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 me into an underground passage that brought us 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."
----------------------------------------
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 Galen 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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