Rav Hisda’s Daughter
?תנוקת מאי היא
כי הא דבת רב חסדא הוה יתבה בכנפיה דאבוה
הוו יתבי קמיה רבא ורמי בר חמא
?אמר לה: מאן מינייהו בעית
.אמרה ליה: תרוייהו
.אמר רבא: ואנא בתרא
— בבא בתרא יב ע”ב
Once, the daughter of Rav Hisda was sitting on her father’s lap.
Rava and Rami bar Hama sat before them.
Rav Hisda asked his daughter, “Which of them do you want?”
She said to him, “Both of them.”
Rava said, “Then I will be the last.”
— Bava Batra 12b
Four people held the posts of my bridal canopy: one father, two brothers, and the second man I would marry. The posts were cedar and pine, hewn from the trees that were planted when my betrothed and I were born. They still had the smell of the soil on them, and they trembled in the hands of the bearers, as though at any moment they would swoon and fall to the ground.
I did not look at the men around the canopy. I did not look at my groom, either, at his downcast eyes or his nervous slouch. I knew them too well to want to look at them.
Instead, I stared over the heads of the crowd and into the rainless sky, at the thin clouds drifting over an open scroll of blue. Not for the first time, I took comfort in the lazy quiet up there. Words are heavy things — loud things — things that leave their big ugly footprints on the world as soon as they are spoken. Silence, on the other hand, makes no mark.
Then the music started, and everyone cheered, and it was over. My husband smiled at me like a happy baby, the kind of happiness that shakes you out of yourself and forces you to share in it. I wanted to tell him: don’t love me too much, I am going to kill you. And at the same time I wanted to treasure every breath of it — the laughing people and the clear bright sky and the smoke of roasted meat and the glorious face of my beloved — hoard it all, a child hoarding a handful of sand even as it slips through his fingers.
***
I really did want to marry them both. That is to say, when I was seven years old, I wanted to marry them both. Or rather I wanted to marry the cloud they both walked in, a haze of keen sight and swift remarks and knowledge that seemed endless, a kind of jittery energy that rubbed off on everyone around them. Everyone said that my father was wise, but to me he seemed slow, gentle, almost bovine — maybe because that was his way, or maybe because he was old and I was very little. Maybe, too, because he was a great tzaddik and very devout, and piety like that demands a certain patience with the world.
These two were different. They were young and inseparable and endlessly energetic and wielded their words like daggers, and they laughed all the while as though in play. There was Rami bar Hama, the genius, who always seemed to be moving too fast for his own body; Rami bar Hama, pale and wiry with dark hair that stood on end. And then there was stolid Rava, a sweet, pudgy, joking boy whose eyes perpetually surveyed his surroundings.
Between them there were conversations that never ended, one of which would flow straight into the next, and whether I was sneaking around the study hall or listening to them on market day I never heard a moment of silence between them. I had been raised on a steady diet of conversation, and so I could identify the quality of these conversations — even at the age of seven, I caught a whiff of their depth, their acuity. I caught something dangerous in the conversations too, almost cruel, a game played with sharp points. The winner wins, the loser walks away with his face fallen and trying to hide tears.
I liked them instantly.
***
When my father pulled me up on his lap that day, he was joking. Rava and Rami bar Hama were joking, too. There was laughter. The air was light.
But I, seven years old and too serious for my size, I meant what I said. I would marry both of them if I could. I would marry the whole study hall, the whole Torah. In them I sensed a fire — black burning on white, clearing pathways in the fuddled logic of the day-to-day. I could not have defined it, I was too little to have words for a thing like that, but it was intoxicating. I wanted to cup a bit of the fire in my hands and take it home with me. One twig, one burning coal.
Was it because I meant it so badly that it came true? Or was it because words, idly spoken, have a tendency to come true, because it is not only God whose speech wills new things into being? They say that prophecy is a gift given to idiots and children. Say instead — only idiots and children are foolhardy enough to accept it.
***
Unfortunately, all along, they were not only carriers of the Torah; they were also people, petty and volatile and above all fleeting. Rami was not only a genius but a person, falling over his own feet in his haste to greet me, absently tossing pebbles back and forth between his hands as he spoke.
Once, when we were courting, he took me to walk by the river. It was the heat of the day, and our talk hung damply in the hot air. I could tell that he was getting bored, and then all of a sudden I saw the shadow of something blissful and devilish dart across his face, and before I could turn to ask he had already leapt into the water. He floated there, carried by the gentle ripples, staring at me still on the bank. The scholar’s dignity cast aside, he splashed his toes like the wiggling tail of a fish. He beckoned me to jump in, join him. I did not.
The pleasure of being married to someone is that you get a thousand moments like this: in which another patch of the full person is revealed, another piece of the puzzle. Little by little, over the course of time and exposure, he ceases to be a caricature and becomes a man. And in the process, he also becomes beloved, as only familiar things can be.
***
I am standing under the bridal canopy and I realize that my bridegroom does not remember what I said when I was seven. If he did, he would approach me as one approaches a crossroads: resolutely. But he is all light, all ease, all happy nervousness. He does not know.
I want to tell him: don’t love me too much, I am going to kill you. I love you, stay away from me. I have the glowing coal already in my hand from every moment we have spent together, I have my piece of the fire; go and make some other woman happy. Go and live.
And at the same time I want to pretend away the whole weight of prophecy. Let the past be the past, the future the future. Stronger than death is love.
All the while, holding a branch of the tree they planted when my husband was born, there is Rava. He does not know, either. Only I can see the ghosts around the canopy, and so I look away from the canopy, above it, into the blank sky.
***
When my first husband died, suddenly and young, the scholars came and sat with us in our mourning. My father stared with sightless eyes at the endless line of boys, as though in every one of them he saw his two favorite quarreling schoolboys as they had stood years earlier. Perhaps I was not the only one who remembered.
We had one daughter before he left me behind: an exact combination of the two of us, Rami’s zeal, my soft footsteps. She did not know — could not know — that her mother had killed her father many years before her father died. Like a shade she wandered between the guests, eyes red from crying. Her parents’ child, precise and wise, she spoke incessantly to anyone who would listen. I should have taught her to hold her tongue.
I sat in the center of the room, an eye for the storm in our house. One by one the mourners approached me, and I either spoke to them or I did not; I was half with them and half in my memories, Rami arguing, Rami dancing, Rami splashing his toes like fins in the muddy water.
Among the mourners that day was Rava. He was as stolid as he had ever been, with a new beard and a luxurious set of clothes. Behind him, reverently, thronged his students. He looked at me then, his intelligent eyes asking permission to speak.
And I ignored him. I turned away from him — from the encroaching future, from the inevitable — and towards the back wall of the house my husband and I had made our own.
For another hour or two, I thought, let me sit in the past. What comes after will come after.
