8
A PLACE IN TRADITION
The Torah binder of Mordechai Gompel, Germany, 1750. The four pieces of the original circumcision cloth are now sewn together in one long strip. The Hebrew script reads from right to left.
On 31 October 1750, in a Jewish community somewhere in Germany, at the full moon, on the eve of the Sabbath, Mordechai Gompel was born. That is all we know of his life, and all we are ever likely to know. Yet we can say with great precision what those who cared for him in his first months hoped and prayed his life would be, because they set down those hopes and prayers in an engaging – and extremely well-preserved – piece of needlework. It is a strip of linen embroidered with coloured silks, about seventeen centimetres high and three metres long. It would have been presented to the synagogue in thanksgiving for Mordechai’s birth, for use as a binder to tie the scrolls of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The scrolls would be rolled up, bound with a strip like this and then stored in the Ark, from which they would be ceremonially taken out so that extracts could be read every week to the congregation (Chapter 20). It is not known how or when this binder came to the British Museum, but it was probably once attached to a manuscript Torah scroll now in the British Library.
Beverley Nenk, responsible for the Judaica Collection at the Museum, sets out what we may infer of its earlier history:
Originally it would have been a square or rectangular piece of linen, used to swaddle the baby boy during the ceremony of his circumcision, when he was eight days old. After the circumcision, it would have been cut into four strips and sewn together – you can see the joins quite clearly. And then, traditionally, the women of the household, the mother and the sisters, would have embroidered it. From the style of the sewing we can say that it must have been made in Germany, but it is impossible to be more specific. They have used brightly coloured silks, which are still vivid, and enlivened them with sequins of silver-plated copper. Inevitably these have now tarnished, and we can’t clean the silver without damaging the cloth, but originally they would have sparkled and looked very beautiful.
This elegant piece of needlework lays out the ideal life of an eighteenth-century Jewish boy – a life in which the religious and the social are indistinguishable – and defines his identity in the context of thousands of years of Jewish tradition. Through the ceremony of circumcision, when the cloth was wrapped around him, he was made heir to the ancient covenant between the Jews and their God, and was bound by the law of Moses. Almost as important, Beverley Nenk tells us, he was given his name:
Written in Hebrew, to be read from right to left, the first words we see are the baby’s name, Mordechai Gompel. Then comes the father’s name, Eli ha-Levi. Underneath are a little pitcher and basin, the symbols of the Levis, who traditionally washed the hands of the priests in the Temple. Next we read that he was born to good luck, to ‘mazel’, an abbreviation for ‘mazel tov’, on the eve of the holy Sabbath, on the full moon and under a good constellation – you can see an exquisitely detailed Scorpio. Then it has the date in the Jewish calendar, which equates to 31 October 1750.
This is Mordechai’s inheritance – individual, familial and cosmic, his story up to his eighth day, when his circumcision takes place. It is followed by prayers for his future role in society.The first thing asked for is that he may grow up to study the Torah, and the words are accompanied by a small image of the scroll of the law, with above it a crown, and below it the traditional description: ‘This is a tree of life to those who hold it fast.’ Learning to read or chant the Hebrew of the Torah in the synagogue, which usually requires long preparation (Chapter 20), is the indispensable task which must be performed – today, as in the eighteenth century – before a boy can take his place as a full member of the Jewish community. Traditionally the Bar Mitzvah – becoming a ‘son of the law’ – is celebrated at the age of thirteen. From then on, the boy may be called upon to read from the Torah in the synagogue, he may be counted as one of the ten adults that make up a minyan, a prayer quorum, and he has, in religious law, the right to own property and to testify. These new rights are accompanied by new obligations: he now has the duty to follow the precepts of the law, and he himself – no longer his father – is henceforth accountable for his actions. He also becomes responsible for the community as a whole. In a ceremony still widely practised in Jewish communities around the world, the boy has, in the presence of the congregation, become a man, a responsible adult.
The scrolls of the law from which Mordechai Gompel will read
Our embroidery may well have been given to the synagogue specifically to tie the scroll from which Mordechai Gompel read at his Bar Mitzvah and from which he would read in the future, the cloth of his infant circumcision literally binding his life as a man to the law that will govern it. Immediately following comes the hope that he will pass under the chupah, the wedding canopy: marriage and parenthood are among the duties that the new adult will be expected to fulfil. Beverley Nenk describes how this is the only point in the embroidery where the human figure appears:
There’s a beautiful and moving vignette of a couple getting married under a canopy, wearing exquisite eighteenth-century clothes. They are standing under the ceremonial canopy while the Rabbi marries and blesses them, looking for all the world like figures from a Mozart opera set not in the seraglio but the ghetto in Frankfurt or Hamburg.
A traditional Jewish wedding canopy, chupah, under which he will marry
Now that he is able to play his full part in the prayer life of the synagogue and is happily married, ideally with children, says Beverley Nenk, Mordechai’s parents have only one thing more to wish:
The scroll concludes with a prayer for a third blessing, which is ‘ve’ma’asim tovim’: that he may do good deeds throughout the whole of his life. Then, at the very end, are the words: ‘Amen Selah’, So be it.
‘So be it.’ Mordechai Gompel’s scroll presents a crystal-clear view of what was expected from him as a member of his society, and of the stages by which he would play his part in it. It was a life framed in terms of duties to be fulfilled, and – characteristically for the Abrahamic faiths and for the Europe of his day – it was a life to be led by a man, but embroidered by (no doubt several) women.
In many reformed Jewish synagogues today, however, there is much greater equality between the sexes. Girls become Bat Mitzvah, daughters of the law, also around the age of twelve or thirteen. Like their brothers they too learn to read the Hebrew text of the Torah in the synagogue, and so assume publicly a new role with greater personal responsibility. In spite of growing secularization, the ceremony remains extremely popular with both girls and boys. Abe and Rebecca Dein, a brother and sister who live in north-west London, both found in it a powerful affirmation of their new, adult, identity and of a very old tradition. For Rebecca Dein:
It was so important for me, because that was the time when I became a Jewish woman. It was nerve-racking, because everyone was looking at me and it was so quiet. I’d never even touched the Torah before, but I’d worked very hard for that moment. After I had finished reading my passage everyone smiled at me and said: ‘Mazel Tov’ – I was now part of them, and I was with them. I just felt so good. I felt that now I was one of the community.
A boy preparing for his Bar Mitzvah learns to read the Torah scroll using a yad (Chapter 20)
For her brother, Abe Dein, there was a similar exhilaration in being received into the adult community, but above all a great sense of taking his place in a long continuum:
It was very important that ancestors before me had done this. The Bar Mitzvah has been around in the Jewish tradition for centuries and centuries. I don’t believe in God myself, but I really love Jewish culture. It’s a tradition you would want to carry on, because everyone has done it before you. Practising and memorizing my ‘parsha’, which is a section of the Torah, was a lot of work. When I finished, I looked up, and everyone was smiling. And I felt, yes, I’ve done it. It was…well it was a coming of age.
One of the striking things about the Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies is how unusual they now seem in an increasingly secular Western world. Not so long ago many communities’ hopes for, and expectations of, their young – even if never given such explicit visual form – would have been just as clear as those embroidered on Mordechai Gompel’s Torah binder.
In the last chapter we saw how bringing a child safely into the world, and getting it healthily through its early years, has always been fraught with worry and danger. Once the perils of infancy have been safely navigated comes the biggest challenge of all: parents – and the wider community – need to prepare the child for the world he or she will live in. Socializing a child is such a long process that it usually leaves few objects behind which document it succinctly. But there is one such physical record, as eloquent in its own way as the Torah binder, from a very different kind of community and from the other side of the world. It looks at first sight like a small bunch of dried flowers. It is light brown, about twenty centimetres long and nearly 200 years old. It comes from Vanuatu, and was the first object to enter the British Museum from Melanesia, the vast area of the Pacific that runs from New Guinea to Fiji. It was donated in 1831 by George Bennett, a surgeon on board the Sophia, a ship that had been chartered in Sydney for the purpose of collecting sandalwood from southern Vanuatu. The Museum register soberly recorded its arrival as a ‘Tuft of the hair of a male inhabitant of Tanna, one of the New Hebrides Group, as worn by the natives’.
The bundle of bound hair collected by George Bennett in Vanuatu around 1830
This bundle of carefully plaited human hair was indeed ‘as worn by the natives’, but it was, and is, much more than that. It is the record of a long process of instruction, literally the binding into a young man of all that he needs to know to take his place in society as an adult. And it is a process still carried out on the island of Tanna in the Republic of Vanuatu. In the years after boys reach puberty, and as they are growing to maturity, senior men bind their hair at regular intervals with leaf-fibre, shaping it into something like dreadlocks. While they are binding, they tell the boys important traditional knowledge about the world, what its history is, how to behave to your kin, how to conduct yourself in life.
Sam Posan, a fieldworker at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, who comes from the island of Tanna, where George Bennett collected our bundle of hair, describes how this course of education for life is organized:
You circumcise the boy first. Then you fasten his hair. And you teach him everything, about the world, about how to behave. You are fastening tightly all the things you are telling him – binding them into his head. Then two or three months later you both come back and you ask the boy questions, to see if he still remembers what you taught him or not. You will meet again and bind his hair again, and tell him once more the things he’s forgotten. You will fill his head. And when his bound hair reaches the bottom of his back, the old people say – then he will be a man.
It seems that George Bennett arrived at a moment when one young man had just completed this long course of induction: at that point the bound hair is cut off, to mark the boy’s move into adulthood. It seems rarely to be kept, and to have no particular value, even to the new adult himself. But when, a few years ago, some men from Vanuatu visited the Museum, they recognized at once what the cut, bound hair was, remarking: ‘this is our university’.
Stories and knowledge are progressively bound into the hair of young men in Tanna, Vanuatu. The process takes several years.
Sam Posan explains that if a man lives according to what he is taught as his hair is being bound, then the stages of wisdom through which he will pass can be marked off on the fingers of one hand:
You begin with your little finger, which is you when you are a child, and you don’t know anything about the world. Then you grow a bit bigger, you reach the next finger: you ask and ask, and the old people tell you everything. Then it comes to the time of the tall middle finger, when you learn to do everything, when the spirit of the things that you are doing comes into you. Then you go down again to the next finger, and that’s when you teach the children.
When you are old, and have white hair, then you come down to the last finger, to the thumb. You sit down like a stone in its proper place. Young people have their knives and if the knives get blunt, they come and sharpen them on your stone. They can ask the old person everything, and he will tell them everything, because he has walked through those experiences.
This is life in Vanuatu articulated as a five-finger exercise – with rights and obligations set out as clearly as in the Torah binder, and with a comparable focus on continuity and tradition. As with many societies across the world, there can be great comfort in knowing so securely where you stand, both within your own life and in the community. Like all structures, however, while they support, they also constrict. In the first place you must accept someone else’s definition of who you are, as a man or a woman, and for a woman that will in most societies usually mean a subordinate role.
Professor Linda Woodhead, of the University of Lancaster, has made a special study of these rites of passage and initiation:
Because men in most societies have a higher status and more of a public role, the ritual of boys’ initiations is more public and more gruelling. Masculinity is generally more about public display, so a public initiation ritual is the way you are presented as a man in that society. Of course, women are also initiated into many different traditions by other women, but the rituals are likely to be more domestic and private, with less ceremonial.
Modern Western society hardly lacks for rites of passage – from the school prom, to the first holidays with friends, or descending into muddy, drunken, chaos at music festivals. But we have moved away from a model of elders initiating children into an adult world – children joining their parents in a new role, after an intergenerational transfer of wisdom. The traditional twenty-first birthday party thrown by parents for friends and family, coming with the right to vote and to be given ‘the key of the door’ – classic markers of adulthood in the public and private spheres – has now largely faded away. Instead, the young initiate each other into adult worlds of their own – with joyous baptisms of beer, song and dance.
Linda Woodhead thinks that this development is the inevitable consequence of technological advance, but also of the increasing insistence on choice and individual rights in preference to patterns of convention and obligation:
Something is happening in our society, which has to do with the speeding-up of change. Those rituals where you are initiated into a set wisdom, a fixed body of learning which is passed on across the generations – all that stops making sense when things are changing so rapidly that a teenager already knows a lot more than their parents about critically important things like digital technology. That disrupts the old pattern of the handing down of knowledge. I think as a society we’re grappling with the problem of how the values which are enduring and do not change can be transmitted.
We also now have greatly widened access to any kind of cultural good that might be wanted. There’s much more room for choice, for thinking about the kind of person you want to be and the kind of gang you want to belong to. We want to choose the kind of rituals that will go along with becoming what we have individually decided to become. We are a liberal society. We want choice. We don’t want our future handed down to us.
It is an enormous change. The embroidered Torah binder. The plaited hair from Vanuatu. Your place in a tradition. Your responsibilities as well as your rights. These are precious visions of life, framed for individuals by their community. Offered a blank piece of linen, now, and asked to sketch out our hopes for our children, we would surely wish them health and happiness. But what else? I suspect that most parents today would say that it was not up to them – that their children must make their own way and their own choices. It would be a very difficult thing to ask of any child, to devise the narrative of their own Torah embroidery, or to bind the knowledge they need into their own hair. But Linda Woodhead argues that even if the rituals of initiation into adulthood have largely disappeared, Western society has been so deeply shaped by its long Christian traditions that it perhaps no longer requires them:
We remain a very morally coherent society. You can see it clearly, for example, when we have collective tragedies. What immediately resurfaces are the traditional Christian values – love, solidarity, caring for one another, standing up against evil: in spite of the decline of the church, all those things remain deeply embedded. There is enormous moral consensus.
Of course many other faiths also proclaim these values. For Linda Woodhead, their persistence suggests that even in consumerist, multi-cultural Europe, there appears still to be a secure ethical framework within which young adults – perhaps now more freely than ever before – can make the choices that will shape their lives, not as society has determined, but as they wish them to be.