Intercourse (14 page)

Rechele was born in Goray just before the massacre there. Her father took her to Lublin, and left the new infant with her uncle, a ritual slaughterer; and the holy slaughter of the animals is a wretching counterpoint to the profane slaughter of the Jews. The environment is filled with the carnage of killed animals, blood, feathers, knives, the smell of the killing; and sex begins for her here, with these sounds and smells of violence, in a hard bench-bed with a morbid old woman; the old woman “smelled of burned feathers and mice. Sometimes she would lift the child’s shift and run her dead hands over the girl’s hot body, cackling with impure delight: Tire! Fire! The girl’s burning up! ”’
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One night after the old woman has died, Rechele is left alone on Yom Kippur, the holiest night for Jews; Polish lords rape Jewish women on that night, and children die in fires. In terror, she collapses, “lying with her knees pulled to her chest, her eyes glazed and her teeth clenched. ”
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She stopped speaking altogether, became chronically ill, and was paralyzed in one leg. She was never strong or normal again. But her uncle wanted to marry her because she was beautiful; so he tried to have her healed. He hired an old woman to wash her in urine to get rid of any evil spirits. He provided the best medical care, a Polish doctor who taught her Latin. He himself taught her Torah so that she could pass the hours. When her uncle soon died, she was sent back to Goray to live with her father, who traveled often and had no interest in her. Mostly she was alone: “For days on end she sat on a foot bench facing the hearth, reading the volumes she had brought from distant cities, and it was rumored that she was versed in the holy tongue. ”
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It even became publicly known that she knew Latin. Matchmakers tried to get her married, but her father was indifferent to the idea, and she preferred reading to socializing. She was lame, but still “she aroused sinful thoughts in men. ”
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Goray had changed. Once a center for the old-fashioned scholars, pure and holy, then deserted after the massacre, now it was receptive to the many bounders who came preaching deviations from Jewish law, justified by the imminence of the Messiah’s arrival. For those who thought that Chmelnicki’s pogroms were but an indication that the Messiah was on his way, no twist or turn of thought could prove illogical. There were two theories: one group became austere, did penances, and had no intercourse to prepare for the coming of the Messiah; another group noted that holy texts declared that the generation right at the time of the coming of the Messiah would be degenerate; and so they strove to break every law and commit every outrage, so as to hasten the coming of the Messiah:

They were secretly adulterous, ate the flesh of the pig and other unclean foods, and performed those labors expressly forbidden on the Sabbath as most to be avoided.... Other believers defiled the bathhouses, so that the women could not clean themselves properly, and their husbands had to lie with them in their unclean state.
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Throughout the city, sensuality and transgression were rampant. Men and women did ecstatic dancing together; women listened to men when they were not supposed to, for instance, reading presumably holy messages from distant sages. Men and women drank together; and the sexual meanings of cabalistic texts were publicly declaimed. Charms were used, magic amulets and ointments; men and women uncovered their heads and kissed and embraced, and the rules that created barriers between men and women were ignored or even flouted. Men even invaded, for fun, the bathing place of the women, raiding it: “Those who were large and slow-moving were so confused that they remained transfixed. Uncovered before the eyes of the men, they were publicly shamed. There was much jesting and frivolity that evening. ”
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Women who had stopped menstruating were told “to eat the foreskin of a circumcised infant”; and those who wanted to be loved “were told to have their men drink the water in which their breasts had been washed. ”
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The false Messiah most honored was Sabbatai Zevi, and the Messiah’s wife, Sarah, was also honored, having “once been an inmate of a brothel in Rome. ”
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Especially, the women were out of hand and out of line, increasingly deviant and lawless. One woman came to Goray preaching, spreading news of miracles and words of solace; she promised salvation:

Crowds of women followed her about, tirelessly asking question after question—and she replied in phrases from the holy tongue, like a man.
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Women were “in mannish boots, their heads covered with torn shawls... ”
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And Rechele, incarnating this deviation toward the masculine, had studied the holy tongue and Latin. In God’s legal universe, this does not occur. Freud outlined precisely the implicit orthodox Jewish view of gender when he wrote:

the appeased wish for a penis is destined to be converted into a wish for a baby and for a husband, who possesses a penis. It is strange, however, how often we find that the wish for masculinity has been retained in the unconscious and, from out of its state of repression, exercises a disturbing influence.
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Goray was disturbed; the women presumed in the direction of masculine privilege.

The hedonism was doctrinal, a cabalistic sexual-liberation creed in which each transgression led to new, more far-ranging sensual experiments: all licensed by the rabbi who shrewdly interpreted the will of the coming Messiah. The rabbi himself, the leader of the law, “explained to young matrons ways to en-flame their husbands and whispered in their ears that... the commandment against adultery was void. ”
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Following an ever expanding new doctrine of sensuality as divinely sanctioned, men were exchanging wives, and incest too was indulged in: every lust was fulfilled. The authority of religion, in the person of the rabbi, insisted on an ideological commitment to and justification for promiscuity and sensual indulgence; and behavior conformed to the demands of ideology, the ecstatic substitute for Leviticus. Male authority, religious authority, and civic authority all converged, indistinguishable, at the point of entry into a woman’s body; and it was in this context that Rechele was sexually possessed, first by mortal men, these very authorities, then by a
dybbuk.
And in this same context the religious community of the Jews was transformed into a social pornography of possession: a socially established imperative toward sensual derangement; religion sexualized so that it became the doctrinal imperative for the sexual possession of women—by men, by force—even to the point of annihilation and death. Each act of possession is a sensual derangement for the woman—physical, overpowering, consuming; and each act of possession illuminates the meaning of sex in which the woman is owned by the man, her body becoming his. The physical and spiritual impact of this sexual dominance is on the integrity of the woman. She is necessarily (because of the nature of the act) unable to withstand its assaultive intensity; she is overwhelmed by it, driven to physical collapse and the abandonment of will. Each act of possession is sensual and singular; but possession also has a communal dimension to it, the community regulating, to a staggering degree, the social and sexual boundaries of possession—the meaning of the fuck, the degree of public complicity in maintaining each erotic relationship, what aspects of possession can and cannot be shown or acknowledged in the public realm, the role of the fuck in controlling women.

Reb Itche Mates, to whom Rechele is first married, is accepted by the citizens of Goray as someone wise and holy with great magical and mystical gifts; he engages in austere practices of penitence, including fasts and physical mortifications. In a letter from scholars in other communities, Goray is warned that Reb Itche Mates is a false prophet, one who is “‘forever sunk in melancholy, whose root is lust... ”’
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He is accused of using magic to cause the deaths of innocent and good people; and, in fact, a rabbi of the old school who opposes the new magical practices being taken up in Goray dies such a death. Reb Itche Mates is a con artist, the letter accuses; he entices woman after woman in town after town to marry him but then does not consummate the marriage; “
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his purpose is to make her unclean and to give her a bad name.... he will not divorce them, and lets them sit alone, grass widows, the tears on their cheeks, their bitter cries splitting heaven, with no recourse. ’”
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At Rechele’s betrothal feast, she “changed her mind and fell to weeping that she did not want Reb Itche Mates. ”
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But she was made to capitulate: talked to, persuaded, bribed with gifts until she agreed to the marriage again. At the betrothal, after her consent is socially coerced, Rechele experiences physical possession; she is given to and belongs to Reb Itche Mates; he need not fuck her, or even touch her, for the meaning of possession to be real for her as a woman. On Yom Kippur, alone at her uncle’s, she responded to the terror of imminent rape by Polish lords with fits resembling physical possession; and now she experiences possession in response to force—forced to be female, subordinate, owned, her own free will expressed and then violated, resulting in a marriage repugnant to her. Male ownership of her is phenomenologically real, a physical reality of possession:

Before anyone could reach her, she had fallen and she lay choking with sobs. Her eyes glazed, her arms and legs contorted, foam ran from her twisted mouth. She shuddered, twisted, and a vapor rose from her as from a dying ember.
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In having her will violated, in being owned, in being compelled through social force and money (having nothing herself), she experiences the sexuality of possession: force triggers the possession, just as terror did; force is the equivalent of the fuck in creating the reality of possession; responding to force sexual-izes ownership, and force is the sex of it, sexual dominance without penile penetration. She has been taken. The force of male dominance is possession even when that force is a social coercion, the community forcing her to sexual subordination and an implicit sexual servitude.

From that time on, her body is not her own, even though Reb Itche Mates is impotent and does not fuck her. Each morning after her wedding, matrons from the community examine her and the bedding to find the blood of the first fuck: “Ashamed, Rechele hid under the bolster, but that did not bother them... And so they uncovered her, and examined her slip and bedclothes carefully, their faces reddening as they piously went about their work. ”
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Her body, no longer hers, belongs to the community that upholds male dominance; and these women are agents of that community, that male dominance, not a subversive or sympathetic sisterhood; they are entitled to search every nook and cranny of her body to see that she is being possessed according to the rites and laws of male dominance: that she is being fucked. The community expresses its will on her body; it mandates the fuck. The sensuality of possession, then, is what she has inside that system of reality; and without it, she has nothing. Reb Itche Mates does not fuck her, but he does use her. At night, he read prayers, beat his breast, wept, confessed, then

warmed his frigid hands between her breasts and his bristly hairs pricked her, yet his teeth continued to chatter and his body shook so that the bed shook with it.
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The demon Lilith, in the room with them, seen by him, looked like Rechele; and the vision of her, her presence for him, gave him pleasure: “‘Long hair like yours. Naked. Concupiscent. ’”
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Eventually, the community leaves Rechele to him, to do to her what he wants according to whim or taste. Not being fucked, she ceases to exist for the community. She becomes socially invisible. The community does not value ownership of a female without the fuck. The continuing reality of male potency is the interest of the community served by the sex act as possession. Not serving that interest, an adult woman has no social existence or importance. Abandoned by the penis, she is abandoned by her community, organized on earth to celebrate and perpetuate male power and potency as divine. She is abandoned by power, by God.

Rechele herself is broken down by the coldness and alienation of this ownership without the fuck, this impotence, a kind of callous foreplay of possession: ownership without ecstasy; loss of the self in an absence of male potency, like a burnt offering in a universe without God, a sacrifice in a vacuum; loss of the body in a sterile hideousness of male frigidity. Not being fucked, she ceases to exist; but not through erotic annihilation, not through the slow and glorious wearing away of her vitality and substance in fits and spasms and violent upheavals. Instead, abandoned, she is a shell, like an empty house, deserted because no one wants to live there, worthless.

Reb Gedaliya, known for his piety and learning, did not want to leave the house empty. His ethic was to use; his gift was to invent the doctrinal justifications for promiscuity. He urged the community to fuck, since “neglect of the principle of fruitfulness would delay their redemption. ”
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When the Messiah came, he suggested, fucking many strange women “might even be considered a religious duty; for each time a man and a woman unite they form a mystical combination and promote a union between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Divine Presence. ”
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He conjured up demons, “deceived the townspeople and knew their wives and fathered bastards without number... ”
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Religious fervor and sexual fervor pervaded each other; and the rabbi’s “lust and license”
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was legitimized, protected, shielded, by mystic interpretations of religious tradition. The ecstasy of religion and the ecstasy of sex were one passion. In this carnal epistemology, sex and knowledge were synonyms; and prophecy was the body possessed, as it would be in sex, by a knowledge beyond itself.