At 9pm we cross the checkpoint into the West Bank. Three of my friends and I are crunched into my Hebrew teacher’s little car on the way to see Kever Rachel: Rachel’s tomb. The holy site sits in a small bubble of Israeli territory on the other side of the partition wall. An Israeli soldier approaches us with a machine gun slung loosely across his hip and Odelya rolls down the window to speak to him in a fast riff of sing-song Hebrew. He quickly smiles and waves us on without questioning. “I just kept blessing him so there would be no questions, he’ll think she’s one of those,” Odelya laughs. We drive down the short road guarded by high-wall security fences. This area used to be verdant groves and rolling hills. Now, busses transporting families from Jerusalem weave between police jeeps.
Rachel is a tragic matriarch in the Hebrew Bible who waited seven years to marry her true love Jacob. After seven years, she was then compelled to give him to her older sister. When they finally did marry, Rachel died giving birth to her second child. She bled to death and since it’s unholy to touch a corpse that has lost blood, Jacob was forced to bury her on the side of the road, isolated and far from her family. Rachel represents the person who is on the path, but is not getting to where they want to go because of obstacles.
As we enter the site, we slowly submerge ourselves into a group of religious women. The cave-like room has white-washed walls that stretch up into a domed ceiling. The huge arched tomb rests at the very back and is covered with a white embroidered cloth. Women and whispers forcefully press in on all sides. We follow Odelya hand-in-hand as she expertly wades through the crowd. Reaching the front, she wraps a white knit scarf around her shoulders and prays into her small Siddur. When it’s my turn to touch the tomb, I press my left hand into the cloth and close my eyes. I feel a thin electric trickle down my vein and think: your blood is my blood, bone of my bone, life of my life, death of my death. And then it stops, I feel nothing.
I wander back through a sea of foreign faces: haggard, paunchy, sharp, strange. Outside, women are sifting flour in big plastic bowls. Odelya explains that in ancient times people brought bread sacrifices to the Temple. Today, women symbolically continue the tradition by preparing bread at the tomb and baking it at home. Baking Challah is one of the three things women are compelled to do in Judaism. “When women come together to pray it is very powerful. We are not allowed to study Kabbalah,” Odelya says, “we are not required to study Torah. Why?” She looks at all of us in the eyes. “Women are more spiritual than men. Men have to work to get to a spiritual place. They need the book to help them get there,” she curls her hand into a fist and motions an imaginary line from her heart to the sky. “Women are always there, they just have to open their mouths and speak it. According to Torah, man is light that grows and spreads everywhere. Women are vessels, the containers. Some men resent being contained, but those borders make the light concentrated and exact, like a laser beam,” she puts her hands together and cuts a line of air in front of us. “Otherwise they are only light that does nothing. A man is compelled to marry a woman, but a woman is not compelled to marry a man in Judaism. They need women’s help you see.”
“Then why do women have such a small part of the Western Wall?” my friend asks in a quiet voice.
“Men do not know...they still do not know...people do not understand,” she answers.
Odelya is beautiful and as she speaks other women turn to look at her in wonder. I know very little about her, only that she is Yemenite, not married, university educated, and religious. Mostly, I know that she inspires me.
“Can we take a picture with you?” my friend asks.
“Yes, yes,” she quickly walks over to the sign that says Nashim: Women. She points and grins. “Here, this’ll be a feminist picture.”
No comments:
Post a Comment