The fun of seeing the pieces come together
November 5, 2020
I’m baaack. With a new stage in life as grandma (“Bubbe”) to a three-year-old, and with a new historical novel, seven years in the brewing, called JUSTICE: MACCABEES AND PHARISEES.
As a grandmother, not being responsible for runny noses and toilet training, I’m able to relish the miraculous unfolding of a mind and a personality. The little boy who at eighteen months pointed to a fire truck and said, “uck!” now pulls out a small toy vehicle, drives it to the end of the table, fits a straw into the gas tank, and says, “the front-end loader needs to have his gas tank refilled, but after that the operator needs to keep working on the construction site until lunch time.”
It’s the coming together of so many abilities, each of them miraculous, that makes grandparent-hood for me such a revelation.
The emergence of a historical novel after much research and many rewrites feels to me like a similar miracle of the coming-together of parts.
In the first century BCE, women were almost invisible in the historical record. Even an extraordinary woman, Queen Salome Alexandra (Shalom-Zion), a Jewish queen who changed the course of the history of the Jews, is barely mentioned. The main account of her reign was written by Josephus Flavius, a Roman-Jewish historian who didn't approve of women gaining power. I wanted to hear the history from a woman's point of view so I had to imagine it in my novel QUEEN OF THE JEWS.
When I finished that first novel, I realized there was another story to be told. In my Hebrew school education, ancient history ended with the Maccabee victory over Antiochus IV, the Macedonian Greek ruler of Syria, when Greek idols were tossed out of the Holy Temple. I hadn't realized that the Maccabee victory was the beginning of a transformation: a turbulent and bloody century in which the Jewish people lost faith in the priests and in the efficacy of animal sacrifices as a way to be right with God. The loyalty of everyday Jews shifted to a group (called Sages by their followers, Pharisees by their enemies) who taught and re-interpreted the teachings of the Bible. That is how we became the People of the Book.
The early rabbis were trying to define a system of justice and a holy way of life. Because women’s sphere of action was almost entirely separate from men’s, we learn almost nothing from traditional sources about how women’s lives were affected by the teachings, the wars, and the shattering of Jerusalem. I decided to write the story of the emergence of the rabbis from the point of view, not of Shimon ben Shetakh, leader of the Pharisee movement, but from the point of view of his wife. For until women's voices are part of the story, the Book will not be complete.
I’m baaack. With a new stage in life as grandma (“Bubbe”) to a three-year-old, and with a new historical novel, seven years in the brewing, called JUSTICE: MACCABEES AND PHARISEES.
As a grandmother, not being responsible for runny noses and toilet training, I’m able to relish the miraculous unfolding of a mind and a personality. The little boy who at eighteen months pointed to a fire truck and said, “uck!” now pulls out a small toy vehicle, drives it to the end of the table, fits a straw into the gas tank, and says, “the front-end loader needs to have his gas tank refilled, but after that the operator needs to keep working on the construction site until lunch time.”
It’s the coming together of so many abilities, each of them miraculous, that makes grandparent-hood for me such a revelation.
The emergence of a historical novel after much research and many rewrites feels to me like a similar miracle of the coming-together of parts.
In the first century BCE, women were almost invisible in the historical record. Even an extraordinary woman, Queen Salome Alexandra (Shalom-Zion), a Jewish queen who changed the course of the history of the Jews, is barely mentioned. The main account of her reign was written by Josephus Flavius, a Roman-Jewish historian who didn't approve of women gaining power. I wanted to hear the history from a woman's point of view so I had to imagine it in my novel QUEEN OF THE JEWS.
When I finished that first novel, I realized there was another story to be told. In my Hebrew school education, ancient history ended with the Maccabee victory over Antiochus IV, the Macedonian Greek ruler of Syria, when Greek idols were tossed out of the Holy Temple. I hadn't realized that the Maccabee victory was the beginning of a transformation: a turbulent and bloody century in which the Jewish people lost faith in the priests and in the efficacy of animal sacrifices as a way to be right with God. The loyalty of everyday Jews shifted to a group (called Sages by their followers, Pharisees by their enemies) who taught and re-interpreted the teachings of the Bible. That is how we became the People of the Book.
The early rabbis were trying to define a system of justice and a holy way of life. Because women’s sphere of action was almost entirely separate from men’s, we learn almost nothing from traditional sources about how women’s lives were affected by the teachings, the wars, and the shattering of Jerusalem. I decided to write the story of the emergence of the rabbis from the point of view, not of Shimon ben Shetakh, leader of the Pharisee movement, but from the point of view of his wife. For until women's voices are part of the story, the Book will not be complete.
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