Vol. 64, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2009
David had just arrived home and parked his car outside their apartment building along the Marine Drive in Summerstrand, Port Elizabeth. He was in a good mood. The last two lessons he had taught that day were in the class of the girls preparing for their Bat Mitzvah, and this was his favorite class at the Theodor Herzl School.
“Hi David. Did you have a good day?” Yael was just putting glasses of orange juice and biscuits on the small table in the kitchen and beckoned to her husband to join her. He sat and looked through the window towards the beach. The wind was blowing almost at gale force – typical of the “Windy City”.
“Yes, Baruch Hashem. It was a great day. My pupils paid attention during the lessons and participated in all the work and activities with enthusiasm. What about you? What can you tell me?”
“Do you recall I told you that I have a new little boy in my nursery school class – Alan Fink, the son of Mark and Dawn? She converted about a year ago – just before we came to live in Port Elizabeth. Today, when Dawn came to fetch Bruce after school, she asked me a very strange question: ‘Is it true that Jewish wives don’t go to heaven?’” David was astounded: “What did you answer?”
Somewhat amused, Yael replied, “I told her to speak to you. After all, you’re the Rabbi and I am only the Rebbetzin”.
Suddenly, David recalled the story Domestic Idyll by Yitzchak Leib Peretz. It was all about Hayim the porter and his loving wife Hannah. At the Shabbat meal, we are told that they look so lovingly and with such devotion into one another’s eyes that one would think that they had just stepped from under the chuppah. After his Shabbat nap, Hayim goes to the Bet Midrash to listen to the melamed’s shiur to the simple people. After one of these shiurim, in a quavering voice, he asks the melamed: “Rebbe, could you be so kind as to advise me what I should do in order to be worthy of the World to Come?”
“Devote yourself to the study of Torah, my son,” the other counseled him.
“But I don’t know how”.
“Then study the commentaries, the Aggadot, or, at least, Pirkei Avot”.
“I don’t know even how to do that”.
“Recite the Psalms, in that case”. “I can’t spend the time to do so”.
“Pray with fervor and ardor then”.
“But I don’t understand the words of the prayers!”
The melamed regards him with loving kindness and asks: “What is your trade? What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a porter”.
“In that case, you can be of service to Talmudic scholars”.
“How?”
“Well, for one thing you could carry a few pails of water to the Shul every afternoon for the scholars to drink”.
Hayim beams with joy, but then asks, “But what about my wife, Rebbe?”
“If the husband finds a seat in Gan Eden, his wife becomes his footstool”.
When Hayim came home to chant Havdalah, and found his wife reciting the prayer ‘God of Abraham’, he was stirred to the depths.
“Hannah, I won’t stand for you being my footstool!” he exclaimed as he embraced her, “I shall raise you up and take you alongside of me. We will sit together, like equals, as we do now. It is so good to have you near me – do you hear, Hannah? You must sit right alongside of me. The Lord of the Universe will simply have to sanction it”.
David, still in his reverie, now saw his grandfather’s shul, the Shul of Grodno, and imagined that it was there that Hayim had gone to the shiur of the melamed on that Shabbat afternoon – that beautiful old shul made of wooden beams and its triple-tiered roof with its octagonal copula of wooden slats, whose vaulting inside was supported by the four pillars surrounding the bimah, with its ornate latticework above. He imagined the aron kodesh, also so grand and ornate with three beautiful decorative frames on each side of it, the magnificent rendition of the Ten Commandments above it, with its two decorative frames on either side, above that, the illustration of the two hands of the Cohen, blessing the congregation and with the whole surmounted by two sculptured lions. On the one side of the shul below the ezrat nashim – the women’s gallery – was a little corner with a table and chairs. There, surely, the simple folk had sat to listen to the shiur of the melamed.
When she was at school, Dawn had attended the Holy Rosary Convent. One day during the catechism class, she said to the Mother Superior: “May I ask you a question?”
“Certainly, my daughter”, the Mother Superior replied, looking at her with a sweet smile.
Dawn opened her Bible and read from Deuteronomy, Chapter 13:
If there should rise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and give thee a sign or a wonder. And the sign or wonder come to pass, of which he spoke unto thee saying. Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them: Thou shalt not hearken to the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams; for the Lord your God puts you to the proof, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him and obey his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.
“Mother”, Dawn proclaimed loudly and confidently, “I don’t understand – if these are the words of God, our Father in heaven, how could our so-called ‘Messiah’ come and revoke most of the commandments of the Old Testament? According to the words of God in Deuteronomy, he must have been a false prophet”.
“You apostate, you heathen! Get out!”
Dawn did get out. She never returned to the convent and never stepped into a church again. From that day onwards, she was engrossed in studying the ‘Old Testament’, and a few weeks later she began attending services at the Glendinningvale Synagogue. That was the beginning of her learning Judaism, and she was soon befriended by other congregants. She found the sermons of the Rabbi inspiring and she also went to shiurim on Tanach. After two years of applying herself assiduously to Torah study she finally, with the Rabbi’s recommendation, appeared before the Beth Din in Johannesburg. It was a long process, but after going to the Beth Din twice more, she finally went through the process of Giur conversion to Judaism.
Shortly after that, Dawn and Mark started dating. He was a regular attendee at shul, and she had seen him in there and at shiurim. Dawn soon found out that Mark was a loving and caring man, and when he finally proposed to her, she felt that her new emunah (faith) in Hashem and her fulfillment of the Mitzvot had brought her the biggest brachah that any Jewish woman could wish for…. and that was the way she always felt, from the time of their Chuppah and when Alan, their son, was born.
What had triggered off Dawn’s question to the Rebbetzin? That morning, after dropping Alan off at the Theodor Herzl Nursery School, she had gone to the Walmer library, where she worked as a librarian. In the middle of the morning, she suddenly saw a nun standing at the reception desk. It was Sister Margaret, who had been her class teacher in the 11th Grade. She recognized her immediately in her black habit and black and white veil. Sister Margaret, after Dawn had greeted her and written down the books she was taking in the library register, suddenly showed a sign of recognition.
“My goodness Dawn, we haven’t seen you in church for a long time!”
“That’s true, sister. I haven’t been to church for a very long time – not since I converted to Judaism”.
“Oh, my dear! Don’t you know that Jewish wives
don’t have a place in heaven?”
Dawn suddenly felt dizzy and sat down, traumatized. Later, when she had calmed down and gotten over her shock somewhat, she asked two of her colleagues if they, too, had heard that Jewish wives had no place in heaven.
Winifred, the senior librarian, immediately responded: “Of course sweetie. That’s why Jewish husbands treat their wives so well – I guess they feel sorry for them”. Adding further to Dawn’s upset was that other Christian colleagues and friends confirmed what Sister Margaret and Winifred had said.
It was 1.00 p.m. As Dawn entered Alan’s classroom at the nursery school, Alan came running to meet her and gave her a big hug. She then approached Yael, who said, “You have such a wonderful little boy. Alan has been helping me to tidy up”.
“I have a question to ask you”, said Dawn, with obvious anxiety on her face.
“Go ahead. How can I help you?”
“Yael, is it true that Jewish wives don’t go to heaven?” Yael was taken aback.
“How can you ask such a thing? Of course it’s not true! Who told you so?”
“Do you think you could explain this to me – perhaps give me the source…?” Yael smiled warmly.
“You know what? Speak to my husband, Rabbi David, and ask him to explain this to you. After all, he is the Rabbi and I am just the Rebbetzin”.
That night, Dawn called Rabbi David, who invited her to come over the following afternoon. Yael opened the front door and welcomed her. Then Rabbi David entered the room, holding a Tanach and a Chumash with commentaries. “Come and sit at the dining room table and then I can show you the sources relating to your question”.
Before he could begin his explanations, Yael had
already come with a tray with coffee and cake.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I am also curious to
find out the answer to your question” she said.
“Well ladies, you will be delighted to know that in relation to Dawn’s question, the Rabbis of the first Mishnah of Chapter 10 of Tractate Sanhedrin said the following: ‘All Israel have a share in the world to come, as it is said: (Isaiah 60:21) Your people shall all be righteous; they shall possess the land forever; [in other words, in this world and the next] they are a plant of my own, the work of my hands, wherein I may glory’. The words ‘All of Israel’ obviously refers both to men and women”.
“But Rabbi, is there a Biblical source which indicates that women have a part in the world to come and therefore go to heaven?” (Dawn was thinking to herself, “I must show my Christian friends a proof from the ‘Old Testament’ that their assumptions and presumptions about Jewish women are unfounded and wrong”.)
“There certainly is – not just one source, but even two. It is striking that both sources also form part of the Haftarahs on the two days of Rosh Hashanah. In the first Book of Samuel, Chapters One and Two, we read that when Chanah came to the sanctuary of the Lord in Shiloh, bringing her little son Samuel, she addressed Eli the priest and said, ‘I prayed for this boy, and the Lord has granted me what I asked’. Then she prayed to the Lord, saying, ‘The Lord causes death and bestows life, He lowers to the grave and brings up’. Thus we learn from Chanah that Hashem resurrects the dead, and of course that includes all of Israel, both men and women”.
“In the Haftarah of the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read from Jeremiah, Chapter 31, ‘Thus said the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah – lamentation, bitter weeping; it is Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for they are away. Thus says the Lord: Restrain your voice from weeping, your eyes from tears; your work shall have its reward, says the Lord; they shall return from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, says the Lord; the children shall return to their own land’. What better proof is there that Jewish women have a place in Heaven? Here the Tanach records that many, many years after Rachel died and was buried in Efrat, her spirit revived and she wept for the Jewish people who were going into exile in Babylon”.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Barry Sidelsky is a former Rabbi of both the East London Hebrew Congregation and the Summerstrand Hebrew Congregation in Port Elizabeth and Hebrew and Jewish Studies teacher at the Theodor Herzl School. He holds a BA (Hons) from the University of South Africa and an MA from the University of Port Elizabeth
.
