But it was not exactly true, said Rav Harriett when Annamae told her about this exchange.
Angels were not just one thing.
There were lots of different stories about angels. And even in just that one story they’d talked about, the one where God is asking the angels whether or not to create human beings, there were lots of different interpretations. Some of the sages said God asked their opinion out of real ambivalence. (Annamae: “A question of curiosity.”) Some said God wanted to demonstrate that it’s good to be humble. Some said the angels themselves disagreed about how to respond.
The angel of love said, Yes, create people, because they’ll do acts of kindness. The angel of truth said, No, don’t, because they’ll just lie. The angel of righteousness said, Yes, do, because people will work for justice. The angel of peace said, No, no, no; they’re just going to fight all the time.
“It’s true,” observed Annamae.
“Which?”
“Well. All of it.”
Rav Harriett grinned.
Annamae frowned.
“What?”
“It’s just. If they’re all saying different things and they’re all right, it’s …”
“Yes?”
“Frustrating.”
Rav Harriett clapped her hands together. “You know what’ll bug you even more?” She said it like Ooh, do I have a treat for you! She crossed the office to the bookshelf behind her desk. When she found what she was looking for, she carried it over not to the purple armchair where she always sat, but to the couch, planting herself thigh to thigh with Annamae and opening the book so that it spread over both their laps. This reminded Annamae so vividly of the time Leslie had shown her the big book of Escher drawings that for an instant she wondered if Rav Harriett and Leslie were really the same person. Then instantly she was embarrassed because, obviously. That was stupid.
Anyway, this book was totally different. Annamae had never seen anything like it. In the middle of the page was a box of writing, bordered by columns of more writing, and those columns were surrounded on all sides by still more blocks of text. The letters were all from the alef-bet, so she couldn’t read what it said. But the layout, like a patchwork quilt or a hedge maze, might have been something out of Escher.
“This is the Talmud. Or a fraction of it.” Rav Harriett said the whole Talmud consisted of sixty-three tractates.
“What’re tractates?”
Tractates were kind of like volumes, she said, and they covered all sorts of subjects: law, history, ethics, folklore. “Just about everything under the sun. There’s stuff in here about farming.” Rav Harriett turned the pages slowly. Annamae saw how the arrangement varied from page to page, how the hedge maze did not replicate itself exactly, but shifted its pattern. “Stuff on health care. Cooking. Fashion. Philosophy. Jokes.”
“How come it looks like that?”
Rav Harriett said it showed you who was talking. The different sections represented different sages’ opinions about the writing in the center. “Remember I was telling you about the black fire and the white fire?”
Annamae nodded.
“So all this white space between the blocks of text—and even within the blocks of text, right? all the white space—that’s the most important part. That openness makes room for our questions, and it’s also what allows all these sages to gather. In a sense. Some of them lived hundreds of years apart, right? They never got to meet in real life. But here they get to be in conversation with one another. Disputing across the ages.”
“Disputing.” Annamae tasted the word. “So it’s like a book of arguments?”
“Arguments. Tangents. Measurements. Refinements. Disagreements.”
“Who wins?”
“Who wins what?”
“Like on this page, each of these”—tapping her finger on the outer quadrilaterals—“is a different opinion about what that”—the innermost quadrilateral—“means?”
“Yes.”
“So how do you know which one is right?”
“The short answer is, you don’t. The slightly less short answer is, that’s what keeps it juicy. That’s why people still read it, still study it, still, for that matter, keep arguing about it, to this very day. It’s for each of us, in every generation, to interpret for ourselves.”
Annamae scratched her nose. “But, you know. What do the top people say is right?”
“Top people?”
“Like the Pope?”
“We don’t have a Pope.”
“But like the Pope. The head rabbis or whatever.”
Rav Harriett gave her head a little shake. “We don’t have a central authority figure.”
“What about God?”
There was a silence. Annamae felt proud to have come up with such a deep, wise response.
Rav Harriett drew a long breath through her nose. “Oh Annamae,” she said. “What a very good question that is.”
Annamae tried to look modest. She imagined Rav Harriett saying, Of course. She imagined Rav Harriett smacking herself on the forehead and saying, Yes, you’re right. How could I have missed it—God! She imagined the rabbi from Shayna’s bat mitzvah saying, Annamae is a very special girl.
Rav Harriett frowned out the window, as if a million thoughts were fluttering around inside her head and she had to hold very still in order to let them flock together and assume a clear shape.
Outside the window, the city had grown dark. Actually, no. It had become a relief map of light: The lit grid of office windows, the glow of storefronts at street level, the headlights creeping sluggishly along the avenue, all of these stood out from the thickening shadows.
When next she spoke, Rav Harriett said (what else?), “That reminds me of a story.”