Deborah secretly buys and reads the Talmud

Devorah’s secret purchase and reading of the Talmud marks a turning point in her intellectual life: she crosses a boundary imposed on girls and encounters religious discussion that unsettles the simplified lessons she has received. The act begins as a concealed search for knowledge, but its importance lies in what follows. Reading brings her into contact with competing interpretations, and she later recognizes this period as the moment she began to question authority rather than accept it automatically.

Prohibition and curiosity

In Devorah’s household, English is treated as spiritually dangerous, and reading an English book is regarded as more serious still. Zeidy condemns her for speaking English with her cousins and teaches that the language can damage the soul. His books of religious learning are kept locked away from her: he says they are for men, while girls belong in the kitchen. The prohibition does not extinguish her interest. Instead, the limited religious instruction offered at school leaves her wanting to know more about the texts and arguments withheld from her.

Her questions focus on stories that her teachers present as morally settled. She wonders about Rachel, who, according to the account she has been taught, lived in poverty while her husband, Rabbi Akiva, studied Torah for twelve years. Devorah cannot accept the simple description of Rachel as a saint as a complete explanation of her choices. She wants to understand why a wealthy young woman would marry a poor and unlearned man, and why she would endure such deprivation. When no one around her supplies a convincing answer, she decides that she must look for one herself. The concealed book promises access to discussion beyond the carefully limited lessons available at school.

Buying and hiding the book

Devorah buys a volume of the Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud at a small Judaica shop in Borough Park. She has made reconnaissance visits and believes that only one bookseller works there. When she makes the purchase, she claims that the book is for a cousin. The elderly bookseller accepts the sixty dollars she has saved, mostly in single bills earned from babysitting, wraps the large book in brown paper, and lets her leave. Devorah travels home to Williamsburg with the parcel, worried that people might notice it or suspect what she has done.

At home, she pushes the book beneath her mattress, smooths the bedding, and covers the bed so the volume cannot be seen. The concealment does not bring immediate relief. Guilt holds her in place, and throughout Shabbos she leaves the book untouched, aware that both Zeidy and Bubby would be horrified if they knew. Her decision to wait shows that the transgression is not an uncomplicated triumph: she has obtained the means to read, but still lives within the authority and surveillance she is trying to test.

Reading and encountering another account

The opportunity comes on Sunday, when Zeidy and Bubby leave for a cousin’s bar mitzvah and Devorah has several hours alone. After watching them depart, she retrieves the book and studies its format: the original Talmudic text appears alongside an English translation, with rabbinic discussion filling the lower portion of each page. Those discussions interest her especially because they preserve arguments among rabbis rather than offering only a single, simplified conclusion.

On page sixty-five, she finds a discussion of King David and Bathsheba. As Devorah understands the fragments, Bathsheba was already married when David desired her; David sent her husband, Uriah, to the front lines, where he was killed, and then took Bathsheba as his wife. The account she reads further presents David as recoiling from the reminder of his wrongdoing and leaving Bathsheba neglected. Devorah sets this difficult material against the teaching she has received at school, where David is presented as saintly and beyond reproach. The contrast is not merely between two stories: it reveals that the religious tradition she had been taught to treat as settled contains discussion that complicates its exemplary figures.

The reading continues to expand her vocabulary and her understanding of the text’s claims. She learns about concubines and considers what the rabbis say about David’s relationships with women. The discussion of Bathsheba’s prior marriage also complicates the image of David as a flawless holy ruler. Devorah connects these accounts to the earlier lessons that had treated him as an unquestionable model, and begins to ask how severe her own secret reading can be when measured against the conduct attributed to a revered king. Her response is exploratory rather than a finished judgment: the new material gives her grounds to compare and question, not a ready-made alternative doctrine.

Consequences and significance

Devorah later identifies this encounter with the Talmud as a specific moment when she stopped believing in authority simply because it was authority and began forming her own conclusions about the world around her. At the time, however, she does not understand the change as a loss of innocence. The gap between her thoughts and the teachings she continues to absorb grows into an internal conflict. She can still maintain an outwardly composed appearance, but curiosity increasingly strains that performance, and others sometimes try to draw her back before she goes further.

The purchase therefore has consequences beyond the hours spent reading in private. It joins an act of secrecy to an act of interpretation: Devorah does not merely acquire a forbidden book, but uses it to compare what she has been told with what she can discover for herself. The volume’s hidden place beneath the mattress, the long wait until the house is empty, and the dense pages of translation and debate mark the steps of that change. The episode establishes reading as both a breach of gendered religious limits and an early practice of independent judgment, while leaving visible the fear, guilt, and divided loyalties that accompany it.