since Isaac and Rebecca had been physically intimate, but they were the very best of friends—and since friendship was what had connected them from the first, and because they didn’t know about sexual shame, you can imagine the mutual joy and laughter they experienced when they sat down to have a conversation one night around a crackling fire, and Rebecca admitted to Isaac that she was falling in love with Suvah—and Isaac shared with her his feelings about his brother. True, Ishmael had a wife, several concubines, and a good number of daughters and sons. But what he felt with Isaac was different. It was the meeting of two embodied gods, grounded in their prior history, and it awakened in each a depth of feelings neither had ever known before. So the long-separated half-brothers became lovers, their union later sealed, ironically and deliberately, by the head priestess of Asherah at Luz. Within a year Isaac had moved into Ishmael’s stone house in Lahai-roi, although to your eyes it would be called scarcely more than a stone hut. But it was the grandest building in the village, in fact the only building, in a small village of scattered tents. And that stone house became Isaac’s home for the rest of his life, his and Ishmael’s.
Now you can see now why there’s so little about Isaac in your Torah. Not because he was traumatized by his near sacrifice, which never really happened, but because the later redactors didn’t know how to redeem him, a runaway youth who nearly had himself castrated, fathered twin sons, and then became the lover not only of another man, but of another man who was also his half-brother. The writers, editors, and redactors couldn’t leave Isaac out of the story but they skipped over him as much as they could, so that only a few clues remain, the mention of Lahai-roi being one of them. The later editors retold the story about Abraham, Sarah, and the king of Gerar as if it had happened to Isaac and Rebecca, to give him what today would be called “solid heterosexual credentials,” because they had to leave Isaac in in order to get to his son Jacob, who they really liked. And then they told lots of stories about Grandpa Jacob, that multi-married adventurer, to distract us from everything they’d left out about Isaac, because we still knew those stories, back in the time of the judges and the first kings of Israel. But they did, accidentally, leave one little lingering clue. The word they use for what Isaac and Rebecca did out in the fields, “play” or “sport,” depending on how you translate it, is also used to talk about what Ishmael and Isaac did when Isaac was small, which is not what they did then, but which lay the foundation for what later happened—delicious and mature and sexy love.
In spite of what the Torah tells you, Isaac wasn’t buried in Hebron, in the same cave as his parents. He and Ishmael were buried in the same grave, at Lahai-roi, and all through the time of the judges and into the early years of the monarchy, young men who loved each other in Judah and Israel would go there to seal their vows. In fact David and Jonathan went there, but as the patriarchy grew in strength and same-sex love was outlawed, visits to the tomb were forbidden and the custom forgotten. But imagine how the world would be now, if the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac, at war in such painful ways, had always remembered that their founders were not just sons of the same honored father, but also lovers. There would be no war now, no hatred, no fear. Only love and joy would exist between our two peoples. (Although I tremble in telling this story, afraid that I will find myself having to go into hiding, like poor Mr. Salman Rushdie, for telling stories that will outrage the orthodox of both the Muslim world and the Jewish. Although, on the other hand, to make them rage together could be a unifying thing and perhaps what I’ll be most remembered for. We shall see.)
All of this background material is gradually getting us up to the time of my own birth, in that tent you’re probably tired of hearing about. So please stay with me for a little while longer and I promise you that you’ll get there, because you now know the story about Abraham and Sarah, and the story about Isaac and Rebecca, and Isaac and Ishmael. But before I go on to tell the story of the next generation, of Esau and Jacob and his wives and concubines and all twenty-five of their children, who were my father and my aunts and uncles, let me tell you about Davah, purged from history by the Stalinist editors of the past. And then, when this chapter is over, we’ll be ready for that tent made of goatskins, washed and scraped with stones, cleaned and stretched out on frames in the sun to dry, then painstakingly sewn together with goat gut for thread.
As you now know, Davah was the youngest daughter of our ancestors Sarah and Abraham. All three of her older sisters, who were born in the north, went back there to marry and never returned to Canaan. But Davah, who was born in Canaan, remained there her entire life. Now, for several generations, as I may have said earlier, the family business was divided into two divisions, trade and pasturing. Archaeologists say that the Torah is wrong when it mentions camels in the time of the patriarchs and matriarchs because they hadn’t been domesticated yet, but they are wrong, as I told you in an earlier chapter. (See. People think the elderly repeat themselves but don’t know it. Not in my case. I repeat myself and I do know it. I like my own stories. They’ve kept me company for all these years, haven’t they?)
So yes, we had camels, although they were rare and expensive. It was Davah who decided to make camel breeding a third part of the family business. She ran it herself for years, and when she got older Leah helped her and then my Aunt Dinah ran it, before we all went down to Egypt. It’s because of my great aunt Davah that domestic camels are now common in the Middle East. She built up the business until we were making more from selling camels than we were from our flocks and our trading combined. And there used to be prayers offered to the God of Davah, El the Generous, for camel’s milk was a part of our diets way back then.
So, you know the basics of the story I want to tell you from the Bible, if you’ve read it, and I hope you have. For all my criticism of the book as it exists now, it is more than two thousand five hundred years old, which can be said of very few other books. It’s an artifact, like those wonderful statuettes done by Keturah and Abraham’s daughter Kalyah, which are found in museums all over the world. You may not like them, but would you go in and change them? A famous artist once drew a mustache on a copy of DaVinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa, and we write midrashim, stories about Torah stories, that are not unlike mustaches. But would we change the original because we don’t like it? No. And so it should be with your Torah. For all of its failings, it is an ancient text, one worth honoring, as you would if you dug it up somewhere, rather than found it in a library, or in the ark of a synagogue.
So all of you camel lovers, say a prayer of thanks to Davah and let’s move on with our story. Rebecca and Isaac had two sons, who were twins. The eldest, Esau, was just as the stories about him say, a kind of a jock, rough, rugged, ruddy, an outdoorsman. You can see why Isaac liked and encouraged him as he was growing up. Esau was all the things that Isaac had wanted to be when he was a boy—strong, determined, and independent. Butch. Isaac was like some of the tame suburban husbands I see walking on Venice Beach, kids in tow, but with a crazy wild look in their eyes, gazing out on the surfers. Each time that Esau went wild, beating up his brother, teasing the shepherd boys, stealing animals from the flocks and trading them for knives or bows and arrows, Isaac would take him aside and give him a good talking to, a talking to that never said in words but always said in tone, “Son, I’m proud of you! I collapsed after my one big rebellion. So do what you want to do and don’t hold back.”
Although Isaac left his marriage after his father died and spent the rest of his life in Lahai-roi with his beloved Ishmael, his sons were young adults at the time, finding their own way in the world. And Isaac was devoted to Rebecca for the rest of his life. She took over the family business and so they saw each other fairly often, and it’s Suvah her beloved and not Isaac who was buried next to Rebecca in that tomb in Hebron, the real one that everyone’s forgotten about.
Growing up, Jacob had been something of a mama’s boy, just as your Torah depicts him. (See, it isn’t all wrong.) You can understand why he was Rebecca’s favorite. Esau had no interest in the financial aspect of the family business. He liked nothing more than to be out all day with the flocks, alone, rather like his Uncle Ishmael. Jacob on the other hand was a people-person, and he was fascinated by the traders who passed through our region, going up to Mesopotamia, down to Egypt, and to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. He would stand behind his mother as she inspected their wares and worked out deals with them, staring at everything they brought as if it were food. As soon as he was old enough, Rebecca began to include Jacob in her work, increasingly