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.
Our people do not look upon women as women. They are wives, mothers, eventually our daughters, slightly unfortunate children of God, but as women? No, we go discreetly with our god and that which God joins to us, we abide with discretion. As Egypt does we indulge our base lusts, but Egypt copulates wantonly amid a day's acrid heat. Egyptians must think us next to celibate; because for us it is done in the bed chamber, on Sabbath night, by cover of darkness. Our bodies are but vessels for the wondrous, and Jews make love not to the body but the soul.
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."
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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 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.
"How did you know, Majesty?"
"A woman knows."
"Yes, Majesty."
"And you call yourself a eunuch?"
"Of a type, Your Majesty."
"No doubt if your fellow Rabbis knew they would create a ruling allowing an exception for you."
"Are there exceptions for me?"
"I don't know yet."
"Did the Rabbis know?"
"Rav Moshe did."
"Well he must be at the Sinai by now, it's not worth recalling him just to punish him."
"Am I to be punished Your Majesty?"
"It depends on what you think is punishment. You see that lyre over there?"
"Yes."
"Play it."
"I'm not very good."
"All the better, I don't like it when my servants show off."
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