Jews vs Zombies

by Rena Rossner

  While they were thus engaged, a great number of those [of whom it was said, it arises from the ground] ‘OUT OF ITS PROPER TIME’, approached the Academy to pursue [the people there]. R. Jose said, ‘if your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat’34, and cast loaves before them, but they did not eat. R. Judah then said, ‘at twilight you shall eat meat’35, and he cast a hen before them. The pursuers devoured the hen. Then R. Nehemiah cast two ducks before them, and they devoured the ducks. Then R. Phineas cast three ewes before them, and they devoured the ewes. Then R. Nathan cast four goats before them, and they devoured the goats. Then R. Yochanan cast five calves before them, and they devoured the calves. He said, ‘They slice meat on the right, but are still hungry, and they devour on the left, but are not satisfied.’36

  Then R. Shimon ben Gamaliel cast six bulls before them, and they devoured the bulls. R. Phineas said, ‘When they had eaten them, no one would have known that they had eaten them, for they were still as ugly as at the beginning.’37 R. Judah said: May we also awaken!38 Then R. Judah cast seven oxen before them, and they devoured the oxen. Then R. Meir cast eight elephants before them, and they devoured the elephants. Then R. Shimon bar Yochai brought a Leviathan from the sea, and they devoured the Leviathan. At once they became so rotund that their bellies were like the wheels of a chariot, and the men of the Academy rolled them into the sea.

  R. Eliezar ben Hyrcanus meanwhile entered the house of Acher to pursue him. Because Acher was unable to escape, he said: my master, I have a question about the [ritual purity of] ovens. Although R. Eliezar was compromised in his faculties, the matter interested him greatly, and so he ceased [to pursue].

  Acher said: consider an oven like that of Aknai39 which, in the year of the Destruction of the Temple, was used on the first day of Passover to store unleavened bread that had previously been wrapped in a cloth that was stained with the menstrual blood of the oven’s owner40, and the owner then purified only the parts that had been touched by the unleavened bread.

  Now, consider that the mother of the owner was a proselyte; however, the rabbinical court which converted her had said: we will allow you to convert only under the condition that your parentage is pure.41 But the proselyte’s father had been a Jew who was conceived after his own father had given his mother a bill of divorce about which he said: this paper belongs to me, except under the condition that the Temple will be destroyed, God forbid, and that on the first day of the festival of Passover of that year, we will have a great-granddaughter who, G-d forbid, will own an impure oven, in which case this paper belongs to you.42 In such a case, is the oven pure or impure?

  R. Eliezar said: it is pure! And with that he returned to dust.

  Rava asked Raba: who is more to be praised, R. Meir, because he warned the Academy, or R. Shimon bar Yochai, because he brought the Leviathan? R. Abye objected: but perhaps Acher is to be praised, for his task was the greater?43 Raba answered: R. Eliezar ben Hyrcanus is to be praised. At his second death, he remembered the Temple and turned towards Jerusalem, as we learned: IF IT FACES TO THE EAST.

  * * *

  1 Psalm 1:3.

  2 Psalm 1:4.

  3 The crops arising out of season.

  4 But on his departure, surely all business has been completed. The crops facing west accompany the setting sun’s departure, while those facing east greet the rising sun. It is no longer clear how the Talmudic sages determined which way crops were facing. Rashi regards the direction in which most of the grain’s tassels were pointing as determinative, while Rambam interprets the phrase to allude to the orientation of the leaves.

  5 Deut. 14:3.

  6 In a cave, by reason of Roman persecution. cf. Shabbat 33b.

  7 The cucumbers that R. Eliezar ben Hyrcanus was able to summon by invoking the Divine will, cf. Sanhedrin 68a.

  8 Song of Solomon 2:10.

  9 R. Eliezar ben Hyrcanus had caused the death of R. Shimon ben Gamaliel’s father, after the dispute over the Aknai oven, cf. Baba Mezia 59b.

  10 Psalm 27:14.

  11 Lit. ‘his thoughts were eaten‘

  12 Because of the dispute over honours due to the various offices of heads of the Academy, R. Shimon ben Gamliel had decreed this punishment for R. Meir, cf. Horayot 13b.

  13 Psalm 17:10.

  14 Numbers 26:25, cf. Sanhedrin 110. Moses approached the supporters of Korah, about which the Talmud observes, ‘This teaches that one must not be obdurate in a quarrel.‘ Bruria thus urges R. Meir to emulate Moses in pursuing reconciliation.

  15 Proverbs 14:1.

  16 According to Rambam, ‘the house of Israel‘ was threatened because of R. Eliezar ben Hyrcanus having arisen, and it was with this argument that Bruria sought to persuade her husband to put aside private enmity. The Wilna Gaon observed in response: every feud between scholars is a danger to the house of Israel.

  17 As if the latter had been excommunicated.

  18 Lit. ‘his thoughts have been eaten‘.

  19 cf. the Mishnah cited in Sanhedrin 67a.

  20 cf. Sanhedrin 68a, regarding the permissibility of the magical production of cucumbers solely for the purpose of research.

  21 i.e., to impress R. Shimon ben Gamaliel with your learning.

  22 R. Elisha ben Abuya, R. Meir’s former teacher, who had been excommunicated as a heretic, cf. Hagigah 15b.

  23 Psalm 27:2.

  24 Rabbi (R. Yehuda ha-Nasi), the son of R. Shimon ben Gamliel, was thus the teacher of Raba’s teacher’s teacher.

  25 This may be a pseudonym or cognomen of R. Meir, used by later sages to attribute teachings to him indirectly, in deference to the decree of R. Shimon ben Gamliel forbidding rulings to be recorded in his name, cf. Erubin 13b.

  26 Because he is arisen through magic, and not through the Divine will.

  27 If the person is himself regarded as technically dead, but is still in possession of his faculties, he will be unable to cleanse himself of the impurity arising from contact with the dead. This presents a legal puzzle. Various Gaonim argued that if he returns to life through no fault of his own, he cannot be held liable for the impurity, but if he asks a friend to resurrect him, he is liable. Rambam regards the resurrection of R. Eliezar as metaphorical, representing the resumption of the debate over the aknai oven (cf. Baba Mezi’a 59a) at a time when it was no longer appropriate, that is, after the majority had already decided, likening stubborn debate without legal justification unto a reanimated corpse deprived of the good inclination.

  28 cf. Megilla 7b.

  29 R. Abye, taking Raba literally, objects that since Zeira’s resurrection was accomplished through prayer rather than magic, the problems discussed earlier do not apply. Raba responds by saying that Abye has only learned to eat bread, and not cake. According to Rashi, bread here represents serious study, while cake represents light-heartedness. According to the Tosafot, bread represents literal meanings, while cake represents the deeper metaphorical level. R. Abye has failed to apprehend that Rabba’s compliment to Zeira is figurative rather than literal. Rabba was known for employing humor as a pedagogical tool, cf. Shabbat 30b.

  30 That is, this predatory behavior is typical of the Romans.

  31 Psalm 2:2. In other words, we have no obligation to assist the Romans, our occupiers.

  32 Psalm 5:11.

  33 Psalm 31:4-5.

  34 Proverbs 25:21.

  35 Exodus 16:12.

  36 Isaiah 18:20.

  37 Genesis 41:21.

  38 The passage which R. Phineas cites, in which Pharaoh recounts his dream to Joseph, is followed by, ‘Then I awoke.‘

  39 An oven composed of many parts; the debate about whether the whole, or only the parts, must be purified, led to R. Eliezar’s excommunication, cf. Baba Mezia 59b.

  40 Which would render the cloth, and thus the matzah, and thus the oven impure, presuming the owner of the oven is Jewish.

  41 In other words, only if her immediate ancestry is free of illegitimate births; in this case, the legitimacy of her fat
her is in question.

  42 The divorce is valid only if the bill of divorce, including the paper it is written on, is given entirely to the wife. If the husband retains ownership, the divorce would be invalid, and thus the woman would be the legitimate offspring of the couple, and hence her daughter, the oven’s owner, would be Jewish. cf. Gittin 84a.

  43 Because R. Eliezar was a more formidable threat than the others.

  WISEMAN’S

  TERROR TALES

  ANNA TAMBOUR

  Irving Wiseman’s uncle Leo dropped some magazines on Irving’s bed. ‘Enough dreaming,’ he said, pulling the book from his nephew’s hands and placing it on the bureau. He would have liked to toss it, but it was a book, and even more than that, a library book.

  ‘You gotta make a living,’ he said.

  Irving sighed, but rolled over and laid the magazines out before him on his bedspread like cards in a game.

  ‘You got talent,’ said Leo. ‘You must have. So they’re showing it, no?’ He pointed like some professor in the movies at the middle magazine.

  The right breast of the woman in the underwired but otherwise unstructured pink brassiere stared at the 17-year-old. It wasn’t just the woman’s youth that perked those breasts, Irving knew. His uncle had told him that 64% of women, once they hit the age of 20, already have bosoms that not only fail the pencil-test, but are as perky as easy-over-light fried eggs. This woman’s bazoongas were held up in their most flattering form, high as they could go. Irving didn’t know but guessed that the reason was those arms pulled up by wrists clamped into cuffs on that chain pulled over the swing-bar by the scientist’s assistant.

  Leo stabbed that cover – Marvel Tales, May 1940 – with his pipe. Ashes fell on the assistant’s manic frown. ‘What have you to tell me?’

  Irving opened his mouth, looking ready to recite, or yawn.

  ‘No, that’s too easy,’ said Leo. ‘What does that remind you of? And this is no bordello. What you lying down for?’

  Irving sat up and ran his hand through his thick curls. ‘The other pink job.’

  ‘And when are they not pink?’

  ‘When they’re red or chartreuse or – ’

  ‘If you can’t piece these together, just how you think – ’

  The boy took off his glasses and pinched his nose, an odd gesture considering that without his horn-rims, he looked like Michelangelo’s son of stone. ‘Long blade of paper-guillotine in action of cutting a brunette in half. All right already. False underwire of round cotton-waste piping, non-adjustable rayon-satin ribbon straps, one-inch separator of same connecting bandeaux-style shallow unshaped cups. Suitable for women with no body who think they don’t need fill. A Twenties look.’

  ‘Better.’ Leo produced yet another magazine from inside his fitted suit. ‘This? I just picked it up.’

  Irving pulled the magazine close to his face. Its ink was still loud, crude. Only out for a few months, this February 1941 Spicy-Adventure Stories, ‘Space Burial’, featured a screaming redhead slipping off the back of some flying bird – the important thing being that apricot sateen number with the shaped straps and wholly improbable way that the breasts could be supported. He snorted. ‘Artistic license. No can do. Not with that fabric and no seams.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Leo pointed to the bed. ‘What do you think of that one in the line-up?’

  ‘ “The Soul Scorcher’s Lair”?’

  The middle-aged man with no paunch waited. After all, he had once had dreams, too. But 15 seconds was enough.

  ‘If you think I’ll let a fantazyor eat your mother’s kreplach. And she a widow working her fingers off… ’

  ‘Hot-formed lace, steel underwire, flare-banded from armpit to breast differentiators, elasticised arm straps, presumably three-hook back, D cup, black, suitable for full but firm breasts because there is still no adequate support for the average woman.’

  ‘Excellent, my boy.’ Leo smiled broadly, the picture of the proud uncle, even possibly, though he’d never seen it, the university professor gratified that his student had actually listened to all his lectures. Leo was proud of himself, too, for he had successfully hidden the hurt that the boy, through the callousness of youth, had dealt him. For Irving was right. That bra had been a great seller in ’37 – but its success had rested on the racy lace and daring black. Women don’t know how to fit a bra, and this one, for all its advertised appeal, was two flimsy colanders, so the average woman’s breasts were sadly earthbound or showing their inadequacy of build with an embarrassment of collapsed cups when what they needed was adequate shaping, filling, engineering, uplift.

  As Irving civilised his hair and washed his face and hands, he heard his mother setting the freshly scrubbed table in the kitchen – laying it with three places for the three people who lived in that little flat in the Bronx.

  He was pleased in one way that he’d made Uncle Leo happy. Of course he didn’t want to hurt the man – and besides, he felt sorry for him. But he also felt a simmering anger that he could hardly admit to himself. To sign his life away. Yes, so Mama had started in the sweatshops at the age of nine. But still. Irving put that out of his mind while he dried his face, and dreamed for another snatched moment of designing rockets.

  What he knew of the breasts of the average woman, of any woman for that matter, was the sum of what he’d seen of Egyptian, Greek and Roman statuary in the Metropolitan Museum, all those magazines his uncle brought home for him to study, and Leo’s own blueprints and lectures about the real things.

  Irving wondered if the man, that lifelong bachelor, had ever touched the real things. He’d gone from being a tailor of men’s suits, an unenviable specialty in New York in the 1930s, to a brassier designer, only because of a friendship made by Irving’s mother, who when her husband dropped dead of a heart attack when Irving was only 13, went into business on her own, sewing foundation garments to fit particular women, especially those with a breast or two cut off, and opera singers.

  Her constructions, all made of pink canvas, could have held cement. Their fillings felt rather like it, and never shifted. Sometimes she made shapes that looked quite beautiful to Irving, but that she inevitably had to modify for her conservative clients, who seemed to prefer what Irving thought of as the ‘squashed look’. Maybe they were ashamed. He didn’t know but felt frustrated for his mother, who couldn’t afford that luxury.

  It was she who had talked to her brother about setting Irving up. She not only didn’t have the money but there was also that limit of ‘Hebrew’ students already reached in all the top schools. So he had to take that job Uncle Leo wangled for him, opening in January. Until then, after graduation from high school in a week (what a waste of science classes!) he was to learn the trade – designing for three dimensions with two-dimensional materials, under her. Not that this training came, of course, with an opportunity to look at or touch the goods inside these constructions.

  The first day in training he successfully ran a Singer needle through his forefinger. It was a good lesson in driving speed on the newly electrified machine. After that, he surprised himself on the thing, finding that the more difficult the curves, the more fun he had making the turns, and he grew so skilled that his mother started trusting him with ever more mountainous jobs.

  The fittings were all done in her bedroom, and the clients looked nothing like, say, that blonde with manacled hands and the rayon full-torso breast-delineating underpiping but otherwise purely unsupportive cups fronting Terror Tales, September 1934. Most of her clients were, frankly, variations on the potato or a cubist painting, even with her expert foundations giving them shape. ‘Today’s woman,’ he said to her one day, ‘should thrust out rockets, not your matzo balls.’

  ‘So, Irving. This today’s woman? She tells you this?’

  Her son blushed reassuringly.

  ‘You fantazyor,’ she said, patting his cheek. ‘Your today’s woman is in the future, and she’s made of steel.’

&nb
sp; But to make him happy, she let him create two designs that were quite astoundingly shaped, giving body where needed he said, but always ‘up and outlift’. She hated wasting the canvas and thread, but kept that thought to herself. After he had constructed both models – impeccably cut and sewn, she was pleased to note – she offered them to her two youngest clients, having quickly to explain that it was just an idea. She almost lost both women.

  So instead, she asked Irving to tell her of his dreams while he sewed.

  It helped him to hear her sigh.

  The months passed more quickly than he imagined they would, and he was doubly sorry to see them go. His mother had always been a heroine to his way of thinking. One day he would find a woman like that, he thought when he forgot that he’d be a brassiere designer, something to laugh at. So embarrassed did he feel that he refused all comers, and with looks like his and his shy, thinker’s manner, he could have explored all he wanted, even the nice girls.

  December came, and with it, the Day of Reprieve.

  He was told that there was no way he could get into the Air Corps, so he went to the Army office across the street, but after interviewing him, the guy there wrote something on a piece of paper and sent him back across the street. And he walked out of that office signed up for a course, launching him into the Air Corps.

  With his new skills in map-making, he flew over Germany and then was stationed to Burma, where he learned to hate the English for their filled storehouses, meant not for the people who needed them, but for export; visited temples that he laughed to think about gracing towns in the US of A – the horror! And in this alien land he felt for the first time, the real things, if only stone; and after much encouragement and teasing, the real things with a real-life woman, who said she ‘love’ him, but she kicked his pet mongoose.