Jephte's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

whose storefronts boasted signs in Hebrew. There, she and her friends felt at home building little wooden booths on Succoth, dancing with the Torah through the streets on Simchat Torah. As for those who passed by and looked at them queerly, who were they but foreigners?
    But the older she got, the more she realized how artificial her world was. She was on an island, in a little golden ghetto. The great floodwaters of the outside world, which her parents and teachers fought so vigilantly to keep at bay by forbidding television, allowing only Disney movies, and carefully monitoring her every waking hour, trickled in anyway through a thousand tiny cracks.
    As young as three or four, Batsheva saw Santa Claus on every street corner and begged passionately to be allowed to sit on his knee. She saw shop windows filled with delicious chocolate Easter eggs and yellow marshmallow bunnies and cried miserably to have a taste. She saw little girls in their white communion dresses, with perfect little hats and gloves, and pleaded in frustrated longing to be just like them.
    But the way a child gets used to his mother’s cooking, no matter how bland or incredibly spicy it might be, so that nothing else can quite satisfy his hunger and give him the same feeling of well-being, so Batsheva accepted the life of her parents as the norm against which all things must be measured. By the age of five, used to her parents’ steadfast denials, she learned to look at all these things the way a tourist might look at the wares of an exotic and alien race somewhere far away from home: with curiosity and admiration, but with a lack of desire to actually take anything home.
    Thus, while Santa Claus remained appealing, along with the beautifully decorated trees and the sparkling heap of presents, the idea of such things suddenly appearing in her living room next to her father’s bookcase of Talmuds and her mother’s silver candlesticks seemed as ludicrous and frightening as Santa Claus suddenly putting on a yarmulke and talking Yiddish.
    By age six, she had learned to pass judgment on everything, tagging it as something that belonged either to “our way” or to “their way,” a process of selection that became as natural and automatic to her as breathing. “Their way” was Friday-night car rides and drive-in movies; “our way” was the hushed, candlelit quiet of a contemplative and joyous Sabbath dinner. “Their way” was Saturday-morning cartoons, washing the car, going to the beach; “our way” was putting on beautiful clothes, going to the synagogue, reading and talking.
    The Sabbath was in many ways a day of “don’ts”: don’t turn on the lights, don’t turn on the radio, don’t use the car, don’t draw (even with your finger on a moist window), don’t tear or cut, don’t handle money (that meant no bus rides, no movies, no eating out); don’t cook, wash, or clean; don’t answer the phone…the list went on and on. And while many of her friends freely admitted they found the Sabbath day something of a tedious bore, Batsheva never did.
    Sitting at her father’s side in the men’s section of the synagogue long after most girls her age had been banished behind the grillwork partition with the women, she found magic in the emotion-filled chanting of prayers, in the sudden emergence of the holy Torah scroll covered in velvet and gold braid and a silver shield. She loved watching the way the light bounced off the tinkling silver bells that decorated its wooden handles, the incredible reverence in the hands of the men as they lifted it up before the congregation. The sudden unveiling of the stiff, yellowish parchment inscribed by hand with the ancient and sacred words of God never failed to raise a field of goosebumps down her arms and to lift the little hairs at the back of her neck. And while the other women and girls had to content themselves with kissing their fingertips and pointing them in the direction of the Torah, she,