{"id":4023,"date":"2011-09-17T01:20:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-17T08:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/216.92.17.21\/?p=4023"},"modified":"2011-09-28T13:49:45","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T20:49:45","slug":"intro-%e2%80%94-vavah-oops-%e2%80%94-1-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/?p=4023","title":{"rendered":"almighty one, rebbe zero \u2014 1.1.3 \u2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

The third daughter of the rebbe tended to be called (affectionately) Vavah.\u00a0 It was one of those perhaps unfortunate infant names conferred upon her at long-last, after her sainted mother claimed to have witnessed her utter those long-awaited first sounds, not even words, but \u00a0 \u2014 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u2014va-va-va-va<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That the chatty babe invoked the letter \u00a0\u05d5\u00a0 vav so insistently pleased her tzaddik father no end.\u00a0 He ran into his library and offered up a prayer of thanks the moment he had heard the news.\u00a0 Another miracle.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it was overcompensation. I mean, the contrast with Binah\u2019s deadly silence may well have accounted for the rebbe\u2019s elation, but that, surely, was not his own understanding of the matter.\u00a0 For him, it was quite simply that a child\u2014his child\u2014should take upon herself the divine language, uttering repetitively such a sacred upright letter as the letter vav.\u00a0 This was further evidence of the attention to detail with which the Almighty favored him.<\/p>\n

To reciprocate, the rebbe proclaimed at the child’s naming ceremony, that the girl\u2019s appellation was to be\u00a0 (of all things) Yesodite. \u00a0That she would be the \u00a0vav upon his Tree of Life. Gevalt<\/em>. But the nickname Vavah stuck instead as a result perhaps of the babe\u2019s continued emphatic repetitions of holy letter, third letter in the unspeakable name of the Almighty himself.\u00a0 The name \u2018Yesodite\u2019 appeared to be both contrived and redundant, while \u2018Vavah\u2019 was clearly the genuine article.<\/p>\n

Almighty one.\u00a0 Rebbe zero.<\/p>\n

After the birth of the twins, the rebbe was on a roll.\u00a0 His conversation with the Almighty appeared to have taken on (at long last) the theme of \u2018offspring\u2019\u2014a topic sanctified and codified in the annals of both Torah and tribal antiquity.\u00a0 Not much could have stopped the rebbe by then. \u00a0His own life was beginning to feel quite suddenly like a parable hovering over the horizon. And so, he had foretold, even while his third child was still in utero, that this babe would grow to be built like a fortress, solid, tall, and strong.\u00a0 The only problem being that the little vav-ling was supposed to have been the boy-child of his imagination that he was still so patiently waiting.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the rebbe blessed this girl, invoking one of the teachings that the children were later to hear at least a million times:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cJust as the\u00a0 \u05d5 \u00a0vav supports the\u00a0 \u05d9\u00a0 yud, his king, who wears the crown, and holds his head erect and upholds his father\u2019s laws, so too \u2026\u201d bla bla bla<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 and the rest flew enthusiastically out the rebbe’s mouth before he had quite noticed,<\/p>\n

\u201cso too will you, my son, be righteous, honor your mother and your father, support the head of this humble household, and obey your father\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cZeh beni bekhori<\/em> \u2026\u201d he continued unconsciously, before he stopped, frozen. Oops<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cWhat have I done?\u201d he implored the heavens, in shock.<\/p>\n

For he had begun invoking upon his third-born daughter the Pidyon ha-Ben, the Redemption of the First-Born Son.\u00a0 But catching his error maybe just on time, he had not completed the act of redemption.<\/p>\n

At least, there had been no bris, and thus no binding covenant.\u00a0 He gave a little chuckle and mopped his sopping brow.<\/p>\n

There was (at least) no one to see, for he had taken the child into his library alone for the private ritual and brachah.\u00a0 He had fallen too deeply inside his vision of his own progeny rather than inside the observable objective fact of what he had in fact begot.\u00a0 There was no one to see all this except the One on high, who grasped the situation long before the rebbe had.<\/p>\n

And so he hastily brought the babe out from its basket floating in a cozy sea of manuscripts and scrolls and crumbling volumes that was his library and quickly returned her to her mother\u2019s arms.\u00a0 He could not look on her for fear of what he might have done.\u00a0 He ran back into the solitude of his study, slammed the solid oak door shut, and davened a spur of the moment\u00a0improv Slichas, despite it being now early in the month of Iyyar\u2014half the calendric cycle away from those particular prayers of forgiveness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cI am old,\u201d he muttered to himself.\u00a0 \u201cI am way too old for this,\u201d he said, and rounded out another set of Slichas just in case.\u00a0 The Almighty merely snickered.<\/p>\n

Yes, the poor sainted man had said it, invoked it\u2014the Pidyon ha-Ben\u2014in the masculine, of course, for what other way was there to do it?\u00a0 Quite automatically he had allowed another nine months of expectation to overtake the empirical evidence at hand.\u00a0 His anticipated, long awaited son!\u00a0 Not just any son\u2014but the son of his dreams, his hopes, and his desires\u2014had once again turned out to be a girl. Chas v’chalilah<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The rebbe was not without premonition now, that the cosmic order of things might have taken an unprecedented turn.<\/p>\n

He had an inkling too, that he may well have done this third daughter some great spiritual damage.\u00a0 He worried that his inadvertent and highly inappropriate blessing might possibly have been worse than hubris, it might incur for her quite unintended consequences.\u00a0 Or perhaps, the opposite:\u00a0 mayhap his aborted prayer over the firstborn son had not been intoned quite loud enough or with enough conviction and intention to do either good or harm.\u00a0 But it was folly to think in this direction: his exuberant sincerity was beyond question.<\/p>\n

Or, he mused further, perhaps his good intentions for this infant daughter would rub off on her, and she would be a scholar at his side, despite her gender.\u00a0 But somewhere deep inside himself he rejected her as thus.<\/p>\n

At any rate, whatever would come of it, Vavah had received the old man\u2019s blemished benediction for the first-born son all those years ago, as well as two upright virile\u00a0 \u05d5\u05d5 vavs to form her name.\u00a0 She, even more than her elder twin sisters, had been incubated, born, and raised with an early dose of the attempted force of her father\u2019s use of will.<\/p>\n

What would that portend?<\/p>\n

The fiasco of Vavah, although not widely known outside the family (except for whispering as the child began to grow), nevertheless had at least one definitive and unintended consequence.\u00a0 This manifested itself not terribly long after these events.\u00a0 When the time came that the rebbe\u2019s son, his only one, did finally arrive on this planet earth ruddy and vibrant and fully formed the very next year, the rebbe sensed that it was now too late to redeem the boy properly. \u00a0The blessing, or at least part of it, had already been given.<\/p>\n

After applying his profound intellectual acuity to the problem, the rebbe determined that Vavah unequivocally had received the full intent<\/em> (at least) of his benediction, despite his not having completed the words themselves.\u00a0 There was, he surmised, after analyzing methodically the model provided by the holy book, no more blessing that he could give.\u00a0 The boy child he had so long awaited could not therefore be redeemed.<\/p>\n

The boy was was not merely doomed; he could only bring on disappointment.<\/p>\n

And when the time came, the rebbe\u2019s wife wondered at her husband\u2019s indifference and lack of joy at the birth of a son at last.\u00a0 But we will come to that anon.<\/p>\n

Vavah, in the meantime, grew like a weed in the fields.\u00a0 She became more incomprehensible to her father each year, and yet he was sure that she was exactly what he deserved. \u00a0The rebbe continued to fret over his abortive brachah, and yearly added it to his list of sins requiring supplementary atonement.<\/p>\n

Okay, he had made a terrible mistake in a thoughtless moment of elderly dementia.\u00a0 But had it been\u2014and he was beginning to suspect that it had indeed been\u2014a case of a mistaken \u00a0\u2014abra-c\u2019dabra<\/em>\u2014\u00a0 I create as I speak<\/em>.\u00a0 Had he unwittingly performed a magical act upon this daughter, born of his impatience for the coming of a son?<\/p>\n

The rebbe, after extensive thought and contemplation, which was what he was best at, concluded that he could well be guilty of having brought \u2014on impulse and without thinking of consequence\u2014an abomination into the world.<\/p>\n

Hubris indeed!\u00a0 He beat his chest hard as he davened back and forth, and prayed incessantly that, despite his honest appraisal of the matter, that this would not be the case.\u00a0 The Almighty snorted.\u00a0 Their conversation together was devolving.\u00a0 No longer filled with playful nuance or joy.<\/p>\n

The rebbe could now only see this third daughter as somehow not quite right and also, surely, as not quite entirely his fault or her own.\u00a0 His actions, surely, had been directed from above.\u00a0 How could they not?\u00a0 He was a righteous man!\u00a0 Still, he beat his breast \u00a0as best he could, just in case, and watched this child grow into a stubborn, sullen, big-boned girl-child who really and truly should have been the boy he had envisioned.\u00a0 For he did see in her the qualities he valued in a son\u2014and qualities his own son did not possess.\u00a0 Vavah had fortitude and strength, quick intelligence and an unfortunate independence of mind for a girl.\u00a0 She lacked in the physical grace and easy domesticity of her elder sisters, and was not at all what he had had in mind as \u201cthe \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0vav\u00a0 who should uphold the \u00a0\u05d9 \u00a0yud, his father.\u201d\u00a0 He wondered that he should have conjured her up at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cTo what purpose, Lord?\u201d he pondered.\u00a0 But there was no reply. The Almighty had walked out of the conversation.<\/p>\n

The rebbe had known the child’s stature and her ken before her birth, but clearly had mistook her gender.\u00a0 An odd sort of miracle of prescience, this, but a miracle no less.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am in your hands,\u201d the rebbe declared silently, with an unfocused well-practiced gaze up to the heavens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese things have a life of their own.\u00a0 I will not argue this one\u2014only inquire (if I may), with acceptance, not with any expectation at all.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 But there was bitterness in his soul that could not be hidden or disguised.<\/p>\n

And answer came there none. Not then, at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The third daughter of the rebbe tended to be called (affectionately) Vavah.\u00a0 It was one of those perhaps unfortunate infant names conferred upon her at long-last, after her sainted mother claimed to have witnessed her utter those long-awaited first sounds, not even words, but \u00a0 \u2014 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u05d5 \u00a0\u2014va-va-va-va. That the chatty babe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[250,216,812],"tags":[851,226,254,806],"class_list":["post-4023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","category-altteach","tag-aleph-bet-mysticism","tag-dads","tag-ritual","tag-the-rebbes-queer-daughters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4023"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4109,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions\/4109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}