Lisa Batya Feld's Blog, page 3

The sanctity of life

Thought for the morning: You know that quote about whoever causes one life to be lost, it’s as though they have destroyed a whole world, but whoever saves a single person, it’s as though they have saved a whole world? It’s from Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5. It’s the injunction given to witnesses in capital cases. Which means that it isn’t just a nice aphorism about people in general, it’s meant to prevent miscarriages of justice. It’s meant to apply to people who are suspected of crimes that might warrant the death penalty (let alone petty crimes!). Even if you don’t know all the details. Even if you’re not sure if they were resisting arrest or just trying to catch their balance, their breath. It is THEIR lives you must be most careful with, you, the witnesses, the bystanders. You hold their lives in your hands and you have a responsibility to save and sustain their lives, to not allow their whole world to be destroyed. Black. Lives. Matter.

Out on my daily ramble…

…I had the thrill of hearing two tween girls pausing on opposite sides of a street with their bikes for social distance, putting on British accents and pretending to be spies contacting each other on a mission. One of them was codenamed Side-Eye. I am so delighted by their awesomeness.

Remembering Mike Resnick

I studied under Mike Resnick at Clarion in 1999. Every night, he’d invite whichever of the students wanted to come down to the local Denny’s to pick his brain, and most nights only two of us accepted, me and Tobias Buckell. He very much took Tobias under his wing, and for whatever reason (possibly gender, possibly my lack of interpersonal skills at that age), I wasn’t his cup of tea, but he never made me feel unwelcome, and I learned a lot from those late-night conversations and from him in general:





1. The first night, he teased me for not having a pen and paper with me to write down a recommendation of his. “And you want to be a writer? What happens when you get an idea and you’re in the middle of nowhere?” (My private answer was that I need time to develop ideas before I write them down, and if I can’t hold on to them, they’re not worth writing, but 21 years later, I still carry a pen and notepad everywhere I go.)





2. He taught us that as writers, we are the ones who get paid, not the ones who pay, not for editing or publishing, and not for a working meal, and thus generously paid for whatever we wanted to eat or drink, night after night.





3. The reason he went to Denny’s was that they were cheap and open at ridiculous hours, ideal for his writing schedule because late hours means no phone calls or other interruptions. He taught us to be protective of our writing time.





4. He explained both book/magazine contracts and the Hollywood option and screenwriting process to us in such a way that we would feel comfortable taking ownership of our careers. In my MFA program, this meant more than one of my classmates turned to me when they sold their stories because I knew what a reasonable contract should look like and what it was okay to push back on.





5. He taught us to break down the mechanics of any book or plot to understand it better, and apologized that we’d never be able to just enjoy watching a movie again. He made up for it by showing us Casablanca, which he argued was the perfect cyberpunk movie if you swap out the letters of transit for any tech MacGuffin/plot device.





He’s an indelible part of my formation as a writer, and while I may have wished for more, I’m glad for what I learned from him.

2020 Vision

I see a lot of people posting what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in the last decade. In 2010 I was midway through a graduate program in creative writing (which I chose in part because I thought you couldn’t be a rabbi unless you wanted it more than anything else—turns out you can have more than one calling!) and in 2000 I was finishing up my BA in medieval studies (because it was the closest I could get to majoring in fantasy world building, and I was sure I’d break in as an SFF writer within the next five years).

Ten years later, twenty years later, I’m back in school, working on another degree, another path to what I think will be a meaningful, happy, successful life. And you know what? Both times, I was right about the meaning and happiness. Both times, just going to the school took a leap of faith that paid off in unexpected ways. Both times, I made friends who are still a huge part of my life. Both times, I learned things that helped me grow and that continue to delight me. And both times, I was totally wrong about where I’d be in ten years, where my path was leading me, because the things that are most meaningful to me now are things I didn’t know I wanted (let alone, things I could accomplish) until I’d done more growing. So I fully expect my 2030 self to be nothing like I imagine. I can’t wait to meet her.

Build-a-Baraita

This semester has been intense, and I’m on my last of nine finals, but it’s also been fun, stretching my brain with different kinds of text study and writing. For my Talmud class, we had to write a Talmudic argument on the subject of theft, and with my background, intellectual property rights were a no-brainer:

The one who steals a character, story, or song from his fellow repays the value as as the time of the theft. If by stealing he has devalued the stolen items or damaged the reputation of the owner, he pays damages for lost income. But if the owner has died, behold it is ownerless, and he does not pay the inheritors. Mar Disney says, “You do pay the inheritors.”

At the time of the theft. We are taught in a baraita, “at the time the theft was discovered.” Whose is this? It is J”K bat Rowling’s. It happened that J”K bat Rowling discovered a thief selling her book. She said, “You owe me the value of all the books you have sold.” The thief said, “Only one was yours, and I paid for it.” She asked, “Is it that you have sold plain paper in the marketplace? You have sold my story. You took one book and made a thousand, and behold, they are all my work, and those who bought, bought because of my name, not yours.” As we stated elsewhere, “When a man stamps several coins with one die, they are all similar.”

Mar Disney says, “You do pay the inheritors.” But note the contradiction: the inheritors of Disney took from Bnai Grimm and Rav Hans Ben Anders the Christian and did not pay. This is not difficult: Mar Disney ruled in a case where the inheritors are known, and there they did not know the inheritors and could not find them. Rav Tolkien asks, can the dead own their thoughts? Surely all who learn from a story are the inheritors.

Biblical fanfic

Let’s talk about midrash.

For those who don’t know, midrash is interpreting a (sacred) text, usually through storytelling techniques, to fill in gaps, draw connections, and creatively embellish that text. The classic example is that Chapter 1 of Genesis says God created male and female in God’s own image, seemingly equal and simultaneous, while Chapter 2 gives us the rib story, woman created after man, from man. So the ancient rabbis resolved the contradiction by inventing Lilith, Adam’s imagined first wife, who ditched Adam when he wasn’t okay with equality.

My favorite, which I only learned about this past year, is Serah, the daughter of Asher. She’s listed as going down to Egypt, and then mentioned again in the first census after the Israelites leave Egypt 430 years later, so the rabbis imagine her as an immortal who has first-hand knowledge of their history and can use it to solve mysteries and settle disputes about past events.

But in the last few weeks, I learned a Talmudic midrash that I found really problematic. There’s something called the conservation of biblical personalities, where the rabbis will say that minor character X is really the nickname of major character Y, so character Y is more present in the story. It’s also a way of resolving contradictions when a character like Moses’s single father-in-law has three different names at three different points in the story. In this case, they decided that Caleb’s two wives, Helah and Naarah (who are inconsistently named elsewhere in the Torah) are really both one woman, Moses’s sister Miriam. By this interpretation, both names are puns, the first meaning “sickly,” the second meaning “young,” and the reason given is that Caleb married her despite her being sickly, and because he married a virtuous woman regardless of how she looked, she became beautiful like a young woman.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman leader will have stories invented to denigrate or delegitimize her. I get particularly irritated by this in the Talmud, where it’s just about impossible to find a named woman who gets to be strong and smart without being torn down for reasons. Miriam is the rare counterexample, except for this moment where we need to both marry her off and prop up her husband’s masculinity by saying he deserved better.

So I thought about Miriam, and about Caleb. Miriam dares to approach an Egyptian princess to maneuver Moses’s mom into becoming his wet nurse. She dares to question her brother’s leadership. In a few midrashim, she talks back to her father, and is even the midwife who talks back to Pharaoh, both times ensuring the survival of the Jewish people. She is courageous in saying what needs to be said, regardless of the personal consequences. Caleb and Joshua are the only two spies who give an honest report of the Promised Land, encouraging the Israelites to trust God and keep moving forward, even when the other spies and community leaders are shouting them down with pronouncements of doom. He speaks out, even when he’s in the minority, because it’s the right thing to do. They’re remarkably alike. He’s younger than Miriam, so I can imagine if they were indeed a couple, other people would call her the biblical equivalent of a cougar and wonder what he sees in her, and she’d retort that sparring with him makes her feel young. All the previous midrashim can be true, and yet not be the whole truth.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Long overdue

There’s so much I want to say right now, and all of it is creating a logjam so none of it has gotten posted in a timely fashion. While I was in Israel, it made sense to post updates about my life to a photo album on Facebook so family and friends could see everything in one coherent package, but it was exhausting to cross-post to my blog, so I was mostly silent here. That was compounded by my chaplaincy training this summer, which was both intense and tied up in issues of confidentiality. Over the next month, I aim to bring the Israel posts over here (possibly using Flikr to host the photos), write some posts on my summer chaplaincy experience, and make this site do what it’s supposed to do: offer a picture of my life, my writing, and my journey to become a rabbi.


For now, two brief updates on what’s been going on lately:




Having done my first year of rabbinical school in Israel at the Conservative Yeshiva, I’m settling into the new semester at Hebrew College as a second-year student who is also a newbie. The classes are great, the students and teachers are extraordinary, and the morning prayers are deeply meaningful–I keep feeling affirmed that I made the right choice in coming here. But I’m still acclimating to the workload–it doesn’t help that an extra course got crowbar-ed into my already-packed schedule (two of my classes meet at the same time, timeturner required). Hopefully next semester will be easier.

I’ve had the extraordinary experience of co-leading Rosh Hashanah services with my dad this year, and will co-lead Yom Kippur with him as well. He suggested it (with his typical overwhelming generosity) as a way for me to get used to leading and to the High Holiday liturgy without having to do the whole thing my first time out, and he was right about how helpful that was. But the real gift was the “backstage pass” of seeing how to put together a meaningful service beforehand and how to change it on the fly depending on whether you’re running late, what the congregation’s mood is like, etc. Invaluable.


So much more to say, but that feels like plenty for now.

Moving to new heights

For some reason, I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life living in one attic or another. I’m spending the summer living in the attic of one of my professors, and if it works out, we’ll continue it into the school year. The space is gorgeous, windows all around, a view of the neighborhood, sheltered by enough treetops to give me privacy while allowing me to admire sunrise, sunsets, and the occasional lightning storm. It’s also way too much space for me at present, because until the arrangement is permanent, it makes sense to leave the contents of my storage locker where they are, so I’m living out of the same two suitcases that got me through the year in Israel. I’ve closed the door to the giant living room for now so I don’t feel like a bean rattling around in a jar.

However, my friend David has very generously offered to give me the books that got him through rabbinical school, so I now have an epic collection of Judaica filling one bookshelf. Some are classic reference works I’ll use in all my classes, but others just seemed like fascinating reads that I wanted for my own pleasure and growth, which says to me that I’m in the right field.

I also have been dipping into the storage unit every time I go visit my folks, and have been taking out a box at a time, mostly books, some clothes. It’s been clarifying to sort through things I lived without for a year and make decisions that yes, I really can live without this thing, or no, my heart soars when I’m reunited with it and I’ll never let it go. This winnowing process was going fine until today, when  I moved what I thought was a randomly placed stepladder that turned out to be the only thing bracing my mattress and keeping it from sliding down and eating me alive in a space too narrow to turn around. I made it home with four boxes of books, all of which I had sorely missed. And hopefully, shelving them in the living room will tempt me into finally using all of my space and making my new apartment into more of a home.

 

A high note

I was determined that the horrific counter-protest on International Women’s Day not be my last experience of Women of the Wall. I went back today. My friend Heather read Torah, and while usually the security guards search our bags to ensure we can’t bring in a Torah scroll to read from (although they often wave the protesters through without checking their backpacks!), this month we got lucky and smuggled one in. It was such a joy to have it here for my last time.

And then we walked to class and got there super late, dealing with streets that were inexplicably blocked off, drivers who ignored stoplights and refused to let us cross streets, and all manner of typical Israeli craziness. I felt like our frustration about the traffic and the time was really a way to vent the tension we had been carrying all morning, waiting to see if we were going to have another violent experience. It was finally safe to feel everything we needed to feel and get it out.

I’m conscious that I’m leaving very, very soon. Everywhere I go, I’m taking pictures of friends, trying to crystallize memories so I can carry them with me. It’s so very hard to leave.

Lost in translation

In transit. It was hellish getting to the airport, and when I got there, I discovered my smaller bag was twice the allowed weight, despite my careful packing, and my larger bag was also a bit too heavy. I had to make split-second decisions about what was really important to me and what I was throwing in the trash, after already having pared down my belongings to the absolute minimum.

I’ve now been awake for almost 40 hours straight at this point and still literally have miles to go on this trek from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to Zurich to Toronto to Boston to Northampton. My tired brain keeps wanting to improve the situation the way I’ve done for the past year, by trying to speak to people in Hebrew when I need something, and I have to keep reminding myself that in Zurich and Toronto, that’s not particularly helpful.