The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood
“Of course she does. I just meant . . . it would be nice to learn more Torah. I know Mama is very, very busy with Abigail, and —”
“Do you not learn Torah in your studies with Mrs. Samuels?” Papa’s voice had risen just enough for Rebekah to know he did not like this conversation.
“Mrs. Samuels does teach us the parsha every week,” she said carefully as she took a seat with her own dish. “I simply hoped to learn a little bit more — maybe the Prophets and the Megillot. Perhaps even Hebrew, so I might study them for myself.”
“You do not need any such instruction, child,” Papa said firmly. “Our Sages are very clear that it is most important for the women of Israel to focus on nurturing a family and maintaining a kosher home. How can you have time to learn everything you need to know in order to be a proper Jewish bride and mother if you’re filling your head with other things? If you marry a scholar, how will you support his Torah study if you do not learn the skills needed to maintain a boardinghouse or store?”
A hundred answers rose in Rebekah’s throat, and she swallowed them all down. None were proper for a young southern lady or a daughter of Israel. “Yes, Papa,” she said around the lump they formed.
“This is the nonsense the Yankees are spreading,” he muttered. “That Gratz woman is shaking up Philadelphia with that new school of hers. Can’t leave well enough alone.”
“New school?” Rebekah had not heard any word of this, not even from her most gossipy classmate, Miriam. “What kind of new school?”
“It’s foolishness,” her father assured them all, buttering his corn bread with a firm hand. “A free Hebrew Sunday school for boys and girls. It seems Miss Gratz does not think our current educational system is sufficient.”
What educational system? Rebekah wanted to ask, and she had to clamp her teeth down on her lips to keep from doing so. She knew she herself was lucky to have a mother who would teach her the ways of a kosher home, and Mrs. Samuels to teach her other matters; some did not have even this. It was no wonder so many of their Jewish neighbors were turning from Halakha and discarding the ways of their faith.
“And who is teaching in this school?” Mama asked. “Miss Gratz herself?”
“Among others.” Her father stabbed his corn bread with such fierceness that Rebekah knew he was anxious to end the discussion, but she could not have been more enthralled. A school full of teachers? A school that would give equal education to boys and girls? To Rebekah, it sounded like paradise. “And the school trains new teachers as well. As if more women need to be distracted from their homes and children with this pointless pursuit.”
Rebekah’s heart beat a frantic tattoo. A school that trained new teachers. What if she could not only receive a better Jewish education but impart one as well? Her father’s annual trip to New York was coming soon, and her entire being burned with the desire to join him on the journey north and stop in Philadelphia along the way.
But of course she could not. She would never see the inside of Miss Gratz’s school, never teach in one of her own. She would remain in Savannah forever, bearing children and running a boardinghouse so her husband could continue the studies she could not. There would be no time for the “pointless pursuit” of her own studies.
They made the blessings over their food, then ate the rest of their meal in silence.
For the next week, she did not talk to Caleb even once; instead, she watched with envy from her porch as he went to learn with the men. Nor did she ask to attend services with Papa on Friday night, as he occasionally permitted, instead staying home to set the table for Shabbat dinner and help Mama put Abigail to sleep. He had been unusually irritable ever since the conversation about Miss Gratz’s school, and she feared if she did not behave as a model daughter of Israel now, the few-and-far-between favors he granted would vanish completely.
But when Papa left for three months in New York with several of the other merchants from the congregation, Rebekah felt impatient to expand her education again. She was not brazen enough to try to intercept Caleb on his way to class, but she did walk past the synagogue again in the hopes he would be there. He wasn’t, that first day. Nor the second. It wasn’t until the third day that he appeared, his ill-fitting vest highlighting how rapidly he’d been growing this past year — too quickly for his mother’s arthritic fingers to keep up. Rebekah wondered idly just how improper it would be to stitch him a new vest in between her work on tablecloths and aprons, and had to acknowledge that she already knew the answer.
But then, it wasn’t any more improper than the favor she was about to ask.
“Caleb Laniado.”
He seemed surprised to see her, but no less polite for it. “Miss Rebekah.” He tipped his hat. “Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi’s The Kuzari, before you ask. We talked about The Kuzari and other works of medieval Jewish philosophy in class today. It was fascinating.”
A light flush filled her cheeks, and she prayed it was shadowed by her parasol. “I wasn’t going to ask,” she lied, or, well, it wasn’t really a lie. She wasn’t going to ask that.
She was going to ask something much bigger.
“Caleb, you are fond of teaching, are you not?”
“I am.”
“And you’re good at it.”
Now he was the one to flush. “I just share that which God enables me to.”
Modesty — the most notable of the great prophet Moses’s virtues. Her father was fond of making sure she internalized that lesson. “Do you think God would enable you to share more? With me?” Her face promptly flamed at her inelegant phrasing. “Would you teach me?”
He furrowed his thick, dark eyebrows. “Teach you?”
“I know to teach me Talmud or Kabbalah would be forbidden,” she said quickly, fiddling with the cuff at the elbow of her green cotton dress. “But Hebrew. Torah. Prophets. I just want to know more about our people, our history, our language. And nobody wants to teach me that. Nobody thinks women deserve to know anything but how to make challah and bless the Shabbat candles.”
“A woman’s role in the home is very important, Rebekah,” he said, his voice patient but firm. “Men would not be able to both learn and provide for our families if women didn’t —”
“I know.” She exhaled sharply. “I know. I hear so much about the woman’s role in Klal Yisrael, and I know it is important. But Papa learns and works, and so do the other men of Mickve Israel. If you all have time to do both, why don’t we?”
“Because caring for children —”
“I don’t have any children, Caleb.” She was supposed to be demure, to know her place, but she’d had it with everyone deciding her place but her. If her biblical namesake had stuck to her place, the warlike Esau might be their forefather instead of the peaceful, learned Jacob. If Esther had stuck to her place, the Jewish people might not exist at all. Jewish history was not made of women who remained willfully ignorant in order to sew tablecloths. “But when I do, God willing, I want them to be learned. I want my boys and my girls to know our traditions, our words. I want them to see why observing our laws and sharing our history matters. There is so much more women could be doing in our community, if only we were allowed.”
There was a long silence as Caleb stroked his angular jaw while contemplating her words, and then, mercifully, gave one stiff nod. “All right, Rebekah. I will teach you. But —”
“I won’t tell anyone,” she promised.
“I am not sure that is for the best. The laws of yichud forbid an unwed man and woman from being alone.”
She knew this, but she also knew that if anyone had an inkling they were engaging in this private study, she’d never be permitted to leave home again — not for lessons or any services at which women’s presence was merely optional, not even to call upon Deborah for social visits. And if word spread to the matchmaker that she was stubborn and immodest, not only would it be more difficult to find her a match, but possibly more difficult to find one for Sarah as well.
I
There was another long silence, but, finally, the spark of an idea flashed in his dark eyes. “We must find a place that is both public and private. As long as people are freely able to enter and see us, I think that would be halakhically permissible.”
A place both public enough to keep with Jewish law and private enough that they would not be spotted . . . “Why, I reckon we could use the Gottliebs’ carriage house, same as Mrs. Samuels teaches us in. They don’t lock the doors after hours. We could leave them open; there’d be no reason for anyone to come looking.”
Judging by Caleb’s pinched expression, he still wasn’t entirely convinced of the propriety and wisdom of Rebekah’s plan, but he nodded. “We’ll try it. Sunday evening.”
“I’ll bring a candle,” she promised, praying to Hashem her mother did not keep careful count. “I’ll see you Sunday evening, after supper.”
He agreed, and she left before he could change his mind.
“So Deborah was not the only female hero in Judges,” Rebekah said with no small amount of satisfaction as they ended their session for the evening. They’d been studying together for weeks now, and as night began to fall earlier and earlier, they’d cut their lessons from two evenings a week down to just one, fearing her mother would notice if she snuck too many extra candles. “I cannot believe no one speaks of Yael.”
“A woman who lulled a general to sleep and then stabbed him through the temple with a tent peg is not generally considered a topic for polite conversation.”
Rebekah laughed at Caleb’s dry wit, careful to keep her mirth quiet. She hadn’t known Caleb had a strong sense of humor, but he routinely made her laugh, and she loved the way his dark eyes twinkled in the candlelight. He would make a wonderful teacher someday, and what’s more, he inspired her to want to be the same.
It made her wonder how Miss Gratz taught in that school of hers up in Philadelphia.
It made her wonder about that a lot.
“Simply because she was whispering her prayers, Eli thought she was drunk?” Rebekah was flabbergasted. They were making steady progress in the Prophets portion of the Bible and were now studying the book of Samuel. “But we pray silently every day. I was punished with an entire week of extra chores for speaking aloud during the Amidah.”
Caleb smiled, even as he gestured for her to keep her voice low. “Yes, we pray silently now, but our Sages point to this very source as evidence that we did not always. If silent prayer had been commonplace at that time, surely the High Priest would not have questioned Hannah. And so we must infer that it was not.”
“So then Hannah is responsible for the way in which we now pray?”
His smile widened, just a little bit. “Arguably, yes, she is.” He looked back down at the book in his lap. “I suspected you might like that.”
She did not need to confirm for him how correct he was.
They continued through Kings and learned of Ahab and the queen Jezebel, who ordered the death of hundreds of prophets. Of Athaliah, a woman so violently stricken with ambition that after her son was killed, she murdered her entire family so she could reign. Of Jehosheba, the righteous princess who managed to rescue a single child of that family and protect him until he was old enough to reclaim the crown, therefore salvaging the Davidic line of monarchy.
They learned until Rebekah could slowly, slowly read the letters of the Aleph-Bet, until she could recognize the different forms of the name of God, until she could spot her own name in the book of Genesis, and Caleb’s in the book of Numbers.
They learned until the night a shadow filled the door of the carriage house and covered the pages of Caleb’s open Bible.
They never made it to the book of Ruth.
“What were you thinking?” her father raged. Her mother had been too preoccupied with baby Abigail and preparing the house for her husband’s return to notice Rebekah’s regular absence, but he noted it almost immediately. He’d only been back from New York for a week before he came looking in the carriage house. It felt like everything happened in seconds then: her and Caleb jumping apart as if struck by lightning. Her father’s voice thundering in her ears. The candle flame being extinguished, although she had no idea who actually plunged the carriage house into darkness. Her father’s demand that she and Caleb march in front of him around the corner to the Laniados’ house. And now they were in the Laniados’ simply furnished parlor, her fingernails digging into the wood of her armchair as if it might anchor her when everything else was spinning and it took every ounce of her strength to meet Caleb’s father’s gaze.
Haim Laniado’s quiet nature made him all the more imposing, and Rebekah knew her father was ashamed in front of him now — ashamed of her, his rebellious daughter.
Nothing made her father angrier than feeling ashamed.
“I just wanted to learn,” Rebekah said quietly. “There was nothing improper between us.”
“The entire arrangement was improper.” Her father’s normally pale complexion was ruddy with anger, his knobby hands slicing the air as he spoke. Only his determination not to be heard throughout Savannah kept his voice at a fierce whisper. “The two of you? Alone? You know this is forbidden. You both know this.”
“We were not in violation of yichud,” she said, stealing a glance at Caleb. He would not meet her eyes, would not look at anything but his hands folded over his dark breeches. “The door was always open. Always.”
“How can we believe a word you say?” Mr. Laniado’s voice was as soft as his demeanor. “My own son — my only son — hiding with a girl in secret.” He took a deep breath. “You were taught better than this, Caleb.”
“She’s telling the truth, Abba. All we did was study, and the door was always open. She asked me to teach her Torah, and I did. But I am sorry I did it in secret.”
“No one would have let us if we did not do it in secret,” Rebekah pointed out, earning glares from all the men. She pressed on anyway. “If you don’t believe that we were studying, then test me. Ask me about the Judges or Kings. Ask me to read from a Torah scroll. Ask me about something I would never learn from Mrs. Samuels. Ask me and I will know.”
“That is not the point, Rebekah. What did I say the last time we discussed this?”
“Did I not help Mama with chores these past few months? Did I not find time for both? I know my place in the Jewish home, Papa. But I think I have a place outside of it, too.” She took a deep breath. “You and Mama have taught me so well to preserve our traditions, to put being Jewish first. You have warned me of all the dangers of turning from our path. But what of those who have not received such teachings? The nation around us holds such temptation to blend in. How can those resist it who feel they have nothing in our own beautiful Jewish nation to grasp? How can we continue as a community if we do not educate enough teachers within it?”
Papa snorted. “You view yourself as a teacher? Anavah, Rebekah. Midat Moshe Rabbeinu. Our greatest leader possessed modesty above all.”
She winced; he could not have injured her more had he slapped her. But memories of the women who’d come before her, who’d believed they had more to give than men expected of them, drove her forward. “So I’m permitted to learn the virtues of Moses, but I’m not permitted to learn the story of him receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai? Doesn’t that sound silly?”
Every man in the room sucked in a breath at her insolence, and she wondered if she had gone too far. But what did it matter now? Her father??
What did she have left to lose?
“Tell me, Papa,” she pleaded. “What do I have to do in order to learn? All I want is to be a learned daughter of Israel. I don’t want to disobey you and Mama. I don’t want to hide. I certainly don’t want trouble for Caleb. But I want to learn. There must be a way. If he cannot teach me, will you?”
“I do not have time for this nonsense, Rebekah. I have a son who needs to learn Talmud, as does Mr. Laniado. The community has decided what you need to know, and you need to trust your community. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh — all of Israel is responsible for one another. You need to accept that your elders know what is best.”
Caleb shook his head. “I do not think they do,” he said, and Rebekah snapped to attention. “You are of course correct that Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, but does that not include being responsible for the women of the community, too? For their knowledge and education? Rebekah is very clever, sir. And she is interested — far more than most of the young men with whom I have studied. I do not believe it is in the interest of the Jewish community to deprive her of an equal education. I think she would have very much to offer Mickve Israel, especially since the new synagogue will be finished soon.”
Rebekah was stunned to hear Caleb defend her, but he wasn’t finished. He remained calm even though her father’s jaw was clenched tight enough to crack a pecan. “I would like to keep teaching her. She is the most insightful study partner I have found in Savannah, and I think our learning has been beneficial not only for her education but for mine. I believe she could be a wonderful teacher someday.”