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Friday February 2, 2007

New book looks at the world of matriarchs

by jessie hawkins
correspondent

With historical fiction (“An Imperfect Lens”) and examinations of motherhood (“Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World” and “Lovingkindness”) in her wake, Anne Roiphe’s latest book, “Water From the Well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah” marries the subjects of religion and women’s studies, bravely scrutinizing incidents, culpabilities and rationales in a light both observant of tradition and sympathetic to proto-feminism.

Proposing possible settings, climates, afflictions and triumphs with recurring “what if” questions, Roiphe introduces us to the four women who are arguably the most important in Jewish tradition. She recounts their life stories, speculating and postulating what went on in the hearts and minds that helped form a nation and culture.

In the first section, Roiphe reacquaints us with pretty protagonist Sarah, conjures our sympathy when her beauty becomes Abraham’s liability and evokes our dismay when he attempts to sacrifice their long-awaited child. The second section observes both Rebekah’s moral fortitude, exemplified by her effort to quench the thirst of Eliezer’s menagerie, and the favoritism she shows her sons. In section three, sisters Rachel and Leah bring an aesthetic and temperamental pluralism to Jacob’s life, continuing the traditions of the women’s culpability and compelling strength.

The nonfiction book adopts both the tone of the Torah and rhetorical imagination. Roiphe makes good use of Biblical repetition and abuses conjunctions freely (“And Jacob came to Bethel and God spoke to him and promised that a nation of kings would come from his loins, and Jacob set up a pillar of stone and poured oil on it,” etc.), but also floats in and out of first person and present tense, making the ancient seem personal and immediate. Her frequent rhetorical questions allow us to use our imaginations — and she reminds us that the biblical world was brutish.

Our four women, Roiphe tells us, lived in a harsh reality, where famine, drought, pestilence and death by common cold were not so much a threat as a backdrop. The air buzzed with flies and tribes buzzed with slander. Rumors of atrocities spread (they may also have actually occurred) with easy consistency. Rapes were avenged with massacres, fathers had first rites with their own virgin daughters. It’s a pleasure/pain ratio with which most of Roiphe’s readers will not be familiar or comfortable, but our heroines’ additional troubles (with conception, with servants, with sons), all remind us that it’s God’s grace that allows us peace, familial joy and survival.

A balanced storyteller, Roiphe’s admiration for our matriarchs is well tempered. She doesn’t shy away from asking whether rabbis and sages vilified Ishmael in order to excuse Sarah’s behavior. She discusses the possibility that the tribulations of the Jewish people might be the direct result of Sarah’s jealous heart and considers that Jacob’s theft of his brother’s birthright may have been retroactively excused by horrible stories about Esau. She asks an eternal Jewish question: “Is guilt inherited? Is punishment spun out through the generations?”

After reading Roiphe’s moving account of a visit to the graves of Rachel, Abraham, and Sarah, one wonders how many of our assets and strengths, flaws and vulnerabilities, are our own creation? How many are simply an echo of the past?

Roiphe’s insights make the past resonate. Sarah’s treatment of Ishmael relates to current events with startling clarity; Rebekah gracefully crosses the line between diplomacy and passive aggression and leads the propagation of a people; Rachel and Leah maintain faith in their one true God despite a truly dysfunctional family. The author points out that, in the era of these strong, fascinating, startlingly corporeal women, “the knowledge that we are all human and in need of one another was the great rock of wisdom at the time.”

Perhaps it still should be. Perhaps we should stand at the reservoir of hope, faith, comfort, patience and fortitude these women have filled for us, admire their closeness to God and reflect.

“Water From the Well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah” by Anne Roiphe (288 pages, HarperCollins, $24.95).

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