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Tonight begins Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that usually leaves me both unsettled and confused.

Watching my children learn about the Holocaust from slick, well-designed and age-appropriate curricula has made me aware of just how raw and scattershot my own Holocaust education was.  Holocaust education was a battering experience.  I remember being constantly exposed to artifacts of the horror of it all with, it seems to me in retrospect, the primary goal of causing horror and pain.  There were live and (a little later) videotaped survivor testimonies and lampshades made of flesh, endless pictures of doomed children and corpses.  First-person literary accounts and art and music composed by the doomed.  Having recently revisited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem I was reminded of the old complex, before it was remodeled in a kinder, gentler, way that gave thought to developing a story and educating.  The old Yad Vashem was just a blindly thrown roundhouse punch.

The thing was, it connected.  The Holocaust pains me.  It evokes in me a diffuse emotional horror.  I feel for my people, and those grotesque images play through my mind.  I feel compelled to seek a connection.

And there’s the problem.  I never had an organic, real connection to the Holocaust.  My family, on both sides, came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and did not stay in close contact with relatives in Europe.  My family, I was always told, knew of no relatives who actually suffered.  We were unscathed.  I feel a need to connect, but that is perhaps only because I lack an immediate connection.  It leave me with a fissure somewhere in my emotional response.

But it is not just this lack of personal connection that causes a certain sense of distance.  For many, the Holocaust has been profitable.  Politically, some have tried to use it to justify the unjustifiable.  Many others have achieved fame or made good livings off it.  While my children’s curricula are well-done (I wish that they existed when I was young), they leave me cynically wondering how many people must have profited through them.  I sometimes feel that the pain that was so carefully created is now being exploited for the personal benefit of others, even as the last Holocaust survivors sometimes struggle to put food on their tables.  My point here is not to condemn but just to note that I struggle with balancing my appreciation of this work with that of its material reality.

The other day I received an email from my mother.  She was doing some genealogical research and stumbled on a “page of testimony” in the online Yad Vashem database.  The page concerned a woman who bore her (Yiddish) name.  Feige, according to the unsteady, block Hebrew script of her sister-in-law, was simply “exterminated by the Nazis.”  It happened in Poland in 1943, the year my mother was born, and it dovetailed with a family memory that her name was changed at the last minute in response to a recent death.

Feige was a 26 year old single seamstress.  That much is clear.  Most everything else about the page of testimony, though, is odd.  She bears her mother’s last name (my grandfather’s), but her father appears to have a different last name.  Her sister-in-law, a survivor who must have been married to her brother, bears yet another set of names.  Each of these anomalies, of course, can be explained.  Most puzzling to me, however, is how word of the death of yet another obscure, poor Jew in Poland would have made it back to the U.S. so quickly.

When the Yom Hashoah siren sounds here in Jerusalem-commencing a moment of national silence-I will try to put aside the mind-numbing data and larger abstract and theological issues raised by the Shoah.  I will try to ignore the voices around me that will use the Holocaust to score points and I will try to suppress what I know will be my cynical response to them.  I will, instead, try to focus on Feige, this simple, almost forgotten seamstress, my distant relative, who died for no good reason.

 

This month, for the first time in a while, the group Women of the Wall managed to pray at the Western Wall without any serious incidents (here is a news report of the gathering).  The group’s goal, in addition to simply conducting a meaningful prayer service at the Western Wall, is to advocate for equal treatment of men and women at the site.  While there are many issues in play here (e.g., currently women are discouraged from singing “too loudly” at the Wall and prohibited from reading from a Torah scroll), one of the real hot-button issues has been the right for women to wear a tallit, or prayer-shawl, particularly those that look “manly.”

According to the rabbi who sets the rules at the Wall (and whose decisions are enforced by the regular Israel police force), one of the primary reasons why women are not allowed to wear masculine-looking prayer shawls at the Wall is that women are not allowed to wear any “man’s garment” (e.g., pants) from the Torah:

A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

The reason behind this stricture is hardly obvious.  Why should such an activity be forbidden?  The Bible itself doesn’t tell us and it mystified Jews even in antiquity.  In the first century BCE-CE, the Jewish philosopher Philo wrote:

So earnestly and carefully does the law desire to train and exercise the soul to manly courage that it lays down rules even about the kind of garment which should be worn.  It strictly forbids a man to assume a woman’s garb, in order that no trace, no merest shadow of the female, should attach to him to spoil his masculinity….  In the same way he trained the woman to decency of adornment and forbade her to assume the dress of a man, with the further object of guarding against the mannish-woman as much as the womanish-man.  He knew that as in buildings, if one of the foundation stones is removed, the rest will not remain as they were. (Philo, On the Virtues, 18, 21, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Philo, then, the purpose of the law is to instill in its followers a sense of gender difference.  Dress is one of a complex of behaviors that define the “natural” gender roles decreed by God.

Writing several decades later, though, the Jewish historian Josephus understood the intention behind the law quite differently.  As he pithily relates it:

Beware, above all in battle,, that no woman assume the accoutrements of a man nor a man the apparel of a woman” (Josephus Antiquities 4.301, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Josephus, the purpose of the law appears to be practical: it is so that in battle men and women would not be confused with each other.  Thus confusion might lead especially to the killing of women, but also for men would serve as a kind of unfair disguise.

The rabbis, though, have yet another interpretation:

Here is the heart of the matter:  A woman should not dress like a man and then go among the men, and a man should not ornament himself like a woman and then go among the women.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov says: How do we know that a woman a woman should not put on battle clothes and go forth to war?  Because it is written, “a woman shall not wear a man’s clothing…” (Sifre Deuteronomy 226)

For the anonymous writers, the reason for the prohibition is the fear of promiscuity. Were it not for this prohibition we could expect women to sneak into places where men congregate and vice-versa, a situation that would inevitably lead to illicit relations.

I suspect that the rabbi of the Western Wall is not seriously concerned that women who wear tallitot will use them to slip into the men’s section undectected so that they can cavort with them.  Nor, of course, is there any concern for battle.  So that, curiously, leave Philo’s rationale that improper dress can destroy personal virtue.  (A side thought: I wonder how the authorities would respond to a man who attempts to pray there in a “feminine” tallit.)

However the prohibition is justified today, though, it is intriguing to note that our puzzlement over it is nothing new.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my new edited volume, The Gift in Antiquity, published by Wiley-Blackwell.  The official description:

“You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in fulfillment of an vow, for both are abhorrent to the Lord your God,” the Bible declares (Deuteronomy 23:19; translation NJPS).   This cryptic verse, like many such other biblical commands, raises a large number of exegetical problems.  How does one define a “whore” and, more problematically, “the pay of a dog”?  What is the situation that the verse envisions?  What precisely is abhorrent to the Lord, and why?

Leaving aside here the clause “the pay of a dog,” one traditional way to understand this is to envision a situation in which a prostitute vows to give something to God.  Perhaps she does this because she feels that God has shown favor to her (e.g., healed her or her children from an illness; helped her business flourish); perhaps just because she wants to give.  God, though, will not accept such a gift because it the means by which it was acquired were “abhorrent.”

This interpretation is certainly not impossible, but it is also not without its difficulties.  There are many ways to acquire money that one would think that God would find “abhorrent.”  Why is this particular act singled out?

An alternative scenario, though, is suggested by a passage in Herodotus.  In it, Herodotus discusses the gift of a prostitute, Rhodopis, to a temple:

For Rhodopis desired to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, making an offering such as nobody else had thought of and placed in a temple…. With a tenth of her money she had made many iron roasting-spits, as many as the tithe would provide, and sent them to Delphi; and they are still here now, piled up behind the altar that the Chians dedicated.  (2.135)

The problem suggested in this passage is not the way that the prostitute acquired her money, but the way that she used her money to “clean” her reputation by giving a gift (usually made as a fulfillment of a vow) to the temple.  This, then, is what may also be behind Deuteronomy 23:19: what is abhorrent is not the money itself but the use of the money to create a permanent  “memorial” to a prostitute within the Jerusalem temple.

In antiquity, as today, money could buy respectability.

 

Yesterday and today Israeli news has been abuzz with a story that dare not speak its name.  In 2010 a mysterious prisoner committed suicide in an Israeli prison.  The Australian press is reporting that this prisoner was actually an Australian citizen who moved to Israel and was involved in ways unspecified with the Mossad before being detained and “disappeared.”  The circumstances of his detention and death remain murky, as does the reasoning behind the Israeli government’s insistence that Israeli news outlets do not actually report on this affair, although it is now all over the world press.

Quite incidentally, I stumbled this morning on a much older spy case.  In 1963, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that an Egyptian spy named Kabarik Jacobian had been arrested in Israel.  JTA reported only the bare outline of the story, in which Jacobian was given a cover identity as a Jew and then joined the Israeli army, in which he served briefly.  It is unclear if he actually harmed Israeli security.

Whatever happened to Jacobian?  Here, the internet trail runs dry – I have not looked particularly hard, but I have been unable to find any mention of him apart from this brief report.  If anybody has any ideas how I might learn more about Jacobian, please let me know!

P.S.  After posting this I received this link from a friend, for those who read Hebrew.  It would still be interesting to know what happened to him after he returned to Egypt.