Deathless - Andrew Ramer

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It began as friendship, the two of them linked by shared values. Seeing what was happening, and hoping for more, Sarah took Rebecca aside and gently encouraged her. Rebecca was the one who proposed. She genuinely liked her cousin and saw him as a good catch. Abraham and Sarah’s business in Canaan was doing very well. She knew that she’d be comfortable there, while under her father’s control the old family business was faltering. And Isaac, knowing that his parents approved, and needing their approval as much as he needed to rebel against them, because he was still too ashamed to go back to Luz—although he wanted to in his heart of hearts—decided instead to marry his cousin and new friend Rebecca.

      It took a while for Sarah to persuade Rebecca’s mother Kahinah to let her daughter travel back to Canaan with them. But like Sarah, Rebecca was a younger daughter, not her mother’s heir, and so she was willing to allow Rebecca to marry her troubled but rich and charming cousin. I can’t say that things were ever smooth after that between Abraham and Isaac. To the day that Isaac died, my father told me, he never quite forgave his father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz and embarrassing him in front of his new friends. But Isaac loved his wife, never took another wife, nor had any concubines like most of the rest of the men in our family at that time. Instead he fully entered into the family business and maintained an awkward truce with Abraham.

      From time to time, when tempers threatened to flare up again, Sarah would find a sly way to remind Isaac, “If your father hadn’t brought you home that day you would never have met Rebecca. And you know she’s the best thing that ever happened to our family. Where would we all be without her?” After their twin sons Esau and Jacob were born, Isaac mellowed a bit, and Abraham, now having male heirs, was able to finally forgive him. At night, in bed, on those nights when they shared a tent, Sarah would sometimes whisper to Abraham, “Isn’t it nice how things worked out? Even better than we could have hoped for, all those long years ago when we set out from Ur with nothing to call our own. And look at us now, with children and grandchildren and flocks and herds and friends to share our joy with.”

      Chapter Four

      In which the author reveals one of

      the major lost secrets of her people

      My grandmother Zilpah named her first son after the god Gad, who was one of the Elohim or gods, that we believed in, one of Asherah and Yahweh’s sons. My father Asher was her second son. Expecting a daughter that time she named him after the goddess herself, but I’m getting ahead of my tale. So let’s go back to Isaac.

      The family business was flourishing, largely because of Rebecca, who was a natural businesswoman. Merchants were always stopping by her tent to see what she was selling. She and Davah her sister-in-law ran the whole concern after Abraham died. Rebecca was often on the road herself, visiting local princes and the petty kings and few remaining queens who ruled the city-states that dotted Canaan, bartering and trading. After Sarah and Abraham both died and were buried in the cave that they bought from Sarah’s lover Efron, Rebecca began to visit Hagar and Ishmael at Lahai-roi, the village they lived in, for she’d met an older woman named Suvah at Abraham’s funeral, liked her and liked spending time with her.

      Usually Isaac stayed home in Beersheba when his wife traveled, watching over their sons and playing music. He was a very fine composer and had a lovely voice, which I inherited, as I was often told. He and Davah were both fond of a game that’s the ancestor of backgammon, and the two of them would play for hours, while servants looked after Esau and Jacob. One spring, however, Isaac decided to join Rebecca when she traveled out to visit Lahai-roi. Which leads me to another subject.

      In my youth we had none, but in this day and age I find that there are three main taboo subjects—death, God, and sex. Death I know nothing about, personally, although I’ve witnessed it far more times than even an emergency room medic in the worst war zone or inner city hospital, so I’m quite an authority on it. I’ve seen people die in more ways than anyone else I’ve ever met. And I’ve seen people kill and get killed in more ways than a person ever should. On that one subject alone I could write an entire book. But I won’t. God is a subject that I have spoken about already. This seems like a good time to talk about sex, that other potent three-letter word.

      A few years ago I read an article in a women’s magazine about how to heal yourself from the toxic values of a sex-negative culture. The author proposed that we remember the days when there were sacred prostitutes, and reinstitute them as sexual healers. I had to laugh, having grown up with what you call sacred prostitutes and counting several among my friends and family, our family. But, and I speak with authority here—you can’t have sacred prostitutes in a sex-negative culture. They can only exist in a place and time when sex is considered holy, when people are conceived in joy, raised in joy, and come to their own sexuality in that way—joyfully. You can’t reinstitute sacred prostitutes any more than the founders of the first kibbutzim could raise non-authoritarian non-bourgeois non-ghettoized children by mandating and enforcing new childrearing practices. In other words, you can’t turn a dog back into a puppy, or a sex-constrained adult into someone who’s free in their body and hasn’t ever felt any shame.

      When I was a girl we had sacred prostitutes, although that’s not what we called them. We called them Holy Ones, “holy” from the same root as the word you used today to refer to God—Kadosh—Holy, Set Apart. But in my youth the culture was already changing. Shame was first appearing, an unforeseen by-product of the expansion of the patriarchy, which seemed a good thing at the time, just as automobiles seemed good at first. No more horseshit in the streets. Who knew that what you can’t see or smell or step in would turn out to be far more toxic? Same with sex-negativity. It seemed like a way to channel energy into more productive avenues. Alas, looking back on two and a half thousand years of sex-negativity I would have to say that all it’s done is channel energy into rage, resentment, and destruction. But in the time of Isaac there was almost no shame around sex or the human body. The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent hadn’t been told yet, but it would be later on—a story told to defame the goddess and her serpent, not for us phallic but a symbol of her umbilical cord, that serpent a living creature come to share the Goddess’s wisdom with the first two human beings. Back in my youth when people fell in love they believed that they were encountering one of the Elohim through their beloved. (You can read about the lasting influence of this idea in some interpretations of Song of Songs in the Bible, and by reading some of the wonderful poems of Rumi. Another wonderful man. I met him once in a tavern reciting some of his poetry.) Among the Elohim were many who took lovers of both genders, and sometimes contained more than one gender within themselves. This is challenging for me to talk about, not because it’s about sex but because in those days we had no such labels as straight, gay, bisexual, transgender. Or, we had all of them, tucked away inside ourselves, a reflection of all the Elohim, all their aspects to be embodied as we each saw fit. So, as you will see again and again in this story, people made love-choices in varied ways, which became problematic as the patriarchy became entrenched in our culture.

      Having discussed sex, let’s go back to the story of Isaac. Remember that he and Rebecca went to see Hagar at Lahai-roi. The last time Abraham’s two sons had seen each other was at their father’s burial. Before that they hadn’t seen each other in years, so that last meeting had been a time of awkwardness and grief. Their next reunion was different. Isaac had mellowed over time, while Ishmael had remained wild and unpredictable. He was taller, darker, more brooding than his half-brother, but both of them shared the same father-wound. Abraham adored his first son, Ishmael, and it had been torture to him to send him away, but he did, and Ishmael never forgave him for that any more than Isaac forgave their father for dragging him away from the temple at Luz, humiliating him in front of his friends.

      But over the days and weeks of that visit their families saw very different sides of the two men, which was both unsettling and enlivening. The past was behind them and when they saw each other again the brothers reconnected with joy. They laughed and talked and talked and went for long long walks. Night after night around a fire Isaac would sing and Ishmael would play his bone-flute. Sometimes they played songs they remembered from childhood, sometimes they sang new songs, or made them up as they went along. And little by little their hearts opened up in a way that I hope you’ve experienced yourself, like flowers

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