After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt. I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life."
Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him:
"Papa, I have the soul of a man."
"So why then were you born a woman?"
"Can heaven make mistakes?"
"No."
"But I know I'm a man."
"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah."
"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"
"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin."
"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man."
"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah."
On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot.
Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked.
It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God.
I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty.
Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand.
It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance.
Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal.
"A pregnant man..."
"What?"
"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one."
"I'm pregnant?"
"Yes, and you're not dying."
"I'm pregnant?"
"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms."
"So I'm a man?"
"No less than I..."
"Are you a man?"
"Of a type..."
"What type?"
"The type that bleeds, same as you."
"You bleed?"
"I did."
"Has your monthly cycle ended?"
"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed."
"What was severed?"
The old healer pointed to his loins.
"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"
"The babe is eight days old."
"It's still barbaric."
"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"
"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service."
"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?"
"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court."
"Do you desire to defile women?"
"Less than most men, but yes."
The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect.
And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead into an underground passage that brought me by candlelight directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service.
"And who is this Reb Moshe?"
"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...."
"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh."
I had to think quickly what my name would be.
Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name."
"What?"
"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work."
"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"
"Right now?... I guess..."
"So you're a khakham."
"Of a type..."
"And you are... one of us?... nu?"
Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch.
"And you can lain Torah?"
"Hen vaHen."
"So you're a Rabbi?"
"Of a type."
"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit."
B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood.
I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame."
I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they.
"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?"
"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)
"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"
"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..."
"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai."
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Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Hippocrates and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath.
Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory.
"How's he coming along?"
"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides."
"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."
"Why not Eilat?"
"Too many Jews."
"Oy. There are more in Egypt."
"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?"
"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."
"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?"
"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."
"Shayn fargessen."
And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol.
That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here).
But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor.
"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"
"I am, your majesty."
"Strip."
"What?"
"Strip."
"Why?"
"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip."
"I fear to do so."
"I know what you are, now do as I say."
And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth.
"Why did you do it?"
"Because I believe I am a man."
"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women."
"But I am a man."
"And you were a woman before you did this?"
"No, I was a man in a woman's body."
"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies."
"I don't understand."
"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?"
"But Your Majesty, I know I have them."
"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?"
"Probably most of them."
"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?"
"Probably a few."
"So how then are they men?"
"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?"
"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."
"Repression, Majesty?"
"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?"
"We don't?"
"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg."
"Your Majesty I assure y..."
"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"
"We make love to the soul, not the body."
"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing."
"Has lust been a blessing for your people?"
"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight."
"I did not like them."
"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now."
"I'm not sure I follow."
"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts."
"I could... I don't understand."
"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts."
"I... I can?"
"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me."
"Majesty..."
"Do you desire to copulate with women?"
"I honestly have never considered the question."
"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?"
"I... well... Sometimes."
"Do you desire women and men?"
"Yes, yes I suppose I do."
"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys."
"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty."
"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews."
"Your majesty is not powerful?"
"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor."
"Thank you, Majesty."
"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."
"Majesty..."
"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree."
"You flatter me Majesty."
"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do."
"If Your Majesty orders i....."
"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"
"Certainly."
"You've studied Aristotle yes?"
"Yes."
"Hippocrates?"
"Yes."
"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"
"Yes, yes, and yes."
"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless."
"Majesty?"
"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."
"I'm afraid I don't...
"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward."
"Isn't it?"
"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"
"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..."
"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the greatest of all virtues is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there."
"Your majesty this is an awesome..."
"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."
"Majesty."
"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?
"Yes, Majesty."
"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."
"Yes, Majesty."
"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"
"Yes, Majesty."
"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty."
"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can."
"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening."
"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am."
"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"
"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."
"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge."
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And so we began work, but I knew Pharaoh's priority. On the one hand, there were the projects to benefit all people: those which Rav Yosef was already working on for years, and for the moment, those would still be 'delegated' to him until all the other projects were completed. Then there were the projects unique to women.
One of the first things Rav Moses told me was 'a good civil servant always knows a boss's true intention by what they don't say.' What Pharaoh didn't say was that the real priority was the women's issues - if the general issues were solved first, men would use the greater resources to sit atop them and make women beg for a share as ever through history as recorded on the tablets. But the more progress women made, the more they could share in general progress, and the more evenly men must share their spoils. It's not like men wouldn't still get the majority of it.
So I tried first to locate the source of women's headaches. One of Pharaoh's great innovations was a specific prison where only women were kept: the prisoners were women, the guards were women, even the warden was a woman. There were one thousand prisoners, and of the 1000, a full 200 complained of headaches.
I could immediately dismiss at least one solution. The good father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed headaches were induced by digestive problems and could be cured by the instigation of vomit. However, at least fifteen of the prisoners chronically induced vomiting in themselves. Of those fifteen, five suffered from chronic headaches. None of the five reported any change in their head pain by their induction of vomit.
As a control for our experiment, we tried the four traditional methods on four separate patients: cupping, leeching, bloodletting, and burning the head. None of them seemed to work, but truth be told, we already knew that.
Our first true experiment was to try the ancient Egyptian method of tying a clay mini-crocodile to the head, stuffing the crocodile's mouth with grain and a piece of linen containing the names of the god we think is responsible for headaches, though nobody seemed to agree which god it was. We took the ten women with the severest headaches as test subjects, we began the experiment by writing the name of a different deity among the ten major gods in each separate crocodile. Secretly, I also included an eleventh subject in whom I placed the name 'Yahweh.' Inconclusive results. We then used all 200 test subjects to write the names of all ten major gods in every possible combination and tied bigger mini-crocodiles to the test subjects whose mouth could hold a bigger piece of linen with more writing. There are 1400 minor Egyptian gods, realizing that there was no way to include each minor god in every possible combination on our test subjects, we limited it to the thirty minor gods we thought would be most relevant to headaches, and tried them all in combination. After three months, the results were inconclusive.
Our second experiment was with potions. We tried boiling 22 separate herbs alone, some of which seemed promising: giving a few hours of relief, until the potion was administered to a second subject for whom the solution was nowhere near so effective. We then attempted combinations of herbs. Some potions showed promise, but results were still inconclusive by the time they were administered to the third or fourth subject.
I did not want to do the last two experiments because they seemed so drastic. One was to bathe the subject in hot water filled with electrostatic eels. Even one eel struck me as potentially lethal, but clearly it would take more than one to result in a level of electrostatic that could cure a severe headache. This seemed incredibly inhumane.
So instead we made incisions into the skull and prodded the brain with tools. We enlisted sixteen particularly brave prisoners and made an incision in a different part of the brain for each subject. The results were fascinating, they were also at times quite mystifying. Subjects whose previous behavior was relatively lucid began to speak words that were completely unrelated to what they tried to express. Other subjects, previously quite docile, began to exhibit violent behaviors. Still others exhibited slurred speech. Still others lost memories which were previously quite vivid. We could only conclude that, unprotected by skulls, various spirits had invaded their brains and stolen their neurofunctions.
It had been nine months since we began these experiments, and it was always with great trepidation that I reported these findings to the Pharaoh at our weekly audience. At every meeting, she was extremely solicitous, understanding, and cordial, but after nine months I found her patience worn.
"Rav Yanai, you've now exhausted all the potential solutions you listed to me at our second meeting. I have given you the full term of a pregnancy to find the source of women's headaches and you have not produced results. Is my confidence in you misplaced?
"No Majesty, but I do need time to pursue other remedies."
"While you're thinking of those remedies, it's time you conducted experiments on the question of when a fetus comes to life. Women who were not pregnant at our first meeting have now died in childbirth."
"Yes Majesty, I understand."
"I'm not sure you do..."
"Well then I'd be happy for Majesty to explain it to me."
"I don't like your tone."
"Majesty, all I want to do is serve you."
"I'm sure, and I'm sure your fear of me affects your work, so I am taking you into the palace."
And the Pharaoh did take me underground, and lo, it was the very same place where our weekly Jewish minyan was held, yet it was transformed to a brothel. Never had it occured to me to use the torch to look at the walls, yet when Cleopatra held torch to wall I saw iconography of Zeus transformed to a bull to rape Europa and into eagle to kidnap Ganymede, Apollo chasing Daphne then making love to her trunk, Circe pining after Glaucon as he attempted to kiss a rock, while Pyramis and Thisby did more than kiss through the glory of a wall.
And against the wall opened a door, where came out a man and woman unconcealed.
"Have you been with men or women?"
"Neither of course."
"You will know one, then the other, and then...."
And right on the lectern where Rav Yosef and I read every week from the Sefer Torah, I spent three whole days on my back amid orgiastic factoral groupings from every conceivable sexual taxonomy in every geometric permutation. To be sure, Cleopatra was among the many lovers I encountered, so, I think, was Marc Anthony, and so even were a few of my prisoners. Lights were always lit. I did not know most names of my collaborators, yet as exhilarating as it was, it was still more exhausting. The climaxes themselves ceased to be joyful, they felt merely like compulsive mechanics - each of their own type, more to be understood than experienced. I was neither man nor woman, merely a machine of gears and wheels in a laboratory far more elaborate than any provided for me. In experiencing her many satisfactions, I felt as though Cleopatra raised me to the height of her service so that I could bring an eye as clinical to science as she brought to sex.
And so we began upon abortion.
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Well, first we had to get the women pregnant. Not a single one among the prisoners didn't want to be part of the experiment; even women who vastly preferred women, even the few women who thought themselves men. It was easy enough for the prisoners who have sexual contact with each other, it happened all the time and vaginal disease could be rampant; but the contact of men was the closest any prisoner would get to the freedom they'd once known, even if, like most every sexual congressum, a moment's freedom could result in eternal slavery. Since every palace guard who could defend himself against a prisoner was a eunich, and every male prisoner could not be trusted in the private company, we brought in Roman soldiers on the proviso that their coitus must be watched by myself, a prison guard, and a eunuch palace guard to ensure that the woman was in no way mishandled.
We started with a group of thirty to whom we'd permit three sessions of coitus with a male prisoner at days corresponding with their cycle's greatest fertility. We waited a month after conception and administered silphium in doses strong enough that there would be no chance that the baby would remain alive. We explained to them that many of these potions were so strong that they could damage the health of the mother as well as the baby, they didn't care. One of the patients died immediately, one died after a few days of searing pain, two lived on with irreparable bodily damage. Twenty-three of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a grain of rice. Of those who did not expunge, only two remained pregnant. All fetuses too small to read whether the test subject had any signs of life.
We then asked for a second group of thirty, there were no fewer volunteers. We waited two months and administered silphium at twice the dose. Two of the patients died immediately, two died after a few days of searing pain, still two more died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. Five lived on with irreparable damage. Twenty-two of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a finger's breath - one-third of it was head. There was no sign of life.
We asked for a third group of thirty, there were slightly fewer volunteers. We waited three months after conception and administered silphium at three times the initial dose. Five of the patients died immediately, five died after a few days of searing pain, eight died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. All other seven lived on with irreparable damage. All thirty women expunged fetuses, all the size two fingers' breath. All fetuses exhibited signs of normal development with fully developed extremities: arms, hands, legs, feet, and nails. Yet none were in a living state.
It was at this moment when I had to report more than just another written report to Cleopatra and had to see her immediately, for I knew what had to be done to observe a live fetus, and dreaded it as a horror greater than any Pharaoh could visit upon me; a horror greater than any visited upon me on my journey to Egypt, horror so far greater than that performed on myself.
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"What do you mean horror?"
"Your Majesty, it is an abomination to cut women open merely to see the living fetus inside."
"Women die in childbirth all the time and must be cut into alive to save the fetus. By killing thirty women you can save an eternity of them."
"These women needn't die!"
"Then you will send entire eras of women to their deaths."
"Why is it on me to save people the world disposes of so casually?"
"Because you can."
"I have no idea if I can save so many women."
"Alright, then because I can save them. These are the subjects I value, and if you do not impregnante thirty women again and cut them open, I will liquidate the subjects you value. I won't just execute you, I will liquidate the entire servant class of eunuchs will die in lieu of these women."
"I still refuse."
"Then I will kill every Jew in Egypt and march on Judea to do the same there."
"Your Majesty, I don't believ Pharaoh Cleopatra, world renowned for her humanity, could ever do something so unspeakable."
"Every humane leader must do terrible things to serve humanity."
"How does killing a race of people serve humanity?"
"I have held out to you the possibility a race of people might die, but surely you know, the possibility of every woman's death is held out every day."
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