I do not embellish when I say troubling tales abound within it, containing as it does some of the more obscure records of the law and lore of the Jews. It was created by male Jews, naturally, whose most pressing pursuit has forever been to fantasize, then legislate on matters female. Finding them guilty. Of everything.

To begin, however, it is necessary to interrogate one of Black Fire’s more arcane oddments, which recounts the strange incident of the female scholar in the nighttime. Even if its provenance is contested—and do, please, contest it, Sisters—one asks it to be recognized that wherever the expression “female scholar” is inked upon the scrolls it is generally considered to be either an oxymoron or a scribal error. For all that, the name of the female scholar in question is Bruriah, translated from classical Hebrew to mean “Clarity of God.” Herewith the original, black-fired oddment. It is completely different from the version appearing in White Fire’s palimpsest, which I will come to in good time. For now, remember my name—Arielle, Lioness of God, Shomer ha’Emeth, Custodian of Truth—and listen to my voice….

(Black Fire: Kiddushin, 80b)

Under Roman occupation of Palestine in 170 CE, Bruriah’s parents were burned alive for teaching outlawed Torah texts. Her father, along with ten other martyrs, was recorded, remembered, and revered in the Chronology of Renown as having died sanctifying the Holy Name. Disqualified by her genitalia, Bruriah’s mother, nameless flower, was not.

But in defiance of the occupiers’ edict, Bruriah would preserve her parents’ legacy. In hiding, she delved into texts alongside teachers, masters, and sages—including her husband, the great scholar Meir himself—in an otherwise all-male study-house. At one time she contradicted them over their epigram, “Women are light-minded, flighty,” an unctuous reference to women’s putative lack of sexual inhibition. She mocked such casuistry.

In response to her discourteousness Meir said, “By your life, you will prove their saying to be correct.”

That night, to demonstrate his point, he instructed his most brilliant student—an apple-cheeked, bright-eyed lad, tall and lusty—to seduce her. The student urged her over many days. She resisted until the night she did not. When Meir’s part in the incident became known, Bruriah fell into such a profound state of decline that the scholars prayed for death’s mercy to be visited upon her. And God listened.

Meir fled Palestine to Babylonia in disgrace.

So what think you, having heard this reading? Was Meir guilty of murder? Black Fire does not investigate the question. White Fire, in contrast, devotes folios to its discussion, yet achieves no consensus. Which is as it should be. As a sub-scroll of Black Fire, it, too, is a never-ending argument through the ages. Consensus is the least of its ambitions.

And then, surpassing White and Black, as Truth’s Custodian, I give you Spoken Fire—tales which blaze from lips of fabulists and troubadours, passed down through the blood of aeons and clan. Whether composed by truth-tellers or dragon fabricators there can be no knowing, but through it, astonishing as it might seem, women’s voices are heard at least as frequently as men’s. So listen as I tell it to you in the way I heard it told:

Fleeing to Babylon, seeking absolution, yearning for redemption, Meir decided to follow the route taken by Palestine’s defeated people, those exiled to Nebuchadnezzar’s land half a millennium previous. Northwest from Lydda to the Mediterranean coast, eyes dazzled by tears and ocean, he was a scholar, not a sportsman, unprepared for the journey’s rigors. Traveling alone, invention of the compass still a mystery unborn in Shen Kuo’s inchoate dreaming, all Meir had to guide him were stars he could not read and the Tenth Book of Writings whose directions he could not fathom.

For weeks he followed that coastline: striding when his belly was full, staggering when his waterskin was empty. On day one of the First-Fruits Festival, stoned by the good Christians of Tyre, he labored ever-northward, finding unlikely refuge for his burning body and blistered feet in Sidon where, espying him collapsed by the marketplace’s fountain, Ennion the glassblower took pity on him.

“Come home with me, thou man of letters. We will light candles, drink wine, and break bread together.”

“You know me?” Meir asked.

“Your wisdom precedes you. Stay with me awhile. It has been too long since I unraveled a scroll’s mysteries at the feet of a scholar who could illuminate them.”

“Scholar!” Meir said, the word a bitter rustle. “I’m no scholar.”

Yet he remained in the glassblower’s house a fortnight, watching gleaming orbs emerge from the end of a straw held between his host’s lips: silver-streaked amethyst, the color of Bruriah’s eyes; gold-streaked carnelian, color of her hair.

Byblos

Arvad

Hamath

Aleppo

Boarding a kuphar, he was at the mercy of its dizzying circles as it wheeled and twisted down the pale green Euphrates. Finally achieving Babylonia, though never happiness—a just outcome, some of his compeers have asserted—he lived an erudite if caviling life, dying in a village among Anatolia’s jagged mountainscapes.

And Bruriah? The woman with whom Black Fire wants no truck? Let me read to you from its literary counterpoint. Here, as Arielle, God’s Lioness, I find beauty and truth both.

(White Fire: HaNashi, 36a)

Bruriah fell into no state of decline. She did not die. To avoid being stoned at the Elders’ decree for her crime of adultery, she headed southeast from Acre. Yet wherever she ran, fearful of exposure, her urge towards learning, for all it had cost her, was unassuaged. Only upon reaching Tiberias did she decide it safe to halt her flight. And let it be noted that at that particular moment, Palestine was briefly fortunate, inasmuch as the Romans were less concerned with their little eastern date-pit of a province than with fighting the Parthians. Neither empire considered it sufficient to control only half the world respectively, a conceit that would contribute to the downfall of them both.

And a curious phenomenon arose in Tiberias. Women from she-was-never-quite-sure-where-or-why began materializing on Bruriah’s doorstep. They came for advice on questions of law and to hear interpretations of their history which were either foreign or not contained in texts permitted to them. For her teaching Bruriah had only a single scroll, a fantastical work replete with hidden meanings, secret sacred truths, and tales improbably chronicled before events contained within them could possibly have happened. When asked how she came to be in possession of such a masterwork, all she would ever say was “theft and flight.”

Naturally it was a text proscribed for females, who were deemed too credulous to be exposed to its profundities. For further within it were recorded arcane traditions, mysterious registers of ancient law, along with statutes dictating what people could wear in days of yore, what they might eat, and when they were permitted to procreate. This last was the reason given for its proscription: too salacious for the feeble female mind. Bruriah, however, taught that the genuine motive for the embargo lay elsewhere: had women been given access to the Law’s innermost, oft-concealed meanings, they could have challenged its inconsistencies, traversed its fault lines, even if, as the Sages never tired of declaring, The Law Has No Fault Lines.

So no, the “mercy” of death was not visited upon her, much as scholars might have wished it.

As Truth’s Custodian and God’s Lioness, it would be remiss of me not to tell you of the most vivid of Spoken Fire’s rhapsodists and oral recorders—Yael—or Ibex, when her name is translated from classical Hebrew. Wild and lovely, she was reputed to have a quick tongue that balanced on truth as precariously as her nimble namesake teetered on mountain rocks. What are we to make of the following tale she is said to have passed down? Thus she spoke it. Thus I give it over to you:

A curious woman has come to our little Tiberian town, a teacher, healer of the spirit. And gentle-voiced, sad-eyed, she has drawn us close. She says her name is Lailie, Nightfall, and she has read us uncanny tales profuse with the life force of the feminine and the death force of the masculine. And as if that were not sufficiently remarkable, she welcomes and gives succor without question to the plethora of strangers who importune her, who would sit at her feet and learn.

I lie awake and listen to these strangers’ broken Hebraic syllables as one particular cohort practices our strange language, trying to master it. Their hair curls in wondrous profusion and their eyes are dark, like ours, but dappled with flecks of amber. How is it possible—if I understand them correctly—that they have travelled across a warm ocean where dolphins and fierce sea-monsters played havoc with their boats? Across a sea beneath which coral jewels colored white sands? Around the pointed coastlines of a land whose people—as old as the first star—fed them succulent fish and rainbow fruits? Through the Erythraean Sea towards the Red Sea, to land here.

A few days ago, after a morning session, I said to one of them, “You travelled a long way to study with her. How did you know to come here?”

“We trusted to the boat. That has always been our way.”

Unable to help myself I asked, “What exactly is your way?” But she turned aside, as though she had already said too much. Across the courtyard, shaking her head, I saw our teacher signing at me to be quiet.

On the streets, in the market, and even by the river where we gather to wash our clothes and gossip, Lailie swathes herself in cinctured garments and scarves, filaments of silk, with tendrils of Jerusalem Bellflower woven through her hair. She is a silhouette, her face and body a whisper, and somehow she has keys to mysteries of the Sages. I think I have loved her from the moment I first inhaled her scent, amber and sandalwood, as it hovers between us. I stand, tantalized by the sight and sense of her.

“Go home,” she says to me that late evening. “There is nothing for you here.”

The women convene on her rooftop, where she teaches as we sew. Date palms shade us, cloaking us from men’s eyes. If they think about us at all, they think we are mending their clothes. Why do they not ask about the strange women visiting in our midst? Asking would imply they have looked, and looking is forbidden.

Our scholarship is rudimentary so we depend upon her to read for us; but over time that changes. “One day, women everywhere will be able to decipher even the most complicated texts,” she tells us. “May you be their ancestors, those who began it all…”

There came a morning when I asked to learn the true story of the one they called Bruriah, not the version told to women and children as a cautionary tale. Lailie was discomposed and displeased.

“How did you hear about her, Yael?” she asked me. “The tale most commonly told is unhappy and specious. Written by men. Why would you want to learn it?”

I stuttered. “My father mentioned her once when he found me trying to read one of his manuscripts. He said such actions were unsafe for women; that they could lead to my death as they did to hers.”

“A falsification of the facts.” Lailie’s eyes clashed with mine, as though I were responsible for the lie, but her voice was a whisper and a waver, a warp and a weft. We women ceased to sew. Who could wield a needle when such words issued from her lips, burning them?

And here ends Yael’s Spoken Fire tale. I hear you cry, “Arielle, Arielle! What comes next? We must know.” As it happens—by divine or human intervention—the lacuna is filled by White Fire, which prefaces its account with a strange little epigram: “Because after all, there must be such a thing as truth.” So pay close attention as I read to you from it.

(White Fire: Emeth, 54b)

It was the worst of times for those in thrall of the Roman occupiers, perilous to be a Jew. Although it was forbidden to study or teach Torah, there were those who defied the edict. They were burned for their trouble. Moreover, Jewish mothers became afraid to walk in the streets with their children for fear of a legionnaire randomly snatching a male child from their arms and spearing him on the spot. Thus, on the eighth day after Barur—meaning Clear—was born and secretly named, his father held a public naming ceremony, whereat he announced his child’s name to be Bruriah. Thenceforth his parents clothed him in girls’ garments, curled and beribboned his hair and, from his earliest age, enjoined him not to reveal his sex. Providentially, although able-bodied, he was far from muscular. Under his parents’ tutelage, Barur became that rarest of things: a preeminent female scholar. Whenever she sat opposite them at their benches, Sages would lower their gaze for she was uncommonly beautiful. Violet eyes, thought Meir, foremost amongst scholars. A white and slender neck, hair beyond her waist, dark-shining beneath shafts of sunlight illuminating lettered parchment.

One terrible morning word came to the study-house that Barur’s parents, discovered in their basement teaching forbidden scrolls to children, had been arrested and hauled to the public square for burning. Barur ran as he had never run, wind thrusting his breath back down his throat, forcing tears from his eyes.

“Holy Blessed One,” he cried, “Save them and I swear a life of fealty to You. I will consecrate myself to You in abstinence and chastity all the days of my life. I will not cut my hair, wine shall not pass my lips, and I will give myself to no other.”

He watched his parents being tied to stakes. His ears were ruined by soldiers’ jeers. His father, whose pyre was set alight first, began to scream in his agony. Now a soldier approached his mother, burning torch in hand but, at the moment he reached out to ignite the pyre, the sun’s very light was blotted out. A glowing triangle pierced the blackness and shone directly onto the bound woman. Jeers turned to howls of fear and, in an instant, the square was deserted. Barur unbound his mother and she staggered into his arms.

“Oh, my boy,” she said, before her heart gave out and she died, but Barur knew his vow must stand.

Sequestered within the study-house, hidden from the Romans, Meir watched her. Barur knew it, felt it, and could not help but return his searching look. Some say Meir was also a rare thing, a scholar broad of shoulder, wide of chest with arms whose muscles could be seen rippling beneath the silk of his prayer serape. Barur had loved him from the moment he had first been allowed to study with the men.

“Will you marry me?” Meir asked her late one evening, his voice quiet in the almost empty study-house.

“I have taken a vow of chastity for the life of my mother,” Barur replied, the pain of refusal harrowing.

“I would wed you nonetheless,” Meir said, “just to have a woman such as you by my side all the days of my life. We shall sleep in separate rooms, bathe at different times, and clothe ourselves in privacy. No wine shall pass the threshold of our house, no impropriety shall ever befall us.”

He paused. “But sometimes I would hold you.”

And so it became possible, and so it was.

Then came the day when Bruriah contradicted the Sages—and Meir himself—over their saying, “Women are light-minded, flighty.”

“Better light of mind than heavy of hardened limb,” she said.

In shocked response to her lewdness Meir said, “By your life, these words will be your undoing.”

That night, to prove his Master’s point, Meir’s most brilliant and devoted student—an apple-cheeked, bright-eyed lad, tall and lusty—went to seduce her. Barur resisted until the youth could countenance this presumed coyness no longer. He ripped off Barur’s clothing, then his undergarments, which came away in a tattered cloud, suspended for a moment in the heated air. Then the youth began to chortle and hoot, finally dissolving into lewd laughter.

“You pervert!” he said at last, gasping for breath. “You and the great Meir, perverts both. Could he no longer stand the subterfuge? Had his need to confess become greater than his need to conceal? And did he wish that I, his favorite, should have the honor of revealing his sin to the congregation?”

“He did not know the truth about me,” whispered Barur.

“He did not know? After twenty-how-many years of marriage? Don’t play me for a fool, Bruriah.” He pronounced the name with scorn. “Or perhaps your name is really Barur. It is quite clear that it could be,” he said, delighting in the pun.

He darted off to the study-house to spread the tale. In disgrace, Meir fled to Babylonia, where he fell into such a profound state of decline that scholars prayed for death’s mercy to be visited upon him.

Barur fled too.

Yet, having looked over many market stalls, at last able to buy men’s clothing and even a Jewish prayer serape, a tallis, from an old merchant in a tiny, dark alcove, he found he could no longer be a man. He could neither dress, walk, nor comport himself as one even though, as he aged, wherever he went, there always seemed someone who, after a while, would begin eyeing him strangely or with suspicion. At which point he knew it was time to move on yet again. To another town. And another.

As once again Yael the Ibex leaps through silvered unravelings, now bringing the apologue to its final reckoning, I, Arielle, bring Yael’s words home. Here is how I heard her end it.

Spoken Fire:

We students sat silent, distraught.

“Indeed an unhappy tale,” I [Yael] said.

“You were forewarned,” Lailie replied. “Now go to your homes, feed your children, put them to bed. You cannot sit here chattering like hens.”

I waited until the rest had left.

“Yes?” In the evenlight Lailie’s voice wavered. “What is it, Yael?”

I looked at that long hair, gleaming dark chestnut in the late afternoon sun, and knew I loved him, whatever his clothes, whether he were man, woman, or anything else God in Their wisdom had seen fit to create.

“Barur?” I asked faintly.

“Clearly,” he said.

My eyes asked questions my voice could not, but he shook his head.

“Go home,” she said and touched my cheek. “There is nothing for you here. You, I, and Meir too, came to berth in the wrong season, on the wrong tide.”

That night, I tried to close my eyes, but my eyelashes were like embers scorching my cheeks. So did I dream it or truly hear the voices of the curly-haired wayfarers entreating her?

“It has come time for us to return. Won’t you come too, swim with us in our warm seas, touch the dolphins? As you taught us the ways of letters, we will teach you the ways of water.”

I thought I heard longing in Bruriah’s refusal and, as they tried to persuade her, their words streamed like rain behind my eyelids, dousing the embers, leaving me unnaturally becalmed.

The following morning, the outlanders were gone and our teacher with them. We Tiberian women found she had left us the scroll, bound with a tendril of Jerusalem Bellflower. I cared not for the gesture’s banality. I unbound its wilting petals from the parchment and pressed them between leaves of papyrus. I would fain be buried with them.

As God’s Lioness and Custodian of Truth, I promised you beauty, promised you truth. But as curator or creator, apostle or author—which am I really—did I deliver? After all, quid est pulchritudo? Quid est veritas?

Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa

by Marian Mathews Clark

  Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa is an edgy, humorous memoir with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids and no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say, “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can, too.” Pieces such as 'What Not to Say at a Funeral' and 'Dusting and Other Insanities' provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her. Marian Mathews Clark grew up among loggers in Mist, Oregon (pop 50), then caught the Union Pacific to Iowa to attend Graceland College. In the ensuing years, she capped perfume bottles on Coty’s assembly line in New York, was stranded on Loveland Pass during a blizzard, ironed costumes for Polynesian dancers at the Calgary Stampede, tried to shear a sheep in Australia, earned an MFA in Fiction from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and with co-writer Patricia Stevens was a finalist at O’jai’s Film Festival for their feature script Timber. Bart Yates, author of The Distance Between Us, said of her memoir, “Clark is a sly writer; she lured me in with…broken garbage disposals and mysteriously disappearing walls; only later did I realize she was…writing about mortality, loss, joy, and love. Great stuff.” 2015 edition available from Amazon, Culicidae Press, and from your local independent bookseller.

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