Torah

The Torah appears in the memoir not as a distant scripture but as an authority repeatedly tested against the life around it. Deborah turns to it for answers about abuse, justice, and religious obligation; what she encounters instead is a painful mismatch between the certainty with which law governs ordinary conduct and the uncertainty, silence, or deference that surrounds serious harm. Its narrative significance lies in that mismatch: the Torah is both the language through which the community understands right and wrong and a standard Deborah uses to question what the community chooses to take seriously.

Sacred Authority and Unanswered Questions

Deborah’s questions begin with local discussion of an older man suspected of molesting children. As people debate whether he could have committed the alleged acts, and a neighbor offers a history of the man’s own abuse as a possible explanation, Deborah turns from gossip toward religious law. She wonders whether the Torah or rabbinical procedure addresses child abuse. The question is not merely whether a rule exists; she is trying to understand how a religious system that seems to provide punishments for many offenses responds to harm against children.

Her conclusion is that the Torah does not appear to address what to do with a man who seeks sex with children, while it does address sex between men and sex with animals. The contrast unsettles her. In her account, the conspicuous absence of a response to child abuse makes the law’s distribution of attention feel morally disproportionate: conduct treated as forbidden is clearly named, while the abuse she is trying to understand seems to lack an equivalent account or procedure. The memoir presents this as Deborah’s troubled reading of the Torah, not as a comprehensive survey of Jewish law.

Interpretation at the Shabbos Table

When Deborah voices her indignation at dinner, Eli offers a historical explanation. He says that people married very young in earlier times, including women at age nine, and argues that there was no clear distinction between children and adults as there is today. In his view, the absence of a social taboo in the past helps explain why laws against sex with children would not have been framed as they are now. He dismisses modern sensitivity about the boundary between childhood and adulthood as a matter of semantics, and the other men agree.

The scene makes interpretation itself part of the conflict. Eli uses an account of the past to explain why the law might not contain the prohibition Deborah expects; his explanation does not answer her concern about what should happen to children now. As the men discuss the issue, Deborah watches them eat the chicken soup she prepared, with chickpeas and sliced radish added to their plates. She is present as the person who made the meal, yet feels invisible in the conversation. The Torah’s authority is being debated around her, while the household’s gendered expectations limit her place in that debate.

Deborah also fears being judged for the intensity of her response. Eli regularly reproaches her for becoming angry at the Shabbos table and compares her unfavorably with other women. Against that pressure to calm down, she recalls the Talmud’s challenge, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?” The quotation is from the Talmud, not the Torah, but it sharpens the distinction between inherited religious authority and the personal responsibility Deborah draws from religious teaching. If she is expected to follow the rabbis, she reasons, she should also take seriously an injunction to act rather than remain quiet.

Law, Evidence, and Communal Silence

The Torah returns in a later conversation about a boy’s reported death. The account is uncertain: a person relays what neighbors supposedly heard, and a dispatcher is said to have advised someone to go home and keep quiet. The boy is reportedly buried quickly, without a death certificate. Deborah asks whether a possible murderer will be left free to protect the community’s reputation, and contrasts the attention given to minor infractions with the silence surrounding a possible violation of the Ten Commandments.

The response invokes the Torah’s requirement of two witnesses for a man to be tried for murder. That legal standard is presented within the conversation as a reason the allegation may not lead to a trial; it is not confirmation that a murder occurred. The speaker also warns that repeating the story could get the person who shared it into trouble. Deborah answers that she now understands what the community is capable of, but she restrains herself at the Shabbos table because Eli would not forgive her for raising the subject. The scene places a formal rule of evidence beside the practical pressure to keep silent. For Deborah, the problem is not only what the Torah requires, but how appeals to law and reputation can leave grave suspicions unresolved.

Religious Rules and Bodily Consequences

The Torah also figures in Deborah’s account of stopping her visits to the mikvah. She describes dreading the questions women asked about her menstrual cycle, miscarriages, and plans for another pregnancy, as well as their scrutiny of her makeup and nail polish. On mikvah nights she leaves for several hours with a magazine, sometimes parking near a Starbucks on Route 59 and watching modern Orthodox girls study. The ritual’s surrounding scrutiny has become something she avoids rather than an experience she can approach without anxiety.

Deborah says that, under the rule as she understands it, Eli cannot have intercourse with her if she does not immerse, yet he does not hesitate. She cannot tell whether his desire outweighs his religious fear or whether he does not suspect her deception. She believes the Torah condemns women who act as she does and says a child conceived under these circumstances would be impure throughout life. She then states that she is using birth control and does not intend to stop. Pregnancy has already intensified her anxiety about the dangers facing a child; here, religious judgment and reproductive decisions meet in the same private conflict.

Across these episodes, the Torah’s presence is inseparable from questions of interpretation and power. It is invoked to explain the limits of prosecution, to describe restrictions surrounding ritual purity, and to establish obligations that Deborah takes seriously even when she challenges how others apply them. The memoir’s account does not resolve the legal questions she raises. Instead, it shows how her growing insistence on asking them turns religious authority into a measure against which communal silence and unequal treatment can be seen.