.

“Isaac, I am sorry for the suffering you have gone through because of me. But it is not a tenth of what you made me suffer. You are a bully, Isaac, and a faking hypocrite—I pity the poor people who come to you for help and for instruction. How you must ruin their lives.” He grabbed her by the wrists and held her hard, his breath coming in hot, quick gasps that burnt her face.

She looked at him in surprise and contempt, at if seeing him for the very first time. He was tall, but not powerful. His arms were thin and unaccustomed to any real work. His face, contorted in rage, was almost laughably like that of a villain in a cartoon—mean and petty and cruel. Why would God want to stand by him? He had never repented of his cruelty, never done
teshuva
as she had, suffering for her sins, becoming a better person because of them. In a way, she almost felt sorry for him. She was filled with love—for God, for Akiva, for David. But there was no love in Isaac, perhaps not even the capacity for loving, which may have been beaten out of him when he was a small child shivering in fear behind the rusting iron bars of the yeshivah. She felt pity that he had never been able to lift his eyes and really see the exquisite white beauty of the city he had lived in all his life.

But then the crushing pressure of his hands on her wrists took away her pity, replacing it with pain and fury. “I loathe you. You make me want to throw up. I’d rather be dead than have you touch me again. But you don’t frighten me anymore.” She loosened a wrist from his grasp and in a cool, calculated movement of her whole body, thrust her palm up hard against his nose. He cried out in pain, dropping her other wrist, and brought both his hands up to his face to catch the streaming blood.

She grabbed her purse and as she turned to go her eyes met his. She saw them glitter above his bloodstained hands with the serious, murdering light of a true enemy.

The rabbinical court of Jerusalem is housed in a small, unassuming suite of rooms in the old Ministry of Religion building near the Russian Compound, called so because of the overwhelming presence of the Russian Orthodox Church. The green-and-white church, with its onion-shaped spires, lends a mysterious foreign air to the low, ramshackle buildings around it that house government offices, the police station, and an old prison complex where the British once hanged young Jewish resistance fighters. But most of it is devoted to providing rare downtown parking spaces.

The irony of her strange and prosaic surroundings was not lost on Batsheva as she made her way toward the triumverate of
dayanim
, rabbinical judges, who would decide her fate. Here, in the shadow of this foreign church, amongst the ghosts of hanged men, surrounded by these cars, three men would decide if her life was to have any real happiness or meaning or if she would be forced to give up one of the two people she loved most for the sake of the other. Gratefully, she returned the comforting squeeze of her mother’s hand.

After her disastrous meeting with Isaac, she had lain awake wondering if she should not just run away again and live with David and Akiva, without risks, without trials. And always she came back to the same irreversible conclusion: She believed in God and she was bound by His Law, the
Halacha
, as handed down from generation to generation, carefully interpreted and occasionally changed by only the most respected and learned scholars of the time. She could not run away from it because it was simply a part of her, like her heart or her lungs. One cannot cut out one’s lungs and live, she told herself.

As she entered the small courtroom she breathed deeply, feeling the tangible expansion of her chest as it filled with the unseen yet lifegiving oxygen. If only her faith would expand, she thought, and fill every doubtful cavity of her mind with belief that it would all end well. Then, as she studied the faces of the three men before her for clues, she realized that it was not her faith in God or His Law that she lacked. It was her faith in man, in the men who had been delegated to carry out His Law. She knew that she could tell nothing about them from their outer appearance. They all wore the same long black suits of Meah Shearim—the same shades of black Isaac, her father, and Gershon wore. They all had beards and glasses. But she knew they were not interchangeable. It was the difference in their intelligence, in their true piety and learning, that would decide her fate. And this she could not tell by looking at them.

Isaac sat up front with his mother and two Hassidim. His mother stood up and fanned herself vigorously as she saw Batsheva enter, her face lined with the wrinkles of hate. Batsheva saw Isaac turn and look over her head, dismissing her as if she were a ghost, as if she had already ceased to exist. And then the hearing began.

Isaac spoke first: “As the distinguished
dayanim
know, my wife ran away with my son two years ago. All of us thought she was dead. I cannot tell you what anguish I have suffered. I asked God so many times why? What did I do to deserve such a
Gehennom
? I think I must have deserved it, yes. I must have sinned greatly to have suffered so.” His voice became very mild and humble. “And because I accepted this long ago as God’s will, I bear no hatred toward my wife, the way Joseph bore no hatred toward his brothers for selling him into slavery in Egypt because it was all God’s will. Despite the terrible injustice, the grief she has made me suffer by taking away my child, I am prepared to take them both back and rebuild our family. I ask for
shalom bais
. I love my wife.”

Batsheva listened to him, stunned. In the worst scenario of her wildest imagination she could not have dreamt that Isaac would pull this kind of a performance. She had expected his righteous anger, his arrogant superiority. But this phony humility, this accepting piety, was beyond anything she imagined him capable of. With horror, she saw the two judges on either side, Rabbi Getz and Rabbi Millstein, look at each other and relax, leaning back in their chairs with approving little nods. Only the judge in the middle, his thick white brows knit together sternly, reserved judgment. Rabbi Magnes looked down at Isaac piercingly, without expression.

“And you say you feel no anger toward your wife. You are willing to accept her back in love?” Rabbi Getz asked.

“I have suffered, but I have uprooted all anger from my heart. As He is compassionate, so must I be,” Isaac said piously, looking at his mother, who nodded, her lips a thin line of hatred.

“And will you be able to start a new life after two years of such a separation?” Rabbi Millstein inquired, running his fingers through his beard.

“Everything will be exactly as it was. Exactly as it must and should be,” Isaac said without hesitation.

The white head of Rabbi Magnes looked up for the first time and his clear eyes, which had not grown dim but sharper with countless hours of studying the tiny print of Talmudical exegeses and commentaries, took in Isaac’s hard, glittering eyes, the strained, unnatural lowering of his head. Rabbi Magnes gestured impatiently toward Batsheva to begin.

She got up shakily and for a moment the realization of the enormity of the tragedy that could befall her, the happiness that could be denied her, took away her voice. She felt her mother pat her arm encouragingly and began softly to fill the room with the story of her marriage to Isaac Meyer Harshen. She told them of the false accusation against her virginity. She told them of how he had burned her books and made her a prisoner in her own house. How, slowly, he had taken away from her all of her pleasures, denying her all of her needs until she felt she was being destroyed. Until she felt that she would rather be dead and see her son dead than to suffer so. As she spoke she looked straight ahead, her eyes never budging from Rabbi Magnes. She did not hear the door to the courtroom open and she did not see the tall, distinguished man, bent down with age and grief, enter and sit down quietly in the back.

“When I was pregnant with Akiva, my husband beat me so badly I could not stand, forcing me to turn over my money to him so that I was penniless. He explained that the Rambam said that a man is allowed to beat his wife in order to get her to obey him. But he did not tell me that the Rambam also said a woman is allowed to divorce her husband if she finds him disgusting and loathsome. This I learned through my own diligence.” She glanced at Isaac’s grudging acknowledgment of the point gained. “I ask the court for my divorce because I despise Isaac and will never be a wife to him in any sense. I married Isaac because I was young and ignorant and thought I would be pleasing God, my father, and mother. But I don’t believe God means us to suffer. That is why His Law allows divorce. But most of all, I ask a divorce for the sake of my son. I would have been able to bear my own suffering, but I could not watch my child destroyed. It was for his sake that I was willing to betray my parents and cause them such pain.” She looked down at her mother’s ravaged face and her eyes filled with tears. And then very quietly and simply, she told them of how Isaac had treated his son, remembering suddenly the story of the ice cream. There was complete silence as she described the way Isaac had taken spoonful after spoonful in front of the heartbroken, crying child. And she saw in the eyes of the judges that they understood how such a small thing can break a mother’s heart. “I ask the court to end my suffering and let me go free to raise my child with love for other people, for God and for His Law.”

The man in the back of the room held his head in his hands and rocked back and forth. The sweat began to roll down his face, and as he took out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and forehead, his eyes, full of horror and grief, looked up only once. They met the clear, stern gaze of Rabbi Magnes as they had once before, long ago.

Rabbi Magnes gestured to Isaac. “Is this true?”

Isaac’s eyes shifted uneasily. “The woman was disgracing me. She wore the clothes of a harlot and people would tell me that she wandered alone through the hills at night taking forbidden pictures. I warned her and she would not listen to me. I had no choice but to chastise her, the way a father disciplines a child.” He stopped in confusion and embarrassment as he remembered what she had just told the court about how he disciplined his child. He blushed furiously and rushed recklessly ahead. “Her books, her clothes, all brought disgrace to me. I thought I could educate her. I offered, begged her, to let me lead her, teach her. But she was stubborn and willful. I had no choice…” And then, because he was only human and not a machine, just for a tiny instant he forgot himself and looked at his wife with all the real venom of his heart flashing brightly incandescent on his face. And when he remembered himself and again donned the mask of his humility, he saw in the sharp, clear eyes of Rabbi Magnes that this battle was lost. So he changed tactics.

“Perhaps then, what she says is true. Perhaps she cannot be a wife to me. I will divorce her then, and gladly. I also have a life and I don’t need any more grief. Then I ask the court for only one thing: Give me my son Akiva before she ruins him altogether. Before he is lost completely to the Jewish people.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers and waved them like a battle flag. “I have proof that my wife is planning to marry her lover, a Christian, a man who studied for the priesthood.”

A shocked, audible gasp exploded through the courtroom. Batsheva saw her mother’s eyes fill with disbelief and quick tears. She saw the judges move uneasily in their seats, all compassion and understanding erased from their faces. Rabbi Magnes folded his hands before him and looked carefully at Batsheva. “Is this true?”

Her whole body went weak with fear. But then she felt new strength flowing into her from another source. Anger. “David Hope is a man I met in England more than a year after I left Isaac. He was at one time studying for the priesthood.” She heard a low intake of breath once more, an ominous silence. “David came to Israel three months ago and learned that his mother was a Jew. Since then, he has been learning with Reb Gershon, who will vouch for the depth of his scholarship and understanding, the beauty of his character. I swear before God that I have not sinned in any way. But it is true that I cannot help loving him. He will make Akiva a much better father than his real one.”

“So, you admit you plan to marry this man after your divorce?” Rabbi Getz said with shock and irritation.

“Yes.” The simple answer took a huge amount of courage. I am lost, Batsheva told herself in despair, looking at the puzzled, quizzical faces of the judges. She could just see the lurid scenario going through their minds. Perhaps they had developed a little sympathy for her by now. Perhaps they even believed Isaac capable of cruelty, of wife beating. But nothing he had done could ever excuse a good Jewish married woman, no matter the provocation, from slinking off into the night and coming back in love with a man who had once studied to be a priest. Were they not flesh and blood, these judges? Were they not the same as all the other people in Meah Shearim who would judge her case by the surface and condemn her for it?

She looked up at them in despair, seeking out the tangled brows of Rabbi Magnes. “I will say this,
kavod harav
. I came back to Israel to arrange my
get
because I believe in the
Halacha
, God’s Law, and that it will be interpreted carefully without regard to social pressures, or rumors.” She stopped, her throat tightening, holding back tears of desperation. “My hope is the Law. I believe I am entitled to the divorce by Law. David is a Jew, by Law. I have not sinned, by Law. And so there is nothing to prevent me from marrying him and bringing up Akiva, by Law. I submit my happiness into your hands as interpreter of the Law and ask only for justice.”

Rabbi Magnes rose. “I will ask you to bring Akiva and David Hope to court tomorrow, since they are also involved.” Rabbi Getz and Rabbi Millstein looked up in surprise.

Isaac got up, furious. “To have this Christian in the same room with my son! I will not tolerate it…”

Rabbi Magnes turned his steady gaze upon Isaac and nodded with a cryptic smile. “A scholar should know the Law.” Batsheva was pleased to see Isaac Harshen, all false humility gone, all arrogance clearly written on a face contorted with hatred and rage, sit down and shut up. Like a shadow, the tall man in the back of the room got up and walked painfully and silently out of the courtroom, attracting the attention and compassion of only one pair of clear, intelligent eyes under heavy white brows.

Information about the divorce proceedings of Isaac and Batsheva Ha-Levi Harshen spread like a chemical fire throughout Meah Shearim. Rival Hassidic groups saw in the trial validation for all the rumors and controversies of the past two years. Groups hostile to the Ha-Levis pointed out the disgraceful behavior of Batsheva and her shocking liaison with an apostate as proof of the eternal evil of the Ha-Levis, brought on by excessive indulgence in material things.