Malkah, too, however, was not the queerest of them all.<\/p>\n
There was a fifth daughter that the rebbe had, although that should not be, especially after the fuss of Vavah. Especially after the birth of perfect Malkah.<\/p>\n
And yet there was one more.<\/p>\n
And she, needs be, was the mysterious light of the rebbe’s eye, and so he called her Orah. \u00a0A nice little pun that made him chuckle, for their ancestors had come originally from Ur, the City of Light\u2014albeit moonlight, for Ur was the ancient dominion of the Moon God himself.<\/p>\n
The rebbe had not thought that a father could be more blessed than to have a Malkah of his own, but Orah delighted and confused him beyond his comprehension.\u00a0 Unlike any of her sisters, she had startling, unmistakably blue-green eyes with almost white lashes, and the palest of skin that made both the rebbe and his wife search hard and long their ancestry to explain it, almost translucent it was, with barely visible delicate blue rivers meandering beneath her gleaming skin.\u00a0 Any educated person would have seen clearly that Orah was more a genetic anomaly than a misplaced accidental daughter of Yafet.<\/p>\n
Orah was no sneaky oops, thus no aspersion upon her mother’s soul.<\/p>\n
So unlike her sister Malkah was this fragile child, that she could not abide the sun at all.\u00a0 She did not bronze, she blistered painfully, the sun abused her so. \u00a0It was not her friend. In nature, it is not every oyster (if I may be so bold) that produces the pearl we treasure beyond reason.\u00a0 And Orah was the tzaddik\u2019s hidden treasure.\u00a0 Her hair, too, was not dark like that of all her sisters, but was almost white, long and fair and straight, like summer wheat just before the sickle cuts it down for harvest.<\/p>\n
Orah, too (unlike the other girls) was tall, fine-boned and delicate. A tree unlike Vavah’s mature and solid hulk. Orah was a slender sapling blowing in the wind. She had exceedingly narrow branches (with downright prehensile digits at the end). She had unformed hips and breasts that had not yet bud\u2014and that seemed indeed, at this rate, might never bud at all.<\/p>\n
But for now, okay, she was only fourteen.<\/p>\n
She could sing with the voice, the voice of the Divine emerging not through sound but through its afterglow, more like the memory of voice\u2014its echo reverberating in our body, in our mind.\u00a0 Her voice could be sonorous, light, loud and clear, yes.\u00a0 But more often it was muted, subtle, softened, with hidden strength\u2014not even a whisper.\u00a0 A warbling in the back of your mind.\u00a0 You turn your head, but no being is there. You walk through the forest and hear the distant sound, but never can you find her or get closer. It was a voice like that.<\/p>\n
And Orah could have, when her tzaddik father called for it in prayer, a five-octave range beyond the ken of men.\u00a0 And she could weave with it intricate patterns of ancient tribal trills and murmurs rooted in the trope of her people, for she was inventive, and also a good listener at her father\u2019s library door.\u00a0 And at those times when her voice would fall, deep and tremulous into minor keys of heart-wrenching desperate melody, she could set the entire congregation of manuscripts atremble with five thousand years of accumulated desire.\u00a0 Oh, she could strut her stuff alright.<\/p>\n
Orah loved her papa with all her heart, with all her soul, and with all her might, and wanted to please him with the sanctity of her being.\u00a0 And for Orah, albino daughter of moonlight, her voice was the only visible darkness within her.\u00a0 She was her father\u2019s crowning joy, and given privilege beyond those of her elder sisters.<\/p>\n
And in this way the rebbe, in his indulgence of the light, never once thought to fear for her, never dreamed to feel a shred of concern for her interminable pre-pubescent stalk of a self, for who could harm luminosity itself? And he bedded her a gift, and he gifted her a bed, alone and apart from all her sisters, that may well have done her harm. Or may well have been her destiny.<\/p>\n
But by now, you must be wondering about the mother of these angels.\u00a0 And the rebbe himself, you might wonder, some, at least a little, about him as well.<\/p>\n
For, as it would happen, the rebbe\u2019s name was Avram and his wife, indeed, was Sarah.\u00a0 And like their forebears, they had waited long years to conceive with issue, and once they had begun, it was not for them to choose to terminate their fruitfulness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malkah, too, however, was not the queerest of them all. There was a fifth daughter that the rebbe had, although that should not be, especially after the fuss of Vavah. Especially after the birth of perfect Malkah. And yet there was one more. And she, needs be, was the mysterious light of the rebbe’s eye,…<\/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":[895,893,806,894],"class_list":["post-4117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","category-altteach","tag-avram-and-sarah","tag-orah","tag-the-rebbes-queer-daughters","tag-ur"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117","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=4117"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}