15 November 82

In this week's NATURE, an archaeologist, on seeing two donkeys turning in a circle threshing wheat on the historic island of Melos, finds himself transported into the past--the scene is repeated, even to the details of the farmer's straw hat and wooden switch, on ancient pottery.

I found the past with a shorter trip this weekend to San Francisco; or, as we shall see, San Francisco Between the Bay and the Ocean. For two and a half hours I was no longer Jef Raskin of the twentieth century, but a peasant from the earliest days of recorded history. I was Jef, son of William, also called Bill, in a Hebrew phrase that sounded, in my ears: Yef ben Weellyam dimyskery Beell. For I was being divorced, in an old ceremony, from Kahrin bas Samoo-el dimyskery Sahm.

My presence was an accommodation to my ex-wife who had herself agreed to it solely to please her new husband, who himself would not have asked us to go through with it except that he believed it necessary in order to ensure that his teen-age sons would be able to emigrate to Israel if they ever wanted to. He was concerned that such relocation might be forbidden to them if he married a woman who had not gotten a religious divorce. Since actions of the father after the birth of the sons would seem to be irrelevant to the issue, I did not believe any of this, but I was determined to participate in good faith and with dignity (for the relationship with my first wife had been a good one, and we still regard each other with trust and respect). Nonetheless, it seemed strange and asymmetrical to have a religious divorce for a marriage that had been solemnized with only a civil ceremony. Not having a yarmulke, I did not remove my outdoor hat, and stepped into a dark green house, located in a street where all the other houses were painted in pastels.

The past was there in three foldings: one evoked by my memory of feelings of eight years ago when Karen and I were divorced; the second by my nose detecting the smells I remembered from visits three decades ago to the Jewish homes of friends where the wonderful aromas of traditional foods permeated every fixture, the furniture, the rugs, and the wallpaper. The oldest past was from a time of four thousand years ago when writing was the latest technology, when letters were magic, and the text--like the incantation of a spell--had to be letter perfect if sense and effect were to be conveyed by its words. We were suddenly in a time when one error of spelling, or the miswriting of a single character, would render the meaning of the whole null and void.

It was played out with all the intensity and deliberation, and all the importance, of a child not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk on the way to school. Tiring of this simple game when I was a child, I used to make the task more difficult. For example, the challenge might be expanded by trying to skip without stepping on a crack, or by seeing how many steps you can take with your eyes closed and still miss the cracks. The ceremony seemed created in the same spirit. The divorce is accomplished by a document written in twelve lines of Hebrew and, because it would have been too easy otherwise, the rabbi wrote with a quill pen in an indelible ink, with an authentic feather of a ritually slaughtered bird. The quill itself was carved with a carefully blessed knife into a nib suitable for making the handsome letters of the Hebrew alphabet, with their thick horizontals and thin verticals. The rabbi could write in magnificent calligraphy, and needed his skill to scribe with perfection this document, the gehtt, that would in his eyes dissolve once and forever the failed alliance between Karen and myself.

By the Orthodox rules, the document must be written with pen and ink of mine, and on paper that I owned. So the rabbi began by making me a gift of his writing implements. He said that I was to take the large blotter on which the paraphernalia was laid as a gift (I had to hold it up at the level of my eyes) with the intent to keep it as my own. I had no such intent, but he gave it to me with such kindness that I could not refuse. As I took it, the two witnesses, one an old and friendly looking man, the other a young and unhandsome man whose yarmulke was a light purple color, who struggled with Hebrew, and who was otherwise awkward in his ways, muttered some phrase I did not understand.

Nowhere in this ritual was there a moment meant for reflection: it was perfunctory even as it was protracted. For I am still saddened and disappointed to be once divorced and though my new wife is more wonderful a person than any man has reason to expect to find, there is still something special about a first marriage, a certain poignancy that can never be replaced, a lost decade of anniversaries that can never be made up, a shared fabric that is now shredded. I did not cry, but was near to tears that I would not let show. The rabbi was an old hand at such divorces, and he seemed to imagine that that any love between us was dead and cold, hardened into ice between us. The rabbi was not told that though we are divorced we still loved each other, as close as a brother and sister might be after having lived apart for a decade. Our relationship being too strong to dissolve so quickly in the acid rain of time and too deep to be diluted to homeopathic ratios by new affections. The rabbi was also not told that both Karen and I had already remarried. I don't think he would have cared or raised a fuss that would have jeopardized his three hundred and thirty dollar fee even if he had known. He also blesses tank cars for the railroad when it transports kosher goods.

The words of the ceremony were often poetical, the city was never San Francisco, but always, and repeated again and again, San Francisco Between the Bay and the Ocean. But also there were also those childish moments: I had to state that I was not under any compulsion to get the divorce and that I was seeking it of my own free will. To this I assented in the presence of two witnesses. I also had to affirm that I had not said before two witnesses that I didn't want the divorce but would tell the rabbi that I did want the divorce. To demonstrate that that wasn't yet a deeper deception I was required to agree to the assertion that I had not said to two witnesses that I would perjure myself to two other witnesses by telling them that I was entering into divorce of my own free will and not under any compulsion and would tell the rabbi so, when in fact I really did not want to get the divorce.

My mathematical training warned me that this was leading to an infinite regression, and thus a very long afternoon indeed; so I was relieved when the rabbi explained to me that the next part was an "affirmation to the end of affirmations" that I was under no compulsion to get the divorce and had made no declarations before witnesses counter to the ones I was making now. This is clearly a wonderful device thought up by clever rabbi in the midst of a scholarly debate to answer the implied infinity of possibilities, but I wondered why we could not have just started out with it. American jurisprudence with its "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" seems to cover the same ground not only more cleanly, but with as good a rhythm and sonority as you could desire.

Because the paper on which the gehtt was written must have no spot or mark upon it but the words, and because it seemed a matter of deepest concern that the document be as neat as possible, the rabbi took the handsome parchment and laid it on a board on which strings made of gut had been stretched in a traditional pattern. The blank document was laid upon it and, using a soft roller, the rabbi pressed the paper on the cords, embossing twelve full width and two shorter depressions in a slow and deliberate process. The two shorter leger lines were for the witness' signatures--which would be written as painstakingly as the rest of the document--each taking some five minutes to write. I would hate to be in line behind these men as they cashed a check.

After finishing one line in my presence, and one line in her presence, and the remaining 10 lines in the presence of God, the rabbi folded the gehtt into a special elaborately folded shape, and then brought Karen in.

I wondered whether Karen or I would get to keep the document. I assumed it would be Karen since I had been told that I would give it to her at the end of the ceremony. We were kept strictly apart, first I downstairs with the rabbi in his study, overfull of books so heavy that the shelves that lined the walls sagged to rest on the books below. Then, while I participated upstairs, she was downstairs. There were two stairs so that we did not see each other in passing. We were not allowed to talk to one another once the ceremony began, the separation of the sexes in matters religious being a strict Orthodox tradition.

Karen was finally brought into the room where I was waiting with the rabbi. He unfolded the document, read it to Karen, and then carefully applied Judaic origami to return it into the same shape. The finale consisted of my placing the document, still folded in the special way, into her hands. But, in accordance with the nature of the game, she had to hold her arms and fingers in a particular posture, and I had to place the gehtt into her hands with a special gesture. Even after some practice in the rabbi's study, I apparently still did it incorrectly on my first two tries with Karen. In frustration at some error in my motion that I could not detect, the rabbi took my hands to guide them along the righteous path. Nonetheless, it took another two tries before I finally managed to achieve some imperceptible change that the rabbi took as significant and allowed the document to stay in her hands. She then took four steps, no more, no less, away from me and we were divorced. What we would have been had she taken only three steps, or a generous five? We did not experiment and we did not ask.

This was not, however, the end of the ceremony, as we had been led to believe. Now the rabbi took out a small scissors and cut into the four corners of the folded form that he had so laboriously made, so that (he told us) it could not be used by another couple, and to symbolize the cutting of our bonds. The document then disappeared into his pocket with the scissors. Neither Karen nor I, but the rabbi got to keep the handsome document, or what was left of it after the ritual mutilation.

Then he and the witnesses filled out and signed some rather ugly and mechanically reproduced forms, in English and in Hebrew, which we did get to keep. Each was signed with all the care and deliberation of a monarch giving away his kingdom. Then each was stamped with a rubber stamp. Only this rabbi could take so much care with the inking and application of this time-saving device that to have written its contents by hand would have been quicker. Perhaps the deliberation and complexity of the ritual was designed to make us feel we had gotten our money's worth.

The rabbi then told me, bluntly and hastily, to make him a gift of the writing implements. For once he seemed hurried, his early kindness and later indifference moving nearly to rudeness, and he practically grabbed the blotter from me, as though he thought I might not voluntarily surrender the venerable goods.

Leaving the rabbi, his wife, and the two witnesses in their green warren, we stepped out into the afternoon. Like coming out of a matinee movie, it was surprising to find that it was still light outside. I realized that the rabbi's house had had no uncovered windows. Karen and I along with her husband and my wife and Karen's mother (who was recently divorced and had come along for the ride), went out to a Japanese restaurant where, though the sushi was good and the wasabi cleaned out my sinuses, we had an otherwise miserable meal.