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My Companion the Aleph-Bet I once made a pact with myself: I would buy the first volume of the Babylonian Talmud, make poems of it, and read it, not so much as a scholar or religionist, but in the manner of the poet, grazing here and there, attracted by one passage, skipping the next, remembering days later a phrase or a word, trying always to imagine the sound of the voice that spoke a particular portion. Of course it was second best. My dream had been to read the Talmud in its original languages: first the Torah portion, fixed to the center of the page, itself the core, the heart. Around it, the dialogues, the discussions, the blessed and crooked conversations . Rashi to the left, the Tosafists to the right, the more contemporary additions set out of the way in the back. Somewhere in my memory was the ancient Geniza of Cairo where the souls of the books were kept in a chamber in the earth. Those discarded books, too worn for use, too holy to destroy. I settle for English, always feeling cheated by my lack of drive and by my accident of birth in the Diaspora. Had I been born elsewhere, I might very well not have been alive now. Therefore I will only complain briefly about being outside the heart’s place for a Jew, cut off from the language and religion that might have taken up the slack in his eternal longing, a long5 4 ing he cannot name or define. It is akin to the longing Plato speaks of in the Symposium, a longing that is not lost by the coming together of two souls. Longing is a condition of being alive. But to know that doesn’t help. Indeed, it takes more and more elaborate forms as one grows older. I would like to buy the first volume of the Babylonian Talmud, I told the bookstore owner. He looked at me, disbelieving, just as he had looked at me the year before when I told him that I wanted to buy a shofar . He had asked which organization I represented. I said that it was for my husband’s birthday, that he had always wanted a shofar. Once past his initial shock, the owner agreed that it was an unusual idea, that perhaps this would be the beginning of a good thing. But the Talmud is different . He seemed suspicious and concerned, as though I were breaking an ancient taboo. What, after all, did a woman want with such a book? In the synagogue the women traditionally read the Tzena u-Re’ena, the book written in Yiddish that deals with matters pertaining to women, read as they sat upstairs in the synagogue separated from the men. Hadn’t I my grandmother’s own copy, the small black book with an embossed cover and yellowed pages that I so cherished? My eldest sister had given it to me at the time of my mother’s death. I could imagine his thoughts. Here was this woman asking him to break the set of the Soncino edition of the Babylonian Talmud, to sell her the first volume, Zera’im (Seeds). The book deals in the first part with the prescribed forms for saying the blessings, and in the second with the laws regarding the planting, harvesting, and division of the fields. Even such practical matters as where a pious man shall put his tefillin when he goes to use the public privy are considered. In Berakoth we read: Beth Hillel says, He keeps them in his hand and enters. R. Akiba said: He holds them in his garment and enters. In his garment, do you say? Sometimes they may slip out and fall! Say rather, he holds them in his hand and in his garment, and enters, and he puts them in a hole on the side of the privy, but he should not put them in a hole on the side of the public way, lest they should be taken by passersby, and he should render himself suspect. For a certain student once left his tefillin in a hole adjoining the pubic way, and a harlot passed by and took them, and she came to the Beth ha-Midrash and said: See what So-and-so gave me for my hire, and when the student heard it, he went to the top of a roof and threw himself down...

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