LITMIR.BIZ

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Canaan, months and months. Then he sent two messengers ahead to let Esau know they were coming, and they returned telling him that Esau had planned a huge feast to welcome them back. Today a man who is stressed out might just go for a massage and then soak in a hot tub. The night before they all met up with Esau and his family, Grandpa went off by himself to visit to the nearby shrine of the god Baal Hadar, one of the Elohim. That’s the night when Jacob wrestled with a strange man and became Israel.

      Today we might say that Grandpa needed more male energy to return home again after all those years and face his butch twin brother, so he opened himself up to an encounter with a man who served at that temple. His name was Uzzi and he was a holy one, a kedesh, which King James’s Bible casts into English as “sodomite” but which is usually now translated as “cultic male prostitute.” The story in your Torah says that Jacob and the man wrestled all night and that Grandpa’s thigh was wrenched out of its socket. But the truth is that “thigh” or “hip” was a euphemism invented by an uncomfortable man several hundred years later, who couldn’t acknowledge that a defining moment in Jacob’s history happened while he was being the passive partner in anal sex with a sacred priest trained in the Middle Eastern version of what we now call Tantra. Instead of telling the truth, that Grandpa had a marvelous spiritual experience that led him to change his name to commemorate the event, the “holy one” was later desexualized and morphed (I do love that new word) into an angel. But angel means “messenger” in Hebrew, and that’s what those kedeshim considered themselves to be—body-to-body messengers of one of the many aspects of the Divine.

      In the 21st century, when people define themselves with labels, you might be inclined to ask yourself: “Was Jacob gay? Or, closeted?” Not a chance! My grandfather was what thirty years ago we’d call “a notorious heterosexual.” Today he would be labeled metrosexual, perhaps, but his father Isaac occupies a different place on the famous (or is it infamous?) Kinsey Scale. Way back then none of that had any bearing on who they were in their own lives. When a man spent time with a holy one and had wives and children, his encounter had very much more to do with his spiritual life than his sexual preference. Remember that. There is much I like about the present, but for all of its freedom, it is restrictive in different ways than the ones I grew up with, and this matter of labeling is one of them.

      So let me talk about Grandpa Jacob’s wives and concubines, who are all so important to my story. Let’s begin with Rachel, who was Grandpa’s favorite. Everyone said that she was beautiful, round and shapely, with a busty figure like many of our goddesses had. And we are taught by the Torah to feel sorry for poor Rachel, as she had to wait for so long to have a son, while Leah had boy after boy. But the truth is that Rachel had a daughter Maacah a year after she was married, and then she had Joseph, two years later. Then she had Rabat, and then she gave birth to twin daughters, Tovah and Zillah. After they were born she delivered a stillborn boy, and then, just as the story still says, Rachel died after giving birth to her last child, a son she named Ben-oni, “Son of my sorrow.” Jacob renamed him Ben-yamin, which most people say means “Son of my right hand,” but which really meant, “Son of the south,” which is where he was born.

      Rachel was buried in the region that much later belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, and it says so in the Bible. But people think that her tomb is on the road to Bethlehem, which was in Judah’s territory, and for generations a tomb there has been a place of pilgrimage, but just as the tomb in Hebron is the wrong one, so too is that one on the way to Bethlehem. Herod rebuilt it, but it was the wrong place even then. I tried to correct him, but that’s a story for later on, perhaps. Rachel’s death was devastating to my grandfather. It was a sadness that he wore like a garment, even years later when he married again for love, and even after his family had grown and prospered.

      I never knew Rachel but I remember Leah, and I always liked her. Rachel was the favored wife, but Leah was the first wife, which is how they set it up themselves, and neither of them minded that. Rachel was very involved in the family business, but Leah loved being a mother and devoted most of her time to the family’s children, her own and everyone else’s. The Torah says that she was soft-eyed, weak-eyed, or doe-eyed, but I remember Leah very well and she had the most extraordinary eyes—pale pale hazel—the color of green grapes, big and shining. She had very dark skin. We all did. And there was something haunting about her face, with those pale eyes staring out from it. Even as an old woman she had a regal bearing. The Torah says that she had six sons and only one daughter, Dinah, but Leah also had another daughter, Rizpah. The two full sisters were very close. The Torah has some things to say about Dinah, and I have a few more, but that too is a story for later, about love and lust and other tents.

      As I mentioned above, Rachel and Leah each had maids who they gave to their husband as concubines. These two women were sisters, just as their mistresses were, daughters of a woman named Helbenah. Bilhah the younger sister worked for Rachel. She was a tiny woman, wiry and quick. She spoke quickly, moved quickly, and she did everything as if there wasn’t enough time, which was a very odd thing as we didn’t have clocks or watches yet. It was just her temperament: speedy. All the women in the family had jobs, and Bilhah was in charge of food preparation. When I talk about my family I’m speaking of more than eighty-five people, plus servants and guests. Bilhah didn’t do all the cooking herself, but she did coordinate it, which was a lot of work, like running a summer camp, which I only mention because it’s something I once did, back in Germany, between the two World Wars, work at a Jewish summer camp. Maybe I liked her because I associated her with food. All of us kids did. Or maybe I liked her because of who she was, sweet and warm herself, femme in a way that I liked even as a little girl. She and grandfather had two sons and a daughter named Ahuvah. Sadly, Bilhah got into some trouble later on, but I’ll tell you about it when I get there.

      In spite of a certain, I would say, natural nostalgia for the past, I can’t help but comment on the insanity of slavery, concubinage, and the insane way in which people were bought and sold and given away as gifts. These things all still go on, under different names, but they were horrible then and are horrible now, only it never occurred to me to question them for about a thousand years. So you have to remember that my grandmother Zilpah was Bilhah’s older sister, and Leah’s maid—her property actually. Eventually Leah gave Zilpah to my grandfather, as people did back then, and they had two sons together, Uncle Gad and my father Asher, and three daughters, my aunts, Bikurah, Hadar, and Yael. Grandma Zilpah was a taller version of her sister Bilhah, but she was very different in temperament. Bilhah was fast and my grandmother was slow. Her words were slow, her actions were slow. She walked with a slow rolling gait and she was always the last one done eating, to the annoyance of her sister, who liked to have all the eating utensils washed up and put away as soon as she herself was done eating. Not that our table was very fancy. To begin with, we didn’t have a table. We all ate sitting on the ground, from clay bowls, with our fingers, sitting on woven mats and animal skins.

      My grandma’s job was shearing, weaving, garment and rug making. We needed a lot of it, cloth for garments, rugs and coverings for the floors of our tents, and for the backs of our donkeys and camels, although we also traded for a lot of the skins and fabric we used, and got a lot of our rugs from the Bedouins. Grandma was always bent over a floor loom, or doing hand-weaving from a loom that was strung between her body and a tree trunk, or sewing or mending, or embroidering. She tried to teach me and my sister Tamimah. I was terrible at it and Tamimah was good. Besides, by the time that I arrived, Grandma was always sick, with one thing or another, and spent more and more of her time in her tent. Looking back on it now I’d say she had rheumatoid arthritis in her legs, but we didn’t know about that then. We called what she had “the achy bone disease,” to distinguish it from the “stabbing bone disease, the “burning bone disease,” and several other similar disorders.

      Even when she was sick, Grandma kept weaving. She had a wonderful sense of color and style. I would give anything to have one of her garments, but alas, none of them survived, except in stories. It was she who Grandpa Jacob went to when he wanted to give Uncle Joseph a special gift, and she wove and embroidered the cloak that you can still read about, the coat of many colors is what it’s usually called, although that’s not the case at all. It was deep blue and had long hanging sleeves, and I may have more to say about it later. Her hands were always stained with dyes, and she was the one who hennaed the hands and feet

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